The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  When Susan turned eighteen, they decided not to wait any longer. On his next furlough, she and Al wed in Florence on February 17, 1945. When the war ended, Al received his honorable discharge and he and Susan began married life in earnest, running the greenhouse together. They wanted children, but Susan’s initial pregnancies ended in early miscarriages. Then their luck turned.

  In June 1948, Susan and Al Panaro were two months away from the birth of their daughter, Diana, Ella’s first grandchild. But when the baby girl arrived that August, celebration was the furthest thing from the minds of her parents and grandmother. Sally had disappeared and they knew who had taken her. They also now knew what sort of man he was.

  Five

  The Search for Sally

  An eight-state police search for Sally Horner began on August 5, 1948. By then she had been gone from Camden for six weeks. The news wires picked up the story of her abduction, as well as Ella’s delay in reporting her daughter missing. The picture of Sally on the swing went out across the country, appearing in wire reports published from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Rochester, New York, and in local papers like the Camden Courier-Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

  Robert and Jean Pfeffer were among those who read the news about Sally Horner’s disappearance. How strange, the couple thought. “If [Sally] had wanted to warn us about anything she had every opportunity, but never did so.” Robert picked up the phone, called the Camden police, and told the officer who answered about their encounter in Brigantine Beach. 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.

  The shock of the news about Sally, combined with mundane family matters, delayed Pfeffer from making the two-and-a-half-hour round trip back to Atlantic City to pick up their car for several weeks. He never learned whether La Salle himself or some other mechanic restored it to good working order.

  Sally and La Salle, however, were long gone from Atlantic City. Camden police now knew, with queasy certainty, why Sally’s family had ample reason to be fearful of what Frank La Salle might do to their little girl.

  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. As the months wore on, his colleagues weren’t shy about voicing their opinions. The girl had to be dead. She couldn’t up and vanish like this, no trace, no word, when they knew who had her, what they both looked like, and that they were posing as father and daughter.

  Thompson felt otherwise. Sally must be alive. He figured it was likely she was still near enough to Camden. And even if she wasn’t, he would find her. It was his job as detective to care about every case, but the plight of a missing girl really got to him.

  He had been promoted to detective only the year before, nearly two decades into his time on the force. Thompson’s appointment in March 1928 happened the same year his only daughter, Caroline, was born, and not long after he and his wife, Emma, moved to the Cramer Hill neighborhood in Northeast Camden. The young couple had long-standing Camden roots, Thompson in particular. His father, George, had served as justice of the peace, and his grandfather John Reeve Thompson was a member of Camden’s first city council.

  Tangles with “local pugilists,” raids on illegal speakeasies, breaking up home gambling dens, and other minor crimes littered Thompson’s stretch as a Camden cop. Most of the time he worked with Sergeant Nathan Petit; their names often appeared together in the local papers’ accounts of various notable arrests.

  Off duty, Thompson entertained family and friends by playing classical piano, which his mother, Harriette, taught him as a child. His musical ability was called out with hyperbolic flourish by a Courier-Post columnist in 1939: “Marshall Thompson, one of Camden’s finest, is a talented pianist. He never took a music lesson.”

  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.” He chased every lead and followed up on every tip. One phone call came in to say La Salle was holed up in a house on Trenton Avenue and Washington Street in downtown Camden. A state police teletype arrived placing La Salle at a residence on Third and Sumner Avenue in Florence, the same town where Sally lived as a little girl. Neither tip panned out.

  Once Thompson was on the case full-time, he let it dictate his entire waking life. He got in touch, in person and by telephone, with the FBI; state and city police at Columbus, Newton, Riverton, and Langhorne, Pennsylvania; state parole offices at Trenton and Camden; detective divisions in Philadelphia; and the Trenton post office. Several months into Sally’s disappearance, Thompson received reports of La Salle being spotted in Philadelphia, northern New Jersey, South Jersey Shore resorts, and at a restaurant in Haddonfield, observed by a waitress working there. He followed each lead to no avail.

  Thompson also cast his net farther and deeper in the surrounding states. He checked in regularly with state and city police in Absecon, Pleasantville, Maple Shade, Newark, Orange, and Paterson, New Jersey; parole offices in Atlantic City and the state prison farm in Leesburg; and the Compensation Bureau in Trenton, in case La Salle drew or cashed a paycheck in the state.

