According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), Miss Phalen broke her hip in Savannah, Ga., on the very day he arrived in Ramsdale and moved in the Haze house:
The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake. It would have been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one: she had not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty in her own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets would be whispering apart, and playing apart, and having a good time all by themselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome lodger conversed sedately in the seminude, far from prying eyes. Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues did wag. How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo. Before my actual arrival, my landlady had planned to have an old spinster, a Miss Phalen, whose mother had been cook in Mrs. Haze’s family, come to stay in the house with Lolita and me, while Mrs. Haze, a career girl at heart, sought some suitable job in the nearest city. Mrs. Haze had seen the whole situation very clearly: the bespectacled, round-backed Herr Humbert coming with his Central-European trunks to gather dust in his corner behind a heap of old books; the unloved ugly little daughter firmly supervised by Miss Phalen who had already once had my Lo under her buzzard wing (Lo recalled that 1944 summer with an indignant shudder); and Mrs. Haze herself engaged as a receptionist in a great elegant city. But a not too complicated event interfered with that program. Miss Phalen broke her hip in Savannah, Ga., on the very day I arrived in Ramsdale. (1.12)
In a letter to Humbert Humbert (who receives with the same mail a letter from Lolita, now married to Richard F. Schiller) John Farlow mentions the Haze “complications:”
I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was by Farlow’s hysterical letter. I knew his wife had died but I certainly expected him to remain, throughout a devout widowhood, the dull, sedate and reliable person he had always been. Now he wrote that after a brief visit to the U.S. he had returned to South America and had decided that whatever affairs he had controlled at Ramsdale he would hand over to Jack Windmuller of that town, a lawyer whom we both knew. He seemed particularly relieved to get rid of the Haze “complications.” He had married a Spanish girl. He had stopped smoking and had gained thirty pounds. She was very young and a ski champion. They were going to India for their honeymoon. Since he was “building a family” as he put it, he would have no time henceforth for my affairs which he termed “very strange and very aggravating.” Busybodies – a whole committee of them, it appeared – had informed him that the whereabouts of little Dolly Haze were unknown, and that I was living with a notorious divorcee in California. His father-in-law was a count, and exceedingly wealthy. The people who had been renting the Haze house for some years now wished to buy it. He suggested that I better produce Dolly quick. He had broken his leg. He enclosed a snapshot of himself and a brunette in white wool beaming at each other among the snows of Chile. (2.27)
On the other hand, “a not too complicated event” that interfered with Charlotte’s plans brings to mind VN’s play Sobytie (“The Event,” 1938). Its characters include three old women: Marfa (the cook in the Troshcheykin family), Mme Vagabundov (whose portrait Troshcheykin is eager to finish) and Eleonora Shnap (the midwife of Troshcheykin’s wife Lyubov). As I pointed out in my earlier posts, this trio seems to be parki (the Fates). The name of Mme Vagabundov (who speaks in verse) seems to hint at Ein Kind, ein Hund, ein Vagabund ("A Child, a Dog, a Tramp," 1934), a German film also known under the title Vielleicht war's nur ein Traum ("Perhaps it was Only a Dream"). Humbert Humbert’s wife Charlotte (Lolita’s mother) dies under the wheels of a truck because of a neighbor’s hysterical dog. On the previous day Charlotte received a letter from the second miss Phalen (Euphemia's sister):
I think it was exactly a week after our last swim that the noon mail brought a reply from the second Miss Phalen. The lady wrote she had just returned to St. Algebra from her sister’s funeral. “Euphemia had never been the same after breaking that hip.” As to the matter of Mrs. Humbert’s daughter, she wished to report that it was too late to enroll her this year; but that she, the surviving Phalen, was practically certain that if Mr. and Mrs. Humbert brought Dolores over in January, her admittance might be arranged. (1.22)
Humbert Humbert sometimes calls his wife "Lotte," after the main female character of Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” 1779). In Part Two (Act I) of Goethe’s Faust (1808-32) die Parzen (the Fates) appear (note that Goethe mixed up Atropos with Clotho):
Die Parzen.
Atropos.
5305
Mich die älteste zum Spinnen
Hat man dießmal eingeladen;
Viel zu denken, viel zu sinnen
Gibt’s beim zarten Lebensfaden.
Daß er euch gelenk und weich sey
5310
Wußt’ ich feinsten Flachs zu sichten;
Daß er glatt und schlank und gleich sey
Wird der kluge Finger schlichten.
