The real-life Lolita
She’s the character whose name is a byword for sexual precocity. But now a new book reveals that Nabokov’s classic novel – despite his denials – was based on the true story of an 11-year-old girl kidnapped and abused for two years . . .
Shortly before Christmas 70 years ago, a local newspaper in Philadelphia carried a heartwrenching seasonal article under the headline: ‘An Xmas tree Glows; A lonely Mother Waits’.
It told the plaintive story of Mrs Ella horner, a widow whose pretty, fair-haired 11-year-old daughter Sally — the very personification of innocence in her virginal white dress and short socks — had gone missing six months earlier, abducted by a stranger, and not heard of since.
What was even more tragic was that Mrs horner had actually consented to her daughter going off with this middle-aged man she had never met. She’d been told by Sally that he was the father of one of Sally’s school friends and she was going on holiday with them to the seaside.
this was a fabrication — made, as we shall see, by Sally under duress — but Mrs horner didn’t question it. In reality, the man was no such thing. A 50-year-old car mechanic who went by the name of Frank la Salle (one of many aliases), he was a convicted rapist and an unrepentant paedophile who preyed on sub-teen girls for his deviant sexual kicks.
For close on two years from 1948 to 1950, he held Sally captive, driving her from one city to another to stay ahead of the police, telling anyone who inquired that he was her doting, attentive father when the sordid truth was that he was using her as his concubine and satiating his lust on her at every opportunity.
By coincidence, around the same time, a russian-born professor of literature at elite Cornell University was working on the germ of an idea.
Vladimir Nabokov — gifted, charismatic and already an acknowledged poet and author — wanted to explore through a novel about forbidden love the secret life of a man sexually obsessed with a young girl and in such thrall to this ‘nymphet’ (a word that Nabokov coined) that he would risk all to possess her.
he called the man humbert humbert and the 12-year-old girl Dolores — lolita, for short. the story of their secret, sordid relationship as they journey from motel to motel, posing as father and daughter, would form one of the most electrifying, influential and notorious novels of the 20th century.
Was there an unacknowledged connection between fact and fiction here? Were Sally’s experiences in some way a blueprint for Nabokov’s creation?
American crime writer Sarah Weinman believes so and argues her case in a recently published book revealing Sally horner, as its title declares, as ‘the real lolita’.
Not that Sally was in any way a temptress in the way lolita was portrayed — her very name becoming, thanks to Nabokov, a dictionarydefined synonym for a sexually precocious young girl, a pouting under-age siren. Sally was, in fact, an innocent, tricked and coerced into sexual slavery.
one day in her home town of Camden, New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia, she was caught in the act of stealing a cheap notebook for school from the local Woolworth’s.
A fierce-looking man grabbed her, identified himself as an FBI agent and told her gruffly she was under arrest.
She wept, he relented and said he would let her go as long as she promised to report to him from time to time. otherwise she would be off to jail as a thief. Aged barely 11 and terrified of her mother finding out, she agreed.
A few months later, she ran into him again and fell for the yarn he spun that she would have to accompany him to his police headquarters in Atlantic City, on the coast 60 miles away.
She was to tell her mother she was going there with a school friend for a few days, and her busy mother — who worked long hours as a seamstress after her husband’s suicide and was grateful for someone to take her daughter on holiday — foolishly accepted her story at face value.
She even took Sally to the bus station and waved her off, catching just a glimpse of the furtive Frank, but thinking no more of it.
yet the days turned into weeks and the weeks into more than a month, and Ella realised something was wrong.
there were no phone calls home and her letters to the address she had for Sally were returned to sender. She raised the alarm.
PolICE went to Atlantic City, traced where they had been staying and quickly identified the man as la Salle. But there was no sign of Sally and the man she apparently now called ‘Daddy’. they had disappeared and were on the run.
And when a police search over eight states failed to find them, official interest fell away, leaving Ella to a mournful, lonely Christmas, waiting in vain for her little girl to return.
