I am equally sure of the colours I saw in my final onboard dream as we approached America: the varying shades of depressing gray that colored my dream vision of a shabby, low-lying New York, instead of the exciting skyscrapers that my parents had been promising. Upon disembarking, we also saw two differing visions of America: a small flask of Cognac vanished from our baggage during the customs inspection; on the other hand, when my father (or was it my mother? Memory sometimes conflates the two) attempted to pay the cabbie who took us to our destination with the entire contents of his wallet — a hundred-dollar bill of a currency that was new to us — the honest driver immediately refused the bill with a comprehending smile.
The Original of Laura itself has, in the mind of a fevered coterie, somehow become a lost masterpiece. If no one had ever been allowed to read it, it would have stayed like that forever. Unfortunately, it turns out to be rambling, trite, and, evidently, a very early draft of some quite confused material. There is another of Nabokov’s extreme narrators, this one possessed of an unprecedented desire to mutilate himself by removing his toes, and a slightly more adult version of Dolores Haze, tormentingly juvenile and sexually provocative:
Her frail, docile frame when turned over by hand revealed new marvels — the mobile omoplates of a child being tubbed, the incurvation of a ballerina’s spine, narrow nates of an ambiguous irresistable [sic] charm.
The celebrated abstruseness of Nabokov’s vocabulary seems to keep itself going without much reference to any human reality, and without much in the way of wit, either. Was this all we were waiting for, the reader wonders? But what were you expecting? The books he published before starting work on this one— Ada, Look at the Harlequins and Transparent Things — have never been much admired, even by the specialist: .
Of the books in English, Speak Memory Pnin, Lolita and Pale Fire are enough to base Nabokov’s reputation on. Why anyone thought this last draft, written so long afterhe had lost his mojo, would turn out to be a masterpiece is a puzzle. Dmitri should have burnt it, kept it in the safe indefinitely, or, best of all, brought it out apologetically and on a small scale, immediately after his father’s death. As it is, the much discussed Original of Laura has been revealed as, in Oscar Wilde’s words, a sphinx without a secret.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.