V. Nabokov

The original of Laura

A novel in fragments

CHAPTER ONE

Her husband, she answered, was a writer, too — at least, after a fashion. Fat men beat their wives, it is said, and he certainly looked fierce, when he caught her riffling through his papers. He pretended to slam down a marble paperweight and crush this weak little hand (displaying the little hand in febrile motion). Actually she was searching for a silly business letter — and not in the least trying to decipher his mysterious manuscript. Oh no, it was not a work of fiction which one dashes off, you know, to make money; it was a mad neurologist's testament, a kind of Poisonous Opus as in that film. It had cost him, and would still cost him, years of toil, but the thing was of course, an absolute secret. If she mentioned it at all, she added, it was because she was drunk. She wished to be taken home or preferably to some cool quiet place with a clean bed and room service. She wore a strapless gown and slippers of black velvet. Her bare insteps were as white as her young shoulders. The party seemed to have degenerated into a lot of sober eyes staring at her with nasty compassion from every corner, every cushion and ashtray, and even from the hills of the spring night framed in the open french window. Mrs. Carr, her hostess, repeated what a pity it was that Philip could not come or rather that Flora could not have induced him to come! I'll drug him next time, said Flora, rummaging all around her seat for her small formless vanity bag, a blind black puppy. Here it is, cried an anonymous girl, squatting quickly. Mrs. Carr's nephew, Anthony Carr, and his wife Winny, were one of those easy — going, over-generous couples that positively crave to lend their flat to a friend, any friend, when they and their dog do not happen to need it. Flora spotted at once the alien creams in the bathroom and the open can of Fido's Feast next to the naked cheese in the cluttered fridge. A brief set of instructions (pertaining to the superintendent and the charwoman) ended on: "Ring up my aunt Emily Carr," which evidently had been already done to lamentation in Heaven and laughter in Hell. The double bed was made but was unfresh inside. With comic fastidiousness Flora spread her fur coat over it before undressing and lying down. Where was the damned valise that had been brought up earlier? In the vestibule closet. Had everything to be shaken out before the pair of morocco slippers could be located infoetally folded in their zippered pouch? Hiding under the shaving kit. All the towels in the bathroom, whether pink or green, were of a thick, soggy-looking, spongy-like texture.

Let us choose the smallest. On the way back the distal edge of the right slipper lost its grip and had to be pried at the grateful heel with a finger for shoeing-horn. Oh hurry up, she said softly. That first surrender of hers was a little sudden, if not downright unnerving. A pause for some light caresses, concealed embarrassment, feigned amusement, prefactory contemplation. She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen, so flat as to belie the notion of "belly." Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel — became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems. The cup-sized breasts of that twenty-four year old impatient beauty seemed a dozen years younger than she, with those pale squinty nipples and firm form.

Her painted eyelids were closed. A tear of no particular meaning gemmed the hard top of her cheek. Nobody could tell what went on in that little head. Waves of desire rippled there, a recent lover fell back in a swoon, hygienic doubts were raised and dismissed, contempt for everyone but herself advertised with a flush of warmth its constant presence, here it is, cried what's her name squatting quickly. My darling, dushka moya (eyebrows went up, eyes opened and closed again, she didn't meet Russians often, this should be pondered). Masking her face, coating her sides, pinaforing her stomach with kisses — all very acceptable while they remained dry. Her frail, docile frame when turned over by hand revealed new marvels — the mobile omoplates of a child being tubbed, the incurvation of a ballerina's spine, narrow nates of an ambiguous irresistible charm (nature's beastliest bluff, said Paul de G watching a dour old don watching boys bathing). 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, because newborn and thus generalized, in the sense of primitive organisms of art as opposed to the personal achievement of great English poets dealing with an evening in the country, a bit of sky in a river, the nostalgia of remote sounds — things utterly beyond the reach of Homer or Horace. Readers are directed to that book — on a very high shelf, in a very bad light — but already existing, as magic exists, and death, and as shall exist, from now on, the mouth she made automatically while using that towel to wipe her thighs after the promised withdrawal. A copy of Glist's dreadful "Glandscape" (receding ovals) adorned the wall. Vital and serene, according to philistine Flora. Auroral rumbles and bangs had begun jolting the cold misty city. She consulted the onyx eye on her wrist. It was too tiny and not costly enough for its size to go right, she said (translating from Russian) and it was the first time in her stormy life that she knew anyone to take off his watch to make love. "But I'm sure it is sufficiently late to ring up another fellow (stretching her swift cruel arm toward the bedside telephone)."She who mislaid everything dialed fluently a long number. "You were asleep? I've shattered your sleep? That's what you deserve. Now listen carefully." And with tigerish zest, monstrously magnifying a trivial tiff she had had with him whose pyjamas (the idiot subject of the tiff) were changing the while, in the spectrum of his surprise and distress, from heliotrope to a sickly gray, she dismissed the poor oaf forever. "That's done," she said, resolutely replacing the receiver. Was I game now for another round, she wanted to know.

No? Not even a quickie? Well, tant pis. Try to find me some liquor in their kitchen, and then take me home. The position of her head, its trustful proximity, its gratefully shouldered weight, the tickle of her hair, endured all through the drive; yet she was not asleep and with the greatest exactitude had the taxi stop to let her out at the corner of Heine street, not too far from, nor too close to, her house. This was an old villa backed by tall trees. In the shadows of a side alley a young man with a mackintosh over his white pyjamas was wringing his hands. The street lights were going out in alternate order, the odd numbers first. Along the pavement in front of the villa her obese husband, in a rumpled black suit and tartan booties with clasps, was walking a striped cat on an overlong leash. She made for the front door.

