The names of Sternberg and Lang never meant anything to me. In Europe I went to the corner cinema about once in a fortnight and the only kind of picture I liked, and still like, was and is comedy of the Laurel and Hardy type. I enjoyed tremendously American comedy — Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Chaplin. My favorites by Chaplin are The Gold Rush [1925], The Circus [1928], and The Great Dictator [1940] — especially the parachute inventor who jumps out of the window and ends in a messy fall which we only see in the expression on the dictator's face. However, today's Little Man appeal has somewhat spoiled Chaplin's attraction for me. The Marx Brothers were wonderful. The opera, the crowded cabin [A Night at the Opera, 1935], which is pure genius . . . [Nabokov then lovingly rehearsed the scene in detail, delighting particularly in the arrival of the manicurist.] I must have seen that film three times! Laurel and Hardy are always funny; there are subtle, artistic touches in even their most mediocre films. Laurel is so wonderfully inept, yet so very kind. There is a film in which they are at Oxford [A Chump at Oxford, 19401 • In one scene the two of them are sitting on a park bench in a labyrinthine garden and the subsequent happenings conform to the labyrinth. A casual villain puts his hand through the back of the bench and Laurel, who is clasping his hands in an idiotic reverie, mistakes the stranger's hand for one of his own hands, with all kinds of complications because his own hand is also there. He has to choose. The choice of a hand.
How many years has it been since you saw that movie?
Thirty or forty years. [Nabokov then recalled, again in precise detail, the opening scenes of County Hospital, 1932, in which Stan brings a gift of hardboiled eggs to relieve the misery of hospitalized Ollie and consumes them himself, salting them carefully.] More recently, on French 1 V 1 saw a Laurel and Hardy short in which the «dubbers» had the atrocious taste to have the two men speak fluent French with an English accent. But I don't even remember if the best Laurel and Hardy are talkies or not. On the whole, I think what 1 love about the silent film is what comes through the mask of the talkies and, vice versa, talkies are mute in my memory.
Did you only enjoy American films?
No. Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc [1928] was superb, and I loved the French films of Rene Clair — Sousles Toits de Paris [1929], Le Million [1931], A Nous la Liberte [1931] — a new world, a new trend in cinema.
A brilliant but self-effacing critic and scholar has described Invitation to a Beheading [ 1935-36] as Zamiatin's We restaged by the Marx Brothers. Is it fair to say that Invitation to a Beheading is in many ways akin to the film comedies we've been talking about?*
[*Nabokov's novels abound in the slapstick elements, the cosmic sight gags, as it were, of Keaton, Clair, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers. Pale Fire's kingdom of Zembla recalls the funhouse palace of Duck Soup(1933), with its ludicrous functionaries, uniformed guards and mirror walls, as well as the sequence in A Night at the Opera in which, managed by Groucho, the others disguise themselves as the three identically bearded Russian aviators, Chicoski, Harpotski, and Baronof. Witness Kinbote in Pale Fire, as King Charles, modestly «lecturing] under an assumed name and in a heavy makeup, with wig and false whiskers» (his real, immense, Americangrown beard will earn him his sobriquet, The Great Beaver), or the vision of him making his escape from Zembla, abetted by a hundred loyalists who, in a brilliant diversionary ploy, don red caps and sweaters identical to the King's, in their apprehension packing the local prison, which is «much too small for more kings» (shades of A. Might at the Opera's crowded cabin!). The activities of The Shadows, that regicidal organization of stooges, recall Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops, and The Shadows' grotesque, bumbling, but lethal agent, assassin Gradus, is a vaudevillian, jetage Angel of Death, imagined as «always streaking across the sky with black traveling bag in one hand and loosely folded umbrella in the other, in a sustained glide high over sea and land». And in The Defense (1930), Luzhin's means of suicide is suggested to him by a movie still, lying on a table, showing «a whitefaced man with his lifeless features and big American glasses, hanging by his hands from the ledge of a skyscraper — just about to fall off into the abyss» — the most famous scene in Harold Lloyd's Safety Last (1923). I trust you have enjoyed this note, to paraphrase a comment made by Kinbote under very different circumstances.]
I can't make the comparison between a visual impression and my scribble on index cards, which I always see first when I think of my novels. The verbal part of the cinema is such a hodgepodge of contributions, beginning with the script, that it really has no style of its own. On the other hand, the viewer of a silent film has the opportunity of adding a good deal of his own inner verbal treasure to the silence of the picture.
Although parts were eventually discarded or revised by Stanley Kubrick, you nevertheless did write the original screenplay for Lolita. Why?
I tried to give it some kind of form which would protect it from later intrusions and distortions. In the case of Lolita I included quite a number of scenes that I had discarded from the novel but still preserved in my desk. You mention one of those scenes in The Annotated Lolita — Humbert's arrival in Ramsdale at the charred ruins of the McCoo house. My complete screenplay of Lolita, all deletions and emendations restored, will be published by McGrawHill in the near future; I want it out before the musical version.
The musical version?
You look disapproving. It's in the best of hands: Alan Jay Lerncr will do the adaptation and lyrics, John Barry the music, with settings by Boris Aronson.
I notice that you didn't include W. C. Fields among your favorites. For some reason his films did not play in Europe and I never saw any in the States, either.
Well, Fields' comedy is more eminently American than the others, less exportable, I suppose. To move from movies to stills, I’ve noticed that photography is seen negatively (no pun intended, no pun!) in books such as Lolita and Invitation to a Beheading. Are you making a by now traditional distinction between mechanical process and artistic inspiration?
No, I do not make that distinction. The mechanical process can exist in a ludicrous daub, and artistic inspiration can be found in a photographer's choice of landscape and in his manner of seeing it.
You once told me that you were born a landscape painter. Which artists have meant the most to you?
Oh, many. In my youth mostly Russian and French painters. And English artists such as Turner. The painters and paintings alluded to in Ada are for the most part more recent enthusiasms.
The process of reading and rereading your novels is a kind of game of perception, a confrontation of novelistic trompe l'oeil, and in several novels (Pale Fire and Ada among others) you allude to trompe l'oeil painting. Would you say something about the pleasures inherent in the trompe l'oeil school?
A good trompe l'oeil painting proves at least that the painter is not cheating. The charlatan who sells his squiggles to epater Philistines does not have the talent or the technique to draw a nail, let alone the shadow of a nail.
What about Cubistic collage? That's a kind of trompe l'oeil.