Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Read online

  Nevertheless, the book was published in England last November by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and the whole edition sold out on the first day, despite the antipathy of the critics, who failed to duplicate the American relish for Nabokov’s elegantly randy wit. Typical of the reviews was that of the Daily Telegraph & Morning Post, which said: “Let us hear no more high-flown stuff about Mr. Nabokov having written a great work of art. His theme is unlikely to corrupt; his manner almost certain to anesthetize.” The Spectator’s acrid Kingsley Amis gave the book the old heave-ho by remarking that while “Few books published in this country since the King James Bible can have set up more eager expectation … it is thoroughly bad in both senses: bad as a work of art, that is, and morally bad.”

  Although probably disappointed by the English reviews, Nabokov has remained imperturbably confident of his own talent, while anything but reticent about what he considers the lack of it in others. He has referred to both Conrad and Hemingway as “writers for little boys,” called Dostoyevsky “a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar,” attacked Balzac, Dreiser and Thomas Mann, and, at the mention of Thomas Wolfe, snorted, “Mediocrity!”

  His opinions on other subjects are equally outspoken. Music bores him, and he has commented that it affects him “merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.” Of psychiatry he has said, “I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud … what matters is what people think, not why.” He dismisses all politics as bad and, of course, feels that in the good old days of the Czar, “a freedom-loving Russian had more freedom than under Lenin,” without, however, specifying whether he meant freedom-loving aristocrats or freedom-loving serfs.

  While publishers were cagily rushing into print translations of his earlier works—he wrote eight novels in Russian before switching to English—and reissuing books like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov, himself, put the final polish on a labor of scholarly love, his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, on which he worked off and on for nine years. The Bollingen Foundation is publishing it in five volumes, of which one is the translation and the other four contain Nabokov’s commentaries. And Random House will publish The Song of Igor’s Campaign, one of the greatest epics of medieval Europe, which Nabokov has translated and annotated. The work of an anonymous Russian poet in 1187, it is, according to Nabokov, “a colorful, resounding poem, much more gusty than the Chanson de Roland.”

  Last spring Nabokov interrupted his European holiday to return to America at the request of James Harris and Stanley Kubrick, who bought the film rights to Lolita for $150,000, plus fifteen percent of the producers’ net profits. They persuaded Nabokov to go to Hollywood to write the script.

  As far as the film version of Lolita is concerned, the burning question in everyone’s mind is: How in God’s name can they do it? However, Harris and Kubrick, both in their early thirties, are two of the brightest and most unorthodox of the new type of filmmakers and, if anyone can pull off the feat of successfully translating the book to the screen, they are about the likeliest candidates. They would prefer Sir Laurence Olivier or David Niven as Humbert, but justifiably feel that the casting of the title role presents a problem. All this year their offices have been besieged by ambitious mothers who want to see their small daughters play Lolita, while hundreds of others, unable to make the trek to Hollywood, mail in photos of their subteen female progeny, accompanied by enthusiastic sales pitch letters, a chilling commentary on American mother love.

  Since Nabokov is a complex and protean man, he can probably latch onto the intricacies of Hollywood with more adaptability than would other men of his background. Indeed, one of the surprises of Lolita was that this foreign-born, aristocratic, elderly university professor should reveal such an astounding knowledge of our more coarsely demotic American slang. Coupled with his often irritating tendency to strew his text with unnecessary French phrases—as when he describes a trip south by saying, “we dipped deep into ce qu’on appelle Dixieland”—this produces an effect of which one might well say that vraiment, it is, comme on dit, a gasser.

  Aware of these qualities, it was with a combination of confidence, hope and trepidation that Harris and Kubrick hired him to do the cinema version. They know that whatever else he may be, he is unpredictable—and a persistent intellectual prankster. At this writing, no one knows the eventual fate of the script. Producer Harris feels that Nabokov’s exposure to the film colony may open up an entirely new career for him and that he could develop into one of the titans of the movie world. On the other hand, it seems just as likely that his experiences there could imaginably result in an abrupt departure and, subsequently, the book on Hollywood to end Hollywood.

  V. Nabokov Unresting

  Phyllis Meras / 1962

  From The Providence Sunday Journal, May 13, 1962. © 2011 The Providence Journal. Reprinted by permission.

  “All writers that are worth anything are humorists,” Vladimir Nabokov said. “I’m not P.G. Wodehouse. I’m not a funny man, but give me an example of a great writer who is not a humorist. The best tragedian is O’Neill. He is probably the worst writer. Dostoyevsky’s slapstick is wonderful, but in his tragedy he is a journalist.”

  But didn’t he consider the satirical Lolita a humorous book?

  “It’s not humor,” he replied. “It’s not a story. It’s a poem.”

  Although reluctant to talk about Pale Fire before publication, the author did say that it was not at all like Lolita, except for “a kind of bizarre streak running through it.”

