The Original of Laura: pieces of a man

“Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what contemporary descriptions of intercourse so seldom convey…”

—from The Original of Laura

Its weight in your hands approximates that of someone’s remains. It contains the unfinished work of a dying man mediating on physical things, so there’s plenty of sex and a sense of proximity to death all the more unnerving for its relentless playfulness. It’s one of these posthumously published puzzles pulled from the fire, but to my nose smells nothing like literary betrayal nor crass cash-in. Take a look at its thick, largely blank pages: no one could mistake this for anything other than what it is: an art object; an homage; a glorious sketch. It leaves us wanting more, as it should. This “novel in fragments” doesn’t even hold all the fragments necessary to make a whole book—not even a third, I’d guess. But what remains of its narrative ambitions is also something about fragments, about the body as Death’s construction site, or rather demolition zone, a place where fragments of a person can be stolen or actually willed away, piece by piece, in this case from the feet up. There’s another title, not on the jacket but inside: Dying is Fun. I’m not sure if I buy this assertion, but if anyone could transform such irony into articulated desire it would’ve been Vladimir Nabokov.

I stalled an awfully long time on reading The Original of Laura (Knopf, $42), feeling that perhaps I should wait until I’ve read everything else by Nabokov—still working on that one!—uncertain as to how this artifact should be approached. The book came out one year ago and I’m only now finally reporting on it, feeling silly for my trepidation. It’s actually a pretty fun, fascinating read, and the context provided by the packaging and introduction is all the context anyone needs. It can’t be stated too clearly that this represents the roughest of, well, not even something we can call a draft, from an author whose prose is famous for its shining eloquence. But, as with say, the Bootleg Series recordings of Bob Dylan, this roughness, this exposure of process, is partly what’s so interesting to examine.

“Learning to use the vigor of the body for the purpose of its own deletion,” an wealthy, elderly, fat man considers science, writing, and his slow disappearance, as well as his longing for the young woman whose name rhymes with the one in the title. Flora recalls Margot from Laughter in the Dark and, quite obviously, the eponymous nymph of Lolita—she’s even molested as a child by an older man named Hubert H. Hubert. Her backstory is arguably the book’s most coherent section, and includes a suicide recorded on camera and a fatal stroke occurring in an elevator: “Going up, one would like to surmise.” The Original of Laura was the project undertaken by Nabokov during his final, sickly years in Montreux. It was clearly far from completion when he died in 1977, though his son Dmitri offers what seems to me a perfectly convincing case for its survival and publication in his painstakingly Nabakovian introduction, which possesses the faintest echo of Pale Fire, and in its concern with correcting legacy invokes The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

Designed by Chip Kidd, the cover emphasizes themes of disintegration and absence, with words fading to black before their termination. Nabokov’s text itself appears as facsimiles of the index cars upon which the author composed his works, the edges of which perforated, encouraging consumers to punch them out and perhaps rearrange them in some new order, though, jarring as many of the transitions may be, it’s hard to imagine an arrangement more satisfying than the one presented here. The Original of Laura is fractured and elliptical, a mere hint at something that might have been, peppered with sparks of the old brilliance in search of their final form, mischievously sculpted to make it almost seem intentional, and in precisely this way it’s kind of perfect.

The Man Between: the Cinematheque Ontario celebrates 20 years with the films of James Mason

I’m thinking about that scene in Lolita (1962), the one where Clare Quilty meets Humbert Humbert on the veranda of the hotel where a police convention just happens to be underway. “You have a most interesting face,” Quilty tells Humbert in parting. Yet only minutes earlier he’d told him, “You have the most normal face I’ve ever seen.” That’s James Mason.

5 Fingers (1952)

The Cinematheque Ontario, recently—and, it must be said, lamentably—re-dubbed TIFF Cinematheque, turns 20 this year, and it strikes me at least as serendipitous that among the numerous exciting programmes being unveiled in their newly launched anniversary season, which include retrospectives of legendary directors such as Eric Rohmer, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Akira Kurosawa, they’ve made room for a 14-film retrospective of James Mason, the extraordinary actor whose larger body of work I only became exposed to, and only began to fully appreciate, after becoming a Cinematheque member five years ago when I first moved to Toronto.

