The entries from a comparatively recent (1946) Who's Who in the Limelight that Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) finds in the prison library begin with "Pym, Roland:"
I had my little revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich neé Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will be illustrated with photographs when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works. The one to which I am restricted these days, despite my lawyer’s favors, is a good example of the inane eclecticism governing the selection of books in prison libraries. They have the Bible, of course, and Dickens (an ancient set, N.Y., G.W. Dillingham, Publisher, MDCCCLXXXVII); and the Children’s Encyclopedia (with some nice photographs of sunshine-haired Girl Scouts in shorts), and A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie; but they also have such coruscating trifles as A Vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice Revisited, Boston, 1868, and a comparatively recent (1946) Who’s Who in the Limelight - actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes. In looking through the latter volume, I was treated last night to one of those dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe and poets love. I transcribe most of the page:
Pym, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y. Made debut in Sunburst. Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from Here, The Girl in Green, Scrambled Husbands, The Strange Mushroom, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming of You.
Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N.J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for children are notable. Little Nymph (1940) traveled 14,000 miles and played 280 performances on the road during the winter before ending in New York. Hobbies: fast cars, photography, pets.
Quine, Dolores. Born in 1882, in Dayton, Ohio. Studied for stage at American Academy. First played in Ottawa in 1900. Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers. Has disappeared since in [a list of some thirty plays follows].
How the look of my dear love’s name even affixed to some old hag of an actress, still makes me rock with helpless pain! Perhaps, she might have been an actress too. Born 1935. Appeared (I notice the slip of my pen in the preceding paragraph, but please do not correct it, Clarence) in The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! (1.8)
Roland Vivian Pym (1910-2006) was a British painter, illustrator and theatrical designer (who was born in the same year as Humbert Humbert).The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837) is a novel by E. A. Poe (an American poet and writer, 1809-1849). In Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel À rebours ("Against Nature," 1884), Poe's novel is the bible of Jean des Esseintes (the novel's main character, a reclusive aesthete):
If he tired of consulting these guides, he could rest his eyes by gazing at the chronometers and sea compasses, the sextants, field glasses and cards strewn on a table on which stood a single volume, bound in sealskin. The book was "The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym", specially printed for him on laid paper, each sheet carefully selected, with a sea-gull watermark. (Chapter 3)
In one of the next paragraphs, Huysmans says that Des Esseintes felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things:
Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things. It was possible, in his opinion, to gratify the most extravagant, absurd desires by a subtle subterfuge, by a slight modification of the object of one's wishes. Every epicure nowadays enjoys, in restaurants celebrated for the excellence of their cellars, wines of capital taste manufactured from inferior brands treated by Pasteur's method. For they have the same aroma, the same color, the same bouquet as the rare wines of which they are an imitation, and consequently the pleasure experienced in sipping them is identical. The originals, moreover, are usually unprocurable, for love or money. (ibid.)
