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I don’t envy Dmitri Nabokov ...
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Butterflies and Guns
http://butterfliesandguns.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/nabokovs-laura-pitch-publish-or-prolong-the-pause/
Nabokov’s ‘Laura’: pitch, publish or prolong the pause?
Posted in Literature and History, Visual and Concrete by Jack Robertson on February 20th, 2008
I don’t envy Dmitri Nabokov, the man who has to decide what to do with the last fragments written by the greatest prose writer of the 20th century.
When he died just over three decades ago Vladimir Nabokov was working on a novel, possibly to be called ‘The Original of Laura’. Fragments of it, on fifty-odd index cards, are stored in a safety deposit box in Switzerland, fragments that Dmitri, the current executor of his estate, has naturally read - and has described as constituting ‘the most concentrated distillation of [VN’s] creativity…‘ Alas, his father decreed before he died that this ‘distillation’ be destroyed, as a mere work-in-progress. Following his death first his widow Vera, and then subsequently until now his son, put off fulfilling that wish, one which (at bare minimum) involves the depriving of the world of an illuminating piece of literary history.
Now Dmitri is growing old himself, and the pressure is on to resolve this one way or another at last.
How literarily Romantic, eh? Typical Nabokov too, innit. Fragments of undisputed genius cooling in a safety deposit box in the heart of Timeless Europe, ghostly commands from the Old to the New World of Letters, races against literal and literary mortality, secrets and whispers and speculative what-ifs?…could these scribbled lines hold the key to VN’s cosmopolitan life, the universe and everything? It’s not unlike a Real Deal da Vinci code…or such is how we’re all primed to see it in this era of the daily-unfolding Latest Explicating Climax to the story of this or that.
It’s unlikely there’s anything $ynical going on here, I hasten to add. I doubt the Nabokov Estate is strapped for cash, somehow, and by most accounts Dmitri’s been a terrific, noble executor of his father’s legacy. Indeed, that’s exactly why he’s clearly genuinely torn about what to do now. Writers all over the place have different opinions on it, too: Tom Stoppard says ‘burn it’, John Banville says ’save it’. You can sympathise with all the arguments, even if all you really care about is working out how to engineer a casual meeting with Dmitri over there in Switza, how to get him matily drunk (or distract him with a pash and cuddle), how to lift the key to the safety deposit box from his impeccably-tailored suit pocket, and thus - yay - how to sneak away like the Pink Panther for a gloriously-selfish, solitary squiz at the raw stuff of lit’ry legend. If you could do that…well, bugger the rest of the reading public, either way. I dunno if Dmitri’s anything of a pantsman - probably not, at 73 - but talk about a fantastic variation on the ‘come up and see my etchings’ line, eh? The Original of Laura: if that’s not a title to tease even the most casual of Nabokov groupies, male or female, I don’t know what is. Couple the sly, playful, loop-the-loop gymnastics of his known oeuvre with the dribs and drabs we’ve got via Nabokov sleuths and stirrers (like Ron Rosenbaum), and it’s like hearing on the grapevine that a Shakespeare sonnet titled ‘O Dark Lady, Lit’ has finally surfaced.
I’m a huge fan of Nabokov. Of all the novelists I admire he is the one whose writing most fills me with an ache to write myself. There’s a breathtaking and limitless quality to his prose. Everything he writes bellows, to me: Look! See? Read that! See? You can do anything you want if you’re got the guts and the stamina and the reckless joy…this is the big league, kiddo, you’ve gotta unshackle your fears and go for it…WRITE BIG, boy. Better to fail big than succeed small…
*Coughs…Australian writers take note…coughs coughs*
More than any other 20th century prose writer Nabokov tells-by-showing us, our generations, the possibilities of that prose, of fiction, because unlike James Joyce he manages to combine an accessible joie d’vivre with his rarified erudition and structural game-playing. (To laugh and hum with pleasure at Joyce you’ve first got to scowl and grimace and plod and swot your way through thirty years’ worth of the classical Canon - yo, dumbass Irish dude! Most of us ain’t got the time, man…). How some critics can dismiss Nab’s oeuvre in those Joycean terms, ie as enormously clever and aesthetically swoon-making but arcane and inaccessible in a character, narrative, moral sense…escapes me. (That the same critics who dismiss Nabokov as a professional literary smart-arse tend to line up Martin Amis as a moral nihilist is a comfort…the problem is a tin ear, not tin prose, methinks…I digress…)
Anyway, I can fully understand those - like Banville, like Rosenbaum - whose instinct is to urge Dmitri to publish, or, at least, to keep pausing and leave it for later generations to decide. (Code, of course, for: let later generations decide to publish…) It’s a doozy of a literary conundrum.
But to me, pretty straightforward, too. You respect and protect the author’s fictional words best by taking his non-fictional ones at face value, in so far as it is in your capacity to know what they were. So if there was uncertainty or literal ambiguity about what Nabokov wanted done with this unpublished work, sure - by all means leave it up to his literary executors to decide. That’s what literary executors are for.
But Vladimir Nabokov quite clearly said: Destroy it. So that’s what we should do.
It’s as much about respecting the critical link between non-fiction words (especially verbs) and concrete human action, as well as the determined distinction we must maintain between an author’s fictional and his non-fiction words, as it is about Nabokov and ‘The Original of Laura’, as such.
Destroy it.
Patience, people. Another Real Deal literary genius will come along, sooner or later.
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