  There were periods where he worked twenty-four hours or more without taking a break. Finding Sally Horner was more important than sleep. Thompson tracked down La Salle’s first wife in Portland, Maine, but she knew nothing of his whereabouts. The detective also contacted La Salle’s second wife, now living in Delaware Township with her daughter, her new husband, and their baby son. The woman gave Thompson an earful about her wayward, criminal ex-husband’s habits and history, including the dramatic beginning of their marriage and its equally explosive end.

  Thompson used his holidays to travel for the case. On one six-day “vacation,” Thompson went to the Trenton State Fair. Each morning, he stood outside the entrance to the grounds, hoping that La Salle might turn up to apply for a job. Or perhaps he would bring Sally with him.

  None of the leads amounted to anything. Nor did tips from numerous anonymous phone calls and letters. All had to be followed up on, but none yielded the answer Detective Marshall Thompson craved: the whereabouts of Sally Horner.

  It was the nature of a detective’s job to get hopes up and have them crushed. So many of his colleagues believed the girl was dead. But not Thompson. He could not give up. He knew in his bones that he would, someday, find Sally alive and bring her back to Camden, to her mother, her family.

  And that he would find Frank La Salle and see justice done.

  Six

  Seeds of Compulsion

  Vladimir Nabokov holding a butterfly, 1947, at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he was a fellow.

  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. So far, he had not been successful. He could have, and tried to, abandon it altogether—there were plenty of other literary projects for Nabokov to pursue. But the drive to get this story right went beyond formal exercise. Otherwise, why did Nabokov explore this same topic, over and over, for more than twenty years? At almost every stage of his literary career, Nabokov was preoccupied with the idea of the middle-aged man’s obsession with a young girl.

  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 ae
sthetics. There are just too many of them.”

  “Aesthetics” is one way to phrase it. 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. What impulses he possessed were literary, not literal, in the manner of the “well-adjusted” writer who persists in writing about the worst sort of crimes. 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.

  Nabokov likely realized how often this theme persisted in his work. That would explain why he was quick to deny connections between Lolita and real-life figures, or to later claim the novel’s inspiration emerged from, of all things, a brief article in a French newspaper about “an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”

  But there is no getting around the deep-seated compulsion that recurs again and again in Nabokov’s work. I read through his earlier Russian-language novels, as well as more contemporary accounts by literary critics, to figure out why this awful subject held such allure for him.

  NABOKOV’S INITIAL EXPLORATION of an older man’s unnatural desire for a preteen girl was published in 1926, within the first year of his career as a prose writer. Before then, he devoted himself exclusively to poetry. Did prose free Nabokov up to wrestle with the darkness and tumult that already surrounded him? 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.

  Nabokov published his first novel, Mashen’ka (Mary), in 1926, under the pseudonym of V. Sirin, which he would use for all of his poetry and prose published before he moved to America. That same year Nabokov, as Sirin, published “A Nursery Tale.” The short story includes a section on a fourteen-year-old girl clad in a grown-up cocktail dress designed to show off her cleavage, though it isn’t clear that the narrator, Erwin, immediately notices that aspect:

  “There was something odd about that face, odd was the flitting glance of her much too shiny eyes, and if she were not just a little girl—the old man’s granddaughter, no doubt—one might suspect her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly, her legs moved closer together, she was asking her companion something in a ringing voice—and although Erwin gave no command mentally, he knew that his swift secret wish had been fulfilled.”

  Erwin’s “swift secret wish” is his inappropriate desire for the girl.

  Two years later, in 1928, Nabokov tackled the subject in poetry. “Lilith” also strongly features the so-called demonic effect of a little girl, of her “russet armpit” and a “green eye over her shoulder” upon an older man: “She had a water lily in her curls and was as graceful as a woman.” The poem continues:

  And how enticing, and how merry,

  her upturned face! And with a wild

  lunge of my loins I penetrated

  into an unforgotten child.

  Snake within snake, vessel in vessel

  smooth-fitting part, I moved in her,

  through the ascending itch forefeeling

  unutterable pleasure stir.