She told the newspaper that ran her story: ‘Whatever she has done, I can forgive her for it... if I can just have her back again.’ What Sally was actually doing was whatever diabolical deed la Salle told her she had to do. She was his slave and she lived in abject fear of him.
But to those they met in the neighbourhoods where they lived, she smiled, and they looked every inch the devoted father and daughter. In Baltimore, he got a job and, every day while he was at work, she dutifully went to school and came home in the evening. And said not a word to anyone.
too scared to defy ‘Daddy’ or run away, she hid the truth from everyone — even though by now he had gone from kidnapper to child molester and was regularly forcing her to have sex with him.
he still held over her the threat that she could go to jail, and, in the naivety her young age, she believed him. (Similarly, humbert keeps lolita in line by warning her she, too, will end up behind bars if she goes to the authorities.)
And whenever la Salle felt the law getting too close, they moved on — to Dallas in texas and then San Jose in California. they lived in trailer parks, where for a year, Sally played house, socialised with other families, went shopping, even baked cakes. on the surface, nothing was wrong. But one nosy neighbour was unconvinced. Something about the two of them was fishy. they were too close, that little bit too intimate for a healthy father-daughter relationship.
EVENtUAlly that neighbour, one ruth Janisch, got Sally on her own and wheedled the truth out of her. Sally was already beginning to crack: she’d confided to a friend at school what her ‘father’ did to her in secret in bed at night, and the friend told her it was unnatural and immoral and she should stop.
Now she revealed all, confessing to ruth Janisch that la Salle was not her real father, he’d forced her to stay with him for two years and she wanted to go back to her mother. ruth passed her the telephone and she rang home.
‘I’m in California,’ she squeaked to the family member who answered. ‘Send the FBI after me, please! tell mother I’m oK and don’t worry. I want to come home. I’ve been afraid to call before.’
And so her ordeal came to an end. la Salle was arrested, protesting even now that Sally really was his daughter. She told police that he was mean, threatened her and also forced her to ‘be intimate’ with him.
She repeated this in court, and he eventually pleaded guilty to abduction and was sentenced to 35 years in jail. reunited at last with her mother, Sally and Ella clung to each other, weeping so much they could barely speak.
Back home, they ignored the flashbulbs of the photographers and the shouted questions from reporters and shut the door behind them as they went inside. there would be no more details, no revealing interviews. It was over and best forgotten.
Meanwhile, in Cornell, Nabokov was struggling with his troublesome oeuvre. More than once he’d been on the brink of giving up and would have done so had his wife, Vera, not rescued the manuscript from the fire where he’d tossed it.
the first half of the book was fine, recounting how the smarmy humbert insinuated his way into lolita’s life by marrying her mother, while flirting with her and planning her seduction.
the mother was killed off in a fortuitous car accident, leaving him free to pursue the pliable and willing lolita. his problem now was how to resolve the second half — what happened to the two of
them after they became lovers. His solution was to have them go on a libidinous road trip around America, living in cheap hotels and temporary homes and posing as father and daughter — just like La Salle and Sally.
He even has Lolita go to school — again like Sally.
Author Sarah Weinman feels sure that Nabokov followed newspaper reports of the Sally Horner case and used Sally’s terrible ordeal to inform the second half of the book that would make him a huge bestseller and a literary superstar.
‘I believe,’ she writes, ‘that he would never have fully realised the character of Dolores [Lolita] without knowing of Sally’s reallife plight.’ Nabokov vehemently denied any such major influence on his masterpiece when such a connection was first mooted by an academic.
But he was an arrogant man who liked the conceit that all of his work was totally original, the fruits of his brilliantly vivid imagination, and owed nothing to anyone else.
Yet there is no doubt he knew something of Sally. He even name-checks her in Lolita. In an aside towards the end of his book, he has Humbert ask himself: ‘Had I done to Dolly [another of his pet names for Lolita] perhaps what Frank La Salle, a 50-yearold mechanic, had done to 11year-old Sally Horner in 1948?’