Julius Caesar (53)

Laura and I arrived in June of 2005, right in the middle of a heat wave and right in the middle of the Cinematheque’s Ingmar Bergman retrospective. We’d just traveled across the country with our aging Mexican poodle, had been through car trouble and illnesses along the way, and had nearly exhausted our finances completely. Nonetheless, a Cinematheque double membership was the first thing we bought with our last bit of cash. It was one of the best investments we ever made. If you’re going to be broke for a summer in Toronto, you might as well spend it watching elegantly projected masterpieces with an enthusiastic and attentive crowd.

Bigger Than Life (56)

It was at the Cinematheque that I first saw Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment (49) and Caught (49). In the former Mason plays a blackmailer, in the latter a kindly pediatrician. It was at the Cinematheque where I first saw Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (77), in which Mason plays a Nazi. And it was at the Cinematheque where I finally saw Bigger Than Life (56), Nicholas Ray’s melodrama about a middle-American schoolteacher and patriarch who’s saved from a death sentence by a wonder drug only to have it drive him off the rails. The material is fascinating and provocative, the mise en scène exacting and so tense as to make you grit your teeth, but its Mason who makes the film so enduringly troubling. With his mid-Atlantic accent, his slightly overwrought cheerfulness and contained superiority, Mason’s Ed Avery is that much more reflective a mirror of postwar American values by so obviously being an outsider, one quietly desperate to fit in, and when he’s gradually transformed from an amiable, humble, hard-working family man into a potentially murderous, ultra-conservative megalomaniac, you never quite buy that it was just the drugs that did it. It was something already there, inside the character and permeating his environment. I believe this sort of transformation, this rigorous persistence of ambiguity, even while working within the confines of the Hollywood studio system, is evidence of Mason’s genius.

North by Northwest (58)

The Cinematheque will be screening all of the above pictures minus the Peckinpah, as well as some well-known favourites such as North by Northwest (58), where we get to see Mason survey Cary Grant’s well-tailored wrong man like he’s sniffing leftovers and stroke Eva Marie Saint’s neck like he’s fitting it for a noose. And of course we get Lolita, which took Mason even farther out on a limb than Bigger Than Life. Mason’s Humbert is rather different from that of Vladimir Nabokov’s source novel, as are so many things, but Nabokov’s own adaptation, realized by Stanley Kubrick, manages to offer a slightly more palatable, if still inky-blackly comic variation on the novel’s pedophile’s confession. (As I get older and begin to re-asses Kubrick, Lolita is starting to look more or more like his best work.)

Lolita (62)

I cannot imagine another actor in this role, not even Jeremy Irons, who played Humbert in the later Adrian Lyne version (97), which corrected certain things while completely screwing up others. It’s the odd sincerity in Mason’s expression and vulnerability in his voice when he urges Quilty to understand he’s about to be killed. It’s his deliciously ridiculous attempt to cha cha cha with the very horny Charlotte Haze. It’s the hoity-toity way he enunciates words like “issue” and “toenails.” Mason’s Humbert, though afflicted with a perverse, crippling nostalgia, is indeed, as Mason’s characters usually are, urbane. He’s also bumbling. He’s nefariously manipulative, yet he’s also somehow innocent, even in the depths of his moral bankruptcy.

Odd Man Out (47)

Mason was born in 1909 in Yorkshire. He studied architecture. He co-authored a book about cats. He led several lives, it seems, before his death in 1984. He was self-effacing, yet his career, which thrived both in the UK and the US, was clearly driven by a tremendous ambition and belief in his particular talent. The Cinematheque’s programme gives a superb assessment of his singular career, and is not to be missed.

Is This Desire?: Daniel Bergner takes readers for four illuminating walks on the wild side

There’s a school of ostensible common sense that tells us our sexuality is among the most banal aspects of our identities, but a modicum of experience tells us the particularities of individual desire can form the threshold of mystery, and of deeper understanding. You meet someone, you go to bed, you discover, to use a fairly common example, that they like it a little rough. Maybe a lot. How far do you follow their lead? Spanking? Choking? Bondage? Elaborately constructed rape scenarios? How dynamically does your desire tangle with theirs? Where does play end and perversion begin? How much of this is experimentation? How much is base need? What exactly is it that this person is chasing?

Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing (Ecco, $32.99) penetrates the labyrinth of human desire not with the intention of carefully mapping it out so as to make future travels through its terrain safer. This slim, engrossing collection of four essays is concerned rather with the varying ways we cope or even thrive with the strange desires that drive us, that sometimes compel us to feel guilt or keep secrets, that separate us from the comfort of social norms. Hard conclusions are few, but the book brims with insight and compassion. However, unless you share some of the unusual proclivities reported, I can’t promise you’ll find it sexy. In fact, some of it is positively alarming.

Jacob Miller is the most harmless and, sadly, most traumatized by conformity of all Bergner’s subjects. Jacob has his quirks. An American, he really, really likes Toronto, which he considers some utopia of social harmony. And Jacob really likes feet. I know, the Toronto thing seems weirder, but it’s the foot thing that messes him up. He can’t even listen to a weather report promising however many “feet” of snow without going orgasmic. And he feels ashamed of it. Bergner’s relentlessly inquisitive but also respectful of Jacob’s fetish and his difficulty in accepting it—something certain readers may lose their patience with. (Bergner also uses this first essay to lubricate things tonally. Within the first few pages we know we’re not in for anything overly clinical, not after Bergner’s casual use of terms like cock, fuck, and, my personal favourite, one that Bergner perhaps coined: “footcunt.”)

Baroness is the presumably self-designated moniker of Bergner’s second subject, a female sadist—apparently a real rarity—and successful clothing designer, though her recent work has been tailored exclusively for latex. She maintains a happy marriage to a guy with a ponytail and zero interest in getting a brutal beating while getting off. Her other life is rife with activities that many might have a hard time defining as sex at all. She recounts the time she had a guy slathered in honey and roasted on a spit. “I feel like God,” says Baroness. “There is a stillness when I’m about to use the bullwhip, or my wand if I’m about to set someone on fire. Have you ever watched an animal that is scared, caught in headlights or conscious of your presence... you can feel time stopping.” Baroness can be hard to take, but Bergner’s open-minded immersion into her populous milieu is fascinating.

The book’s longest essay, one which originated in The New York Times Magazine, for which Bergner is a staff writer, concerns Roy, a man convicted for molesting his stepdaughter. It is the book’s most controversial and troubling foray into abnormal sex, and in some regards its most vital. Roy is sympathetic. His actual crimes were relatively minimal. He’s nothing if not regretful, seeks therapy for his urges and is engaged to an adult woman with whom he’s open about his past. But Bergner, who has two children, questions how much he can trust Roy, while asking equally difficult questions about memory and innocence and how the nature of our sexual experiences change as we reflect on them. This essay ends with the book’s most eloquent and haunting image, one of Roy literally trapped on a fence as he attempts to flee a scenario that threatens to mirror the one that he claims first drew him into his longing for preadolescent flesh.

The fourth and final of Bergner’s essays is so good it’s worth the asking price alone—it even has a happy ending. It’s a love story, about Laura, a young woman who loses her legs in a car accident, and Ron, an older photographer resolved to the fact that he’s attracted to the disabled. Laura is Ron’s perfect woman: smart, cute and legless. The mind reels at the conclusions one can draw from such a kink—I immediately thought of something I read years ago about the inherent misogyny of Gauguin’s Polynesian women, with their absent/incomplete limbs. But Bergner addresses these concerns shrewdly and concisely, all the while stressing the polemical value of Ron’s erotic photographs of disabled women.

In each of Bergner’s essays, he shifts dexterously between the narratives of his central subjects and, just as interestingly, those working to better understand and treat their cases. Most often, Bergner finds the available theories to be in direct conflict, and a consistent debate concerning nature versus nurture lies at the heart of the matter. Bergner also draws upon art and literature to elucidate the stories he tells. He discusses Nabokov’s Lolita, of course, with regards to Roy, but also the life and work of Surrealist sculptor/photographer Hans Bellmer (author of the lead-off image) and German writer/artist Unica Zürn in relation to Ron. (I found myself wishing Bergner would also discuss J.G. Ballard’s infamous novel Crash, made into the equally infamous David Cronenberg film, which has often been criticized as absurdly grotesque for its proposed equation between accident and injury and eros—a proposal which resonates intensely with Ron and Laura’s story.) Through it all there is much to learn about things like gender difference, genetics and cultural conditioning, yet there’s also a subtextual analysis of something more fluid and elusive: the psyche’s unwillingness to go with the program. When it comes to our intimate lives, The Other Side of Desire proves that each of us is stubbornly unique, and yet none of us are beyond some contact with the sublime.