  But this illicit coupling is the man’s ruin. Lilith closed herself off to him and forced him out, and as he shouts, “let me in!” his fate is sealed: “The door stayed silent, and for all to see / writhing with agony I spilled my seed / and knew abruptly that I was in Hell.” Two and a half decades before Lolita, Nabokov anticipated Humbert Humbert’s remark that he was “perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.”

  Another proto-nymphet appears in Laughter in the Dark, though this one, Margot, is a little older: eighteen in the original version published in Russian, Camera Obscura (1932), and sixteen in the heavily revised and retitled edition Nabokov released six years later. (Nabokov rewrote the novel a third time in the 1960s.) Margot attracts the attention of the much-older, wealthy art critic Albert Albinus,* whose name foreshadows Humbert Humbert.

  We only see Margot’s actions and personality filtered through Albinus’s eyes. He depicts her as capricious, whimsical, and full of manipulation. Just as in Lolita, when Humbert’s plans are upended by the arrival of Clare Quilty, an interloper foils the relationship between Albinus and Margot. 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. The image grows in substance in tandem with Nabokov’s artistic growth. A paragraph in Dar, written between 1935 and 1937 but not published until 1952 (the English translation, published as The Gift, appeared a decade later), all but summarizes the future plot of Lolita. “What a novel I would whip off!” declares a secondary character, contemplating his much, much younger stepdaughter:

  Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long [after] he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down, the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the torment, the itch, the mad hopes . . .

  Nabokov did not exactly “whip off” the novel that became Lolita. There was one more abortive attempt written in his mother tongue, Volshebnik, which was the last piece of fiction he wrote in Russian. He worked on it at a critical point in his life, while waiting to see if he and his family would be able to flee Europe and immigrate to America. But Volshebnik would not see publication until almost a decade after his death.

  WHEN GERMANY DECLARED WAR on Poland in September 1939,plunging the rest of the world into global battle, Vladimir Nabokov was under considerable stress. He had reunited with his wife, Véra, and their son, Dmitri, in Paris, after an extended separation stranded them in Germany. He had broken off his affair with fellow émigré Irina Guadanini to join his family, but Paris was no safe haven anymore, as the Vichy regime became increasingly close with the Nazis. Véra was Jewish, and so was Dmitri, and if they could not get out of France, they might be bound for concentration camps.

  The personal stakes were never higher, and Nabokov’s health suffered. That fall, or perhaps in the early winter of 1940, he was “laid up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia,” a mysterious ailment of damage to nerves running between the ribs that would plague him off and on for the rest of his life. He could not do much more than read and write, and he retreated into the refuge of his imagination. What emerged was Volshebnik, the fifty-five-page novella that most closely mirrored the future novel.

  Unlike Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Volshebnik is nameless (though Nabokov once referred to him as “Arthur”). He does not have Humbert’s artful insolence. Instead he is in torment from the first sentence, “How can I come to terms with myself?” 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 h
is 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.

  Nabokov was not the artist he would later become, and it shows in the prose: “I’m not attracted to every schoolgirl that comes along, far from it—how many one sees, on a gray morning street that are husky, or skinny, or have a necklace of pimples or wear spectacles—those kinds interest me as little, in the amorous sense, as a lumpy female acquaintance might interest someone else.” He doesn’t have the wherewithal to describe his chosen prey, whom he first sees roller-skating in a park, as a nymphet. Such a word isn’t in his vocabulary because it wasn’t yet in Nabokov’s.

  Still there are glimpses of Lolita’s formidable style, as when Volshebnik’s narrator comments on “the radiance of [one girl’s] large, slightly vacuous eyes, somehow suggesting translucent gooseberries” or “the summery tint of her bare arms with the sleek little foxlike hairs running along the forearms.” Not quite up to the level and the hypnotic rhythm of Humbert’s rhapsodizing about Dolores Haze (“The soot-black lashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes . . . I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as red as licked candy”), but the disquiet is present, waiting to spring like a trapdoor.

  As in the later novel, Nabokov’s narrator preys upon his underage quarry through her mother. She is more broadly cast than Charlotte Haze, whose rages against and aspirations for her daughter make her an interesting figure. The mother here is little more than a cipher, a plot device to engineer the man and girl toward their fates.

  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. He has the “fancy prose style” at his disposal to couch or deflect his intentions. So when he does state the obvious—as he will, again and again— the reader is essentially magicked into believing Dolores is as much the pursuer as the pursuee.