Would it be fair to say that you see life as a very funny but cruel joke?
Your term «life» is used in a sense which I cannot apply to a manifold shimmer. Whose life? What life? Life does not exist without a possessive epithet. Lenin's life differs from, say, James Joyce's as much as a handful of gravel does from a blue diamond, although both men were exiles in Switzerland and both wrote a vast number of words. Or take the destinies of Oscar Wilde and Lewis Carroll — one flaunting a flamboyant perversion and getting caught, and the other hiding his humble but much more evil little secret behind the emulsions of the developing-room, and ending up by being the greatest children's story writer of all time. I'm not responsible for those real-life farces. My own life has been incomparably happier and healthier than that of Genghis Khan, who is said to have fathered the first Nabok, a petty Tatar prince in the twelfth century who married a Russian damsel in an era of intensely artistic Russian culture. As to the lives of my characters, not all are grotesque and not all are tragic: Fyodor in The Gift is blessed with a faithful love and an early recognition of his genius; John Shade in Pale Fire leads an intense inner existence, far removed from what you call a joke. You must be confusing me with Dostoevski.
10
Before coming to Montreux in midMarch, 1969, Time reporters Martha Duffy and R. Z. Sheppard sent me a score of questions by telex. The answers, neatly typed out, were awaiting them when they arrived, whereupon they added a dozen more, of which I answered seven. Some of the lot were quoted in the May 23, 1969, issue — the one with my face on the cover.
There seem to be similarities in the rhythm and tone of Speak, Memory and Ada, and in the way you and Van retrieve the past in images. Do you both work along similar lines?
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind. It is a familiar embarrassment that I face with very faint qualms, particularly since I am not really aware of any special similarities — just as one is not aware of sharing mannerisms with a detestable kinsman. I loathe Van Veen.
The following two quotations seem closely related: «I confess I do not believe in time. Hike to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another». (Speak, Memory,) and «pure time, perceptual time, tangible time, time free of content, context and running commentary — this is my time and theme. All the rest is numerical symbol or some aspect of space. « (Ada) Will you give me a lift on your magic carpet to point out how time is animated in the story of Van and Ada?
In his study of time my creature distinguishes between text and texture, between the contents of time and its almost tangible essence. I ignored that distinction in my Speak, Memory and was mainly concerned with being faithful to the patterns of my past. I suspect that Van Veen, having less control over his imagination than I, novelized in his indulgent old age many images of his youth.
You have spoken in the past of your indifference to music, but in Ada you describe time as «rhythm, the tender intervals between stresses». Are these rhythms musical, aural, physical, cerebral, what?
Those «intervals» which seem to reveal the gray gaps of time between the black bars of space are much more similar to the interspaces between a metronome's monotonous beats than to the varied rhythms of music or verse.
I , as you have said, «mediocrity thrives on 'ideas,' « why does Van, who is no mediocrity, start explaining at length near the end of the book hts ideas about time? Is thts the vamty of Van? Or is the author commenting on or parodying his story?
By «ideas» I meant of course general ideas, the sincere ideas which permeate a so-called great novel, and which, in the inevitable long run, amount to bloated topicalities stranded like dead whales. 1 don't see any connection between this and my short section devoted to a savant's tussle with a recondite riddle.
Van remarks that «we are explorers in a very strange universe» and this reader feels that way about Ada. You are known for your drawings — is it possible to draw your created universe? You have said that the whole substance of a book is in your head when you start writing on the cards. When did terra, antiterra, demonia, Ardis, etc., enter the picture? Why are the annals for terra fifty years behind? Also, various inventions and mechanical contrivances (like Prince Zemskis bugged harem) make seemingly anachronistic appearances. Why?
Antiterra happens to be an anachronistic world in regard to Terra — that's all there is to it.
In the Robert Hughes film about you, you say that in Ada, metaphors start to live and turn into a story . . . «bleed and then dry up». Will you elaborate, please?
The reference is to the metaphors in the TextureofTniie section of Ada: gradually and gracefully they form a story — the story of a man traveling by car through Switzerland from east to west; and then the images fade out again.
Was Ada the most difficult of your books to write? If so, would you discuss the major difficulties?
Ada was physically harder to compose than my previous novels because of its greater length. In terms of the index cards on which I write and rewrite my stuff in pencil, it made, in the final draft, some 2,500 cards which Mme. Callier, my typist since Pale Fire, turned into more than 850 pages. I began working on the TextureofTime section some ten years ago, in Ithaca, upstate New York, but only in February, 1966, did the entire novel leap into the kind of existence that can and must be put into words. Its springboard was Ada's telephone call (in what is now the penultimate part of the book).
You call Ada a family novel. Is your reversal of the sentiment in the opening line of Anna Karenin a parody or do you think your version is more often true? Is incest one of the different possible roads to happiness? Are the Veens happy at Ardis — or only in the memory of Ardis?
If I had used incest for the purpose of representing a possible road to happiness or misfortune, I would have
been a bestselling didactician dealing in general ideas. Actually I don't give a damn for incest one way or another. I merely like the «bl» sound in siblings, bloom, blue, bliss, sable. The opening sentences of Ada inaugurate a scries of blasts directed throughout the book at translators of unprotected masterpieces who betray their authors by «transfigurations» based on ignorance and self-assertiveness.
Do you distinguish between Van the artist and Van the scientist? As his creator, what is your opinion of Van s works? Is Ada in part about an artists inner life? In the Hughes film, you speak of illusionary moves in novels as in chess. Does Van make some false turnings in his story?
Objective, or at least one-mirror-removed, opinions of Van's efforts are stated quite clearly in the case of his Letters from Terra and two or three other compositions of his. I — or whoever impersonates me — is obviously on Van's side in the account of his antiVienna lecture on dreams.
Is Ada the artists muse? How much does Van know about her? She seems to appear and reappear in his story and to dramatize successive stages of his life. When he borrows the first line of 'L'invitation au voyage' in his poem to her, does he suggest so close an identification as Baudelaire's — 'aimer et mourir au pays qui te ressemble' ?