Nabokov's interview. (03) Playboy [1964]
Toffler,
Alvin: "Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov". Playboy (Chicago, IL), 11
(1), Jan 1964, pp.35-41, 44-45
This exchange with Alvin Toffler appeared in Playboy for January,
1964. Great trouble was taken on both sides to achieve the illusion of a
spontaneous conversation. Actually, my contribution as printed conforms
meticulously to the answers, every word of which I had written in longhand
before having them typed for submission to Toffler when he came to Montreux in
mid-March, 1963. The present text takes into account the order of my
interviewer's questions as well as the fact that a couple of consecutive pages
of my typescript were apparently lost in transit. Egreto perambis doribus!
With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and
fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary
cognoscenti-- which you bad enjoyed for more than 30 years-- to both acclaim
and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational bestseller. In the
aftermath of this cause celebre, do you ever regret having written
Lolita?
On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there was a
moment, in 1950, and again in 1951, when I was on the point of burning Humbert
Humbert's little black diary. No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was
like the composition of a beautiful puzzle-- its composition and its solution at
the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you
look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works-- at least those I wrote
in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short
stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a
queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.
Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that her charm is
tender, few would deny that it is queer-- so much so that when director Stanley
Kubrick proposed his plan to make a movie of Lolita, you were quoted as
saying, "Of course they'll have to change the plot. Perhaps they will make
Lolita a dwarfess. Or they will make her 16 and Humbert 26. " Though you finally
wrote the screenplay yourself, several reviewers took the film to task for
watering down the central relationship. Were you satisfied with the final
product?
I thought the movie was absolutely first-rate. The four main actors
deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or
childishly pulling on her sweater in the car-- these are moments of
unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty is a masterpiece, and
so is the death of Mrs. Haze. I must point out, though, that I had nothing to do
with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on stressing certain
things that were not stressed-- for example, the different motels at which they
stayed. All I did was write the screenplay, a preponderating portion of which
was used by Kubrick. The "watering down," if any, did not come from my
aspergillum.
Do you feel that Lolita's twofold success has affected your life
for the better or for the worse?
I gave up teaching-- that's about all in the way of change. Mind you, I
loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved composing and delivering my lectures on
Russian writers and European great books. But around 60, and especially in
winter, one begins to find hard the physical process of teaching, the getting up
at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle with the snow in the driveway,
the march through long corridors to the classroom, the effort of drawing on the
blackboard a map of James Joyce's Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping
car of the St. Petersburg-Moscow express in the early 1870s-- without an
understanding of which neither Ulysses nor Anna Karenin,
respectively, makes sense. For some reason my most vivid memories concern
examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith. Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30.
About 150 students-- unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably well-groomed
young females. A general sense of tedium and disaster. Half-past eight. Little
coughs, the clearing of nervous throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling
of pages. Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind
their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me, seeing in me w^ith hope and hate
the source of forbidden knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask:
"Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that . . . ? Or do you want us to answer
only the first part of the question?" The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone
of the nation, steadily scribbling on. A rustle arising simultaneously, the
majority turning a page in their bluebooks, good teamwork. The shaking of a
cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch
eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious
meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing
gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time's up.
Citing in Lolita the same kind of acid-etched scene you've just
described, many critics have called the book a masterful satiric social
commentary on America. Are they right?
Well, I can only repeat that I have neither the intent nor the temperament
of a moral or social satirist. Whether or not critics think that in Lolita
I am ridiculing human folly leaves me supremely indifferent. But I am annoyed
when the glad news is spread that I am ridiculing America.
But haven't you written yourself that there is "nothing more
exhilarating than American Philistine vulgarity"?
No, I did not say that. That phrase has been lifted out of context, and,
like a round, deep-sea fish, has burst in the process. If you look up my little
after-piece, "On a Book Entitled Lolita," which I appended to the novel, you
will see that what I really said was that in regard to Philistine vulgarity--
which I do feel is most exhilarating-- no difference exists between American and
European manners. I go on to say that a proletarian from Chicago can be just as
Philistine as an English duke.
Many readers have concluded that the Philistinism you seem to find the
most exhilarating is that of America's sexual mores.
Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a problem, sex as a
platitude-- all this is something I find too tedious for words. Let us skip sex.
Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?
Have I been what?
Subjected to psychoanalytical examination.
Why, good God?
In order to see how it is done. Some critics have felt that your barbed
comments about the fashionability of Freudianism, as practiced by American
analysts, suggest a contempt based upon familiarity.
Bookish familiarity only. The ordeal itself is much too silly and
disgusting to be contemplated even as a joke. Freudism and all it has tainted
with its grotesque implications and methods appears to me to be one of the
vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it
utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the
conventional, or the very sick.
Speaking of the very sick, you suggested in Lolita that Humbert
Humbert's appetite for nymphets is the result of an unrequited childhood love
affair; in Invitation to a Beheading you wrote about a 12-year-old girl,
Emmie, who is erotically interested in a man twice her age; and in Bend
Sinister your protagonist dreams that he is "surreptitiously enjoying
Mariette (his maid) while she sat, wincing a little, in his lap during the
rehearsal of a play in which she was supposed to be his daughter. " Some
critics, in poring over your works for clues to your personality, have pointed
to this recurrent theme as evidence of an unwholesome preoccupation on your part
with the subject of sexual attraction between pubescent girls and middle-aged
men. Do you feel that there may be some truth in this charge?
I think it would be more correct to say that had I not written Lolita,
readers would not have started finding nymphets in my other works and in their
own households. I find it very amusing when a friendly, polite person says to
me-- probably just in order to be friendly and polite-- "Mr. Naborkov," or "Mr.
Nabahkov," or "Mr. Nabkov" or "Mr. Nabohkov," depending on his linguistic
abilities, "I have a little daughter who is a regular Lolita." People tend to
underestimate the power of my imagination and my capacity of evolving serial
selves in my writings. And then, of course, there is that special type of
critic, the ferrety, human-interest fiend, the jolly vulgarian. Someone, for
instance, discovered telltale affinities between Humbert's boyhood romance on
the Riviera and my own recollections about little Colette, with whom I built
damp sand castles in Biarritz when I was ten. Somber Humbert was, of course,
thirteen and in the throes of a pretty extravagant sexual excitement, whereas my
own romance with Colette had no trace of erotic desire and indeed was perfectly
common-place and normal. And, of course, at nine and ten years of age, in that
set, in those times, we knew nothing whatsoever about the false facts of life
that are imparted nowadays to infants by progressive parents.
Why false?
Because the imagination of a small child-- especially a town child-- at
once distorts, stylizes, or otherwise alters the bizarre things he is told about
the busy bee, which neither he nor his parents can distinguish from a
bum-blebee, anyway.
What one critic has termed your "almost obsessive attention to the
phrasing, rhythm, cadence and connotation of words" is evident even in the
selection of names for your own celebrated bee and bumblebee-- Lolita and
Humbert Humbert. How did they occur to you?
For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the
most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin
tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be
pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy,
clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop",
the "L" liquid and delicate, the "lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians
pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress.
Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain
name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My little girl's heartrending fate had
to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also
provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive:
Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish mists blend with a
German bunny-- 1 mean, a small German hare.
You're making a word-playful reference, of course, to the German term
for rabbit-- Hase. But what inspired you to dub Lolita's aging inamorato
with such engaging redundancy?
That, too, was easy. The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very
suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name,
and I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble.
Lends itself also to a number of puns. And the execrable diminutive "Hum" is on
a par, socially and emotionally, with "Lo," as her mother calls her.
Another critic has written of you that "the task of sifting and
selecting just the right succession of words from that multilingual memory, and
of arranging their many-mirrored nuances into the proper juxtapositions, must be
psychically exhausting work. " Which of all your books, in this sense, would you
say was the most difficult to write?
Oh, Lolita, naturally. I lacked the necessary information-- that
was the initial difficulty. I did not know any American 12-year-old girls, and I
did not know America; I had to invent America and Lolita. It had taken me some
forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by a
similar task, with a lesser amount of time at my disposal. The obtaining of such
local ingredients as would allow me to inject average "reality" into the brew of
individual fancy proved, at fifty, a much more difficult process than it had
been in the Europe of my youth.
Though born in Russia, you have lived and worked for many years in
America as well as in Europe. Do you feel any strong sense of national identity?
