#think write speak

Lolita isn’t a perverse young girl. She’s a poor child who has been debauched and whose senses never stir under the caresses of the foul Humbert Humbert, whom she asks once, ‘how long did [he] think we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy things together…?’ But to reply to your question: no, its success doesn’t annoy me, I am not like Conan Doyle, who out of snobbery or simple stupidity preferred to be known as the author of “The Great Boer War,” which he thought superior to his Sherlock Holmes. It is equally interesting to dwell, as journalists say, on the problem of the inept degradation that the character of the nymphet Lolita, whom I invented in 1955, has undergone in the mind of the broad public. Not only has the perversity of this poor child been grotesquely exaggerated, but her physical appearance, her age, everything has been transformed by the illustrations in foreign publications. Girls of eighteen or more, sidewalk kittens, cheap models, or simple long-legged criminals, are baptized “nymphets” or “Lolitas” in news stories in magazines in Italy, France, Germany, etc; and the covers of translations, Turkish or Arab, reach the height of ineptitude when they feature a young woman with opulent contours and a blonde mane imagined by boobies who have never read my book. In reality Lolita is a little girl of twelve, whereas Humbert Humbert is a mature man, and it’s the abyss between his age and that of the little girl that produces the vacuum, the vertigo, the seduction of mortal danger. Secondly, it’s the imagination of the sad satyr that makes a magic creature of this little American schoolgirl, as banal and normal in her way as the poet manqué Humbert is in his. Outside the maniacal gaze of Humbert there is no nymphet. Lolita the nymphet exists only through the obsession that destroys Humbert. Herein an essential aspect of a unique book that has been betrayed by a factitious popularity.

With the exception of a few Swiss butterflies, I have invented the species but not the genera featured in “Ada.” And I maintain that it’s the first time that anyone has invented in a novel butterflies that are scientifically possible. You could reply: Very well, but in satisfying the expert, you’re profiting a little from the reader’s ignorance of butterflies, because if you had invented a new type of dog or cat for the manor folk, the trickery would only have irritated the reader, who would have to imagine a little mythological quadruped each time Ada takes the animal in her arms. It’s a pity I didn’t try to invent quadrupeds—I didn’t think of it—but I invented a new tree in the manor’s orchard, that’s already something!

[C]ommonsense will point out that life on earth, from the barnacle to the goose, and from the humblest worm to the loveliest woman, arose from a colloidal carbonaceous slime activated by ferments while the earth was obligingly cooling down. Blood may well be the Silurian sea in our veins, and we are all ready to accept evolution at least as a modal formula. Professor Pavlov’s bell-hopping mice and Dr. Griffith’s rotating rats may please the practical minds, and Rhumbler’s artificial amoeba can make a very cute pet. But again it is one thing to try and find the links and steps of life, and it is quite another to try and understand what life and the phenomenon of inspiration really are.

For me writing doesn’t come in a continuous stream. I have a lot of trouble, a lot of difficulty. Writing a letter, even a postcard, takes me hours. I don't know how it’s done.

Lunatics are lunatics just because they have thoroughly and recklessly dismembered a familiar world but have not the power—or have lost the power—to create a new one as harmonious as the old. The artist on the other hand disconnects what he chooses and while doing so he is aware that something in him is aware of the final result. When he examines his completed masterpiece he perceives that whatever unconscious cerebration had been involved in the creative plunge this final result is the outcome of a definite plan which had been contained in the initial shock, as the future development of a live creature is said to be contained in the genes of its germ cell.

Yet people like Edmund Wilson and Isaiah Berlin, they have to love “Zhivago” to prove that good writing can come out of Soviet Russia. They ignore that it is really a bad book. There are some absolutely ridiculous scenes. Scenes of eavesdropping for instance. You know about eavesdropping. If it is not brought in as parody it is almost philistine. It is the mark of the amateur in literature. And that marvelous scene where he had to get rid of the little girl to let the characters make love, and he sends her out skating. In Siberia. To keep warm they give her her mother’s scarf. And then she sleeps deeply in a hut while there is all this going on. Obviously Pasternak just didn’t know what to do with her. He’s like Galsworthy. Galsworthy in one of his novels gave a character a cane and a dog and simply didn’t know how to get rid of them. And the metaphors. Unattached comparisons. Suppose I were to say ‘as passionately adored and insulted as a barometer in a mountain hotel’ (he said looking out at the rain), it would be a beautiful metaphor. But who is it about? The image is top-heavy. There is nothing to attach it to. And there is a pseudo-religious strain in the book which almost shocks me.

Now I don’t need to earn a living, I have a girl called Lolita who earns it for me. In short I’m an old pimp and I have a girl who’s on the game… Oh, don’t write that… What do you think, Véra? All right, do as you like.

Q: How does your wife, Véra Nabokov, puzzle you? A: I am puzzled by many things about her: by her inability to keep figures and dates in her head, by the disorder on her desk, by her gift of tracking down a needed item that is the more precious the more complicated the search in the maze. I marvel at the way she can quote by heart old Russian sayings and ditties – sometimes quite new to me after almost half a century of shared life. I find fascinating the accuracy with which she picks out the best book in the batch that publishers send me every month or so with their compliments and hopes. I am filled with wonder every time that my random thoughts or actual sentence is simultaneously voiced by her in those flashes of domestic telepathy whose mystery is only enhanced by their frequency. And I also find enigmatic the stroke of miraculous intuition that makes her find the right words of consolation to give me when something awful, such as a misprint somehow left uncorrected by me in a recent novel, causes me to plunge into a torrent of Russian despair.