The Invisible Handout
The Nabokov The Original of Laura manuscript saga is getting, well, I don't know if you can even call it Nabokovian anymore. It's just weird.
To review, VN, who took ill suddenly and was unable to do the job himself, asked his wife to burn his final, incomplete novel TOoL. She never did, and, following her death, only child Dmitri also has demurred, although he has been whetting appetites and provoking outcry by both dangling the manuscript and also threatening to go ahead with the bonfire.
Dmitri says he reached a decision after an imagined ghostly conversation with his dead father—one in a far different key from Hamlet's talk with his dead dad.
"I have decided...that my father, with a wry and fond smile, might well have contradicted himself upon seeing me in my present situation and said, 'Well, why don't you mix the useful with the pleasurable? That is, say or do what you like but why not make some money on the damn thing?' "
And so the imagined shade of V.N., demonstrating indulgent and affectionate fondness for his son's "present situation" (it's not clear what exactly that means, but it could refer to financial or heath problems or just the worldwide outcry to save Laura), gave him ghostly permission to raise some funds with it.
Odd, but I can relate. My father gave me ghostly permission to raise some funds by mowing the lawn once.