Wolltet ihr bei Lust und Tänzen
Allzu üppig euch erweisen,
Denkt an dieses Fadens Gränzen,
Hütet euch! er möchte reißen!
Klotho.
Wißt! in diesen letzten Tagen
Ward die Scheere mir vertraut;
Denn man war von dem Betragen
5320
Unsrer Alten nicht erbaut.
Zerrt unnützeste Gespinnste
Lange sie an Licht und Luft,
Hoffnung herrlichster Gewinnste
Schleppt sie schneidend zu der Gruft.
5325
Doch auch ich im Jugend-Walten
Irrte mich schon hundertmal;
Heute mich im Zaum zu halten
Scheere steckt im Futteral.
Und so bin ich gern gebunden,
5330
Blicke freundlich diesem Ort;
Ihr in diesen freien Stunden
Schwärmt nur immer fort und fort.
Lachesis.
Mir, die ich allein verständig,
Blieb das Ordnen zugetheilt;
5335
Meine Weife, stets lebendig,
Hat noch nie sich übereilt.
Fäden kommen, Fäden weifen,
Jeden lenk’ ich seine Bahn,
Keinen laß ich überschweifen,
5340
Füg’ er sich im Kreis heran.
Könnt’ ich einmal mich vergessen
Wär’ es um die Welt mir bang;
Stunden zählen, Jahre messen,
Und der Weber nimmt den Strang.
Herold.
5345
Die jetzo kommen werdet ihr nicht kennen,
Wär’t ihr noch so gelehrt in alten Schriften;
Sie anzusehn, die so viel Uebel stiften,
Ihr würdet sie willkommne Gäste nennen.
Die Furien sind es, niemand wird uns glauben,
5350
Hübsch, wohlgestaltet, freundlich, jung von Jahren;
Laßt euch mit ihnen ein, ihr sollt erfahren
Wie schlangenhaft verletzen solche Tauben.
Zwar sind sie tückisch, doch am heutigen Tage,
Wo jeder Narr sich rühmet seiner Mängel,
5355
Auch sie verlangen nicht den Ruhm als Engel,
Bekennen sich als Stadt- und Landesplage.
(The Three Fates appear)
Atropos I, the eldest, I, the spinning 5305
Am lumbered with this time: I’ve
Need of lots of pondering, thinking,
To yield the tender threads of life.
So you may be soft and supple,
I sift through the finest flax: 5310
Drawn through clever fingers, double
Fine, and even, smooth as wax.
If you wish all joy and dancing,
Excessive now, in what you take,
Think about those threads: their ending. 5315
Then, take care! The threads might break.
Clotho Know that in these latter days,
I was trusted with the shears:
Since our eldest sister’s ways,
Failed to help men, it appears. 5320
She dragged all her useless spinning,
Endlessly to air and light,
While the hopes of wondrous winnings,
Were clipped and buried out of sight.
I too made a host of errors: 5325
Myself, in my younger years,
But, to keep myself in check, there’s
The case, in which I keep my shears.
And so, willingly restrained,
I look kindly on this place, 5330
In these hours, your freedom gained,
Run on and on, at your wild pace.
Lachesis I, the only one with sense,
To twist the threads am left:
My ways brook no nonsense, 5335
I’ve never hurried yet.
Threads they come, threads I wind,
Guiding each one on its track,
Letting no thread wander blind,
Twining each one in the pack. 5340
If I, once, forgot myself, my fears
For the world would give me pause:
Counting hours, measuring years,
So the Weaver holds her course.
Herald You wouldn’t recognise the ones who come now, 5345
However much you know of ancient troubles,
To look at them, the cause of many evils,
You’d call them welcome guests, and bow.
They’re the Furies: no one will believe me,
Pretty, shapely, friendly, young in years: 5350
But meet with them, you’ll quickly learn I fear,
How serpent-like these doves are to hurt freely.
Though they’re malicious, in modernity,
Where fools now boast about their sinful stories,
They too have ceased to want the Angels’ glories: 5355
Confess themselves the plague of land and city.
In “The Event” Troshcheykin compares his beautiful wife Lubov to a fury:
Трощейкин. Это, вероятно, мне всё снится: эта комната, эта дикая ночь, эта фурия. Иначе я отказываюсь понимать.
