Владимир Набоков: The original of Laura

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.

"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.

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