The six-week stay was not without rough moments, though. Dmitri and Richard Buxbaum decided to try climbing Disappointment Peak, next to the Grand Tetons’ East Ridge. The climb to the top, seven thousand feet above base level, was straightforward at first. Then Dmitri, with the overconfidence befitting a fifteen-year-old boy, decided they should switch to a more difficult path, one that required extra equipment they lacked. Realizing they would get stuck up there if they carried on, they turned around, but hours passed—and the sun nearly set—by the time they made it back to Vladimir and Véra, who were understandably frantic.
Buxbaum hitchhiked home at the end of August. The Nabokovs, with Véra now driving, ventured northeast to Minnesota, then up to northern Ontario, for more butterfly collecting, before they finally arrived in Ithaca on September 4. Nabokov had three courses to teach that fall, but had attracted only twenty-one students, combined, a workload greeted with suspicion by his fellow professors. Even so, Nabokov wanted more money.
Cornell’s head of the Literature Department, David Daiches, received Nabokov’s request and offered a deaclass="underline" he would approve a salary raise if Nabokov took over teaching the European fiction course, Literature 311–12. Nabokov could shape the curriculum as he saw fit and pick the authors he liked most. Nabokov said yes. He began right away, scribbling notes on the back of Daiches’s letter for the course that would define his Cornell career for the next decade.
And in spare moments, Nabokov began at last to shape the novel that had lived in his head for so long.
NABOKOV’S RAMSDALE IS not Camden. The made-up town where Humbert Humbert insinuates himself into the lives of Charlotte and Dolores Haze is most likely located in New England, which is why Dolores is deposited in a school in the Berkshires, and why both older man and younger girl seem to know the area well. Nabokov gleaned this knowledge during his years living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But the names of the towns are similar, as is the Linden Street of Sally Horner’s childhood home and the Lawn Street where the Haze women live. Both towns shared a white, middle-class bucolic atmosphere. As would happen again and again, the Sally Horner story parallels Lolita in all sorts of surprising ways.
Humbert Humbert came to Ramsdale by design, but moved into the Haze home at 342 Lawn Street by accident. He meant to stay nearby with the McCoos, parents to “two little daughters, one a baby the other a girl of twelve.” Lodging there, he assumed, would allow him to “coach in French and fondle in Humbertish.” But when Humbert gets there, he finds out that the McCoos’ house has burned down, and he must find someplace else to live.
He is not pleased to be shuffled off to a “white-frame horror… looking dingy and old, more gray than white—the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of a shower.” Humbert is further irked upon overhearing Charlotte Haze’s contralto voice ask a friend if “Monsieur Humbert” has arrived.
Then she comes down the steps—“sandals, maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order”—tapping her cigarette with her index finger. In Humbert’s estimation, Charlotte isn’t much: “the poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich.” Then he spies Dolores, and it is as if he saw his “Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses,” two and a half decades after his prepubescent romance with Annabel, as if the years “tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.” Now that the true object of Humbert’s obsession has revealed herself, Charlotte becomes a nuisance to be manipulated and endured.
When Charlotte sends Humbert a letter, confessing she is “a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life,” he senses opportunity: marry Charlotte to gain access to Dolores. Another line in Charlotte’s letter stands out: that if Humbert were to take advantage of her, “then you would be a criminal—worse than a kidnapper who rapes a child.” Charlotte, bafflingly, concludes that if he showed no sign of romantic interest in her, and remained in her home, then she would take it that he was “ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.” (Since we’re always in Humbert’s head, we only have his word that Charlotte wrote this.)
The American widow and the European widower marry in haste while Dolores is away at summer camp. It is, suffice to say, a bad match. What galls Humbert the most is what he describes as Charlotte’s vituperative attitude toward her daughter. The words Charlotte underlined in her copy of A Guide to Your Child’s Development to mark her daughter’s twelfth birthday: “aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate.”
Humbert has already decided to murder Charlotte and stage it as an accident, perhaps at a thinly populated beach they visited (“The setting was really perfect for a brisk bubbling murder”). His simmering rage boils over when Charlotte informs him that she intends to send Dolores to boarding school at Beardsley, so that the two of them can take a trip to England. He resists. They argue. Then she reveals to him that she has read his notes, and knows the truth about him: “You’re a monster. You’re a detestable, abominable, criminal fraud. If you come near—I’ll scream out the window. Get back!”
Humbert exits the house. He notes that Charlotte’s face is “disfigured by her emotion” and remains calm. He goes back into the house. He opens a bottle of Scotch. Then, quietly, he begins to gaslight her. “You are ruining my life and yours. Let us be civilized people. It is all your hallucination. You are crazy, Charlotte. The notes you found were fragments of a novel.”
Charlotte runs back to her room, claiming she has a letter to write. Humbert makes her a drink—or so he says—while she is gone. He realizes she is not, in fact, in her room. The telephone rings. “Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been run over and you’d better come quick.” Fate has played a trick. Instead of becoming the potential savior of her daughter’s virtue, Charlotte ends up dead. It’s also played a fast one upon Humbert: he was all set to become a murderer.
THE DESCRIPTION OF CHARLOTTE HAZE as Dietrich-lite sounds a jarringly familiar bell when I look at pictures of Ella Horner from when her daughter disappeared in 1948. She was forty-one and often wore her hair pulled back, sometimes in a bun (a “bronze-brown bun”), and plucked her eyebrows over eyes that tended to disappear into their creases. Her other facial features—strong jawline, prominent nose, pronounced cheekbones—were reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich before she emigrated from Germany and became a Hollywood star. Based on the photographs of her that I’ve seen from before and after Sally’s kidnapping, I imagine when Ella smiled, it didn’t often reach her eyes. (Humbert on Charlotte: “Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow.”)
There is another similarity, coincidence or otherwise, that ties Charlotte Haze to Ella Horner: the device of marriage to gain access to their daughter. For the fictional Humbert Humbert it was a real gambit. For Frank La Salle, it was a delusion he created to explain why he took Sally away from her mother. It was a ruse Sally had to live by in order to survive being with him in Atlantic City and Baltimore, and she would have to endure it for quite a while longer.