Print

---

Thank you so much............was getting prepared for an upcoming
conference, and dreading it.  Quite forgotten the delicious pleasures of
stealing away with a novel, and needed this brief respite and reminder of
beauty....and truth.
_______________________
J.S. Tweedie
School of Linguistics
and Applied Language Studies
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
_______________________
[log in to unmask]

> ----------
> From:         Jamie MacKinnon[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Reply To:     CASLL/Inkshed
> Sent:         April 20, 1999 2:30 PM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      In the shadow of the waxwing
>
> This Friday is the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest
> novelists of all time, Vladimir Nabokov.  I'll be raising a glass (of
> kvass?) to a writer who has taught me a good deal about, well, many
> things:  how metaphysics can be refracted in prose, the importance of
> truth in detail, the poetic possibilities of English prose . . .  Feel
> free to join me in my toast tele-ontologically.
>
> Below, for those who might find it interesting, I've copied a few
> sentences from VN's literary autobiography, Speak, Memory, as well as a
> transcript of television interview from 1965.
>
> "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our
> existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of
> darkness.  Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the
> prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some
> forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). . . .
>
> "Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and
> aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between.
> Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should
> be limited.  In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
>
> "I rebel against this state of affairs.  I feel the urge to take my
> rebellion outside and picket nature.  Over and over again, my mind has
> made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in
> the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life.  That this darkness is
> caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from
> the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most
> gaudily painted savage."
>
> -  Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
>
>
> Nabokov interview. (05)  TV-13 NY [1965]
>
> In  September, 1965, Robert Hughes visited me here to make a filmed
> interview for the Television 13 Educational Program in New York. At our
> initial meetings I read from  prepared  cards, and this part of the
> interview is given below.  The rest, represented by some fifty pages typed
> from the tape, is too colloquial and rambling to suit the scheme of the
> present book.
>
>
> As with Gogol and even James Agee, there is occasionally confusion about
> the  pronunciation  of  your last name. How does one pronounce it
> correctly?
>
> It  is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends
> to regard the "a" of the first  syllable as a misprint  and then tries to
> restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the "o"-- filling up the
> row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts.
> No-bow-cough.  How ugly, how wrong.  Every author whose name is fairly
> often mentioned in periodicals develops a  bird-watcher's or
> caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I
> always get caught by the word "nobody" when capitalized at the beginning
> of a sentence.  As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff,
> with the accent on the last syllable.  Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on
> the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians
> also do.  Na-bo-kov.  A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker."  My New
> England ear is not offended by the long elegant   middle "o" of Nabokov as
> delivered in American academies.  The awful "Na-bah-kov"is a despicable
> gutterism.  Well, you can make your choice now.  Incidentally, the first
> name is pronounced Vladeemer -- rhyming  with "redeemer" -- not Vladimir
> rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think).
>
> How  about  the  name  of  your extraordinary creature, Professor P-N-I-N?
>
>
> The "p" is sounded, that's all. But since the "p" is  mute in English
> words starting with "pn", one is prone to insert a supporting "uh" sound
> -- "Puh-- nin" -- which is wrong.  To get the "pn" right, try the
> combination "Up North", or still better "Up,  Nina!",  leaving out the
> initial "u." Pnorth, Pnina, Pmn.  Can you do that? . . . That's fine.
>
> You 're responsible for brilliant summaries of the lives and works of
> Pushkin and Gogol. How would you summarize your own?
>
> It is not so easy to  summarize  something which is not quite finished
> yet. However, as I've pointed out elsewhere, the first part of my life is
> marked by a rather pleasing chronological  neatness.  I  spent my  first
> twenty  years in Russia, the next twenty in Western Europe, and the twenty
> years after that, from 1940 to 1960, in America. I've been living in
> Europe again for five years now, but I cannot promise to stay around
> another fifteen so as to retain the rhythm.  Nor  can I predict what new
> books I may write. My best Russian novel is a thing called, in English,
> The Gift.  My two best American ones are Lolita and Pale Fire.
