San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The true crime
Sixty years after it was published to great acclaim and controversy, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” continues to delight, haunt, amuse and horrify readers around the world. No one who encounters the novel can ever forget its unreliable narrator, the delusional pedophile and murderer Humbert Humbert. Equally memorable is his victim, Dolores Haze, a.k.a. Lolita, the “nymphet” whose innocence he steals and life he ruins.
Until now, however, one of the crucial questions about the book, a major source of Nabokov’s inspiration, has been overlooked and forgotten. Rather than the pure product of imagination that the author would have his audience believe it to be, “Lolita” seems to owe a debt to a sensational real-life crime whose aftermath shocked the nation just as Nabokov was desperately trying to finish the book he had struggled with for a decade.
In “The Real Lolita,” truecrime journalist Sarah Weinman, editor of “Women Crime Writers” and “Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives,” digs deep into the details of the Sally Horner abduction and finds a strong connection between it and Nabokov’s now-classic novel. Weinman is especially careful not to sugarcoat the stark reality of the sexual and emotional abuse Sally suffered at the hands of Frank La Salle. She also observes that “Humbert raped a twelve-year-old child repeatedly over the course of nearly two years, and got away with it.”
“Millions of readers missed how ‘Lolita’ folded in the story of a girl who experienced The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World in real life what Dolores Haze suffered on the page,” she writes.
“Knowing about Sally Horner does not diminish ‘Lolita’s brilliance, or Nabokov’s audacious inventiveness, but it does augment the horror he also captured in the novel.”
Eleven-year-old Florence “Sally” Horner’s life changed forever in May 1948, when she stole a notebook from a Woolworth’s in Camden, N.J. A “hawk-faced” man grabbed her and said, “I am an FBI agent ... and you are under arrest.” Told she would be sent to reform school, Sally stopped crying when the “agent” let her go, with the promise that she would report to him occasionally.
Months went by before the man contacted her again. Sally’s alcoholic father had committed suicide five years earlier, and her distracted mother eked out a precarious living as a seamstress. There was no one in the household to raise any doubts when a “Frank Warner,” supposedly the father of two friends from school, called to invite Sally on a family trip to Atlantic City.
On June 14, Ella Horner waved goodbye to her daughter at the bus depot, never suspecting that she had delivered her child into the hands of a molester named Frank La Salle. Sally would not be seen again by her family for 21 months — and would live only a few years after her rescue before being killed in a car crash.
Seven years after the kidnapping, Nabokov published “Lolita.” Readers everywhere wanted to know what autobiographical experiences might have had inspired the writing of the novel. Always protective of their privacy, Nabokov and his wife, Vera, were especially cagey when questions moved toward the personal. Weinman writes, “Any speculation that ‘Lolita’ could be inspired by a reallife case went against the single-minded Nabokovian belief that art supersedes influence, and so influence must be brushed off.”
But tucked away in the finished novel is a single, tantalizing reference to Sally Horner’s abduction. While spiriting Dolores away from home after her mother’s accidental death, Humbert muses, “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”
What impact did the Horner kidnapping have on the development of “Lolita”? Although the proof is not ironclad, Weinman argues that the book might not exist without it. She writes, “Some cases drop all the direct evidence into your lap. Some cases are more circumstantial. The case for what Vladimir Nabokov knew of Sally Horner and when he knew it falls squarely into the latter category.”
Relying on prior investigations, court documents, library archives and interviews with surviving friends and family members, Weinman builds an intricate portrait of Sally, one that emphasizes her bravery and resourcefulness in the face of a horrifying situation.
As she recounts the twists in the Horner case, Weinman also follows the perambulations of the Nabokovs, especially their summertime cross-country trips, during which he hunted butterflies and wrote notes for a novel on index cards. Any fan of Nabokov is likely to find “The Real Lolita” enchanting, capturing as it does Nabokov’s inscrutable genius and his mundane quirks.
The greatest strength of “The Real Lolita,” however, lies in Weinman’s insistence that Sally be viewed as a complete person. She sees her as abused three times over: “snatched from her ordinary life by Frank La Salle, only for her life to be cut short by car accident, and then stripmined to produce the bones of ‘Lolita,’ the only acknowledgment a parenthetical hidden in plain sight, hardly noticed by many millions of readers.”
“The Real Lolita” is the real deal — suspenseful, insightful and moving. Weinman makes her case with passion and eloquence, and her book will stand as a poignant reminder that behind the literary pyrotechnics of “Lolita” lies a real-life tragedy, one worthy of recognition more than 60 years later.
Michael Berry is a freelance writer. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com