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Nonfiction

Behind the Kidnapping Case That Inspired ‘Lolita’

Sally Horner before her nearly two-year disappearance.Credit...Philadelphia Bulletin, via Associated Press

THE REAL LOLITA
The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World
By Sarah Weinman
306 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

RUST AND STARDUST
By T. Greenwood
356 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $26.99.

Sixty years after the American publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s literary tour de force “Lolita,” two new books take up the kidnapping of an 11-year-old New Jersey girl by a pedophile, the case on which Nabokov partially based his novel. Both Sarah Weinman’s nonfiction account, “The Real Lolita,” and T. Greenwood’s novel, “Rust and Stardust,” reflect changes in our understanding of pedophilia and sexual abuse as a disorder of power rather than as a side effect of uncontrollable lust; more important, in the light of the #MeToo movement, we have come to value the witness of abused little girls.

When Nabokov’s sensational, now classic, novel was first published in Europe in 1955, it was banned. As a result, it was turned down by a number of publishers in the United States. Until it was finally published here, in 1958, Americans smuggled it home as once they had “Ulysses” or “Fanny Hill.” Told in the first person by the child molester Humbert Humbert, “Lolita” describes his affair with the 12-year-old “nymphet” he kidnapped and held for nearly two years. Humbert’s account was written from prison, where he died while awaiting trial for the murder of a rival. Lolita, we are told, eventually married and died in childbirth — Nabokov’s way of finessing the problem of imagining a future for the violated child and her abuser.

At the time, the novel was mostly seen as a tragedy, the tale of a man tormented by lust and guilt — a perverse love. In other words, it was Humbert’s tragedy, but also possibly a work of comic genius. Although the initial critical reception acknowledged the feelings of unease created by the erotic situation, the work was generally well received, the rare literary achievement that became a best seller. Two New York Times critics captured the prevailing reactions.

Elizabeth Janeway saw the novel (as did Nabokov) as being essentially about Humbert Humbert: “I can only say that Humbert’s fate seems to me classically tragic, a most perfectly realized expression of the moral truth that Shakespeare summed up in the sonnet that begins, ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action’: right down to the detailed working out of Shakespeare’s adjectives, ‘perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame.’”

Orville Prescott, writing at the same time, had a different opinion: “There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.”

Image
Credit...MGM

We know there have been countless real-life stories that mirror the plot of “Lolita” — older man kidnapping and abusing a little girl. Both Weinman’s and Greenwood’s books follow the case of Sally Horner, who in 1948 was abducted by the 50-year-old Frank LaSalle and, as in Nabokov’s novel, held captive for nearly two years. Eventually, Sally was found unharmed — except, of course, for the lasting trauma of the experience. Her life, like Lolita’s, was to be short; she was killed in an automobile accident when she was just 15.

A few commentators noted briefly, and Nabokov acknowledged, that some details in his book were based on actual cases of pedophilic kidnappers, and he explicitly mentions Sally Horner in “Lolita” when Humbert asks himself, “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a 50-year-old mechanic, had done to 11-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?” But because he insisted on the primacy of art over reality, he held that “Lolita” sprang essentially from his own artistic gifts.

Sarah Weinman is a crime writer who has seriously researched the Nabokov connection. Her book provides extensive background for the Horner story: Among the many people she tracks down are one of Horner’s nieces and a neighbor who was instrumental in Sally’s rescue. The achievement of her impressive literary sleuthing is to bring to life a girl whose story had been lost. And she provides documentation of Nabokov’s use of the case, demonstrating that the writer, long fascinated with the essential paradigm of middle-aged men obsessed with young girls, was well into writing “Lolita” when he encountered the real-life story of Sally Horner and incorporated details of it into his novel, something he would later deny or downplay.

Weinman takes pains to address the virtual lack of empathy with Sally in the critical coverage of Nabokov’s fiction, noting that Vera Nabokov was concerned about this in the wake of the success of “Lolita.” “One subject bothered her above all: the way that public reception, and critical assessments, seemed to forget that there was a little girl at the center of the novel, and that she deserved more attention and care: ‘I wish someone would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence upon the monstrous HH, and her heart-rending courage all along.’”

But if Vera believed her husband understood the situation from Dolly’s point of view, the reader is not apt to agree. Humbert Humbert is racked by guilt and sorrow, by recollections of his passion for “Lo,” but he is also filled, one feels, with satisfaction at his own literary genius. There is very little about the novel that reveals Dolly’s thoughts and emotions.

In “Rust and Stardust,” T. Greenwood sets herself the task of dramatizing Sally’s experience, attempting to fill in those missing feelings and reactions, as well as those of her family and friends. “I have taken many, many liberties with both character and plot,” Greenwood admits. There was, for example, no such person as the nice nun, Mary Katherine, who when she can’t persuade her superiors to share her concern about the dreamy, motherless girl in her class, vows to devote herself in the future to the welfare of abused children. Did the real Frank LaSalle give Sally a puppy? What was the actual social level of the Horners? Theirs was a world of trailer parks and cheap motels (as in “Lolita”) but while Greenwood has them talk like characters out of Steinbeck (“I wanna see that picture,” Sally said. “I know I ain’t nearly as glamorous as that girl Lena,” says someone else), Weinman and Nabokov employ a higher level of diction. What were these vanished people really like? Unlike Greenwood, Weinman restricts herself to what can be known and labels what is speculative as such.

Some readers (myself included) are troubled by fictionalizations, although we find ourselves caught up by them all the same. Yet since Nabokov’s day, as we come to understand more about the artistic process, the unconscious and the nature of “inspiration,” we have realized that no work of art is unrelated to the factual world. Even if Nabokov refined and dreamed the events of his novel, in the process turning it into art, our understanding of the convergence of fiction and life has changed. We know that Sally Horner’s experience was only too horrifyingly real. Fictional versions of actual events raise the salient question of our day: the role of truth. And, of course, whether we value it.

A correction was made on 
Sept. 20, 2018

The biographical note with an earlier version of this review referred incorrectly to the reviewer’s most recent book. “Flyover Lives” is a memoir, not a novel.

How we handle corrections

Diane Johnson is the author, most recently, of the memoir “Flyover Lives.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Little Girl Lost. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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