{"id":17883,"date":"2011-07-02T00:00:14","date_gmt":"2011-07-02T04:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=17883"},"modified":"2011-07-05T12:17:26","modified_gmt":"2011-07-05T16:17:26","slug":"vladimir-nabokov-and-the-art-of-the-self-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/07\/02\/vladimir-nabokov-and-the-art-of-the-self-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of the Self-Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Today, as you may know, is the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s death. There won\u2019t be parades, but there will be an abundance of talk, mainly on NPR, about his most famous novel Lolita <\/em>or his penchant for butterflies. On no other day will the words lepidopterist<\/em>\u2014one who studies a large order of winged insects, including butterflies and moths\u2014and nymphet<\/em>\u2014which Nabokov forever altered to mean \u201ca sexually attractive or sexually mature young girl\u201d\u2014be used with such frequency. What probably won\u2019t be discussed is Nabokov\u2019s shrewd and savvy approach to publicity and fame. Perhaps more than any other writer in the twentieth century, he knew how to control his image. As John Updike wrote in Assorted Prose<\/em>, Nabokov was not only one of the best writers in English, but also \u201ca solid personality\u201d giving a performance \u201cscarcely precedented in American literature.\u201d It would be hyperbolic to place Nabokov in the same category as celebrity doyens like Madonna or Lady Gaga, but he could certainly have taught them a thing or two about fame and the art of the interview.<\/p>\n

Fame descended on Nabokov after the 1958 publication of Lolita<\/em>. He was sixty years old at the time and held a lectureship at Cornell. My father took Nabokov\u2019s American literature course and says he can\u2019t remember anything about it except for the way that Nabokov, wearing a black cape, used to sweep into the lecture hall with Vera, his wife and assistant, in tow. Nabokov would then deliver his lecture from prepared notes to great affect. His dramatic performances in class drew students to him, and, according to Nabokov\u2019s most meticulous biographer Brian Boyd, his European literature course was second in enrollment to Pete Seger\u2019s folk-song course. As a literature teacher, Nabokov emphasized the importance of reading for detail, assigning students fewer books in order to read them slowly. He quizzed students on the pattern of Madame Bovary\u2019s wallpaper and sketched the path that Bloom walks in Ulysses <\/em>on the blackboard. According to Nabokov, this approach \u201c\u2018irritated or puzzled such students of literature (and their professors) as were accustomed to \u2018serious\u2019 courses replete with \u2018trends,\u2019 and \u2018schools,\u2019 and \u2018myths,\u2019 and \u2018symbols,\u2019 and \u2018social comment,\u2019 and something unspeakably spooky called \u2018climate of thought.\u2019 Actually these \u2018serious\u2019 courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nabokov treated fame as if it were a novel to be read or written according to the details. Before immigrating first to England, where he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, then to Berlin, and finally to America, Nabokov had already written nine novels and was well-known. But even in Paris in the 1930s, he never took critics or the fame machine seriously. To taunt the critic Georgy Adamovich, Nabokov published under the pen name Sirin. In a review of one of \u201cSirin\u2019s\u201d books, Adamovich, after having dismissed Nabokov as a writer, wrote that \u201cSirin\u201d promised to be one of the world\u2019s great talents. So it comes as no surprise that Nabokov staged a photo for \u201cLife Magazine\u201d in 1959 in which he is seen writing Lolita <\/em>on notecards in the Nabokov family sedan, after the novel had been published. Or that he gladly appeared on the cover of Time <\/em>in 1969 and Newsweek <\/em>in 1962. Or that he corrected Carl Proffer\u2019s Keys to Lolita <\/em>and revised Andrew Field\u2019s biography of him, saying that his life resembled \u201ca bibliography rather than a biography\u201d and that the best part of a writer\u2019s biography is not \u201cthe record of his adventures but the story of his style.\u201d Or that he tightly controlled the collection of his short stories, compiling them according to \u201ctheme, period, atmosphere, uniformity, variety.\u201d Or that he translated his early Russian novels, such as Despair<\/em> and The Luzhin Defense<\/em>, as well as the autobiography that became known as Speak, Memory<\/em>, <\/em>into English himself, making substantial revisions and adding prefaces to the texts. Or, conversely, that he translated his English works, like Conclusive Evidence<\/em> and Lolita<\/em>, into Russian. Or that he conducted and wrote all of his interviews himself.<\/p>\n

Although Nabokov is one of the many practitioners of the self-interview, a tradition which includes Oscar Wilde, James Barrie, Evelyn Waugh, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Glenn Gould, Milan Kundera, and Philip Roth, he was the only writer who always <\/em>conducted his own interviews. Nabokov\u2014to my knowledge\u2014never conducted an interview without having received and answered the questions in advance. Even when he appeared with Lionel Trilling on a \u201clive\u201d taped interview on a 1958 program called \u201cClose Up\u201d to discuss the controversy surrounding Lolita <\/em>for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Nabokov reads his responses\u2014on television\u2014from his index cards. On a set designed to look like a writer\u2019s study but which is really just a studio at Radio City Music Hall, Nabokov doesn\u2019t bother to pretend that the interview is \u201creal.\u201d Like Nabokov\u2019s lectures at Cornell, which he enacted from notes, his interviews weren\u2019t just performances\u2014every interview is a performance\u2014they were texts.<\/p>\n