Her husband followed, now carrying the cat. The scene might be called somewhat incongruous. The animal seemed naively fascinated by the snake trailing behind on the ground. Not wishing to harness herself to futurity, she declined to discuss another rendez-vous. To prod her slightly, a messenger called at her domicile three days later. He brought from the favorite florist of fashionable girls a banal bevy of bird-of-paradise flowers. Cora, the mulatto chambermaid, who let him in, surveyed the shabby courier, his comic cap, his wan countenance with its three days growth of blond beard, and was about to raise her chin and embrace his rustling load but he said "No, I've been ordered to give this to Madame herself." "You French?", asked scornful Cora (the whole scene was pretty artificial in a fishy theatrical way). He shook his head — and here Madame appeared from the breakfast room. First of all she dismissed Cora with the strelitzias (hateful blooms, regalized bananas, really). "Look," she said to the beaming bum, "if you ever repeat this idiotic performance, I will never see you again. I swear I won't! In fact, I have a great mind — "He flattened her against the wall between his outstretched arms; Flora ducked, and freed herself, and showed him the door; but the telephone was already ringing ecstatically when he reached his lodgings.

CHAPTER TWO

Her grandfather, the painter Lev Linde, emigrated in 1920 from Moscow to New York with his wife Eva and his son Adam. He also brought over a large collection of his landscapes, either unsold or loaned to him by kind friends and ignorant institutions — pictures that were said to be the glory of Russia, the pride of the people. How many times art albums had reproduced those meticulous masterpieces-clearings in pine woods, with a bear cub or two, and brown brooks between thawing snow-banks, and the vastness of purple heaths!

Native "decadents" had been calling them "calendar tripe" for the last three decades; yet Linde had always had an army of stout admirers; mighty few of them turned up at his exhibitions in America. Very soon a number of inconsolable oils found themselves being shipped back to Moscow, while another batch moped in rented flats before trouping up to the attic or creeping down to the market stall. What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion invading his once famous pictures such as "April in Yalta" or "The Old Bridge"? Let us not dwell on the choice of the wrong place of exile. Let us not linger at that pitiful bedside. His son Adam Lind (he dropped the last letter on the tacit advice of a misprint in a catalogue) was more successful. By the age of thirty he had become a fashionable photographer. He married the ballerina Lanskaya, a delightful dancer, though with something fragile and gauche about her that kept her teetering on a narrow ledge between benevolent recognition and the rave reviews of nonentities. Her first lovers belonged mostly to the Union of Property Movers, simple fellows of Polish extraction; but Flora was probably Adam's daughter. Three years after her birth Adam discovered that the boy he loved had strangled another, unattainable, boy whom he loved even more. Adam Lind had always had an inclination for trick photography and this time, before shooting himself in a Montecarlo hotel (on the night, sad to relate, of his wife's very real success in Piker's "Narcisse et Narcette"), he geared and focused his camera in a corner of the drawing room so as to record the event from different angles. These automatic pictures of his last moments and of a table's lion-paws did not come out too well; but his widow easily sold them for the price of a flat in Paris to the local magazine Pitch which specialized in soccer and diabolical faits-divers. With her little daughter, an English governess, a Russian nanny and a cosmopolitan lover, she settled in Paris, then moved to Florence, sojourned in London and returned to France. Her art was not strong enough to survive the loss of good looks as well as a certain worsening flaw in her pretty but too prominent right omoplate, and by the age of forty or so we find her reduced to giving dancing lessons at a not quite first-rate school in Paris. Her glamorous lovers were now replaced by an elderly but still vigorous Englishman who sought abroad a refuge from taxes and a convenient place to conduct his not quite legal transactions in the traffic of wines. He was what used to be termed a charmeur. His name, no doubt assumed, was Hubert H. Hubert. Flora, a lovely child, as she said herself with a slight shake (dreamy? incredulous?) of her head every time she spoke of those prepubescent years, had a gray home life marked by ill health and boredom. Only some very expensive, super-Oriental doctor with long gentle fingers could have analyzed her nightly dreams of erotic torture in so-called "labs," major and minor laboratories with red curtains. She did not remember her father and rather disliked her mother. She was often alone in the house with Mr. Hubert, who constantly "prowled" (rodait) around her, humming a monotonous tune and sort of mesmerizing her, enveloping her, so to speak in some sticky invisible substance and coming closer and closer no matter what way she turned. For instance she did not dart-to let her arms hang aimlessly lest her knuckles came into contact with some horrible part of that kindly but smelly and "pushing" old male.

