Did Nabokov Write Novels to Get Rid of Them?

There’s something in the Lydia Davis book of essays I’m reading about why Nabokov wrote his stories. He wrote them to get rid of them. Or, no, not even his stories. His novels. She says this on page 173 of Essays One: “Nabokov said he never set out to write a novel but to get rid of it.”

She compares this to her writing notebook, the place where she writes, well, whatever. It’s in an essay about revising one sentence, all day long, one specific sentence. The essay is called Revising One Sentence.

There are another few parts I underlined before getting to the part about Nabokov.

in the notebook nothing has to be permanent or good

And

I am not afraid because what I write in here doesn’t have to become a story, but if it wants to, it will.

And

Now the stories force themselves on me.

I don’t care very much for the sentence she’s revising in the essay about revising the sentence, but that’s okay. I like what she’s recommending. I have several notebooks that I use for various things. One is for lists and it says Lists on the cover. Another says Words on the cover. Two are journals, one for general journaling and another for only journaling about writing.

What I think about is that it’s not specific to novels, what Nabokov said, whenever and wherever he said it. I need to write more to get rid of things.

I don’t know if this Nabokov anecdote is real or apocryphal. I google it and don’t find anything.

The results look like this:

The only evidence I can find of it is things that bring me back to the Lydia David essay—which you can read here, on The Paris Review.

But that’s okay. I like the sentiment of it. And if we don’t write things simply to get rid of them, then why am I writing this? (Also, I think Pale Fire is something much more than a thing a guy wrote to get rid of it.)