According to Vadim Vadimovich, the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974), his method of choosing and blending words could hardly be called a timesaving expedient:
Since 1925 I had written and published four novels; by the beginning of 1934 I was on the point of completing my fifth, Krasnyy Tsilindr (The Red Top Hat), the story of a beheading. None of those books exceeded ninety thousand words but my method of choosing and blending them could hardly be called a timesaving expedient. (2.2)
In Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) the Hatter was sentenced to death by the ill-tempered Queen of Hearts for “murdering the time,” but he manages to escape decapitation. In retaliation, Time halts himself in respect to the Hatter, keeping him and the March Hare at 18:00 (or 6:00 pm) forever (“it’s always tea time,” as the Hatter tells Alice).
A linguistic blend of words (cf. Vadim’s method of choosing and blending words) is called a portmanteau or portmanteau word. The word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of unusual words used in "Jabberwocky.” In the phrase slithy is used to mean "slimy and lithe" and mimsy is "miserable and flimsy". Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of combining words in various ways:
You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.
In his introduction to The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Carroll uses portmanteau when discussing lexical selection:
Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious". Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious".
Vadim marries Louise Adamson (Vadim’s third wife), because he is afraid that people will think that, like Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll’s real name), he loves little girls:
The grand was the first to go--it was carried out by a gang of staggering iceberg movers and donated by me to Bel's school, which I had reasons to pamper: I am not an easily frightened man but when I am frightened I am very much frightened, and at a second interview that I had had with the schoolmistress, my impersonation of an indignant Charles Dodgson was only saved from failure by the sensational news of my being about to marry an irreproachable socialite, the widow of our most pious philosopher. Louise, per contra, regarded the throwing out of a symbol of luxury as a personal affront and a crime: a concert piano of that kind costs, she said, as least as much as her old Hecate convertible, and she was not quite as wealthy as, no doubt, I thought she was, a statement representing that knot in Logic: the double-hitch lie which does not make one truth. I appeased her by gradually overcrowding the Music Room (if a time series be transformed into sudden space) with the modish gadgets she loved, singing furniture, miniature TV sets, stereorphics, portable orchestras, better and better video sets, remote-control instruments for turning those things on or off, and an automatic telephone dialer. For Bel's birthday she gave her a Rain Sound machine to promote sleep; and to celebrate my birthday she murdered a neurotic's night by getting me a thousand-dollar bedside Pantomime clock with twelve yellow radii on its black face instead of figures, which made it look blind to me or feigning blindness like some repulsive beggar in a hideous tropical town; in compensation that terrible object possessed a secret beam that projected Arabic numerals (2:00, 2:05, 2:10, 2:15, and so forth) on the ceiling of my new sleeping quarters, thus demolishing the sacred, complete, agonizingly achieved occlusion of its oval window. I said I'd buy a gun and shoot it in the mug, if she did not send it back to the fiend who sold it to her. She replaced it by "something especially made for people who like originality," namely a silver-plated umbrella stand in the shape of a giant jackboot--there was "something about rain strangely attractive to her" as her "analyst" wrote me in one of the silliest letters that man ever wrote to man. She was also fond of small expensive animals, but here I stood firm, and she never got the long-coated Chihuahua she coldly craved. (4.6)
Vadim’s threat to shoot the clock in the mug brings to the Hatter’s crime in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.