Onyx reviews: The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 09/05/2018

There is a long tradition of real events inspiring fiction. Some authors or screenwriters don't shy away from acknowledging their inspiration (think: just about any episode of Law & Order) whereas others are more coy. In the latter camp, Sarah Weinman argues, is Vladimir Nabokov.

She's not the first to note that Lolita mentions the abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner, who was held captive for nearly two years by Frank La Salle, although she has dug into the facts of that case and the Nabokovs' knowledge of it in far greater detail than anyone else. The first person who wrote about the parallels between Lolita and Horner's kidnapping was Peter Welding in Nugget in 1963. That essay didn't have a great reach, given the nature of the magazine.

The question remains: what did Nabokov know, and when did he know it? He and his wife, Vera, who acted as his spokesperson, refused to admit any real-life influence on his novel, perhaps because they believed to do so would dilute Lolita's impact. If he was inspired or influenced by those events, should that change our reading of Lolita? It is well documented that Nabokov explored the concepts found in his controversial novel long before Sally Horner told her story. However, it is possible that the publicity that followed her escape helped Nabokov solve problems he was having with the book.

Was it exploitive of him to make use of Horner's story, even though most readers had no idea he had done so? Or did he, by mentioning Horner in the novel, acknowledge the debt he owed to her horrific experience? In interviews, Nabokov derided the "morbid fascination" people had with exploring whether a work of art was traceable to a true story. "When a novel is based on an actual crime, it should do much more than loosely fictionalize it. The novel must stand alone as a work of art that justifies using the story for its own purposes," Weinman argues in an essay in Vanity Fair.

Weinman digs into records as if attempting to solve a cold case. She interviews surviving relatives and others who might have known young Sally Horner, whose much-publicized escape was followed by a tragic end to her story. Horner has been relegated to a footnote in history, so Weinman is determined that her story should be told in full, as much as is possible more than half a century later. In parallel, to perhaps underscore the real-life influence on Lolita, Weinman outlines the struggle Nabokov had writing and getting the book published. While her argument is convincing, it's also true that, by the end of her research, Weinman knows far more about Horner's life and experience than Nabokov ever could have.

Perhaps more significantly, Weinman demolishes the popular notion that Lolita is about a young female seductress (Dolores Haze) who lures an innocent and charming older man into a twisted relationship. Humbert Humbert is a monster, full stop. And Haze is a victim, a twelve-year-old girl taken from her family and forced to survive under the most horrific of circumstances. By investigating the Horner case and laying it out in full detail, from the moment young Sally first encounters La Salle in a pharmacy while shoplifting all the way to the end when she is finally able to break free from her prolonged confinement, readers see that this wasn't an ingénue whose flirtations got her into trouble. La Salle was a pedophile who deliberately sought Horner out, tricked her mother into letting her go away with him, manipulated her and trapped her with threats of imprisonment. Weinman doesn't exploit Sally, but neither does she shy away from revealing the details of her horrible experience.

How different would things have been if Sally had met a different fate after her escape? If she had still been around years later to comment on Lolita? Perhaps the shallow reading of the novel that has turned the word "Lolita" into a misconception wouldn't have happened, given a real face and a real story to reflect the novel.