>
> I am now in the process of translating Lolita into Russian, which is like
> completing the circle of my creative life.  Or  rather starting a new
> spiral.   I've lots of difficulties with technical  terms, especially with
> those pertaining to the motor car, which has not really blended with
> Russian  life  as it, or rather she, has with American life.  I also have
> trouble with finding the right Russian terms for clothes, varieties of
> shoes, items of furniture, and so on.  On the other hand, descriptions of
> tender emotions, of my nymphet's grace and of the soft, melting American
> landscape slip very delicately into lyrical Russian.  The book will be
> published in America or perhaps Paris; travelling poets and diplomats will
> smuggle it into Russia, I hope.  Shall I read three lines of this Russian
> version?  Of course, incredible as it may seem, perhaps not everybody
> remembers the way Lolita starts in English. So perhaps I should do the
> first lines in English first.  Note that for the necessary effect of
> dreamy tenderness both "l"s and the"t" and indeed the whole word should be
> iberized and not pronounced the American way with crushed "l"s, a coarse
> "t," and a long "o":
>
> "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.  Lo-lee-ta:
> the  tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to
> tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo.  Lee.  Ta."
>
> Now  comes  the  Russian.  Here  the first syllable of her name sounds
> more like an "ah" sound than an "o" sound, but the rest is like Spanish:
> (Reads in Russian) "Lah-lee-ta, svet moey zhizni, ogon' moih chresel. Greh
> may, dusha moya."  And so on.
>
> Beyond what's stated and implied in your various prefaces, have you
> anything to add about your readers and/or your critics?
>
> Well,  when I think about critics in general, I divide the family of
> critics into three subfamilies.  First,  professional reviewers, mainly
> hacks or hicks, regularly filling up their allotted space in the
> cemeteries of Sunday  papers.  Secondly, more ambitious critics who every
> other year collect their magazine articles into volumes with allusive
> scholarly titles -- The  Undiscovered  Country,  that  kind  of thing.
> And thirdly, my fellow writers, who review a book they like or loathe.
> Many bright blurbs and dark feuds have been engendered that way. When an
> author whose work I admire praises my work, I cannot help experiencing,
> besides a ripple of almost human warmth, a sense of harmony and satisfied
> logic. But I have also the idiotic feeling that he or she will very soon
> cool down and vaguely turn away if I do not do something at once, but I
> don't know what to do, and I never do anything, and next morning cold
> clouds conceal the bright mountains. In all other cases, I must confess, I
> yawn and forget. Of course, every worthwhile author has quite a few clowns
> and criticules -- wonderful word:  criti-cules, or  criticasters -- around
> him,  demolishing one another rather than him with their slapsticks. Then,
> also, my various disgusts which I like to voice now  and  then  seem to
> irritate people. I happen to find second-rate and ephemeral the works  of
> a number of puffed-up writers -- such as Camus, Lorca, Kazantzakis, D. H.
> Lawrence, Thomas Mann,  Thomas  Wolfe,  and literally  hundreds of other
> "great" second-raters.  And for this, of course, I'm automatically
> disliked by their camp-followers,  kitsch-followers, fashion-followers,
> and all kinds of automatons.   Generally speaking, I'm supremely
> indifferent to adverse criticism in regard to my fiction.  But on the
> other hand, I enjoy retaliating when some pompous dunce finds fault with
> my translations and divulges a farcical ignorance of the Russian language
> and literature.
>
> Would you describe your first reactions to America? And how you first came
> to write in English?
>
> I had started rather sporadically to compose in English a few  years
> before migrating to America, where I arrived in the lilac mist of a May
> morning,  May  28,  1940.  In  the late thirties,  when  living in Germany
> and France, I had translated two of my Russian books into English and had
> written  my  first straight  English  novel, the one about Sebastian
> Knight. Then, in America, I stopped writing in my  native  tongue
> altogether except  for  an  occasional poem which, incidentally, caused my
> Russian  poetry  to  improve  rather  oddly  in urgency  and
> concentration.  My complete switch from Russian prose to English prose was
> exceedingly painful -- like learning anew to handle things after losing
> seven or eight fingers in an  explosion.  I have  described  the writing
> of Lolita in the afterpiece appended in '58 to the American edition.  The
> book  was first published in Paris at a time when nobody else wanted it,
> 10 years ago now -- 10 years -- how time crawls!
