Arthur Phillips [The Master's Sputum: Unfinished Nabokov
Novel Now Open to Examination] In 1962 novelist Vladimir Nabokov
replied, “Only ambitious non-entities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their
rough drafts. It is like passing around samples of one’s sputum.” Now,
more than 30 years after his death, we have an opportunity—against Nabokov’s
expressed wishes—to examine such a sample...
JM:
Thank heavens that Humbert wrote about the "fire of his loins"
giving no hint of inguens or intestinal hernias. Apparently he
also didn't suffer from throbbing inflamed nails and obesity, nor did his
lungs behave like Goldsworth's "incurably vitiated"
furnace exhaling a "moribund’s last breath." Neither
was his ornate recherché vocabulary, like now, touched
by medical terms long out of use (even though I prefer the indication of
"omoplates" to "scapula") - but his interest in female shoulders
and folding angel's wings is an ever present theme. Much like feet and
shoes (Cinderella's slippers, Ada's Glass shoes, peeing Ida's prune colored
rogues, Martha's red pompons), which reappear when a
"pre-coital Laura locates a pair of morocco slippers that are "foetally folded into their zippered pouch".
If there is one single thing that I'm certain about Nabokov is
his being a conjurer, ie, someone whose incessant chatter diverts attention to
what's been happening in the limelight, ie: the exhibition of his
personal note cards. In "Strong Opinions" VN speaks of "passing
around one's sputum" but, in another interview, he's proffered
his cards kept, like Hugh Person's brown-mackintosh packages, in a shoebox
- and the reader is even allowed a peek, much like now with the facsimiles of
TOoL's cards. VN's anatomy lesson is proffered, as a prophet's
head, on a plate. Was it or was it not VN's wish that this should happen to
him?
btw: tt's just occurred to me that we are seldom allowed (by
nature) to peek into higher mammal's embryonic developments, or inside
reptilian and avian eggs, but the metamorphosis of butterflies is exhibited
through its various slimy ramping stages... However, to rub off one's mortal ego
from self-referential sentences is not achievable by erasing (even
less by expunging) body parts, Wild's dolorous efforts( Philidor
wildly implicates a kind of 'friendship with pain').
Had Nabokov kept to writing in Russian, instead of English, and ranked
among the great Russian novelists and stylists, would "TOoL" also fare as
an "embryonic masterpiece"? Playing with one of Nabokov's favorite games, I must
admit that just like the "s" that changes the "comic" and the "cosmic", I note
that a similar role awaits the letter "H" metamorphs from the escathologic
into the escatologic.