“How did they ever make a film of Lolita?” asked the ads promoted the film’s release. “They” inevitably came down to director Stanley Kubrick who commissioned Lolita’s author, Vladimir Nabokov, to write the screenplay The question, posed in the waning years of old-school censorship, wondered how the story of a middle-aged academic having his way sexually with a 12-year old girl got the greenlight. Even the novel was initially banned in the U.S. before it became a runaway bestseller.
In The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman wonders about that as well as the victim of a real-life pedophile who helped inspire Nabokov. True crime buffs will be interested in the drifter who called himself—among other names—Frank La Salle. In 1948 La Salle kidnapped a fifth grader, Sally Horner, took her across the country and held her captive until her rescue in 1950. Word of her trial, which received sensational media coverage, reached Nabokov, and although he liked to deny it, literary critics have identified too many threads of connection with Lolita to be explained by coincidence.
The tragic case (Horner died only two years after she was freed) and how it was transmuted into a novel ranked with the last century’s greatest and a film considered a classic is only the beginning. The Real Lolita is a meditation on how we look at a particular class of sex crime, a particular species of sexual predator and the way such crimes can become spectacle, entertainment, even art. Nabokov was not exactly an apologist for pedophilia and understood Lolita as a study in lives ruined by uncontrolled hunger and compulsion. Lolita’s predator, Humbert Humbert, tells the story from his perspective but is clearly an unreliable narrator spinning a silken web of (self?) deception.
And yet, Nabokov denied any moral purpose behind his story. The abuse endured by girls like the “nymphette” of his novel should be exceptionally disturbing in any era but Lolita was often read voyeuristically and was received by some in the Swingin’ ‘60s as a facet of the sexual revolution—at least the one advertised by the likes of Hugh Hefner. Weinman makes her point clearly and it resonates in our era of frank revelations of destructive sexual conduct. Our judgment “should not be subsumed by dazzling prose, no matter how brilliant,” she writes. Elsewhere, she adds: “The appreciation of art can make a sucker out of those who forget the darkness of real life.”
