Владимир Набоков - The original of Laura

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.

"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.

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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.

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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.

[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)

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.

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.