In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the caretakers of the various cemeteries involved who report that no ghosts walk:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” or “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore, “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlemen in the remotest Northwest. “Vivian Darkbloom” has written a biography, “My Cue,” to be publshed shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.
Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” is Lolita's married name. According to John Ray, Jr., Humbert Humbert died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start (most likely, Humbert commits suicide immediately after completing his work). At the end of his manuscript Humbert says that, if Lolita's husband does not treat her well, Humbert's specter will come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve:
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.26)
"Nerve by nerve" may hint at Gérard de Nerval (the pen name of Gérard Labrunie, 1808-55), the French writer, poet, and translator. Gerard de Nerval's collection of short prose works, poetry and a play Les Filles du feu (The Daughters of Fire, 1854) brings to mind the fires in Lolita (Humbert meets Lolita and falls in love with her, because on the eve McCoo's house was destroyed by fire; in Coalmont Lolita tells Humbert that the Duk Duk Ranch to which Quilty took her has burned to the ground). Gerard de Nerval translated into French the works of German Romantic authors, including Klopstock, Schiller, Bürger and Goethe. At the age of twenty he translated Goethe's Faust. Like Humbert, Gerard de Nerval suffered nervous breakdowns and was a patient of several mental institutions. At the age of forty-six Gerard de Nerval committed suicide by hanging himself.
On the other hand, the author of novels and short stories about Sherlock Holmes (a private detective) and Doctor Watson, Conan Doyle said: “When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.” The characters in Lolita include Shirley Holmes (the headmistress of Camp Q) and her son Charlie (Lolita's first lover who gets killed in Korea):
I reached my destination around half past two; parked my car in a pine grove where a green-shirted, redheaded impish lad stood throwing horseshoes in sullen solitude; was laconically directed by him to an office in a stucco cottage; in a dying state, had to endure for several minutes the inquisitive commiseration of the camp mistress, a sluttish worn out female with rusty hair. Dolly she said was all packed and ready to go. She knew her mother was sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean, Mr. Humbert, care to meet the camp counselors? Or look at the cabins where the girls live? Each dedicated to a Disney creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be sent over to fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room for a dance. (And perhaps afterwards she would say to somebody or other: “The poor guy looked like his own ghost.”) (1.27)
Selecting a Ghost (1883) is a story by Conan Doyle. It begins as follows:
I am sure that Nature never intended me to be a self-made man. There are times when I can hardly bring myself to realise that twenty years of my life were spent behind the counter of a grocer's shop in the East End of London, and that it was through such an avenue that I reached a wealthy independence and the possession of Goresthorpe Grange. My habits are conservative, and my tastes refined and aristocratic. I have a soul which spurns the vulgar herd. Our family, the D'Odds, date back to a prehistoric era, as is to be inferred from the fact that their advent into British history is not commented on by any trustworthy historian. Some instinct tells me that the blood of a Crusader runs in my veins. Even now, after the lapse of so many years, such exclamations as "By'r Lady!" rise naturally to my lips, and I feel that, should circumstances require it, I am capable of rising in my stirrups and dealing an infidel a blow — say with a mace — which would considerably astonish him.
The author of Lolita, VN (a Russian aristocrat with refined tastes) became a self-made man in America. In Oscar Wilde's humorous short story The Canterville Ghost (1887) the family of Hiram B. Otis (the American Minister to the court of St James's) moves to a castle haunted by the ghost of a dead English nobleman, who killed his wife and was then walled in and starved to death by his wife's brothers. Oscar Wilde is the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Lolita dies in Gray Star, a settlement in Alaska (formerly, a part of the Russian Empire).
Humbert's term for sexually attractive little girls, nymphet brings to mind "Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered" (Hamlet's words to Ophelia at the end of his famous monologue in Shakespeare's Hamlet, 3.1). The characters in Shakespeare's play include the Ghost. The name Clare Quilty (of the playwright whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita) seems to hint at the phrase "clearly guilty." In Hamlet (4.5) Gertrude says: "So full of artless jealousy is guilt, / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt." Queen Gertrude is Hamlet's mother who married Claudius (Hamlet's uncle who murdered his brother) after her husband's death. On the porch of The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) Quilty (who resembles Gustave Trapp, the Swiss cousin of Humbert's father) asks Humbert "where is her mother?" and later tells Humbert that he knew Charlotte (Lolita's mother) slightly:
“Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing farce is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything - sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre , sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere - is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today, but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégée to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables . You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next play - I have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow - you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa - curious name - who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thing - you are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work - drop that gun - with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies - drop that gun - and moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow -” (2.35)
It seems that the spirit of Charlotte (who dies under the wheels of a truck on her way to the mailbox), as well as that of Humbert's aunt Sybil (who committed suicide soon after Humbert's sixteenth birthday), have an influence on the lives of other characters (Humbert, Quilty and Lolita).