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March 27 - March 28, 2022
Clues would present themselves and then evaporate. Letters and diary entries would hint at larger meanings without supporting evidence. My central quest with respect to Nabokov was to figure out what he knew about Sally Horner and when he knew it. Through a lifetime, and afterlife, of denials and omissions about the sources of his fiction, he made my pursuit as difficult as possible.
Somewhere Nabokov is savoring the irony.
Scores of interviewers, whether they wrote him letters, interrogated him on television, or visited him at his house, abided by his rules of engagement. They handed over their questions in advance and accepted his answers, written at leisure, cobbling them together to mimic spontaneous conversation.
A strange thing happened as I looked for clues in his published work and his archives: Nabokov grew less knowable.
And now hes cackling
Even Boyd claimed, more than a decade and a half after writing his biography of Nabokov, that he still did not fully understand Lolita.
Lolita’s narrative, it turns out, depended more on a real-life crime than Nabokov would ever admit.
I can’t say Nabokov designed the book to hide Sally from the reader. Given that the story moves so quickly, perhaps an homage to the highways Humbert and Dolores traverse over many thousands of miles in their cross-country odyssey, it’s easy to miss a lot as you go.
Yet Sally Horner’s plight is also uniquely American, unfolding in the shadows of the Second World War, after victory had created a solid, prosperous middle class that could not compensate for terrible future decline. Her abduction is woven into the fabric of her hometown of Camden, New Jersey, which at the time believed itself to be at the apex of the American Dream.
Sally stopped crying. He was going to let her go. She wouldn’t have to call her mother from jail—her poor, overworked mother, Ella, still struggling with the consequences of the suicide of her alcoholic husband, Sally’s father, five years earlier; still tethered to her seamstress job, which meant that Sally, too often, went home to an empty house after school.
The Camden of Sally’s girlhood was far removed from the Camden of today. Emma DiRenzo, one of Sally’s classmates, remembered it as a “marvelous” place to grow up in. “Everything about Camden back then was wonderful,” she said. “When you tell people now, they look at you with big eyes.”
Sally’s life in Camden was not idyllic. Despite outward appearances, she was lonely. Sally knew how to take care of herself but she wished she didn’t have to.
SALLY HORNER WAS WALKING home from Northeast School by herself after the last bell on a mid-June day in 1948. The route from North Seventh and Vine to her house took ten minutes by foot. Somewhere along the way, Sally was intercepted by the man from Woolworth’s.
No matter how he did it, the man convinced Sally that she must go with him to Atlantic City—the government insisted. But how would she persuade her mother? This would be no easy task, despite Ella’s general state of apathy and exhaustion. The man had an answer for that, too. Sally was to tell her mother that he was the father of two school friends who had invited her to a seashore vacation after school ended for the year.
Under the force of his persuasion, Ella let her concerns slide. “It was a chance for Sally to get a little vacation,” she said weeks later. “I couldn’t afford to give her one.”
From there the story Robert Pfeffer told both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Camden Courier-Post turns strange, riddled with unsolvable inconsistencies. People turn up where they shouldn’t. Chronologies bend out of shape. What’s clear is that he was so disturbed by what happened that July morning that he alerted law enforcement and, when they didn’t listen, the newspapers.
EVERY TIME ELLA HORNER began to wonder if she had done the right thing in sending Sally off to Atlantic City, a letter or a call—always from a pay phone—arrived to assuage her guilt and soothe her mind.
On July 31, 1948, Ella was relieved to receive another letter. Sally wrote to say she was leaving Atlantic City and going on to Baltimore with Mr. Warner.
Nabokov had also traveled across America three times, in the summers of 1941, 1943, and 1947. (He would repeat the cross-country trip four more times.)
The first time, Dorothy Leuthold, a middle-aged student in his language class, had spirited the Nabokovs from New York City in a brand-new Pontiac (dubbed Pon’ka, the Russian word for “pony”) all the way to Palo Alto, California.
The America Nabokov witnessed on these trips was eventually immortalized as the “lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” that Humbert Humbert comments on in Lolita:
After these summer trips, Nabokov was always glad to return to Cambridge. Wellesley, his academic and personal refuge, had turned down his multiple entreaties for a full-time professorship.
By August, they had rented a large house on 802 East Seneca Street, one far bigger than their “wrinkled-dwarf Cambridge flatlet”—and future inspiration for the house where a man named Humbert Humbert would discover the object of his obsession.
He drew attention to one appendix that contained the late-nineteenth-century confession of an unnamed engineer of Ukrainian descent. The man had first had sex at age twelve with another child, found the experience so intoxicating he repeated it, and eventually destroyed his marriage by sleeping with child prostitutes. From there the man went further downhill, to the point where he flashed young girls in public. The confession, as Nabokov related in a later interview, “ends with a feeling of hopelessness, of a life ruined by hunger beyond control.”
In Humbert Humbert’s eyes, the girl named Dolores Haze is a canvas blank enough to project whatever he, and by virtue of his narration, the reader, sees or desires—“But in my arms she was always Lolita.” She is never allowed to be herself.
Humbert Humbert was describing a compulsion. Vladimir Nabokov set out to create an archetype. But the real little girls who fit this idea of the mythical nymphet end up getting lost in the need for artistic license.
The abuse that Sally Horner, and other girls like her, endured should not be subsumed by dazzling prose, no matter how brilliant.
