In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) the number 342 reappears three times. 342 Lawn Street is the address of the Haze house in Ramsdale. 342 is Humbert Humbert's and Lolita's room in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together). According to Humbert Humbert, between July 5 and November 18, 1949, he registered (if not actually stayed) at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes.
The number 342 seems to hint at Earth, Mars and Venus (the third, the fourth and the second planet of the Solar System). But in The Poems of the Seven Plantes (the seven planets are Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury and Luna) the third planet is Mars:
I am the third planet, Mars,
Wrathful, raging through the stars.
I'm full of hate - and hot and dry,
With my might I magnify
All who please me, and I will
Glorify those who war and kill.
My houses the Scorpion and the Ram.
If there is conflict, there I am.
In the Goat I'm lifted high,
In the Crab lose strength and die.
The twelve signs I travel through
Not in one year, but in two.
The fourth planet in the geocentric model, Sol (the sun) rules and reigns in the Ram:
Men call me Sol, I am the sun,
The middle planet, on I run.
Beneficent and warm and dry,
By nature my rays fill the sky.
The Lion's my house, therein I dwell,
And brightly shining I do well.
There I stand, fair and bold,
Against old Saturn's bitter cold.
In the Ram I rule and reign,
But in the Maid I fail, I wane.
And through the stars my way to wend,
Three hundred and sixty-five days I spend.
One of the constellations of the zodiac, the Ram (Aries) brings to mind Ramsdale (a town in New England where thirty-seven-year-old Humbert Humbert falls in love with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze and marries her mother Charlotte). Latin for "ram," Aries makes one think of Ares, the ancient Greek god of war who corresponds to Roman Mars.
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Humbert Humbert died in legal captivity on Nov. 16, 1952. From approximately October 23 to November 21 (depending on the year) the sun is in Scorpio (a zodiacal constellation mentioned in the above quoted verses). 1952 was a leap year. In a leap year there are 366 days. There are 24 hours in a day. Twenty-four years passed between Humbert's childhood romance with Annabel Leigh and his meeting with Lolita (who was born on Jan. 1, 1935, eleven years after Annabel's death). 366 – 24 = 342.
Saturn and Luna (the first and the seventh of the Seven Planets) remind one of Saturnia luna, the Russian name of the luna moth (Actias luna), also called the American moon moth, a Nearctic moth in the family Saturniidae.
Humbert's pseudonym seems to hint at Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940), a poet who died on Jan. 5, 1940, his fifty-fifth birthday. Volki i ovtsy ("Wolves and Sheep," 1875) is a play by Aleksandr Ostrovski (1823-86). In Ostrovski's play Groza ("The Thunderstorm," 1859) Katerina fears that she will be killed by lightning. In 1913 (on the eve of World War I) Humbert's photogenic mother died in freak accident (picnic, lightning). The second of the seven planets in the geocentric model, Jupiter was called after the Roman god of the sky and thunder:
Great Jupiter is now my name,
The second planet, strong in fame.
I am moist and truly warm,
By nature I can do no harm.
Two signs I have, their houses mine-
Archer and fishes, which golden shine.
Seek and prove me there, I pray:
Much good will surely come your way.
When in the Crab, I'm lifted high.
Weaker, in the Goat I sigh.
My passage round the twelve signs is
In twelve long years accomplished.
Humbert is guilty of killing Quilty (a playwright who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital):
Pym, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N. Y. Made debut in Sunburst . Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from Here, The Girl in Green, Scrambled Husbands, The Strange Mushroom, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming of You.
Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N. J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for children are notable. Little Nymph (1940) traveled 14,000 miles and played 280 performances on the road during the winter before ending in New York. Hobbies: fast cars, photography, pets.
Quine, Dolores. Born in 1882, in Dayton, Ohio. Studied for stage at American Academy. First played in Ottawa in 1900. Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers. Has disappeared since in [a list of some thirty plays follows].
How the look of my dear love’s name even affixed to some old hag of an actress, still makes me rock with helpless pain! Perhaps, she might have been an actress too. Born 1935. Appeared (I notice the slip of my pen in the preceding paragraph, but please do not correct it, Clarence) in The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! (1.8)
Mars's children are "butchers of men, killers of swine:"
All my trueborn children fight,
Murder, strive, and slay with might.
Angry, haughty, warlike, proud,
Liars, thieves, their boasts are loud.
Burning, cheating, robbing, hot,
Their quarrels may be just - or not.
Small teeth, small beards, tall and thin,
Noses sharp and hard rough skin.
Butchers of men, killers of swine,
Smiths and marshals, children mine.
Captains, gunners, doctors good,
All those who deal in fire and blood.
Humbert meets Lolita, because on the eve the fire destroyed McCoo's house:
Upon signing out, I cast around for some place in the New England countryside or sleepy small town (elms, white church) where I could spend a studious summer subsisting on a compact boxful of notes I had accumulated and bathing in some nearby lake. My work had begun to interest me againI mean my scholarly exertions; the other thing, my active participation in my uncle’s posthumous perfumes, had by then been cut down to a minimum.
One of his former employees, the scion of a distinguished family, suggested I spend a few months in the residence of his impoverished cousins, a Mr. McCoo, retired, and his wife, who wanted to let their upper story where a late aunt had delicately dwelt. He said they had two little daughters, one a baby, the other a girl of twelve, and a beautiful garden, not far from a beautiful lake, and I said it sounded perfectly perfect.
I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish. Nobody met me at the toy station where I alighted with my new expensive bag, and nobody answered the telephone; eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down - possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins. His family, he said, had fled to a farm he owned, and had taken the car, but a friend of his wife’s, a grand person, Mrs. Haze of 342 Lawn Street, offered to accommodate me. A lady who lived opposite Mrs. Haze’s had lent McCoo her limousine, a marvelously old-fashioned, square-topped affair, manned by a cheerful Negro. Now, since the only reason for my coming at all had vanished, the aforesaid arrangement seemed preposterous. All right, his house would have to be completely rebuilt, so what? Had he not insured it sufficiently? I was angry, disappointed and bored, but being a polite European, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in that funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even more elaborate means of getting rid of me. I saw him scamper away, and my chauffeur shook his head with a soft chuckle. En route, I swore to myself I would not dream of staying in Ramsdale under any circumstance but would fly that very day to the Bermudas or the Bahamas or the Blazes. Possibilities of sweetness on technicolor beaches had been trickling through my spine for some time before, and McCoo’s cousin had, in fact, sharply diverted that train of thought with his well-meaning but as it transpired now absolutely inane suggestion. (1.10)