Is the Queen pregnant?…When I saw her on television at the World Cup watching football she kept making this gesture.
He mimes smoothing a dress, and Gilliatt comments: “She always does that.”
Oh, I see. A queenly movement. Permanently with child. With heir.
On the Montreux Palace
A lovely Edwardian heap.
On his body
I am six foot. I have very thin bones. The rest is flesh.
(GILLIATT: “He picked at his arm as if it were a jacket.”)
Gilliatt comments on Nabokov’s “delicate and pure” French, which he regards as dated.
The slang goes back to Maupassant.
The Nabokovs are thinking of returning to America, to California for the climate, to the country for the language.
We were in Italy, but we don’t want to live there. I don’t speak Italian. And the scioperi (strikes)…I don’t much care for de Gaulle. I fear things will happen there when he dies. I would go to Spain, but I hate bullfights. Switzerland: lakes, charming people, stability. All my publishers pass through from one festival to another.
On his taking a spa bath in the basement of the Kurhaus
I discovered the secret of levitation. One puts the feet flat braced against the end of the bath and rises covered with bubbles like a fur. I felt like a bear. A memory of a former state.
When they order whiskey, rather early in the morning, Nabokov asks for a soda to go with his drink, which looks small.
Make the glass grow. The grass glow.
When Gilliatt sees Nabokov’s notebooks of paper squared like mathematics books, she reflects, “The formal pattern that might distract most people obviously stimulates him. I could understand this: It must be a little like seeing figments in the black and white tiles in public lavatories.”
Some of my best poems and chess problems have been composed in bathrooms looking at the floor.
They play anagrams, Gilliatt proposing “cart horse” (with “orchestra” as the solution), Nabokov offering “Her actors,” while knowing the solution should be one word. The conversation moves to Nabokov’s teaching.
I know Dublin exactly. I could draw a map of it. I know the Liffey like the Moskva. I have never been to Dublin but I know it as well as Moscow. Also, I have never been to Moscow.
Nabokov talks of his past with Véra, the possibility that they could have met in St. Petersburg, then:
Vera’s coming down in a moment. She’s lost something. A jacket. I think. When she loses things, it is always something very big.
He laughs at this, and then:
Vera has been doing “cart horse” as well. Eventually she suggested “horse-cart.” She hadn’t much hope.
On modern novels
The avant-garde French novels that I’ve read don’t stir my artistic appetite. Only here and there. Even Shaw can do that.
Genet?
An interesting fairyland with good measurements.
Ostrovsky?
[He has] a streak of poetry that he unfortunately put down because he was so intent on writing about the merchant class.
On the Russian translation of Lolita, about to be published in New York
To be smuggled in,1 dropped by parachute, floating down on the blurb.
On hospitals
In Massachusetts once I was ill with food poisoning. I was being wheeled along a corridor. They left the trolley by a bookcase and I drew out a big medical dictionary and in the ward I drew the curtains around myself and read. It wasn’t allowed because it looked as if I were dying. They took the book away. In hospitals there is still something of the eighteenth-century madhouse.
Pasternak?
Doctor Zhivago is false, melodramatic, badly written. It is false to history and false to art. The people are dummies. That awful girl is absurd. It reminds me very much of novels written by Russians, of, I am ashamed to say, the gentler sex. Pasternak is not a bad poet. But in Zhivago he is vulgar. Simple. If you take his beautiful metaphors there is nothing behind them. Even in his poems: what is that line, Véra? “To be a woman is a big step.” It is ridiculous.
This kind of thing recurs. Very typical of poems written in the Soviet era. A person of Zhivago’s class and his set, he wouldn’t stand in the snow and read about the Bolshevist regime and feel a tremendous glow. There was a liberal revolution at that time. Kerensky. If Kerensky had had more luck—but he was a liberal, you see, and he couldn’t just clap the Bolsheviks into jail. It was not done. He was a very average man, I should say. The kind of person you might find in the Cabinet of any democratic country. He spoke very well, with his hand in his bosom like Napoleon, because it had almost been broken by handshakes.