I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where I
studied French literature, before spending fifteen years in Germany. I came to
America in 1940 and decided to become an American citizen, and make America my
home. It so happened that I was immediately exposed to the very best in America,
to its rich intellectual life and to its easygoing, good-natured atmosphere. I
immersed myself in its great libraries and its Grand Canyon. I worked in the
laboratories of its zoological museums. I acquired more friends than I ever had
in Europe, My books-- old books and new ones-- found some admirable readers. I
became as stout as Cortez-- mainly because I quit smoking and started to munch
molasses candy instead, with the result that my weight went up from my usual 140
to a monumental and cheerful 200. In consequence, I am one-third American-- good
American flesh keeping me warm and safe.
You spent 20 years in America, and yet you never owned a home or had a
really settled establishment there. Your friends report that you camped
impermanently in motels, cabins, furnished apartments and the rented homes of
professors away on leave. Did you feel so restless or so alien that the idea of
settling down anywhere disturbed you?
The main reason, the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short
of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me. I would never
manage to match my memories correctly-- so why trouble with hopeless
approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for instance, the
question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I propelled myself out of Russia so
vigorously, with such indignant force, that I have been rolling on and on ever
since. True, I have rolled and lived to become that appetizing thing, a "full
professor," but at heart I have always remained a lean "visiting lecturer." The
few times I said to myself anywhere: "Now, that's a nice spot for a permanent
home," I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying
away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of
settling in one particular nook of the earth. And finally, I don't much care for
furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things-- perhaps because
in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any
too-earnest attachment to material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no
bitterness when the Revolution abolished that wealth.
You lived in Russia for twenty years, in West Europe for 20 years, and
in America for twenty years. But in 1960, after the success of Lolita,
you moved to France and Switzerland and have not returned to the U. S. since.
Does this mean, despite your self-identification as an American writer, that you
consider your American period over?
I am living in Switzerland for purely private reasons-- family reasons and
certain professional ones too, such as some special research for a special book.
I hope to return very soon to America-- back to its library stacks and mountain
passes. An ideal arrangement would be an absolutely soundproofed flat in New
York, on a top floor-- no feet walking above, no soft music anywhere-- and a
bungalow in the Southwest. Sometimes I think it might be fun to adorn a
university again, residing and writing there, not teaching, or at least not
teaching regularly.
Meanwhile you remain secluded-- and somewhat sedentary, from all
reports-- in your hotel suite. How do you spend your time?
I awake around seven in winter: my alarm clock is an Alpine chough-- big,
glossy, black thing with big yellow beak-- which visits the balcony and emits a
most melodious chuckle. For a while I lie in bed mentally revising and planning
things. Around eight: shave, breakfast, enthroned meditation, and bath-- in that
order. Then I work till lunch in my study, taking time out for a short stroll
with my wife along the lake. Practically all the famous Russian writers of the
nineteenth century have rambled here at one time or another. Zhukovski, Gogol,
Dostoevski, Tolstoy-- who courted the hotel chambermaids to the detriment of his
health-- and many Russian poets. But then, as much could be said of Nice or
Rome. We lunch around one p.m., and I am back at my desk by half-past one and
work steadily till half-past six. Then a stroll to a newsstand for the English
papers, and dinner at seven. No work after dinner. And bed around nine. I read
till half-past eleven, and then tussle with insomnia till one a.m. about twice a
week I have a good, long nightmare with unpleasant characters imported
from earlier dreams, appearing in more or less iterative surroundings--
kaleidoscopic arrangements of broken impressions, fragments of day thoughts, and
irresponsible mechanical images, utterly lacking any possible Freudian
implication or explication, but singularly akin to the procession of changing
figures that one usually sees on the inner palpebral screen when closing one's
weary eyes.
Funny that witch doctors and their patients have never hit on that
simple and absolutely satisfying explanation of dreaming. Is it true that you
write standing up, and that you write in longhand rather than on a typewriter?
Yes. I never learned to type. I generally start the day at a lovely
old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on, when I feel gravity nibbling
at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair alongside an ordinary
writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spine, I lie down
on a couch in a corner of my small study. It is a pleasant solar routine. But
when I was young, in my twenties and early thirties, I would often stay all day
in bed, smoking and writing. Now things have changed. Horizontal prose,
vertical verse, and sedent scholia keep swapping qualifiers and spoiling the
alliteration.
