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Nabokov’s Walled Garden ...
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Thursday, April 24, 2008
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/saving-laura-part-2-or-nabokovs-walled-garden/
April 24, 2008, 5:06 pm
Saving Laura, Part 2; Or, Nabokov’s Walled Garden
By Steve Coates
Vladimir Nabokov (Herbert Mitgang)
This newspaper was the principal conduit for early notice of “The Original of Laura,” the novel that Vladimir Nabokov was working on before his death in July 1977 at the age of 78, and the literary world has remained intrigued ever since. (As my colleague Greg Cowles mentioned here yesterday, Nabokov’s son and literary executor, Dmitri Nabokov, is reported to have decided to publish the manuscript — actually 50 or so pencil-inscribed index cards — which his father had enjoined should be destroyed.) In the archives, I found a couple of old articles that not only hinted at the gestation of “Laura” but that are otherwise full of lovely Nabokoviana.
The first I’ll look at is a Jan. 5, 1977, article by Herbert Mitgang, who visited Nabokov at the Montreaux Palace hotel in Switzerland, where Nabokov lived for the last two decades of his life. Nabokov wasn’t ready for one of his formal interviews, but he seemed happy to have Mitgang come by for a friendly visit and even to take his picture.
Mitgang had learned from Nabokov’s editor in New York that Nabokov had “completed his next novel in his head.”
“It’s all there: the characters, the scenes, the details. He is about to do the actual writing on 3-by-5-inch cards. The cards are then filled with words, shuffled, and, in his editor’s phrase, Mr. Nabokov will deal himself a novel.
“Its reference title is ‘Tool,’ presumably an anagram, somehow based on a character named Laura. But it is idle to speculate about the title or the meaning, his editor says, because Mr. Nabokov likes to play games with words, ideas and publishers, and it is impossible to tell until those shuffled cards are typed into a manuscript.
“And what is the new novel about? This interviewer asked.
“ ‘If I told you,’ Mr. Nabokov replied, ‘that would be an interview.’ ”
But in something of a Nabokovian twist, Mitgang could have found an answer to some of the mystery, the title of the new novel at least, in his own newspaper — in the Book Review, to be precise. Exactly a month earlier, on Dec. 5, Nabokov had responded to a Book Review survey asking for authors’ comments on “the three books they most enjoyed this year.” Movingly, Nabokov took the opportunity to inform readers about his condition (he died some seven months later) and his preoccupations — evading the question and instead listing “the three books I read during the three summer months of 1976 while hospitalized in Lausanne.” The first book is Dante’s “Inferno,” in Charles S. Singleton’s literalist translation. The second is “The Butterflies of North America,” by William H. Howe.
But the third, as he wrote, is “ ‘The Original of Laura.’ The not quite finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking before my illness and which was completed in my mind: I must have gone through it some 50 times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted 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. Perhaps because of my stumblings and fits of coughing the story of my poor Laura had less success with my listeners than it will have, I hope, with intelligent reviewers when properly published.”
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