Yet people like Edmund Wilson and Isaiah Berlin, they have to love Zhivago to prove that good writing can come out of Soviet Russia. They ignore that it is really a bad book. There are some absolutely ridiculous scenes. Scenes of eavesdropping for instance. You know about eavesdropping. If it is not brought in as parody it is almost philistine. It is the mark of the amateur in literature. And that marvelous scene where he had to get rid of the little girl to let the characters make love, and he sends her out skating. In Siberia. To keep warm they give her her mother’s scarf. And then she sleeps deeply in a hut while there is all this going on. Obviously Pasternak just didn’t know what to do with her. He’s like Galsworthy. Galsworthy in one of his novels gave a character a cane and a dog and simply didn’t know how to get rid of them.
And the metaphors. Unattached comparisons. Suppose I were to say “as passionately adored and insulted as a barometer in a mountain hotel” (he said, looking out at the rain), it would be a beautiful metaphor. But who is it about? The image is top-heavy. There is nothing to attach it to. And there is a pseudo-religious strain in the book which almost shocks me. Zhivago is so feminine that I sometimes wonder if it might have been partly written by Pasternak’s mistress.
As a translator of Shakespeare he is very poor. He is considered great only by people who don’t know Russian. An example. (His wife helped him to remember a line of a Pasternak translation.) What he has turned it into in Russian is this: “all covered with grease and keeps wiping the pig-iron.” You see. It is ridiculous. What would be the original?
GILLIATT: “Greasy Joan doth keel the pot?”2
Yes. “Keeps wiping the pig-iron”!
Pasternak himself has been very much helped by translation. Sometimes when you translate a cliché—you know, a cloud has a silver lining—it can sound like Milton because it is in another language.
VÉRA: “Isn’t that what happened to Pushkin?”
He had translated the French writers of his day. The small coin of drawing-room poets and the slightly larger coin of Racine. In Russian it became breathtaking.
Out driving with Véra, while Nabokov jibes about the sheer drops where she has sometimes chosen to turn
Sometimes my son wishes I wouldn’t joke so much.
After a long wait for a waitress “who had seemed not to have heard the order,” he says peacefully:
I can tell by the nape of her neck that the cakes are coming.
Gilliatt asks him whether Lolita would have turned into a boy if his own real child had been a girl.
Oh, yes. If I had had a daughter Humbert Humbert would have been a pederast.
On the origin of Lolita
I had written a short story with the same idea as Lolita. The man’s name there is Arthur. They travel through France. I never published it. The little girl wasn’t alive. She hardly spoke. Little by little3 I managed to give her some semblance of reality. I was on my way to the incinerator one day with half the manuscript to burn it, and Véra said wait a minute. And I came back meekly.
“I don’t remember that. Did I?” said Mrs. Nabokov.
What was most difficult was putting myself….I am a normal man, you see. I traveled in school buses to listen to the talk of schoolgirls. I went to school on the pretext of placing our daughter. We have no daughter. For Lolita I took one arm of a little girl who used to come to see Dmitri, one kneecap of another.
Nabokov’s translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert. Have you seen those photographs of him with little girls? He would make arrangements with aunts and mothers to take the children out. He was never caught, except by one girl who wrote about him when she was much older.
Lolita again
was a great pleasure to write, but it was also very painful. I had to read so many case histories.
* “Nabokov,” Vogue, Dec. 1966, 224–29, 279–81. Penelope Gilliatt visited VN at the Grand Hotel and Kurhaus, Bad Tarasp, in the Engadine, on Aug. 20, 1966, in advance of the publication of Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (copyrighted 1966, published Jan. 9, 1967). Gilliatt, a novelist, film critic, soon to become celebrated as the scenarist of the critically acclaimed film Sunday, Bloody Sunday, and married to the playwright John Osborne, drew all eyes when she arrived in a miniskirt, Véra reported to her friend Jane Rowohlt, wife of VN’s German publisher, Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt.