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

^Twenty-Two The Note Card

On the morning of August 19, 1952, as he and Véra were about to begin the long drive back to Ithaca, Vladimir Nabokov opened up a newspaper somewhere near Afton, Wyoming, and chanced upon an Associated Press story. Perhaps the newspaper Nabokov read was the New York Times, which carried the wire report of Sally Horner’s death on page twelve of their early edition. Maybe it was a local daily, which splashed the sensational news on or near the front page. Wherever Nabokov read the report, he took notes on one of his ninety-four surviving Lolita index cards.

The handwritten card reads as follows:

Here, in this note card, is proof that Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case. It is proof that her story captured his attention and that her real-life ordeal was inspiration for Dolores Haze’s fictional plight. Less clear is whether the wire report Nabokov read in August 1952 was the first time he had heard of the girl, or if he was, like all who had read the news stories in March and April 1950, stunned to realize that she’d only lived two more years after her rescue.

The note card, written on front and back, included a number of strikethroughs that ended up in the text of Lolita itself. Nabokov crossed out “middle-aged morals offender” and “cross-country slave,” both phrases that serve as Humbert Humbert’s justification to Lolita that the “bunkum” they read in the newspapers has no relation to their “father-daughter” relationship. Misspellings dotted the note card. The most notable is “harrowing,” which Nabokov tortured into some alternate, Russified version of the word.

At the top of the note card Nabokov wrote: “in Ench. H. revisited?…. in the newspaper?” As Alexander Dolinin explained, Nabokov was referring to “a scene (Chapter 26, Part II) in which Humbert revisits Briceland and in a library browses through a ‘coffin-black volume’ with old files of the local Gazette for August 1947. Humbert is looking for a printed picture of himself ‘as a younger brute’ on his ‘dark way to Lolita’s bed’ in the Enchanted Hunters hotel, and Nabokov evidently thought of making him come across a report of Sally Horner’s death in what the narrator aptly calls the ‘book of doom.’”

Nabokov decided against this approach. Instead, he seeded Sally Horner’s abduction story throughout the entire Lolita narrative, making it a tantalizing thread for readers to discover on their own—though the vast majority never did.

AN ALTERNATE THEORY of the ending of Lolita pops up in Nabokovian circles from time to time. It contends that Dolores Haze, rather than meeting and marrying Dick Schiller, becoming pregnant, and then dying in childbirth before she is eighteen, actually died at the age of fourteen and a half. Her short, tragic adult life is in fact Humbert Humbert’s delusion, a projected fantasy in order to create some sort of romanticized ending for the girl he defiled.

In this version, rather than bearing responsibility for her death, Humbert can indulge in the illusion that—at least for a short time—Dolores found her way to a kind of happiness. By extension, he can remold their rapist-victim power dynamic into real love. Humbert can convince himself he did not want Dolores because she fit the nymphet type born out of his childhood obsession with Annabel Leigh, but that he pursued the girl out of some special regard for her as a human being.

If that theory is true—Nabokov certainly never confirmed or denied—Humbert’s final visit to Ramsdale carries an extra sharpness. Just before Nabokov invokes Sally Horner and Frank La Salle in a parenthetical aside, the reliable means through which he conveys true meaning to the reader, he has Humbert Humbert walking through Ramsdale, reminiscing about his first, fateful glimpse of Dolores Haze. Humbert strolls by his old house and spies a “For Sale” sign with a black velvet hair ribbon attached. Just then, “a golden-skinned, brown-haired nymphet of nine or ten” passes him, looking at him with “wild fascination in her large blue-black eyes.”

She could be a composite of Lolita and Sally, her eyes the same color as Sally’s, more or less. Humbert says, “I said something pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you have, but she retreated in haste and the music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man, glistening with sweat, came out and glared at me. I was on the point of identifying myself when, with a pang of dream-embarrassment, I became aware of my mud-caked dungarees, my filthy and torn sweater, my bristly chin, my bum’s bloodshot eyes.”

Here, so late in Lolita, Humbert has his moment of reckoning. He understands, briefly, “what he might really look like in the eyes of his eternal jury: children and their protectors.” The glib charm, all of the smooth veneer, is stripped away in an instant. Humbert reveals himself as the monster he knows he is. And by killing Clare Quilty for taking Dolores away from him—in his mind, taking away what was rightfully his— Humbert Humbert loses his last vestige of morality.

Dolinin takes a charitable view of Nabokov’s treatment of Sally Horner in Lolita, claiming that the number of references, including the architecture of the novel’s second half, does not obscure the real girl. Rather, he writes, “[Nabokov] wanted us to remember and pity the poor girl whose stolen childhood and untimely death helped to give birth to his (not Humbert Humbert’s) Lolita—the genuine heroine of the novel hidden behind the narrator’s self-indulgent verbosity.”

This sense of pity Dolinin speaks of emerges in Humbert’s final meeting with Dolores. She is married, pregnant, and seventeen, with “adult, rope-veined narrow hands.” She has aged out of his perverse desires, and he finally understands, through the use of the parenthetical, how much he defiled and violated her, how much damage he has caused:

“…in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy… palliative of articulate art.”

Humbert’s epiphany is in keeping with Véra’s diary note only days after the American publication of Lolita in 1958. She was ecstatic about the largely positive press and fast sales of the novel, but was unnerved by what critics weren’t saying. “I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along.”

It is to Nabokov’s credit that something of the true character of Dolores—her messy, complicated, childish self—emerges out of the haze of his narrator’s perverse pedestal-placing. She is no “charming brat lifted from an ordinary existence only by the special brand of love.” She excels at tennis; she is free with sharp comebacks (“You talk like a book, Dad”); and when she seizes the opportunity to break away from Humbert and run off with Clare Quilty, she does so in order to survive. Any fate is better than staying with her stepfather.

Never mind that she will, later, run from Quilty’s desire to embroil her in pornography with multiple people. Never mind that Dolores will “settle” for Dick Schiller and a life of domesticity and motherhood that is, sadly, cut short. She still has the freedom and the autonomy to make these choices for herself, a freedom she never had while under Humbert Humbert’s power.

These choices are likely why Véra rated Dolores so highly in the diary entry, and why Nabokov himself ranked Lolita second (after Pnin) of all the characters he ever created that he admired most as a person.