The Original of Laura

The Final

Work by

the Modern

Era's Most

Ingenious

Writer

For 32 years the heirs of Vladimir Nabokov safeguarded the literary giant's last novel in a vault in Switzerland while they wrestled with his request to destroy the unfinished manu­script. The decision ivas ultimately left to son Dmitri and deferred till noiv: This month Alfred A. Knopf will publish The Original of Laura (or Dying Is Fun), an event for readers the world over, playboy is proud to publish an exclusive excerpt and introduce another of Nabokov's mystifying and mythic heroines, Flora, the subject of a novel within the novel.

'A.

lora's] husband...was a writer...—at least, after a fashion. Fat men beat their wives, it is said, and he certainly looked fierce when he caught her riffling through his papers. He pretended to slam down a marble paperweight and crush this weak little hand (displaying the little hand in febrile motion). Actually she was search­ing for a silly business letter—and not in the least trying to decipher his mysterious manuscript. Oh no, it was not a work of fiction which one dashes off, you know, to make money; it was a mad neurologist's tes­tament, a kind of Poisonous Opus.... It had cost him, and would still cost him, years of toil, but the thing was, of course, an absolute

secret. If she mentioned it at all, she added, it was because she was drunk.

She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen so flat as to belie die notion of "belly." Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel—became in fact die secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems. The cup-

sized breasts of that twenty-four-year-old impatient beauty seemed a dozen years younger than she, with diose pale squinty nipples and firm form.

Her frail, docile frame when turned over by hand revealed new marvels— the mobile omoplates of a child being tubbed, die incurvation of a ballerina's spine, narrow nates of an ambiguous irresistible charm (nature's beastliest bluff, said Paul de G watching a dour old don watching boys bathing).

Only by identifying her with an un­written, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what contemporary descriptions of in­tercourse so seldom convey, because newborn and thus generalized, in the sense of primitive organisms of art as opposed to the personal achievement of great English poets dealing with an eve-

ning in the country, a bit of sky in a river, the nostalgia of remote sounds—things utterly beyond the reach of Homer or Horace.

[Flora's] grandfather, the painter Lev Linde, emigrated in 1920 from Moscow to New York with his wife Eva and his son Adam. He also brought over a large collection of

his landscapes, either unsold or loaned to him by kind friends and ignorant institutions—pictures that were said to be the glory of Russia, the pride of the people. How many times art albums had reproduced those meticulous master­pieces—clearings in pine woods, with a bear cub or two, and brown brooks be­tween thawing snow-banks, and the vast-ness of purple heaths!

Native "decadents" had been calling them "calendar tripe" for the last three de­cades; yet Linde had always had an army of stout admirers: mighty few of them turned up at his exhibitions in America. Very soon a number of inconsolable oils found themselves being shipped back to Moscow, while another batch moped in rented flats before trouping up to the attic or creeping down to the market stall.

What can be sadder than a discour­aged artist dying not from his own com­monplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion invading his once famous pictures such as "April in Yalta" or "The Old Bridge"? Let us not dwell on the choice of the wrong place of exile. Let us not linger at that pitiful bedside.

His son Adam Lind (he dropped the last letter on the tacit advice of a misprint in a catalogue) was more successful. By the age of thirty he had become a fashionable photographer. He married the ballerina Lanskaya, a delightful dancer, though with something fragile and gauche about her that kept her teetering on a narrow ledge between benevolent recognition and the rave reviews of nonentities. Her first lovers belonged mostly to the Union of Property Movers, simple fellows of Polish extraction; but Flora was probably Adam's daughter. Three years after her birth Adam discovered that the bov he

loved had strangled another, unattain­able, boy whom he loved even more. Adam Lind had always had an in­clination for trick photography and this time, before shooting himself in a Montecarlo hotel (on the night, sad to relate, of his wife's very real success in Piker's Narcisse et Nanette), he geared and focused his cam­era in a corner of the drawing room so as to record the event from different

angles. These automatic pictures of his last moments and of a table's lion-paws did not come out too well; but his widow eas­ily sold them for the price of a flat in ftiris to the local magazine Pitch, which special­ized in soccer and diabolical faits-dwen.

With her little daughter, an English gov­erness, a Russian nanny and a cosmopoli­tan lover, she settled in Paris, then moved to Florence, sojourned in London and re­turned to France. Her art was not strong enough to survive the loss of good looks as well as a certain worsening flaw in her pretty but too prominent right omoplate, and by the age of forty or so we find her reduced to giving dancing lessons at a not quite first-rate school in Paris.

