87 Interview with Anne Guérin for L’Express (1959)*

In France, like everywhere for that matter, Lolita has had a great success. Were you expecting it?

When an author writes a book, he has a certain vision of this book. Success is part of that vision: If one writes a book, it’s so that it will be published. If it’s to be published, it’s so that it will be read. And read well. In other words, so it can be successful. Success goes along with the book. It’s an element of the book itself.

I must say that Lolita is my favorite book. Among the tens of novels I’ve written in Russian and in English, it’s the one I like most. I told myself: there are many good readers around the world, it will be read. But I imagined it would appear in a limited edition, restricted, reserved for a few literati. I also thought it would be banned in the United States. Now, for it to be banned in England and Australia, that’s normal. But that it should be approved in the United States and banned in France, there’s a paradox!

What kind of success has Lolita had in the United States?

Artistic and philosophic. It hasn’t been a succès de scandale. Strangely, Americans haven’t thought of Lolita as a book that one shouldn’t put into everyone’s hands. The young read it just as they read anything else. Then they come to find me, students, high-schoolers, and say to me: “Here’s a copy of Lolita. I’d like to give it to Father for Easter, to Mother for Christmas; can you sign it for me, Mr. Nabokov?” I didn’t sign copies, but it’s the move that’s interesting. Then Papa would read it and say nothing to me. On the contrary: religious groups have asked me to lecture on Lolita. I haven’t done it. And I’ve received letters from readers around the world who have liked the book and discuss it subtly.

For many of your readers Lolita appeared, so one hears, to be a shocking love story. Is that what you wanted?

In Lolita there’s something chock-full, replete, with harmony. I think a writer sees his book as a certain design he wants to reproduce, and I think I’ve reproduced this design rather well; the contours are there, the details, too. There was a moment when I said to myself: “There, that’s it, I can’t add anything.” I may have then cut out a few pages here and there, a few longueurs. But the book is there. I worked hard on it, for years. I had other things to do: my university lectures at Cornell, a work on Pushkin that took me ten years (I was going to say a hundred). I wrote Lolita only during the vacations. My wife and I crisscrossed motel America, the whole of America. We hunted butterflies in the Rockies, and when it rained, when the weather was dull, if I wasn’t tired, I’d settle down in our car parked near the motel cabin and write. I’d write a page, two pages, and if it was going well, I’d carry on.

You wrote in your car?

Yes, I write by hand on what we call “index cards.” I write in pencil. My dream would be to have a pencil that always stayed sharp. This first draft I then write out in ink on ordinary paper. Then my wife types it up. I don’t know how to type. I can’t do anything with my hands. Not even drive a car.

Didn’t you say you hunted butterflies?

Oh yes, indeed, that’s the only thing! When I start to take a butterfly apart, to dismember it to examine under the microscope, that’s when suddenly I develop very dexterous hands, tapering fingers, and I can do everything with my hands. But that’s the only thing. Then once more I’m all thumbs.

Do you make many corrections in your books?

Always. That’s why I write first in pencil: you can take an eraser and fix mistakes. For me writing doesn’t come in a continuous stream. I have a lot of trouble, a lot of difficulty.

Writing a letter, even a postcard, takes me hours. I don’t know how it’s done.

Why the name Lolita?

That began with Dolores. It’s a very beautiful name, Dolores. A name with a long veil, a name with liquid eyes. The diminutive of Dolores is Lola, and the diminutive of Lola, Lolita.

You know where there’s a Dolores? I’ve remembered just now: in Monte-Cristo. I read it when I was little.

Hasn’t the theme of Lolita been in your books for a long time already?

So critics say. I have young girls here, three very young girls there, perhaps a little perverse….I don’t know. I’m going to publish a book of memoirs with Gallimard, there’s a childhood love story there. I’m talking about a little girl I knew on the beach at Biarritz. I was ten, she nine. It was a perfectly Platonic love. Absurd to see the first Lolita there.

Was it you who invented the term “nymphet”?

Yes, it was me. There was “nymph” already. And Ronsard, who likes Latin diminutives, used “nymphet” in a sonnet. But not in the sense I’ve used it. For him, it was a pleasing nymph.

Yours isn’t. You’ve been rather hard on Lolita.

Yes. But she’s also a very touching character. Toward the end of the book, the reader and the author pity her, this poor child who has been sacrificed on the altar of motels. It’s very sad. She’s married with this poor lad, this Schiller, and at this moment, Humbert Humbert understands that he loves her and that this time it’s real love. She’s not pretty anymore, she’s not graceful, she’s going to have a baby, and it’s now that he loves her. It’s the great love scene. He says to her, “Leave your husband and come with me,” and she doesn’t understand. It’s still his Lolita, and he loves her very tenderly. Not with this morbid passion. Then she dies. Already in the introduction I spoke of a Mrs. Schiller who died in a little settlement in Alaska, Gray Star. It’s her, but since the reader doesn’t know she is going to marry and be called Schiller, he doesn’t understand. Yet it’s already there: a “plant,” as the Americans say. Lolita is dead, since the book is published, and that was the stipulation.1 All this cost me tears of blood. All these little details. It’s very difficult to make a book which hangs together from end to end.

