Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Read online

  In all this amiable and homey setting, as cozy as a teakettle and a purring cat on the hearth, there is little to suggest the emotional origins of Lolita. Why did he write it?

  He certainly didn’t do so, as some other authors might have, because he was trying to write a sensational bestseller which would make a lot of money. He believed that it could probably never be published. Nor did he do it as a diabolic joke. He is a seriously creative writer who would hardly expend such a tremendous amount of time, energy, thought and caressing attention to detail just for a lark. It was in Paris in 1939 that he wrote the first version in Russian as a short story. He read it to some friends, who were horrified and advised him to tear it up. Instead, he put the manuscript in a trunk, but carried the story around in his mind and began to work on it again at Cornell ten years later, this time in English. Much of it was written on summer cross-country butterfly hunts in 1951 and 1952. He wrote the whole book in longhand on six-by-four-inch filing cards, often working in motels or parked in his car, and finally finished it in the summer of 1953 in a rented house in Oregon.

  To one interviewer, he has explained that he had to write it as a satisfaction of his need for self-expression. But again, why? Why did he have to write it? He, himself, has written, and he told me again that the original inspiration was an item in the French newspaper Paris-Soir, describing a scientist’s attempts to persuade an ape in the zoo to draw with charcoal. After months of coaxing, the animal produced a sketch which showed the bars of its cage. Nabokov told me that there was no rational connection between the item and Lolita. “My point,” he said, “is that in a sense the book, which is kind of a memoir, represents the grating of Humbert’s personality, which he tries to break through.”

  It has been suggested by his admirers that the book is pure satire, representing variously “old Europe debauching young America,” “young America debauching old Europe,” and “Nabokov’s love affair with the romantic novel.” This, I think, is piffle. It is interesting, if not significant, that Lolita is not his first literary effort dealing with a sexual relationship between a grown man and a child. Twenty-five years ago, the original Russian version of Invitation to a Beheading was published in Paris. In this novel, twelve-year-old Emmie keeps darting into the hero’s cell to snuggle with him. Evidently aware that some might regard this as more than coincidence, Nabokov has added to the recently published English version one of his arrogantly caustic caveats to the reader, in which he attempts to head off any odious comparisons by flatly stating that it is “the evil-minded who will perceive in little Emmie a sister of little Lolita.”

  This is all very well, but there was also another novel, Laughter in the Dark, published here in 1938, in which a married man deserts his wife and daughter to live—“in a thin, slimy layer of turpitude”—with greedy, scheming, immoral little Margot, aged sixteen. This novel was described by critic Clifton Fadiman as “combining Chekhovian lassitude with surrealist degeneracy.”

  Delving further into Nabokov’s writings, we find another provocative similarity, this time between Lolita and an admittedly autobiographical short story. In Lolita, Humbert traces his perverse lust for nymphets back to his childhood when, at thirteen, he fell passionately in love on a Riviera beach with a child whom he calls Annabel Leigh: “We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.” She was, he said, “the initial fateful elf” in his life, and ever afterward he was to be haunted by her memory.

  In the collection of short stories, Nabokov’s Dozen, there is one called First Love, written in Boston in 1948. Of this story, Nabokov says that, except for a change of names, “it is true in every detail to the author’s remembered life.” It deals with a summer spent at Biarritz when Nabokov was ten, and tells of a nine-year-old French girl, with green eyes and “delicate, downy forearms,” whom he met on the beach and with whom he fell in love.

  Would it not seem possible that the tender memory of her, and not that artistic ape in Paris, was the true emotional impetus for Lolita? Just as it is impossible to shrug off a weird nightmare by saying, “After all, it wasn’t me; it was only a dream”—because you were the one who dreamed it! So is it true that everyone who writes a book reveals a great deal of himself in it (no matter how fanciful a product of the conscious imagination he may claim it) if only because he chose to write that particular book. It is interesting to toy with the notion that perhaps for all these years Vladimir Nabokov may have been faithful, in his fashion, to a little girl on the beach at Biarritz.

