Think, Write, Speak by Vladimir Nabokov

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
By Vladimir Nabokov
Edited by Brian Boyd & Anastasia Tolstoy
Knopf, 2019

It’s been nearly 50 years since the appearance of Vladimir Nabokov’s big, entertaining collection of nonfiction pieces (interviews, book reviews, editorials, etc.), Strong Opinions, and in his Introduction to Think, Write, Speak, a new and significantly less entertaining collection of Nabokov nonfiction, Brian Boyd calls Strong Opinions “a rushed compromise.” The implication is that Think, Write, Speak isn’t a rushed compromise but rather a work of more considered scholarship. 

This is certainly true - editors Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy have produced a meticulously contextualized volume just brimming with supporting information - but it’s also cautionary: Think, Write, Speak is indeed a work of considered scholarship - Nabokov scholarship, which will be of interest mainly to Nabokov scholars and fervent completists. The book assembles dozens of often very short interviews that weren’t included in Strong Opinions, plus speeches, the occasional indifferent book review, and a smattering of almost humorously pedantic letters to various long-suffering editors. Nabokov himself, when characterizing the contents of Strong Opinions half a century ago, said, “There remain two or three broken crackers and some mouseturdies at the bottom of the barrel; otherwise, c’est tout.” The ultimate result of Think, Write, Speak’s impressive scholarship is to validate that opinion. 

Defiantly, Boyd claims that “what remained of his ‘public prose’ after his selection of Strong Opinions, on the other hand, is not the bottom but the bulk of the barrel.” It’ll be up to readers to decide what they’re getting in these pages: the bulk of the barrel, or mouseturdies?

The bulk of the book’s many interviews were given after the publication of Lolita and its stratospheric success. It’s fairly clear that this success caught Nabokov completely by surprise, and as in almost all such cases, his first reaction was to lie about that fact, to behave in every way as though the success of his novel was carved in Sumerian cuneiform at the dawn of civilization. In other words, Think, Write, Speak presents many decades and many layers of pomposity. 

In a 1958 interview with Paul O’Neil for Life, for instance, Nabokov responds to the filming of Lolita with just the kind of contradictory public flailing that he’d tend to use for thirty years. “It was perfectly all right for me to imagine a 12-year-old Lolita … She existed inside my head,” he claims. “But to make a real 12-year-old girl play such a part in public would be sinful and immoral, and I will never consent to it.” So: writing pornography? Acceptable. Acting pornography? Sinful. Check. In an interview the following year for the Washington Post, the author is asked point-blank if Lolita is pornography, and he responds with a steaming bowl of borscht: “My definition of pornography is ‘a copulation of clichés’ in which an author puts the reader on familiar ground and then makes a direct attempt at provoking the most basic response.” He then adds: “This is not the case with Lolita.” Good to know.

The pre-Lolita Nabokov, gaining teaching positions and learning how much spare spending money could be picked up doing commissioned work, isn’t much less insufferable. Way back in 1941, in an endless piece terrifyingly titled “The Creative Writer,” the Master was already leadenly trying to turn banalities into wisdom:

Sequence arises only because words have been written one after the other on consecutive pages, just as the reader’s mind must have time to go through the book, at least the first time he reads it. Time and sequence cannot exist in the author’s mind because no time element and no space element had ruled the initial vision. 

I have no idea what any of that means, but it’ll no doubt have Nabokov fans nodding eagerly. Those fans will look on Think, Write, Speak as the treat of the book season, and they’re fortunate to have such a conscientiously-assembled volume. Readers skeptical of the Nabokov phenomenon - if they exist anymore - will want to read carefully around the mouseturdies.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.