WHOSE LIFE IS IT, ANYWAY?
posted by James Reel
Apropos of nothing except that it would be nice if I blogged more substantially than has been my recent norm, here's an essay I wrote about 10 years ago when I was doing a monthly literary column for an e-zine called The Whole Wired World (TW3). Yes, it's dated, but on the Internet, everything lives forever.
A NOVELIST'S FAVORITE cliché is that "my characters just took on a life of their own." This could be true, because those characters -- and fictionalized versions of novelists themselves -- are increasingly likely to cavort in some other novelist's work.
But once in a rare while, those characters' guardians will find them in suspect precincts and yank them home. On Nov. 6, Farrar, Straus & Giroux agreed to cancel its planned July '99 publication of Lo's Diary, Italian author Pia Pera's retelling of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from the point of view of the title nymphet. Lo's Diary, published in 1995 but not yet having appeared anywhere in English translation, is reportedly a parody. As such, it should be immune to charges of copyright infringement, but that's just the complaint filed in court by Nabokov's son. The American publisher backed off, which is no surprise considering how wussy American publishers have become in the '90s. [UPDATE: The book was eventually published in the United States with a scathing introduction by Nabokov's son.]
I think the battle would have been worth fighting on intellectual grounds. But I can't help feeling that the whole idea of a Lolita parody is a bad mistake, and I'm a little relieved that it will now be impossible for me to read the thing.
Pera's not being especially innovative here. These days, novelists readily appropriate characters from stories no longer under copyright. Browsing through a catalog of remaindered items recently, I spotted Fred Saberhagen's Seance for a Vampire. The plot, according to the blurb: "When two suspicious psychics offer Ambrose Altamont and his wife the opportunity to contact their recently deceased daughter, the wealthy British aristocrat hires Sherlock Holmes to investigate." Why not? Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation has been in the public domain for some time now.
Some characters never belonged to a particular author. The Hardy boys, for example, were a franchise; over the decades, the publisher farmed the adolescent sleuths out to any number of authors, all writing under the same pseudonym.
More recently, authors' estates or relevant publishers have allowed new writers to complete or continue stories from the backlists. Raymond Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe found new life, of a sort, in Robert B. Parker's completion of the novel Poodle Springs (pointedly ignored by Colette Bancroft in her Colette's List survey of Chandler, although she does have fine things to say about Parker's own work elsewhere). More recently came Alexandra Ripley's authorized sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind. Janet Maslin, in a New York Times review, deemed this a "fearless act of cultural cannibalism." She didn't mean it as a compliment.
These efforts, however misguided, were sanctioned by relevant authorities. No such permits are required for raiders pillaging the literary tombs of authors dead a century or more.
As far as The Great Unwashed were concerned, Jane Austen's novels were submerged as deep as the Titanic until Hollywood raised them to public consciousness in the 1990s. Now, in print, various completions and sequels cling like barnacles to Austen's authentic works. Further examples would be equally and needlessly depressing.
In 1975, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime launched an odd, somewhat related fad: populating novels with figures from fairly recent history. Ragtime is essentially about fictitious characters from conflicting classes in turn-of-the-century America, but they mingle with the likes of Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman and Emiliano Zapata.
One of the more recent successes in this line is Carol de Chellis Hill's Henry James' Midnight Song, a murder mystery that mixes in Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Edith Wharton and, of course, Henry James. Hill's and Doctorow's works are not traditional historical novels -- loosely accurate dramatizations of actual events. Instead, these fabricate events, pulling in historical figures as if they were stock commedia dell'arte characters to be used and abused at the author's whim. Doctorow and Hill spin their tales with a sense of historical responsibility, but I wonder about some of the other items I see in that remainders catalog ...
The Marble Orchard by William F. Nolan: "Amateur detectives Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardiner join forces to investigate the apparent ritual suicide in a Chinese cemetery of the former husband of Chandler's wife." Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin: "Caspar, an unpromising 1930s painter, falls madly in love with Caroline, a sensible typist, and when she vanishes he embarks on a terrifying comic journey through war-ravaged Europe, encountering Orson Welles, Salvador Dali and Dylan Thomas along the way."
To borrow one of Dave Barry's taglines, I am not making this up.
This is not just a publishing craze; it's hitting the boards, too. Steve Martin's mystifyingly popular play Picasso at the Lapin Agile not only revolves around an imaginary encounter between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in a Paris bistro just before World War I, but, as if it were a throw-away Saturday Night Live sketch, squanders its last scenes on an intrusion by that other defining genius of the 20th century, Elvis Presley. Shakespeare may have played fast and loose with the events in Richard III, but at least he didn't prop up the play with cameos by Julius Caesar and Prince Hal. Shakespeare had enough understanding of the character he half-borrowed, half-created to let him stand without pandering to the cheapest tastes of his restless audience. (Elizabethan theater was, by and large, bawdy, violent, lowest-common-denominator crap, just like today's TV. We can now regard the Elizabethan-Jacobean period as a golden age because the crap eventually got flushed from literary history, with only the likes of Shakespeare and Marlowe remaining as the era's Tidi-Bowl men.)
What worries me about Lo's Diary is, does Pia Pera really understand the Lolita/Lo/Dolly/Dolores Haze created by Vladimir Nabokov? Has she revived this Nabokovian nymphet without pandering to our current sanctimonious horror of child abuse? This is critical, because even though it's a novel in which an adult repeatedly engages in not-entirely-consensual sexual relations with a minor, Lolita is not at all about child abuse. It's a terrifically funny novel about obsession, repression, romantic literature, the vacuity of the American middle class, and, especially, the seriocomic self-delusion of one Humbert Humbert, an arrogant, emotionally traumatized fetishist whose tragedy is not that he's a sex offender but that he winds up deeply loving a girl who cannot love him -- or, apparently, anyone -- back.
Lolita is Humbert's story -- his tale told in his voice. Because Humbert doesn't really understand Lolita as an individual, she comes across as shallow, manipulative and cruel, with just enough flashes of intelligence to keep Humbert (and us) interested. In other words, a typical teenager. Perhaps Pera wants to rehabilitate Lolita, dress her up as a distaff Holden Caufield. This would be a more honorable literary effort than just tarting the story up as an incest novel and trotting out little Dolores Haze as a pathetic victim. Even so, I just don't want to understand Lolita as anything more than a kid broken by her own trampishness (remember that, initially, Lolita and Humbert are each the other's willing victim). I have no interest in learning more about any character in Nabokov's first-person narratives. In great novels like Lolita and Pale Fire, Nabokov's point is to parse the psyches of the delusional narrators. The other characters aren't intended as much more than funhouse mirrors to reflect, attract and bedevil the central figure.
Compare this to the works of, say, Elmore Leonard, wherein you feel that every richly odd walk-on character is another novel waiting to happen. But it's a novel you'd want to be written by Leonard himself -- not, for instance, by Pia Pera.
Literary characters seem to be up for grabs, though. Real people are, too. Individuals who do something especially heroic or heinous can easily sell their tale to the highest bidder: ABC News, The National Enquirer, a Hollywood producer. The woman who murders her children, the celebrity who bottoms out and belatedly dries out -- for a fee, these people gladly relinquish control of their own past experiences. Perhaps Nabokov's son wasn't offered a high enough fee to relinquish control of Lolita to Pia Pera.
Or perhaps he was sincerely trying to protect the integrity of his father's work and characters. But it's a futile effort. A life, real or fictitious, is no longer a grand story. It's merely a commodity.
