Jim, the Lasdun's examples you directed us
to ( http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2196751,00.html ) are pretty
amazing. There seems to
be a "real" Carver ( gone religious) and Lish's creation of
a Carver.* As I see it (with
no other recommendation except a common reader's audacity), the issue
at stake is "un-authored great art" versus "authorial
true artsiness." ** Must readers be
intent on feeling the unadulterated individual soul, animus,
style in a writer, or are they sometimes entitled to be
treated to filtered art? This issue is as undecidable as getting used
to the Parthenon wearing its full original colors.
And ...I'll
discipline myself to avoid associating "Solus Rex," not to PF or to BS,
but to TOoL's leftovers, since it is clear that, as regards these two
Russian chapters, Nabokov still cherished "the dust and debris"
of his old fancies. In a way his position marks a point against
editorial interventions, like Lish's. Another point relates to
Nabolkov's opinions about "translation" (ie: they
shouldn't improve the original. The specific words he applied to
this kind of translation escape me now, but there's a posting about Georg
Steiner, in the N-L Archives, where they are mentioned).
Here are his words (cf. final notes
in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov): "The winter of
1939-40 was my last season of Russian prose writing. In spring I left for
America, where I was to spend twenty years in a row writing fiction solely in
English. Among the works of those farewell months in Paris was a novel which I
did not complete before my departure, and to which I never went back. Except for
two chapters and a few notes, I destroyed the unfinished thing. Chapter 1,
entitled "Ultima Thule," appeared in 1942 (Novyy Zhurnal, vol. 1, New York). It
had been preceded by the publication of chapter 2, "Solus Rex," in early 1940
(Sovremennyya Zapiski, vol. 70, Paris). The present translation, made in
February 1971 by my son with my collaboration, is scrupulously faithful to the
original text, including the restoration of a scene that had been marked in the
Sovremennyya Zapiski by suspension points [...] one thing is clear enough. In
the course of evolving an imaginary country (which at first merely diverted him
from his grief, but then grew into a self-contained artistic obsession), the
widower becomes so engrossed in Thule that the latter starts to develop its own
reality [...] His art helps him to resurrect his wife in the disguise of Queen
Belinda, a pathetic act which does not let him triumph over death even in the
world of free fancy [...]That is about all I can make out through the dust and
debris of my old fancies[...] Prince Adulf, whose physical aspect I imagined,
for some reason, as resembling that of S. P. Diaghilev (1872-1929), remains one
of my favorite characters in the private museum of stuffed people that every
grateful writer has somewhere on the premises [...] Freudians are no longer
around, I understand, so I do not need to warn them not to touch my circles with
their symbols. The good reader, on the other hand, will certainly distinguish
garbled English echoes of this last Russian novel of mine in Bend Sinister
(1947) and, especially, Pale Fire (1962); I find those echoes a little annoying,
but what really makes me regret its noncompletion is that it promised to differ
radically, by the quality of its coloration, by the amplitude of its style, by
something undefinable about its powerful underflow, from all my other works in
Russian."
Returning to the hazel-filbert issue, I got a
delightful color-rendering in another set of Nabokovian first
lines( "La Veneziana"): "...It was about five in the afternoon. The ripe sunshine dozed
here and there on the grass and the tree trunks, filisred through the
leaves, and placidly bathed the court, which had now come alive.
"
............................................................
* "Gordon Lish, cut the stories radically
before publication, jettisoning as much as half of the original in some cases,
reshaping them and changing the way they ended. Carver wasn't at all pleased
with the results and begged Lish to withdraw the book from
publication...Certainly he seems to have felt uncomfortable with the Carver
persona created by the collaboration (if that's the word) with Lish. And judging
from these earlier versions, as well as his post-Lish work, that persona is at
best only a partial reflection of Carver's actual temperament as a
writer.
As precedents for this kind of restoration,
Stull and Carroll cite, among other things, Plath's Ariel, and Lawrence's The
Lost Girl. Personally I think The Waste Land would be more apposite. As Pound's
cuts did with Eliot's original, Lish's audacious slashings liberated Carver's
densely expressive artistry from the superfluous connective tissue of his rather
mediocre rumination... But in literature there's no right and wrong, only good
and bad. Pragmatism trumps "authenticity", a dubious notion at the best of
times. Auden didn't want his great poem September 1939 included in his
Collected, but at this point it belongs to us, not him, and we have no intention
of letting it disappear. The great taxi scene in Conrad's The Secret Agent is
said to have been partially written by Ford Maddox Ford, but we wouldn't dream
of cutting it in the name of "authenticity" or anything else. Bowdler's
Shakespeare on the other hand... Etcetera."
** - I remember the famous answer
given by a student in his term-paper on "The Odyssey":
"The Odyssey was not written by Homer but by
another guy with the same name."