In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions “My Cue,” a biography written by Vivian Darkbloom:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadows 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 settlement in the remotest Northwest. ‘Vivian Darkbloom’ has written a biography, ‘My Cue,’ to be published 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.
Vivian Darkbloom (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) is a lady writer, Clare Quilty's coauthor. “My Cue” hints at Cue, Quilty’s nickname mentioned by Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller) when Humbert visits her in Coalmont:
She took from the mantelpiece a concave glossy snapshot. Old woman in white, stout, beaming, bowlegged, very short dress; old man in his shirtsleeves, drooping mustache, watch chain. Her in-laws. Living with Dick’s brother’s family in Juneau.
“Sure you don’t want to smoke?”
She was smoking herself. First time I saw her doing it. Streng verboten under Humbert the Terrible. Gracefully, in a blue mist, Charlotte Haze rose from her grave. I would find him through Uncle Ivory if she refused.
“Betrayed you? No.” She directed the dart of her cigarette, index rapidly tapping upon it, toward the hearth exactly as her mother used to do, and then, like her mother, oh my God, with her fingernail scratched and removed a fragment of cigarette paper from her underlip. No. She had not betrayed me. I was among friends. Edusa had warned her that Cue liked little girls, had been almost jailed once, in fact (nice fact), and he knew she knew. Yes… Elbow in palm, puff, smile, exhaled smoke, darting gesture. Waxing reminiscent. He sawsmilingthrough everything and everybody, because he was not like me and her but a genius. A great guy. Full of fun. Had rocked with laughter when she confessed about me and her, and said he had thought so. It was quite safe, under the circumstances, to tell him…
Well, Cue - they all called him Cue.
Her camp five years ago. Curious coincidence… took her to a dude ranch about a day’s drive from Elephant (Elphinstone). Named? Oh, some silly name - Duk Duk Ranch you know just plain silly but it did not matter now, anyway, because the place had vanished and disintegrated. Really, she meant, I could not imagine how utterly lush that ranch was, she meant it had everything but everything, even an indoor waterfall. Did I remember the red-haired guy we (“we” was good) had once had some tennis with? Well, the place really belonged to Red’s brother, but he had turned it over to Cue for the summer. When Cue and she came, the others had them actually go through a coronation ceremony and then a terrific ducking, as when you cross the Equator. You know.
Her eyes rolled in synthetic resignation.
“Go on, please.”
Well. The idea was he would take her in September to Hollywood and arrange a tryout for her, a bit part in the tennis-match scene of a movie picture based on a play of his Golden Guts and perhaps even have her double one of its sensational starlets on the Klieg-struck tennis court. Alas, it never came to that.
“Where is the hog now?”
He was not a hog. He was a great guy in many respects. But it was all drink and drugs. And, of course, he was a complete freak in sex matters, and his friends were his slaves. I just could not imagine (I, Humbert, could not imagine!) what they all did at Duk Duk Ranch. She refused to take part because she loved him, and he threw her out.
“What things?”
“Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and tow boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.” (Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start.)
“What things exactly?”
“Oh, things… Oh, I - really I” - she uttered the “I” as a subdued cry while she listened to the source of the ache, and for lack of words spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and-down-moving hand. No, she gave it up, she refused to go into particulars with that baby inside her.
That made sense.
“It is of no importance now,” she said pounding a gray cushing with her fist and then lying back, belly up, on the divan. “Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I’m just not going to [she used, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler] your beastly boys, because I want only you. Well, he kicked me out.”
There was not much else to tell. That winter 1949, Fay and she had found jobs. For almost two years she hadoh, just drifted, oh, doing some restaurant work in small places, and then she had met Dick. No, she did not know where the other was. In New York, she guessed. Of course, he was so famous she would have found him at once if she had wanted. Fay had tried to get back to the Ranchand it just was not there any moreit had burned to the ground, nothing remained, just a charred heap of rubbish. It was so strange, so strange. (2.29)
Duk Duk Ranch seems to hint at Duka, Maxim Gorki's household name mentioned by Hodasevich in his memoir essay Zavtrak v Sorrento ("A Breakfast in Sorrento," 1938). The penname of Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov (1868-1936), Максим Горький (Maxim Gorki) ends in кий. While горький means "bitter," кий (kiy) is Russian for "cue." In her letter to Onegin (Eugene Onegin, Chapter Three) Tatiana mentions gor'koe muchen'ye (bitter torment):
Зачем вы посетили нас?
В глуши забытого селенья
Я никогда не знала б вас,
Не знала б горького мученья.
Души неопытной волненья
Смирив со временем (как знать?),
По сердцу я нашла бы друга,
Была бы верная супруга
И добродетельная мать.
Why did you visit us?
In the backwoods of a forgotten village,
I would have never known you
nor have known this bitter torment.
The turmoil of an inexperienced soul
having subdued with time (who knows?),
I would have found a friend after my heart,
have been a faithful wife
and a virtuous mother.
In Chapter Four (XIVL) of EO Pushkin describes Onegin's day in the country and mentions Onegin's tupoy kiy (blunt cue):
Прямым Онегин Чильд-Гарольдом
Вдался в задумчивую лень:
Со сна садится в ванну со льдом,
И после, дома целый день,
Один, в расчеты погруженный,
Тупым кием вооруженный,
Он на бильярде в два шара
Играет с самого утра.
Настанет вечер деревенский:
Бильярд оставлен, кий забыт,
Перед камином стол накрыт,
Евгений ждет: вот едет Ленский
На тройке чалых лошадей;
Давай обедать поскорей!
