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with Daisy’s bycycle 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,
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clowning dully. She pushed the board away and Mr. Hubert carefully removed it to the chair that supported the tea 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 pedalling legs hit him in the crotch. As he lurched aside, the teapot, a saucer of raspberry jam,
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an[d] 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 [her] to marry him, saying she was the image of the young actress who had been his wife, and indeed to judge by the photographs
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she, Madame Lanskaya, did ressemble 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.
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Ch. Three
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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
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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
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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
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eager, more or less interchangeable couple she would bycycle 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.
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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 betwe[e]n 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 modelled upon it by a fantastically lucky artist. Of art, of love, of the
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difference between dreaming and waking she knew nothing but would have darted at you like a flatheaded blue serpent if you questioned her.
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She returned with her mother and Mr. Espenshade to Sutton, Mass. where she was born and now went to college in that town.
At eleven she had read A quoi revent les enfants, by a certain Dr Freud, a madman.
The extracts came in a St Leger d’Exuperse series of Les great representant de notre epoque though why great represent[atives] wrote so badly remained a mystery
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Ex [0]
Sutton College
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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 minuscule 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:
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Ex [1]
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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
*References are to Lomonosov and Derzhavin, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Tatanya, and Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich; [ ] is used to indicate an intentional blank space throughout. —Dmitri Nabokov
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Modern French writers
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was the little cluster of interlocked names on the ball of Flora’s thumb: Malraux, Mauriac, Maurois, Michaux, 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
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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 representants could get away with the most execrable writing, provided they represent their times.
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Chapter Four
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Mrs Lanskaya died on the day her daughter graduated from Sutton College. A new fountain had just been bequeat[h]ed 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
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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 photograph[er]s moved among the crowd as indifferent to it as specters doing their spectral job. And certainly for no earthly reason does this passage ressemble in r[h]ythm another novel,
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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
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legs under her black gown and at the fair hair under her academic cap.
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Chapter Five
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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.
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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’éventails 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 clubtailed Chinese butterflies oh they were a great hit, and one day Wild came and bought five (five spreading out her own fingers like pleats)
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for “two aunts and three nieces” who did not really exist, but nevermind, it was an unusual extravagance on his part[.] His shyness suprized and amused FLaura.
Less amusing surprises awaited her. To day after three years of marriage she 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
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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.
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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.
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Chapter [Five]*
Ivan Vaughan
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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
* This chapter was originally numbered as chapter five, but the author seems to have intended to change its number.
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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] number seven and eight and nine in a general collapse beyond any hope of recovery.
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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.
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Similarly [the] spare prose of the author with its pruning of rich adjectives
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Philip Wild read “Laura” where he is sympath[et]ically depicted as a co[n]ventional “great s[c]ientist” and though not a single physical trait is mentioned, comes out with astounding classical clarity, under the name of Philidor Sauvage
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[Chapter Six]
Times Dec. 18 75
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“An enk(c?)ephalin 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 tradename, e.g. cephalopium[;] find substitute term for enkephalin)
I taught thought to mimick an imperial neurotransmitter an aw[e]some messenger carrying my order of self destruction to my own brain. Suicide made a pleasure,
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D
its tempting emptiness
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D1
Settling for a single line
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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
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vision after a surfeit of poring over a collection of coins or insects. Sound sleep and an eyebath should be enough to cleanse the locus.
Now comes the mental image. In preparing for my own experiments—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
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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 D[a]lling 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 D[a]lling-like doll, a sketchy skeleton. Or would the letters of my name do? Its recurrent “i”
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coinciding with our favorite pronoun suggested an elegant solution: a simple vertical line across my field of inner vision 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
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The Original of Laura Page 3