Who are the great American writers you most admire?
When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville, whom 1 did not read as a boy. My feelings towards James are rather complicated. I really dislike him intensely but now and then the figure in the phrase, the turn of the epithet, the screw of an absurd adverb, cause me a kind of electric tingle, as if some current of his was also passing through my own blood. Hawthorne is a splendid writer. Emerson's poetry is delightful.
You have often said that you «don't belong to any club or group», and I wonder if the historical examples of the ways Russian writers have allowed ideology to determine if not destroy their art, culminating in the Socialist Realism of our own time, have not gone a long way in shaping your own skepticism and aversion to didacticism of any kind. Which «historical examples» have you been most conscious of?
My aversion to groups is rather a matter of temperament than the fruit of information and thought. I was born that way and have despised ideological coercion instinctively all my life. Those «historical examples» by the way are not as clearcut and obvious as you seem to imply. The mystical didacticism of Gogol or the utilitarian moralism of Tolstoy, or the reactionary journalism of Dostoevski, are of their own poor making and in the long run nobody really takes them seriously.
Would you say something about the controversy surrounding the Chernyshevski biography in The Gift? You have commented on this briefly before, but since its suppression in the thirties expresses such a transcendent irony and seems to justify the need for just such a parody, I think your readers would be most interested, especially since so little is known about the emigre communities, their magazines, and the role of intellectuals in these communities. If you would like to describe something of the writer's relationship to this world, please do.
Everything that can be profitably said about Count GodunovCherdyntsev's biography of Chernyshevski has been said by Koncheyev in The Gift. I can only add that I devoted as much honest labor to the task of gathering the material for the Chernyshevski chapter as I did to the composing of Shade's poem in Pale Fire. As to the suppression of that chapter by the editors of Sovremennye Zapiski, it was indeed an unprecedented occurrence, quite out of keeping with their exceptional broadmindedness, for, generally speaking, in their acceptance or rejection of literary works they were guided exclusively by artistic standards. As to the latter part of your question, the revised Chapter Fourteen in Speak, Memory will provide additional lnfomation.
Do you have any opinions about the Russian antiutopian tradition (if it can be called this), from Odoevski's «The Last Suicide» and «A City Wtthout a Name» in Russian Nights to Bryusov'sThe Republic of the Southern Cross and Zamyatin'sWJe (to name only a few)?
I am indifferent to those works.
Is it fair to say that Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister are cast as mock antiutopian novels, with their idelogical centers removed — the totalitarian state becoming an extreme and fantastic metaphor for the imprisonment of the mind, thus making consciousness, rather than politics, the subject of these novels?
Yes, possibly.
Speaking of ideology, you have often expressed your hostility to Freud, most noticeably tn the forewords to your translated novels. Some readers have wondered which of Freud's works or theories you were most offended by and why. The parodies of Freud in Lolita and Pale Fire suggest a wider familiarity with the good doctor than you have ever publicly granted. Would you comment on this?
Uh, 1 am not up to discussing again that figure ot fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care. ,
Your contempt for Freud's «standardized symbols» extends to the assumptions of a good many other theorizers. Do you think literary criticism is at all purposeful, and if so, what kind of criticism would you point to? Pale Fire makes it clear what sort you find gratuitous (at best).
My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on «ideas». Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the «how» above the «what» but do not let it be confused with the «so what». Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.
As a writer, have you ever found criticism instructive — not so much the reviews of your own books, but any general criticism? From your own experiences do you think that an academic and a literary career nourish one another? Since many writers today know no other alternative than a life on campus Yd be very interested in your feelings about this. Do you think that your own work in America was at all shaped by your being part of an academic community?
I find criticism most instructive when an expert proves to me that my facts or my grammar are wrong. An academic career is especially helpful to writers in two ways: 1) easy access to magnificent libraries and 2) long vacations. There is of course the business of teaching, but old professors have young instructors to correct examination papers for them, and young instructors, authors in their own right, are followed by admiring glances along the corridors of Vanity Hall. Otherwise, our greatest rewards, such as the reverberations of our minds in such minds as vibrate responsively in later years, force novelist-teachers to nurse lucidity and honesty of style in their lectures.
What are the possibilities of literary biography?
They are great fun to write, generally less fun to read. Sometimes the thing becomes a kind of double paper chase: first, the biographer pursues his quarry through letters and diaries, and across the bogs of conjecture, and then a rival authority pursues the muddy biographer.
Some critics may find the use of coincidence in a novel arch or contrived. I recall that you yourself at Cornell called Dostoevski's usage of coincidence crude.
