Nuggets from Tom's Former Tutor

[Steelhead]

These nuggets from Vladimir Nabokov are from a 1966 interview in Vogue
magazine by Penelope Gilliatt:

On the Queen:
"Is the Queen pregnant?" Nabokov asked.
"I don't believe so."
"When I saw her on television at the World Cup watching football she kept
making this gesture." He did a mime of smoothing a dress.
"She always does that."
"Oh, I see. A queenly movement. Permanently with child. With heir."

On his physique:
"I am six foot. I have very thin bones. The rest is flesh." On his nose" "A
handsome Germanic organ with a boldly boned bridge and a slightly tilted,
distinctly grooved, fleshy end."

On his English accent, cultured at Cambridge:
"That's Cambridge, Cambridge. Not Cambridge, Mass."

On his "dated" French accent:
"The slang goes back to Maupassant."

On looking for a place to live:
"We were in Italy, but we don't want to live there. I don't speak Italian.
And the _scioperi_[strikes]...Vera found a chateau in France, but it would
have cost a lot of money to convert it. It had drawbridges. It had its
drawbridges and drawbacks."

"I don't care much for DeGaulle. 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 the next."

On levitation in the tub:
"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."

We had a drink rather early in the morning. The whiskey's looked small as
he asked for soda. "Make the glass grow," he said, and then muttered: "The
grass glow."

Nabokov wrote all his books on index cards, using 3B pencils with India erasers.
"Some of my best poems and chess problems have been composed in the
bathrooms looking at the floor."

On James Joyce leaving out any mention of Bloom's return from the cemetery:
"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."

On Genet:
"An interesting fairyland with good measurements."

On a little lite reading in the hospital:
"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 18th century
madhouse."

On 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, Vera? 'To be
a woman is a big step.' It is ridiculous...._Zhivago_ is so feminine that I
sometimes wonder if it might have been 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. 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?"
"Greasy Joan doth keel the pot?"
"Yes. 'Keeps wiping the pig iron!' Pasternak himself has been very much
_helped_ by translation. Sometimes when you translate a cliche--you, know a
cloud has a silver lining--it can sound like Milton because it's in another
language."

I asked 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....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."

On Lewis Carroll:
"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} was a great pleasure to write, but it was also very painful. I
had to read so many case histories. Most of it was written in a car to have
complete quiet."

On his former student:
Nothing.

My conclusion:
Vladimir Nabokov talks better than David Foster Wallace writes.