He told her stories about his sad life, he told her about his daughter who was just like her, same age — twelve — same eyelashes — darker than the dark blue of the iris, same hair, blondish or rather palomino, and so silky — if he could be allowed to stroke it, or l'effleurer des lèvres, like this, that's all, thank you. Poor Daisy had been crushed to death by a backing lorry on a country road — short cut home from school — through a muddy construction site — abominable tragedy — her mother died of a broken heart. Mr. Hubert sat on Flora's bed and nodded his bald head acknowledging all the offences of life, and wiped his eyes with a violet handkerchief which turned orange — a little parlor trick — when he stuffed it back into his heart-pocket, and continued to nod as he tried to adjust his thick outsole to a pattern of the carpet. He looked now like a not too successful conjuror paid to tell fairytales to a sleepy child at bedtime, but he sat a little too close. Flora wore a nightgown with short sleeves copied from that of the Montglas de Sancerre girl, a very sweet and deprived schoolmate, who taught her where to kick an enterprising gentleman. A week or so later Flora happened to be laid up with a chest cold. The mercury went up to 38!in the late afternoon and she complained of a dull buzz in the temples. Mrs. find cursed the old housemaid for buying asparagus instead of Aspirin and hurried to the pharmacy herself. Mr. Hubert had brought his pet a thoughtful present: a miniature chess set ("she knew the moves") with tickly-looking little holes bored in the squares to admit and grip the red and white pieces; the pin-sized pawns penetrated easily, but the slightly larger noblemen had to be forced in with an enervating joggle. 'I he pharmacy was perhaps closed and she had to go to the one next to the church or else she had met some friend of hers in the street and would never return. A fourtold smell — tobacco, sweat, rum and bad teeth — emanated from poor old harmless Mr. Hubert, it was all very pathetic. His fat porous nose with red nostrils full of hair nearly touched her bare throat as he helped to prop the pillows behind her shoulders, and the muddy road was again, was for ever a short cut between her and school, between school and death, with Daisy's bicycle wobbling in the indelible fog. She, too, had "known the moves," and had loved the en passant trick as one loves a new toy, but it cropped up so seldom, though he tried to prepare those magic positions where the ghost of a pawn can be captured on the square it has crossed. Fever, however, turns games of skill into the stuff of nightmares. After a few minutes of play Flora grew tired of it, put a rook in her mouth, ejected it, clowning dully. She pushed the board away and Mr. Hubert carefully removed it to the chair that supported the lea things. Then, with a father's sudden concern, he said "I'm afraid you are chilly, my love," and plunging a hand under the bedclothes from his vantage point at the footboard, he felt her shins. Flora uttered a yelp and then a few screams. Freeing themselves from the tumbled sheets her pedaling legs hit him in the crotch. As he lurched aside, the teapot, a saucer of raspberry jam, and several tiny chessmen joined in the silly fray. Mrs. Lind who had just returned and was sampling some grapes she had bought, heard the screams and the crash and arrived at a dancer's run. She soothed the absolutely furious, deeply insulted Mr. Hubert before scolding her daughter. He was a dear man, and his life lay in ruins all around him. He wanted to marry her, saying she was the image of the young actress who had been his wife, and indeed to judge by the photographs she, Madame Lanskaya, did resemble poor Daisy's mother. There is little to add about the incidental, but not unattractive Mr. Hubert H. Hubert. He lodged for another happy year in that cosy house and died of a stroke in a hotel lift after a business dinner. Going up, one would like to surmise.

CHAPTER THREE

Flora was barely fourteen when she lost her virginity to a coeval, a handsome ballboy at the Carlton Courts in Cannes. Three or four broken porch steps — which was all that remained of an ornate public toilet or some ancient templet — smothered in mints and campanulas and surrounded by junipers, formed the site of a duty she had resolved to perform rather than a casual pleasure she was now learning to taste. She observed with quiet interest the difficulty Jules had of drawing a junior-size sheath over an organ that looked abnormally stout and at full erection had a head turned somewhat askew as if wary of receiving a backhand slap at the decisive moment. Flora let Jules do everything he desired except kiss her on the mouth, and the only words said referred to the next assignation. One evening after a hard day picking up and tossing balls and pattering in a crouch across court between the rallies of a long tournament the poor boy, stinking more than usual, pleaded utter exhaustion and suggested going to a movie instead of making love; whereupon she walked away through the high heather and never saw Jules again — except when taking her tennis lessons with the stodgy old Basque in uncreased white trousers who had coached players in Odessa before World War One and still retained his effortless exquisite style. Back in Paris Flora found new lovers. With a gifted youngster from the Lanskaya school and another eager, more or less interchangeable couple she would bicycle through the Blue Fountain Forest to a romantic refuge where a sparkle of broken glass or a lace-edged rag on the moss were the only signs of an earlier period of literature. A cloudless September maddened the crickets. The girls would compare the dimensions of their companions. Exchanges would be enjoyed with giggles and cries of surprise. Games of blindman's buff would be played in the buff. Sometimes a voyeur would be shaken out of a tree by the vigilant police.

This is Flora of the close-set dark-blue eyes and cruel mouth recollecting in her midtwenties fragments of her past, with details lost or put back in the wrong order, TAIL between DELTA and SLIT, on dusty dim shelves, this is she. Everything about her is bound to remain blurry, even her name which seems to have been made expressly to have another one modeled upon it by a fantastically lucky artist. Of art, of love, of the difference between dreaming and waking she knew nothing but would have darted at you like a flatheaded blue serpent if you questioned her knowledge of dreaming.

She returned with her mother and Mr. Espenshade to Sutton, Mass., where she was born and now went to college […] At eleven she had read A quoi r?vent les enfants, by a certain Dr. Freud, a madman. The extraits came in a St. Léger d'Eric Perse series of Les grands repr?sentants de notre?poque though why great representatives wrote so badly remained a mystery.

A sweet Japanese girl, who took Russian and French because her stepfather was half French and half Russian, taught Flora to paint her left hand up to the radial artery (one of the tenderest areas of her beauty) with miniscule information, in so called "fairy" script, regarding names, dates and ideas. Both cheats had more French than Russian; but in the latter the possible questions formed, as it were, a banal bouquet of probabilities:

[DN: references are to Lomonsov and Derzhavin, Tatyana and Eugene Onegin, and Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich; [] = intentional blank space throughout]

