You’ve written Pnin; how soon will you sit down to write Vnin?
I presume you refer to an American continuation of my autobiography, a kind of Speak on, Memory. Yes, it would be rather fun to describe my academic experience—at Wellesley, Cornell, Harvard, and elsewhere. But that peach is still as hard as wood in my mind. It is curious that the sensation of duration—and this has nothing to do with Bergson or Proust—the sensation of duration in regard to the distant past is both stronger and smoother than the recollection of time apprehended more recently. My childhood, my youth automatically fall into an artistic pattern, but my rather recent thirty years in America form an irregular patchwork with all sorts of gaps in my memory and with lumps of raw matter. In other words, if the distant past is highly organized poetry, the recent past is nothing but rough topical prose.
* For Swiss Broadcast, European and Overseas Service. Emended typescript with VN’s manuscript revisions, in English, VNA Berg. On Sept. 8, 1971, Sufrin came to Montreux to record his interview with VN, who had prepared his answers by Sept. 5. VN published some of the exchange in SO (interview 18), but not the question and answer given here.