Vladimir Nabokov confesses to butterflies in the stomach

Not every novelist has opinions. Some of the greatest have a touch of the idiot savant, such as Adalbert Stifter, Ronald Firbank and Henry Green. And those novelists who do have opinions aren’t always worth listening to. But Vladimir Nabokov’s views are of compelling interest — paradoxically, because he regularly insisted that his novels sent no message, made no moral case and presented no argument. The beauty of his views on literary and other matters rests on his openness to laughter. He used to complain that his lectures to undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell were greeted in silence; he was sure that if he had heard them he would have been in fits of laughter from start to finish. The possibility of laughter, never very far away, is what gives Nabokov’s intelligence the confidence of the first-rate.

His non-fiction stands up astonishingly well. There is Speak, Memory, the greatest of autobiographies; there is Strong Opinions, an idiosyncratic collection of reviews and interviews, mostly from the early 1960s onwards; and there are three masterly, intensely practical and hilarious volumes of lectures on, among other things, Russian literature and Don Quixote.

Think, Write, Speak is something of a mopping-up exercise, containing uncollected and unpublished essays and reviews, as well as a large number of interviews with the press. These last could have been approached in a more rational way. The editors have followed the eccentric practice in Strong Opinions of only printing Nabokov’s reported speech from each press interview, omitting any scene-setting or commentary the journalist might have included. There are a handful of truly insightful pieces: Penelope Gilliatt catches Nabokov in full flight, and there is a magnificent account of a butterfly-hunting expedition by Robert H. Boyle for Sports Illustrated.

Not many journalists succeeded in getting Nabokov to talk about butterflies: he knew too much, and they knew nothing at all.