131 Interview with Alan Levy for New York Times Magazine (1970–71)*

Quoting from Nabokov’s afterword to Lolita, which amends a critic’s description of the novel as “the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution ‘English language’ for ‘romantic novel’ would make this elegant formula more correct,” Levy asks Nabokov to elaborate on the nature of this love affair and its recent course.

It is now a kind of second marriage, I bald and benevolent, she, difficult but still chic, and much courted. Metaphors apart, I feel a certain hardening of my vocabulary, with London’s modish phrases and New England slang no longer oxygenating the bloodstream of my style. In a sense, the same thing occurred in regard to my Russian after several years of expatriation in Berlin and Paris.

Can you pinpoint or generalize when you think in English now and when you think in Russian?

Unless one actually recollects or devises sentences, spoken or written, one thinks in images, not in languages (and this is why Bloom’s mental soliloquy is a stylized exaggeration, a delightful kind of delirium). If I am asked, “Do you remember that conversation we had the other day?,” it comes back to me in a shapeless flash. The blur may be flavored with French, or tinged with Russian, or soaked in American—that depends solely on the tongue in which the conversation had been conducted—and a phrase I wish to recall or cannot help recalling may stand out with full verbal precision; but that is all. The same occurs if I say to myself, “I know that I shall tell Ivan Ivanovich” (who happens to be a profound monolinguist) or “I know what old François (another unfortunate) will reply.” To put it in a coconut shell, the actual words (both mine and his) are framed by the lips of the mind if there is intent on retroanalysis but the choice of language itself has no psychological significance; and of course an imagined tower or tree stands speechless.

On Prague and advice to an exile

I cannot match your specific questions with a nonspecific answer. Prague means little to me, a bleak bridge across a bleak river, rain, the wet gargoyles of some place of worship, a local lepidopterist in an entomological laboratory, growling (in 1923), “Our Germans are bad enough, but our Jews are worse.” And the supper à la fourchette, to which Kramarzh,1 married to a White Russian, invited White Russians, and my sister Elena poking casually at an untouched dish and remarking, “Oh it’s not cream, it’s some sort of chaud-froid,” and being at once swept aside, fork in hand, by a pack of hungry convives.

On the rumor in Montreux, especially among tradesmen, that Véra is VN’s ghostwriter

The charm of that rumor is enhanced by the fact that what most Montreusiens seem to know of my work, or of its shadow, is the film Lolita (shown in Switzerland half a dozen years ago). My wife reads my stuff only after I have completed the fair copy in longhand on lined index cards which I fill out while standing at my lectern or lolling in the garden. I am an uncommunicative toiler, and in the case of the longer novels my patient first reader awaits the unknown book with serenity for years and years. Formerly, that is before we could afford secretaries, she used to type all my works and correspondence. She continues to read, very carefully, typescripts and proofs, correcting my grotesque misspellings and sometimes querying an obscure or repetitious word. She also types my Russian letters. It may very well be that the observant and intelligent people who bring me fruit and wine, or come to repair radiators and radios, jump to wrong conclusions because they never see me sitting at a desk, let alone typing.

“Nabokov…loves to tell you something which isn’t true and have you believe it; but even more he loves to tell you something which is true and make you think he is lying.” (Celebrity Register, ed. Cleveland Amory, 1963.) Do you subscribe to this analysis?

I do not possess that Register, and do not know who said that, but whoever did (here comes a bit of palmistry) is a touchy and basically naïve person who writes good English, likes to generalize, and constantly misconstrues another’s motives in specific cases of human behavior.2 I have as many faults as the crest of a mountain chain but deceiving the naïve is not one of them.

On Morris Bishop’s claim that at Cornell the only newspaper Nabokov read was Father Divine’s periodical

My old friend Morris Bishop is a great stylist and he has brought up the “Father Divine’s periodical” on a wave of style. I don’t think I ever read it.

Nowadays, in Switzerland, I dip into quite a number of periodicals: the Herald Tribune, the National Review, The New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek, the Saturday Review, The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, Encounter, The Listener, The Spectator, the New Statesman, Punch, the London Sunday papers and so forth.

We talked the last time about the Manson case, but I never did find out why and how it fascinates you or why it made you wish for once to be a journalist.

I have a taste for case histories and it would have interested me greatly to look for one spark of remorse in that moronic monster and his moronic beast girls. I would also have been interested to find out more about the cretins who “admire” those brutes.

As one American to another, where do you stand on Vietnam?

All I know is that I would not like S. Vietnam to turn into Sovietnam, and that blunders do not win wars.

On the butterflies of 1970

It’s been a wonderful summer for butterflies. Generally, their emergences are staggered. But this year, May and June were such bad months that the butterflies just waited—and then they all came out together!