Can you tell us something more about the actual creative process
involved in the germination of a book-- perhaps by reading a few random notes
for or excerpts from a work in progress?
Certainly not. No fetus should undergo an exploratory operation. But I can
do something else. This box contains index cards with some notes I made at
various times more or less recently and discarded when writing Pale Fire.
It's a little batch of rejects. Help yourself. "Selene, the moon. Selenginsk, an
old town in Siberia: moon-rocket town" . . . "Berry: the black knob on the bill
of the mute swan" . . . "Dropworm: a small caterpillar hanging on a thread" . .
. "In The New Bon Ton Magazine, volume five, 1820, page 312, prostitutes
are termed 'girls of the town' "... "Youth dreams: forgot pants; old man dreams:
forgot dentures" , . . "Student explains that when reading a novel he likes to
skip passages 'so as to get his own idea about the book and not be influenced by
the author'". . . "Naprapathy: the ugliest word in the language."
"And after rain, on beaded wires, one bird, two birds, three birds, and
none. Muddy tires, sun" . . . "Time without consciousness-- lower animal world;
time with consciousness-- man; consciousness without time-- some still higher
state" . . . "We think not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce's
mistake in those otherwise mar-velous mental soliloquies of his consists in that
he gives too much verbal body to thoughts" . . . "Parody of politeness: That
inimitable 'Please' -- 'Please send me your beautiful-- ' which firms
idiotically address to themselves in printed forms meant for people ordering
their product." . . .
"Naive, nonstop, peep-peep twitter of chicks in dismal crates late, late
at night, on a desolate frost-bedimmed station platform" . . . "The tabloid
headline TORSO KILLER MAY BEAT CHAIR might be translated: 'Celui qui tw an
buste peat bien battre une chaise" . . . "Newspaper vendor, handing me a
magazine with my story: 1 see you made the slicks.' " "Snow falling, young
father out with tiny child, nose like a pink cherry. Why does a parent
immediately say something to his or her child if a stranger smiles at the
latter? 'Sure,' said the father to the infant's interrogatory gurgle, which had
been going on for some time, and would have been left to go on in the quiet
falling snow, had I not smiled in passing". . . "Inter-columniation: dark-blue
sky between two white columns." . . . "Place-name in the Orkneys: Papilio" . . .
"Not 1, too, lived in Arcadia,' but 'I,' says Death, even am in Arcadia'--
legend on a shepherd's tomb (Notes and Queries, June 13, 1868, p. 561)" .
. . "Marat collected butterflies" . . . "From the aesthetic point of view, the
tapeworm is certainly an undesirable boarder. The gravid segments frequently
crawl out of a person's anal canal, sometimes in chains, and have been reported
a source of social embarrassment." (Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 48:558).
What inspires you to record and collect such disconnected impressions
and quotations?
All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel's development I get
this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles. Nobody will ever
discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future
nest and the eggs in it. When I remember afterwards the force that made me jot
down the correct names of things, or the inches and tints of things, even before
I actually needed the information, I am inclined to assume that what I call, for
want of a better term, inspiration, had been already at work, mutely pointing at
this or that, having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure.
After the first shock of recognition-- a sudden sense of "this is what
I'm going to write"-- the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on
solely in the mind, not on paper; and to be aware of the stage it has reached at
any given moment, I do not have to be conscious of every exact phrase. I feel a
kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are
there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, if I
stopped the machine and opened its inner compartment; but I prefer to wait until
what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me. There comes a
moment when I am informed from within that the entire structure is finished. All
I have to do now is take it down in pencil or pen. Since this entire structure,
dimly illumined in one's mind, can be compared to a painting, and since you do
not have to work gradually from left to right for its proper perception, I may
direct my flashlight at any part or particle of the picture when setting it down
in writing. I do not begin my novel at the beginning. I do not reach chapter
three before I reach chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the
next, in consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I
have filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and
novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete.
Every card is rewritten many times. About three cards make one typewritten page,
and when finally I feel that the conceived picture has been copied by me as
faithfully as physically possible-- a few vacant lots always remain, alas-- then
I dictate the novel to my wife who types it out in triplicate.
