At the Hôtel Continental
It’s here that I have my earliest memory of Paris. I’d come as an infant with my parents and I recall keeping myself entertained by spitting into this courtyard from my fourth-floor window.
Strolling in Paris
I saw the director of the Tuileries puppet show this morning, taking out from a very small box a heap of accessories, décors, and even a stall. It was like Proust’s madeleine, from which a whole world emerges. What’s struck me most in Paris (I haven’t been back since 1940) is that the cars are darker in color. Where are the red and yellow taxis of old? The smell of the gasoline has changed, too. It’s only in the public gardens that I find the same smells. The smells and the paths.1
The origin of Lolita
It was in 1939. September 3, I’m sure. I remember having seen a sensational photograph in a newspaper. At that time, I read Le Figaro and Paris-soir every day. In which of the two papers was it? I can still see where the photo was, on the left, inside the paper. It was the portrait of an ape. A chimpanzee or a little orangutan. Scientists had wanted to get it to draw, and the first drawing the ape made was of what it saw before itself: the bars of its cage. From there, I began to write a little story, the “prototype” of Lolita. I read it to two friends, one of them Mark Aldanov. And the other day my wife brought me the manuscript in triumph. She had found this first story, which will go, like the others, to the Library of Congress in Washington, the repository of all my papers, as they had requested of me, with an agreement not to make them available before 2000.
Yes, Lolita is the man attached to the barriers, the bars of his passions, and Lolita, the little nymphet struggling with him, is beauty. The idea of sex, to my sense, depends on beauty, contrary to what Freud thinks. Sexual charm is just a tiny detail in the beauty of the world.
Note that this should come out like a scent in my book. I detest theories, messages, imposed ideas, morals. Flaubert is my favorite author; Proust, too. One needs a certain detachment before life. A true artist is never engagé.
What difference have butterflies made to your life?
I learned German very young, from a big book on butterflies. At seven, I knew all the butterflies of Europe. And when I arrived in America, they offered me the post of curator of butterflies at Harvard, considered the greatest entomological museum in the world. I enjoyed describing new species, dissecting them to draw their organs. I found strange coincidences between the butterflies of South America and the butterflies of France. Structures repeated themselves; that gave me a very deep sense of evolution. For seven years, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m., I worked on butterflies at Harvard.
Certainly, this exactitude I seek in butterflies, in my anatomical studies, can be found in my books. This links me with Robbe-Grillet. I appreciate his way of looking. Object and man, it’s the same thing for the man. Each object is so charged with humanity….Yes, and what I appreciate still more in this kind of book2 is that there are no formulas, no general ideas, no bridges between the sentences.
Your forthcoming novel?
Invitation to a Beheading. The last days of a condemned man who talks to another prisoner. This prisoner is the executioner, who needs to get to know his victim before taking his life.
Yes, it’s true, the hero of Lolita is also in prison. Odd, I hadn’t made the connection. But, then, Lolita is, to say it again, a prison of feelings.
What does Mrs. Nabokov think of Lolita?
Oh, she read my book from the artistic point of view. Like something outside us…But I’m going to tell you a curious story that I haven’t told anyone. Just after Lolita came out in America, the newspapers announced the arrest of a Russian. His house, near New York, had caught fire. To settle the insurance, the company rummaged in the debris and they found movies he had filmed with little girls and with other men. He was charged with corrupting minors, but he was released on bail. He left with his car and dog for Mexico; he fled and then hid. No one has ever seen him again.
He was a Russian who spoke English with a Russian accent. I saw his photo: a rather gloomy face, unpleasant but intelligent. My man exactly. And in my novel there’s a fire at the end. No, he couldn’t have read Lolita. The book had barely appeared when he was arrested.
* “À Paris, avec Vladimir Nabokov. Le Héros de Lolita a un sosie…en fuite au Mexique avant d’avoir pu lire le livre” (“In Paris, with Vladimir Nabokov: The Hero of Lolita Has a Double…Who Fled to Mexico Before He Could Read the Book”), Le Figaro littéraire, Oct. 31, 1959.