What kind of folklore preceded poetry in Rus?; speak a little of Lom, and Derzh.; paraphrase T's letter to E.O.; what does I. I.'s doctor deplore about the temperature of his own hands when preparing to [] his patient? — such was the information demanded by the professor of Russian Literature (a forlorn looking man bored to extinction by his subject). As to the lady who taught French Literature, all she needed were the names of modern French writers and their listing on Flora's palm caused a much denser tickle. Especially memorable was the little cluster of interlocked names on the ball of Flora's thumb: Malraux, Mauriac, Maurois, Michoux, Michima, Montherland and Morand. What amazes one is not the alliteration (a joke on the part of a mannered alphabet); not the inclusion of a foreign performer (a joke on the part of that fun loving little Japanese girl who would twist her limbs into a pretzel when entertaining Flora's lesbian friends); and not even the fact that virtually all those writers were stunning mediocrities as writers go (the first in the list being the worst); what amazes one is that they were supposed to "represent an era" and that such repr?sentants could get away with the most execrable writing, provided they represent their times.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mrs. Lanskaya died on the day her daughter graduated from Sutton College. A new fountain had just been bequeathed to its campus by a former student, the widow of a shah. Generally speaking, one should carefully preserve in transliteration the feminine ending of a Russian surname (such as — aya, instead of the masculine — iy or — oy) when the woman in question is an artistic celebrity. So let it be

"Landskaya" — land and sky and the melancholy echo of her dancing name. The fountain took quite a time to get correctly erected after an initial series of unevenly spaced spasms. The potentate had been potent till the absurd age of eighty. It was a very hot day with its blue somewhat veiled. A few photographers] moved among the crowd, as indifferent to it as specters doing their spectral job. And certainly for no earthly reason does this passage resemble in rhythm another novel, My Laura, where the mother appears as "Maya Umanskaya," a fabricated film actress. Anyway, she suddenly collapsed on the lawn in the middle of the beautiful ceremony. A remarkable picture commemorated the event in "File." It showed Flora kneeling belatedly in the act of taking her mother's non-existent pulse, and it also showed a man of great corpulence and fame, still unacquainted with Flora: he stood just behind her, head bared and bowed, staring at the white of her legs under her black gown and at the fair hair under her academic cap.

CHAPTER FIVE

A brilliant neurologist, a renowned lecturer and a gentleman of independent means, Dr. Philip Wild had everything save an attractive exterior. However, one soon got over the shock of seeing that enormously fat creature mince toward the lectern on ridiculously small feet and of hearing the cock-a-doodle sound with which he cleared his throat before starting to enchant one with his wit. Laura disregarded the wit but was mesmerized by his fame and fortune.

Fans were back that summer — the summer she made up her mind that the eminent Philip Wild, PH, would marry her. She had just opened a boutique d'eventails with another Sutton coed and the Polish artist Rawitch, pronounced by some Raw Itch, by him Rah Witch. Black fans and violet ones, fans like orange sunbursts, painted fans with dubtailed Chinese butterflies oh they were a great hit, and one day Wild came and bought five (five spreading out her own fingers like pleats) for "two aunts and three nieces" who did not really exist, but never mind, it was an unusual extravagance on his part. His shyness surprised and amused Flaura. Less amusing surprises awaited her. Today after three years of marriage she had had enough of his fortune and fame. He was a domestic miser. His New jersey house was absurdly understaffed. The ranchito in Arizona had not been redecorated for years. The villa on the Riviera had no swimming pool and only one bathroom. When she started to change all that, he would emit a kind of mild creak or squeak, and his brown eyes brimmed with sudden tears.

She saw their travels in terms of adverts and a long talcum-white beach with the tropical breeze tossing the palms and her hair; he saw it in terms of forbidden foods, frittered-away time, and ghastly expenses.

The novel My Laura was begun very soon after the end of the love affair it depicts, was completed in one year, published three months later, and promptly torn apart by a book reviewer in a leading newspaper. It grimly survived and to the accompaniment of muffled grunts on the part of the librarious fates, its invisible hoisters, it wriggled up to the top of the bestsellers' list then started to slip, but stopped at a midway step in the vertical ice. A dozen Sundays passed and one had the impression that Laura had somehow got stuck on the seventh step (the last respectable one) or that, perhaps, some anonymous agent working for the author was buying up every week just enough copies to keep Laura there; but a day came when the climber above lost his foothold and toppled down, dislodging numbers seven and eight and nine in a general collapse beyond any hope of recovery.

The "I" of the book is a neurotic and hesitant man of letters who destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her. Statically — if one can put it that way — the portrait is a faithful one. Such fixed details as her trick of opening her mouth when toweling her inguen or of closing her eyes when smelling an inodorous rose are absolutely true to the original, similarly the spare prose of the author with its pruning of rich adjectives.

Philip Wild read "Laura" where he is sympathetically depicted as a conventional "great scientist" and though not a single physical trait is mentioned, comes out with astounding classical clarity under the name of Philidor Sauvage.

DN: CHAPTER SIX

Times Dec. 18, 75

"An enkephalin present in the brain has now been produced synthetically." "It is like morphine and other opiate drugs." Further research will show how and why "morphine has for centuries produced relief from pain and feelings of euphoria." [invent trade name, e.g. cephalopium; find substitute term for enkephalin]

I taught thought to mimick an imperial neurotransmitter, an awesome messenger carrying my order ot self-destruction to my own brain. Suicide made a pleasure, its tempting emptiness settling for a single line. The student who desires to die should learn first of all to project a mental image of himself upon his inner blackboard. This surface which at its virgin best has a dark-plum, rather than black, depth of opacity is none other than the underside of one's closed eyelids. To ensure a complete smoothness of background, care must be taken to eliminate the hypnagogic gargoyles and entoptic swarms which plague tired vision after a surfeit of poring over a collection of coins or insects. Sound sleep and an eye bath should be enough to cleanse the locus. Now comes the mental image. In preparing for my own experiment — a long fumble which these notes shall help novices to avoid — I toyed with the idea of drawing a fairly detailed, fairly recognizable portrait of myself on my private blackboard. I see myself in my closet glass as an obese bulk with formless features and a sad porcine stare; but my visual imagination is nil, I am quite unable to tuck Nigel Dalling under my eyelid, let alone keeping him there in a fixed aspect of flesh for any length of time. I then tried various stylizations: a Dalling-like doll, a sketchy skeleton or would the letters of my name do? Its recurrent "i" coinciding with our favorite pronoun suggested an elegant solution: a simple vertical line across my field of inner vision, I, could be chalked in an instant, and what is more I could mark lightly by transverse marks the three divisions of my physical self: legs, torso, and head.

