When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) murders Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital), the latter throws back his head in a howl:
Feu. This time I hit something hard. I hit the back of a black rocking chair, not unlike Dolly Schiller’s - my bullet hit the inside surface of its back whereupon it immediately went into a rocking act, so fast and with such zest that any one coming into the room might have been flabbergasted by the double miracle: that chair rocking in a panic all by itself, and the armchair, where my purple target had just been, now void of all life content. Wiggling his fingers in the air, with a rapid heave of his rump, he flashed into the music room and the next second we were tugging and gasping on both sides of the door which had a key I had overlooked. I won again, and with another abrupt movement Clare the Impredictable sat down before the piano and played several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands tensely plunging, and his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been absent from our fight. Still singing those impossible sonorities, he made a futile attempt to open with his foot a kind of seaman’s chest near the piano. My next bullet caught him somewhere in the side, and he rose from his chair higher and higher, like old, gray, mad Nijinski, like Old Faithful, like some old nightmare of mine, to a phenomenal altitude, or so it seemed - as he rent the air - still shaking with the rich black music - head thrown back in a howl, hand pressed to his brow, and with his other hand clutching his armpit as if stung by a hornet, down he came on his heels and, again a normal robed man, scurried out into the hall. (2.35)
In Rudyard Kipling's story How the Camel got his Hump (1898) the camel lives in the middle of a Howling Desert and is a Howler himself:
In the beginning of years, when the world was so new and all, and the Animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a Camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work; and besides, he was a Howler himself. So he ate sticks and thorns and tamarisks and milkweed and prickles, most ‘scruciating idle; and when anybody spoke to him he said ‘Humph!’ Just ‘Humph!’ and no more.
Quilty is the fellow in the Dromes ads. The famous mascot on Camel cigarette packs is a single-humped dromedary camel named "Old Joe," who was sketched from a circus animal in 1913 by artist Fred Otto Kleesattel. Among the pseudonyms that Humbert has toyed with before hitting on a particularly apt one was Otto Otto:
This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesmer Mesmer” and “Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred.
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.36)
According to Humbert Humbert, it took him fifty-six days (eight weeks) to write Lolita. But only fifty-two days pass between September 25, 1952 (the day of Quilty's murder and of Humbert's arrest) and November 16, 1952 (the day of Humbert’s death in prison). Nevertheless, fifty-six days is not the author's howler. In Kipling's story, the Camel gets his hump from the Djinn because he refused to work in the first three days of the young world (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday):
‘Do you see that?’ said the Djinn. ‘That’s your very own humph that you’ve brought upon your very own self by not working. To-day is Thursday, and you’ve done no work since Monday, when the work began. Now you are going to work.’
‘How can I,’ said the Camel, ‘with this humph on my back?’
‘That’s made a-purpose,’ said the Djinn, ‘all because you missed those three days. You will be able to work now for three days without eating, because you can live on your humph; and don’t you ever say I never did anything for you. Come out of the Desert and go to the Three, and behave. Humph yourself!’
And the Camel humphed himself, humph and all, and went away to join the Three. And from that day to this the Camel always wears a humph (we call it ‘hump’ now, not to hurt his feelings); but he has never yet caught up with the three days that he missed at the beginning of the world, and he has never yet learned how to behave.
The Camel in Kipling's story gets his hump on Thursday. Thursday is the fourth day of the week. 56 − 52 = 4. According to the biblical creation story in Genesis 1:14-19, God made the sun, the moon, and the stars on the fourth day of creation. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951), VN says that the world was made on Sunday. In the penultimate strophe of his poem Zvyozdy ("The Stars," 1925) Vladislav Hodasevich (a Russian poet, 1886-1939, whom VN mentions in Speak, Memory) mentions Den' Chetvyortyi (Day Four on which God created the stars) reflected in a shameful puddle:
И заходя в дыру всё ту же,
И восходя на небосклон,
- Так вот в какой постыдной луже
Твой День Четвёртый отражён!..
Нелёгкий труд, о Боже правый,
Всю жизнь воссоздавать мечтой
Твой мир, горящий звёздной славой
И первозданною красой.
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert by forty days and died on December 25, 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:
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.
But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949. Everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital with Quilty, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.). Humbert Humbert's fifty-six days is John Ray, Jr.'s (rather than VN's) howler. In Russian, we say: "gorbatogo mogila ispravit (the grave will correct the hunchback)." The most common English equivalents of this saying are "a leopard cannot change its spots" and "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". Describing the day of his first physical contact with Lolita (which happens on a June Sunday - presumably, on June 22, 1947, exactly five years after Hittler's invasion of Russia), Humbert calls himself "a humble hunchback abusing himself in the dark:"
I had lunch in town - had not been so hungry for years. The house was still Lo-less when I strolled back. I spent the afternoon musing, scheming, blissfully digesting my experience of the morning.
I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady’s new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact. Thus had I delicately constructed my ignoble, ardent, sinful dream; and still Lolita was safe - and I was safe. What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita - perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness - indeed, no life of her own.
The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance that affected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark. The afternoon drifted on and on, in ripe silence, and the sappy tall trees seemed to be in the know; and desire, even stronger than before, began to afflict me again. Let her come soon, I prayed, addressing a loan God, and while mamma is in the kitchen, let a repetition of the davenport scene be staged, please, I adore her so horribly. (1.14)
At the dinner on the same day Lolita's mother Charlotte mentions Dr. Ivor Quilty (Clare's uncle), the Ramsdale dentist:
Oh, how I was taken aback - for did it not mean I was losing my darling, just when I had secretly made her mine? To explain my grim mood, I had to use the same toothache I had already simulated in the morning. Must have been an enormous molar, with an abscess as big as a maraschino cherry.
“We have,” said Haze, “an excellent dentist. Our neighbor, in fact. Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright. Think it will pass? Well, just as you wish. In the fall I shall have him ‘brace’ her, as my mother used to say. It may curb Lo a little. I am afraid she has been bothering you frightfully all these days. And we are in for a couple of stormy ones before she goes. She has flatly refused to go, and I confess I left her with the Chatfields because I dreaded to face her alone just yet. The movie may mollify her. Phyllis is a very sweet girl, and there is no earthly reason for Lo to dislike her. Really, monsieur, I am very sorry about that tooth of yours. It would be so much more reasonable to let me contact Ivor Quilty first thing tomorrow morning if it still hurts. And, you know, I think a summer camp is so much healthier, and - well, it is all so much more reasonable as I say than to mope on a suburban lawn and use mamma’s lipstick, and pursue shy studious gentlemen, and go into tantrums at the least provocation.”
“Are you sure,” I said at last, “that she will be happy there?” (lame, lamentably lame!)
“She’d better,” said Haze. “And it won’t be all play either. The camp is run by Shirley Holmes - you know, the woman who wrote Campfire Girl. Camp will teach Dolores Haze to grow in many things - health, knowledge, temper. And particularly in a sense of responsibility towards other people. Shall we take these candles with us and sit for a while on the piazza, or do you want to go to bed and nurse that tooth?”
Nurse that tooth. (ibid.)
On September 24, 1952, Humbert revisits Ramsdale and finds out Clare Quilty's whereabouts from his uncle Ivor:
In Beardsley, at the hands of charming Dr. Molnar, I had undergone a rather serious dental operation, retaining only a few upper and lower front teeth. The substitutes were dependent on a system of plates with an inconspicuous wire affair running along my upper gums. The whole arrangement was a masterpiece of comfort, and my canines were in perfect health. However, to garnish my secret purpose with a plausible pretext, I told Dr. Quilty that, in hope of alleviating facial neuralgia, I had decided to have all my teeth removed. What would a complete set of dentures cost? How long would the process take, assuming we fixed our first appointment for some time in November? Where was his famous nephew now? Would it be possible to have them all out in one dramatic session?
A white-smocked, gray-haired man, with a crew cut and the big flat cheeks of a politician, Dr. Quilty perched on the corner of his desk, one foot dreamily and seductively rocking as he launched on a glorious long-range plan. He would first provide me with provisional plates until the gums settled. Then he would make me a permanent set. He would like to have a look at that mouth of mine. He wore perforated pied shoes. He had not visited with the rascal since 1946, but supposed he could be found at his ancestral home, Grimm Road, not far from Parkington. It was a noble dream. His foot rocked, his gaze was inspired. It would cost me around six hundred. He suggested he take measurements right away, and make the first set before starting operations. My mouth was to him a splendid cave full of priceless treasures, but I denied him entrance.
“No,” I said. “On second thoughts, I shall have it all done by Dr. Molnar. His price is higher, but he is of course a much better dentist than you.”
