The Sunday Times had a sweet interview with 74-year-old Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist’s son, about his father’s final work, a "not quite finished manuscript" called The Original of Laura. Nabokov wrote on index cards, often or mostly in his car, and this novel totaled 138 3×5 index cards. We all have our "masters" whose work means more to us than other perhaps equally great writers, and Nabokov is one of mine. Dmitri told the story of how his father almost burned the original manuscript of Lolita, and how its original title was Juanita Dark. His talk utterly charmed me: the thought that there’s another instance of his father’s voice about to waft over time to my ear again was like a wholly unexpected gift. It brought to mind a few things.
A few years ago a young writer friend of mine, a fiction writer, decided to go through the University of Chicago’s one-year graduate writing program. I think the only writer of note to come out of that program has been Philip Roth, but Philip Roth’s a pretty big note. And the U of Chicago is beautiful, and big time, and she was excited. So she went to her first fiction workshop. There were 13 students and the instructor asked them to write on a slip of paper the name of the writer they most wanted to emulate. The instructor then read off their choices. One student–my friend–had chosen Graham Greene; the other twelve had written down "Vladimir Nabokov."
My friend asked what I thought of this: how had all twelve picked the same author? I said in my usual wrongheaded absolutist way, "They’re not writers." She thought this was too harsh. Of course, she had a vested interest in my being wrong: she had to live among these people and honor their attempts for a year. Obviously, she wanted me to be wrong. But what I meant was, they were critics; they were well-educated sons and daughters of liberals who were looking at writing from the outside for a year before they moved on to law school, English departments, etc, while spending a U of Chicago-size tuition bill to do so. I was betting that to them Nabokov looked like a writer, someone they could defend to themselves as a writer. It was a hip, cutting-edge choice, much cooler than the election of plodding moralistic Graham Greene, whom criticism had got the goods on, and society had passed by as an emblem of "the writer."
I can’t say that I was right about those twelve students, mostly because no one ever knows where good writing is going to come from, but by the end of the year they all seemed to have left the fiction fold. But Dmitri’s words jogged another consideration: the influence his father has on young men who are actually writers.
Lolita, like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a book that implicates its audience in its crimes. The gorgeous brilliant thrill of language is in the service of a pretty sad monstrous plot. In our sound-byte culture, I seem to see many young men who understand the former, but not the tar pit of the latter, and hasten to become entertainers rather than artists. So what, you say; life’s short. I agree. But sometimes you have to sit through their, um, zaniness. Recently, I’ve seen a number of these readings. One guy prefaced his reading with a 15-minute tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, then followed with thirty minutes about his penis. I’m not kidding: a full thirty-minute you-better-laugh-you-sombitch paean to his penis. At the end of this he offered to take questions (read: prisoners). After acknowledging a woman in the back, he interrupted her as she started to speak, saying, "I refuse to take questions about my penis!" General laughter and applause. Afterward, someone said, "Man, he’s really OUT THERE!" My thought was he was out HERE; i.e., the provinces.