>
> As to Pale Fire, although I had devised  some odds and  ends  of  Zemblan
> lore in the late fifties in lthaca, New York, I felt the  first  real
> pang  of  the  novel,  a  rather complete vision of its structure in
> miniature, and jotted it down -- I have it in one of my pocket diaries --
> while sailing
> from New York to France in 1959.  The American poem discussed in the book
> by His Majesty, Charles of Zembla, was the hardest stuff I ever had to
> compose.  Most of it I wrote in Nice, in winter,  walking along the
> Promenade des Anglais or rambling in the neighboring hills. A good deal of
> Kinbote's commentary  was written  here  in  the  Montreux Palace garden,
> one of the most enchanting and inspiring gardens I know.  I'm especially
> fond of its weeping cedar, the arboreal counterpart of a very shaggy dog
> with hair hanging over its eyes.
>
> What  is  your  approach to the teaching of literature?
>
> I can give you some examples. When studying Kafka's famous story, my
> students had to know exactly what kind of insect Gregor turned into (it
> was a domed beetle, not the flat cockroach of sloppy translators) and they
> had to be able to describe exactly the arrangement of the rooms, with the
> position of doors and furniture, in the Sarnsa family's flat. They had to
> know the map of  Dublin for Ulysses. I believe in stressing the specific
> detail; the general ideas can take care of themselves.  Ulysses, of
> course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the  academic
> nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths.  I
> once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to
> its chapters the titles borrowed from  Homer  while not even noticing the
> comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh.  He didn't even
> know who the man in the brown mackintosh was.  Oh, yes, let people compare
> me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion
> game.
>
> How did you come to live in Switzerland?
>
> The older I get and the more I weigh, the harder it is for me to get out
> of this or that comfortable armchair or deckchair into which I have sunk
> with an exhalation of content.  Nowadays I  find  it as difficult to
> travel from Montreux to Lausanne as to travel to Paris, London, or New
> York. On  the other hand, I'm ready to walk 10 or 15miles per day, up and
> down mountain trails, in search of butterflies, as I do every summer. One
> of the  reasons I live in Montreux is because I find the view from my easy
> chair wonderfully soothing and exhilarating according to my mood or the
> mood of the lake. I hasten to add that not only am I not a tax dodger, but
> that I also have to pay a plump little Swiss tax on top of my massive
> American taxes which are so high they almost cut off that beautiful view.
> I feel very nostalgic about America and as soon as I muster  the necessary
> energy I shall return there for good.
>
> Where is the easy chair?
>
> The easy chair is in the other room, in my study. It was a metaphor, after
> all:  the easy chair is the entire hotel, the garden, everything.
>
> Where would you live in America?
>
> I think I would like to live either in California, or in New York, or in
> Cambridge, Mass. Or in a  combination of these three.
>
> Because of your mastery of our language, you are frequently compared with
> Joseph Conrad.
>
> Well,  I'll put it this way. When a boy, I was a voracious reader, as all
> boy writers seem to be, and between 8 and  14  I used to enjoy
> tremendously the romantic productions -- romantic in the large sense -- of
> such people as  Conan Doyle,  Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton, Oscar
> Wilde, and other authors who are essentially writers for very young
> people. But as I have well said somewhere before, I differ from Joseph
> Conradically.
>
> First of ail, he had not been  writing in his native tongue before he
> became an English writer, and secondly, I cannot stand today his polished
> clichés and primitive clashes. He once wrote that he preferred Mrs.
> Garnett's translation of Anna Karenin to the original! This makes one
> dream -- "ca fait rever" as Flaubert used to say when faced with some
> abysmal stupidity.  Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities
> as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another called Maxim
> Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as geniuses, I
> have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called
> "great books".  That, for instance, Mann's asinine Death in Venice or
> Pasternak's melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner's
> corncobby chronicles can be considered  "masterpieces,"  or at least what
> journalists call "great books," is to me an absurd delusion, as when a
> hypnotiz.ed person makes love to a chair.  My greatest masterpieces of
> twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's
> Transformation, Biely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy
> tale In Search of Lost Time.
>
> What do you think of American writing? I noticed there are no American
> masterpieces on your list.  What  do you  think  of American writing since
> 1945?
>
> Well, seldom more than two or three really first-rate writers exist
> simultaneously in a given generation.  I think that Salinger and Updike
> are by far the finest artists in recent years.  The sexy, phony type of
> best seller, the violent, vulgar novel, the novelistic treatment of social
> or political problems, and, in general, novels consisting mainly of
> dialogue or social  comment --  these are absolutely banned from my
> bedside.  And the popular mixture of pornography and  idealistic
> humhuggery makes me positively vomit.
