The extensive media coverage meant all of Camden, and much of Philadelphia and the surrounding towns, knew what had happened to Sally. Cohen worried the girl might be judged harshly for the forcible loss of her virtue, even if that reaction was in no way warranted. Cohen also urged Ella to seek the advice of the Reverend Alfred Jass, director of the Bureau of Catholic Charities, “in directing Sally’s return to a normal life.” Ella was a Protestant, but clergy was still clergy, and Sally’s recent attendance at Catholic schools may have influenced Cohen’s choice of religious advisor.
Sally and Ella got home at 1:45 P.M. Waiting reporters and photographers shouted questions and snapped pictures as they walked through the front door, Ella shielding her daughter. Ignoring the shouts, she shut the door firmly behind them.
From that afternoon on, the Horner women were private citizens. They were no longer at the mercy of the legal system, or the national press. The rest of the world could leave them alone.
In some fashion, it worked out that way, but their new-found calm did not last for long.
Eighteen
When Nabokov (Really) Learned About Sally
Vladimir Nabokov spent the morning of March 22, 1950, much as he would every morning for the next month: bedridden and pain-plagued from the same neurological malady that had afflicted him a decade earlier, in the months leading up to his arrival in America. “I have followed your example and am in bed with a temperature above 102 degrees,” Nabokov wrote Katharine White, his editor at the New Yorker, on March 24. “No bronchitis but grippe with me is invariably accompanied by the hideous pain of intercostal neuralgia.”
White had also been ill and advised Nabokov to prize rest above work. Nabokov rested, but did not stop working. Just as he had written The Enchanter while bedridden a decade earlier, so now did he complete two late chapters of Conclusive Evidence, the first version of the autobiography that became Speak, Memory. But as Nabokov told James Laughlin, his editor at New Directions, a month later, he did not “get back to normal conditions” for weeks. That summer, he and Véra did not travel across America to hunt butterflies, as they had done the previous year and on three earlier occasions. Not enough time, not nearly enough money, and too many deadlines loomed as his health slowly mended.
It’s easy to imagine that, as he was laid up in bed at home in Ithaca with limited capacity to work, Nabokov picked up a copy of the local newspaper and came across the news of a kidnapped girl rescued in California after almost two years of cross-country captivity. It is not difficult to believe Nabokov, whom Véra described in their diary as being fascinated by true crime, paid avid attention from his sickbed as each day brought fresh news about Sally’s rescue and Frank La Salle’s crimes.
Here, in newspaper accounts of Sally Horner’s plight, was a possible solution to a long-standing problem with the manuscript that would become Lolita: how to create the necessary scaffolding for all of the ideas rattling around in his mind, the decades of compulsion, and the games he wished to play with the reader.
Robert Roper, the author of Nabokov in America, was certainly convinced that Nabokov “read newspaper reports of a sensational crime” around the time of Sally’s rescue. He told me, “I think reading about Sally was momentous for [Nabokov]. He was on the verge of abandoning his project when the March 1950 stories appeared, and it was as if the world were providing him with justification and template for writing his daring little sex novel. He cribbed so much from the story.”
Yet there is no direct proof that Vladimir Nabokov learned of Sally Horner’s abduction and rescue in March 1950. There was no story in the papers he was most likely to read—the Cornell Daily Sun, the college newspaper, or the New York Times. Similarly, there’s no direct proof he glanced at the Camden or Philadelphia papers, the ones that carried the best details and the most vivid photos. Neither his archives at the New York Public Library nor those at the Library of Congress contain newspaper clippings about Sally. Any connection dances just outside the frame.
However, there is plenty of indirect proof that Nabokov knew about Sally Horner and her rescue. The circumstantial evidence is there in Lolita. And I believe he would never have fully realized the character of Dolores Haze without knowing of Sally’s real-life plight.
LET’S FIRST CONSIDER HOW, roughly at the halfway point of Lolita, Humbert Humbert threatens Dolores into complying with him. He tells her that if he is arrested or if she reveals the true nature of their relationship, she “will be given a choice of varying dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home….” Humbert’s ultimatum echoes La Salle’s repeated threats to Sally Horner, reported in the newspapers in March 1950, that if she did not do what he said, she would be bound for juvenile hall.
But earlier in the same scene, the comparison between Humbert and Frank La Salle is even more explicit: “Only the other day we read in the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever they are. Dolores darling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you to consider yourself my cross-country slave…. I am your father, and I am speaking English, and I love you.”
As Nabokov scholar Alexander Dolinin pointed out in his 2005 essay linking Sally Horner to Lolita, Nabokov fiddled with the case chronology. The cross-country journey in Lolita begins in 1947, an entire year before Sally Horner’s abduction. At that time, Sally would have been nine going on ten, matching the age Humbert cites to his Lolita instead of the age she was when Frank La Salle abducted her. It is clear to Dolinin that “the legal formulae used by [Humbert Humbert] as well as his implying that he, in contrast to La Salle, is really Lolita’s father, leave no doubt that the passage refers to the newspaper reports of 1950….” In other words, the circumstantial evidence is right there in the text that Nabokov did, in fact, read about Sally Horner in March 1950, rather than retroactively inserting her story into Lolita several years after the fact.
To throw off the scent, or perhaps to amuse himself, Nabokov assigned details of La Salle to other characters. Dolores’s eventual husband and the father of her child, Dick Schiller, is a mechanic. Meanwhile, Vivian Darkbloom—an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov—has a “hawk face,” a phrase akin to the description of La Salle as a “hawk-faced man” in the March 1950 coverage of Sally’s rescue. And as Dolinin underscored, references to Dolores’s “Florentine hands” and “Florentine breasts” seem to point as much to Sally Horner’s legal first name of Florence as they do to Botticelli.
Sally’s captivity lasted twenty-one months, from June 1948 to March 1950. At the twenty-first month mark of their connection, Lolita and Humbert land at Beardsley, where Humbert realizes that he no longer has the same hold on the girl he once possessed. He worries Dolores has confided the true nature of her relationship with her “stepfather” to her school friend, Mona. And that in doing so, she might be cherishing “the stealthy thought… that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose [Humbert] without getting penalized herself.”