The Appels and others have said that Cornell's student literati were less attracted to your fiction course than sorority sisters, frat brothers, and athletes. Were you aware of that? If the above is true, the reason given was that you were «a flamboyant, funny lecturer». This description seems at variance with your self-drawn picture as a remote lecturer. Can you talk just a little more about your life as a teacher, as this is an inevitable part of the cover story. How did the students seem to you then? They called the big course «Dirty Lit». Do you think it was you or the Masterpieces of European Fiction that shocked them? Or would anything have shocked them? What would you think of teaching on today's more activist, demonstration-struck campuses?
Classes varied from term to term during my seventeen years of teaching. I do remember that my approach and principles irritated or puzzled such students of literature (and their professors) as were accustomed to «serious» courses replete with «trends», and «schools», and «myths», and «symbols», and «social comment», and something unspeakably spooky called «climate of thought». Actually, those «serious» courses were quite easy ones, with the student required to know not the books but about the books. In my classes, readers had to discuss specific details, not general ideas. «Dirty Lit» was an inherited joke: it had heen applied to the lectures of my immediate predecessor, a sad, gentle, hard-drinking fellow who was more interested in the sex life of authors than in their books. Activist, demonstration-struck students of-the present decade would, I suppose, either drop my course after a couple of lectures or end by getting a fat F if they could not answer such exam questions as: Discuss the twinned-dream theme in the case of two teams of dreamers, Stephen D.Bloom, and Vronski Anna. None of my questions ever presupposed the advocacy of a fashionable interpretation or critical view that a teacher might wish to promote. All my questions were impelled by only one purpose: to discover at all cost if the student had thoroughly imbibed and assimilated the novels in my course.
I can now see that if you don't share Van’s system of «distressibles», you well might. Are you, like him, insomniac?
1 have described the insomnias of my childhood in Speak, Memory. They still persecute me every other night. Helpful pills do exist but I am afraid of them. I detest drugs. My habitual hallucinations are quite monstrously sufficient, thank Hades. Looking at it objectively, I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
Immediately following the above quote, Van warns against the «assassin pun». You are obviously a brilliant and untiring punner and it would seem particularly appropriate if you would briefly discuss the pun for Time which, God knows, is porous from the bullets of a particularly clumsy but determined assassin.
In a poem about poetry as he understands it, Verlaine warns the poet against using la pointe assassine, that is introducing an epigrammatic or moral point at the end of a poem, and thereby murdering the poem. What amused me was to pun on «point», thus making a pun in the very act of prohibiting it.
You have been a Sherlock Holmes buff. When did you lose your taste for mystery fiction. Why?
With a very few exceptions, mystery fiction is a kind of collage combining more or less original riddles with conventional and mediocre artwork.
Why do you so dislike dialogue in fiction?
Dialogue can be delightful if dramatically or comically stylized or artistically blended with descriptive prose; in other words, if it is a feature of style and structure in a given work. If not, then it is nothing but automatic typewriting, formless speeches filling page after page, over which the eye skims like a flying saucer over the Dust Bowl.
11
In April, 1969, Alden Whitman sent me these questions and came to Montreux for a merry interview shortly before my seventieth birthday. His piece appeared in The New York Times, April 19, 1969, with only two or three of my answers retained. The rest are to be used, I suppose, as «Special to The New York Times» at some later date by A. W., if he survives, or by his successor. I transcribe some of our exchanges.
You have called yourself «an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England». How does this make you an American writer?
An American writer means, in the present case, a writer who has been an American citizen for a quarter of a century. It means, moreover, that all my works appear first in America. It also means that America is the only country where I feel mentally and emotionally at home. Rightly or wrongly, I am not one of those perfectionists who by dint of hypercriticizing America find themselves wallowing in the same muddy camp with indigenous rascals and envious foreign observers. My admiration for this adopted country of mine can easily survive the jolts and flaws that, indeed, are nothing in comparison to the abyss of evil in the history of Russia, not to speak of other, more exotic, countries.
In the poem «To My Soul, «you wrote, possibly of yourself, as «a provincial naturalist, an eccentric lost in paradise». This appears to link your interest in butterflies to other aspects of your life, writing, for instance. Do you feel that you are «an eccentric lost in paradise»?
An eccentric is a person whose mind and senses are excited by things that the average citizen does not even notice. And, per contra, the average eccentric — for there are many of us, of different waters and magnitudes — is utterly baffled and bored by the adjacent tourist who boasts of his business connections. In that sense, I often feel lost; but then, other people feel lost in my presence too. And I also know, as a good eccentric should, that the dreary old fellow who has been telling me all about the rise of mortgage interest rates may suddenly turn out to be the greatest living authority on springtails or tumblebugs.
Dreams of flight or escape recur in many of your poems and stories. Is this a reflection of your own years of wandering?
Yes, in part. The odd fact, however, is that in my early childhood, long before the tremendously dull peripatetics of Revolution and Civil War set in, I suffered from nightmares full of wanderings and escapes, and desolate station platforms.
What did you enjoy (and disenjoy) in your Harvard experience? And what induced you to leave Cambridge?
My Harvard experience consisted of seven blissful years (19411948) of entomological research at the wonderful and unforgettable Museum of Comparative Zoology and of one spring term (1952) of lecturing on the European novel to an audience of some 600 young strangers in Memorial Hall. Apart from that experience, I lectured at Wellesley for half-a-dozen years and then, from 1948, was on the faculty of Cornell, ending as full professor of Russian Literature and author of American Lolita, after which (in 1959) I decided to devote myself entirely to writing. I greatly enjoyed Cornell.
In the United States you are probably more widely known for Lolita than for any other single book or poem. If you had your way, what book or poem or story would you like to be known for in the U S. ?
I am immune to the convulsions of fame; yet, I think that the harmful drudges who define today, in popular dictionaries, the word «nymphet» as «a very young but sexually attractive girl», without any additional comment or reference, should have their knuckles rapped.