Where is the easy chair?
The easy chair is in the other room, in my study. It was a metaphor, after alclass="underline" the easy chair is the entire hotel, the garden, everything.
Where would you live in America?
I think I would like to live either in California, or in New York, or in Cambridge, Mass. Or in a combination of these three.
Because of your mastery of our language, you are frequently compared with Joseph Conrad.
Well, I'll put it this way. When a boy, I was a voracious reader, as all boy writers seem to be, and between 8 and 14 I used to enjoy tremendously the romantic productions — romantic in the large sense — of such people as Conan Doyle, Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, and other authors who are essentially writers for very young people.
But as I have well said somewhere before, I differ from Joseph Conradically. First of all, he had not been writing in his native tongue before he became an English writer, and secondly, I cannot stand today his polished cliches and primitive clashes. He once wrote that he preferred Mrs. Garnett's translation of Anna Karenin to the original! This makes one dream — «ca fait rever» as Flaubert used to say when faced with some abysmal stupidity. Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called «great books». That, for instance, Mann's asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak's melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner's corncobby chronicles can be considered «masterpieces», or at least what journalists call «great books», is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses; Kafka's Transformation., Biely's Petersburg; and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.
What do you think of American writing? I noticed there are no American masterpieces on your list. What do you think of American writing since 1945?
Well, seldom more than two or three really first-rate writers exist simultaneously in a given generation. I think that Salinger and Updike are by far the finest artists in recent years. The sexy, phony type of best seller, the violent, vulgar novel, the novelistic treatment of social or political problems, and, in general, novels consisting mainly of dialogue or social comment — these are absolutely banned from my bedside. And the popular mixture of pornography and idealistic humbuggery makes me positively vomit.
What do you think of Russian writing since 1945?
Soviet literature . . . Well, in the first years after the Bolshevik revolution, in the twenties and early thirties, one could still distinguish through the dreadful platitudes of Soviet propaganda the dying voice of an earlier culture. The primitive and banal mentality of enforced politics — any politics — can only produce primitive and banal art.
This is especially true of the so-called «social realist» and «proletarian» literature sponsored by the Soviet police state. Its jackbooted baboons have gradually exterminated the really talented authors, the special individual, the fragile genius. One of the saddest cases is perhaps that of Osip Mandelshtam — a wonderful poet, the greatest poet among those trying to survive in Russia under the Soviets — whom that brutal and imbecile administration persecuted and finally drove to death in a remote concentration camp. The poems he heroically kept composing until madness eclipsed his limpid gifts are admirable specimens of a human mind at its deepest and highest. Reading them enhances one's healthy contempt for Soviet ferocity. Tyrants and torturers will never manage to hide their comic stumbles behind their cosmic acrobatics. Contemptuous laughter is all right, but it is not enough in the way of moral relief. And when I read Mandelshtam's poems composed under the accursed rule of those beasts, I feel a kind of helpless shame, being so free to live and think and write and speak in the free part of the world.That's the only time when liberty is bitter.
WALKING IN MONTREUX WITH INTERVIEWER
This is a ginkgo — the sacred tree of China, now rare in the wild state. The curiously veined leaf resembles a butterfly — which reminds me of a little poem:
The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, illspread, In shape.
This, in my novel Pale Fire, is a short poem by John Shade — by far the greatest of invented poets.
PASSING A SWIMMING POOL
I don't mind sharing the sun with sunbathers but I dislike immersing myself in a swimming pool. It is after all only a big tub where other people join you — makes one think of those horrible Japanese communal bathtubs, full of a floating family, or a shoal of businessmen.
DOG NEAR TELEPHONE BOOTH
Must remember the life line of that leash from the meek dog to the talkative lady in that telephone booth. «A long wait» — good legend for an oil painting of the naturalistic school.
BOYS KICKING A BALL IN A GARDEN
Many years have passed since 1 gathered a soccer ball to my breast. I was an erratic but rather spectacular goalkeeper in my Cambridge University days 45 years ago. After that I played on a German team when I was about 30, and saved my last game in 1936 when I regained consciousness in the pavilion, knocked out by a kick but still clutching the ball which an impatient teammate was trying to pry out of my arms.
DURING A STROLL NEAR VILLENEUVE
Late September m Central Europe is a bad season for collecting butterflies. This is not Arizona, alas.
In this grassy nook near an old vineyard above the Lake of Geneva, a few fairly fresh females of the yery common Meadow Brown still flutter about here and there — lazy old widows. There's one.
Here is a little sky-blue butterfly, also a very common thing, once known as the Clifden Blue in England.
The sun is getting hotter. I enjoy hunting in the buff but I doubt anything interesting can be obtained today. This pleasant lane on the banks of Geneva Lake teems with butterflies in summer. Chapman's Blue and Mann's White, two rather local things, occur not far from here. But the white butterflies we see in this particular glade, on this nice but commonplace autumn day, are the ordinary Whites: the Small White and Green-Veined White.
Ah, a caterpillar. Handle with care. Its golden-brown coat can cause a nasty itch. This handsome worm will become next year a fat, ugly, drab-colored moth.
IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED