Stalking Nabokov (70 page)

In 1973, four years before his death, Nabokov had the initial inkling of what became
The Original of Laura
, but first he had to finish
Look at the Harlequins!
and then, driven by a sense of personal honor, to revise and virtually rewrite the translation of
Ada
for the French publisher, after the first translator’s breakdown. His intense work on the translation, from five
A.M
. each morning, at the age of seventy-six, drained him, as did severe falls, operations, and infections over the next two years, and he could not finish
The Original of Laura
before his death in 1977. Some time earlier, he had asked his wife to promise to destroy the manuscript should it be left uncompleted. She promised but could not bring herself to carry out his injunction.

Two years after his death, I finished my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. After reading it, Véra invited me to visit her in Montreux; after the visit, she asked me to sort out Nabokov’s archive for her. Although from late 1979 I had free access to the archive, I could not see other materials that Véra guarded in her bedroom: Nabokov’s letters to his parents and to her, his diaries, and
The Original of Laura
. By mid-1981 she agreed even to condone my working on a biography and, in principle, to allow me access to all I wished to see. She gradually allowed me access first to Nabokov’s letters to his parents, then to what she chose to read into my tape recorder of his letters to her. Not until February 1987, as I was already working on Nabokov’s American years, did she at last agree to my entreaties to read Nabokov’s final but unfinished fiction. She placed the little box of index cards on the maroon-and-silver striped period sofa on the west side of her narrow living room and monitored me from the matching sofa two meters away on the east side. I could read the manuscript once only and could take no notes. I also had to agree to delete anything she wished of what I might write on the novel as a result of this reading. The conditions could hardly have been worse.

Not long afterward, on Dmitri Nabokov’s next visit to Montreux, Véra and Dmitri asked me what they thought I should do with the manuscript of
The Original of Laura
. I said, to my own surprise, “Destroy it.” How glad I am now that they ignored my advice and that their attachment to Nabokov’s work overrode even their respect for his last wish.

In 1950 Nabokov would have burned another manuscript of another still incomplete book, entitled
Lolita
, if Véra had not stopped him on his way to the incinerator. Of course, Nabokov, Véra, Dmitri, and the whole world have good reason to be thankful that that didn’t happen. But he finished
Lolita
, and he came nowhere near finishing
The Original of Laura
. So why am
I
now thankful about
this
publication?

The Original of Laura
could have been published badly, as if it were a new
Lolita
or at least a new
Pnin
. Instead it was better published than I could have imagined. Subtitled “A Novel in Fragments” on the cover and “(Dying Is Fun)” on the title page, the index cards now bound into book form rightly flaunt their unfinishedness. Readers should not expect a new story to rival
Lolita’
s intensity or a new character to match Pnin’s pathos but instead glimpses of a famously demanding writer still challenging his readers and himself, in his late seventies, with death closing in.

What troubled me so much when I first read
The Original of Laura
and recommended that VN’s wishes should be followed and the text destroyed? And what has changed so much in my sense of the novel that I welcomed its publication?

All my initial dissatisfactions I have seen echoed in the responses of such gifted reviewers as Martin Amis, John Banville, Jonathan Bate, Alexander Theroux, and Aleksandar Hemon.

My first disappointment was that the fragments remain just that. I knew that Nabokov had had the first idea for the novel almost four years before his death and that when he still had more than fourteen months to live Véra had reported that he was “about half way” to completion.
¹
I had expected much more than I found. Reading and understanding need trust. The embryonic nature of the text sapped my trust, especially when I could read it only once under Véra’s wary eyes. For reviewers, their reluctance to trust an inchoate Nabokov text, too, was compounded by their suspicion of the rationale for its publication.

My second regret was that there were no sympathetic characters and no one who looms large in the imagination like Luzhin, Humbert, Pnin, Kinbote, or Van Veen.

The third was that the narrative driveshaft seemed broken. In
Lolita
,
Pale Fire
, and
Ada
, Nabokov reinvents fiction without forfeiting the pleasures of plot.
The Original of Laura
has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it’s hard to see how readers would have been impelled from one to the next even if the novel had been completed.

The fourth was the recurrence of unpleasantly heartless sex, as in
Transparent Things
, and the fifth, the recurrence of a
Lolita
theme. Nabokov had recycled the name of
Lolita
, or much more, in
Pale Fire
,
Ada
, and
Look at the Harlequins!
In
The Original of Laura
he introduces a character called Hubert H. Hubert, the partner of Flora’s mother. When his hand touches twelve-year-old Flora’s legs under the bedclothes, she kicks him in the groin. Do we really need a
fourth
reprise of
Lolita
, even with this twist?

The sixth disappointment was that the hero has a problem too strange to engage the imagination. Luzhin’s love of chess haunts even readers who cannot play the game. Humbert’s desire for Lolita compels readers despite their feelings about child rape. But in Nabokov’s last completed novel,
Look at the Harlequins!
, Vadim Vadimych’s maddening problem is merely that he can’t imagine turning around to walk the other way along a street, an act that he can readily perform in real life but that sends his imagination spinning—and a problem that has always failed to turn
my
imagination. In
The Original of Laura
Philip Wild wants to find out how to
will
his own body dead, inch by inch, from his feet upward, so that dying becomes fun and a reversible relief from the itch of being. Most of us surely think about death, and most of us have times when we wouldn’t mind redrawing our figures. But Philip Wild’s obsessive quest to erase his body seems far from ordinary human preoccupations.

My seventh concern was the novel’s style. In a 1974 review a stern young Martin Amis had greeted
Look at the Harlequins!
: “[Its] unnerving deficiency…is the crudity of its prose…. In the book’s 250-odd pages I found only four passages that were genuinely haunting and beautiful; in an earlier Nabokov it would be hard to find as many that were not.”
²
I, too, was sadly disappointed by
Look at the Harlequins!
and wondered if it marked an irreversible decline in Nabokov’s powers. Yet he still sparkled in interviews and introductions. As his biographer, I sweated in 1987 as I picked up the first of the
Laura
index cards: would I be able to describe Nabokov’s invention as undimmed, or would the manuscript confirm a decline? My fraught first reading, alas, bore out my fears. Above all, I felt that whatever
might
have become of the novel, the cards that survived fell far short of Nabokov’s standards and should be destroyed as he wished.

If you have not yet bought
The Original of Laura
you will now be thinking that you need not bother. Read on: I want to change your minds. And rest assured that I’m not someone who approves of whatever Nabokov writes: I have sometimes been harsher than anyone on those of his works I think not up to his high standards.

My estimation of
The Original of Laura
has changed dramatically. It’s not another
Lolita
or
Pale Fire
, but it could have been—it already is—another fascinating Nabokov novel and a priceless entry into his workshop. What’s changed my mind? Not reading under impossible conditions. Not reading with wrong expectations. Reading for what’s there and not for what’s missing. Rereading. Trusting more.
Re
-rereading, and trusting still more.

My first disappointment was that the novel was so fragmentary, so unfinished. It still is, but there’s a strong beginning, a vivid middle, a wry end, and an already intricate design. The more I reread the more I think that Nabokov may indeed have been nearly halfway to another short novel like
The Eye
or
Transparent Things
.

My second was with the characters. True, none is sympathetic. But the heroine, Flora, is deliciously unlikable, and her husband, the neurologist Philip Wild, is an unforgettable presence from his tartan booties and his ingrown toenails to his Buddha-like bulk and his brilliant brain trying to erase his feet.

My third lay with the plot. But if there’s little plot tension there’s also headlong action from reckless Flora and comic inertia from Wild’s repeated self-erasures. Perhaps one in two of Nabokov’s novels lacks a powerful plot impetus. Unless I’m mistaken, as you know by now I can be,
The Original of Laura
would have offered different pleasures from those of suspense: the contrasts of helter-skelter narration and meditative stasis and the puzzles of who has created and who has obliterated whom.

Three problems down, four to go. You’ll still be far from persuaded.

My fourth and fifth: the frequent focus on sex and the replay of the
Lolita
theme. Why I thought the former disappointing on first encounter I now can’t imagine. I now find Nabokov’s descriptions of sex here hilariously unappetizing, prodigiously unsatisfying emotionally and often physically, comic in their painful shortcomings. Just forget the tension of
Lolita
or the ecstatic, “passionate pump-joy” release of
Ada
(
Ada
286); forget, above all, the romance of first love in
Speak, Memory
or in
Mary
. Here’s the different world of
The Original of Laura
:

Flora was barely fourteen when she lost her virginity to a coeval, a handsome ballboy at the Carlton Courts in Cannes. Three or four broken porch steps—which was all that remained of an ornate public toilet or some ancient templet—smothered in mints and campanulas and surrounded by junipers, formed the site of a duty she had resolved to perform rather than a casual pleasure she was now learning to taste. She observed with quiet interest the difficulty Jules had of drawing a junior-size sheath over an organ that looked abnormally stout and at full erection had a head turned somewhat askew as if wary of receiving a backhand slap at the decisive moment. Flora let Jules do everything he desired except kiss her on the mouth, and the only words said referred to the next assignation.

(77–79)

Nabokov has focused on sex before, but never has he shown it so divorced from feeling. But he surely amuses and appalls us in a new way with the sexual activity he depicts here.

My fifth concern yielded even greater surprises. Nabokov evokes Humbert Humbert not to replay
Lolita
but to mislead our expectations. Mr. Hubert H. Hubert lost a daughter at twelve, run over by a truck. He sees her in a sense resurrected in Flora, Daisy’s age when she died, and wants to be nearer Flora than she wants him to be, wants, even, to brush her hair with his lips. But as far as I can see, he feels toward her only as the father of the lost daughter whom Flora keeps reminding him of. Flora, who knows about sex but not about love, misreads his intentions, as do readers misled by Nabokov’s expert deception. The real link to
Lolita
we should make from Hubert H. Hubert is not to Humbert crushing Lolita under his memory of “Annabel Leigh,” but to the Kasbeam barber, whom Nabokov identifies in his essay “On a Book Entitled
Lolita”
as one of “the nerves of the novel… the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted” (
Lolita
318). The barber appears in a sentence that, Nabokov reports, cost him a month of work:

In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years.

(
Lolita
215)