What are your plans for future work?
I am writing a new novel but of this I cannot speak. Another project I have been nursing for some time is the publication of the complete screenplay of Lolitathat I made for Kubrick. Although there are just enough borrowings from it in his version to justify my legal position as author of the script, the film is only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down scene by scene during the six months I worked in a Los Angeles villa. I do not wish to imply that Kubrick's film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rate, but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of poshlost is often given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass. Kubrick, I think, avoided this fault in his version, but I shall never understand why he did not follow my directions and dreams. It is a great pity; but at least I shall be able to have people read my Lolita play in its original form.
If you had the choice of one and only one book by which you would be remembered, which one would it be?
The one I am writing or rather dreaming of writing. Actually, I shall be remembered by Lolita and my work on Eupene Onepin.
Do you feel you have any conspicuous or secret flaw as a writer?
The absence of a natural vocabulary. An odd thing to confess, but true. Of the two instruments in my possession, one — my native tongue — I can no longer use, and this not only because I lack a Russian audience, but also because the excitement of verbal adventure in the Russian medium has faded away gradually after I turned to English in 1940. My English, this second instrument I have always had, is however a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse and shop. An old RollsRoyce is not always preferable to a plain Jeep.
What do you think about the contemporary competitive ranking of writers?
Yes, I have noticed that in this respect our professional book reviewers are veritable bookmakers. Who's in, who's out, and where are the snows of yesteryear. All very amusing. I am a little sorry to be left out. Nobody can decide if I am a middleaged American writer or an old Russian writer — or an ageless international freak.
What is your great regret in your career?
That I did not come earlier to America. I would have liked to have lived in New York in the thirties. Had my Russian novels been translated then, they might have provided a shock and a lesson for pro-Soviet enthusiasts.
Are there significant disadvantages to your present fame?
Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.
8
On February 17, 1968, Martin Esslin came to see me at my hotel in Montreux with the object of conducting an interview for The New York Times Book Review. The following letter awaited him downstairs.
«Welcome! I have devoted a lot of pleasurable time to answering in writing the questions sent to me by your London office. I have done so in a concise, stylish, printable form. Could I please ask you to have my answers appear in The New York Times Book Review the way they are prepared here? (Except that you may want to interrupt the longer answers by several inserted questions). That convenient method has been used to mutual satisfaction in interviews with Playboy, The Paris Review, Wisconsin Studies, Le Monde, La Tribune de Geneve, etc. Furthermore, I like to see the proofs for checking last minute misprints or possible little flaws of fact (dates, places). Being an unusually muddled speaker (a poor relative of the writer) I would like the stuff I prepared in typescript to be presented as direct speech on my part, whilst other statements which I may stammer out in the course of our chats, and the gist of which you might want to incorporate in The Profile, should be used, please, obliquely or paraphrastically, without any quotes. Naturally, it is for you to decide whether the background material should be kept separate in its published form from the question-and-answer section,
I am leaving the attached material with the concierge because I think you might want to peruse it before we meet. I am very much looking forward to seeing you. Please give me a ring when you are ready». The text given below is that of the typescript. The interview appeared in The New York Times Book Review on May 12, 1968.
How does VN live and relax?
A very old Russian friend of ours, now dwelling in Paris, remarked recently when she was here, that one night, forty years ago, in the course of a little quiz at one of her literary parties in Berlin, I, being asked where I would like to live, answered, «In a large comfortable hotel». That is exactly what my wife and I are doing now. About every other year she and I fly (she) or sail (she and I), back to our country of adoption but I must confess that I am a very sluggish traveler unless butterfly hunting is involved. For that purpose we usually go to Italy where my son and translator (from Russian into English) lives; the knowledge of Italian he has acquired in the course of his main career (opera singing) assists him, incidentally, in checking some of the Italian translations of my stuff. My own Italian is limited to «avanti» and «prego».
After waking up between six and seven in the morning, I write till ten-thirty, generally at a lectern which faces a bright corner of the room instead of the bright audiences of my professorial days. The first half-hour of relaxation is breakfast with my wife, around eight-thirty, and the creaming of our mail. One kind of letter that goes into the wastepaper basket at once, with its enclosed stamped envelope and my picture, is the one from the person who tells me he has a large collection of autographs (Somerset Maugham, Abu Abdul, Karen Korona, Charles Dodgson, Jr., etc.) and would like to add my name, which he misspells. Around eleven, I soak for twenty minutes in a hot bath, with a sponge on my head and a wordsman's worry in it, encroaching, alas, upon the nirvana. A stroll with my wife along the lake is followed by a frugal lunch and a two-hour nap after which I resume my work until dinner at seven.