Her glamorous lovers were now re­placed by an elderly but still vigorous Englishman who sought abroad a ref-

uge from taxes and a convenient place to conduct his not quite legal transac­tions in the traffic of wines. He was what used to be termed a charmeur. His name, no doubt assumed, was Hubert H. Hubert.

Flora, a lovely child, as she said herself with a slight shake (dreamy? Incredu­lous?) of her head every time she spoke of those prepubes-cent years, had a gray home life marked by

ill health, and boredom. Only some very expensive, super-Oriental doctor with long gentle fingers could have analyzed her nightly dreams of erotic torture in so-called "labs," major and minor labo­ratories with red curtains. She did not remember her father and rather disliked her mother. She was often alone in the house with Mr. Hubert, who constantly "prowled" (rodait) around her, humming a monotonous tune and sort of mesmer­izing her, enveloping her, so to speak, in some sticky invisible substance and com­ing closer and closer no matter what way she turned. For instance she did not dare to let her arms hang aimlessly lest her knuckles came into contact with some horrible part of that kindly but smelly and "pushing" old male.

He told her stories about his sad life, he told her about his daughter who was just like her, same age—twelve—same eyelashes—darker than the dark blue of the iris, same hair, blondish or rather palomino, and so silky—if he could be al­lowed to stroke it, or7'effkutrrdes levrts, like this, that's all, thank you. Poor Daisy had been crushed to death by a backing lorry on a country road—short cut home from school—through a muddy construction site—abominable tragedy—her mother died of a broken heart. Mr. Hubert sat on Flora's bed and nodded his bald head ac­knowledging all the offences of life, and wiped his eyes with a violet handkerchief which turned orange—a little parlor trick—when he stuffed it back into his

heart-pocket, and con­tinued to nod as he tried to adjust his thick outsole to a pattern of the carpet. He looked now like a not too successful conjuror paid to tell fairy tales to a sleepy child at bedtime, but he sat a little too dose. Flora wore a nightgown with short sleeves copied from that of the Mont-glas de Sancerre girl, a very sweet and depraved schoolmate, who taught her where to kick an enterprising gentleman.

A week or so later Flora happened to be laid up with a chest cold. The mer­cury went up to 38° in the

sent!^^

late afternoon and she complained of a dull buzz in the temples. Mrs. Lincl cursed the old housemaid for buying asparagus instead of aspirin and hurried to the pharmacy herself. Mr. Hubert had brought his pet a thoughtful present: a miniature chess set ("she knew the moves") with tickly-looking little holes bored in the squares to admit and grip the red and white pieces; the pin-sized pawns penetrated easily, but the slightly larger noblemen had to be forced in widi an enervating joggle. The pharmacy was perhaps dosed and she had to go to the one next to the church or else she had met some friend of hers in the street and would never return. A fourfold

smell—tobacco, sweat, rum and bad teeth—emanated from poor old harm­less Mr. Hubert; it was all very pathetic. His fat porous nose with red nostrils full of hair nearly touched her bare throat as he helped to prop the pillows behind her shoulders, and the muddy road was again, was forever a short cut between her and school, between school and death, with Daisy's bicycle 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, 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 pedaling legs hit him in the crotch. As he lurched aside, the teapot, a saucer ot raspberry jam and 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 she, Madame Lanskaya, did resemble 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.

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 organ that looked abnormally stout and at full erection had a head (concluded on page 164)

LAURA

(continued from page 48) 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 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 eager, more or less inter­changeable couple she would bicycle 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.

This is Flora of the close-set dark-blue eyes and cruel mouth recollecting in her midtwen-ties fragments of her past, with details lost or put back in the wrong order, tail between dki.ta 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.

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 enfanls, Dy a certain Dr. Freud, a madman.

The extracts came in a St. Leger d'Exuperse series of Les [grands] represenlants cte notre epoque,

though why great representatives wrote so badly remained a mystery.

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 -aw, 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 correctJy 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 non­existent 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.

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'evenlails with another Sutton coed and the Polish artist Rawitch, pronounced by some Raw Itch, by him Rah

Witch. Black fans and violet ones, fens like orange sunbursts, painted fans with dubtailed Chinese butterflies, oh they were a great hit, and one day Wild came and bought Bve {fii* 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 [Flora].

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 prompdy 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 librari-ous 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 luiura 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 Iuiura 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.

5HE WRS

OFTEN

RLONE

IN THE

HOUSE

WITH MR.

HUBERT,

WHO CON-

STRNTLY

RROUND HER.