Dmitri's Dilemma

The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun) is the novel Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899 – 1977) was working on until death interrupted his labors. It was supposed to be fed to the fire, or at least that was Nabokov's declared wish. Nabokov--who, for those who don't know, was a multilingual Russian-American novelist, poet, short story writer, entomologist and master chess player--grew increasingly ill while working on the book (banal operation, hospital infection), so he undoubtedly knew there was a strong chance death at any time could stop him from scribbling on those index cards on which he wrote the initial drafts of many of his novels.
In case the reader has not intuited it by now, I am a fan of Nabokov's. Fan doesn't seem to be the proper descriptive, but I don't know how else to describe how I feel about him. I have read most of his books, some many times. I read Brian Boyd's wonderful two-part biography and numerous books and articles of criticism and analysis.




Here is a review I once wrote of Nabokov's Despair, an earlier book:

In my opinion Despair is one of Nabokov's best novels. Here we can see an early draft of what would eventually become Nabokov's signatures: clever puns, comically cruel descriptions of characters as seen through the narrator's eyes, a story hovering beneath the "official" story, and vivid writing. "I took a handful of snow, squeezed out a curling worm of soap into it, beat it with the brush and applied the icy lather to his whiskers and mustache." The novel proper concerns Hermann Hermann, a "second-rate businessman with ideas" who one day stumbles across a hobo who Hermann believes resembles him as closely as "two drops of blood" resemble each other. The chance meeting in the mountains of Prague (circa the 1920s, when the novel was written) leads Hermann Hermann (an echo of Humbert Humbert?) to devise a cunning plan for committing what he believes would be the perfect crime, which he likens to a work of art. During the course of the novel, we are introduced to a bevy of colorful, vividly drawn characters: Hermann's wife, Lydia; her cousin, Ardalion; and Dr. Orlovious. The entire novel, so to speak, is Hermann's justification for an evil that he has done because he has a "lookalike," an evil that Hermann believes is an artistic masterpiece when viewed in its totality. That it is an artistic masterpiece absolves him of having committed the worst of all crimes, he believes. But the wonder of Despair is not so much in the story line and plot but rather it is in Hermann's remarkable asides and stray thoughts, which, when sewn together form a wondrous tapestry that reveal a story within the story, a story that Hermann Hermann can't or won't face. I wonder how many readers of Despair have recognized the true relationship between Lydia and Ardalion, a relationship that seems to zip right passed the eyes of "observant" Hermann. To read Nabokov, it helps to pay attention to each syllable; and rereading is required.

