After one stern denial in a 1962 interview, Nabokov changed his tune a little in the near-next breath, saying that Humbert did exist, but only after he had written Lolita. “While I was writing the book, here and there in a newspaper I would read all sorts of accounts about elderly gentlemen who pursued little girls: a kind of interesting coincidence but that’s about all.”
This is a close-to-tacit admission by Nabokov that he knew of actual cases that bore some resemblance to his fictional world. Cases like Sally Horner’s kidnapping at the hands of Frank La Salle. Nabokov references them in the text of Lolita, but to do so in an interview was anathema, lest listeners or readers connect the dots.
But there is no getting around the fact that Nabokov kept returning to this taboo relationship between a young girl and an older man throughout his career. That compulsion had real-life basis not only in other people’s lives, but also in his own. A clue to that compulsion emerges when Humbert Humbert describes his “rather repulsive” uncle, Gustave Trapp. He thinks of Trapp again while tracking Ivor Quilty, Clare’s dentist uncle, and again during his first encounter with Clare at the Enchanted Hunters hotel. (Quilty also punches through the proverbial fourth wall by signing his name as “G. Trapp” in the hotel’s guestbook entry. As the German scholar Michael Maar points out, “Quilty cannot know the name.”)
That uncles figure so much in Lolita recalls a revelation in Speak, Memory: that Vladimir’s uncle Ruka took his then-nine-year-old nephew onto his knee and fondled him repeatedly “with crooning sounds and fancy endearments” until the boy’s father called for him from the veranda. The real-life scene seems to foreshadow the famous fictional one of Humbert achieving orgasm with Dolores on his lap. Humbert, of course, believes his emission to be furtive—that the girl doesn’t know. But Nabokov, in his description, leaves it up to the reader to decide what Lolita knew.
IN READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN, Azar Nafisi makes the excellent point that Dolores Haze is a double victim, because not only her life is taken from her, but also her life story: “The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another.” Without realizing it, Nafisi has made the exact parallel between Dolores Haze and Sally Horner. For Sally’s life, too, was forever marked by the twenty-one months she spent as Frank La Salle’s captive, his false daughter, his own realized fantasy. After she was rescued, she attempted to resume the life snatched away from her. And it seemed she did, on the surface.
But how could she, when her story had been front-page news all across the country, and when those in Camden knew exactly what had happened to her and judged her—blamed her—for it? Whether she’d lived two years or many decades, whether she might have had time to move forward, even if she could not move on, Sally Horner was forever marked.
Lolita’s end, dying in childbirth, is a tragedy. But Sally Horner’s demise by car accident is the bigger tragedy, because it was real, and robbed her of the chance to grow up and at least attempt to move forward. In fact, Sally Horner is a triple victim: snatched from her ordinary life by Frank La Salle, only for her life to be cut short by car accident, and then strip-mined to produce the bones of Lolita, the only acknowledgment a parenthetical reference hidden in plain sight, hardly noticed by many millions of readers.
Over the course of researching this book these last few years, I would ask faithful fans of Lolita if they’d caught the parenthetical reference to Sally Horner’s kidnapping. The unanimous answer was “no.” This was no real surprise. If no one caught the reference, how could they be expected to see how much of the novel’s structure rides on what happened to Sally in real life? But once seen, it is impossible to unsee.
There is no simple lock-and-key metaphor to equate the tragic story of Dolores Haze to the tragic story of Sally Horner. Vladimir Nabokov was too shrewd to create a life-meets-art dynamic. But Sally’s story is certainly one of those important keys that, once employed, unlocks a critical inspiration. There is no question Lolita would have existed without Sally Horner because Nabokov spent over twenty years dwelling on the theme, working it out in bits and pieces as he moved around Europe and America. But the narrative was also strengthened and sharpened by the inclusion of her story.
Sally Horner can’t be cast aside so easily. She must be remembered as more than a young girl forever changed by a middle-aged man’s crime of monstrous perversion. A girl who survived adversity, manipulation, and cross-country horror, only to be denied the chance to grow up. A girl immortalized, and forever trapped, in the pages of a classic novel of satire and sadness, like a butterfly with wings damaged before ever having the chance to fly.
Acknowledgments
The Real Lolita has a single author—me—but could not have been written or published without the input, advice, support, and sounding board of many people, in ways large and small. This odyssey began when Jordan Ginsberg, editor-in-chief at Hazlitt, replied to my March 2014 article pitch about Sally Horner’s kidnapping: “Just brought this up in our editorial meeting, and it got one of the fastest and most enthusiastic ‘yes’ votes I’ve heard in a while.” Eight months later, in great part to Jordan’s editorial vision, the piece was published and changed the course of my professional life. Much has transpired in the intervening four years, and I remain thrilled that it all began at Hazlitt. Additional thanks to senior editor Haley Cullingham, whom I have loved working with and hope to do so again soon.
Transforming Sally Horner’s story from a magazine piece to a book was equal parts challenging, exhilarating, exhausting, and rewarding. Shana Cohen offered invaluable feedback on the first rounds of book proposal drafts. My agent, David Patterson, has been a brilliant advocate and champion of this project, as has the entire team at the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, particularly Aemilia Phillips, Hannah Schwartz, Ross Harris, and Stuart Krichevsky. Thanks also to my UK agent, Jane Finigan at Lutyens & Rubinstein.
My wonderful editors, Zack Wagman at Ecco and Anne Collins at Knopf Canada, pushed me to meet my ambitions for The Real Lolita and then exceed them. I am fortunate to have had such incisive and thoughtful editorial guidance from two of the very best in the business. And to Holly Harley, my editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK, thank you for your continued support and never wavering in your enthusiasm for the project.
At Ecco, thanks to Miriam Parker, Sonya Cheuse, Meghan Deans, Megan Lynch, Denise Oswald, Dan Halpern, James Faccinto, Ashley Garland, Martin Wilson, Sara Wood (for the heart-stopping cover design), Allison Saltzman, Lisa Silverman, Andrea Molitor, and especially to Emma Janaskie. At Penguin Random House Canada, thanks to Sarah Jackson, Pamela Murray, Max Arambulo, Marion Garner, Matthew Sibiga, Sarah Smith-Eivemark, Liz Lee, Jared Bland, Robert Wheaton, and Kristin Cochrane.
Special thanks to the MacDowell Colony, for the gift of time and space to finish the first draft of the book; to Karen Riedenburg and David Dean, for invaluable research assistance; to all the archivists and institutions I visited for my research, and the sources who were generous with their time and interviews (more on them in the Notes section); and to Diana Chiemingo, who gave me her trust, faith, and belief that I could do full justice to the brief life of her aunt Sally.