FICTION: The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun)By Vladimir Nabokov Penguin, 278pp, £25.00
A NEW NOVEL by Nabokov who died in 1977? How come? The Original of Laurais scarcely new, but nonetheless sees the light of day for the first time in this edition authorised by the novelist's son and literary executor Dimitri. Publication has been dogged by controversy. Before his death, Nabokov had requested that the work be destroyed: is Dimitri's decision to publish an act of filial betrayal?
Under any circumstances, a writer's estate is not easy to run: the executor must commission translations and biographies, execute wills and sell rights, protect copyright and embargo material. In the case of Vladimir Nabokov, the estate must now also deal with accusations of opportunism. For over 30 years Dimitri and his mother Véra (who died in 1991) have debated whether to carry out Nabokov's express wish to burn an incomplete but perhaps important work of literature. Véra, ignoring her husband's injunction, consigned The Original of Laurato a bank vault in Switzerland.
Thus cloistered, inevitably the book provoked needling questions. Was it any good? Had Nabokov been too hasty in his deathbed wish? Handwritten in pencil on a series of index cards, The Original of Laurawas seen by a handful of scholars, who objected that Nabokov's genius belonged to the world, not a safe-deposit box. Besides, concealing or burning material had got other estates into a great deal of trouble, it was pointed out. Silvia Plath's last novel, Double Exposure, for example, had vanished some time in 1970, apparently at the behest of her estate which was run jointly by her former husband Ted Hughes and his sister Olwyn.
Should we be glad of this novel-from-the-grave? For all its occasional brilliance, The Original of Laurais unquestionably a pale shadow beside the author's finished works. In compensation, Penguin has reproduced in facsimile all 138 of the index cards, with the printed transcription underneath each card. The result may have the look and feel of a collector's item, but as a literary undertaking it reads like a preliminary sketch to be coloured in later. According to his diary, Nabokov had first conceived of the novel in December 1974 under the deadpan title Dying Is Fun. By the summer of 1976 the plot was "completed in his mind", but by then the 77-year-old's health was failing rapidly.
In spite of the narrative disarray, a plot is discernable. Philip Wild, a "roly-poly" neurologist, is married to a mercurial young woman called Flora, "the original of Laura". The book opens at a party, where Wild is handed a copy of a scandalous novel, My Laura, which turns out to be about Flora (spelled, once, as "Flaura"). Disconcerted, the wealthy Wild embarks on a bizarre course of "self-deletion"; beginning with the surgical removal of his toes, he hopes the "sweetest death" will result from the removal likewise of his other extremities. Thoughts of suicide appear often enough in Nabokov's scattered writings to signal at least an underlying concern with the possibility of self-destruction. The Original of Laura, though, is unusually concerned with violent, abrupt endings and their outcome. Throughout, Wild is seen to loath the "stink and stickiness" of his ageing, unwashed body and wonders how he will feel, physically, before the final coming to rest. The great unanswered question of death indeed lies at the heart of this unfinished book; it is tinged with a very Nabokovian sense of loss and the self-examination of an old man looking back on his life.
What does one mean by "Nabokovian"? The shimmering brilliance of a Fabergé egg? A self-conscious piece of candy floss? The Original of Lauracontains much maddeningly opaque and rococo prose, yet some passages dazzle with their comic immediacy of detail and punctilious description.
“The street lights were going out in alternate order, the odd numbers first. Along the pavement in front of the villa [Flora’s] obese husband, in a rumpled black suit and tartan booties with clasps, was walking a striped cat on an overlong leash.”
UNSURPRISINGLY, THE NOVEL GLITTERSwith allusions to Russian literature. In his maturity Nabokov considered the loss of his ancestral Russia to be the greatest ordeal of his life. His father, a leading member of the liberal Kerensky government, was described by Trotsky as "an overstarched Englishman". No doubt Nabokov's own dandyism – his butterfly collecting, his penchant for Rocquefort cheese – derived in part from his father's patrician stiffness. His upbringing in pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg was, moreover, later reflected in his mandarin, etiolated prose, as far removed from his detested Dostoevsky as was Proust from Zola.
Flora's own exotic background is informed by the Russian émigré world of Paris and Berlin in the 1920s, which Nabokov had known so well. Her parents, exiled to the West from Moscow, manage to scrimp a pittance as artists (he, a photographer; she, a ballerina). Much about their daughter recalls the "pubescent nymphet" heroine of Lolita, Nabokov's 1955 masterwork which Graham Greene, among others, had sought to rescue from threats of censorship.
With her “pale squinty nipples” and “close-set dark-blue eyes”, Flora is at one point molested by an older man named Hubert H Hubert, a homonymous near-miss to Humbert Humbert, the unsavoury charmer of Lolita.
Whatever its academic interest, The Original of Laurarepresents the mere litter of the author's workshop. Dimitri, in his rather irritating introduction, sees fit to proclaim the work-in-progress as "the most controlled distillation of my father's creativity, his most brilliant novel."
In reality it is an unworthy coda to the works of genius: Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Speak, Memory. It is as if after Macbeth Shakespeare had written only third-rate bagatelles – at best curious little pieces. No doubt this is to be the last we shall see of this strange, lonely prospector in the universe of words; I only wish we could have done right by him and incinerated those index cards.
Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi won the Royal Society WH Heinemann Award 2003. He is currently writing a book for Faber Faber on Tallinn during the second World War and his Russian-Baltic roots