But Weinman believes she was much more than just a passing reference and that Nabokov knew much more about Sally’s plight than he ever let on — and all because of a tragic footnote to her story. Back home — and with La Salle safely in prison for the rest of his life — Sally put her terrible ordeal behind her, went back to school, made new friends.
She didn’t bother with the therapists and psychiatrists who would be de rigueur today for a girl in her situation, nor did she brood, even though those close to her sometimes saw a melancholy look in her eye as if she was grown-up beyond her years.
School wasn’t easy for her. the gossips talked behind her back; boys pestered her about her sexual experiences; the word ‘slut’ was bandied around. But she was doing well at making a new and happy life for herself.
until mid-August 1952 — two years after her return — when she went for a weekend of fun and sun on a New Jersey beach with a girlfriend. A boy she met there, 20-year-old Edward Baker, was giving her a lift home in his car when it crashed, barrelling into the back of a parked lorry.
He survived. Fifteen-year-old Sally was dead, her skull fractured, her neck snapped.
this tragic ending brought, not surprisingly, a fresh wave of newspaper coverage, including in the New York times. It undoubtedly caught Nabokov’s eye because he scribbled down what had happened on the lined index cards on which he made notes for the book.
For Weinman, this is the clinching evidence that, for all Nabokov’s denials, the story of Sally Horner was crucial to the writing of his masterpiece.
Sixteen months after Sally’s death, Nabokov completed ‘my enormous, mysterious heartbreaking novel’, recording the fact in his diary on December 6, 1953, that it had taken five years of ‘monstrous misgivings and diabolical labours’.
But it would be many months more before he found a publishing house daring enough to take on such a troublesome subject. Would-be publishers read the manuscript and shied away from content they thought would be deemed obscene.
though mild by today’s explicit standards, it was far too racy for the times. they feared that, despite its high literary merit, it would be banned as smut — which indeed it was in some countries. It finally found a home with a publisher in France who specialised in books that pushed the boundaries of acceptability and first appeared there in 1955.
It took another three years before a u.S. publisher took the risk and followed suit. It was an instant hit, selling out in days and propelling Nabokov to the very top of the literary tree. the New York times critic hailed it as ‘one of the funniest and saddest books of the year’.
that set the tone. Even now, its most recent reincarnation as a Penguin Classic praises it as ‘hilarious, flamboyant, heartbreaking, a masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust’.
Yet the subject it tackles is no laughing matter — however much literary acclaim the book and its author attract.
Paedophilia is a terrible modern menace. Its dangers cannot be overlooked or softened — and all the more so in our age when incidences have soared out of control via the internet.
Just this month the Home Secretary warned that thousands of youngsters are in danger of being groomed, exploited and blackmailed by sexual predators.
ONE of the difficulties with Nabokov’s novel is that it comes over as morally neutral. Written from the viewpoint of poor, pathetic, selfjustifying Humbert, it gives the impression that he is as much the victim as the girl he corrupts.
He feels sorry for himself. He was led on by her. A ‘demon girl’ encouraged him and he was powerless to stop himself. ‘I was as naive as only a pervert can be,’ he says plaintively.
Weinman says this ‘left a vacuum for decades of readers to misinterpret Lolita’.
It allowed for a culture of teen-temptress vamping that didn’t account for the victimisation at the novel’s core.
‘Even today, many readers still don’t see through Humbert’s vile perversions, and still blame Lolita for her behaviour, as if she had the will to resist, and chose not to.’
Which is why the parallel, truelife story of Sally Horner revealed in Weinman’s book is an important corrective. the real Lolita — abducted and abused by Frank La Salle — is a timely reminder that paedophilia is a power game, and one in which the power rests with the predatory adult, never with the exploited child.
Nor should it be taken lightly. As author Sarah Weinman concludes: ‘the abuse that Sally Horner and other girls like her endured should not be subsumed by dazzling prose, no matter how brilliant.’
The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman is published by Weidenfield & Nicholson at £16.99. © Sarah Weinman 2018. To order a copy for £13.59, visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15. Offer valid to September 22, 2018.