by Brian Boyd
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)
Hubert H. Hubert feels tender love for his dead Daisy, and would like to offer the same to Flora, but Flora understands only sex, not love, not tenderness, and repays his attentions with a kick in the groin. Through the Hubert name and other Lolita echoes, Nabokov dupes us at first into misreading the scene just as hard-bitten Flora does. But in this novel of human erasures, Daisy’s death has not been erased for her father, who remembers his lost child so painfully, so hopelessly. Nabokov has hidden under our noses the beating core of tenderness in this apparently heartlessly hard novel: Flora as potential Daisy, not as Lolita, is one of this novel’s “secret points.”
My sixth problem was that Philip Wild’s obsession with willing his own death, erasing himself by inches so that he can restore himself by inches—so that death can dance to his tune—seems so remote from our experience and our desires. Wild’s quest is certainly singular. But many of us have wished to shed intense pain or discard excess weight. Wild wants both. Many have sought to train the mind to control and transcend self, through meditation, and Wild has not only the shape of the fattest Buddha but the same urge to reach nirvana (the text makes reference to both) and to eliminate the self. In Wild’s case life has pained him, with his vast bulk, abscessed toes, writhing gut, and the “anthology of humiliation” (219) his life has been since he married Flora. The word anthology derives from the Greek for “collecting flowers,” but in Wild’s case, his Flora casually plucks and casually or viciously jettisons other men.
Nabokov has some sympathy with Wild in his humiliation, and so should we, but he is no Pnin. All of us might wish at times we could control our own death or restoration, but Nabokov surely presents Wild’s as exactly the wrong way to transcend death. Eliminating the self promises no worthwhile passage beyond life. The only transcending of death Nabokov could imagine wanting would take the self through death to a freer realm of being but not deny its accumulation of experience: “I am ready to become a floweret / Or a fat fly,” John Shade writes in Pale Fire, “but never, to forget” (PF 52–53). In Ada, Van Veen explains “the worst part of dying”: “the wrench of relinquishing forever all one’s memories—that’s a commonplace, but what courage man must have had to go through that commonplace again and again and not give up the rigmarole of accumulating again and again the riches of consciousness that will be snatched away!” (Ada 585).
Wild obsessively tries to will his own elimination, but for Nabokov self-elimination can only be the falsest kind of self-transcendence. Wild’s ingrown toenails cause him agony. One time, as he lies in a mattress in his bath, again willing away what he can, he not only seems to erase his toes but decides not to restore them when he emerges from his hypnotrance. Opening his eyes, his heart sinks when he sees his toes are intact, but when he scrambles out of the tub, he falls flat on the tiled floor. To his “intense joy,” his toes are “in a state of indescribable numbness. They looked all right, though … all was rubber and rot. The immediate setting-in of decay was especially sensational” (167).
For many over many millennia, but never more than for Nabokov, transcending death has seemed somehow akin to escaping earth’s gravity. Fat Philip Wild flopping over on erased toes succumbs to gravity more grotesquely than ever. And his obsessive quest seems an apotheosis of self and of stasis, a self-fixated and self-enclosed attempt to circumvent the limits to the self that death imposes. To the extent that Nabokov imagines possibly passing through death—and that’s to a very considerable extent—he sees it as a transition that hurtles the self into a state retaining accumulated selfhood but no longer subjected to “the solitary confinement of [the] soul” (CE 217)
Wild conjures up an image of an “I,” “our favorite pronoun” (137), on his mental blackboard, its three bars representing his legs, torso, and head, and he sees his auto-hypnosis as akin to successively rubbing out each bar. Images of erasure or self-deletion pervade the whole novel in ways that reveal Nabokov’s customary care in constructing and concealing his patterns. To take one example: Wild feels delight and relief at erasing his ingrown toenails. Flora, by contrast, wipes not a mental blackboard but her own flesh: she requires her menfolk to withdraw before ejaculation and promptly wipes the semen off her groin or, as the novel once phrases it, her “inguen” (121). How many know this word for “groin”? Ingrown-inguen: Nabokov covertly links Wild erasing his own life, rubbing out his toes, with Flora briskly wiping
off the possibility of new life. The Roman Flora was a fertility goddess; Nabokov’s Flora, a sterility goddess.
Art can offer a kind of immortality, a different promise of transcending death. But not here, not in this novel. Flora’s grandfather, a painter of once-admired sentimental landscapes, falls forever out of favor: “What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion invading his once famous pictures such as ‘April in Yalta’ or ‘The Old Bridge’?” (43–45) His son, a photographer, films his own suicide, his being rubbed out. The photographer’s wife, Flora’s mother, a ballerina known only as Lanskaya, finds her art fading as her body ages. Flora herself becomes the subject of a kiss-and-tell novel, My Laura, which aims not to immortalize but to expunge her: “The ‘I’ of the book is a neurotic and hesitant man of letters who destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her” (121). The laurel was associated with literary immortality because its leaves last so long after they detach. Flora, so eager to be deflowered, remains alive at the end of the novel; unlike her husband, obsessed with his own death, she ends The Original of Laura refusing to look at the novel My Laura lying on her lap and at what a friend recommends as “your wonderful death….the craziest death in the world” (227).
We come to my seventh concern, the novel’s style. For an older and still sterner Martin Amis, this by itself would be decisive. In 1999, for the centenary of Nabokov’s birth, the oldest of the five journals devoted to him, the Nabokovian, decided to stage a Nabokov write-alike contest. A panel of judges selected three submissions, which appeared alongside what were announced as two “never before published pieces of Nabokov’s prose”—both from The Original of Laura—that, readers were informed, Dmitri had supplied. Subscribers were invited to pick the original of Vladimir. Delightfully, most picked as Nabokov’s a passage by Charles Nicol, an academic and writer who has been publishing superb work on Nabokov for more than thirty years, and no one picked the passages from The Original Of Laura. Nobody picked Nabokov as the one who wrote most like Nabokov.