Several months have now gone since I began working — not every day and not for protracted periods — on the upright line emblemizing me. Soon, with the strong thumb of thought I could rub out its base, which corresponded to my joined feet. Being new to the process of self-deletion, I attributed the ecstatic relief of getting rid of my toes (as represented by the white pedicule I was erasing with more than masturbatory joy) to the fact that I suffered torture ever since the sandals of childhood were replaced by smart shoes, whose very polish reflected pain and poison. So what a delight it was to amputate my tiny feet! Yes, tiny, yet I always wanted them, roily polly dandy that I am, to seem even smaller. The daytime footwear always hurt, always hurt. I waddled home from work and replaced the agony of my dapper oxfords by the comfort of old bed slippers. This act of mercy inevitably drew from me a voluptuous sigh which my wife, whenever I imprudently let her hear it, denounced as vulgar, disgusting, obscene. Because she was a cruel lady or because she thought I might be clowning on purpose to irritate her, she once hid my slippers, hid them furthermore in separate spots as one does with delicate siblings in orphanages, especially on chilly nights, but I forthwith went out and bought twenty pairs of soft, soft Carpetoes while hiding my tear-staining lace under a Father Christmas mask, which frightened the shopgirls.

For a moment I wondered with some apprehension if the deletion of my procreative system might produce nothing much more than a magnified orgasm. I was relieved to discover that the process continued sweet death's ineffable sensation which had nothing in common with ejaculations or sneezes. The three or four times that I reached that stage I forced myself to restore the lower half of my white "I" on my mental blackboard and thus wriggle out ol my perilous trance.

I, Philip [Wild], lecturer in Experimental Psychology, University of Ganglia, have suffered for the last seventeen years from a humiliating stomach ailment which severely limited the jollities of companionship in small dining rooms.

I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it — the wrong food, heartburn, constipation's leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet three minutes before a punctual engagement.

There is, there was, only one girl in my life, an object of terror and tenderness, an object too, of universal compassion on the part of millions who read about her in her lover's books. I say "girl" and not woman, not wife nor wench. If I were writing in my first language I would have said "fille." A sidewalk cafe, a summer-striped Sunday: il regardait passer les filles — that sense. Not professional whores, not necessarily well-to-do tourists but "fille" as a translation of "girl" which I now retranslate: [Here the story line jumps to sell-dissolution and this card comes much later.] from heel to hip, then the trunk, then the head [until?] nothing was left but a grotesque bust with staring eyes.]

Sophrosyne, a platonic term for ideal self-control stemming from man's rational core.

DN: CHAPTER SEVEN

I was enjoying a petit-beurre with my noon time tea when the droll configuration of that particular biscuit's margins set into motion a train of thought that may have occurred to the reader even before it occurred to me. He knows already how much T disliked my toes. An ingrown nail on one foot and a corn on the other were now pestering me. Would it not be a brilliant move, thought I, to get rid of my toes by sacrificing them to an experiment that only cowardliness kept postponing? I had always restored, on my mental blackboard, the symbols of deleted organs before backing out of my trance. Scientific curiosity and plain logic demanded I prove to myself that if I left the flawed line alone, its flaw would be reflected in the condition of this or that part of my body. I dipped a last petit-beurre in my tea, swallowed the sweet mush and resolutely started to work on my wretched flesh.

Testing a discovery and finding it correct can be a great satisfaction but it can be also a great shock mixed with all the torments of rivalry and ignoble envy. I know at least two such rivals of mine — you, Curson, and you, Croydon — who will clap their claws like crabs in boiling water. Now when it is the discoverer himself who tests his discovery and finds that it works he will feel a torrent of pride and purity that will cause him actually to pity Prof. Curson and pet Dr. Croydon (whom I see Mr. West has demolished in a recent paper). We arc above petty revenge. On a hot Sunday afternoon, in my empty house — Flora and Cora being somewhere in bed with their boyfriends — I started the crucial test. The fine base of my chalk white "I" was erased and left erased when I decided to break my hypnotrance. The extermination of my ten toes had been accompanied with the usual volupty. I was lying on a mattress in my bath, with the strong beam of my shaving lamp trained on my feet. When I opened my eyes, I saw at once that my toes were intact. After swallowing my disappointment I scrambled out of the tub, landed on the tiled floor and fell on my face. To my intense joy I could not stand properly because my ten toes were in a stale of indescribable numbness. They looked all right, though perhaps a little paler than usual, but all sensation had been slashed away by a razor of ice. I palpated warily the hallux and the four other digits of my right foot, then of my left one and all was rubber and rot. The immediate setting-in of decay was especially-sensational. I crept on all fours into the adjacent bedroom and with infinite effort into my bed. The rest was mere cleaning-up. In the course of the night I teased off the shriveled white flesh and contemplated with utmost delight

I know my feet smelled despite daily baths, but this reek was something special.

That test — though admittedly a trivial affair — confirmed me in the belief that I was working in the right direction and that (unless some hideous wound or excruciating sickness joined the merry pallbearers) the process of dying by auto-dissolution afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man.

I expected to see at best the length of each foot greatly reduced with its distal edge neatly transformed into the semblance of the end of a bread loaf without any trace of toes. At worst I was ready to face an anatomical preparation often bare phalanges sticking out of my feet like a skeleton's claws. Actually all I saw was the familiar rows of digits.

