The Original of Laura
By Vladimir Nabokov
Edited by Dmitri Nabokov
(Knopf, 304 pp., $35)
So this is what we’ve all been waiting for? The last, lost work of the great master, all but complete, so rumor had it, at the time of his death, sequestered for decades in a Swiss vault, “brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical,” according to his son and heir, “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity”--and all that it amounts to, we now learn, is a handful of crumbs, a bit of lint, a few coins. Well, print it in a scholarly journal, sell it to The New Yorker, put it in a catchall collection of unpublished work. I was not for burning, as Nabokov decreed, but after dithering for two decades, after Ron Rosenbaum’s Web-based worldwide plebiscite, after all the prefatory gestures of a small-time conjurer building up to the culminating bunny, is this really what Dmitri Nabokov proposes to foist on us? Scarcely thirty pages worth of text, packaged into a brick of a book (curb weight 2.4 pounds) and modestly priced at, ahem, thirty-five bucks.
It’s a sham, a scam. I don’t think Dmitri did it for the money--Lolita’s child must be rolling in it. But I do think Knopf did, and they must have drafted a platoon of cosmetologists to gussy up this pig. Lipstick? Lipstick, rouge, high heels, falsies, and a little black cocktail dress. Nabokov worked on index cards, and The Original of Laura amounted, at his death, to 138 of them. But rather than simply printing the texts of the cards one after another, or even printing each one on a separate page, Knopf has put the whole thing on heavy, stiff card stock and given us a facsimile of each and every card, its handwritten contents typeset underneath. And on the reverse of each page, a facsimile of the back of the card, almost invariably blank or consisting of nothing more than a large “X” in pencil strokes. Hence the 304 pages, the 2.4 pounds, the thirty-five bucks.
But wait, there’s more. The cards are perforated and, as Dmitri says in a note, “can be removed and rearranged, as the author likely did when he was writing the novel.” I’ll get back to the second half of that statement, a claim both strategic and semi-dubious (not to mention ungrammatical). The first breaks new ground in editorial chutzpah, inviting us to play a kind of Nabokov: Rock Band--the novel as theme park. One can only imagine what dear old dad--the ultimate artistic control freak, not to mention one of the all-time snobs--would have thought of the idea of letting his readers re-arrange his scraps and chapters at will.
The design offers other distractions from the volume’s meager content. Mock perforations in snazzy red, typographical hijinks, little doodads strewn about. The images of two of the index cards reproduced on the covers, one of them so positioned that the title appears on the spine in Nabokov’s own hand. An author photo, twice reproduced, that might have been thought the better of. Instead of the familiar image from the backs of the later novels--head tilted, cheek fisted, forehead furrows cocked, an expression of sardonic impatience as if bracing for the next stupid question--this one gives the writer face-on and near to bald, his look of defensive hostility somewhat undermined by a buxom set of jowls imperfectly hidden by a strategic hand at the chin, the whole producing an impression both babyish and batrachian, a Slavic Truman Capote.
Most prominently of all--it is the first thing we see--a graphic gimmick on the dust jacket: the words slowly fade from left to right, white letters disappearing into black background. The gesture has multiple meanings, some obvious, some revealing themselves only in retrospect. The book itself fades to black, its words incomplete. Nabokov’s life, as he wrote it, likewise evanesced. And within the novel, a different kind of effacement. The story has three strands: Flora, a femme fatale; her husband, Philip Wild, a fat and famous neurologist; her lover, or one of them, the author of a novel named Laura or My Laura (the pronoun seems to have been a late addition on Nabokov’s part), based on Flora’s life. Flora is thus the “original of Laura,” with all the metaphysical, metafictional involutions that the idea entails. But Wild also has a story--indeed, has a book, the record of his experiments in self-erasure, in willed ecstatic suicide. The method is mental: he imagines a vertical chalk line, standing for his body, then slowly, starting at the bottom--the toes, the feet--begins to rub it out, with “more than masturbatory joy,” by a kind of concentration or meditation. Always careful to restore what’s been erased before breaking his trance--the one time he doesn’t he finds that his toes start to crumble off--Wild intuits nonetheless the possibility of blissful self-extinction.
Hence the third meaning of the jacket’s design: the letters mimic Wild’s chalk-stroke effigy, on its way to deletion. But there is a further implication, central to Dmitri’s claims about the novel, which, though never completely spelled out, are insistently insinuated, most clearly in a curious phrase that also appears on the jacket (though nowhere in the volume proper). At the bottom, in small letters, this: “A novel in fragments.” Not “fragments of a novel,” which is what the volume clearly is: two numbered chapters in fair copy; three more in somewhat less finished condition; a few other pieces, labeled but not numbered, in various states of construction; and about a dozen and a half miscellaneous singleton cards--notes, scribbles, superseded drafts, scraps of research. This mess, Dmitri would have us believe, adds up to a novel--or, as his introduction puts it, all but “the last few card lengths needed to finish at least a complete draft.”
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