An American friend gave us a Scrabble set in Cyrillic alphabet, manufactured in Newtown, Conn.; so we play Russian skrebl for an hour or two after dinner. Then I read in bed — periodicals or one of the novels that proud publishers optimistically send me. Between eleven and midnight begins my usual fight with insomnia. Such are my habits in the cold season. Summers I spend in the pursuit of lepidoptera on flowery slopes and mountain screes; and, of course, after my daily hike of fifteen miles or more, I sleep even worse than in winter. My last resort in this business of relaxation is the composing of chess problems. The recent publication of two of them (in The Sunday Times and The Evening News of London) gave me more pleasure, I think, than the printing of my first poems half a century ago in St. Petersburg.
VN's social circle?
The tufted ducks and crested grebes of Geneva Lake. Some of the nice people in my new novel. My sister Elena in Geneva. A few friends in Lausanne and Vevey. A steady stream of brilliant American intellectuals visiting me in the riparian solitude of a beautifully reflected sunset. A Mr. Van Veen who travels down from his mountain chalet every other day to meet a dark lady, whose name I cannot divulge, on a street corner that I glimpse from my mammothtusk tower. Who else? A Mr. Vivian Badlook.
VN’s feelings about his work?
My feelings about my work are, on the whole, not unfriendly. Boundless modesty and what people call «humility» are virtues scarcely conducive to one's complacently dwelling upon one's own work — particularly when one lacks them. I see it segmented into four stages. First comes meditation (including the accumulation of seemingly hap hazard notes, the secret arrowheads of research); then the actual writing, and rewriting, on special index cards that my stationer orders for me: «special» because those you buy here come lined on both sides, and if, in the process of writing, a blast of inspiration sweeps a card onto the floor, and you pick it up without looking, and go on writing, it may happen — it has happened — that you fill in its underside, numbering it, say, 107, and then cannot find your 103 which hides on the side, used before. When the fa
ir copy on cards is ready, my wife reads it, checking it for legibility and spelling, and has it transferred onto pages by a typist who knows English; the reading of galleys is a further part of that third stage. After the book is out, foreign rights come into play. I am trilingual, in the proper sense of writing, and not only speaking, three languages (in that sense practically all the writers I personally know or knew in America, including a babel of paraphrasts, are strictly monolinguists). Lolita I have translated myself in Russian (recently published in New York by Phaedra, Inc.); but otherwise I am able to control and correct only the French translations of my novels. That process entails a good deal of wrestling with booboos and boners, but on the other hand allows me to reach my fourth, and final, stage — that of rereading my own book a few months after the original printing. What judgment do I then pronounce? Am I still satisfied with my work? Does the afterglow of achievement correspond to the foreglow of conception? It should and it does.
VN's opinions: on the modern world; on contemporary politics; on contemporary writers; on drug addicts who might consider Lolita «square»?
I doubt if we can postulate the objective existence of a «modern world» on which an artist should have any definite and important opinion. It has been tried, of course, and even carried to extravagant lengths. A hundred years ago, in Russia, the most eloquent and influential reviewers were leftwing, radical, utilitarian, political critics, who demanded that Russian novelists and poets portray and sift the modern scene. In those distant times, in that remote country, a typical critic would insist that a literary artist be a «reporter on the topics of the day», a social commentator, a class-war correspondent.
That was half a century before the Bolshevist police not only revived the dismal so-called progressive (really, regressive) trend characteristic of the eighteen sixties and seventies, but, as we all know, enforced it. In the old days, to be sure, great lyrical poets or the incomparable prose artist who composed Anna Karenin (which should be transliterated without the closing «a» — she was not a ballerina) could cheerfully ignore the leftwing progressive Philistines who requested Tyutchev or Tolstoy to mirror politicosocial soapbox gesticulations instead of dwelling on an aristocratic love affair or the beauties of nature.
The dreary principles once voiced in the reign of Alexander the Second and their subsequent sinister transmutation into the decrees of gloomy police states (Kosygin's dour face expresses that gloom far better than Stalin's dashing mustache) come to my mind whenever I hear today retro-progressive book reviewers in America and England plead for a little more social comment, a little less artistic whimsy. The accepted notion of a «modern world» continuously flowing around us belongs to the same type of abstraction as say, the «quaternary period» of paleontology. What I feel to be the real modern world is the world the artist creates, his own mirage, which becomes a new mir («world» in Russian) by the very act of his shedding, as it were, the age he lives in. My mirage is produced in my private desert, an arid but ardent place, with the sign No Caravans Allowed on the trunk of a lone palm. Of course, good minds do exist whose caravans of general ideas lead somewhere — to curious bazaars, to photogenic temples; but an independent novelist cannot derive much true benefit from tagging along.
I would also want to establish first a specific definition of the term politics, and that might mean dipping again in the remote past. Let me simplify matters by saying that in my parlor politics as well as in open-air statements (when subduing, for instance, a glib foreigner who is always glad to join our domestic demonstrators in attacking America), I content myself with remarking that what is bad for the Reds is good for me. I will abstain from details (they might lead to a veritable slalom of qualificatory parentheses), adding merely that I do not have any neatly limited political views or rather that such views as 1 have shade otf into a vague old-fashioned liberalism. Much less vaguely — quite adamantically, or even adamantinely — I am aware of a central core of spirit in me that flashes and jeers at the brutal farce of totalitarian states, such as Russia, and her embarrassing tumors, such as China.
