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 ressemble 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.
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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’?ventails 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) 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 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.
Chapter [number obscured]
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Ivan Vaughan 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 number 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.
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I, Philip Wild, Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, University of Ganglia, have suffered for the last seventeen years from a humiliating stomack 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.
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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 caf?, 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” .
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The photographer was setting up I always know she is cheating on me with a new boy friend 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 sleighride down a short slope by a kind stranger, he saw her back, her hips between his hands.
Like toads or tortoises neither saw each other’s faces.
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Winny Carr waiting for 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 the soft cover copy of Laura issued virtually at 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, fictionalised 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.”
* The text is as it appears in the novel
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Estate of Vladimir Nabokov 2009
Extracted from The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov, with an introduction by his son, Dmitri Nabokov, to be published by Penguin Classics on November 17. It is available from BooksFirst priced £22.50 (RRP £25), free p&p, on 0845 2712134;timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst