There is a parenthetical remark in Despair about a «vulgar, mediocre Herzog. « Is that a bit of added fun about a recent best seller?
Herzog means «Duke» in German and I was speaking of a conventional statue of a German Duke in a city square.
Since the reissued edition of Laughter in the Dark is not graced by one of your informative forewords, would you tell us something about the book's inception and the circumstances under which you wrote it? Commentators are quick to suggest similarities between Margot and Lolita, but I'm much more interested in the kinship between Axel Rex and Quilly. Would you comment on this, and perhaps on the other perverters of the imagination one finds throughout your work, all of whom seem to share Rex's evil qualities.
Yes, some affinities between Rex and Quilty exist, as they do between Margot and Lo. Actually, of course, Margot was a common young whore, not an unfortunate little Lolita. Anyway I do not think that those recurrent sexual oddities and morbidities are of much interest or importance. My Lolita has been compared to Emmie in Invitation, to Mariette in Bend Sinister, and even to Colette in Speak, Memory — the last is especially ludicrous. But I think it might have been simply English jollity and leg-pulling.5* (5* A reference to Kingsley Amis' review of Lolita, «She was a Child and I was a Child», Spectator, CCIII (Nov. 6, 1959), p. 636.)
The Doppelganger motif figures prominently throughout your fiction; in Pale Fire one is tempted to call it a Tripling (at least). Would you say that Laughter in the Dark is your earliest Double fiction?
I do not see any Doubles in Laughter in the Dark. A lover can be viewed as the betrayed party's Double but that is pointless.
Would you care to comment on how the Doppelganger motif has been both used and abused from Poe, Hoffmann, Andersen, Dostoevski, Gogol, Stevenson, and Melville, down to Conrad and Mann? Which Doppelganger fictions would you single out for praise?
The Doppelganger subject is a frightful bore.
What are your feelings about Dostoevski's celebrated The Double; after all, Hermann in Despair considers it as a possible title for his manuscript.
Dostoevski's The Double is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's «Nose». Felix in Despair is really a false double.
Speaking of Doubles brings me to Pnin, which in my experience has proved to be one of your most popular novels and at the same time one of your most elusive to those readers who fail to see the relationship of the narrator and the characters (or who fail to even notice the narrator until it's too late). Four of its seven chapters were published in The New Yorker over a considerable period {195557), but the allimportant last chapter, in which the narrator takes control, is only in the book. I'd be most interested to know if the design o/Pnin was complete while the separate sections were being published, or whether your full sense of its possibilities occurred later.
Yes, the design of Pnin was complete in my mind when I composed the first chapter which, I believe, in this case was actually the first of the seven I physically set down on paper. Alas, there was to be an additional chapter, between Four (in which, incidentally, the boy at St. Mark's and Pnin both dream of a passage from my drafts of Pale Fire, the revolution in Zembla and the escape of the king — that is telepathy for you!) and Five (where Pnin drives a car). In that still uninked chapter, which was beautifully clear in my mind down to the last curve, Pnin recovering in the hospital from a sprained back teaches himself to drive a car in hed by studying a 1935 manual of automobilism found in the hospital library and by manipulating the levers of his cot. Only one of his colleagues visits him there — Professor Blorenge. The chapter ended with Pnin's taking his driver's examination and pedantically arguing with the instructor who has to admit Pnin is right. A combination of chance circumstances in 1956 prevented me from actually writing that chapter, then other events intervened, and it is only a mummy now.
In a television interview last year, you singled out Bely's St. Petersburg, along with works by Joyce, Kafka, and Proust, as one of the greatest achievements in twentiethcentury prose (an endorsement, by the way, which has prompted Grove Press to reissue St. Petersburg, with your statement across the front cover). I preatly admire this novel but, unhappily enough, it is relatively unknown in America. What are its qualities which you most admire? Bely and Joyce are sometimes compared; is the comparison a just one?
Petersburg is a splendid fantasy, but this is a question I plan to answer elsewhere. There does exist some resemblance in manner between Petersburg and certain passages in Ulysses.
Although I've never seen it discussed as such, the Ableukhov father-son relationship to me constitutes a doubling, making Petersburg one of the most interesting and fantastic permutations of the Doppelganger theme. Since this kind of doubling (if you would agree it is one) is surely the kind you'd find more congenial, say, than the use Mann makes of the motif in Death in Venice, would you comment on its implications?
Those murky matters have no importance to me as a writer. Philosophically, I am an indivisible monist. Incidentally, your handwriting is very like mine.
Bely lived in Berlin in 1922 — 23. Did you know him there? You and Joyce lived in Paris at the same time; did you ever meet him?
Once, in 1921 or 1922, at a Berlin restaurant where I was dining with two girls. I happened to be sitting back to back with Andrey Bely who was dining with another writer, Aleksey Tolstoy, at the table behind me. Both writers were at the time frankly pro-Soviet (and on the point of returning to Russia), and a White Russian, which I still am in that particular sense, would certainly not wish to speak to a bolshevizan (fellow traveler). I was acquainted with Aleksey Tolstoy but of course ignored him.
As to Joyce, I saw him a few times in Paris in the late thirties. Paul and Lucy Leon, close friends of his, were also old friends of mine. One night they brought him to a French lecture I had been asked to deliver on Pushkin under the auspices of Gabriel Marcel (it was later published in the Nouvelle revue francaise).
I had happened to replace at the very last moment a Hungarian woman writer, very famous that winter, author of a bestselling novel, I remember its title, La Rue du Chat out Peche, but not the lady's name. A number of personal friends of mine, fearing that the sudden illness of the lady and a sudden discourse on Pushkin might result in a suddenly empty house, had done their best to round up the kind of audience they knew I would like to have. The house had, however, a pied aspect since some confusion had occurred among the lady's fans. The Hungarian consul mistook me for her husband and, as I entered, dashed towards me with the froth of condolence on his lips. Some people left as soon as I started to speak.
A source of unforgettable consolation was the sight of Joyce sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team. Another time my wife and I had dinner with him at the Leons' followed by a long friendly evening of talk. I do not recall one word of it but my wife remembers that Joyce asked about the exact ingredients of myod, the Russian «mead», and everybody gave him a different answer. In this connection, there is a marvelous howler in the standard English version of The Brothers Karamazov: a supper table at Zosima's abode is described with the translator hilariously misreading «Medoc» (in Russian transliteration in the original text), a French wine greatly appreciated in Russia, as medok, the diminutive of myod (mead). It would have been fun to recall that I spoke of this to Joyce but unfortunately I came across this incarnation of The Karamazovs some ten years later.