According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert by forty days and died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of he District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite “H. H.”‘s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author’s bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this maskthrough which two hypnotic eyes seem to glowhad to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer’s wish. While “Haze” only rhymes with the heroine’s real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to “H. H.”‘s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to come under my reading lamp.
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 settlement 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.
Byron's poem Growing Old (1818) begins with the line "But now at thirty years my hair is grey:"
But now at thirty years my hair is grey—
(I wonder what it will be like at forty ?
I thought of a peruke the other day—)
My heart is not much greener ; and, in short, I
Have squandered my whole summer while ’twas May,
And feel no more the spirit to retort ; I
Have spent my life, both interest and principal,
And deem not, what I deemed, my soul invincible.
No more—no more—Oh ! never more on me
The freshness of the heart can fall like dew,
Which out of all the lovely things we see
Extracts emotions beautiful and new ;
Hived in our bosoms like the bag o’ the bee.
Think’st thou the honey with those objects grew ?
Alas ! ’twas not in them, but in thy power
To double even the sweetness of a flower.
No more—no more—Oh! never more my heart,
Canst thou be my sole world, my universe !
Once all in all, but now a thing apart,
Thou canst not be my blessing or my curse :
The illusion’s gone for ever, and thou art
Insensible, I trust, but none the worse,
And in thy stead I’ve got a deal of judgement,
Thou Heaven knows how it ever found a lodgement.
My days of love are over ; me no more
The charms of maid, wife, and still less of widow,
Can make the fool of which they made before,—
In short, I must not lead the life I did do ;
The credulous hope of mutual minds is o’er,
The copious use of claret is forbid too,
So for a good old-gentlemanly vice,
I think I must take up with avarice.
Ambition was my idol, which was broken
Before the shrines of Sorrow, and of Pleasure ;
And the two last have left me many a token
O’er which reflection may be made at leisure :
Now, like Friar Bacon’s Brazen Head, I’ve spoken,
‘Time is, Time was, Time’s past’ : a chymic treasure
Is glittering Youth, which I have spent betimes—
My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.
What is the end of Fame ? ’tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper :
Some liken it to climbing up a hill,
Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour ;
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their ‘midnight taper’,
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture and worse bust.
What are the hopes of man ? Old Egypt’s King
Cheops erected the first Pyramid
And largest, thinking it was just the thing
To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid ;
But somebody or other rummaging,
Burglariously broke his coffin’s lid :
Let not a monument give you or me hopes,
Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops.
But I, being fond of true philosophy,
Say very often to myself, ‘Alas!
All things that have been born were born to die,
And flesh (which Death mows down to hay) is grass ;
You’ve passed your youth not so unpleasantly,
And if you had it o’er again—’twould pass—
So thank your stars that matters are no worse,
And read your Bible, sir, and mind your purse.’
In the poem's penultimate line, "So thank your stars that matters are no worse," Byron mentions stars. The poem's last line, "And read your Bible, sir, and mind your purse," brings to mind Grainball (the ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town of Rita's brother):
She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back – I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tiger-moth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did – and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband – and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant – the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother was – and no doubt still is – a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and boaster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it “going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry moth.” (2.26)
Rita is primarily a short form or diminutive of Margarita, which is the Spanish and Italian form of the name Margaret. Before Lord Byron was married (Byron married Annabella Milbanke on January 2, 1815), he enjoyed a passing flirtation with Margaret Mercer Elphinstone (1788-1867), the daughter of Admiral Lord Keith (1746-1823) and Jane Mercer, a close friend of Princess Charlotte of Wales (1796-1817), daughter of the Prince Regent. Elphinstone was careful to keep Byron at arm’s length and they remained friends, and it has been suggested that his poem Love and Gold (written c.1812-13) could have been about her. In May 1814, Byron decided to send Elphinstone a present, writing in a letter:
“I send you the Arnaout [Albanian] garments, which will make an admirable costume for a Dutch Dragoon... It is put off & on in a few minutes – If you like the dress – keep it – I shall be very glad to get rid of it – as it reminds me of one of two things I don’t wish to remember. - - - To make it more acceptable – I have worn this very little – and never in England except for half an hour to Phillips – I had more of the same description but parted with them when my Arnouts went back to Tepalen and I returned to England, it will do for a masquerade.”
The costume, the very one Byron had posed in for his Phillips portrait, was now Elphinstone’s to do with as she pleased. On January 1, 1950 (Lolita's fifteenth birthday), Humbert mails Lolita's old clothes and other belongings as an anonymous gift to a home for orphaned girls on a windy lake, on the Canadian border:
Other things of hers were harder to relinquish. Up to the end of 1949, I cherished and adored, and stained with my kisses and merman tears, a pair of old sneakers, a boy’s shirt she had worn, some ancient blue jeans I found in the trunk compartment, a crumpled school cap, suchlike wanton treasures. Then, when I understood my mind was cracking, I collected those sundry belongings, added to them what had been stored in Beardsley - a box of books, her bicycle, old coats, galoshes - and on her fifteenth birthday mailed everything as an anonymous gift to a home for orphaned girls on a windy lake, on the Canadian border. (2.24)
Lord Byron died on April 19, 1824, at age 36 in Missolonghi, Greece. He died from a severe fever, likely exacerbated by medical bloodletting, while aiding the Greek war for independence. Byron's poem Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos (1810) ends in the line "For he [Leander] was drowned, and I've the ague." It seems that Lolita dies of ague on July 4, 1949, in the Elphinstone hospital. Everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, the murder of Clare Quilty and Humbert's death in prison) was invented by John Ray, Jr. (Humbert Humbert's "real" name).
Byron incorporated the sixth stanza of his poem Growing Old in Don Juan (One, I, CCXVIII). In his Eugene Onegin Commentary (vol. II, p. 15) VN quotes the first two lines ("What is the end of Fame ? ’tis but to fill / A certain portion of uncertain paper") and the last two lines ("To have, when the original is dust, / A name, a wretched picture and worse bust) of the poem's sixth stanza:
Byron went to Pope, and Pushkin went to Pichot. Pope (An Essay on Man, ep. IV, 237-38) has:
"What's fame? a fancy'd life in other's breath,
A thing beyond us, ev'n before our death."
Byron (Don Juan, I, CCXVIII, 1-2, 7-8) has:
What is the end of Fame? 'tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper:
..........
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a picture and worse bust."
Humbert's childhood love, Annabel Leigh has the same surname as Byron's half-sister and lover Augusta Leigh.