At Silver Spur Court in Elphinstone (a little town in the Rockies where Lolita falls ill and is hospitalized) big Frank greets Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) with the word "Howdy:"
I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.
It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little.
Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better and would I come today?
At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health; at five, as now, he was a ruddy mosaic of scarshad been blown through a wall overseas; but despite nameless injuries he was able to man a tremendous truck, fish, hunt, drink, and buoyantly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either because it was such a great holiday, or simply because he wanted to divert a sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his left hand (the one pressing against the side of the door) and revealed to the fascinated sufferer not only an entire lack of fourth and fifth fingers, but also a naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of his crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head. Oh, delicious… reclining against the woodwork, like some sly fairy.
I asked him to tell Mary Lore I would stay in bed all day and would get into touch with my daughter sometime tomorrow if I felt probably Polynesian.
He noticed the direction of my gaze and made her right hip twitch amorously.
“Okey-dokey,” big Frank sang out, slapped the jamb, and whistling, carried my message away, and I went on drinking, and by morning the fever was gone, and although I was as limp as a toad, I put on the purple dressing gown over my maize yellow pajamas, and walked over to the office telephone. Everything was fine. A bright voice informed me that yes, everything was fine, my daughter had checked out the day before, around two, her uncle, Mr. Gustave, had called for her with a cocker spaniel pup and a smile for everyone, and a black Caddy Lack, and had paid Dolly’s bill in cash, and told them to tell me I should not worry, and keep warm, they were at Grandpa’s ranch as agreed.
Elphinstone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town. It was spread like a maquette, you know, with its neat greenwool trees and red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I think I have alluded earlier to its model school and temple and spacious rectangular blocks, some of which were, curiously enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist. Very amusing: at one gravelgroaning sharp turn I sideswiped a parked car but said to myself telestically - and, telepathically (I hoped), to its gesticulating owner - that I would return later, address Bird School, Bird, New Bird, the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain, and after some lapses and losses common to dream sequences, I found myself in the reception room, trying to beat up the doctor, and roaring at people under chairs, and clamoring for Mary who luckily for her was not there; rough hands plucked at my dressing gown, ripping off a pocket, and somehow I seem to have been sitting on a bald brown-headed patient, whom I had mistaken for Dr. Blue, and who eventually stood up, remarking with a preposterous accent: “Now, who is neurotic, I ask?”and then a gaunt unsmiling nurse presented me with seven beautiful, beautiful books and the exquisitely folded tartan lap robe, and demanded a receipt; and in the sudden silence I became aware of a policeman in the hallway, to whom my fellow motorist was pointing me out, and meekly I signed the very symbolic receipt, thus surrendering my Lolita to all those apes. But what else could I do? One simple and stark thought stood out and this was: “Freedom for the moment is everything.” One false move - and I might have been made to explain a life of crime. So I simulated a coming out of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke in tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I apologized with a flourish that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man - free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother. (2.22)
Big Frank brings to mind Mr. Big, the Dwarf's name in Ray Bradbury's story The Dwarf (1953). A character in the story, Ralph Banghart (the ticket salesman at the Mirror Maze who plays a cruel joke on the Dwarf) exclaims "Boy howdy!":
"What kind of people go up in roller coasters?"
Ralph Banghart worked his cigar a full thirty seconds. "People wanna die. That rollie coaster's the handiest thing to dying there is." He sat listening to the faint sound of rifle shots from the shooting gallery. "This whole damn carny business's crazy. For instance, that dwarf. You seen him? Every night, pays his dime, runs in the Mirror Maze all the way back through to Screwy Louie's Room. You should see this little runt head back there. My God!"
"Oh, yes," said Aimee, remembering. "I always wonder what it's like to be a dwarf. I always feel sorry when I see him."
"I could play him like an accordion."
"Don't say that!"
"My Lord." Ralph patted her thigh with a free hand. "The way you carry on about guys you never even met." He shook his head and chuckled. "Him and his secret. Only he don't know I know, see? Boy howdy!"
