Books: I Have Never Seen a More Lucid, More Lonely, Better Balanced Mad Mind Than Mine: Nabokov

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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."