Thirty years after The Lolita Complex, another unauthorized sequel took a different approach, retelling Lolita from Dolores Haze’s perspective. Lo’s Diary, by the Italian journalist Pia Pera, proved to be a missed opportunity. Instead of getting at the truth of Dolores Haze’s dark plight, of showing her the way even Nabokov hinted at—as a clear victim, struggling to survive and maintain some sort of agency when she could never have enough power—Pera’s version of Lolita depicted her as a brazen seductress, her behavior more reminiscent of Veda, the young (but not underage) daughter in James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce. Lo’s Diary also suffered from years of litigation with the Nabokov estate, which blocked its publication in English until 1999.
Two years earlier, Adrian Lyne’s film remake of Lolita arrived out of its own legal quagmire, having faced almost as many censorship issues as did Stanley Kubrick’s. Lyne’s film, scripted by Stephen Schiff, is quite faithful to Nabokov’s novel. Jeremy Irons is almost too perfectly cast as Humbert Humbert (he later lent his voice to the audiobook edition of the novel issued on Lolita’s fiftieth anniversary). Dominique Swain is starkly believable as Dolores, holding her own against Irons’s all-encompassing talent, and Frank Langella shines as Clare Quilty.
The cultural climate had shifted back and forth between liberal progressiveness and conservative backlash in the intervening thirty-five years, but in 1997 the appetite for a new film version was particularly low. Lyne had tried and failed to make the film for years. Once he had finally finished shooting, he faced fresh legal issues, after the passage of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, which made illegal any visual depictions of children having sex with adults—whether or not a child was involved.
Lyne battled lawyers seeking significant cuts to the film and struggled to find a distributor, which delayed Lolita’s opening in North American theaters by more than a year. The theatrical run was tiny (to qualify for the Academy Awards) and a prelude to an airing on the cable television network Showtime. This Lolita, as a result, did even poorer box office business than its predecessor. Once more, the general public did not have much appetite for seeing Lolita on-screen, as opposed to imagining her within the covers of a book.
More than sixty years on, the appetite for adapting Lolita or reviving earlier adaptations has likely subsided for good. It is difficult to see how it could be done, especially given the growing polarization of the political climate. The dark heart of Lolita, and the tragedy of Dolores Haze, may now be too much to transform into entertainment. It’s wiser, and saner, to remember the little girl at the center of the novel, and all of the real girls, like Sally Horner, who suffered and survived.
Epilogue
On Two Girls Named Lolita and Sally
Both times I met with Sally Horner’s niece, Diana Chiemingo, she picked me up at the Burlington Towne Center light rail station in New Jersey and drove us a mile down the road to Amy’s Omelette House, which does, in fact, specialize in omelets. Diana turned seventy in August 2018. Her figure is slight and her voice does not carry, but both convey a steely toughness. She gets to a point quickly and is not prone to running on. Silences often stretched between us as she considered how to phrase her answers in just the right way.
Sally is never far from her niece’s thoughts. It was particularly apparent in our first face-to-face meeting in the summer of 2016. Each of us arrived at the diner with photos to show the other. Diana brought a stack of black-and-white images of Sally, Susan, Al, Ella, and others—her best friend, Carol, Sally’s unidentified date for the evening social, probable classmates at Burrough Junior High, possible acquaintances from her last summer. Both Diana and I marveled at what a fully grown, vibrant girl Sally appeared to be. A vibrancy that had so little time to assert itself.
Then it was my turn. My photos—grainy images scanned from the Courier-Post coverage of Sally’s rescue—were nowhere near in as good condition as Diana’s trove. But I knew she needed to see the one of her, not quite two, sitting with her parents as Susan speaks to Sally on the telephone, hours after her younger sister’s rescue in San Jose. Diana was startled by the photograph—she had never seen it before. Seeing her and her family all together, so long ago, made Sally’s story feel fresher, more vivid. The tragic parts, but also the happier parts. Sally had come home and was part of their family again, even if it wasn’t for very long.
Diana spoke of her parents, of her grandmother Ella, of her own life. The family tried to hold Sally’s abrupt loss at bay with mixed results. She became, and remained, the family phantom. For a long time, Diana had no inkling of the Lolita connection. She’d never read the novel, so of course she would not have seen the reference to her aunt in the text. She learned of the connection when her brother, Brian, a police department evidence technician in Florence, searched online and discovered Sally’s sparse Wikipedia entry as well as the essay by Alexander Dolinin.
“He was shocked,” Diana told me. “I was, too. I don’t know how to explain it. To think that someone is writing about your family? I was so young when everything happened, and for people to be writing about Sally—that’s a really big thing.”
By our second face-to-face meeting, nearly a year later, Diana had had more time to sit with the idea that Sally’s story was part of a larger mosaic of girls and women who had been cruelly wronged and abused by men. Stigmas take a long time to fade. But the more Diana talked about her aunt, the more the relief, and even the joy, showed through to compensate for what she, her family, and Sally had lost.
LOLITA’S POST-PUBLICATION afterlife meant that years later, Vladimir Nabokov was still being asked about the novel, again and again, in interviews. He did not like this. The irritation is evident, leading to contradictory responses about what influenced him. He denied Humbert Humbert had a real-life basis, despite his repeated chess matches with Henry Lanz at Stanford, or his reading of Havelock Ellis: “He’s a man I devised, a man with an obsession, and I think many of my characters have sudden obsessions, different kinds of obsessions; but he never existed.” He denied Lolita was based upon a real girl, despite the parenthetical mention of Sally Horner. He denied any moral agenda, telling the Paris Review: “it is not my sense of the immorality of the… relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere.”
To admit he pilfered from a true story would be, in Nabokov’s mind, to take away from the power of his narrative. To diminish the authority of his own art. The controlled nature of these interactions, with questions submitted in advance and responses edited after the fact, still left room for surprises— all the more because, as was customary with Nabokov, of what he chose not to say, as well as his exact phrasing of things he did say.