Nabokov

With some caution I take up the task of writing about Vladimir Nabokov. By way of preamble, it's necessary to note that he was a genius, someone whom a blogger like me should never sleight without the utmost care and respect, though that's someway off my radar, it must be said.

As his final, unfinished work is published (click), it would be remiss not to revisit the tale that led to its survival. I first mentioned the unfolding saga almost two years ago, following a rather impassioned article by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, who proceeded to deliver a string of emails to Dmitri Nabokov, the author's son and translator. The collision between familial loyalties and the yearnings of the scholarly elite was set in motion.

In my initial post I referred to the case of Samuel Beckett who, likewise, demanded his final, unfinished play go unpublished and unproduced. I should also have cited the case of TS Eliot; we would be without much of his later poetry were his wishes recognised in full. Obviously, the case was a delicate one. Empiricists, like myself, would be expected to ignore Nabokov's dying wishes; once the death takes place, his desires, whether fulfilled or not, go unquenched. However, the small matter of a man's reputation is potentially at stake: something to which we all apply a degree of value. A literary legacy, a library of letters, sculpted and tended to with the dearest perfectionism. Who are we to take such a thing into our own hands?

In a strange, though not unprecedented move, Dmitri sent the typescript of Nabokov's work, tentatively titled, The Original of Laura, to a few members of society that may be of some help. Martin Amis was one such individual. In a long, lavish, and luscious article for The Guardian, Amis claims that "writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies". Nabokov, he states, was no exception, and yet the commonplace is circumvented.

When a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.

Laura, then, falls under the heading of post-"accident". I have not yet read it so I cannot comment, but Amis certainly may. He frames his expectations for Nabokov with an example of genius, quoting from what Amis calls "the incomparable Pnin", Nabokov's only lengthy reference to the Holocaust:

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths - until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

The desperation, the agonies of a lifetime ended swiftly in under a sentence, hyphenated. Such instances give any writer, me included the sense, as Christopher Hitchens once noted, "that you shouldn't be in the writing business".

Just as I approached this post, I shall approach Laura with caution, but not before I reread Lolita and several other seminal works pre-"accident". First, however, I must go on with my sudden infatuation for J.M. Coetzee who, in his Man Booker Prize winning novel, Disgrace, briefly intercepts the Nabokovian arc. In it, as in Lolita and five other of Nabokov's novels, Coetzee attempts to "vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime" (Amis' words), that is: the crime of paedophilia or, more accurately, "nympholepsy". I recommend it thoroughly, but that's the subject of another post.