Another critic has written of you that «the task of sifting and selecting just the right succession of words from that multilingual memory, and of arranging their manymirrored nuances into the proper juxtapositions, must be psychically exhausting work”. Which of all your books, in this sense, would you say was the most difficult to write?
Oh, Lolita, naturally. I lacked the necessary information — that was the initial difficulty. I did not know any American 12yearold girls, and I did not know America; I had to invent America and Lolita. It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by a similar task, with a lesser amount of time at my disposal. The obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject average «reality» into the brew of individual fancy proved, at fifty, a much more difficult process than it had been in the Europe of my youth.
Though born in Russia, you have lived and worked for many years in America as well as in Europe. Do you feel any strong sense of national identity?
I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where 1 studied French literature, before spending fifteen years in Germany. I came to America in 1940 and decided to become an American citizen, and make America my home. It so happened that I was immediately exposed to the very best in America, to its rich intellectual life and to its easygoing, goodnatured atmosphere. I immersed myself in its great libraries and its Grand Canyon. I worked in the laboratories of its zoological museums. I acquired more friends than I ever had in Europe. My books — old books and new ones — found some admirable readers. I became as stout as Cortez — mainly because I quit smoking and started to munch molasses candy instead, with the result that my weight went up from my usual 140 to a monumental and cheerful 200. In consequence, I am onethird American — good American flesh keeping me warm and safe.
You spent 20 years in America, and yet you never owned a home or had a really settled establishment there. Your friends report that you camped impermanently in motels, cabins, furnished apartments and the rented homes of professors away on leave. Did you feel so restless or so alien that the idea of settling down anywhere disturbed you?
The main reason, the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me. I would never manage to match my memories correctly — so why trouble with hopeless approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for instance, the question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I propelled myself out of Russia so vigorously, with such indignant force, that I have been rolling on and on ever since. True, I have rolled and lived to become that appetizing thing, a «full professor», but at heart I have always remained a lean «visiting lecturer». The few times I said to myself anywhere: «Now, that's a nice spot for a permanent home», I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth. And finally, I don't much care for furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things — perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any tooearnest attachment to material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution abolished thai wealth.
You lived in Russia for twenty years, in West Europe for 20 years, and in America for twenty years. But in I960, after the success of Lolita, you moved to France and Switzerland and have not returned to the U.S. since. Does this mean, despite your selfidentification as an American writer, that you consider your American period over?
1 am living in Switzerland for purely private reasons — family reasons and certain professional ones too, such as some special research for a special book. I hope to return very soon to America — back to its library stacks and mountain passes. An ideal arrangement would be an absolutely soundproofed flat in New York, on a top floor — no feet walking above, no soft music anywhere — and a bungalow in the Southwest. Sometimes I think it might be fun to adorn a university again, residing and writing there, not teaching, or at least not teaching regularly.
Meanwhile you remain secluded — and somewhat sedentary, from all reports — in your hotel suite. How do you spend your time?
I awake around seven in winter: my alarm clock is an Alpine chough — big, glossy, black thing with big yellow beak — which visits the balcony and cunts a most melodious chuckle. For a while I lie in bed mentally revising and planning things. Around eight: shave, breakfast, enthroned meditation, and bath — in that order. Then I work till lunch in my study, taking time out for a short stroll with my wife along the lake. Practically all the famous Russian writers of the nineteenth century have rambled here at one time or another. Zhukovski, Gogol, Dostoevski, Tolstoy — who courted the hotel chambermaids to the detriment of his health — and many Russian poets. But then, as much could be said of Nice or Rome. We lunch around one p.m., and I am back at my desk by halfpast one and work steadily till halfpast six. Then a stroll to a newsstand for the English papers, and dinner at seven. No work after dinner. And bed around nine. I read till halfpast eleven, and then tussle with insomnia till one a.m. About twice a week I have a good, long nightmare with unpleasant characters imported from earlier dreams, appearing in more or less iterative surroundings — kaleidoscopic arrangements of broken impressions, fragments of day thoughts, and irresponsible mechanical images, utterly lacking any possible Freudian implication or explication, hut singularly akin to the procession of changing figures that one usually sees on the inner palpebral screen when closing one's weary eyes.
Funny that witch doctors and their patients have never hit on that simple and absolutely satisfying explanation of dreaming. Is it true that you write standing up, and that you write in longhand rather than on a typewriter
Yes. I never learned to type. I generally start the day at a lovely old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on, when I feel gravity nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair alongside an ordinary writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spine, I lie down on a couch in a corner of my small study. It is a pleasant solar routine. But when I was young, in my twenties and early thirties, I would often stay all day in bed, smoking and writing. Now things have changed. Horizontal prose, vertical verse, and sedent scholia keep swapping qualifiers and spoiling the alliteration.
Can you tell us something more about the actual creative process involved in the germination of a book — perhaps by reading a few random notes for or excerpts from a work in progress?
Certainly not. No fetus should undergo an exploratory operation. But I can do something else. This box contains index cards with some notes I made at various times more or less recently and discarded when writing Pale Fire. It's a little batch of rejects. Help yourself. «Selene, the moon. Selenginsk, an old town in Siberia: moonrocket town»
. . . «Berry: the black knob on the bill of the mute swan»
. . . «Dropworm: a small caterpillar hanging on a thread»
. . . «In The New Bon Ton Magazine, volume five, 1820, page 312, prostitutes are termed 'girls of the town'«
. . . «Youlh dreams: forgot pants; old man dreams: forgot dentures»
. . . «Student explains that when reading a novel he likes to skip passages 'so as to get his own idea about the book and not be influenced by the author'«