All of which brings to mind another outspoken emigre, Mr. Stravinsky. Have you had any associations with him?
I know Mr. Stravinski very slightly and have never seen any genuine sample of his outspokenness in print.
Whom in Parisian literary circles did you meet in the thirties, in addition to Joyce and the editorial board of Mesures?
I was on friendly terms with the poet Jules Supervielle. Him and Jean Pauhan (editor of Nouvelle revue frangaise) I especially remember.
Did you know Samuel Beckett in Paris?
No, I did not. Beckett is the author of lovely novellas and wretched plays in the Maeterlinck tradition. The trilogy is my favorite, expecially Molloy. There is an extraordinary scene in which he is crawling through a forest by dragging himself, «by catching the crook of his walking stick, his crutch, in the vegetation before him, and pulling himself up, wearing three overcoats and newspaper underneath them. Then there are those pebbles, which he is busily transferring from pocket to pocket. Everything is so gray, so uncomfortable, you feel that he is in constant bladder discomfort, as old people sometimes are in their dreams. In this abject condition there is no doubt some likeness with Kafka's physically uncomfortable and dingy men. It is that limpness that is so interesting in Beckett's work.
Beckett has also composed in two tongues, has overseen the Englishing of his French works. In which language have you read him?
I've read him in both French and English. Beckett's French is a schoolmaster's French, a preserved French, but in English you feel the moisture of verbal association and of the spreading live roots of his prose.
I have a «theory» that the French translation of Despair (1939) — not to mention the books she could have read in Russian — exerted a great influence on the so-called New Novel. In his Preface to M-me. Sarraute's Portrait cTun inconnu (1947), Sartre includes you among the antinovelists, a rather more intelligent remark — don't you think? — than his comments of eight years before when, reviewing Despair, he said that as an emigre writer — landless — you had no subject matter. «But what is the question?»you might ask at this point. Is Nabokov precursor of the French New Novel?
Answer: The French New Novel does not really exist apart from a little heap of dust and fluff in a fouled pigeonhole.
But what do you think of Sartre's remark?
Nothing. I'm immune to any kind of opinion and I just don't know what an «antinovel» is specifically. Every original novel is «anti» because it does not resemble the genre or kind ot its predecessor.
I know that you admire Robbe-Grillet. What about some of the others loosely grouped under the «New Novel» tag: Claude Simon? Michel Butor? and Raymond Queneau, a wonderful writer, who, while not a member of l'ecole, anticipates it in several ways?
Queneau's Exercices de style is a thrilling masterpiece and, in fact, one of the greatest stories in French literature.* [*Nabokov's encomium is not without humor, however, since Queneau's Exercices is an antistory, if not noveclass="underline" a man is jostled on a bus and is later advised by a friend to add a button to his overcoat, and this «story», such as it is, is retold ninety-nine different times and ways, none of which is as «thrilling» as, say, an episode in James Bond] I am also very fond of Queneau's Zazie, and I remember some excellent essays he published in Nouvelle revuefrancaise. We met once at a party and talked about another famous fillette. I do not care for Butor. But Robbe-Grillet is so unlike the others. One cannot, one should not lump them together. By the way, when we visited Robbe-Grillet, his petite, pretty wife, a young actress, had dressed herself a la gamine in my honor, pretending to be Lolita, and she continued the performance the next day, when we met again at a publisher's luncheon in a restaurant. After pouring wine for everyone but her, the waiter asked, «Voulezvous un CocaCola, Mademoiselle?» It was very funny, and Robbe-Grillet, who looks so solemn in his photographs, roared with laughter.
Someone has called the New Novel «the detective story taken seriously» (there it is again, the influence of the French edition of Despair). Parodistic or not, you take it «seriously», given the number of times you've transmuted the properties of the genre. Would you say something about why you've returned to them so often?
My boyhood passion for the Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown stories may yield some twisted clue.
You once said that Robbe-Grillet's shifts of levels belong to psychology — «psychology at its best. «Are you a psychological novelist?
All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists, I guess. Speaking of precursors of the New Novel, there is Franz Hellens, a Belgian, who is very important. Do you know of him?
No, I don't. When was he active, in which period did he write? The post-Baudelaire period*
Nabokov is of course funning ihe academic proclivity to assign individual artists or writers to neatly, arbitrarily defined «periods», «schools», and «isms» («there is only one school, that of talent», he says), but his answer turns out to be a sound one. Baudelaire spent the last few years of his life in Belgium, and Hellens was horn there in 1881, only 14 years after Baudelaire's death. Now in his ninetieth year, Hellens does indeed embody «the postBaudelaire period». Hellens' vast oeuvre includes eight novels and fourteen volumes of verse. A 1931 volume includes a portrait drawing of him by Modigliani. His Poesie Complete was published in 1959, his most recent book, Objets, in 1966. The Nouveau Larousse Universel, Vol. I (1969), includes a brief entry on him. Nabokov has not seen Hellens for many years. In 1959 he sent Nabokov a presentation copy of his novel, Oeil-de-Dieu, warmly inscribed «To the Author of Lolita».
Could you be more specific?
Hellens was a tall, lean, quiet, very dignified man of whom I saw a good deal in Belgium in the middle thirties when I was reading my own stuff in lecture halls for large emigre audiences. La femme partagee (1929), a novel, I like particularly, and there are three or four other books that stand out among the many that Hellens wrote. I tried to get someone in the States to publish him — Laughlin, perhaps — but nothing came of it. Hellens would get excellent reviews, was beloved in Belgium, and what friends he had in Paris tried to brighten and broaden his reputation. It is a shame that he is read less than that awful Monsieur Camus and even more awful Monsieur Sartre.
What you say about Hellens and Queneau is most interesting, in part because journalists always find it more «colorful» to stress your negative remarks about other writers.
Yes, «good copy» is the phrase. As a private person, I happen to be goodnatured, straightforward, plainspoken, and intolerant of bogus art. A writer for whom I have the deepest admiration is H. G. Wells, especially his romances: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Country of the Blind, The War of the Worlds, and the moon fantasia The First Men on the Moon.
And as final food for thought, sir, what is the meaning of life? [A rather blurry reproduction of Tolstoy’s photographed face follows this question in the interviewer's typescript].
For solutions see p. 000 (thus says a MS note in the edited typescript of my Poems and Problems which I have just received). In other words: Let us wait for the page proof.