  In attempting to unravel the riddle of Nabokov by interviewing his professorial colleagues—brilliant, perceptive men like Arthur Mizener of Cornell and Harry Levin of Harvard—one finds that these men who have known him at close range agree that none of them really knows him. “He is an incorrigible mystificator, a leg-puller,” said Levin, while Mizener described him as “wheels within wheels, whose writing is a joke within a joke within a joke, an enormously complicated and subtle joke which is deadly serious.”

  Whether dazzling listeners with the eximious quality of his sophistication, or cultivating an attitude of excessively inefficient unworldliness, Nabokov manages to charm his associates into a mood of puzzled admiration. When it amuses him, he has a tendency to overplay the middle-age professor, walking with an exaggerated stoop and acting benign and innocent. One of his girl students once sought to curry favor with him by making conversation after class. “Isn’t it a beautiful day, professor?” she cooed. Nabokov assumed a beatific expression and intoned solemnly, “The little trees will love it.”

  In a 1947 essay, Jean-Paul Sartre speaks of Nabokov’s writing as belonging to the “curious literature of the Russian émigrés or déracinés. They do not care for any society, not even to revolt against it, because they do not belong to any society.” He adds that Nabokov “never writes without seeing himself write, as others listen to themselves talk, and what interests him almost uniquely are the subtle deceptions of his own conscience … One would swear that he writes for masochism.”

  To try to understand Nabokov, one must first try to understand his background, a difficult trick for any native American. He belonged to the aristocracy of Czarist Russia and until he was twenty he inhabited a fabulous world glimpsed by us only through the novels of Tolstoy or an occasional Hollywood super-spectacle. It was a world of enormous wealth, pomp, and luxury. His family had been for generations people of high position and influence: generals, diplomats, members of the nobility, privileged participants in the most glittering court life of the Western world. His grandmother was a baroness and his aunt a princess. It is not unusual for scions of the aristocracy to be cultural cretins, but Nabokov was fortunate in that his family were not only patrician but rich, not only but rich but cultured, scholarly and—for their era and social status—rather liberal. His father was one of the founders of the Constitutional Democratic Party in 1905 and later forfeited his court title, refused to drink the Czar’s health at a banquet, and advertised for sale his gorgeous court uniform.

  Vladimir Nabokov (pronounced with the accent on the second syllable in both names) was born in 1899 in St. Petersburg and spent his childhood in his families palatial pink-granite townhouse or on their huge country estate, to which he now refers as “our pleasant house,” which is a little as if England’s Prince Charles should in future years look back on Buckingham Palace as “a nice place.” A permanent staff of fifty servants was kept at the country place alone, and Nabokov grew up surrounded by butlers, maids, footmen, coachmen, chauffeurs, valets, cooks, gardeners, and other lackeys. He had four or five female English governesses in turn, all of whom lived with the Nabokovs and, later on, two male English tutors who lived out. He also had a French mademoiselle, a Swiss tutor, a French boxing and fencing instructor, and a drawing master. When the Nabokovs traveled to Biarritz or the Riviera, an entourage of maids, valets, and tutors accompanied them. One of Vladimir’s early memories is of walking with his mother and
an English governess in Nice when he was four and being stopped by the Queen of Belgium, who inquired about his grandfather’s health.

  A great to-do has been made over how astonishing it is that Nabokov can write so well in English, but the fact is that he learned it before he learned Russian. By the time he was six, he could read and write in English, but not in Russian, so a schoolmaster was hired to come every afternoon and give him lessons in his native tongue. His father and mother, like many of the Russian aristocracy, spoke French to each other much of the time. They also liked to talk to the children in English, and his mother used to read to Vladimir in that language every night, after which he would be turned over to an English governess to be undressed and put to bed.

