Vladimir Nabokov: Strong opinions

What colors are your own initials, VN?

V is a kind of pale, transparent pink: I think it's called, technically, quartz pink: this is one of the closest colors that I can connect with the V. And the N, on the other hand, is a greyishyellowish oatmeal color. But a funny thing happens: my wife has this gift of seeing letters in color, too, but her colors are completely different. There are, perhaps, two or three letters where we coincide, but otherwise the colors are quite different. It turned out, we discovered one day, that my son, who was a little boy at the time — I think he was ten or eleven — sees letters in colors, too. Quite naturally he would say, Oh, this isn't that color, this is this color», and so on. Then we asked him to list his colors and we discovered that in one case, one letter which he sees as purple, or perhaps mauve, is pink to me and blue to my wife. This is the letter M. So the combination of pink and blue makes lilac in his case. Which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle.

Whom do you write for? What audience?

I don't think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.

In your books there is an almost extravagant concern with masks and disguises: almost as if you were trying to hide yourself behind something, as if you'd lost yourself

Oh, no. I think I'm always there; there's no difficulty about that. Of course there is a certain type of critic who when reviewing a work of fiction keeps dotting all the i's with the author's head. Recently one anonymous clown, writing on Pale Fire in a New York book review, mistook all the declarations of my invented commentator in the book for my own. It is also true that some of my more responsible characters are given some of my own ideas. There is John Shade in Pale Fire, the poet. He does borrow some of my own opinions. There is one passage in his poem, which is part of the book, where he says something I think I can endorse. He says — let me quote it, if I can remember; yes, I think I can do it: «I loathe such things as jazz, the whitehosed moron torturing a black bull, rayed with red, abstractist bricabrac, primitivist folk masks, progressive schools, music in supermarkets, swimming pools, brutes, bores, classconscious philistines, Freud, Marx, fake thinkers, puffedup poets, frauds and sharks». That's how it goes.

It is obvious that neither John Shade nor his creator are very clubbable men.

1 don't belong to any club or group. 1 don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, cosign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.

It sometimes seems to me that in your novels — in Laughter in the Dark for instance — there is a strain of perversity amounting to cruelty.

I don't know. Maybe. Some of my characters arc, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade — demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out. Actually, I'm a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty.

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 Мontreux in midMarch1963. The present text takes into account the order of my interviewer's questions as well as the fact that a couple of consecutive pages ot my typescript were apparently lost in transit. Egreto perambis doribus [l]

With the American publication Lolita in 1958, your fame and fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary cognoscenti — which you had enjoyed for more than 30 years — to both acclaim and abuse as the worldrenowned author of a sensational best seller. 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, 1 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 dwarf ess. 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 firstrate. 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, 1 loved teaching, 1 loved Cornell, 1 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 semisleeping car of the St. PetersburgMoscow express in the early 1870s — without an understanding of which neither Ulysses nor Anna Karenina, 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 wellgroomed young females, A general sense of tedium and disaster. Halfpast 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 with 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 Cminus, 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.