MEDICAL INTERMEZZO

"Install yourself," said the youngish suntanned, cheerful Dr. Aupert, indicating, openheartedly an armchair at the north rim of his desk, and proceeded to explain the necessity of a surgical intervention. He showed A.N.D. one of the dark grim urograms that had been taken of A.N.D.'s rear anatomy. The globular shadow of an adenoma eclipsed the greater part of the whitish bladder. This benign tumor had been growing on the prostate for some fifteen years and was now as many times its size. The unfortunate gland with the great gray parasite clinging to it could and should be removed at once. "And if I refuse? said A.N.D. "Then, one of these days[…"]

[Provisional ending]

Miss Ure, this is the Ms of my last chapter which you will, please, type out in three copies — I need the additional one for prepub in Bud, or some other magazine. Several years ago, when I was still working at the Horloge Institute of Neurology, a silly female interviewer introduced me in a silly radio series ("Modern Eccentrics") as a gentle oriental sage, founder of the manuscript in longhand of Wild's last chapter, which at the time of his fatal heart attack, ten blocks away, his typist, Sue U, had not had time to tackle because of urgent work for another employer, was deftly plucked from her hand by that other fellow to find a place of publication more permanent than Bud or Root. Winny Carr, waiting for her train on the station platform of Sex, a delightful Swiss resort lamed for its crimson plums, noticed her old friend Flora on a bench near the bookstall with a paperback in her lap. This was the soft cover copy of Laura issued virtually at the same time as its stouter and comelier hardback edition. She had just bought it at the station bookstall, and in answer to Winny's jocular remark ("hope you'll enjoy the story of your life") said she doubted if she could force herself to start reading it. Oh you must! said Winny. It is, of course, fictionalized and all that, but you'll come face to face with yourself at every corner. And there's your wonderful death. Let me show you your wonderful death. Damn, here's my train. Are we going together? "I'm not going anywhere. I'm expecting somebody. Nothing very exciting. Please let me have my book."

"Oh, but I simply must find that passage for you. It's not quite at the end. You'll scream with laughter. It's the craziest death in the world." "You'll miss your train," said Flora.

###

that shall keep it free from any interruption, tired eyes. Such as hypnagogic gargoyles or the entoplic swarms of a vertical line chalked against a plum-tinged darkness over one's collection of coins or insects.

-----------

a [?] or a little skeleton but that [?]

This goes with the self-destruction. In this very special self-hypnotic state there can be no question of getting out of touch with oneself and floating into a normal sleep (unless you are very tired at the start). To break the trance all you do is to restore in every chalk-bright detail the simple picture of yourself, a stylized skeleton on your mental blackboard. One should remember, however, that the divine delight in destroying, say, one's breastbone should not be indulged in. Enjoy the destruction, but do not linger over your own ruins lest you develop an incurable illness or die before you are ready to die.

The delight of getting under an ingrown toenail with sharp scissors and snipping off the offending corner affords the added ecstasy of finding beneath it an amber abscess whose blood flows, carrying away the ignoble pain. But with age I could not bend any longer toward my feet and was ashamed to present them to a pedicure.

[Last Chapter]

[Miss Ure, this is the MS of my last chapter which you will, please, type out in three copies — I need the additional one for prepub in Bud — or some other magazine.] Several years ago, when I was still working at the Horloge Institute of Neurology, a silly female interviewer introduced me in a silly radio series ("Modern Eccentrics") as a gentle oriental sage, founder of the manuscript in longhand of Wild's last chapter, which at the time of his fatal heart attack, ten blocks away, his typist, Sue U, had not had the time to tackle because of urgent work for another employer, was deftly plucked from her hand by that other fellow to find a place of publication more permanent than Bud or Root.

Fits in with conversation in first of book

Well, a writer of sorts. A budding and already rotting writer. After being a poor lector in some of our last dreary castles. Yes, he is a lecturer too. A rich rotten lecturer (complete misunderstanding, another world). Whom are they talking about? Her husband I guess. Flo is horribly frank about Philipp (who could not come to the party — to any party)

SELF-DESTRUCTION SEGMENT

heart or brain — when the ray projected by me reaches the lake of Dante or the Island of Reil

This goes with self-destruction

I do not believe that the spinal cord is the only or even main conductor of the extravagant messages that reach my brain. I have to find out more about that — about the strange impression I have of there being some underpath, so to speak, along which the commands of my will power are passed to and fro along the shadow of nerves, rather than along the nerves proper.

This goes with part about Laura

The photographer was setting up.

I always know she is cheating on me with a new boyfriend whenever she visits my bleak bedroom more often than once a month (which is the average since I turned sixty)

The only way he could possess her was in the most [] position of copulation; he reclining on cushions, she sitting in the fauteuil of his flesh with her back to him. The procedure — a few bounces over very small humps — meant nothing to her. She looked at the snow-scape on the footboard of the bed — at the curtains; and he holding her in front of him like a child being given a sleigh ride down a short slope by a kind stranger, he saw her lyric [] back, her hips between his hands.

Like toads or tortoises neither saw each other's faces.

