Strong opinions

FOREWORD

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. Throughout my academic ascent in America, from lean lecturer to Full Professor, I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand and not held under my eyes on the bright lit lectern. My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French. At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, 1 have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts. Even the dream I describe to my wife across the breakfast table is only a first draft.

In these circumstances nobody should ask me to submit to an interview if by «interview» a chat between two normal human beings is implied. It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance. Nowadays I take every precaution to ensure a dignified beat of the mandarin's fan. The interviewer's questions have to be sent to me in writing, answered by me in writing, and reproduced verbatim. Such are the three absolute conditions.

But the interviewer wishes to visit me. He wishes to see my pencil poised above the page, my painted lampshade, my bookshelves, my old white borzoi asleep at my feet. He feels he needs the background music of bogus informality, and as many colorful details as can be memorized, if not actually jotted down («N. gulped down his vodka and quipped with a grin). Have I the heart to cancel the cosiness? I have.

A certain excellent lotion for thinning hair is by nature of an unattractive, emulsive tint. Its makers try to correct this by adding some green color — green being meant to suggest, by cosmetological tradition, the freshness of spring, pinewoods, jade, tree frogs, and so forth. The bottle, however, has to be vigorously shaken in order to have its contents viridate; otherwise, in repose, all that shows is an inchwide green border topping the unchanged, genuine, opalescent pillar of liquid. Not shaking the bottle before use is with me a matter of principle.

Similarily, in dealing with the results of interviews as they appear on the printed page, I ignore the floating decor and keep only the basic substance. My files contain the results of some forty interviews in several languages. Only some of the American and British ones have been included here. A few of those have had to be skipped because, by a kind of awful alchemy, and not merely by a good shake, my authentic response got so hopelessly mixed with the artificial color of human interest, added by the manufacturer, as to defy separation. In other cases I have had no trouble in leaving out the wellmeant little touches (as well as the gaudiest journalistic inventions), thus gradually eliminating every element of spontaneity, all semblance of actual talk. The thing is transmuted finally into a more or less neatly paragraphed essay, and that is the ideal form a written interview should take.

My fiction allows me so seldom the occasion to air my private views that I rather welcome, now and then, the questions put to me in sudden spates by charming, courteous, intelligent visitors. In this volume, the questionandanswer section is followed by a few Letters to Editors, which are «selfexplanatory», as lawyers put it in their precise way. Finally, there is a batch of essays, all but one of which were written in America or Switzerland.

Swinburne has a shrewd comment on «the rancorous and reptile crew of poeticules who decompose into criticasters». This curious phenomenon was typical of the situation in the small literary world of the Russian emigration in Paris around 1930 when the aesthetics of Bunin, Hodasevich and one or two other outstanding authors underwent particularly nasty attacks from variously «committed» criticulcs. In those years I methodically derided the detracters of art and enjoyed tremendously the exasperation my writings caused in that clique; but translating today my numerous old essays from my difficult Russian into pedantic English and explaining nice points of former dislocation and strategy is a task of little interest either to me or the reader. The only exception I have allowed myself is the piece on Hodasevich.

In result, the present body of my occasional English prose, shorn of its long Russian shadow, seems to reflect an altogether more agreeable person than the «V. Sirin», evoked with mixed feelings by emigre memoirists, politicians, poets, and mystics, who still remember our skirmishes of the nineteenthirties in Paris. A milder, easier temper permeates today the expression of my opinions, however strong; and this is as it should be.

Vladimir Nabokov Montreux, 1973