The narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert affectionately calls his pocket automatic handgun (.32 caliber) "Chum:"
Gros Gaston, in his prissy way, had liked to make presents - presents just a prissy wee bit out of the ordinary, or so he prissily thought. Noticing one night that my box of chessmen was broken, he sent me next morning, with a little lad of his, a copper case: it had an elaborate Oriental design over the lid and could be securely locked. One glance sufficed to assure me that it was one of those cheap money boxes called for some reason “luizettas” that you buy in Algiers and elsewhere, and wonder what to do with afterwards. It turned out to be much too flat for holding my bulky chessmen, but I kept itusing it for a totally different purpose.
In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself being enmeshed, I had decideddespite Lo’s visible annoyanceto spend another night at Chestnut Court; definitely waking up at four in the morning, I ascertained that Lo was still sound asleep (mouth open, in a kind of dull amazement at the curiously inane life we all had rigged up for her) and satisfied myself that the precious contents of the “luizetta” were safe. There, snugly wrapped in a white woolen scarf, lay a pocket automatic: caliber .32, capacity of magazine 8 cartridges, length a little under one ninth of Lolita’s length, stock checked walnut, finish full blued. I had inherited it from the late Harold Haze, with a 1938 catalog which cheerily said in part: “Particularly well adapted for use in the home and car as well as on the person.” There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb.
I was now glad I had it with meand even more glad that I had learned to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and Charlotte’s glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an admirable marksman, and with his .38 actually managed to hit a hummingbird, though I must say not much of it could be retrieved for proofonly a little iridescent fluff. A burley ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in the twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us and bagged a tiny woodpecker - completely out of season, incidentally. Between those two sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything, though I did would a squirrel on a later occasion when I went out alone. “You like here,” I whispered to my light-weight compact little chum, and then toasted it with a dram of gin. (2.17)
I left Insomnia Lodge next morning around eight and spent some time in Parkington. Visions of bungling the execution kept obsessing me. Thinking that perhaps the cartridges in the automatic had gone stale during a week of inactivity, I removed them and inserted a fresh batch. Such a thorough oil bath did I give Chum that now I could not get rid of the stuff. I bandaged him up with a rag, like a maimed limb, and used another rag to wrap up a handful of spare bullets. (2.35)
Chums was a boys' weekly newspaper started in 1892 by Cassell & Company and later, from 1927, published by Amalgamated Press. The publisher gathered the weekly paper into monthly and annual editions. The monthly versions were published on the 25th of the month, and up to November 1920 included all the content of the weekly editions. From then on, the monthly editions had all the story content of the weeklies, but left out the covers. This left a gap which was then filled by short stories, articles and even serials that were not included in the weekly edition. The serial ceased publication in 1941. Humbert murders Quilty (uses Chum on the person) on September 25, 1952. According to Humbert, it took him fifty-six days (eight weeks) to write Lolita:
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)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the author of fifty-six short stories featuring the private detective Sherlock Holmes. The characters in Lolita include Shirley Holmes (the camp mistress of Camp Q) and her son Charlie (Lolita's first lover who, according to Mrs. Chatfield, has just been killed in Korea). In Conan Doyle's story The Captain of the Polestar (1883), the afternote is written by Dr. John M'Alister Ray, senior. According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start:
“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 the 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.
But only fifty-two days pass between September 25 (the day of Humbert’s arrest) and November 16 (the day of Humbert's death). 56 − 52 = 4. Chetyre dnya ("Four Days," 1877) is a story by Vsevolod Garshin (1855-88), a writer who was the model for the younger Ivan in Ilya Repin's painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581. The painter's surname is spelled Repine by the French. Henrietta Cordelia Ray's sonnet Aspiration (1910) ends in the question "Can we repine?":
We climb the slopes of life with throbbing heart,
And eager pulse, like children toward a star.
Sweet siren music cometh from afar,
To lure us on meanwhile. Responsive start
The nightingales to richer song than Art
Can ever teach. No passing shadows mar
Awhile the dewy skies; no inner jar
Of conflict bids us with our quest to part.
We see adown the distance, rainbow-arched,
What melting aisles of liquid light and bloom!
We hasten, tremulous, with lips all parched,
And eyes wide-stretched, nor dream of coming gloom.
Enough that something held almost divine
Within us ever stirs. Can we repine?
Sweet siren music in the sonnet's Line 3 makes one think of Sirin, VN's Russian nom de plume. Henrietta Cordelia Ray (1852-1916) was a black American poet. Clare Quilty's coauthor who, according to John Ray, Jr., has written a biography, "My Cue," to be published shortly, Vivian Darkbloom (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) has Negro blood. In his foreword to Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. says that Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert by forty days and died on December 25, 1952:
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.).
Just before his execution, Quilty "quotes" Kipling:
He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were offering it to him.
“Say!” he drawled (now imitating the underworld numbskull of movies), “that’s a swell little gun you’ve got there. What d’you want for her?”
I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a handful of cigarettes.
“Here they are,” he said cheerfully. “You recall Kipling: une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette? Now we need matches.”
“Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.”
He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it.
“I am willing to try,” he said. “You are either Australian, or a German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile’s house, you know. Maybe, you’d better run along. And do stop demonstrating that gun. I’ve an old Stern-Luger in the music room.”
I pointed Chum at his slippered foot and crushed the trigger. It clicked. He looked at his foot, at the pistol, again at his foot. I made another awful effort, and, with a ridiculously feeble and juvenile sound, it went off. The bullet entered the thick pink rug, and I had the paralyzing impression that it had merely trickled in and might come out again.
“See what I mean?” said Quilty. “You should be a little more careful. Give me that thing for Christ’s sake.”
He reached for it. I pushed him back into the chair. The rich joy was waning. It was high time I destroyed him, but he must understand why he was being destroyed. His condition infected me, the weapon felt limp and clumsy in my hand. (2.35)
Rudyard Kipling was famously described in an article in the Chums boys' annual by an old newspaper colleague in India, who shared ink-splatter habits, working conditions, and youthful memories. During hot weather when he wore only white trousers and a thin vest, Kipling was said to look like a Dalmatian dog because he was completely speckled with ink spots from head to toe. White dogs with black or brown pigmentation marks, the Dalmatians make one think of Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (who is mentioned by John Ray, Jr. in his foreword to Humbert's manuscript and by Humbert in his pocket diary that he kept as Charlotte's lodger in Ramsdale) and explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss (the author of the infolio de luxe Bagration Island, an item in Quilty's collection of erotica). Dogs have vibrissae, commonly known as whiskers. A Mrs. Vibrissa (most reliable and bribable charwoman) mentioned by Quilty brings to mind Kipling's poem The Female of the Species (1911), with its refrain "For the female of the species is more deadly than the male."
Btw., a burley ex-policeman called Krestovski brings to mind Vsevolod Krestovski (1840-1895), a Russian novelist (who was known as "a Russian Eugène Sue") who worked in the city mysteries genre.