It seems that big Frank knows Humbert's secret (only Humbert does not know). A nurse in the Elphinstone hospital, Mary Lore makes one think of Florence Nightingale's grandma mentioned by Ralph Banghart:
"Ralph!" She held out the magazines, her eyes shining. "He's a writer! Think of that!"
"It's a pretty hot day for thinking." He lay back and examined her, smiling faintly.
"I just happened to pass the Ganghes Arms, and saw Mr. Greeley, the manager. He says the typewriter runs all night in Mr. Big's room!"
"Is that his name?" Ralph began to roar with laughter.
"Writes just enough pulp detective stories to live. I found one of his stories in the secondhand magazine place, and, Ralph, guess what?"
"I'm tired, Aimee."
"This little guy's got a soul as big as all outdoors; he's got everything in his head!"
"Why ain't he writin' for the big magazines, then, I ask you?"
"Because maybe he's afraid—maybe he doesn't know he can do it. That happens. People don't believe in them-selves. But if he only tried, I bet he could sell stories any-where in the world."
"Why ain't he rich, I wonder?"
"Maybe because ideas come slow because he's down in the dumps. Who wouldn't be? So small that way? I bet it's hard to think of anything except being so small and living in a one-room cheap apartment."
"Hell!" snorted Ralph. "You talk like Florence Nightingale's grandma."
At the beginning of Lolita Humbert says: "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." The Dwarf in Ray Bradbury's story is not only a writer, but also a murderer:
She held up the magazine. "I'll read you part of his crime story. It's got all the guns and tough people, but it's told by a dwarf. I bet the editors never guessed the author knew what he was writing about. Oh, please don't sit there like that, Ralph! Listen."
And she began to read aloud.
"I am a dwarf and I am a murderer. The two things can-not be separated. One is the cause of the other.
"The man I murdered used to stop me on the street when I was twenty-one, pick me up in his arms, kiss my brow, croon wildly to me, sing Rock-a-bye Baby, haul me into meat markets, toss me on the scales and cry, 'Watch it. Don't weigh your thumb, there, butcher!"
"Do you see how our lives moved toward murder? This fool, this persecutor of my flesh and soul!
"As for my childhood: my parents were small people, not quite dwarfs, not quite. My father's inheritance kept us in a doll's house, an amazing thing like a white-scrolled wedding cake—little rooms, little chairs, miniature paintings, cameos, ambers with insects caught inside, everything tiny, tiny, tiny! The world of Giants far away, an ugly rumor beyond the garden wall. Poor mama, papa! They meant only the best for me. They kept me, like a porcelain vase, small and treasured, to themselves, in our ant world, our beehive rooms, our microscopic library, our land of beetle-sized doors and moth windows. Only now do I see the magnificent size of my parents' psychosis! They must have dreamed they would live forever, keeping me like a butterfly under glass. But first father died, and then fire ate up the little house, the wasp's nest, and every postage-stamp mirror and saltcellar closet within. Mama, too, gone! And myself alone, watching the fallen embers, tossed out into a world of Monsters and Titans, caught in a landslide of reality, rushed, rolled, and smashed to the bottom of the cliff!
"It took me a year to adjust. A job with a sideshow was unthinkable. There seemed no place for me in the world. And then, a month ago, the Persecutor came into my life, clapped a bonnet on my unsuspecting head, and cried to friends, 'I want you to meet the little woman!' "
Aimee stopped reading. Her eyes were unsteady and the magazine shook as she handed it to Ralph. "You finish it. The rest is a murder story. It's all right. But don't you see? That little man. That little man."
Ralph tossed the magazine aside and lit a cigarette lazily. "I like Westerns better."
"Ralph, you got to read it. He needs someone to tell him how good he is and keep him writing."
Ralph looked at her, his head to one side. "And guess who's going to do it? Well, well, ain't we just the Saviour's right hand?"
