Strong Opinions by Vladimir Nabokov

Author:Vladimir Nabokov [Nabokov, Vladimir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_classic
Publisher: First Vintage International Edition
Published: 1990-09-16T06:00:00+00:00

I can't make the comparison between a visual impression and my scribble on index cards, which I always see first when I think of my novels. The verbal part of the cinema is such a hodgepodge of contributions, beginning with the script, that it really has no style of its own. On the other hand, the viewer of a silent film has the opportunity of adding a good deal of his own inner verbal treasure to the silence of the picture.

Although parts were eventually discarded or revised by Stanley Kubrick, you nevertheless did write the original screenplay for Lolita. Why?

I tried to give it some kind of form which would protect it from later intrusions and distortions. In the case of Lolita I included quite a number of scenes that I had discarded from the novel but still preserved in my desk. You mention one of those scenes in The Annotated Lolita — Humbert's arrival in Ramsdale at the charred ruins of the McCoo house. My complete screenplay of Lolita, all deletions and emendations restored, will be published by McGrawHill in the near future; I want it out before the musical version.

The musical version?

You look disapproving. It's in the best of hands: Alan Jay Lerncr will do the adaptation and lyrics, John Barry the music, with settings by Boris Aronson.

I notice that you didn't include W. C. Fields among your favorites. For some reason his films did not play in Europe and I never saw any in the States, either.

Well, Fields' comedy is more eminently American than the others, less exportable, I suppose. To move from movies to stills, I’ve noticed that photography is seen negatively (no pun intended, no pun!) in books such as Lolita and Invitation to a Beheading. Are you making a by now traditional distinction between mechanical process and artistic inspiration?

No, I do not make that distinction. The mechanical process can exist in a ludicrous daub, and artistic inspiration can be found in a photographer's choice of landscape and in his manner of seeing it.

You once told me that you were born a landscape painter. Which artists have meant the most to you?

Oh, many. In my youth mostly Russian and French painters. And English artists such as Turner. The painters and paintings alluded to in Ada are for the most part more recent enthusiasms.

The process of reading and rereading your novels is a kind of game of perception, a confrontation of novelistic trompe l'oeil, and in several novels (Pale Fire and Ada among others) you allude to trompe l'oeil painting. Would you say something about the pleasures inherent in the trompe l'oeil school?

A good trompe l'oeil painting proves at least that the painter is not cheating. The charlatan who sells his squiggles to epater Philistines does not have the talent or the technique to draw a nail, let alone the shadow of a nail.

What about Cubistic collage? That's a kind of trompe l'oeil.

No, it has none of the poetic appeal that I demand from all art, be it letters or the little music I know.

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