Onegin like a regular Childe Harold
lapsed into pensive indolence:
right after sleep he takes a bath with ice,
and then, at home all day,
alone, absorbed in calculations, armed
with a blunt cue,
using two balls,
ever since morn plays billiards.
The country evening comes; abandoned
are billiards, the cue is forgot.
Before the fireplace the table is laid;
Eugene waits; here comes Lenski,
borne by a troika of roan horses;
quick, let's have dinner!
Childe Harold (the hero of Byron's narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1812-18) brings to mind Harold Haze (Lolita's father). The characters in Lolita include Dr Byron (the Haze family doctor who gives Humbert the sleeping pills with which he drugs Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters). In his poem K moryu ("To the Sea," 1824) Pushkin says that Byron was a poet of the sea:
Там он почил среди мучений.
И вслед за ним, как бури шум,
Другой от нас умчался гений,
Другой властитель наших дум.
Исчез, оплаканный свободой,
Оставя миру свой венец.
Шуми, взволнуйся непогодой:
Он был, о море, твой певец.
Твой образ был на нём означен,
Он духом создан был твоим:
Как ты, могущ, глубок и мрачен,
Как ты, ничем неукротим.
Quilty's play Golden Guts brings to mind golden lyre mentioned by Pushkin in his poem K Vyazemskomu ("To Vyazemski," 1826):
Так море, древний душегубец,
Воспламеняет гений твой?
Ты славишь лирой золотой
Нептуна грозного трезубец.
Не славь его. В наш гнусный век
Седой Нептун земли союзник.
На всех стихиях человек ―
Тиран, предатель или узник.
So ’tis the sea, the ancient assassin
that kindles into flame your genius?
You glorify with golden lyre
Neptune's dread trident?
No, praise him not! In our vile age
gray Neptune is the Earth's ally.
Upon all elements man is a tyrant,
a traitor or a prisoner.
(VN’s translation)
In his EO Commentary (vol. III, p. 358) VN points out that Pushkin’s “epigram on Neptune” was prompted by rumors (which later proved false) to the effect that Great Britain had surrendered the political émigré, Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev, to the Russian government.
The Roman god of freshwater and the sea, Neptune makes one think of a coronation ceremony and a terrific ducking ("as when you cross the Equator") through which Quilty and Lolita had to go at Duk Duk Ranch. In his poem Pushkinu ("To Pushkin," 1815) Delvig (Pushkin's best friend at the Lyceum) mentions the ships that twice disturb the equator:
Кто, как лебедь цветущей Авзонии,
Осененный и миртом и лаврами,
Майской ночью при хоре порхающих,
В сладких грезах отвился от матери, —
Тот в советах не мудрствует, на стены
Побежденных знамена не вешает,
Столб кормами судов неприятельских
Он не красит пред храмом Ареевым,
Флот, с несчетным богатством Америки,
С тяжким золотом, купленным кровию,
Не взмущает двукраты экватора
Для него кораблями бегущими.
Но с младенчества он обучается
Воспевать красоты поднебесные,
И ланиты его от приветствия
Удивленной толпы горят пламенем.
И Паллада туманное облако
Рассевает от взоров, — и в юности
Он уж видит священную истину
И порок, исподлобья взирающий!
Пушкин! Он и в лесах не укроется,
Лира выдаст его громким пением,
И от смертных восхитит бессмертного
Аполлон на Олимп торжествующий.
...Fleets with treasures untold from America,
weighty gold that with blood has been purchased
- not for him do those ships in their wanderings
twice disturb the equator...
Like Pushkin (whose maternal great-grandfather was Abram Petrovich Hannibal, the black godson of Peter I), Vivian Darkbloom has African blood:
Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread a date in the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave ceremonies were over! She took it bravely, I must admit - and, when we discovered there was in kurortish Wace a summer theatre in full swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June evening. I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, bare-limbed - seven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that had been recruited locally (judging by the partisan flurry here and there among the audience) and were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely - Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector.
As soon as the thing was over, and manual applause - a sound my nerves cannot stand - began to crash all around me, I started to pull and push Lo toward the exit, in my so natural amorous impatience to get her back to our neon-blue cottage in the stunned, starry night: I always say nature is stunned by the sights she sees. Dolly-Lo, however, lagged behind, in a rosy daze, her pleased eyes narrowed, her sense of vision swamping the rest of her senses to such an extent that her limp hands hardly came together at all in the mechanical action of clapping they still went through. I had seen that kind of thing in children before but, by God, this was a special child, myopically beaming at the already remote stage where I glimpsed something of the joint authors - a man’s tuxedo and the bare shoulders of a hawk-like, black-haired, strikingly tall woman.
“You’ve again hurt my wrist, you brute,” said Lolita in a small voice as she slipped into her car seat.
“I am dreadfully sorry, my darling, my own ultraviolet darling,” I said, unsuccessfully trying to catch her elbow, and I added, to change the conversation - to change the direction of fate, oh God, oh God: “Vivian is quite a woman. I am sure we saw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda pop.”
“Sometimes,” said Lo, “you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married and has Negro blood.”
“I thought,” I said kidding her, “Quilty was an ancient flame of yours, in the days when you loved me, in sweet old Ramsdale.”
“What?” countered Lo, her features working. “that fat dentist? You must be confusing me with some other fast little article.”
And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy. (2.18)
Elephant (as Lolita calls Elphinstone, the city in which she eloped from Humbert with Quilty) brings to mind Hannibal's war elephants. Vivian Darbloom's My Cue also makes one think of Marina Tsvetaev's essay Moy Pushkin ("My Pushkin," 1937).