154
Interview with Hugh A. Mulligan for Ithaca Post (1977)*
What is the Nabokov diet these days, both literary and caloric?
My caloric diet usually consists of bread and butter, transparent honey, wine, roast duck with red whortleberry jam, and similar plain fare.
My literary regime is more fancy, but two hours of meditation, between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. (when the effect of a first sleeping pill evaporates and that of a second one has not begun), and a spell of writing in the afternoon, are about all my new novel (The Original of Laura) needs.
Somewhere I read that you have never flown across the Atlantic. Do long-distance flights frighten or bore you, and does the phasing out of the passenger liners account for your fewer trips to America?
The first ascent I made took place in a small cheap plane over Margate, Kent, in 1920. Nowadays my flights are limited to delightful hops from Montreux to Nice and back again. I shall certainly enjoy flying across the Atlantic when the last luxurious liner is extinct.
There was, I believe, a recent exchange of letters between you and Solzhenitsyn. What was the gist of them?
I praised the freedom and happiness of the West; he deplored the fact of his children not being able to get a Russian education abroad.
Fair copy manuscript of answers to interview by Hugh Mulligan, Associated Press, 1976. Nabokov said he wore out the erasers on his pencils faster than the lead at the other end.
As the father of Lolita and Ada, two of the glories of that gender, what do you think of the word changes brought about by Women’s Liberation,—e.g. spokesperson, chairperson, snowperson, Ms., etc.?
I regard “Women’s Liberation” as a joke. Let me add to your little list of word changes such combinations as: personure, persondolin and Hellperson.
You once gave your preference for celestial neighbors—Shakespeare laughing ribaldly at frying Freud. Does this indicate a belief in the hereafter and an insight into or presumption of your own future booking arrangements?
No. An infinite comic strip would soon become a dreadful bore.
I am polishing, dusting and perhaps even demolishing some of the statuary in my personal pantheon. Would you assist, please, with some pumice or a hammer for Willa Cather, Fitzgerald, Waugh, Mauriac and Capote?
Mauriac has written some wonderful stuff (e.g. Le Noeud de vipères). Are you sure you have not confused him with the execrable Malraux? Waugh’s talent should also not be despised. The scene of the murder in Capote is great. You must have invented Willa Cather, and I don’t remember anything of Fitzgerald’s writings.
After the jolts and flaws of lost Vietnam and self-flagellating Watergate, do you worry about the future of America?
Political squabbles and awkward wars will be soon forgotten. Let us prepare new weapons and whistle softly as we work. Let me write my new novel in peace. That is my work, my duty. America does not need my worrying about her. The jitters I leave to other countries, and the worse they are the better.
On the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution you wrote “An Anniversary,” proclaiming 10 years of contempt for the Soviet political state and celebrating 10 years of freedom from it. The 60th anniversary is at hand next year. In the intervening half-century, has your contempt diminished?
My contempt for tyranny shall last forever. Things hidden from tourists—the terrible backroads, the jails, the concentration camps—cannot be compensated by a few more motorcars, stale sugar buns in redecorated shops, or the new fad, artificial caviar. Nothing has changed in these five decades. And thus it will remain until that dreary and diabolical regime is destroyed.