The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

^Twelve Across America by Oldsmobile

Vladimir Nabokov finished the 1948–1949 academic year at Cornell University in a state of irritation. He hadn’t found much time to write. He fumed over cuts and changes made without his permission by the New York Times Book Review to his review of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, which he had submitted in March. His finances were depleted: Nabokov hadn’t budgeted for unexpected housing costs and the added expense of Social Security (what he termed “old-age insurance”) taken out of his monthly salary. And he was exhausted from teaching a full load of English and Russian literature undergraduate classes, exacerbated by the extra work he’d inflicted upon himself by translating a pivotal Russian poetic masterpiece, “The Song of Igor’s Campaign,” for one of those classes.

Nabokov had, at least, completed another two chapters of his memoir, Conclusive Evidence, both of which were published later that year in the New Yorker. He did love teaching, and Cornell proved to be more amenable to his idiosyncrasies than Wellesley. But he couldn’t resist complaining: “I have always more to do than I can fit into the most elastic time, even with the most careful packing,” he wrote his friend Mstislav Dobuzhinsky in the spring of 1949. “At the moment I am surrounded by the scaffoldings of several large structures on which I have to work by fits and starts and very slowly.”

Lolita, which he still thought of as The Kingdom by the Sea, was less a work in progress than a seed in Nabokov’s mind, one that wasn’t quite ready to germinate. Perhaps he would make a beautiful work on his summer trip—another cross-country jaunt with Véra and Dmitri. They said goodbye to the Plymouth that had carried them all the way to Palo Alto, California, in 1941, and hello to a used black 1946 Oldsmobile. Dorothy Leuthold, who had shared the driving with Véra eight years earlier, wasn’t available, and neither were two other friends, Andree Bruel and Vladimir Zenzinov. But one of Nabokov’s Russian literature students, Richard Buxbaum, volunteered, and the Nabokovs picked him up at Canandaigua on June 22.

Their first destination was Salt Lake City, where Nabokov was to take part in a ten-day writers’ conference at the University of Utah starting on July 5. But their westward journey almost ended a few miles from Canandaigua, when Véra changed lanes on the highway and narrowly missed plowing into an oncoming truck. Pulling over, she turned to Buxbaum and said: “Perhaps you’d better drive.”

With Buxbaum now behind the wheel, the group traveled south of the Great Lakes and across Iowa and Nebraska. The Nabokovs spoke Russian and encouraged Buxbaum to do the same, chiding him when he lapsed into English. Vladimir was never without his notebook, ready to record all observations, however minuscule, of quotidian American life on the road, be it overheard conversation at a restaurant or vivid impressions of the landscape. They arrived in Salt Lake City on July 3, two days before the conference’s start, and were lodged at a sorority house, Alpha Delta Phi, where the Nabokovs had a room with a private bath—a pivotal part of his participation agreement.

The conference introduced Nabokov to writers he might not have otherwise met, including John Crowe Ransom, the poet and critic who founded and edited the Kenyon Review; and Ted Geisel, a few years away from children’s book superstardom as Dr. Seuss, whom Nabokov recalled as “a charming man, one of the most gifted people on this list.” He also got reacquainted with Wallace Stegner, whom he’d first met at Stanford. Nabokov and Stegner spent the conference debating each other in the novel workshops and in the off-hours playing doubles on the tennis courts, with their sons as partners.

Nabokov did not have much time to idle, though. He taught three workshops on the novel, one on the short story, and another on biography. He took part in a reading with several poets, and repurposed an old lecture on Russian literature under a new title, “The Government, the Critic, and the Reader.” When the conference ended on July 16, he, Véra, Dmitri, and Richard Buxbaum headed north to the Grand Tetons in Wyoming.

Nabokov, once more, was game to hunt more butterflies. But Véra was worried. The Teton Range, she had heard, was a haven for grizzly bears. How would Vladimir protect himself against them carrying a mere butterfly net? Nabokov wrote to the lepidopterist Alexander Klots for advice; Klots assured him that Grand Teton was “just another damned touristed-out National Park.” Any danger would come from clueless visitors, not ravenous bears.

From there the quartet headed to Jackson Hole, where Nabokov wanted to look for a particularly elusive subspecies of butterfly, Lycaeides argyrognomon longinus. On the way the Oldsmobile blew a tire. As Dmitri and Richard started changing it, Nabokov said, “I’m no use to you,” and spent the next hour catching butterflies. They arrived the following day, around July 19. For the next month and a half, the Nabokovs’ home base was the Teton Pass Ranch, at the foot of the mountain range. Nabokov’s hunt for his coveted butterfly subspecies proved successful.

The six-week stay was not without rough moments, though. Dmitri and Richard Buxbaum decided to try climbing Disappointment Peak, next to the Grand Tetons’ East Ridge. The climb to the top, seven thousand feet above base level, was straightforward at first. Then Dmitri, with the overconfidence befitting a fifteen-year-old boy, decided they should switch to a more difficult path, one that required extra equipment they lacked. Realizing they would get stuck up there if they carried on, they turned around, but hours passed—and the sun nearly set—by the time they made it back to Vladimir and Véra, who were understandably frantic.

Buxbaum hitchhiked home at the end of August. The Nabokovs, with Véra now driving, ventured northeast to Minnesota, then up to northern Ontario, for more butterfly collecting, before they finally arrived in Ithaca on September 4. Nabokov had three courses to teach that fall, but had attracted only twenty-one students, combined, a workload greeted with suspicion by his fellow professors. Even so, Nabokov wanted more money.

