"I Have Never Seen a More Lucid, More Lonely, Better Balanced Mad Mind Than Mine"

The Nabokovs have lived in Montreux for nine years. Recently, TIME Reporter Martha Duffy visited them there. Here are a few of her impressions:

"Choughs! Choughs! Alpine choughs!

A little black bird with a yellow bill. A lacquered yellow bill. And red feet."

"Oh, chuffs," the heedless visitor says.

"Aren't they crows?"

"A crow? a CROW? No, no, no, no, no, my goodness no, not a crow at all. They emit a beautiful sound, a sort of kissing sound--chwink, chwink--which a crow cannot even approach. Pity is that they do it right on my window sill at dawn."

So the day starts early for Vladimir Nabokov, when the nervy choughs commence kissing outside the sixth floor of the Montreux Palace Hotel. Not that there has been much night for him. "I am the insomniac of universal literature," he cries. "My wet nurse complained. I was always up, smiling and looking around with my bright eyes. I am awakened by my own snore, which is a Nabokovian paradox. Helpful pills do exist, but I am afraid of them. My habitual hallucinations are quite monstrously sufficient, thank Hades. Looking at it objectively, I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine."

Plumed Sunset. Sometimes his wife Vera awakes to furtive noises in the night. It is the mad mind at work shuffling the 3-by-5 cards on which Nabokov now does all his writing, and which he keeps under his pillow for nocturnal reference.

Staid during the season and stultifying offseason, Montreux is a natural haven for a genius with billowing dreams and a narrowing future. It is a two-street town, one low and one high, dumped at the foot of one Alp and facing another across Lake Geneva. Beyond the town is Byron's Castle of Chillon, the big tourist attraction of the area.

The hotel is a vast rococo establishment. In the offseason, the staff tends to outnumber the 20-odd guests. Most of these regulars are women of 60 or more--a couple of Americans, a few English, a stray Parisian countess or two. Twice a day they gather in the Winter Dining Room, a smallish chamber in the hotel basement, which, despite lavish importation of daffodils and red tulips, is a frightful miniature of desolation. All guests have their own tables; there is almost no talk. The Nabokovs have a cook and eat here only when they have visitors.

Upstairs, on the top floor, the Nabokovs' apartment is a warren of small rooms. Directly below is a. room for their son Dmitri, who visits when he can take time from his operatic career in Milan. When he is in residence, the tone-deaf father sings gleefully in the bathroom until Dmitri makes him stop.

In the summer, the hotel and town are crammed with tourists. It is time for the Nabokovs to leave. They do --to a different place every year, chosen for the local lepidoptera. This year it will be Lugano. Nabokov seemingly never tires of saying he may return to the U.S. "Especially in spring," he says, "I dream of going to spend my purple-plumed sunset in California, among the larkspurs and oaks and in the serene silence of her university libraries."

Nabokov has put aside fiction for the moment. "This was the hardest novel I ever wrote. Now I feel flat here," he says, patting his front, "as if I was delivered." Currently, he is translating all his Russian poems into English. But there is time to receive publishers bringing fat contracts. (Nabokov has remarked that he never cared about money until he had it, and now he does care. He left G. P. Putnam after many years and switched to McGraw-Hill partly because he heard that Putnam President Walter Minton had said: "Oh, Nabokov. He doesn't need money.") Vera, who helps with translation proofs, also does all the negotiating. Vladimir is charming and vague. Scholars come in increasing numbers, seeking enlightenment and hard fact. Nabokov booby-traps his repartee with esoteric references to his own work. (He has been known to reward an apt pupil by autographing his book with a sketch of a butterfly.) Lately there have even been Hollywood producers. "Keen minds, great enchanters," he says. There are also a few friends, including Vevey Neighbor James Mason, who recently dropped off a tie decorated in front with the poster picture of Uncle Sam saying "I want you!" The other side says, ' -Communism." Nabokov loves it.

In conversation, the man who has devoted a lifetime to literary discipline is so given to splutters and outbursts that he must reach for his handkerchief to wipe away the tears. Accuracy yields to hyperbole, especially when he is making game of other writers.

> MAILER: "I detest everything in American life that he stands for."

> BORGES: "At first, Vera and I were delighted by reading him. We felt we were on a portico, but we have learned that there was no house."

>ROTH: "Portnoy's Complaint? Dreadful. Conventional, badly written, corny. It's farcical--such things as the father's constipation. Even such a writer as Gore Vidal is more interesting."

The visitor produces the current Playboy, which contains an excerpt from Ada. The illustrations appall. "Awful! Comic! Dreadful! The artist needs anatomy lessons!" The handkerchief is seeing plenty of action. He starts composing cables and discarding them. Sample: "Either you are pessimistic or optimistic about Ada's bosoms."

In the dining room, the Nabokovs are greeted by a maitre d'hotel, full of suggestions, and a flock of waiters. Selecting wine is a sure trap, as well as a mirror of marital misunderstanding of the sort that besets more ordinary couples.

Nabokov: Shall we have a Swiss red?

Vera: I don't like the Swiss especially, in particular the reds.

Nabokov (registering astonished innocence): In nine years, I have not known that you do not like Swiss wines, especially the reds.

Nabokov finally takes hold and orders, mirabile dictu, a Swiss red. Vera accepts, graceful in this as in everything. With finely drawn, strong features, alabaster skin, brilliant white hair, exquisite hands, she is a natural beauty. Their dinner conversation thrives on little disagreements, contrapuntal, and often not really resolved. In one exchange, Vera begins by explaining the mating ritual of the crested grebe, a grubby little bird which frequents the lake. They never touch, she says, waggling a delicate finger, but wiggle one foot back and forth. "No, no, no, no, no," says Vladimir, who has let this get by during a ticklish entente with a waiter. "They waggle their heads!", and he begins waggling vigorously.

Russian Scrabble. The meal ends, always the same way. Nabokov empties his pockets of silver, apparently at random. Alone of the regulars, he tips at each meal. "You don't know the laws that govern my life," he sighs humbly, looking heavenward. Now there is time for more serious talk, but Nabokov is reluctant to discuss The Novel.

"How can I talk about the novel," he asks, "when I don't know what a novel is? There are no novels, there are no writers, only individual books." To the suggestion that he is a sensual writer, he asks, "Isn't writing sensual? Isn't it about feeling? The spirit and the body are one. My concern is to capture everything--the pictures, the scene, the detail--exactly."

Vera has reduced the complexities of modern life to a shadow that occasionally crosses her husband's path. Yet her real role, one senses, is not in these labors, but as the only confidante of that "lucid, lonely mind." In the summer, they walk as much as 15 miles a day together. In the evening, they play out their Scrabble tournaments, often with a Russian set (he can run up a 500 score). The chess problems he eventually publishes are set first for her to solve. They like to read to each other. They reread War and Peace in a motel in Montana a few years ago, and sad to say, Tolstoy flunked. " 'He paled slightly,' or 'Andrei half smiled,' " quotes Vladimir condescendingly. "Really." Between Tolstoy and Nabokov it is clear that Vera would choose Nabokov, and the dedication she brings to him is total. Recently Nabokov heard that John Crowe Ransom, whose poetry he greatly admires, was rewriting many of his old poems at the age of 80 and dismantling their classic beauty. Vladimir turned to Vera and said quietly, "Never let me do that."

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