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?