But in «real» life they do happen. Last night you were telling us at dinner a very funny story about the use of the title «Doctor» in Germany, and the very next moment, as my loud laughter was subsiding, I heard a person at the next table saying to her neighbor in clear French tones coming through the tinkling and shuffling sounds of a restaurant — «Of course, you never know with the Germans if 'Doctor' means a dentist or a lawyer». Very often you meet with some person or some event irl «real» life that would sound pat in a story. It is not the coincidence in the story that bothers us so much as the coincidence of coincidences in several stories by different writers, as, for instance, — the recurrent eavesdropping device in nineteenth-century Russian fiction.
Could you tell us something about your work habits as a writer, and the way you compose your novels. Do you use an outline? Do you have a full sense of where a fiction is heading even while you are in the early stages of composition?
In my twenties and early thirties, I used to write, dipping pen in ink and using a new nib every other day, in exercise books, crossing out, inserting, striking out again, crumpling the page, rewriting every page three or four times, then copying out the novel in a different ink and a neater hand, then revising the whole thing once more, recopying it with new corrections, and finally dictating it to my wife who has typed out all my stuff. Generally speaking, I am a slow writer, a snail carrying its house at the rate of two hundred pages of final copy per year (one spectacular exception was the Russian original of Invitation to a Beheading, the first draft of wich I wrote in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration). In those days and nights I generally followed the order of chapters when writing a novel but even so, from the very first, I relied heavily on mental composition, constructing whole paragraphs in my mind as I walked in the streets or sat in my bath, or lay in bed, although often deleting or rewriting them afterward. In the late thirties, beginning with The Gift, and perhaps un
der the influence of the many notes needed, I switched to another, physically more practical, method — that of writing with an erasercapped pencil on index cards. Since I always have at the very start a curiously clear preview of the entire novel before me or above me, I find cards especially convenient when not following the logical sequence of chapters but preparing instead this or that passage at any point of the novel and filling in the gaps in no special order. I am afraid to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for, but I do think that in my case it is true that the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out and as precisely as I am humanly able to. The greatest happiness I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot understand, or rather catch myselt not understanding (without the presupposition of an already existing creation) how or why that image or structural move or exact formulation of phrase has just come to me. It is sometimes rather amusing to find my readers trying to elucidate in a matter-of-fact way these wild workings of my not very efficient mind.
One often hears from writers talk of how a character takes hold of them and in a sense dictates the course of the action. Has this ever been your experience?
I have never experienced this. What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane. No, the design of my novel is fixed in my imagination and every character follows the course I imagine for him. I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth. Whether 1 reproduce it as fully and faithfully as 1 would wish, is another question. Some of my old works reveal dismal blurrings and blanks.
Pale Fire appears to some readers to be in part a gloss of Plato's myth of the cave, and the constant play of Shades and Shadows throughout your work suggests a conscious Platonism. Would you care to comment on this possibility?
As I have said I am not particularly fond of Plato, nor would I survive very long under his Germanic regime of militarism and music. I do not think that this cave business has anything to do with my Shade and Shadows.
Since we are mentioning philosophy per se, / wonder if we might talk about the philosophy of language that seems to unfold in your works, and whether or not you have consciously seen the similarities, say, between the language of Zemblan and what Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say about a «private language». Your poet's sense of the limitations of language is startlingly similar to Wittgenstein's remark on the referential basis of language. While you were at Cambridge, did you have much contact with the philosophy faculty?
No contact whatsoever. I am completely ignorant of Wittgenstein's works, and the first time I heard his name must have been in the fifties. In Cambridge I played football and wrote Russian verse.
When in Canto Two John Shade describes himself, «I stand before the window and I pare/My fingernails, «you are echoing Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, on the artist who «remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails». In almost all of your novels, especially in Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Pale Fire, and Pnin — but even in Lolita, in the person of the seventh hunter in Quilty's play, and in several other phosphorescent glimmers which are visible to the careful reader — the creator is indeed behind or above his handiwork, but he is not invisible and surely not indifferent. To what extent are you consciously «answering» Joyce in Pale Fire, and what are your feelings about his esthetic stance — or alleged stance, because perhaps you may think that Stephen's remark doesn't apply to Ulysses?
Neither Kinbote nor Shade, nor their maker, is answering Joyce in Pale Fire. Actually, I never liked A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I find it a feeble and garrulous book. The phrase you quote is an unpleasant coincidence.