I do not know if any of my readers will ever have a chance to say that. It is a delicious dream feeling. Clare’s uncle remained sitting on the desk, still looking dreamy, but his foot had stopped push-rocking the cradle of rosy anticipation. On the other hand, his nurse, a skeleton-thin, faded girl, with the tragic eyes of unsuccessful blondes, rushed after me so as to be able to slam the door in my wake.
Push the magazine into the butt. Press home until you hear or feel the magazine catch engage. Delightfully snug. Capacity: eight cartridges. Full Blued. Aching to be discharged. (2.33)
The middle 'n' in Dr. Molnar's name makes one think of the terminate 'h' in "Humph" (the Camel's only word in Kipling's story). Molnar brings to mind molniya, the Russian word for lightning. Humbert's very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning), when Humbert was three. Clare Quilty is the author The Lady who Loved the Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom). Molnii iskusstva (“The Flashes of Lightning of Art,” 1911) is a series of essays by Alexander Blok (a Russian poet, 1880-1921) written after Blok's journey in Italy in the spring and summer of 1909. In the Russian Lolita (1967), the name of Quilty's coauthor becomes Vivian Damor-Blok. At the beginning of his story Rim ("Rome," 1842) Gogol (a Russian writer, 1809-1852) compares Annunciata’s black eyes to molniya (a lightning):
Попробуй взглянуть на молнию, когда, раскроивши чёрные как уголь тучи, нестерпимо затрепещет она целым потопом блеска. Таковы очи у альбанки Аннунциаты. Всё напоминает в ней те античные времена, когда оживлялся мрамор и блистали скульптурные резцы.
In his poem The Lovers' Litany (1886) Kipling speaks of the eyes of four colors (grey, black, brown and blue):
Eyes of grey - a sodden quay,
Driving rain and falling tears,
As the steamer wears to sea
In a parting storm of cheers.
Sing, for Faith and Hope are high
None so true as you and I
Sing the Lovers' Litany:
"Love like ours can never die!"
Eyes of black – a throbbing keel,
Milky foam to left and right;
Whispered converse near
the wheel In the brilliant tropic night.
Cross that rules the Southern Sky!
Stars that sweep and wheel and fly,
Hear the Lovers' Litany:
“Love like ours can never die!"
Eyes of brown – a dusy plain
Split and parched with heat of June,
Flying hoof and tightened rein,
Hearts that beat the old, old tune.
Side by side the horses fly,
Frame we now the old reply
Of the Lovers' Litany:
"Love like ours can never die!"
Eyes of blue – the Simla
Hills Silvered with the moonlight hoar;
Pleading of the waltz that thrills,
Dies and echoes round Benmore.
"Mabel," "Officers," "Good-bye,"
Glamour, wine, and witchery
On my soul's sincerity,
"Love like ours can never die!"
Maidens of your charity,
Pity my most luckless state.
Four times Cupid's debtor
I - Bankrupt in quadruplicate.
Yet, despite this evil case,
And a maiden showed me grace,
Four-and-forty times would
I Sing the Lovers' Litany:
"Love like ours can never die!"
In his poem "Wanted" written after Lolita's escape from (or, more likely, death in) the Elphinstone hospital Humbert mentions Lolita's vair eyes:
My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister? (2.25)
An old perfume called Soleil Vert brings to mind the half of a Caporal Vert cigarette mentioned by VN in Speak, Memory:
Vladislav Hodasevich used to complain, in the twenties and thirties, that young émigré poets had borrowed their art form from him while following the leading cliques in modish angoisse and soul-reshaping. I developed a great liking for this bitter man, wrought of irony and metallic-like genius, whose poetry was as complex a marvel as that of Tyutchev or Blok. He was, physically, of a sickly aspect, with contemptuous nostrils and beetling brows, and when I conjure him up in my mind he never rises from the hard chair on which he sits, his thin legs crossed, his eyes glittering with malevolence and wit, his long fingers screwing into a holder the half of a Caporal Vert cigarette. There are few things in modern world poetry comparable to the poems of his Heavy Lyre, but unfortunately for his fame the perfect frankness he indulged in when voicing his dislikes made him some terrible enemies among the most powerful critical coteries. Not all the mystagogues were Dostoevskian Alyoshas; there were also a few Smerdyakovs in the group, and Hodasevich’s poetry was played down with the thoroughness of a revengeful racket. (Chapter Fourteen, 2)
The surname Haze (that, according to John Ray, Jr., only rhymes with the heroine's real name) brings to mind Benvolio’s hazel eyes mentioned by Mercutio in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet:
Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes. (Act III, scene 1)