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Interview with Gerald Clarke for Esquire (1974)*

My dear fellow, I am gorged with questions….I admire people who can speak and it all comes out in well-ordered, beautifully rounded sentences. I cannot do that. I can’t speak that way. I am an idiot in conversation.

What are you working on now, or preparing to write?

At the moment I’m basking in the afterglow of a novel I have just completed, Look at the Harlequins! (do not drop the exclamation mark). This stage of retrospective sunbathing is a very short, very private affair, unconnected with any awareness of impending publication, etc. It includes a mental rereading of the thing in spectral script. My next task is a meticulous checking of the French translation of Ada—a huge bedraggled tome typed on anemic paper. The preparation of an interview for the German TV and the examining of an English translation of yet another collection of my old Russian stories will fill up the intervals between the next chapters of Fayard’s adventures with Ada. And after that, or still somewhere in between, I shall go on accumulating the bones and flints of a new novel—a rather paleontological kind of research in reverse, so to speak. According to some of my criticasters, the unfortunate readers of my books have to look up words like “paleontological.”

Could you describe a typical day in the life of VN? Do you have any habits or devices that get you started writing, like sharpening pencils or filling pens?

Friends would sigh and foes grind their teeth if I relisted for the hundredth time my daily habits to an innocent interviewer. It is all in my Strong Opinions, you know. All I care to repeat is that the first sentence of the day is composed in my morning bath.

Which modern writers do you read for pleasure? Are there any living writers you particularly admire? Or particularly dislike?

I find morbidly fascinating the leisurely letters in which English authors of a former age praise at length contemporaneous writers (mostly their correspondents) or revile in detail writers belonging to other so-called “groups” or “schools” of the time. And mind you, those epistolarians’ professional output was a tomb-slab-thick novel per year. My personal letters are rare and brief. Though anything but a prolix novelist, I fear squandering the energy reserved for my novels. On the other hand, I am happy to report that my library of modern literature, which is housed in an attic kindly allotted to me by the hotel, is growing steadily owing to contributions from publishers. A great number of those volumes are ephemeral—you know the type—romances all slaughter and semen or collections of essays by pretentious hacks—but when I think of the care that went into every detail of the jacket, into this or that pathetic little touch of the printer’s art, I feel disinclined to ridicule the dream between the covers.

Your life has been divided into geographic segments—Europe, America, and now Europe again—yet you are an American citizen. Do you still consider yourself American? Do you think that your writing has an American accent?

I have spent nineteen years in Russia, three in England, sixteen in Germany, four in France, twenty in America, thirteen in Switzerland. Of these the longest time segment is the American one. I am American.

Someone has described you, with some admiration, as “a brilliant monster.” Would you care to comment? Do you feel very monstrous?

I guess you’ve invented that “someone” but it is a plausible invention. One of the definitions that my dictionary gives under “monster” is “a person of unnatural excellence.” Of course, I’m aware of my unnatural excellence. I am aware of it, however, only in certain domains (too obvious to be mentioned); but I also am aware of my hopeless ineptitude in other matters such as technology, finance, music and go-getting, to name a few. The epithet “brilliant” is a little redundant. Most monsters have shining appendages or eyes.

In its concern for memory and the recollection of specific detail, your writing reminds me of Proust’s. Do you see any resemblance?

I see no resemblance whatever. Proust imagined a person (the “Marcel” of his long fairy tale In Search of Lost Time) who had a Bergsonian concept of past time and was thrilled by its sensual resurrection in sudden juxtapositions pertaining to the present. I am not an imaginary person and my memories are direct rays deliberately trained, not sparks and spangles.

You are now in your mid-seventies. How do you feel as you look back at your life? Have you accomplished all or most of the things you hoped to accomplish, or has some goal eluded you?

The literary line of my fate from 1920 to 1940 is what I expected at nineteen. I have written in Russian the kind of books I wanted to write. The English ones that followed in the next thirty-four years are a rare recompense for the trouble I took over my first compositions in my native language. If any goal has eluded me, it must be sought in another domain, that of lepidopterology. At the middle point of my life (1940–48) I used to devote many hours daily, including Sundays, to the working out of taxonomic problems in the laboratories of two great museums. Since my years at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Harvard, I have not touched a microscope, knowing that if I did, I would drown again in its bright well. Thus I have not, and probably never shall, accomplish the greater part of the entrancing research work I had imagined in my young mirages, such as “A monograph of the Eurasian and American machaon group,” or “The Eupithecia of the World.” Gratitude for other pleasures leaves, really, no room in my mind for that ghost of regret.

Are you still an insomniac?

I had lately started jogging before turning in. Delightful! Keeping it up for a couple of hours, in the deepening dusk, along lakeside lanes, is both exhilarating and soothing. Except for a few pairs of lovers disentangling themselves to watch my passage there is nobody to notice me. I wear tennis shorts and a heavy sweater which I usually shed after the first hour. I’m afraid I’ve made up this story in toto, but it shows how desperate I am beginning to be in my fight with insomnia. Harmless pills have ceased to affect me, and I decline to rely on brutal barbiturates. My afternoon siesta has stretched to almost three hours, and my night’s sleep has dwindled to about the same length of time. At least two kind strangers have suggested a little warm milk with a spoonful of honey at bedtime.

Which of your books do you remember with the greatest pleasure? Of which character are you fondest?

Oh, The Gift and Lolita, of course, and also the novels I wrote in the Sixties and Seventies. And the four volumes of my work on Eugene Onegin. I am inordinately fond of those old books. (My weakest is certainly Laughter in the Dark, by the way.) As to the characters in them, I cannot love them separately, they are on a par with the fantasy and the fun and the moth on the mottled tree trunk.

If you had had a choice, what language would you have preferred to have been born with?

Russian.

Additional oral exchanges, Sept. 17, 1974:

Nabokov offered him a drink—“A gin and tonic perhaps?”—“and professed amazement, shock, and incomprehension when I wanted instead a local Swiss beer, the agreeable but slightly acidic Feldschlösschen.”

“Feldschlösschen!…Feldschlösschen is for field mice! Try a German beer.”

“Maybe he likes light beer,” Vera gently suggested.

“It’s not a question of light or dark. It’s a question of good or bad.”

If you ever do go back to America, where will you live?

California. California is one of my favorite states. I like the climate, the flora, and the fauna—the butterfly fauna. And it’s close to Mexico and Alaska. I’ve never been to Alaska, unfortunately. It is the best place for butterflies.

Which part of California would you go to?

I like it all. I love Los Angeles, where we lived while I was writing the screenplay of Lolita. I had never seen jacaranda trees before, at least in bloom. Do you remember, darling? There was a whole street lined with jacarandas.

Whom do you most admire? (Clarke asked him again, “repeating one of the questions I had sent him, without getting, as his written reply shows, a very explicit response.”)

Edmund White. He wrote Forgetting Elena. He’s a marvelous writer. I’m also a great admirer of John Updike—the up, up, up Updike. J. D. Salinger is another writer I admire tremendously. Beautiful stuff! He’s a real writer. I like some of Truman Capote’s stuff, particularly In Cold Blood. Except for that impossible end, so sentimental, so false. But there are scenes in which he writes with true appetite, and he presents them very well.

* “Checking In with Vladimir Nabokov,” Esquire, July 1975, 67–69, 131, 133. Emended typescript with VN’s manuscript corrections, VNA Berg. Typescript answers prepared for Clarke for Sept. 17, 1974, the day he visited VN in Montreux; additional oral exchanges edited by VN and returned on Oct. 28, 1974.