  Nabokov’s favorite relative was his Uncle Vasili, a dashing diplomat who spent a lot of time riding to hounds in England and adorning society gatherings in New York and Paris. He owned a chateau near Paris, a villa near Rome and another in Egypt, and a country estate which had once been the home of Peter the Great’s son, the Czarevitch Alexei. Uncle Vasili died when Vladimir was seventeen, leaving him two million dollars and the country estate. It might have seemed as if Vladimir was well-fixed for life. But the year was 1916, and in Russia the vast political and social changes which were to alter the history of the world were already underway. The Nabokovs fled to the Crimea, taking with them jewels hidden in a can of talcum powder, and spent sixteen months there, living with a Countess. Other friends sent them money, and the time passed not too unpleasantly.

  For a brief period Vladimir’s father served as Minister of Justice in Kerensky’s provisional government (Vladimir is still on close terms with Kerensky who now lives in California), but he resigned in 1917. When the Bolsheviks took the Crimea in 1919, Vladimir and his family left Russia forever on a small Greek cargo ship bound for Constantinople and Piraeus. Using the Nansen passports provided for stateless Russian, Armenian and Greek refugees, they arrived ultimately in London. Vladimir and his brother went to Cambridge on scholarships awarded, according to the former, “for political tribulation.” His brother went to Christ College, Vladimir to Trinity. After his graduation in 1922, he joined his father in Berlin, were the latter was editing a newspaper for Russian refugees. It was in that same year that the elder Nabokov, attending a political lecture, attempted to shield the lecturer from the bullets of two assassins and was himself killed. (Vladimir’s widowed mother died in 1930 in a suburb of Prague, where she lived for several years on a pension granted her by the Czech government.)

  Vladimir stayed on in Berlin, eking out a living by giving lessons in boxing, tennis, English and French, writing poetry and fiction for Russian émigré publications, and performing various odd-job intellectual chores. He did a Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland, for which he was paid five dollars; he originated Russian crossword puzzles; he wrote a Russian grammar for foreigners, with exercise sentences like, “Madam, I am the doctor. Here is a banana.”

  In Berlin, in 1923, he met his wife, also a refugee, the daughter of the former owner of the largest and most important publishing house in Russia. They were married in April, 1925. Mrs. Nabokov is Jewish, and they left Germany for France before Hitler came to power. Again, with the advent of World War II, they were forced to move on. Eventually, they escaped through Lisbon and arrived in New York in May, 1940. Shortly afterward, Nabokov became a Research Fellow in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, where he reclassified the butterfly collection and wrote technical papers on the subject. He gave lectures on Russian literature at Wellesley and continued to write poetry and fiction for the Russian-language Chekhov Press, which was sponsored by the Ford Foundation. In 1948 he got a job as European Professor of Russian Literature at Cornell.

  Looking back, he seems rather proud of the fact that in his ten years there he never attended a single faculty meeting or official social gathering, never joined the faculty club or any other club, and lived only in furnished houses rented from other professors who were on leave, a temporary living arrangement resulting in the Nabokovs having to move sometimes twice a year. He has never had a house of his own since he left Russia over forty years ago.

  Nabokov’s lecture courses were popular with the undergraduates, not only because he was known as one of the softest markers ever in Cornell, but also because the students were fascinated by him and generally fond of him in sort of a “My God, what next?” way. The publication of Lolita understandably increased this feeling. In the opinion of some of his colleagues, if the book had not been such a success he would probably have been fired. As it was, the university trustees were inclined to view it as something of a publicity windfall. “If the most expensive public relations firm in New York had been retained to handle the university, they couldn’t have done as spectacular a job,” commented one of the professors.

