What are the large issues that you can't get interested in, and what are you most concerned with?
The larger the issue the less it interests me. Some of my best concerns are microscopic patches of color.
What can (should?) we do about elusive truth?
One can (and should) engage a specially trained proofreader to make sure that misprints and omissions do not disfigure the elusive truth of an interview that a newspaper takes the trouble to conduct with an author who is rather particular about the precise reproduction of his phrase.
18
On September 8, 1971, Paul Sufrin came here to conduct a radio interview for Swiss Broadcast, European & Overseas Service. I do not know when, or if, our rather odd colloquy was used. Here are a few samples.
You've been quoted as saying that in a first-rate work of fiction, the real clash isn't between the characters, but between the author and the world. Would you explain this?
I believe I said «between the author and the reader», not «the world», which would be a meaningless formula, since a creative artist makes his own world or worlds. He clashes with rcaderdum because he is his own ideal reader and those other readers are so very often mere lipmoving ghosts and amnesiacs. On the other hand, a good reader is bound to make fierce efforts when wrestling with a difficult author, but those efforts can be most rewarding after the bright dust has settled.
What is your particular clash?
Well, that's the clash I am generally faced with.
In many of your writings, you have conceived what I consider to be an Alice in Wonderland world of unreality and illusion. What is the connection with your real struggle with the world?
Alice in Wonderland is a specific book by a definite author with its own quaintness, its own quirks, its own quiddity.
If read very carefully, it will be seen to imply, by humorous juxtaposition, the presence of a quite solid, and rather sentimental, world, behind the semidetached dream. Moreover, Lewis Carroll liked little girls. I don't.
The mixture of unreality and illusion may have led some people to consider you mystifying and your writing full of puzzles. What is your answer to people who say you are just plain obscure?
To stick to the crossword puzzle in their Sunday paper.
Do you make a point of puzzling people and playing games with readers?
What a bore that would be!
The past figures prominently in some of your writing. What concern do you have for the present and the future?
My conception of the texture of time somewhat resembles its image in Part Four of Ada. The present is only the top of the past, and the future does not exist.
What have you found to be the disadvantages of being able to write in so many languages?
The inability to keep up with their ever-changing slang.
What are the advantages?
The ability to render an exact nuance by shifting from the language I am now using to a brief burst of French or to a soft rustle of Russian.
What do you think of critic George Steiners linking you with Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges as the three figures of probable genius in contemporary fiction?
That playwright and that essayist are regarded nowadays with such religious fervor that in the triptych you mention, I would feel like a robber between two Christs. Quite a cheerful robber, though.
19
In October, 1971, Kurt Hoffman visited me in Montreux to film an interview for the Bayerischer Rundfunk. Of its many topics and themes I have selected a few for reproduction in this volume. The bit about my West European ancestors comes from a carefully executed and beautifully bound Ahnentafel, given me on my seventieth birthday by my German publisher Heinrich Maria LedigRowohlt.
ON TIME AND ITS TEXTURE
We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example «applied time» — time applied to events, which we measure by means of clocks and calendars; but those types of time are inevitably tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession, stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the «passage of time», we visualize an abstract river flowing through a generalized landscape. Applied time, measurable illusions of time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists, they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada.
He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being «an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration», of being able to delight sensually in the texture of time, «in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum». He also is aware that «Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors».
Time, though akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which would imply motion — and Time does not move. Van's greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence between the beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat.
PERSONAL PAST
Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content and context, this, then, is the kind of Time described by my creature under my sympathetic direction. The Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present, but it looks somewhat out of focus. The Past is a constant accumulation of images, but our brain is not an ideal organ for constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory. The act of retention is the act of art, artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic recombination of actual events. The bad memoirist retouches his past, and the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken by a stranger to console sentimental bereavement. The good memoirist, on the other hand, does his best to preserve the utmost truth of the detail. One of the ways he achieves his intent is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing the right patch of remembered color.
ANCESTRAL PAST
It follows that the combination and juxtaposition of remembered details is a main factor in the artistic process of reconstructing one's past. And that means probing not only one's personal past but the past of one's family in search of affinities with oneself, previews of oneself, faint allusions to one's vivid and vigorous Now. This, of course, is a game for old people. Tracing an ancestor to his lair hardly differs from a boy's search for a bird's nest or for a ball lost in the grass. The Christmas tree of one's childhood is replaced by the Family Tree.
As the author of several papers on Lepidoptera, such as the «Nearclic Members of the Genus Lycaeides», I experience a certain thrill on finding that my mother's maternal grandfather Nikolay Kozlov, who was born two centuries ago and was the first president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Medicine, wrote a paper entitled «On the Coarctation of the Jugular Foramen in the Insane» to which my *Nearctic Members et cetera*, furnishes a perfect response. And no less perfect is the connection between Nabokov's Pug, a little American moth named after me, and Nabokov's River in Nova Zembla of all places, so named after my great-grandfather, who participated at the beginning of the nineteenth century in an arctic expedition. I learned about these things quite late in life. Talks about one's ancestors were frowned upon in my family; the interdiction came from my father who had a particular loathing for the least speck or shadow of snobbishness. When imagining the information that I could now have used in my memoir, I rather regret that no such talks took place. But it simply was not done in our home, sixty years ago, twelve hundred miles away.