I must be dreaming of that room, that wild night, that fury. Otherwise I refuse to understand. (Act Three)
As she speaks to her sister Vera, Lyubov compares the mail box that contained her letter to Barbashin to a bomb:
Любовь. Да, слёзы, озноб... Уехал по делам на два месяца, а тут подвернулся Алёша, с мечтами, с вёдрами краски. Я притворилась, что меня закружило, -- да и Алёши было как-то жаль. Он был такой детский, такой беспомощный. И я тогда написала это ужасное письмо Лёне: помнишь, мы смотрели с тобой посреди ночи на почтовый ящик, где оно уже лежало, и казалось, что ящик разбух и сейчас разорвётся, как бомба. (Act One)
At Antonina Pavlovna’s birthday party Mme Vagabundov wonders if Barbashin (the killer of whom Troshcheykin is mortally afraid but with, but off whom Lyubov is still in love) has enough aplomb (ambition) to hurl a bomb:
Вагабундова.
Может быть, метнёт бомбу?
А, -- хватит апломбу?
Вот метнёт
и всех нас
сейчас -- сейчас
разорвёт. (Act Two)
To this Antonina Pavlovna (Troshcheykin’s mother-in-law, a lady writer) replies that she has no fear for her life, because in India there is a superstition that only great people die on their birthdays: zakon tselykh chisel (the law of whole numbers):
Антонина Павловна. За себя я спокойна. В Индии есть поверье, что только великие люди умирают в день своего рождения. Закон целых чисел.
Любовь. Такого поверья нет, мамочка. (Act Two)
According to Lyubov, such a superstition does not exist. The action in VN’s play takes place on Antonina Pavlovna’s fiftieth birthday. It seems that two days later, on her dead son’s fifth birthday, Lyubov commits suicide (stabs herself, like Shakespeare’s Othello) and in the dream of death (mentioned by Hamlet in his famous monologue) dreams of Salvator Waltz (the main character in VN’s play “The Waltz Invention,” 1938). The eleven generals in “The Event” resemble the mystics in Alexander Blok’s play Balaganchik (“The Puppet Show,” 1906). In the Russian version (1967) of Lolita Vivian Darkbloom (Clare Quilty's co-author, anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) becomes Vivian Damor-Blok.
At the end of the novel Humbert Humbert (who dies in legal captivity a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) says that Lolita will probably survive him by many years. But from the Foreword of John Ray, Jr. we know that Mrs. Richard F. Schiller outlived Humbert Humbert only by forty days and died in childbirth, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star (a settlement in the remotest Northwest). A few days later Lolita (who was born on Jan. 1, 1935) would have been eighteen. One is tempted to assume that the evil Fate (Atropos) who cuts the thread of Lolita’s life is the ghost of her mother (according to John Ray, Jr., “the caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk”). According to Humbert Humbert,Charlotte never loved her daughter:
Of my Lolita she seldom spoke – more seldom, in fact, than she did of the blurred, blond male baby whose photograph to the exclusion of all others adorned our bleak bedroom. In one of her tasteless reveries, she predicted that the dead infant’s soul would return to earth in the form of the child she would bear in her present wedlock. And although I felt no special urge to supply the Humbert line with a replica of Harold’s production (Lolita, with an incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child), it occurred to me that a prolonged confinement, with a nice Cesarean operation and other complications in a safe maternity ward sometime next spring, would give me a chance to be alone with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps - and gorge the limp nymphet with sleeping pills.
Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially vicious was that she had gone out of her way to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool’s book she had (A guide to Your Child’s Development), published in Chicago. The rigmarole went year by year, and Mom was supposed to fill out a kind of inventory at each of her child’s birthdays. On Lo’s twelfth, January 1, 1947, Charlotte Haze, ne Becker, had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under “Your Child’s Personality”: aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, co-operative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening. With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife’s mild nature, she attacked and routed such of Lo’s little belongings that had wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many hypnotized bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an upset stomach (the result of my trying to improve on her sauces) had prevented me from accompanying her to church, I deceived her with one of Lolita’s anklets. And then, her attitude toward my saporous darling’s letters! (1.19)
After Charlotte’s death Humbert Humbert fears her ghost:
So artistically did I impersonate the calm of ultimate despair, the hush before some crazy outburst, that the perfect Farlows removed me to their house. They had a good cellar, as cellars go in this country; and that was helpful, for I feared insomnia and a ghost. (1.23)
Two other Fates in Lolita seem to be Miss Phalen and her sister. Die Parzen (the Fates) in Goethe's Faust bring to mind Robert Browning's poem Paracelsus (1835) in which Paracelsus (who was, like Faust, an alchemist) mentions a luminous haze that links star to star:
Even as a luminous haze links star to star,
I would supply all chasms with music, breathing
Mysterious motions of the soul, no way
To be defined save in strange melodies. (Part II)
In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri says that he cut up music like a corpse and measured harmony by algebra:
Звуки умертвив,
Музыку я разъял, как труп. Поверил
Я алгеброй гармонию.