In what sense do you copy "the conceived picture" of a novel?
A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including
the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of
re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding
duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world. Imagination
without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the
child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is
never simple. To return to my lecturing days: I automatically gave low marks
when a student used the dreadful phrase "sincere and simple"-- "Flaubert writes
with a style which is always simple and sincere"-- under the impression that
this was the greatest compliment payable to prose or poetry. When I struck the
phrase out, which I did with such rage in my pencil that it ripped the paper,
the student complained that this was what teachers had always taught him: "Art
is simple, art is sincere." Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its
source. A schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course,
art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
In terms of modern art, critical opinion is divided about the sincerity
or deceitfulness, simplicity or complexity, of contemporary abstract painting.
What is your own opinion?
I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art.
Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these
matters: it is the individual artist that counts. But if we accept for a moment
the general notion of "modern art," then we must admit that the trouble with it
is that it is so commonplace, imitative, and academic. Blurs and blotches have
merely replaced the mass prettiness of a hundred years ago, pictures of Italian
girls, handsome beggars, romantic ruins, and so forth. But just as among those
corny oils there might occur the work of a true artist with a richer play of
light and shade, with some original streak of violence or tenderness, so among
th" corn of primitive and abstract art one may come across a flash of great
talent. Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but
the individual contribution.
A contribution to society?
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important
to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't
give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth. Although I
do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake"-- because unfortunately such
promoters of it as, for instance, Oscar Wilde and various dainty poets, were in
reality rank moralists and didacticists-- there can be no question that what
makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance
but its art, only its art.
What do you want to accomplish or leave behind-- or should this be of
no concern to the writer?
Well, in this matter of accomplishment, of course, I don't have a 35-year
plan or program, but I have a fair inkling of my literary afterlife. I have
sensed certain hints, I have felt the breeze of certain promises. No doubt there
will be ups and downs, long periods of slump. With the Devil's connivance, I
open a newspaper of 2063 and in some article on the books page I find: "Nobody
reads Nabokov or Fulmerford today." Awful question: Who is this unfortunate
Fulmerford?
While we're on the subject of self-appraisal, what do you regard as
your principal failing as a writer-- apart from forgetability?
Lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts,
third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I
compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
You're doing rather well at the moment, if we may say so.
It's an illusion.
Your reply might be taken as confirmation of critical comments that you
are "an incorrigible leg puller, " "a mystificator, " and "a literary agent
provocateur. " How do you view yourself?
I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed
by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a
reviewer for a review. My second favorite fact-- or shall I stop at one?
No, please go on.
The fact that since my youth-- 1 was 19 when I left Russia-- my political
creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical
to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of
art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to
me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not
exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except
coming through earphones, or played in theaters.
Why no music?
I have no ear for music, a shortcoming I deplore bitterly. When I attend a
concert-- which happens about once in five years-- 1 endeavor gamely to follow
the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a
few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a
diligent bald spot over a fiddle, these take over, and soon I am bored beyond
measure by the motions of the musicians. My knowledge of music is very slight;
and I have a special reason for finding my ignorance and inability so sad, so
unjust: There is a wonderful singer in my family-- my own son. His great gifts,
the rare beauty of his bass, and the promise of a splendid career-- all this
affects me deeply, and I fee] a fool during a technical conversation among
musicians. I am perfectly aware of the many parallels between the art forms of
music and those of literature, especially in matters of structure, but what can
I do if ear and brain refuse to cooperate? I have found a queer substitute for
music in chess-- more exactly, in the composing of chess problems.
Another substitute, surely, has been your own euphonious prose and
poetry. As one of few authors who have written with. eloquence in more than one
language, how would you characterize the textural differences between Russian
and English, in which you are regarded as equally facile?
In sheer number of words, English is far richer than Russian. This is
especially noticeable in nouns and adjectives. A very bothersome feature that
Russian presents is the dearth, vagueness, and clumsiness of technical terms.
For example, the simple phrase "to park a car" comes out-- if translated
back from the Russian-- as "to leave an automobile standing for a long time."