Burning manuscripts is a minor Nabokov theme---a tiny single thread that runs through his biography. He seemed to be forever threatening to consign some of his works to the flames. Lolita almost went up in smoke if his wife, Vera, had not saved it. He supposedly blazed up an earlier version of Lolita that bore only a slight resemblance to the published classic, but then that too ended up published, by Dmitri, as The Enchanter, after Nabokov’s death. So Nabokov either mistakenly thought he burned it or made up a fable. Who can say? Only Nabokov knows for certain.
One thing does occur to me: Destroying something by fire seems an overly dramatic way for an author or anyone for that matter to rid them of something written on paper. He could have just shoved it in a drawer and forgot about it, only to stumble across it years later, like a Stephen King. Or he could have tossed it into the trash. They have trash in Switzerland. In fact in that palace of a hotel in which he and Vera spent their twilight years (now I begrudge him nothing; the man deserved all the riches of the world for the works of art he lovingly left behind for us mere mortals), he probably could have summoned a bellhop to chuck Laura into a dumpster behind the building. His hotel handlers took the trouble of dragging a solid wooden lectern from the hotel’s attic to Nabokov’s domicile, what’s a bundle of papers? (Nabokov usually started the day writing standing up at that lectern; by the setting of the sun, he’d be scribbling supine on the couch, which mustn’t have been a very comfortable position in which to compose.)
What I am getting at is that perhaps Nabokov, on one level, did want the novel destroyed if it wasn’t finished; he once described reading the early drafts of a novel as examining the writer's sputum, his word. Yet on another, deeper, maybe subconscious level, he assumed that Vera and Dmitri would publish it anyway, as had happened in the past, with Vera snatching Lolita from the flames and perhaps Nabokov himself saving The Enchanter, then maybe forgetting about it for half a century.
This would take some of the burden off Dmitri for seemingly going against his fathers “official” wishes. (There is a long history behind the publication of Laura, from Alfred A. Knopf, that I will keep to this parenthetical in which various writers, including Ron Rosenbaum, one of my favorite journalists, tried to influence Dmitri one way or the other.)
I bought the book, dutiful little Nabokovian that I am, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. To me, there isn’t enough there to offer the slightest sense of what is happening in the book.
Now a Nabokov book is a difficult read to begin with; we’re not talking Stephen King or Koontz or Cornwell or any of the dozens of popular novelists peopling the shelves of bookstores today.
Some of his books are easier to read than others, and he often layered his novels and stories so that you didn’t have to be a Lit professor to fully appreciate all his books; but we could partly appreciate some of them. He did reward the re-reader, however, by offering all kinds of stuff hidden within his novels that could only be discovered by reading a book more than once. It would help to understand that he considered the author and the reader to have the relationship of two people playing chess. Nabokov was a master chess player, as well as a butterfly expert--entomologist--who wrote scientific papers still influential in that field today. He even discovered some species and named them, all while writing some of the greatest literature ever created.
Lolita (1955) he wrote most of during a road trip, laying in the backseat of his car (supine again!), pencils and index cards in hand. Lolita is usually considered his greatest work and probably the one he is best known for. It was ranked at #4 in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels. His memoir Speak, Memory was listed #8 on the Modern Library nonfiction list.
If all that is not enough (and it is, it is enough), Nabokov was a synesthete, one who has a condition in which they associate colors with particular letters. I have in my possession a book in which the author, Jean Holabird (interesting name), showcased which colors went with which letter for Nabokov. Upper and lower cases differed, interestingly, so that an “A” was “the tint of weathered wood” and an “a” was “polished ebony.” These are Nabokov’s words, from Speak, Memory, as served up in Holabird’s book. I know; baffling. Clearly Nabokov belonged higher up on the evolutionary scale, beside Einstein, Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci (if you ask me).
I have wandered away from Laura.
Michiko Kakutani, the delightful New York Times book reviewer, described what Laura was about: “He [Nabokov] imagines the death of his protagonist, a writer and neurologist named Philip, as a sort of Nietzschean act of will, as an exercise in self-erasure conducted body part by body part, beginning with his toes. It is the ultimate fantasy of a writer who wants to exert complete control over the narrative of his own life.”
Now that makes only slightly more sense to me than Laura itself. But what I found truly delightful about the book, and worth the $35 I shelled out (though it was on sale at Amazon.com), was that Dmitri included copies of the index cards, covered, some only partially, in Nabokov’s handwriting.
I think the act of laboriously writing words one at a time on index cards made him better focus on those words as they emerged from his brain; too often today writers, I'm one of them, use word processors and not their brain enough. Their eyes and fingers drown out a large part of their brain's potential contribution. In other words, it is my theory that Nabokov thought in words, not sentences. For all we know he may have even thought in individual letters or syllables rather than words. Imagine that! And remember English wasn't even his first language. Or his second. Try third.
Also, the cards are perforated; the reader can punch them out and rearrange them, perhaps as Nabokov might have, for, in addition to being incomplete, it is not at all certain that the fragment we have of the novel is in the proper page-by-page order, or the order Nabokov wanted it to be in. In fact, there is evidence that indicates the order of the fragment is not the order in which the final, polished novel would have been published should that damn Swiss nurse have closed the hospital window before the germ that killed a bedridden Nabokov swooped in (perhaps like a butterfly).
According to Kakutani, “Dmitri decided that his father … or his ‘father’s shade,’ would not ‘have opposed the release of Laura once Laura had survived the hum of time this long.”
As for me, I agree. You can never have too much Nabokov in the world. And maybe after reading Laura for 10 years or so, I will finally understand it.