FAME
Soviet politicians have a rather comic provincial way of applauding the audience that applauds them. I hope I won't be accused of facetious sufficiency if I say in response to your compliments that I have the greatest readers any author has ever had. I see myself as an American writer raised in Russia, educated in England, imbued with the culture of Western Europe; I am aware of the blend, but even the most lucid plum pudding cannot sort out its own ingredients, especially whilst the pale fire still flickers around it. Field, Appel, Proffer, and many others in the USA, Zimmer in Germany, Vivian Darkbloom (a shy violet in Cambridge), have all added their erudition to my inspiration, with brilliant results. I would like to say a lot about my heroic readers in Russia but am prevented from doing so — by many emotions besides a sense of responsibility with which I still cannot cope in any rational way.
SWITZERLAND
Exquisite postal service. No bothersome demonstrations, no spiteful strikes. Alpine butterflies. Fabulous sunsets — just west of my window, spangling the lake, splitting the crimson sun! Also, the pleasant surprise of a metaphorical sunset in charming surroundings.
All Is Vanity
The phrase is a sophism because, if true, it is itself mere «vanity», and if not then the «all» is wrong. You say that it seems to be my main motto. I wonder if there is really so much doom and «frustration» in my fiction? Humbert is frustrated, that's obvious; some of my other villains are frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent characters — in The Gift, in Invitation to a Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera — are victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel — and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.
20
The New York newspaper for which this interview, conducted by correspondence in 1972, was intended, refused to publish it. My interviewer's questions have been abridged or stylized in the following version.
Critics of Transparent Things seem to have had difficulty in describing its theme.
Its theme is merely a beyond-the-cypress inquiry into a tangle of random destinies. Amongst the reviewers several careful readers have published some beautiful stuff about it. Yet neither they nor, of course, the common criticule discerned the structural knot of the story. May I explain that simple and elegant point?
You certainly may.
Allow me to quote a passage from my first page which baffled the wise and misled the silly: «When we concentrate on a material object . . . the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object». A number of such instances of falling through the present's «tension film» are given in the course of the book. There is the personal history of a pencil. There is also, in a later chapter, the past of a shabby room, where, instead of focusing on Person and the prostitute, the spectral observer drifts down into the middle of the previous century and sees a Russian traveler, a minor Dostoevski, occupying that room, between Swiss gambling house and Italy.
Another critic has said —
Yes, I am coming to that. Reviewers of my little book made the lighthearted mistake of assuming that seeing through things is the professional function of a novelist. Actually, that kind of generalization is not only a dismal commonplace but is specifically untrue. Unlike the mysterious observer or observers in Transparent Things, a novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
So who is that observer; who are those italicized «we» in the fourteenth line of the novel; who, for goodness'sake, is the «I» in its very first line?
The solution, my friend, is so simple that one is almost embarrassed to furnish it. But here goes. An incidental but curiously active component of my novel is Mr. R., an American writer of German extraction. He writes English more correctly than he speaks it. In conversation R. has an annoying habit of introducing here and there the automatic «you know» of the German emigre, and, more painfully yet, of misusing, garbling, or padding the commonest American cliche. A good specimen is his intrusive, though well meant, admonition in the last line of my last chapter: «Easy, you know, does it, son». _
Some reviewers saw in Mr. R. a portrait or parody of Mr. N.
Exactly. They were led to that notion by mere flippancy of thought because, I suppose, both writers are naturalized U.S. citizens and both happen, or happened, to live in Switzerland. When Transparent Things starts, Mr. R. is already dead and his last letter has been filed away in the «repository» in his publisher's office (see my Chapter Twenty-One). Not only is the surviving writer an incomparably better artist than Mr. R., but the latter, in his Tralatitions, actually squirts the venom of envy at the infuriatingly smiling Adam von Librikov (Chapter Nineteen), an anagrammatic alias that any child can decode. On the threshold of my novel Hugh Person is welcomed by a ghost or ghosts — by his dead father, perhaps, or dead wife; more probably, by the late Monsieur Kronig, former director of the Ascot Hotel; still more probably by Mr. R.'s phantom. This promises a thriller: whose ghost will keep intruding upon the plot? One thing, however, is quite transparent and certain. As intimated already in this exegesis, it is no other than a discarnate, but still rather grotesque, Mr. R. who greets newly-dead Hugh in the last line of the book.
I see. And what are you up to now, Baron Librikov? Another novel? Memoirs? Cocking a snoot at dunderheads?
Two volumes of short stories and a collection of essays are by now almost completed, and a new wonderful novel has its little foot in the door. As to cocking a snoot at dunderheads, I never do that. My books, all my books, are addressed not to «dunderheads»; not to the cretins who believe that I like long Latinate words; not to the learned loonies who find sexual or religious allegories in my fiction; no, my books are addressed to Adam von L., to my family, to a few intelligent friends, and to all my likes in all the crannies of the world, from a carrel in America to the nightmare depths of Russia.
21
Simona Morini came to interview me on February 3, 1972, in Montreux. Our exchange appeared in Vogue, New York, April 15, 1972. Three passages (pp. 2001, 2012 and 204), are borrowed, with modifications, from Speak, Memory, G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y., 1966.
The world has been and is open to you. With your Proustian sense of places, what is there in Montreux that attracts you so?
My sense of places is Nabokovian rather than Proustian. With regard to Montreux there are many attractions — nice people, near mountains, regular mails, headquarters at a comfortable hotel. We dwell in the older part of the Palace Hotel, in its original part really, which was all that existed a hundred and fifty years ago (you can still see that initial inn and our future windows in old prints of 1840 or so). Our quarters consist of several tiny rooms with two and a half bathrooms, the result of two apartments having been recently fused. The sequence is: kitchen, living-dining room, my wife's room, my room, a former kitchenette now full of my papers, and our son's former room, now converted into a study. The apartment is cluttered with books, folders, and files. What might be termed rather grandly a library is a back room housing my published works, and there are additional shelves in the attic whose skylight is much frequented by pigeons and Alpine choughs. I am giving this meticulous description to refute a distortion in an interview published recently in another New York magazine — a long piece with embarrassing misquotations, wrong intonations, and false exchanges in the course of which I am made to dismiss the scholarship of a dear friend as «pedantry» and to poke ambiguous fun at a manly writer's tragic fate.