If the time comes, how does Dmitri intend to destroy Laura? Death by
paper shredder? A ceremonial burning? “PERHAPS I ALREADY HAVE [destroyed Laura],
AND PREFER NOT TO REVEAL THE METHOD.”
Oh Lord, Dmitri. When will you put us out of our misery? Nabokov’s first
cousin, Ivan Nabokov, a publisher now based in France, who shared a room
with Dmitri when they were both students at Harvard, told me, perhaps
somewhat wearily, that “I’ve not talked to Dmitri about this for quite some
time”, and that he “thought this matter was settled some time ago”. Ivan
speculated that, “the fact that he called to ask people for advice implies
that he has decided not to do [burn] it”. It is Ivan’s view that Laura
is “a fragment, unfinished and unpublished and in my opinion, it should be
destroyed. I don’t think it would do him [Vladimir Nabokov] any good at all
if it were published.” Ivan dislikes the essentially parasitical nature of
“university people” who want the work published for their own ends.
“[Nabokov] didn’t want it published, he was very painstaking all his life.
It was his whole aesthetic philosophy that a work of art is something you
burnish and perfect.”
As late as 1974, Vladimir Nabokov was still chasing butterflies on Swiss
mountain-sides. Brian Boyd, his most respected and diligent biographer, a
confidant of both Véra when she was alive and Dmitri now, traces in Laura’s
origins in the second volume of his excellent biography. We learn that the
first reference to the novel is made in Nabokov’s diaries on December 1,
1974, when he notes the title Dying is Fun. By April 3, 1976, the
working title has changed to The Opposite of Laura, TOOL for
short, and another diary entry reveals that Nabokov is “Proceeding at the
rate of 5 or 6 cards per day, but a lot of rewriting”. Less than three
months later, on June 17, 1976 Nabokov is in hospital with an undiagnosed
infection; Laura is “completed in my mind” and, delirious for six
weeks, he frequently imagines reading the book out to an audience consisting
of “peacocks, pigeons, my long-dead parents, two cypresses, several young
nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost
invisible”.
Nabokov is obsessed with the novel but, weakened by illness and insomnia, his
great task becomes committing the book to paper, the flesh cannot keep up
with the demands of his still startling intellect. In February 1977, Nabokov
appears in a BBC documentary “his skin looks grey and flabby, and he
breathes hard, he moves very slowly”. Time would tell that “he would never
recover enough energy to transfer more than a fraction of his new novel from
mental image to written text”.
Boyd has seen the resulting fragments. When Véra first read them out to him
many years ago in the Montreux Palace, he advised both Véra and Dmitri
against publishing. But Boyd said to me last week that “I have since changed
my mind.” In part Boyd puts the U-turn down to the passing of time. He
argues that it’s now so long since Nabokov’s death that “in a sense his
misgivings about publication have been honoured to an extent”. Since that
first reading, “I reread it in better circumstances and I think it is a
fascinating novel. It is very fragmentary, people shouldn’t expect to be
swept away. He is doing some very brilliant things with the prose, the story
just flashes by, the characters are rather unappealing. It seems a technical
tour de force, just as Shakespeare’s later works where he is extending his
own technique in very, very concentrated ways.” The text is as “grotesque in
some ways as, and unsavoury in different ways from,Lolita. It’s the
kind of writing that induces admiration and awe but not engagement”.
Other people have seen the text. Only a handful, but, with a little digging,
it becomes apparent that this most delicate of literary quandaries is not
quite as veiled in secrecy as it once was. Zoran Kuzmanovich, the editor of
the Journal of Nabokov Studies, was in that Cornell lecture room on
the day Dmitri surprised his audience with an impromptu reading of Laura.
“To me the passage or passages he read sounded very much like the passages
of Nabokov’s densest, erotically charged prose,” he told me.
“I wrote in my notes that Laura may well be a woman and a book
and that its chocolate mousse prose was not entirely safe from sounding like
a parody of Lolita.”
Is Laura any good? Talk to enough Nabokov scholars and the outline of a
plot emerges: Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a
slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially
appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with,
Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov
from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there
follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more
fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his
own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through
meditation. A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.
Is Laura in a fit state for publication? Nabokov wrote most of his
novels including Lolita and Pale Fire nonlinearly on index
cards, which he would shuffle as part of his editing process. As Laura was
unfinished and Nabokov often wrote the middle section of his stories last,
it is questionable whether, published in her current state, Laura
would have resembled the book that its author had intended to write. These
are fragments – 50 cards compared with the 2,000 cards it took Nabokov to
commit Ada or Ardor to paper.
“It seems revealing that the novel itself seems to be about work that seems to
be unfinished,” says Boyd. “How finished it would have been if completed, I
don’t know. There would have been deliberate lacunae.”
The abbreviationTOOL, Boyd speculates, may be a deliberate reference to
the writer’s tool, in Nabokov’s case, the pencil. Nabokov the perfectionist
took pride that he used up the rubber at the end of the pencil faster than
the lead. “I almost wonder whether the title is an acronym. I think it
wasn’t accidental.”
Even Dmitri was fooled when an American librarian published a convincingly
rendered fake Laura. In 1991, a 35-year-old cataloguing specialist at
Penn State University posted a critical essay ostensibly written by a Swiss
professor, “Michel Desommelier”, entitled The Original of
Laura: A First Look at Nabokov’s Last Novel. The article quoted as
yet unseen portions of the manuscript and, of course, it’s always possible
that what details we have are similarly made up.