Russian, at least polite Russian, is more formal than polite English. Thus, the
Russian word for "sexual"-- polovoy-- is slightly indecent and not to be
bandied around. The same applies to Russian terms rendering various anatomical
and biological notions that are frequently and familiarly expressed in English
conversation. On the other hand, there are words rendering certain nuances of
motion and gesture and emotion in which Russian excels. Thus by changing the
head of a verb, for which one may have a dozen different prefixes to choose
from, one is able to make Russian express extremely fine shades of duration and
intensity. English is, syntactically, an extremely flexible medium, but Russian
can be given even more subtle twists and turns. Translating Russian into English
is a little easier than translating English into Russian, and 10 times easier
than translating English into French.
You have said you will never write another novel in Russian. Why?
During the great, and still unsung, era of Russian intellectual
expatriation-- roughly between 1920 and 1940-- books written in Russian by
emigre Russians and published by emigre firms abroad were eagerly bought
or borrowed by emigre readers but were absolutely banned in Soviet Russia-- as
they still are (except in the case of a few dead authors such as Kuprin and
Bunin, whose heavily censored works have been recently reprinted there), no
matter the theme of the story or poem. An emigre novel, published, say, in Paris
and sold over all free Europe, might have, in those years, a total sale of 1,000
or 2,000 copies-- that would be a best seller-- but every copy would also pass
from hand to hand and be read by at least 20 persons, and at least 50 annually
if stocked by Russian lending libraries, of which there were hundreds in West
Europe alone. The era of expatriation can be said to have ended during World War
II. Old writers died, Russian publishers also vanished, and worst of all, the
general atmosphere of exile culture, with its splendor, and vigor, and purity,
and reverberative force, dwindled to a sprinkle of Russian-language periodicals,
anemic in talent and provincial in tone. Now to take my own case: It was not the
financial side that really mattered; I don't think my Russian writings ever
brought me more than a few hundred dollars per year, and I am all for the ivory
tower, and for writing to please one reader alone-- one's own self. But one also
needs some reverberation, if not response, and a moderate multiplication of
one's self throughout a country or countries; and if there be nothing but a void
around one's desk, one would expect it to be at least a sonorous void, and not
circumscribed by the walls of a padded cell. With the passing of years I grew
less and less interested in Russia and more and more indifferent to the
once-harrowing thought that my books would remain banned there as long as my
contempt for the police state and political oppression prevented me from
entertaining the vaguest thought of return. No, I will not write another novel
in Russian, though I do allow myself a very few short poems now and then. I
wrote my last Russian novel a quarter of a century ago. But today, in
compensation, in a spirit of justice to my little American muse, I am doing
something else. But perhaps I should not talk about it at this early stage.
Please do.
Well, it occurred to me one day-- while I was glancing at the varicolored
spines of Lolita translations into languages I do not read, such as
Japanese, Finnish or Arabic-- that the list of unavoidable blunders in these
fifteen or twenty versions would probably make, if collected, a fatter volume
than any of them. I had checked the French translation, which was basically very
good yet would have bristled with unavoidable errors had I not corrected them.
But what could I do with Portuguese or Hebrew or Danish? Then I imagined
something else. I imagined that in some distant future somebody might produce a
Russian version of Lolita. I trained my inner telescope upon that
particular point in the distant future and I saw that every paragraph,
pock-marked as it is with pitfalls, could lend itself to hideous mistranslation.
In the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian version of Lolita would be
entirely degraded and botched by vulgar paraphrases or blunders. So I decided to
translate it myself. Up to now I have about sixty pages ready.
Are you presently at work on any new project?
Good question, as they say on the lesser screen. I have just finished
correcting the last proofs of my work on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin-- four
fat little volumes which are to appear this year in the Bollingen Series; the
actual translation of the poem occupies a small section of volume one. The rest
of the volume and volumes two, three and four contain copious notes on the
subject. This opus owes its birth to a casual remark my wife made in 1950-- in
response to my disgust with rhymed paraphrases of Eugene Onegin, every
line of which I had to revise for my students-- "Why don't you translate it
yourself?" This is the result. It has taken some ten years of labor. The index
alone runs to 5,000 cards in three long shoe boxes; you see them over there on
that shelf. My translation is, of course, a literal one, a crib, a pony. And to
the fidelity of transposal I have sacrificed everything: elegance, euphony,
clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even grammar.
