Sarah Weinman - The Real Lolita - The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

The Nabokovs’ behavior could, I suppose, be attributed as much to carelessness as willful obfuscation. Stacy Schiff, Véra’s biographer, strongly advised against reading anything specific into Véra’s blanket denial to Levin. Schiff told me that Véra’s letter “reads like everything else [the Nabokovs said] about the primacy of art. It’s a realm unto itself, and everything else is on some pedestrian or insignificant level.” Véra, Schiff said, dismissed anything that could be perceived as a “mandarin influence on high art.” The everyday needed to be discarded at the altar of creative imagination.

Except Vladimir and Véra were not careless people. His art, and her management and protection of his art, was all about command and control, about rejecting interpretations that did not fit with their vision. If art was to prevail—and for the Nabokovs, it always did—then explicitly revealing what lay behind the curtain of fiction in the form of a real-life case could shatter the illusion of total creative control.

Véra’s denial by letter had to be definitive to make pesky tabloid reporters slink away without investigating the matter more deeply. Levin published his piece in the Post, but it was soon forgotten, setting the template for further neglect of the Sally Horner case. Andrew Field, in his 1967 critical biography Nabokov: His Life in Art, merely cited the parenthetical as “an actual case of a Philadelphia mechanic who took an eleven-year-old Camden girl to Atlantic City.”

Alfred Appel, in his annotated Lolita published in 1970 (as well as in the revised 1991 version), dutifully footnoted the reference to her, but failed to mention Sally by name. Brian Boyd’s definitive biography of Nabokov was better, noting “‘a middle-aged morals offender’ who abducted fifteen-year-old Sally Horner from New Jersey and kept her for twenty-one months as his ‘cross-country slave’”—but misstated Sally’s age at her abduction by four years.

Vladimir Nabokov’s otherwise scrupulous archive of Lolita -related clippings failed to include anything about Sally Horner because if it had, then the dots would connect with more force, which would upset the carefully constructed myth of Nabokov, the sui generis artist, whose imagination and gifts were far superior to others’. It’s as if he didn’t trust Lolita to stand on its own against the real story of Sally Horner. As a result, Sally’s plight was sanded over, all but forgotten.

Decades after Ruth Janisch gently coaxed Sally Horner to make the long-distance telephone call that freed her from Frank La Salle, Ruth was having tea with her daughter Rachel. After years of estrangement, Rachel had decided she wanted a closer relationship to her mother.

In Sally’s story, Ruth was a heroine whose actions changed the course of a girl’s life forever. But to her children, Ruth was a more complicated, infuriating, mercurial, manipulative creature, whose actions led to long estrangements. That troubling Ruth was not yet in full bloom in 1949 and 1950. Much of her aberrant behavior was still in the future. Rachel described her mother’s life philosophy to me: Ruth would meet someone and say something along the lines of “Hello, my name is Ruth. What can you do for me?”

Years into adulthood, some of Ruth’s children would make peace with the woman she was. Yes, Ruth had done terrible things in the past. She had looked the other way when her children were abused, physically, emotionally, and sexually, by the men in her life, be they husbands or short-lived romantic partners. Ruth had, at times, enabled that abuse by not believing her children and choosing, instead, to believe the men. One of them ended up as Rachel’s first and only husband.

Ruth was working at a bus station in the Bay Area at that time, around the early 1960s. One of her coworkers had two sons, whom Ruth decided must meet her daughters. Ruth wanted the older boy for herself, but she thought the younger one, still a teenager, would be perfect for Rachel. Instead, the younger boy expressed no interest, and the older one gravitated toward Rachel in a way that made her wonder, much later, if there was something more calculated at play.

Rachel grew certain that her mother had made some sordid arrangement with the older boy. That in order for him to have access to Rachel, he had to have some romantic involvement with her mother. Ruth also goaded her daughter about him at the time, saying she couldn’t possibly land a man like him. Rachel would not grasp the impact of her mother’s verbal abuse for years. Then, she thought Ruth’s behavior was normal.

Rachel did “land” the boy, became pregnant, and she then married him in haste and moved away from home. Seventeen years, three children, numerous moves, and countless beatings, rapes, and threats to her life later, Rachel managed to break free. “It was less a marriage than extended captivity,” she said. When she dared to speak up for herself, her husband punished her. He repeated the pattern she knew too well from childhood, when confessing that something hurt her caused more hurt, psychologically from Ruth and physically from her husbands or partners.

Once Rachel’s divorce was final, in the late 1970s, she found a job near where her mother lived. She also thought about what kind of relationship she wanted with Ruth. Because Rachel, despite the past, liked her mother. They shared a love of gardening and of books. As adult women, they could converse, if not as equals then at least on a similar plane. Rachel decided she could handle visiting Ruth at least once a week for tea. The visits were calm at first. She felt herself understanding her mother better. She felt she had enough emotional distance to appreciate Ruth, the woman, and leave the baggage of neglect and abuse behind.

What Rachel created in this new relationship with her mother was a cocoon where old wounds could be erased. But the cocoon turned out to be an illusion. That it broke apart, Rachel realized, should not have surprised her as it did.

One afternoon, Rachel turned up at Ruth’s house and found her mother immersed in her scrapbooks. They were a living testament to Ruth’s belief that she mattered. Subsequent visits by Rachel and other daughters led to them discovering that the scrapbooks contained items Ruth had no business possessing, items she had pilfered from her children without their immediate knowledge, but Rachel wasn’t aware of that yet. As mother and daughter sat for tea, one scrapbook lay between them. The one Ruth had been working on earlier that morning.

Lying next to the scrapbook was an old paperback novel that Rachel didn’t recognize.

Ruth pointed to a newspaper clipping in the scrapbook. “Do you remember this little girl?” Ruth moved her finger to the headline. “Do you remember that girl, Sally Horner?”

“I do remember,” said Rachel.

“And do you remember Frank La Salle, the man who kidnapped her?”

“I do remember,” Rachel said again.

Rachel told me that she felt herself grow cold. But Ruth did not notice, or even understand, her daughter’s reaction.

“Wasn’t that quite the story?” Ruth carried on. “They’re mentioned in this novel, Lolita !”

Rachel hadn’t heard this story before. She would hear a different version of it years later from her sister Vanessa, who had read the novel—that same tattered paperback—at Ruth’s insistence. Vanessa, sixteen at the time, was puzzled at first at her mother’s insistence she read the novel. Then Ruth explained: “ Lolita tells the story of a girl named Sally Horner. A girl who died just before you were born. A girl I helped rescue from a man named Frank La Salle.” This was no mere novel, but literary validation of Ruth’s sense of self, that her single act of decency had larger heroic meaning. Vanessa couldn’t help but read Lolita with her mother’s words echoing in her head. But she also couldn’t read it without thinking of the ways in which Ruth had wronged the family.