Nabokov's Attempted Murder

Kill your darlings.

This is the command given young writers when they’re learning to edit their stories and poems. (It usually comes directly after the first piece of advice for novice authors: Quit now.)

Kill ‘em dead. The line is attributed variously now to Faulkner, now to Hemingway. Extrapolated, it’s something like, ‘take your best sentences, and get rid of them. Chances are, if you’re impressed with your own writing, you’re being too cute.’ Really it’s just another injunction highlighting the masochistic aspects of this practice. Editing is peeling away dead skin, but there’s some pain involved.

Vladimir Nabokov compares a first draft to a loogey you’ve coughed into a tissue – it’s this ugly thing that you don’t want to show anyone, but also it came from deep inside you. At the end of his life, it seems the author of Lolita and Pale Fire took the editorial call to arms a step further than most.

Nabokov died in 1977, leaving behind 138 index cards with a draft of his last novel, The Original of Laura, scribbled on them, and instructions that the cards should be destroyed. (In terms of darling killing, this is something like being an accomplice to murder, I think.) Last week, Dmitri Nabokov – Vladimir’s son – announced he was publishing the manuscript.

I’m reminded of a scene from Don Quixote, when the beautiful Marcela comes down from the hills and confronts a group of travelers. Anyone who looks upon Marcela, it’s said, will immediately fall in love with her. She’s here to tell them not to look:

"Heaven made me, as all of you say, so beautiful that you cannot resist my beauty and are compelled to love me…But until now heaven has not ordained that I love, and to think that I shall love of my own accord is to think the impossible…The limits of my desires are these mountains, and if they go beyond here, it is to contemplate the beauty of heaven and the steps whereby the soul travels to its first home."

And, having said this, and not waiting to hear any response, Marcela turned her back and entered the densest part of a nearby forest, leaving all those present filled with admiration as much for her intelligence as for her beauty. And some…gave indications of wishing to follow her, disregarding the patent discouragement they had heard.

What always bugged me about this episode was that, if Marcela doesn’t want people to see her, she shouldn’t come out of hiding. I suspect that deep down, like everyone else, she likes to be doted on from time to time.

I have the same suspicion of Nabokov’s feelings toward his ‘lost’ novel – if he wanted it destroyed, he would have destroyed it. Dmitri, at least, insinuates as much in an interview with The New York Times. "I also recalled," he said, "that when my father was asked, not very long before his death, what three books he considered indispensable, he named them in climactic order, concluding with The Original of Laura – could he have ever seriously contemplated its destruction?"

The same thing happened about eighty years ago, when Max Brod decided to publish the manuscripts that his good friend, Franz Kafka, had left behind – despite the fact that Kafka wanted his texts destroyed, as well:

Dearest Max,

My last request: Everything I leave behind me (in my bookcase, linen-cupboard, and my desk both at home and in the office, or anywhere else where anything may have got to and meets your eye), in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread; also all writings and sketches which you or others may possess; and ask those others for them in my name. Letters which they do not want to hand over to you, they should t least promise faithfully to burn themselves.

Yours,
Franz Kafka

As Dmitri doubted his father’s intentions, so too did Brod doubt Kafka’s:

Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should stand.

I am far from grateful to him for having precipitated me into this difficult conflict of conscience, which he must have foreseen, for he knew with what fanatical veneration I listened to his every word…I never once threw away the smallest scrap of paper that came from him, no, not even a post card.

Coming to the end of this blog post, I’m finding that I don’t really have a point to make. These are just things that happened. I’m not here to reprimand the authors for attempting -genuinely or not – to destroy their works. Rather I find comfort in the fact that, even on their deathbeds, these writers were still playing head games with those they held dearest. And, of course, I’m thankful to Brod and Dmitri Nabokov for not being the literal-minded readers that might actually have fulfilled their respective authors’ (faux) requests.