You say somewhere that, artistically speaking, you prefer Lolita to all your other books. Has your new novel Ada superseded Lolita in your affection?
Not really. It is true that Ada caused me more trouble than all my other novels and perhaps that bright fringe of overlapping worry is synonymous with the crest of love. Incidentally, speaking of my first nymphet, let me take this neat opportunity to correct a curious misconception profferred by an anonymous owl in a London weekly a couple of months ago. «Lolita» should not be pronounced in the English or Russian fashion (as he thinks it should), but with a trill of Latin T's and a delicate toothy «t».
Do you feel isolated as a writer?
Most of the writers I have met were Russian emigres in the nineteen twenties and thirties. With American novelists I have had virtually no contact. In England, I had lunch once with Graham Greene. I have dined with Joyce and have had tea with Robbe-Grillet. Isolation means liberty and discovery. A desert island may be more exciting than a city, but my loneliness, on the whole, has little significance. It is a consequence of chance circumstance — old shipwrecks, freakish tides — and not a matter of temperament. As a private person I am good-natured, warm, cheerful, straightforward, plainspoken, and intolerant of bogus art. I do not mind my own writings being criticized or ignored and therefore think it funny that people not even concerned with literature should be upset by my finding D. H. Lawrence execrable or my seeing in H. G. Wells a far greater artist than Conrad.
What do you think of the so-called «student revolution «?
Rowdies are never revolutionary, they are always reactionary. It is among the young that the greatest conformists and Philistines are found, e.g., the hippies with their group beards and group protests. Demonstrators at American universities care as little about education as football fans who smash up subway stations in England care about soccer. All belong to the same family of goofy hoodlums — with a sprinkling of clever rogues among them.
What are your working methods?
Quite banal. Thirty years ago I used to write in bed, dipping my pen into a bedside inkwell, or else I would compose mentally at any time of the day or night. I would fall asleep when the sparrows woke up. Nowadays I write my stuff on index cards, in pencil, at a lectern, in the forenoon; but I still tend to do a lot of work in my head during long walks in the country on dull days when butterflies do not interfere. Here is a disappointed lepidopterist's ditty:
It's a long climb
Up the rock face
At the wrong time
To the right place.
Do you keep a journal or seek documentary reminders?
I am an ardent memoirist with a rotten memory; a drowsy king's absentminded remembrancer. With absolute lucidity I recall landscapes, gestures, intonations, a million sensuous details, but names and numbers topple into oblivion with absurd abandon like little blind men in file from a pier.
13
Of the fifty-eight questions James Mossman submitted on September 8, 1969, for Review, BBC-2 (October 4) some 40 were answered and recorded by me from written cards in Montreux. The Listener published the thing in an incomplete form on October 25 of that year. Printed here from my final typescript.
You have said that you explored times prison and have found no way out. Are you still exploring, and is it inevitably a solitary excursion, from which one returns to the solace of others?
I'm a very poor speaker. I hope our audience won't mind my using notes.
My exploration of time's prison as described in the first chapter of Speak, Memory was only a stylistic device meant to introduce my subject.
Memory often presents a life broken into episodes, more or less perfectly recalled. Do you see any themes working through from one episode to another?
Everyone can sort out convenient patterns of related themes in the past development of his life. Here again I had to provide pegs and echoes when furnishing my reception.
Is the strongest tie between men this common captivity in time? Let us not generalize. The common captivity in time is felt differently by different people, and some people may not feel it at all. Generalizations are full of loopholes and traps. I know elderly men for whom «time» only means «timepiece».
What distinguishes us from animals?
Being aware of being aware of being. In other words, if I not only know that I am but also know that I know it, then I belong to the human species. All the rest follows — the glory of thought, poetry, a vision of the universe. In that respect, the gap between ape and man is immeasurably greater than the one between amoeba and ape. The difference between an ape's memory and human memory is the difference between an ampersand and the British Museum library.
Judging from your own awakening consciousness as a child, do you think that the capacity to use language, syntax, relate ideas, is something we learn from adults, as if we were computers being programed, or do we begin to use a unique, built-in capability of our own — call it imagination?
The stupidest person in the world is an allround genius compared to the cleverest computer. How we learn to imagine and express things is a riddle with premises impossible to express and a solution impossible to imagine.
In your acute scrutiny of your past, can you find the instruments that fashioned you?
Yes — unless I refashion them retrospectively, by the very act of evoking them. There is quite a lot of give and take in the game of metaphors.
As you recall a patch of time, its shapes, sounds, colors, and occupants, does this complete picture help combat time or offer any clue to its mysteries, or is it pleasure that it affords?
Let me quote a paragraph in my book Ada: «Physiologi cally the sense of Time is a sense of continuous becoming. . . . Philosophically, on the other hand, Time is but memory in the making. In every individual life there goes on, from cradle to deathbed, the gradual shaping and strengthening of that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of the strong». This is Van speaking, Van Veen, the charming villain of my book. I have not decided yet if I agree with him in all his views on the texture of time. I suspect I don't.
Does the inevitable distortion of detail worry you?
Not at all. The distortion of a remembered image may not only enhance its beauty with an added refraction, but provide informative links with earlier or later patches of the past.
You've said that the man in you revolts sometimes against the fictionist. Can you say why? (Note: I'm thinking of your regret at giving items of your past to characters.)
One hates oneself for leaving a pet with a neighbor and never returning for it.
Doesn’t giving away past memories to your characters alleviate the burden of the past?
Items of one's past are apt to fade from exposure. They are like those richly pigmented butterflies and moths which the ignorant amateur hangs up in a display case on the wall of his sunny parlor and which, after a few years, are bleached to a pitiful drab hue. The metallic blue of so-called structural wing scales is hardier, but even so a wise collector should keep specimens in the dry dark of a cabinet.