Having stifled sounds,
I cut up music like a corpse. I measured
Harmony by algebra. (scene I)
In his Stikhi, sochinyonnye noch'yu vo vremya bessonitsy ("Verses Composed at Night during the Insomnia," 1830) Pushkin mentions parki bab'ye lepetan'ye (a Fate's womanish babble) and zhizni mysh'ya begotnya (life's mousey bustle):
Мне не спится, нет огня;
Всюду мрак и сон докучный.
Ход часов лишь однозвучный
Раздаётся близ меня,
Парки бабье лепетанье,
Спящей ночи трепетанье,
Жизни мышья беготня...
Что тревожишь ты меня?
Что ты значишь, скучный шёпот?
Укоризна, или ропот
Мной утраченного дня?
От меня чего ты хочешь?
Ты зовёшь или пророчишь?
Я понять тебя хочу,
Смысла я в тебе ищу...
I can't sleep, the light is out;
Chasing senseless dreams in gloom.
Clocks at once, inside my room,
Somewhere next to me, resound.
Parcae's soft and mild chatter,
Sleeping twilight's noisy flutter,
Life's commotion -- so insane..
Why am I to feel this pain?
What's your meaning, boring mumble?
Disapproving, do you grumble
Of the day I spent in vain?
What has made you so compelling?
Are you calling or foretelling?
I just want to understand,
Thus I'm seeking your intent...
(transl. M. Kneller)
After her mother's bithday party Lyubov with a pensive smile looks at a mouse (an illusion of the mouse) that appeared from the chink in her husband's studio:
Опять мастерская. Мячи на картине дописаны. Любовь одна. Смотрит в окно, затем медленно заводит штору. На столике забытая Рёвшиным с утра коробочка папирос. Закуривает. Садится. Мышь (иллюзия мыши), пользуясь тишиной, выходит из щели, и Любовь следит за ней с улыбкой; осторожно меняет положение тела, нагибаясь вперёд, но вот -- мышь укатилась. Слева входит Марфа.
Любовь. Тут опять мышка.
Марфа. А на кухне тараканы. Всё одно к одному. (Act Three)
Jean Farlow (John's first wife who dies of cancer) is an amateur painter. Farlow's second wife is Spanish. Describing his stay in Elphinstone (the town in which Lolita is abducted from him by Quilty), Humbert Humbert “quotes” Robert Browning’s poem Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister:
No doubt, I was a little delirious – and on the following day I was still a vibration rather than a solid, for when I looked out of the bathroom window at the adjacent lawn, I saw Dolly’s beautiful young bicycle propped up there on its support, the graceful front wheel looking away from me, as it always did, and a sparrow perched on the saddle – but it was the landlady’s bike, and smiling a little, and shaking my poor head over my fond fancies, I tottered back to my bed, and lay as quiet as a saint
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores,
On a patch of sunny green
With Sanchicha reading stories
In a movie magazine
which was represented by numerous specimens wherever Dolores landed, and there was some great national celebration in town judging by the firecrackers, veritable bombs, that exploded all the time, and at five minutes to two p. m. I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it. (2.22)
In the same chapter Humbert Humbert mentions Goethe's Erlkönig:
Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. (ibid.)
In "The Event" Lyubov compares her husband to the infant from Lesnoy tsar' ("The Forest King"), Zhukovski's version of Goethe's Erlkönig:
Любовь. Ну, ты совсем как младенец из "Лесного царя".
Lyubov. You are like the infant in Erlkoenig. (Act Three)
Lyubov tells her husband that he always was a coward and after her child’s death feared his poor small ghost:
Любовь. Ты всегда был трусом. Когда мой ребёнок умер, ты боялся его бедной маленькой тени и принимал на ночь валерьянку. Когда тебя хамским образом облаял какой-то брандмайор за портрет, за ошибку в мундире, ты смолчал и переделал. Когда однажды мы шли по Заводской и два каких-то гогочущих хулигана плыли сзади и разбирали меня по статям, ты притворился, что ничего не слышишь, а сам был бледен, как... как телятина. (Act Three)
Leaving The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together), Humbert Humbert has a feeling as if he were sitting with the small ghost of somebody he has just killed:
More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed. (1.32)
See also my post "Miss Phalen & St. Algebra in Lolita; male of geometrid in Speak, Memory; phalène in Ada" (https://thenabokovian.org/node/35658).