Why do you dislike writers who go in for soulsearching and selfrevelations in print? After all, do you not do it at another remove, behind a thicket of art?
If you are alluding to Dostoevski's worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Karamazov Brothers and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search.
Is your attachment to childhood specially nostalgic and intense because you were abruptly and forever banished from the place where it evolved by the Russian Revolution?
Yes, that's right. But the stress is not on Russian Revolution. It could have been anything, an earthquake, an illness, an individual departure prompted by a private disaster. The accent is on the abruptness of the change.
Would you ever try to go back there, just to have a look?
There's nothing to look at. New tenement houses and old churches do not interest me. The hotels there are terrible. I detest the Soviet theater. Any palace in Italy is superior to the repainted abodes of the Tsars. The village huts in the forbidden hinterland are as dismally poor as ever, and the wretched peasant flogs his wretched cart horse with the same wretched zest. As to my special northern landscape and the haunts of my childhood — well, I would not wish to contaminate their images preserved in my mind.
How would you define your alienation from present-day Russia?
I loathe and despise dictatorships.
You called the Revolution there «trite». Why?
Because it followed the banal historical pattern of bloodshed, deceit, and oppression, because it betrayed the democratic dream, and because all it can promise the Soviet citizen is the material article, secondhand Philistine values, imitation of Western foods and gadgets, and of course. caviar for the decorated general.
Why do you live in hotels?
It simplifies postal matters, it eliminates the nuisance of private ownership, it confirms me in my favorite habit — the habit of freedom.
Do you have a longing for one place ever, a place in which family or racial continuity has been witnessed for generations, a scrap of Russia in return for the whole of the United States?
I have no such longings.
Is nostalgia debilitating or enriching?
Neither. It's one of a thousand tender emotions.
Do you like being an American citizen?
Yes, very much so.
Did you sit up to watch the Americans land on the moon? Were you impressed?
Oh, «impressed» is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery. Of course, I rented a television set to watch every moment of their marvelous adventure. That gentle little minuet that despite their awkward suits the two men danced with such grace to the tune of lunar gravity was a lovely sight. It was also a moment when a flag means to one more than a flag usually does. I am puzzled and pained by the fact that the English weeklies ignored the absolutely overwhelming excitement of the adventure, the strange sensual exhilaration of palpating those precious pebbles, of seeing our marbled globe in the black sky, of feeling along one's spine the shiver and wonder of it. After all, Englishmen should understand that thrill, they who have been the greatest, the purest explorers. Why then drag in such irrelevant matters as wasted dollars and power politics?
If you ruled any modern industrial state absolutely, what would you abolish?
I would abolish trucks and transistors, I would outlaw the diabolical roar of motorcycles, I would wring the neck of soft music in public places. I would banish the bidet horn hotel bathrooms so as to make more room for a longer bathtub. I would forbid farmers the use of insecticides and allow them to mow their meadows only once a year, in late August when everyone has safely pupated.
Do you like reading newspapers?
Yes, especially the Sunday papers.
You refer somewhere to your father's study teaching you to appreciate authentic poetry. Is any living poet authentic to you now?
I used to have a veritable passion for poetry, English, Russian, and French. That passion started to dwindle around 1940 when I stopped gorging myself on contemporary verse. I know as little about today's poetry as about new music.
Are too many people writing novels?
I read quite a number of them every year. For some odd reason what authors and publishers keep sending me is the pseudo-picaresque stuff of cliche characters and the enlarged pores of dirty words.
You parody the poet W. H. Auden in your novel Ada, / think. Why do you think so little of him?
I do not parody Mr. Auden anywhere in Ada. I'm not sufficiently familiar with his poetry for that. I do know, however, a few of his translations — and deplore the blunders he so lightheartedly permits himself. Robert Lowell, of course, is the greater offender.
Ada has a lot of word play, punning, parody — do you acknowledge influence by James Joyce in your literary upbringing, and do you admire him?
I played with words long before I read Ulysses. Yes, I love that book but it is rather the lucidity and precision of its prose that pleases me. The real puns are in Finnegans Wake — a tragic failure and a frightful bore.
What about Kafka's work, and Gogol's. I am sniffing about for early influences.
Every Russian writer owes something to Gogol, Pushkin, and Shakespeare. Some Russian writers, as for example Pushkin and Gogol, were influenced by Byron and Sterne in French translation. I do not know German and so could not read Kafka before the nineteen thirties when his La metamorphose appeared in La nouvelle revue francaise, and by that time many of my so-called «kafkaesque» stories had already been published. Alas, I am not one to provide much sport for influence hunters.
Tolstoy said, so they say, that life was a «tartine de merde» which one was obliged to eat slowly. Do you agree?
I’ve never heard that story. The old boy was sometimes rather disgusting, wasn't he? My own life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey.
Which is the worst thing men do? (Note: I'm thinking of your remark about cruelty).
To stink, to cheat, to torture.
Which is the best?
To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.
14
On June 26, 1969, Allene Talmey, Associate Editor of Vogue, New York, sent me the questions answered below. The interview appeared in the Christmas number of that journal.
Magic, sleight-of-hand, and other tricks have played quite a role in your fiction. Are they for amusement or do they serve yet another purpose?
Deception is practiced even more beautifully by that other V.N., Visible Nature. A useful purpose is assigned science to animal mimicry, protective patterns and shapes, yet their refinement transcends the crude purpose of mere survival. In art, an individual style is essentially as futile and as organic as a fata morgana. The sleight-of-hand you mention is hardly more than an insect's sleight-of-wing. A wit might say that it protects me from halfwits. A grateful spectator is content to applaud the grace with which the masked performer melts into Nature's background.