A feature of my inner prospect is the absolute abyss yawning between the barbedwire tangle of police states and the spacious freedom of thought we enjoy in America and Western Europe. I am bored by writers who join the socialcomment racket. I despise the corny Philistine fad of flaunting fourletter words. I also refuse to find merit in a novel just because it is by a brave Black in Africa or a brave White in Russia — or by any representative of any single group in America. Frankly, a national, folklore, class, masonic, religious, or any other communal aura involuntarily prejudices me against a novel, making it harder for me to peel the offered fruit so as to get at the nectar of possible talent. I could name, but will nut, a number of modern artists whom I read purely for pleasure, and not for edification. I find comic the amalgamation of certain writers under a common label of, say, «Cape Codpiece Peace Resistance» or «Welsh WorkingUpperclass Rehabilitation» or «New Hairwave School». Incidentally, I frequently hear the distant whining of people who complain in print that 1 dislike the writers whom they venerate such as Faulkner, Mann, Camus, Dreiser, and of course Dostoevski. But I can assure them that because I detest certain writers I am not impairing the wellbeing of the plaintiffs in whom the images of my victims happen to form organic galaxies of esteem. I can prove, indeed, that the works of those authors really exist independently and separately from the organs of affection throbbing in the systems of irate strangers.
Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write for groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the Freudian Farce); as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizons of shimmering deserts. Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read Lolita, or any of my books; some in fact cannot read at all. Let me also observe that the term «square» already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than radical youth, nor is there anything more Philistine, more bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug duncery. Half a century ago, a similar fashion among the smart set of St. Petersburg was cocaine sniffing combined with phony orientalities. The better and brighter minds of my young American readers are far removed from those juvenile fads and faddists. I also used to know in the past a Communist agent who got so involved in trying to wreck anti-Bolshevist groups by distributing drugs among them that he became an addict himself and lapsed into a dreamy state of commendable metempsychic sloth. He must be grazing today on some grassy slope in Tibet if he has not yet lined the coat of the fortunate shepherd.
9
On September 3, 1968, Nicholas Garnham interviewed me at the Montreux Palace for Release, BBC2. The interview was faithfully reproduced in The Listener, October 10, of the same year: a neat and quick job. 1 have used its title tor the present collection.
You have said your novels have 'no social purpose, no moral message.' What is the function of your novels in particular and of the novel in general?
One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist. The book I make is a subjective and specific affair. I have no purpose at all when composing my stuff except to compose it. I work hard, I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn — so much the better. Art is difficult. Easy art is what you see at modern exhibitions of things and doodles.
In your prefaces you constantly mock Freud, the Viennese witch-doctor.
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind? I may have aired this before but I'd like to repeat that I detest not one but four doctors: Dr. Freud, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Schweitzer, and Dr. Castro. Of course, the first takes the fig, as the fellows say in the dissecting-room.
I've no intention to dream the drab middleclass dreams of an Austrian crank with a shabby umbrella. I also suggest that the Freudian faith leads to dangerous ethical consequences, such as wh
en a filthy murderer with the brain of a tapeworm is given a lighter sentence because his mother spanked him too much or too little — it works both ways. The Freudian racket looks to me as much of a farce as the jumbo thingum of polished wood with a polished hole in the middle which doesn't represent anything except the gaping face of the Philistine who is told it is a great sculpture produced by the greatest living caveman.
The novel on which you are working is, I believe, about “time”? How do you see “time”?
My new novel (now 800 typed pages long) is a family chronicle, mostly set in a dream America. Of its five parts one is built around my notion ot time. I've drawn my scalpel through spacetime, space being the tumor, which I assign to the slops. While not having much physics, I reject Einstein's slick formulae; but then one need not know theology to be an atheist. Both my female creatures have Irish and Russian blood. One girl lasts 700 pages, dying young; her sister stays with me till the happy ending, when 95 candles burn in a birthday cake the size of a manhole lid.
Could you tell me which other writers you admire and have been influenced by?
I'd much prefer to speak of the modern books that I hate at first sight: the earnest case histories of minority groups, the sorrows of homosexuals, the anti-American Sovietnam sermon, the picaresque yarn larded with juvenile obscenities. That's a good example of self-imposed classification — books stuck together in damp lumpy groups, forgotten titles, amalgamated authors. As for influence, well, I've never been influenced by anyone in particular, dead or quick, just as I've never belonged to any club or movement.
In fact, I don't seem to belong to any clearcut continent. I'm the shuttlecock above the Atlantic, and how bright and blue it is there, in my private sky, far from the pigeonholes and the clay pigeons.
Strong opinions Page 11