Slaves to the Rhythm: Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia

Though I’ve spent my life largely involved with other forms, I’ve always subscribed to the Romantic notion that all art should aspire to the conditions of music. Music seems to possess a unique power, penetrating our interior world of dreams, memories and desires with inexplicable immediacy, yet simultaneously able to provoke flights of solidarity between individuals who might otherwise never feel united. If I have a single overriding bias when assessing the books or films I write about, it’s most certainly my attraction to anything that has some shape, rhythm or tone that works like music. 

Much as I love music however, I find myself becoming increasingly curmudgeonly in my attitude toward our easy access to and/or abundance of music in every aspect of daily public life. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera has a character lament one’s inability to sit down for a meal in a restaurant without being bombarded with music. Luis Buñuel, in his contemporaneous memoir My Last Sigh, lamented how difficult it was for him to find a bar where music was not always being played. He liked to devise his films in bars, and found that incessant background music interfered with his ability to daydream freely. 20 years and several leaps in technology later and the protests made in these books now seems quaint: the thoughtless battery of music has virtually conquered modern life. Like anything of beauty, when the presence of music becomes total it becomes taken for granted: it plays and plays, but no one hears it.

I’m getting too gloomy. The point of this column is in fact to call attention to a new book that I think functions as a welcome antidote to this musical malaise, one that celebrates the enduring bond between our species and the infinite varieties of music that haunt us. Oliver Sacks is among the world’s most successful popular science writers for a good reason. He conveys the study of neurological science through narratives that seize upon struggles with the business of living that anyone can relate to. In a voice that’s always as compassionate as it is curious, he reveals our vulnerability to the dictates of biochemistry, yet as he does so, the science to which he surrenders so much enthusiasm suddenly begins to expand life’s possibilities rather than shrink them.

Musicophilia (Knopf, $34.95) is Sacks’ latest, and in some ways –though I’m not even sure if Sacks himself is aware of it– it feels like a summation of his previous books. It frequently draws upon case studies from those books to help flesh out his concentrated exploration of our strange contract with music, a force that alone seems to break though countless barriers raised by defects of our brains. Sacks explains how the brains of talented musicians are physically distinctive from those of non-musicians, yet he spends more time marveling at the musical abilities of people whose brains might seem to promise no special talents whatsoever.

Sacks tells of 42-year-old man with no previous special interest in music who after being struck by lightning became obsessed to the point of throwing everything away for a career as a concert pianist. He tells of a man fully gripped by Alzheimer’s who remembers the baritone part of every song he ever sang in his 40 years with an a cappella group. He tells of a man with the worst case of amnesia on record, a man who doesn’t recognize the wife who’s cared for him daily since his debilitating brain infection 20 years ago, yet who can sit down at a piano and play a Bach Prelude with grace. He may not remember who Bach is, but once the notation is placed before him, he “remembers” how to play and for that time and only that time does he truly have a present.

But Sacks also relays fascinating anecdotes about those for whom music has been a sort of curse: victims of musical hallucinations, overwhelming musical sensitivity, or, perhaps most disturbing of all, a complete lack of affect toward music. (He counts William and Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Freud among those famed artists and intellectuals seemingly uninterested or even hostile toward music.) As already evidenced in Awakenings, Sacks’ famous book on his experiences with encephalitis sufferers, music has often been a tremendous therapeutic tool for treating numerous severe neurological disorders, yet it can also be the bane of some, such as the 19th century music critic Nikonov, who eventually became so painfully afflicted by musical antipathy that any music, however soft, would send him into convulsions. (Nikonov authored a pamphlet entitled Fear of Music, a title eventually appropriated by Talking Heads for one of their very best records.)

Sacks strings together his tales and observations by theme, leading to no sweeping thesis aside from the sum of his book’s parts, which seem to me to work just fine, since it’s the very mystery of music that makes these readings so compelling. The final scene described in Musicophilia features several individuals, each of them confined largely to the island constructed from their own severe dementia, suddenly brought together by music which they had no idea was coming, nor will they recall after it disappears. And it’s such moments that remind us eloquently of music’s special ephemeral quality, one so seductive and so heartbreaking.