In view of these admitted flaws, are you looking forward to reading the
reviews of the book?
I really don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or
attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen-- which does happen now
and then. And I never reread them, though my wife collects the stuff, and though
maybe I shall use a spatter of the more hilarious Lolita items to write
someday a brief history of the nymphet's tribulations. I remember, however,
quite vividly, certain attacks by Russian emigre critics who wrote about my
first novels 30 years ago; not that I was more vulnerable then, but my memory
was certainly more retentive and enterprising, and I was a reviewer myself. In
the nineteen-twenties I was clawed at by a certain Mochulski who could never
stomach my utter indifference to organized mysticism, to religion, to the
church-- any church. There were other critics who could not forgive me for
keeping aloof from literary "movements," for not airing the "angoisse"
that they wanted poets to feel, and for not belonging to any of those groups of
poets that held sessions of common inspiration in the back rooms of Parisian
cafes. There was also the amusing case of Georgiy lvanov, a good poet but a
scurrilous critic. I never met him or his literary wife Irina Odoevtsev; but one
day in the late nineteen-twenties or early nineteen-thirties, at a time when I
regularly reviewed books for an emigre newspaper in Berlin, she sent me from
Paris a copy of a novel of hers with the wily inscription "Spasibo za
Korolya, damn, valeta" (thanks for King, Queen, Knave)-- which I
was free to understand as "Thanks for writing that book," but which might also
provide her with the alibi: "Thanks for sending me your book," though I never
sent her anything. Her book proved to be pitifully trite, and I said so
in a brief and nasty review, lvanov retaliated with a grossly personal article
about me and my stuff. The possibility of venting or distilling friendly or
unfriendly feelings through the medium of literary criticism is what makes that
art such a skewy one.
You have been quoted as saying: My pleasures are the most intense known
to man: butterfly hunting and writing. Are they in any way comparable?
No, they belong essentially to quite different types of enjoyment. Neither
is easy to describe to a person who has not experienced it, and each is so
obvious to the one who has that a description would sound crude and redundant.
In the case of butterfly hunting I think I can distinguish four main elements.
First, the hope of capturing-- or the actual capturing-- of the first specimen
of a species unknown to science: this is the dream at the back of every
lepidopterist's mind, whether he be climbing a mountain in New Guinea or
crossing a bog in Maine. Secondly, there is the capture of a very rare or very
local butterfly-- things you have gloated over in books, in obscure scientific
reviews, on the splendid plates of famous works, and that you now see on the
wing, in their natural surroundings, among plants and minerals that acquire a
mysterious magic through the intimate association with the rarities they produce
and support, so that a given landscape lives twice: as a delightful wilderness
in its own right and as the haunt of a certain butterfly or moth. Thirdly, there
is the naturalist's interest in disentangling the life histories of little-known
insects, in learning about their habits and structure, and in determining their
position in the scheme of classification-- a scheme which can be sometimes
pleasurably exploded in a dazzling display of polemical fireworks when a new
discovery upsets the old scheme and confounds its obtuse champions. And
fourthly, one should not ignore the element of sport, of luck, of brisk motion
and robust achievement, of an ardent and arduous quest ending in the silky
triangle of a folded butterfly lying on the palm of one's hand.
What about the pleasures of writing?
They correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading, the bliss, the
felicity of a phrase is shared by writer and reader: by the satisfied writer and
the grateful reader, or-- which is the same thing-- by the artist grateful to
the unknown force in his mind that has suggested a combination of images and by
the artistic reader whom this combination satisfies.
Every good reader has enjoyed a few good books in his life so why analyze
delights that both sides know? I write mainly for artists, fellow-artists and
follow-artists. However, I could never explain adequately to certain students in
my literature classes, the aspects of good reading-- the fact that you read an
artist's book not with your heart (the heart is a remarkably stupid reader), and
not with your brain alone, but with your brain and spine. "Ladies and gentlemen,
the tingle in the spine really tells you what the author felt and wished you to
feel." I wonder if I shall ever measure again with happy hands the breadth of a
lectern and plunge into my notes before the sympathetic abyss of a college
audience.
