'A Person With No Public Appeal'

Interviews with writers are now accepted as a discrete literary form, like rondeaus and villanelles, probably for the same reason people read the biographies of writers whose work they have never read. I suppose the Paris Review encouraged the trend starting in the Fifties by publishing an interview in each issue – T.S. Eliot! Evelyn Waugh! – and lending them further respectability by periodically collecting them between hard covers. The point of an interview is to encourage an impression of intimacy with people we are unlikely ever to meet, though most writers in my  experience are not memorably articulate speakers. I’m not being a snob. If I admire and enjoy a writer, I will seek out and usually read his or her interview, just as I read the biographies of cherished writers. I have no problem with the higher gossip, so long as I don’t take it too seriously. 

A reader recently sent me an interview with an American novelist he likes whose name I had never heard before. That’s not unusual because I don’t read much contemporary fiction. To put it bluntly, this guy came off as a Barnum-esque self-promoter, with a few safe political platitudes and slogans thrown in for the hell of it. There was no literary talk, no mention of favorite books or writers, no discussion of technique or language. He was there strictly to sell books.

 

On this date, June 5, in 1962, Vladimir Nabokov and his wife disembarked from the Queen Elizabeth in New York City. He was in town to attend the premiere of Lolita, Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of his novel. He met with several journalists in his room at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. Nabokov was famous for demanding questions from interviewers in advance, and for preparing his responses in writing. The first question in the edited transcript: “Interviewers do not find you a particularly stimulating person. Why is that so?” Nabokov, who had recently published Pale Fire, replies:

 

“I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life. I never use schoolboy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office or in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever. Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent.”

 

I take Nabokov’s answer as an effective subversion of the interview form and, in general, the celebrity-making industry. Next question: “Still there must be things that move you -- likes and dislikes.” The response:

 

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”

 

I suspect that post-Lolita, Nabokov had little interest in or need for marketing. By then he was a wealthy writer having a good time. I’ve read all his published interviews and he seems to be consistently enjoying himself. He had an ego, of course. But that was muted with humor and leg-pulling. In an essay titled “Going Public” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s, 1975) the American poet L.E. Sissman compares a writer to a baseball pitcher or concert pianist:

 

“He must practice; he must work hard; he must sacrifice mere pleasure to the demands of art; he must be, in a sense, both single-minded and monastic. Unless he is a polymath of the most formidable proportions, he cannot afford or support a second career as a public figure.”

 

Sissman adds:

 

“In a word, the serious writer must take serious vows if he is to concentrate on his chief aim. A vow of silence, except through his work. A vow of consistency, sticking with writing to the exclusion of other fields. A vow of ego-chastity, abstaining from adulation. A vow of solitude, or at least long periods of privacy. A vow of self-regard, placing the self as writer before the self as personality.”