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

^Twenty Lolita Progresses

The Nabokovs couldn’t afford to road-trip across America during the summer of 1950, but the next summer Vladimir and Véra left Ithaca in June, at the end of Cornell’s spring semester. Vladimir had turned in his grades for his European fiction class, and they gave up the lease on the house on East Seneca Street, their home the last three years, having found cheaper accommodations for the fall.

By the time Véra turned their aging Oldsmobile off U.S. Highway 36 at St. Francis, Kansas, on June 30, the pattern was set: hunt for butterflies for as many hours as a given day allowed, depending on their stamina and the weather. On rainier days—which dominated the trip—or when fatigue set in, usually in afternoons, Nabokov worked on the manuscript he was still calling The Kingdom by the Sea.

Nabokov worked in the passenger seat of the Oldsmobile, away from the noise coming through the motel room walls and insulated from the floods and storms that curtailed his exercises in lepidoptery. Dmitri, now seventeen, joined his parents in Telluride, Colorado—he was coming from Harvard, where he’d finished up his first year—and took over the driving duties, too. The family wended their way through the Rockies, Wyoming, and West Yellowstone, Montana, before returning to Ithaca at the end of August.

Weeks of butterfly-hunting in the Rockies, often shirtless with his chest exposed to the sun, had little immediate effect upon Nabokov’s health. The accumulated exposure didn’t cause any issue until he returned to Cornell, when a nasty case of sunstroke finally hit, confining him to bed for two solid weeks. “Silly situation… to be smitten by the insipid N.Y. sun on a dapper lawn,” Nabokov noted in his diary. “High temperature, pain in the temples, insomnia and an incessant, brilliant but sterile turmoil of thoughts and fancies.”

The Nabokovs changed their itinerary for the summer of 1952. They began their journey in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rather than Ithaca, because Vladimir had taken up a teaching post at Harvard for the spring semester (he was on sabbatical from Cornell). A mitigating factor in moving back to the Cambridge area was to be closer to Dmitri, continuing his studies at Harvard.

Vladimir, Véra, and Dmitri, driving the same Oldsmobile as in earlier years, landed in Laramie, Wyoming, at the end of June, about ten days after departing Cambridge. They stayed in the state hunting butterflies all along the Continental Divide. They traveled through Medicine Bow National Forest (“using the abominable local road”) to Riverside in time for the Fourth of July (where “some noisy festival is underway”) and, by early August, arrived in Afton.

All the while Nabokov continued to scribble down notes on index card after index card, adding to the novel that had bedeviled him for so long. He had spent the previous year sharpening his observations of quotidian matters. He noted down all sorts of minutiae, the better to portray the American prepubescent girl at the heart of his novel with greater accuracy. Nabokov recorded heights and weights, average age of first menstruation, attitude changes, even the “proper method of inserting an enema tip into a rectum.”

He also jotted down teen magazine slang—which is why phrases like “It’s a sketch” or “She was loads of fun” appear in Lolita and sound right, not tin-eared. To create the character of Miss Pratt, the Beardsley school head, Nabokov interviewed a real school principal under the guise of having a (fictional) daughter who wanted to enroll.

But he did not make as much progress on Lolita as he wished while wandering along the Continental Divide. The academic year had exhausted Nabokov more than he realized. He saved most of his energy to scour for blues, including a successful sighting of Vanessa cardui. In due course it was time for the Nabokovs to return east. Dmitri had gone back to Cambridge earlier, leaving his parents to travel by themselves along two-lane highways. The couple likely needed two weeks to make the 1,850-plus-mile trip back to Ithaca. They reached the town, and another new rental home, on September 1, 1952.

By that time, Nabokov had read a new story about Sally Horner, one that would change the direction of Lolita so much it’s surprising to think the novel could have existed without it.