It seems that Lolita dies in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1952, and 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.; the author of the foreword to Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr. is the Jekyll part of Humbert's personality). The Russian title of Huysmans' novel À rebours is Naoborot. Describing his life with Rita, Gumbert Gumbert (Humbert's name in the Russian Lolita, 1967) uses the word naoborot (the other way around):
До странности детская вогнутость ее спины, рисовая кожа, медленные, томные, голубиные поцелуи, - все это оберегало меня от беды. Не талант художника является вторичным половым признаком, как утверждают иные шаманы и шарлатаны, а наоборот: пол лишь прислужник искусства. Один довольно смутный кутеж наш имел забавные последствия. Я только что прекратил поиски: бес либо находился в Тартаре, или весело горел у меня в можжечке на больное сердце, я, право, не скажу, чтобы кто-нибудь из них не имел отношения к турниру тенниса, в Сан Диего, где в женском разряде первый приз взяла шестнадцатилетняя Доротея Гааз, мужеподобная дылда. Как-то, во время обратной поездки на восток, в гнуснейшей гостинице (того сорта, где устраиваются коммерческие съезды и бродят, пошатываясь, ярлыками отмеченные, марципановые толстяки, называющие друг друга Джо или Джим, заключающие сделки и хлешущие виски) милая Рита и я, проснувшись за полдень, увидели, что с нами в номере находится еще один человек, молодой бледный блондин, почти альбинос, с белыми ресницами и большими прозрачными ушами. Ни Рита в ее грустной жизни, ни я в моей никогда его не встречали. Весь потный, в грязном фланелевом комбинезоне, в старых походных сапогах на шнурках, он храпел на одеяле нашей двуспальной постели по другую сторону от моей целомудренной подруги. У него не хватало одного переднего зуба, лоб оброс янтарными прыщами. Риточка облекла свою гибкую наготу в мой макинтош - первое, что попалось ей под руку; я же натянул трусики; после чего мы обследовали положение. На подносе стояло целых пять употребленных стаканов, что в смысле примет только усложняло дело. Дверь была плохо прикрыта. На полу валялись мужской свитер да пара бесформенных военных штанов защитного цвета. Мы долго трясли их владельца; наконец несчастный очнулся. Оказалось, что он совершенно потерял память. Говоря с акцентом, который Рита определила как "чисто бруклинский", он обиженно инсинуировал, что мы (каким образом?) присвоили его (ничего не стоящую!) личность. Мы его быстрехонько одели и потом оставили в ближайшей больнице, выяснив по дороге, что какие-то уже забытые извилины и повороты привели нас в пресловутый Грейнбол. Полгода спустя, Рита написала тамошнему доктору. Тот ответил, что "Джек Гумбертсон" - как незнакомца безвкусно прозвали - все еще не вошел в сношение со своим прошлым. 0, Мнемозина, сладчайшая и задорнейшая из муз!
The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, her slow languorous columbine kisses kept me from mischief. It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art. One rather mysterious spree that had interesting repercussions I must notice. I had abandoned the search: the fiend was either in Tartary or burning away in my cerebellum (the flames fanned by my fancy and grief) but certainly not having Dolores Haze play champion tennis on the Pacific Coast. One afternoon, on our way back East, in a hideous hotel, the kind where they hold conventions and where labeled, fat, pink men stagger around, all first names and business and booze - dear Rita and I awoke to find a third in our room, a blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large transparent ears, whom neither Rita nor I recalled having ever seen in our sad lives. Sweating in thick dirty underwear, and with old army boots on, he lay snoring on the double bed beyond my chaste Rita. One of his front teeth was gone, amber pustules grew on his forehead. Ritochka enveloped her sinuous nudity in my raincoat - the first thing at hand; I slipped on a pair of candy-striped drawers; and we took stock of the situation. Five glasses had been used, which in the way of clues, was an embarrassment of riches. The door was not properly closed. A sweater and a pair of shapeless tan pants lay on the floor. We shook their owner into miserable consciousness. He was completely amnesic. In an accent that Rita recognized as pure Brooklynese, he peevishly insinuated that somehow we had purloined his (worthless) identity. We rushed him into his clothes and left him at the nearest hospital, realizing on the way that somehow or other after forgotten gyrations, we ewer in Grainball. Half a year later Rita wrote the doctor for news. Jack Humbertson as he had been tastelessly dubbed was still isolated from his personal past. Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses! (2.26)
Great little Grainball City (Rita's brother is the mayor and boaster of Grainball) brings to mind Against the Grain, as Huysmans' novel À rebours is sometimes translated. On the other hand, Grainball = grain + ball = brain + Gall. The founder of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) was a German neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain. According to Humbert, he abandoned the search, believing that the fiend (Lolita's abductor) was either in Tartary or burning away in his cerebellum. The cerebellum ('little brain;' Russ., mozzhechok) is a major feature of the hindbrain of all vertebrates.