Is there any truth in the rumor that you are thinking of leaving Montreux forever?
Well, there is a rumor that sooner or later everybody living now in Montreux will leave it forever.
Lolita is an extraordinary Baedecker of the United States. What fascinated you about American motels?
The fascination was purely utilitarian. My wife used to drive me (Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Buick, Buick Special, Impala — in that order of brand) during several seasons, many thousands of miles every season, for the sole purpose of collecting Lepidoptera — all of which are now in three museums (Natural History in New York City, Comparative Zoology at Harvard, Comstock Hall at Cornell). Usually we spent only a day or two in each motor-court, but sometimes, if the hunting was good, we stayed for weeks in one place. The main raison d'etre of the motel was the possibility of walking out straight into an aspen grove with lupines in full bloom or onto a wild mountainside. We also would make many sorties on the way between motels. All this I shall he describing in my next memoir, Speak On, Memory, which will deal with many curious things (apart from butterfly lore) — amusing happenings at Cornell and Harvard, gay tussles with publishers, my friendship with Edmund Wilson, et cetera.
You were in Wyoming and Colorado looking for butterflies. What were these places like to you?
My wife and I have collected not only in Wyoming and Colorado, but in most of the states, as well as in Canada.
The list of localities visited between 1940 and 1960 would cover many pages. Each butterfly, killed by an expert nip of its thorax, is slipped immediately into a little glazed envelope, about thirty of which fit into one of the BandAid containers which represent, with the net, my only paraphernalia in the field. Captures can be kept, before being relaxed and set, for any number of years in those envelopes, if properly stored. The exact locality and date are written on every envelope besides being jotted down in one's pocket diary. Though my captures are now in American museums, 1 have preserved hundreds of labels and notes. Here are just a few samples picked out at random:
Road to Terry Peak from Route 85, near Lead, 6500 — 7000 feet, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, July 20, 1958.
Above Tomboy Road, between Social Tunnel and Bullion Mine, at about 10,500 feet, nearTelluride, San Miguel County, W. Colorado, July 3, 1951.
Near Karner, between Albany and Schenectady, New York, June 2, 1950.
Near Columbine Lodge, Estes Park, E. Colorado, about 9000 feet, June 5, 1947.
Soda Mt., Oregon, about 5500 feet, August 2, 1953.
Above Portal, road to Rustler Park, between 5500 and 8000 feet, Chiricahua Mts., Arizona, April 30, 1953.
Fernie, three miles east of Elco, British Columbia, July 10, 1958.
Granite Pass, Bighorn Mts., 8950 feet, E. Wyoming, July 17, 1958.
Near Crawley Lake, Bishop, California, about 7000 feet, June 3, 1953.
Near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, April 21, 1959. Etcetera, et cetera.
Where do you go for butterflies now?
To various good spots in the Valais, the Tessin, the Grisons; to the hills of Italy: to the Mediterranean islands; to the mountains of southern France and so forth. I am chiefly devoted to European and North American butterflies of high altitudes, and have never visited the Tropics. The little mountain trains cog-wheeling up to alpine meadows, through sun and shade, along rock face or coniferous forest are tolerable in action and delightful in destination, bringing one as they do to the starting point of a daylong hike. My favorite method of locomotion, though, is the cableway, and especially the chairlift. I find enchanting and dreamy in the best sense of the word to glide in the morning sun from valley to timberline in that magic seat, and watch from above my own shadow — with the ghost of a butterfly net in the ghost of a fist — as it keeps gently ascending in sitting profile along the flowery slope below, among dancing Ringlets and skimming Fritillaries. Some day the butterfly hunter will find even finer dream lore when floating upright over mountains, carried by a diminutive rocket strapped to his back.
In the past, how did you usually travel, when you were looking for butterflies? Did you go camping, for instance?
As a youth of seventeen, on the eve of the Russian Revolution, I was seriously planning (being the independent possessor of an inherited fortune) a lepidopterological expedition to Central Asia, and that would have involved naturally a good deal of camping. Earlier, when I was, say, eight or nine, I seldom roamed further than the fields and woods of our country estate near St. Petersburg. At twelve, when aiming ai a particular spot half-a-dozen miles or more distant, I would use a bicycle to get there with my net fastened to the frame; but not many forest paths were passable on wheels; it was possible to ride there on horseback, of course, but, because of our ferocious Russian tabanids, one could not leave a horse haltered in a wood for any length of time: my spirited bay almost climbed up the tree it was tied to one day trying to elude them: big fellows with watered-silk eyes and tiger bodies, and gray little runts with an even more painful proboscis, but much more sluggish: to dispatch two or three of these dingy tipplers with one crush of the gloved hand as they glued themselves to the neck of my mount afforded me a wonderful empathic relief (which a dipierist might not appreciate). Anyway, on my butterfly hunts I always preferred hiking to any other form of locomotion (except, naturally, a flying seat gliding leisurely over the plant mats and rocks of an unexplored mountain, or hovering just above the flowery roof of a rain forest); for when you walk, especially in a region you have studied well, there is an exquisite pleasure in departing from one's itinerary to visit, here and there by the wayside, this glade, that glen, this or that combination of soil and flora — to drop in, as it were, on a familiar butterfly in his particular habitat, in order to see it he has emerged, and it so, how he is doing.
What is your ideal of a splendid grand-hotel?
Absolute quiet, no radio playing behind the wall, none in the lift, no footsteps thudding above, no snores coming from below, no gondoliers carousing across the lane, no drunks in the corridor. I remember one awful little scene (and this was in a fiveturret palace with the guidebook sign of a red songbird meaning luxury and isolation!). Upon hearing a commotion just outside the door of my bedroom, I poked out my head, while preparing my curse — which fizzled out when I saw what was happening in the passage. An American of the traveling-executive type was staggering about with a bottle of whisky and his son, a boy of twelve or so, was trying to restrain him, repeating: «Please, Dad, please, come to bed», which reminded me of a similar situation in a Chekhov story.
What do you think has changed over the last sixty years in the traveling style? You loved wagons-lits.
Oh,I did. In the early years of this century, a travel agency on Nevski Avenue displayed a three-foot-long