Cornell’s head of the Literature Department, David Daiches, received Nabokov’s request and offered a deal: he would approve a salary raise if Nabokov took over teaching the European fiction course, Literature 311–12. Nabokov could shape the curriculum as he saw fit and pick the authors he liked most. Nabokov said yes. He began right away, scribbling notes on the back of Daiches’s letter for the course that would define his Cornell career for the next decade.

And in spare moments, Nabokov began at last to shape the novel that had lived in his head for so long.

NABOKOV’S RAMSDALE IS not Camden. The made-up town where Humbert Humbert insinuates himself into the lives of Charlotte and Dolores Haze is most likely located in New England, which is why Dolores is deposited in a school in the Berkshires, and why both older man and younger girl seem to know the area well. Nabokov gleaned this knowledge during his years living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But the names of the towns are similar, as is the Linden Street of Sally Horner’s childhood home and the Lawn Street where the Haze women live. Both towns shared a white, middle-class bucolic atmosphere. As would happen again and again, the Sally Horner story parallels Lolita in all sorts of surprising ways.

Humbert Humbert came to Ramsdale by design, but moved into the Haze home at 342 Lawn Street by accident. He meant to stay nearby with the McCoos, parents to “two little daughters, one a baby the other a girl of twelve.” Lodging there, he assumed, would allow him to “coach in French and fondle in Humbertish.” But when Humbert gets there, he finds out that the McCoos’ house has burned down, and he must find someplace else to live.

He is not pleased to be shuffled off to a “white-frame horror… looking dingy and old, more gray than white—the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of a shower.” Humbert is further irked upon overhearing Charlotte Haze’s contralto voice ask a friend if “Monsieur Humbert” has arrived.

Then she comes down the steps—“sandals, maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order”—tapping her cigarette with her index finger. In Humbert’s estimation, Charlotte isn’t much: “the poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich.” Then he spies Dolores, and it is as if he saw his “Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses,” two and a half decades after his prepubescent romance with Annabel, as if the years “tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.” Now that the true object of Humbert’s obsession has revealed herself, Charlotte becomes a nuisance to be manipulated and endured.

When Charlotte sends Humbert a letter, confessing she is “a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life,” he senses opportunity: marry Charlotte to gain access to Dolores. Another line in Charlotte’s letter stands out: that if Humbert were to take advantage of her, “then you would be a criminal—worse than a kidnapper who rapes a child.” Charlotte, bafflingly, concludes that if he showed no sign of romantic interest in her, and remained in her home, then she would take it that he was “ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.” (Since we’re always in Humbert’s head, we only have his word that Charlotte wrote this.)

The American widow and the European widower marry in haste while Dolores is away at summer camp. It is, suffice to say, a bad match. What galls Humbert the most is what he describes as Charlotte’s vituperative attitude toward her daughter. The words Charlotte underlined in her copy of A Guide to Your Child’s Development to mark her daughter’s twelfth birthday: “aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate.”

Humbert has already decided to murder Charlotte and stage it as an accident, perhaps at a thinly populated beach they visited (“The setting was really perfect for a brisk bubbling murder”). His simmering rage boils over when Charlotte informs him that she intends to send Dolores to boarding school at Beardsley, so that the two of them can take a trip to England. He resists. They argue. Then she reveals to him that she has read his notes, and knows the truth about him: “You’re a monster. You’re a detestable, abominable, criminal fraud. If you come near—I’ll scream out the window. Get back!”

Humbert exits the house. He notes that Charlotte’s face is “disfigured by her emotion” and remains calm. He goes back into the house. He opens a bottle of Scotch. Then, quietly, he begins to gaslight her. “You are ruining my life and yours. Let us be civilized people. It is all your hallucination. You are crazy, Charlotte. The notes you found were fragments of a novel.”

Charlotte runs back to her room, claiming she has a letter to write. Humbert makes her a drink—or so he says—while she is gone. He realizes she is not, in fact, in her room. The telephone rings. “Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been run over and you’d better come quick.” Fate has played a trick. Instead of becoming the potential savior of her daughter’s virtue, Charlotte ends up dead. It’s also played a fast one upon Humbert: he was all set to become a murderer.

THE DESCRIPTION OF CHARLOTTE HAZE as Dietrich-lite sounds a jarringly familiar bell when I look at pictures of Ella Horner from when her daughter disappeared in 1948. She was forty-one and often wore her hair pulled back, sometimes in a bun (a “bronze-brown bun”), and plucked her eyebrows over eyes that tended to disappear into their creases. Her other facial features—strong jawline, prominent nose, pronounced cheekbones—were reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich before she emigrated from Germany and became a Hollywood star. Based on the photographs of her that I’ve seen from before and after Sally’s kidnapping, I imagine when Ella smiled, it didn’t often reach her eyes. (Humbert on Charlotte: “Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow.”)

There is another similarity, coincidence or otherwise, that ties Charlotte Haze to Ella Horner: the device of marriage to gain access to their daughter. For the fictional Humbert Humbert it was a real gambit. For Frank La Salle, it was a delusion he created to explain why he took Sally away from her mother. It was a ruse Sally had to live by in order to survive being with him in Atlantic City and Baltimore, and she would have to endure it for quite a while longer.