  As almost everyone must know by now, Lolita was turned down by all the American publishers to whom Nabokov, mostly for the hell of it, sent the manuscript. One of them wrote the author a letter urging him to burn all copies, while another suggested that it might be more acceptable if Lolita were changed into a small boy. The book was first published in Paris by Olympia Press, a firm which had made a living mostly by publishing pornography. Tourists began bringing home copies, and eventually booksellers in England and America were importing copies and selling them for twelve dollars and fifteen dollars each. The United States Customs permitted importation of the novel, but the British government, viewing with alarm the number of copies brought home, sent a letter to the French Ministry of the Interior calling attention to the International Convention for the Suppression of Obscene Publications. Subsequently, Paris gendarmes swooped down on the Olympia offices, confiscated all copies and forbade further sales. Olympia promptly issued a pamphlet, L’Affaire Lolita, reproducing the letter from the British Home Office in Whitehall and appealing to all loyal Frenchmen to rally round the cause of national sovereignty and liberty.

  As a result of all the publicity, Lolita became more widely known in America and editor Jason Epstein published excerpts from it in the Anchor Review, with an enthusiastic introduction by F.W. Dupee, Professor of English at Columbia University. The magazine caught the eye of a tall, pretty, ex-Latin Quarter showgirl named Rosemary Ridgewell, who brought it to the attention of Walter Minton, President of Putnam’s, whom she knew. Although Olympia owned all the English rights and insisted on fifty percent of the basic royalties and thirty-three and a third percent of publishers’ profits on paperbacks, Minton took a gambler’s chance and brought the book out here in August, 1958. After that, the deluge.

  Within five weeks after publication, Lolita had become the No. 1 bestseller in the country. It remained on the bestseller list for fifty-six weeks. Last December, Fawcett published the paperback edition with a prepublication printing of two million copies. For her historic part in the whole publishing saga, the statuesque Miss Ridgewell received a tidy nest egg: a sizeable equivalent of some of the author’s royalties for the first year, plus an equally sizeable share of the publisher’s subsidiary rights for the next two years. She has been quoted as saying, “I thought Nabokov had a very interesting way of writing, very, you know—crystalline?”

  In general, the intellectual and emotional repercussions varied in vehemence. A state senator in Massachusetts tried unsuccessfully to prohibit the sale of “this vile book.” A staff member resigned in protest when the Cincinnati public library banned it from the shelves. In Lolita, Texas, a deacon of the First Baptist Church circulated a petition to change the name of the town to Jackson. A vice president of a major oil company announced that he had thrown his new copy into the wastebasket without reading it because “I didn’t want to carry it around with me.” On the other hand, Jack Kerouac called it “a classic old love story.”

  In the torrent of critical appraisal which has appeared in print, Nabokov has been compared as a writer to Balzac, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aristophanes, James Thurber, Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Lewis Carrol
l, Dickens, Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Oscar Wilde, Gogol, Conrad, Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and Dostoyevsky crossed with Voltaire. Perhaps the most piquant suggestion of all was that of The New York Times’ Gilbert Millstein, who asked: “Who else is Humbert Humbert but Daddy Long Legs?”

  (Incidentally, everything written about Lolita refers to a “middle-aged man and a twelve-year-old girl,” but the chronology in the book, itself, would make Humbert either thirty-five or thirty-seven, which is not exactly “middle-aged”—at least not from where I sit.)

  Although now translated into Greek, Serbian, Hebrew, Dutch, Polish—to name only a few—Lolita had tough sledding for a while in France, where a French version was prohibited until last winter; in Argentina, which banned it last summer; and in England, where one publisher destroyed the copy sent him (he was reported to have torn it up, page by page) and another threatened to resign if his firm took it. In December, 1958, it was the subject of a two hour Parliament debate, in the course of which Mr. Nigel Nicolson, a Conservative from Bournemouth and also a partner in the firm which finally accepted the book, defended it by stating that, despite its theme, it carries a built-in condemnation since “it leads to utter misery, suicide, prison, murder and great unhappiness.” Mr. Nicolson, previously in hot water for opposing government policy on Suez, ran into a sticky wicket when he sought reelection to the House of Commons. “A director of a firm intending to publish this vulgar novel is no fitting representative for good Bournemouth citizens,” declared a member of his local political group, and a Conservative M.P. remarked, “Lolita is the main issue. Suez has been replaced.”