You have granted that Pierre Delalande influenced you, and I would readily admit that tnfluencemongertng can be reductive and deeply offensive if it tries to deny a writers originality. But in the instance of yourself and Joyce, it seems to me that you've consciously profited from Joyces example without imitating him — that you've realized the implications in Ulysses without having had recourse to obviously «Joycean» devices (stream-of-consciousness, the «collage» effects created out of the vast flotsam and jetsam of everyday life). Would you comment on what Joyce has meant to you as a writer, his importance in regard to his liberation and expansion of the novel form?
My first real contact with Ulysses, after a leering glimpse in the early twenties, was in the thirties at a time when I was definitely formed as a writer and immune to any literary influence. I studied Ulysses seriously only much later, in the fifties, when preparing my Cornell courses. That was the best part of the education I received at Cornell. Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce's writings, and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint oldtimers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake's facade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.
Although I cannot recall your mentioning the involuted structure of Ulysses when you lectured on Joyce, I do remember your insisting that the hallucinations in Nighttown are the author's and not Stephen's or Bloom's, which is one step away from a discussion of the involution. This is an aspect of Ulysses almost totally ignored by the Joyce Industry, and an aspect of Joyce which would seem to be of great interest to you. If Joyce's somewhat inconsistent involutions tend to be obscured by the vastness of his structures, it might be said that the structuring of your novels depends on the strategy of involution. Could you comment on this, or compare your sense of Joyce's presence m and above his works with your own intention — that ts, Joyce's covert appearances in Ulysses; the whole Shakespearepaternity theme which ultimately spirals into the idea of the «parentage» of Ulysses itself; Shakespeare's direct address to Joyce in Nighttown («How my Old-fellow chokit his Thursday-momum», that being Bloomsday); and Molly's plea to Joyce, «O Jamesy let me up out of this» — all this as against the way the authorial voice — or what you call the «anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me» — again and again appears in your novels, most strikingly at the end.
One of the reasons Bloom cannot be the active party in the Nighttown chapter (and it he is not, then the author is directly dreaming it up for him, and around him, with some «real» episodes inserted here and there) is that Bloom, a wilting male anyway, has been drained of his manhood earlier in the evening and thus would be quite unlikely to indulge in the violent sexual fancies of Nighttown.
Ideally, how should a reader experience or react to «the end» of one of your novels, that moment when the vectors are removed and the fact of the fiction is underscored, the cast dismissed? What common assumptions about literature are you assaulting?
The question is so charmingly phrased that I would love to answer it with equal elegance and eloquence, but I cannot say very much. I think that what I would welcome at the close of a book of mine is a sensation of its world receding in the distance and stopping somewhere there, suspended afar like a picture in a picture: The Artist's Studio by Van Bock.1 (1 Research has failed to confirm the existence of this alleged «Dutch Master», whose name is only an alphabetical step away from being a significant anagram, a poor relation of Quilty's anagrammatic mistress, «Vivian Darkbloom».)
It may well be a failure of perception, but I've always been unsure of the very last sentences o/Lolita, perhaps because the shift in voice at the close of your other books is so clear, but is one supposed to «hear» a different voice when the masked narrator says «And do not pity C. Q
. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. . . . «and so forth? The return to the first person in the next sentence makes me think that the mask has not been lifted, but readers trained on Invitation to a Beheading, among other books, are always looking for the imprint of that «master thumb, « to quote Franklin Lane in Pale Fire, «that made the whole involuted, boggling thing one beautiful straight line».
No, I did not mean to introduce a different voice. I did want, however, to convey a constriction of the narrator's sick heart, a warning spasm causing him to abridge names and hasten to conclude his tale before it was too late. I am glad I managed to achieve this remoteness of tone at the end.
Do Franklin Lane's Letters exist? I don't wish to appear like Mr. Goodman in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, but I understand that Franklin Lane did exist.
Frank Lane, his published letters, and the passage cited by Kinbote, certainly exist. Kinbote was rather struck by Lane's handsome melancholy face. And of course «lane» is the last word of Shade's poem. The latter has no significance.
In which of your early works do you think you first begin to face the possibilities that are fully developed in Invitation to a Beheading and reach an apotheosis in the «involute abode» of Pale Fire?
Possibly in The Eye, but Invitation to a Beheading is on the whole a burst of spontaneous generation.
Are there other writers whose involuted effects you admire? Sterne? Pirandello s plays?
I never cared for Pirandello. I love Sterne but had not read him in my Russian period.
The Afterword to Lolita is significant, obviously, for many reasons. Is it included in all the translations, which, I understand, number about twenty-five?
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