Are you writing something now?

Yes, a huge work, this project on Pushkin I told you about. Five volumes. It’s just finished and in the hands of two publishers in New York, Random House and Morning Press. Now I’m going to relax, chatting a little with you, and then I’m going to write another book. A novel, I think.

On what?

No, I can’t tell you about it. If I start talking of these things, they die. It’s like metamorphosis: it won’t happen if anyone is watching.

Lolita’s style has been much admired. Do you think that your knowing three languages, Russian, French, and English, has made a difference?

I like words. Yes, I know these three languages well, this troika, these three horses I have always hooked up to my carriage. My first maid, my nurse, was English. Then I had a French governess. All this time, of course, I spoke Russian. Then seven or eight English governesses, an English teacher, and then a Swiss teacher.

Is it indiscreet to ask you in what language you think?

Do we think in language? We think, rather, in images. That’s the mistake Joyce made, it seems to me, the difficulty he couldn’t completely overcome. Toward the end of Ulysses, in Finnegans Wake, it’s a flood of words, without punctuation, trying to express inner language. But people don’t think like that. In words, yes, but also in ready-made formulas, in clichés. And then in images; the word dissolves in images, then the image produces the next word.

What difference in usage would you point out in these three languages, these three instruments?

Nuances. If you take framboise in French, for example, it’s a scarlet color, a very red color. In English, the word raspberry is rather dull, with perhaps a little brown or violet. A rather cold color. In Russian, it’s a burst of light, malinovoe; the word has associations of brilliance, of gaiety, of ringing bells. How can you translate that?

Humbert Humbert seems profoundly shocked by what’s scandalous in his adventures. Whereas the author seems to keep a certain distance, to place himself ironically in relation to all the drama Humbert Humbert makes of his relations with Lolita. Isn’t that true?

I don’t take sides. It’s his business. He dies from it. You could say, ultimately, there’s the moral, the policeman’s moral that arrives at the end of the book. But also…he has to die of it. If not, there would have been no book.

And more than that: Humbert Humbert wasn’t lucky enough to find himself where he could have been. In a state like Texas or Mississippi, one can marry a girl of eleven. But that my character didn’t know!

Why didn’t you say so?

If I had, there’d have been no book!

Your own ideas about America: what are they?

It’s the country where I’ve breathed most deeply.

Haven’t you had to suffer from its materialism?

Not at all. It’s like everywhere else, there are the angry, the interesting, the philistines, and honest folk. All societies are materialistic. They were even when people wrote with a goose quill and with powder to dry their ink.

Will you return to Russia?

No. Never. Not to Russia. Russia’s finished. It’s a dream I had. I invented Russia. It turned out very badly. It’s over.

Do you read a lot?

Yes. Too much. Two or three books a day. And then I forget it all.

Do you read novels?

For this Pushkin project, I reread all of French literature to Chateaubriand and all of English literature to Byron. I read quickly, but that took me some time. La Nouvelle Héloïse, for example. I read it in three days. It almost killed me, but I read it.

I also read the Abbé Prévost. Manon Lescaut is very fine. You were speaking of love stories: Manon Lescaut is one of those books which give you a shiver, you know? That shiver…A little violin note, long sobs.

Do you think love novels are still being written today?

There’s Proust….

I was talking about contemporaries.

I was twenty when Proust died. He’s of my day. But take Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy: there’s a very fine novel about love. One of the most poetic novels I know, which gives this little shiver we were talking about.

Really?

Yes, the finest love novel since Proust. But let’s not talk about contemporaries; the poor things, they aren’t dead.

Yes, we shouldn’t kill them ahead of time. Do you like Gide?

Not much. There are very good things, Les Caves du Vatican. But in the long run, he’s boring. He doesn’t know life. He knows nothing of the world. His description of little Arabs is perhaps not too bad…a sort of preserved fruit….

Do you go to the theater?

I know very well the theater of Scribe,2 where one dusts the furniture in the first act….And I loved the plays of Lenormand3 when I was young. Are they still put on?

No.

All gone, gone. They were so lovely, so poetic. I don’t often go to the theater. The last time was in 1932.

And films?

There’s television. Seeing Hitchcock here or there, it comes to much the same, doesn’t it?

Do you take an interest in the film they’re going to make of your book?

I know there will be a very pretty Lolita, very well developed. But that’s all.

What year did you leave Europe?

In 1940, on the Champlain. A charming boat—it sailed zigzag, to evade submarines, no doubt. That was its last voyage. It sank straight after. Pity.

What has changed in Europe over twenty years?

Cars. That’s about all. And also there are more bathrooms.