[Wild's notes]

[Aurora]

My sexual life is virtually over but — I saw you again, Aurora Lee, whom as a youth I had pursued with hopeless desire at high-school balls — and whom I have cornered now fifty years later, on a terrace of my dream. Your painted pout and cold gaze were, come to think of it, very like the official lips and eyes of Flora, my wayward wife, and your flimsy frock of black silk might have come from her recent wardrobe. You turned away, but could not escape, trapped as you were among the close-set columns of moonlight and I lifted the hem of your dress — something I never had done in the past — and stroked, moulded, pinched ever so softly your pale prominent nates, while you stood perfectly still as if considering new possibilities of power and pleasure and interior decoration. At the height of your guarded ecstasy I thrust my cupped hand from behind between your consenting thighs and felt the sweat-stuck folds of a long scrotum and then, further in front, the droop of a short member. Speaking as an authority on dreams, I wish to add that this was no homosexual manifestation but a splendid example of terminal gynandrism. Young Aurora Lee (who was to be axed and chopped up at seventeen by an idiot lover, all glasses and beard) and half-impotent old Wild formed for a moment one creature. But quite apart from all that, in a more disgusting and delicious sense, her little bottom, so smooth, so moonlit, a replica, in fact, of her twin brother's charms (sampled rather brutally on my last night at boarding school), remained inset in the medallion of every following day.

And all of this goes with self-destruction segment.

[Willpower, absolute self domination.]

Electroencephalographs recordings of hypnotic "sleep" are very similar to those of the waking state and quite different from those of normal sleep; yet there are certain minute details about the pattern of the trance which are of extraordinary interest and place it specifically apart from both sleep and

As I destroyed my thorax, I also destroyed [] and the [] and the laughing people in theaters with a no longer visible stage or screen, and the [] and the [] in the cemetery of the asymmetrical heart

A process of self-obliteration conducted by an effort of the will. Pleasure, bordering on almost unendurable ecstasy, comes from feeling the will working at a new task: an act of destruction which develops paradoxically an element of creativeness in the totally new application of totally free will. Learning to use the vigor of the body lor the purpose of its own deletion, standing vitality on its head.

Nirvana blowing out [extinguishing], extinction, disappearance. In Buddhist theology extinction… and absorption into the supreme spirit, [nirvanic embrace of Brahma] bonze = Buddhist monk bonzery, bonzeries the doctrine of Buddhist incarnation Brahmahood = absorption into the divine essence.

Brahmism

[all this postulates a supreme god]

Buddhism

Nirvana = "extinction of the self" "individual existence" "release from the cycle of incarnations" "reunion with Brahma (Hinduism) attained through the suppression of individual existence" Buddhism: Beatic spiritual condition The religious rubbish and mysticism of Oriental wisdom. The minor poetry of mystical myths

[Wild A]

The novel Laura was sent to me by the painter Rawitch, a rejected admirer of my wife, of whom he did an exquisite oil a few years ago. The way I was led by delicate clues and ghostly nudges to the exhibition where "Lady with Fan" was sold to me by his girlfriend, a sniggering tart with gilt fingernails, is a separate anecdote in the anthology of humiliation to which, since my marriage, I have been a constant contributor. As to the book, a bestseller, which the blurb described as "a roman a clef with the clef lost for ever," the demonic hands of one of my servants, the Velvet Valet as Flora called him, kept slipping it into my visual field until I opened the damned thing and discovered it to be a maddening masterpiece.

[Last §][Z]

Winny Carr, waiting tor her train on the station platform of Sex, a delightful Swiss resort famed for its crimson plums, noticed her old friend Flora on a bench near the bookstall with a paperback in her lap. This was lhe soft cover copy of Laura issued virtually al the same time as its much stouter and comelier hardback edition. She had just bought it at the station bookstall and in answer to Winny's jocular remark ("hope you'll enjoy the story of your life") said she doubted if she could force herself to start reading it. Oh you must! said Winnie. It is, of course, fictionalized and all that, but you'll come face to face with yourself at every other corner. And there's your wonderful death. Let me show you your wonderful death. Damn, here's my train. Are we going together? "I'm not going anywhere. I'm expecting somebody. Nothing very exciting. Please let me have my book." "Oh, but I simply must find that passage for you. It's not quite at the end. You'll scream with laughter. It's the craziest death in the world." "You'll miss your train," said Flora.

[Five A]

Philip Wild spent most of the afternoon in the shade of a marbrosa tree (that he vaguely mistook for an opulent tropical race of the birch) sipping tea with lemon and making embryonic notes with a diminutive pencil attached to diminutive agenda book which seemed to melt into his broad moist palm where it would spread in sporadic crucifixions. He sat with widespread legs to accommodate his enormous stomach and now and then checked or made in midthought half a movement to check the fly buttons of his old fashioned white trousers. There was also the recurrent search for his pencil sharpener, which he absently put into a different pocket every time after use. Otherwise, between all those small movements, he sat perfectly still, like a meditative idol. Flora would be often present lolling in a deckchair, moving it from time to lime, circling as it were around her husband, and enclosing his chair in her progression of strewn magazines as she sought an even denser shade than the one sheltering him. The urge to expose the maximum of naked flesh permitted by fashion was combined in her strange little mind with a dread of the least touch of tan defiling her ivory skin. To all contraceptive precautions, and indeed to orgasms at its safest and deepest, I much preferred — madly preferred — finishing off at my ease against lhe softest part of her Ihigh. 'I his predilection might have been due to the unforgettable impact of my romps with schoolmates of different, but erotically identical, sexes.

he too had needed and that he would come to stay for for at least a week every other month

-----------

This [?] for a Theme Begin with [poem] etc and finish with mast, and Flora, [ascribe to (?)] picture

[X]

After a three-year separation (distant war, regular exchange of lender letters) we met again. Though still married to that hog she kept away from him and at the moment sojourned at a central European resort in eccentric solitude. We met in a splendid park that she praised with exaggerated warmth — picturesque trees, blooming meadows — and in a secluded part of it an ancient "rotonda" with pictures and music where we simply had to stop for a rest and a bite — the sisters, I mean, she said, the attendants there — served iced coffee and cherry tart of quite special quality — and as she spoke I suddenly began to realize with a sense of utter depression and embarrassment that the "pavillion" was the celebrated Green Chapel of St. Esmeralda and that she was brimming with religious fervor and yet miserably, desperately fearful, despite bright smiles and un air enjou? of my insulting her by some mocking remark.