The seeds of Sally Horner’s kidnapping grew out of choices made by her mother. Ella kept secrets about the circumstances of her daughters’ births and the death of Sally’s father.
SALLY WAS HER NICKNAME. No one is alive to remember why, or who used it first, or how it stuck. Her legal name, listed on the certificate announcing her birth at Trenton Hospital on April 18, 1937, was Florence, no middle name, Horner.
Ella’s older daughter, Susan, also lived with the Horners, though Russell was not her father. Eleven years earlier, at the age of nineteen, Ella had had some sort of relationship with an older man of about thirty.
Ella had good reason to keep Swain’s existence a secret, and never mention him by name. Records indicate he was married to someone else when Susan was born, contrary to the “yes” ticked off on Susan’s birth certificate, indicating her legitimate status. Nor could I find any existing marriage record between Swain and Ella, though one may turn up in the future—vital records are irregularly stored from city to city, state by state.
That’s where Ella met Russell Horner, a widower with a son, also named Russell. Horner began to court her, and some of their meetings were recorded by the local papers, as was the custom of the day. On December 9, 1935, the Asbury Park Press noted that Ella and Russell were “recent visitors to friends in Lakehurst.”
Ella and Russell were not husband and wife, though. It seems Ella had repeated the pattern begun with Swain. While Russell’s first wife, the mother of his son, had died, he had married a second time and never bothered to divorce the woman. By the end of 1937, Russell and Ella were living as husband and wife at the Fourth Avenue house in Roebling.
As for Russell Junior, he married two months before Sally Horner’s birth. Sally never knew of her half brother’s existence. Neither her mother nor Susan mentioned him.
Russell had a drinking problem, which did not mix well with his job as a crane operator, and he could be abusive to his wife and her daughters.
Police told the Asbury Park Press that Russell had been married twice and was “estranged from his current wife,” though they did not say whether the wife in question was Ella. But the address listed on Russell’s death certificate was the address where he’d lived with Ella and the girls in Roebling.
Sally was not quite six years old when her father committed suicide. It isn’t clear how much she knew of her father’s history and manner of death.
After Russell killed himself, Ella, already living as a single mother, was truly on her own. Her mother, Susannah, had passed away in 1939, while her father, Job, died in January 1943, just two months before Russell killed himself.
Robert also mentioned his little sister Barbara’s visit to La Salle’s apartment, which had stretched to ninety agonizing minutes of waiting. Perhaps reading about La Salle’s prior incarceration made him wonder what, exactly, might have happened to Barbara during those ninety minutes. He never heard a word back from the police.
AT FIRST MARSHALL THOMPSON worked the Sally Horner case with other Camden police officers. But when the summer of 1948 gave way to fall, he took on the investigation full-time and never stopped.
Thompson’s innate tenacity made him the perfect choice to look for Sally Horner and Frank La Salle. Over the course of his investigation Thompson learned much about Sally’s abductor, from his choice of haircut to the “quantity of sugar and cream he desired when drinking coffee.”
As Marshall Thompson continued to track Frank La Salle’s whereabouts without results, Vladimir Nabokov remained on a quest to plumb the fictional mind of a man with a similar appetite for young girls.
As Martin Amis wrote in a 2011 essay for the Times Literary Supplement, “Of the nineteen fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls. . . . [T]o be clear as one can be: the unignorable infestation of nymphets . . . is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of aesthetics. There are just too many of them.”
Robert Roper, in his 2015 book Nabokov in America, suggested a more likely culprit: compulsion—“a literary equivalent of the persistent impulse of a pedophile.” Over and over, scholars and biographers have searched for direct connections between Nabokov and young children, and failed to find them.
We generally don’t bear the same suspicions of writers who turn serial killers into folk heroes. No one, for example, thinks Thomas Harris capable of the terrible deeds of Hannibal Lecter, even though he invented them with chilling psychological insight.
His father, the jurist and journalist Vladimir D. Nabokov, had been assassinated four years earlier, and he was a year into his marriage to Véra Slonim, a fellow émigré he met while both lived in Berlin among the community of other Russians who’d fled the Revolution. Neither particularly cared for the city, but they stayed in Berlin for fifteen years, Nabokov supplementing his writing income and growing literary reputation by teaching tennis, boxing, and foreign languages to students.
Axel Rex’s affair with Margot in Laughter in the Dark serves a more mercenary purpose—gaining access to Albinus’s status and fortune—while Quilty is after Dolores for the same illicit reasons as Humbert Humbert.
Except for Margot, who is a proper character, the early precursors to Dolores Haze are merely images that tempt and torment Nabokov’s male protagonists.
There was one more abortive attempt written in his mother tongue, Volshebnik, which was the last piece of fiction he wrote in Russian.
A jeweler by trade, he moves back and forth between being open about his attraction to underage girls and his resolve to do nothing about it, coupling his inner torment to overweening self-justification. “I’m no ravisher,” he declares. “I am a pickpocket, not a burglar.” Humbert would sneer at the hypocrisy of this declaration.
Volshebnik’s narrator may be tormented by his unnatural tastes, but he knows he is about to entice his chosen girl to cross a chasm that cannot be uncrossed. Namely, she is innocent now, but she won’t be after he has his way with her. Humbert Humbert would never be so obvious.
The hotel, in Europe, is less shabby than Humbert’s choice of The Enchanted Hunters, but serves the same purpose: allowing the narrator to watch over the sleeping girl and make his move against her will.