  To illustrate his point about humor, he explained that in The Gift, another novel due next year, there is a scene where a number of people are sitting in a small room and generally falling over each other. “A very serious and important thought is revealed in this scene,” he said, “but there still is humor.”

  The Nabokovs are temporarily residing in Montreux, principally to be near their son, who is living in Milan.

  “You really can’t define humor, though,” the author continued. “In Russian and in French there is no word for humor. In English, it has a kind of cozy sound, but there is a savage humor, too. Perhaps humor is simply seeing things in a singular, unique, extraordinary way. This almost always sounds funny to the average person.”

  “When our son was very small,” Mrs. Nabokov interjected, “they asked him in school, ‘What does rain remind you of,’ and he said ‘It gives goose skin to the puddles.’ ‘This is too unusual,’ the teacher said.”

  “Yes, the unusual is funny in itself,” Nabokov agreed. “A man slips and falls down. It is the contrary of gravity in both senses—that’s a great pun, by the way.”

  Remarking that the writer, in brief, must see both the comic and the cosmic in life, he said that he generally writes more than one book at a time.

  “Plots have a way of breeding—of living in sneaky little labs. Then they break out of their cocoons and I have to mop up the mess.

  “When I was writing Lolita, I was doing Pnin for The New Yorker at the same time. And then I was translating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as well. It’s Russia’s most famous novel and it has never been adequately translated. It will come out in four volumes with a special commentary, and be printed by the Bollingen Foundation. Would you like to see it?”

  He rose and disappeared from the room briefly to return with a mound of galley proofs.

  “It’s taken me ten years to do this,” he said with a contented sigh. “Of course, it all started when my wife said, ‘Why don’t you translate it?’ The Guggenheim people gave me a grant for the work.”

  One spur for the work was his desire to have a good translation for his students. He has taught both at Cornell and Wellesley.

  The translation, he said, kept him busy between novels, and when not writing he keeps occupied with research, chess problems, and his great passion, the study of butterflies.

  “For seven years, you see, I was responsible for the butterflies at Harvard. I was
practically curator there. There’s a butterfly in every one of my novels. One of the first things I ever wrote in English was a paper on Lepidoptera I prepared at the age of twelve. It wasn’t published because a butterfly I described had been described by somebody else. But the paper itself was written in beautiful, precise English.”

  He was born in Russia in 1899, and he described his parents as belonging to “the heights of intellectual Russia.” He himself has “always” known French and English as well as Russian. He writes for the most part in English now. Of his seventeen books, ten were in Russian and the rest in English. One book, Invitation to a Beheading was translated by the son in Milan.

  “It doesn’t matter to me in what language I write,” he said. “Language is just another instrument. Except that, of course, English is the language with the richest literature. It breaks my heart to say it, but after English there comes a little gap. Then I would say Russian and French were on a par as far as literature is concerned. But English literature is huge—especially in its poets. English poetry is supreme.

  “Russian literature only got started in the eighteenth century, and then it had only a century and a half in which it could go before the Revolution occurred. Of course, during that period it had such prose writers as Tolstoy—and, well—I don’t think he has any peer in any other country. I think he’s much greater than Proust or James Joyce, to take two other greats. But then in the twentieth century in Russia, it all stopped.

  “I suppose there is still some goodish writing in Russia—Mandelstam, who died in a concentration camp, was a wonderful poet, for example, but literature can’t thrive where limits are set to human fantasy.

  “My books? They are absolutely banned in Russia. Every word of mine, after all, is filled with contempt for the police state.

  “When do I write? Whenever I feel like it. I write in shorthand—sometimes on a bench in the garden, or in the park, or in the car, or in bed. I always write in pencil on index cards. When the whole thing is one grey smudge of writing and erasing, I tear the whole thing up and make a fair copy. Then all the cards go to the Library of Congress, and they cannot be consulted for fifty years.”

  Nabokov said he hadn’t expected Lolita to become a bestseller. “And I didn’t know that the first company that agreed to print it—that was the Olympia Press in Paris—printed mostly pornography. I was a little taken aback. But it happened that way because after I could not find a publisher in America, my agent said perhaps we could find an English language publisher in Paris to do it.”

  He put down his wine glass and looked out the window toward the Jura Mountains and the Lake of Geneva. The Chateau de Chillon made famous by Lord Byron is not far from Montreux on the lake shore.

  “Besides all these books, lectures, short stories, essays, and poems,” he suggested, “you might want to note that I have also written four books on butterflies.”

  Vladimir Nabokov on his Life and Work

  Peter Duval Smith / 1962

  From The Listener, November 22, 1962. © The Estate of Peter Duval Smith. Reprinted by permission.

  Peter Duval Smith: Would you ever go back to Russia?

  Vladimir Nabokov: I will never go back for the simple reason that all the Russia I need, after all, is always with me: literature, language, and my own Russian childhood. I will never return. I will never surrender. And anyway, the grotesque shadow of a police state will not be dispelled in my lifetime. I don’t think they know my works there—oh, perhaps a number of readers exist there in my special secret service, but let us not forget that Russia has grown tremendously provincial during these forty years, apart from the fact that people there are told what to read, what to think. In America I’m happier than in any other country. It is in America that I found my best readers, minds that are closest to mine. I feel intellectually at home in America. It is a second home in the true sense of the word.

  PDS: You’re a professional lepidopterist?

  VN: Yes, I’m interested in the classification, variation, evolution, structure, distribution, habits, of Lepidoptera: this sounds very grand, but actually I’m an expert in only a very small group of butterflies. I have contributed several works on butterflies to the various scientific journals—but I want to repeat that my interest in butterflies is exclusively scientific.

  PDS: Is there any connection with your writing?

  VN: There is, in a general way, because I think that in a work of art there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science.

  PDS: In your new novel Pale Fire, one of the characters says that reality is neither the subject nor the object of real art, which creates its own reality. What is that reality?

  VN: Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object—a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And any further stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of levels, levels of perception, of false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So, we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects—that machine there, for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me—I don’t understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron.

  PDS: You say that reality is an intensely subjective matter, but in your books it seems to me that you seem to take an almost perverse delight in literary deception.

  VN: The fake move in a chess problem, the illusion of a solution or the conjurer’s magic: I used to be a little conjurer when I was a boy. I loved doing simple tricks—turning water into wine, that kind of thing; but I think I’m in good company because all art is really deception and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation. Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.

  PDS: You talk about games of deception, like chess and conjuring. Are you, in fact, fond of them yourself?

  VN: I am fond of chess but deception in chess, as in art, is only part of the game; it’s part of the combination, part of the delightful possibilities, illusions, vistas of thought, which can be false vistas, perhaps, but I think a good combination should always contain a certain element of deception.

  PDS: You spoke about conjuring in Russia as a child, and one remembers that some of the most intense passages in a number of your books are concerned with the memories of your lost childhood. What is the importance of memory to you?

  VN: Memory is, really, in itself a tool, one of the many tools that an artist uses; and some recollections, perhaps intellectual rather than emotional, are very brittle and sometimes apt to lose the flavor of reality when they are immersed by the novelist in his book, when they are given away to characters.

  PDS: Do you mean that you lose the sense of a memory once you have written it down?

  VN: Sometimes, but that only refers to a certain type of intellectual memory. But, for instance—oh, I don’t know, the freshness of the flowers being arranged by the under-gardener in the cool drawing-room of our country house as I was running downstairs with my butterfly net on a summer day half a century ago: that kind of thing is absolutely permanent, immortal, it can never change, no matter how many times I farm it out to my characters it is always there with me. There’s the red sand, the white garden bench, the black fir trees, ev
erything, a permanent possession. I think it is really all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. I think it’s natural that I have a more passionate affection for my old memories, the memories of my childhood, than I have for later ones, so that Cambridge in England or Cambridge in New England are less vivid in my mind and in myself than some kind of nook in the park on our country estate in Russia.

  PDS: Do you think that such an intense power of memory as yours has inhibited your desire to invent in your books?

  VN: No, I don’t think so.

  PDS: The same sort of incident turns up again and again, sometimes in slightly different forms.

  VN: That depends on my characters.

  Tribute to Russia

  PDS: Do you still feel Russian, in spite of so many years in America?

  VN: I do feel Russian and I think that my Russian works, the various novels and poems and short stories that I have written during these years are a kind of tribute to Russia. And I might define them as the waves and ripples of the shock caused by the disappearance of the Russia of my childhood, and recently I have paid tribute to her in an English work on Pushkin.

  PDS: Why are you so passionately concerned with Pushkin?

  VN: It started with a translation, a literal translation. I thought it was very difficult and the more difficult it was, the more exciting it seemed. So it’s not so much caring about Pushkin—I love him dearly, of course, he is the greatest Russian poet, there is no doubt about that—but it was again the combination of the excitement of finding the right way of doing things and a certain approach to reality, to the reality of Pushkin through my own translations. As a matter of fact, I am very concerned with things Russian and I have just finished revising a good translation of my novel, The Gift, which I wrote about thirty years ago. It is the longest, I think the best, and the most nostalgic of my Russian novels. It portrays the adventures, literary and romantic, of a young Russian expatriate in Berlin in the twenties; but he’s not myself. I am very careful to keep my characters beyond the limits of my own identity. Only the background of the novel can be said to contain some biographical touches. And there is another thing about it that pleases me: probably my favorite Russian poem is the one that I happened to give to my main character in that novel.