Elphinstone brings to mind VN's story Kartofel'nyi el'f ("The Potato Elf," 1924) whose hero, Fred Dobson, is a circus dwarf. John Elphinstone (1722-85) was a senior British naval officer who worked closely with the Russian Navy after 1770, during the period of naval reform under Russian Empress Catherine II. Together with the Scottish-born Samuel Greig (who was known in Russia as Samuil Karlovich Greig) and Admiral Sir Charles Knowles, Elphinstone was a member of the naval staff, headed by Count Alexey Orlov, which defeated the Turkish fleet at the battle of Chesma Bay, near Chios Island, off the far western coast of Turkey. The action in The Dwarf takes place in a seaside town. It begins:
Aimee watched the sky, quietly.
Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights. The concrete pier empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like insects in the air above the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various carnival pitches stood, like melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly, not talking, all down the line.
and ends as follows:
Aimee walked slowly and then began to walk fast and then began to run. She ran down the empty pier and the wind blew warm and it blew large drops of hot rain out of the sky on her all the time she was running.
Lolita's abductor, Clare Quilty was born in Ocean City. Quilty is a seaside town in Clare, a county in Ireland. The crooked mirrors in Ray Bradbury's story bring to mind Chekhov's humorous story Krivoe zerkalo (“The Crooked Mirror,” 1883). In the crooked mirror the hero’s ugly wife becomes a divine beauty (which makes her husband roar with wild laughter). Minus na minus dalo plyus (minus × minus = plus), as he puts it. This rule is also mentioned by Hermann in VN's novel Otchayanie ("Despair," 1934):
Во-первых: эпиграф, но не к этой главе, а так, вообще: литература – это любовь к людям. Теперь продолжим.
В помещении почтамта было темновато. У окошек стояло по два, по три человека, все больше женщины. В каждом окошке, как тусклый портрет, виднелось лицо чиновника. Вон там – номер девятый. Я не сразу решился… Подойдя сначала к столу посреди помещения – столу, разделенному перегородками на конторки, я притворился перед самим собой, что мне нужно кое-что написать, нашел в кармане старый счет и на обороте принялся выводить первые попавшиеся слова. Казенное перо неприятно трещало, я совал его в дырку чернильницы, в черный плевок; по бледному бювару, на который я облокотился, шли, так и сяк скрещиваясь, отпечатки неведомых строк, – иррациональный почерк, минус-почерк, – что всегда напоминает мне зеркало, – минус на минус даёт плюс. Мне пришло в голову, что и Феликс – некий минус я, – изумительной важности мысль, которую я напрасно, напрасно до конца не продумал.
To begin with, let us take the following motto (not especially for this chapter, but generally): Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
It was darkish in the post office; two or three people stood at every counter, mostly women; and at every counter, framed in its little window, like some tarnished picture, showed the face of an official. I looked for number nine…. I wavered before going up to it. …There was, in the middle of the place, a series of writing desks, so I lingered there, pretending, in front of my own self, that I had something to write: on the back of an old bill which I found in my pocket, I began to scrawl the very first words that came. The pen supplied by the State screeched and rattled, I kept thrusting it into the inkwell, into the black spit therein; the pale blotting paper upon which I leaned my elbow was all crisscrossed with the imprints of unreadable lines. Those irrational characters, preceded as it were by a minus, remind me always of mirrors: minus × minus = plus. It struck me that perhaps Felix too was a minus I, and that was a line of thought of quite astounding importance, which I did wrong, oh, very wrong, not to have thoroughly investigated. (Chapter Seven)
In Despair Hermann murders Felix, a tramp whom Hermann believes to be his perfect double. A playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital, Clare Quilty is Humbert's double. Humbert's Chum (as Humbert calls his gun) makes one think of the pistol stolen by Ray Bradbury's Dwarf in the shooting gallery:
Someone came running up the pier. It was Mr. Kelly from the shooting gallery. "Hey, any you see a little guy just now? Little stiff swiped a pistol from my place, loaded, run off before I'd get a hand on him! You help me find him?"
And Kelly was gone, sprinting, turning his head to search between all the canvas sheds, on away under the hot blue and red and yellow strung bulbs.