Is there anything you would care to say about the collaboration your wife has given you?
She presided as adviser and judge over the making of my first fiction in the early twenties. I have read to her all my stories and novels at least twice. She has reread them all when typing them and correcting proofs and checking translations into several languages. One day in 1950, at Ithaca, New York, she was responsible for stopping me and urging delay and second thoughts as, beset with technical difficulties and doubts, I was carrying the first chapters of Lolita to the garden incinerator.
What is your relation to the translations of your books?
In the case of languages my wife and I know or can read — English, Russian, French, and to a certain extent German and Italian — the system is a strict checking of every sentence. In the case of Japanese or Turkish versions, I try not to imagine the disasters that probably bespatter every page.
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.