The original of Laura

by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

  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 b
ath 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.