>
> What do you think of Russian writing since 1945?
>
> Soviet literature . . . Well, in the first years after the Bolshevik
> revolution, in the twenties and early thirties, one could still
> distinguish through the dreadful platitudes of Soviet propaganda the
> dying voice of an earlier culture.  The primitive and banal mentality of
> enforced politics -- any politics -- can only produce primitive and banal
> art.  This is especially true of the so-called "social realist" and
> "proletarian" literature sponsored by the Soviet police state.  Its
> jackbooted baboons have gradually exterminated the really talented
> authors, the special individual, the fragile genius.  One of the saddest
> cases is perhaps that of Osip  Mandelshtam -- a wonderful  poet, the
> greatest poet among those trying to survive in Russia under the  Soviets
> -- whom that brutal and imbecile administration persecuted and finally
> drove to death in a remote concentration camp.  The poems he heroically
> kept composing until madness eclipsed his limpid gifts are admirable
> specimens of a human mind at its deepest and highest.  Reading them
> enhances one's healthy contempt for Soviet  ferocity.
>
> Tyrants and torturers will never manage to hide their comic stumbles
> behind their cosmic acrobatics. Contemptuous  laughter is  all right, but
> it is not enough in the way of moral relief.  And when I read
> Mandelshtam's poems composed under the accursed rule of those beasts, I
> feel a kind of helpless shame, being so free to live and think and write
> and speak in the free part  of
> the world.  That's the only time when liberty is bitter.
>
> WALKING IN MONTREUX WITH INTERVIEWER
>
> This  is  a ginkgo -- the sacred tree of China, now rare in the wild
> state.  The curiously veined leaf resembles a butterfly -- which reminds
> me of a little poem:
>
>  The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
>  A muscat grape,
>  Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,
>  In shape.
>
> This, in my novel Pale Fire, is a short poem by John Shade -- by far the
> greatest of invented poets.
>
> PASSING A SWIMMING POOL
>
> I don't mind sharing the sun with sunbathers but I dislike immersing
> myself in a swimming pool.  It is after all only a big tub where other
> people join you -- makes one think of those horrible Japanese communal
> bathtubs, full of a loating family, or a shoal of businessmen.
>
> DOG NEAR TELEPHONE BOOTH
>
> Must remember the life line of that leash from the meek dog to the
> talkative lady in that telephone  booth.  "A  long wait" --  good legend
> for an oil painting of the naturalistic school.
>
> BOYS KICKING A BALL IN A GARDEN
>
> Many years have passed since I gathered a soccer  ball to my  breast.  I
> was an erratic but rather spectacular goalkeeper in my Cambridge
> University days 45  years  ago.  After  that  I played  on a German team
> when I was about 30, and saved my last game in 1936 when I regained
> consciousness  in the pavilion, knocked out by a kick but still clutching
> the ball which an impatient teammate was trying to pry out of my arms.
>
> DURING A STROLL NEAR VILLENEUVE
>
> Late September in Central Europe is a bad season for collecting
> butterflies. This is not Arizona, alas.  In this grassy nook near an old
> vineyard above the Lake of Geneva, a few fairly fresh females of the very
> common Meadow Brown still flutter about here and  there -- lazy  old
> widows.
>
> There's one.  Here  is  a  little sky-blue butterfly, also a very common
> thing, once known as the Clifden Blue in England.
>
> The sun is getting hotter. I enjoy hunting in the buff but I doubt
> anything interesting can be obtained today.  This pleasant lane on the
> banks of Geneva Lake teems with butterflies in summer.  Chapman's Blue and
> Mann's White, two rather local things, occur not far from here. But the
> white butterflies we see in this particular glade, on this nice but
> commonplace autumn  day, are the ordinary Whites; the Small White and
> Green-Veined White.
>
> Ah, a caterpillar. Handle with care. Its golden-brown coat can cause a
> nasty itch. This handsome  worm will become next year a fat, ugly,
> drab-colored moth.
>
> IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION:  WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED
>
> Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost. The beheading of Louis the
> Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold.  Herman Melville
> at breakfast, feeding a sardine to his cat.
> Poe's wedding.  Lewis Carroll's picnics.  The Russians leaving Alaska,
> delighted with the deal.  Shot of a seal applauding.
>
> Last-modified: Sat, 25-Jul-98 20:40:22 GMT
>
>
>