On the questions a woman in Prague has been posing Levy for her Czech translation of Lolita

Tell her that “ululate” is not a dirty word, “Lull” is a boy’s name; at least the only person I knew named Lull was a boy. “Matted eyelash” means just that—not a pubic hair—and a “red autumn leaf” is a red autumn leaf, not a deflowered nymphet.

On Walter Minton (unnamed in the article) of Putnam’s, Nabokov’s and Levy’s former publisher

He’s a rather astute man with a coarse streak right down the middle and—do you know?—I think it’s his coarse part that kept me with him for so long. Each time I visited his city, he would take me home for dinner and—every single time—he would tell me, as we crossed his threshold, “This is the house Lolita built.” Well, I’ve wrecked some lives in my time, but I also like to think that at least I made a house.

On Véra

Véra was a pale blonde when I met her but it didn’t take me long to turn her hair white.

On his Russian translation of Lolita

…not because I wanted tourists to smuggle it in, but because I was more afraid some Moscow hack would do a translation and—well, for example, there’s no such term as “blue jeans” in the Russian language.

On Alfred Appel, Jr.3

…my pedant. A pedant straight out of Pale Fire. Every writer should have such a pedant. He was a student of mine at Cornell and later he married a girl I’d taught at another time, and I understand that I was their first shared passion.

On journalists and fans

Every Englishman, no matter what his title or credentials, turns out to be a journalist of some sort, but I enjoy talking with them. The Americans I seem to meet are often out to get more than they’re here to give, so I tend to be wary. Not long ago, there was someone with an American name who kept leaving vague messages for me all over Montreux. I started leaving messages, too, that I was unavailable. Then I got one more message—a slip of paper that said, “F—— you.”

Well, this was so much more explicit than the others that I asked the desk what kind of person had left this message. And the desk said, “That wasn’t a person, sir, that was two rather wild-looking American girls.” This intrigued me even more, so I looked at the slip of paper again. And there I found something at the end of the message which I hadn’t noticed on my first reading, a question mark!

On Véra’s comment that the furniture in their suite was a joke

Except for my marvelous wooden lectern…The hotel found the lectern somewhere and gave it to us soon after we moved in. It was used by Flaubert once….It’s very old and very shaky, but it’s not broken. (Véra notes a crack in the wood connecting two legs.) Let’s just say that the legs are the weakest part. Looking at it, I can only guess that some Early American child came over to Europe and set about systematically kicking it to pieces.

While stalking butterflies around Grangettes, near Montreux, looking for the Purple Emperor

…its beautiful violet sheen…If you turn it this way and that way the shimmer changes. It used to fly here until they asphalted this road. Now it’s getting scarcer and scarcer. I saw one the other day up in Caux—but I couldn’t look at it closer because it was flying higher and higher in such a hurry. Ahhhh! (Catches a butterfly.) A brimstone, not uncommon…This was supposed to be the first butterfly ever noticed: hence the name “butterfly.” Another version has it that the name was derived from flutter by—making it all a Spoonerism!

After Levy congratulates VN on the swoop of his butterfly net

I’m glad you appreciated that….It’s not easy to take a flying butterfly—because it dodges. The best way is to wait for it to settle on a flower—or on damp earth, it’s quite easy to take.

On a Gray-Veined White he has caught

So pale!…A very common butterfly that gradually grades into an Alpine form…If you go up certain hills and mountains for about eighteen hundred meters you’ll find a peculiarly beautiful gray-yellowish version of this—but, all along the way up, you’ll encounter intermediate forms. This one and that one fly differently and have different caterpillars, but you can see the changes as you go.4

On the hazards of butterfly hunting, including vipers

Their bites are not fatal—unless you’re ill or old or very young….I have walked among rattlesnakes. Yes, in Arizona, when I was writing the screenplay for Lolita. We would take my index cards in the morning and go out collecting and writing until lunch. And one day, I remember killing an immense rattler that was just lying in wait for us when we came out toward the road. I was the first to hear its hysterical rattlings. Véra almost stepped on it, but I held her back. Then I picked up a piece of lead piping and smashed the thing. A moment later, I saw its female slither away. Véra called me “St. George” for quite a while after that!

More butterfly talk and action

The dimmer the place, the better the butterfly…This one I will take. A lovely intergrade between the common Veined White and its cousin Bryony White.5 Could you ever hear me explaining that subtlety to the ranger?

The butterfly in the Band-Aid box

An old Band-Aid box (laughing). That envelope will hold the butterfly until I want to spread it. In there I can keep my butterflies for years and years, hundreds of years. When I am ready, I have only to relax them between wet towels and leave them overnight—and the next day pin them….Oh, didn’t you see me pinching it under the net? That killed it, though sometimes I have to repinch them. When Véra’s with me, she keeps an eagle eye on them. She hates to see half-dead butterflies.