[D0]

[The grey wall did not go up to the ceiling, but slopped at the magenta horizon of its own painted verge, where the reverse slope of the white washed ceiling used to begin.] I hit upon the art of thinking away my body, my being, mind itself. To think away thought — luxurious suicide, delicious dissolution! Dissolution, in fact, is a marvelously apt term here; for as you sit relaxed in this comfortable chair (narrator striking its armrests) and star! destroying yourself, the first thing you feel is a mounting melting from the feet upward.

In experimenting on oneself in order to pick out the sweetest death, one cannot, obviously, set part of one's body on fire or drain it of blood or subject it to any other drastic operation, for the simple reason that these are one-way treatments: there is no resurrecting the organ one has destroyed. It is the ability to stop the experiment and return intact from the perilous journey that makes all the difference, once its mysterious technique has been mastered by the student of self-annihilation. From the preceding chapters and the footnotes to them, he has learned, I hope, how to put himself into neutral, i.e. into a harmless trance and how to get out of it by a resolute wrench of the watchful will. What cannot be taught is the specific method of dissolving one's body, or at least part of one's body, while tranced. A deep probe of one's darkest self, the unraveling of subjective associations, may suddenly lead to the shadow of a clue and then to the clue itself. The only help I can provide is not even paradigmatic. For all I know, the way I found to woo death may be quite atypical; yet the story has to be told for the sake of its strange logic. In a recurrent dream of my childhood I used to see a smudge on the wallpaper or on a whitewashed door, a nasty smudge that started to come alive, turning into a crustacean-like monster. As its appendages began to move, a thrill of foolish horror shook me awake; but the same night or the next I would be again facing idly some wall or screen on which a spot of dirt would attract the naive sleeper's attention by starting to grow and make groping and clasping gestures — and again I managed to wake up bet?re bloated bulk got unstuck from the wall. But one night when some trick of position, some dimple of pillow, some fold of bed clothes made me feel brighter and braver than usual, I let the smudge start its evolution and, drawing on an imagined matter, I simply-rubbed out the beast. Three or four times it appeared again in my dreams but now I welcomed its growing shape and gleefully erased it. Finally it gave up — as some day life will give up — bothering me.

I have never derived the least joy from my legs. In tact I strongly object to the bipedal condition. The ratter and wiser I grew the more I abominated the task of grappling with long drawers, trousers and pyjama pants. Had I been able to bear the stink and stickiness of my own unwashed body I would have slept with all my clothes on and had valets — preferably with some experience in the tailoring of corpses — change me, say, once a week.

But then, I also loath the proximity of valets and the vile touch of their hands. The last one I had was at least clean but he regarded the act of dressing his master as a battle of wits, he doing his best to turn the wrong outside into the right inside and I undoing his endeavors by working my right foot into my left trouser leg. Our complicated exertions, which to an onlooker might have seemed some sort of exotic wrestling match, would lake us from one room to another and end by my sitting on the floor, exhausted and hot, with the bottom of my trousers mis-clothing my heaving abdomen.

Finally, in my sixties, T found the right person to dress and undress me: an old illusionist who is able to go behind a screen in the guise of a cossack and instantly come out at the other end as Uncle Sam. He is tasteless and rude, and altogether not a nice person, but he has taught me many a subtle trick such as folding trousers properly and I think I shall keep him despite the fantastic wages the rascal asks.

Every now and then she would turn up for a few moments between trains, between planes, between lovers. My morning sleep would be interrupted by heartrending sounds — a window opening, a little bustle downstairs, a trunk coming, a trunk going, distant telephone conversation that seemed to be conducted in conspiratorial whispers. If shivering in my nightshirt I dared to waylay her all she said would be "you really ought to lose some weight" or "I hope you transferred that money as I indicated" — and all doors closed again.

[the art of self-slaughter]

"Nietzsche argued that the man of pure will… must recognize that the there is an appropriate lime to die"

Philip Nikitin:

The act of suicide maybe "criminal" in the same sense that murder is criminal but in my case it is purified and hallowed by the incredible delight it gives.

By now I have died up to my navel some fifty times in less than three years and my fifty resurrections have shown that no damage is done to the organs involved when breaking in time out of the trance. As soon as I started yesterday to work on my torso, the act of deletion produced an ecstasy superior to anything experienced before; yet I noticed that the ecstasy was accompanied by a new feeling of anxiety and even panic.

How curious to recall the trouble I had in finding an adequate spot for my first experiments. There was an old swing hanging from a branch of an old oak tree in a corner of the garden. Its ropes looked sturdy enough; its seat was provided with a comfortable safety bar of the kind inherited nowadays by chair lifts. It had been much used years ago by my half sister, a fat dreamy pigtailed creature who died before reaching puberty. I now had to take a ladder to it, for the sentimental relic was lifted out of human reach by the growth of the picturesque but completely indifferent tree. I had glided with a slight oscillation into the initial stage of a particularly rich trance when the cordage burst and I was hurled, still more or less boxed, into a ditch full of brambles which ripped off a piece of the peacock blue dressing gown I happened to be wearing that summer day.

Thinking away oneself a melting sensation

An envahissement of delicious dissolution (what a miraculous appropriate noun!)

-----------

Aftereffect of certain drug used by anesthesiologist I have never been much interested in navel

Content

V. Nabokov
The original of Laura
A novel in fragments

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

DN: CHAPTER SIX

DN: CHAPTER SEVEN

MEDICAL INTERMEZZO

SELF-DESTRUCTION SEGMENT