The story of the girl who is said to have inspired Lolita

For a long time, Nabokov’s life was scrutinised for events that would have turned novel, Lolita, (60 million copies sold) into a true story. Nothing was ever found; the author was faithful to Vera, his wife, to the end of his life. But what if “the true story” was hiding elsewhere? In 1948, 11-year-old Sally Horner was kidnapped in the circumstances strangely similar to those in the book. Journalist Sarah Weinman’s non-fiction book, published in September, charts the story that possibly inspired Lolita, confirming the tragic value of the novel.

“Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank La Salle, a 50-year-old mechanic, had done to 11-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?” the narrator of Lolita (1955) asks himself in a parenthetical remark in chapter 33 of Vladimir Nabokov’s torrid bestseller. And as so often with Nabokov, it is between the brackets that the essential clues are hiding. Who is this Sally Horner? After some research, the academic Alexander Dolinin reconstructed the story in an article published in The Times Literary Supplement in 2005, “What happened to Sally Horner?” The parallel between the life of Dolores Haze, known as Lolita, and that of Sally Horner is blatant but remains in the realm of intuition. With The Real Lolita, an investigation by the journalist Sarah Weinman, which is appearing simultaneously in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom this month, the case is about to appear in a different light.

The FBI man

It all started with the theft of a notebook. Florence Horner, known as Sally, dreamt of joining the group of cool girls at her school and, to do this, had to go through an initiation test: to steal something from Woolworth’s in Camden, New Jersey, where she lived. Unfortunately, she had scarcely grabbed the notebook when a man in his 50s, with greying hair, interrupted her ploy: “I am an FBI agent, and you are under arrest,” he said, his hand on the girl’s arm. She immediately burst into tears. She apologised. She asked for mercy. In a low voice, he threatened to send her to a reform school and to prison, unless she came back to see him from time to time – which she promised to do. The next day, on the way to school, Sally came across the FBI man again. The rules of the game had changed; the “government” was then insisting that the girl go to Atlantic City with him. To elude prison, she would have to persuade her mother to let her go. To avoid being branded a thief, Sally became a liar for the time of a phone call, claiming to have been invited to stay with a girlfriend. Soon she was boarding a bus with Frank La Salle – a serial rapist who had been in prison six months previously for the rapes of six young girls. Their trip would last for 21 months.

First it would be Atlantic City, then Baltimore, Dallas and San Jose, California. In turn, the kidnapper and his substitute daughter would go by the names of Mr Warner and his daughter, Warner, Madeleine La Plante and Florence Planette. At the start, she would call and write to her mother every two days to assure her that everything was fine, then she would ask if she could stay at her friend’s place for another week, then she would call once and twice again, and nothing more.

Her mum’s letters would return like a boomerang. Sally had disappeared. The girl, at Frank’s side, would be enrolled at several Catholic schools and meet several classmates to whom she would say nothing about her true identity, out of fear – until a neighbour, Ruth Janisch, asked Sally questions about her supposed father, and the girl cracked and admitted everything. The kidnapping and abuse that La Salle forced her into – Sally Horner would attest to these before the judicial authorities subsequently. This was in 1950. After that: a full confession by Frank La Salle (“I don’t need a lawyer – I am guilty,” he would say during his interrogation), and a maximum term of imprisonment. The man who perhaps inspired Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita, was never to see the city lights again and would die in prison in 1966, two months before his 70th birthday.

Parallels and differences

The similarities between Nabokov’s fiction and the story of this kidnapping are numerous: Dolores Haze (known as Lolita) and Florence Horner (known as Sally) are both brunettes, daughters of widows and, something that is not unimportant, not particularly seductive (“unconscious of her fantastic power,” says Humbert Humbert). In both stories, the kidnapping takes the form of an erratic trip in America where the “couple” are relatively cut off from the world (Lolita, like Sally, nevertheless continues to go to school), and the relationship ends with the kidnapper being condemned to 35 years in prison. However, nothing erudite would be found in Frank La Salle, unlike the abominable genius of Humbert Humbert. Above all, the two stories would not have the same outcome; whereas in Lolita, Dolores flees Humbert Humbert in the company of Clare Quilty, another elderly man, Sally would be reunited with her mother after the kidnapping, live with her for two years… and die brutally in a car accident, as unexpected as it was tragic.

How does the factual reality of a story change its novelistic quality?

So, with these parallels and differences, can anything be concluded with certainty about the influence of fact on fiction? In 1963, an article by Peter Welding published in the men’s magazine Nugget went in this direction but was nipped in the bud: Véra, Nabokov’s wife, wrote a letter regarding the author and his article, clearly stating that the story of Sally “was not the inspiration for the book.”

The novel, released by the French publisher Olympia Press (Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, etc), did indeed cause a scandal when it came out. It was unsettling and disturbing, was even banned in 1956, and pushed all the boundaries of people’s assumptions. So had Nabokov never heard of Sally? Really? And yet we know that he was interested in her story, as he devoted one of his notecards to it. (Nabokov prepared his novels on index cards.) It is also known that the motif of the nymphet is a recurrent one in the Russian writer’s work, first appearing in one of his first stories, A Nursery Tale, written in 1926. In The Gift (written between 1935 and 1937, although it would not be published until 1952), there is even a summary of Lolita before the fact. Moreover, we know that Nabokov was unable to finish Lolita and that he had tried to burn manuscript twice. And that he managed to complete the second part only after the story of Sally Horner had become public. Admittedly – and Sarah Weinman is clear on this point – this does not allow us to conclude for sure that a true story has been adapted, but in any case it makes us wonder about the links between fiction and reality in Nabokov, who refused throughout his life to answer this question. And indeed, how does the factual truth of a story change its novelistic quality? And its interpretation?

Not a nice little novel

No doubt, responds Sarah Weinman, the acknowledged existence of the Sally Horner drama prevents Lolita being used as something lightweight to read sitting out in the sun, as people could do when the novel came out, confusing the little girl with Kubrick’s heroine Sue Lyon or romanticising the nymphet as in the musical by John Barry and Alan Jay Lerner, Lolita, My Love.

We forget that the child in the book was 12 years old, was horrified by her first experiences with Humbert Humbert and wanted to flee. In her private diary, Vera Nabokov worried that, in the early reviews of Lolita, nobody seemed to dwell on the terror in the eyes of Dolores. Nabokov’s genius is to have captured the horror in a novel that is as troubling as it is brilliant. It would be wrong to read it and see only a beautiful little novel or, worse still, a libertine novel. Remembering Sally’s story and its close resemblance to that in Lolita is to recall that the tragedy is not and never will be a carnival. To repeat to Nabokov’s readers that, when reading it, you can never be at ease. You cannot feel reassured. So reread it, and be troubled.

The Real Lolita

The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World (in English), by Sarah Weinman, Ecco Press