What is your reaction to the mixed feelings vented by one critic in a
review which characterized you as having a fine and original mind, but "not much
trace of a generalizing intellect, "and as "the typical artist who distrusts
ideas"?
In much the same solemn spirit, certain crusty lepidopterists have
criticized my works on the classification of butterflies, accusing me of being
more interested in the subspecies and the subgenus than in the genus and the
family. This kind of attitude is a matter of mental temperament, I suppose. The
middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot get rid of the furtive feeling that a
book, to be great, must deal in great ideas. Oh, I know the type, the dreary
type! He likes a good yarn spiced with social comment; he likes to recognize his
own thoughts and throes in those of the author; he wants at least one of the
characters to be the author's stooge. If American, he has a dash of Marxist
blood, and if British, he is acutely and ridiculously class-conscious; he finds
it so much easier to write about ideas than about words; he does not realize
that perhaps the reason he does not find general ideas in a particular writer is
that the particular ideas of that writer have not yet become general.
Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal
in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors.
Yet you have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. " Why?
Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love
Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do,
venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap
journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his
tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive
murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment-- by this
reader anyway.
Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad "writers of books
for boys"?
That's exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the better of the
two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful,
highly artistic short story, "The Killers." And the description of the
iridescent fish and rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I
cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of
romanticist cliches. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I
would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly
juvenile, and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of
the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such as-- but
some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are
not yet buried.
What did you read when you were a boy?
Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read
more fiction and poetry-- English, Russian and French-- than in any other
five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe,
Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander
Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and
Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual
child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe,
between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman
Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several--
Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke-- have lost the
glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are
probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. I was never exposed in the
twenties and thirties, as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of the
not quite first-rate Eliot and of definitely second-rate Pound. I read them late
in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend's house, and
not only remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why
anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some
sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I
did.
What are your reading habits today?
Usually I read several books at a time-- old books, new books, fiction,
nonfiction, verse, anything-- and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so
has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I
accumulate another pile. There are some varieties of fiction that I never
touch-- mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I
also detest the so-called "powerful" novel-- full of commonplace obscenities and
torrents of dialogue-- in fact, when I receive a new novel from a hopeful
publisher-- "hoping that I like the hook as much as he does"-- 1 check first of
all how much dialogue there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I
shut the book with a bang and ban it from my bed.
Are there any contemporary authors you do enjoy reading?
I do have a few favorites-- for example, Robbe-Grillet and Borges. How
freely and gratefully one breathes in their marvelous labyrinths! I love their
lucidity of thought, the purity and poetry, the mirage in the mirror.
Many critics feel that this description applies no less aptly to your
own prose. To what extent do you feel that prose and poetry intermingle as art
forms?
Except that I started earlier-- that's the answer to the first part of
your question. As to the second: Well, poetry, of course, includes all creative
writing; I have never been able to see any generic difference between poetry and
artistic prose. As a matter of fact, I would be inclined to define a good poem
of any length as a concentrate of good prose, with or without the addition of
recurrent rhythm and rhyme. The magic of prosody may improve upon w^hat we call
prose by bringing out the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there are
also certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat of
thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom and intonation. As in
today's scientific classifications, there is a lot of overlapping in our concept
of poetry and prose today. The bamboo bridge between them is the metaphor.
You have also written that poetry represents "the mysteries of the
irrational perceived through rational words. " But many feel that the
"irrational" has little place in an age when the exact knowledge of science has
begun to plumb the most profound mysteries of existence. Do you agree?
This appearance is very deceptive. It is a journalistic illusion. In point
of fact, the greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery. Moreover, I
don't believe that any science today has pierced any mystery. We, as newspaper
readers, are inclined to call "science" the cleverness of an electrician or a
psychiatrist's mumbo jumbo. This, at best, is applied science, and one of the
characteristics of applied science is that yesterday's neutron or today's truth
dies tomorrow. But even in a better sense of "science"-- as the study of visible
and palpable nature, or the poetry of pure mathematics and pure philosophy-- the
situation remains as hopeless as ever. We shall never know the origin of life,
or the meaning of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of
nature, or the nature of thought.
Man's understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept of a
Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?
To be quite candid-- and what I am going to say now is something I never
said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill-- I know more than I
can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been
expressed, had I not known more.