Cover

Biographical Notes

jean stafford (1915–1979) was born in Covina, California, the youngest of four children. When she was five her father, an unsuccessful writer of Westerns, lost the bulk of his inherited fortune on the stock exchange. The impoverished family, forced to move, eventually resettled in Boulder, Colorado. Stafford excelled as a student, earning both a BA and an MA in four years on a scholarship at the University of Colorado, but her college years were marked by poverty as well as by the suicide of her friend Lucy McKee, who shot herself in Stafford’s presence. Following her graduation, Stafford spent a year abroad studying philology at the University of Heidelberg, and shortly after her return she met the poet Robert Lowell, whom she married in New York City in 1940. In 1944 she published her first book, Boston Adventure, which became a best seller, and in 1947 The Mountain Lion, her most highly acclaimed book. Stafford was also a gifted writer of short stories, and by 1948, the year in which she received a Guggenheim fellowship, her work was regularly appearing in The New Yorker. Divorced from Lowell in 1948, Stafford remarried twice—to Life editor Oliver Jensen and to the writer A. J. Liebling. In 1952 Stafford published a third novel, The Catherine Wheel, and in 1970 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her Collected Stories. She suffered a stroke in 1976 and died three years later in White Plains, New York, leaving her entire estate to her cleaning woman.

rumaan alam is the author of the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and elsewhere.

Title Page

BOSTON ADVENTURE

JEAN STAFFORD

Introduction by

RUMAAN ALAM

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

INTRODUCTION

In a 1941 letter to a friend, Jean Stafford wrote:

Proust outstrips everyone. He wears me out physically. His intensity demands complementary energy which in me is limited, but I know of no intellectual exercise so rewarding as reading him carefully. . . . That is, no exercise performed with another novelist unless it is James who in a way is better.

This isn’t idle chitchat but a statement of purpose. Though only twenty-five, Stafford had already written one novel, never published. Undeterred, she meant not only to write another but to do so in the footsteps of the modern form’s most revered progenitors.

Influence is important; art is a continuum. But explicit intention usually results in an unhappy muddle. And Proust and James of all people—two writers with distinctly don’t try this at home sensibilities. Stafford pulled it off. She published Boston Adventure in 1944. The twenty-nine-year-old had a hit: the book sold more than two hundred thousand copies, enough to bankroll the purchase of a house. (The details I’m citing here, including the correspondence above, are from Ann Hulbert’s superb biography, The Interior Castle.)

It’s not that interesting to say that Jean Stafford is underread, even if it’s true. Maybe this is because so many of our artists who happen to be women are talked about thus: as vitamins we ought to swallow. Sure, Stafford was overshadowed by her first husband, the poet Robert Lowell; undoubtedly, lifelong struggles with her health (particularly alcoholism, a subject for her heartbreaking story “Children Are Bored on Sunday”) were detrimental to her productivity. But her later novels—1947’s The Mountain Lion and 1952’s The Catherine Wheel—have their fans, and a writer whose Collected Stories won the Pulitzer Prize can’t persuasively be called overlooked.

If Stafford’s debut is said to be underread, this might have something to do with the author’s stated intentions: the book’s Proustian heft and preoccupation with psychology, its Jamesian interest in the Boston Brahmin. The whole enterprise is stubbornly old-fashioned, but that’s the very thing I love about it.

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Sonie Marburg, the novel’s heroine and narrator, lives a mean little life—“we were very poor” are the first words she offers us. Her mother, Shura, Russian by birth, has been disappointed by everything. “How great had been her hopes the day she left Moscow! Her fellow waitresses, clinging to her, sobbing with envy, had sworn that she would be rich.” Instead her marriage to a German shoemaker, and their emigration to the United States, finds her . . . disappointed. “Ah, Hermann Marburg, I hate you from the bottom of my soul!”

From a room inside the hotel where her mother works as a chambermaid, Sonie can sometimes glimpse salvation: “I could see Boston and its State House dome, gleaming like a golden blister.” She has a particular attachment to a regular at the hotel, Miss Lucy Pride (the young Stafford is not especially subtle with character names), who is everything her parents are not: sophisticated, measured, and if not kind at least aware of Sonie’s existence.

To be small is to be stuck. Boston (and adulthood, and liberty) looms—the book’s working title was The Outskirts—but might as well be the moon. The first section of the book isn’t named for the dreary fictional village of Chichester, where it is set, but for the Hotel Barstow itself. That’s where Sonie truly prepares for life, playing understudy to her mother, too ill to work. The Barstow is a seasonal operation; it’s as though Sonie isn’t even a person most of the year.

I’m usually bored by children in fiction that is written for adults. I think writers forget, over time, how we thought when we were young and struggle to fix in words the illogic of childhood. Novels for adults reach for either the sentimental or the surreal, quite in contrast to how the best writers for children—Louise Fitzhugh, Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume—reflect back to their readers something essential about the reality in which they find themselves.

Stafford is able to both observe Sonie and enter her; she’s speaking from the remove of adulthood but remembers the quicksilver state of the young mind:

At night, bound by the narrow walls of our kitchen, I was not always absorbed in my book about girls at boarding school whose clever mothers had sewed for months before their departure, making silk dresses and dark wool jumpers, warm wrappers, innumerable muslin guimpes, had crocheted fascinators and bought blue merino stockings. Although I envied the fortunate creatures, my own life, which I plotted in a variety of patterns, was richer. My hair became blond; my name was Antoinette de la Mar.

Proust demanded and rewarded Stafford’s attention; a tough act to follow. Sometimes her Proustian digressions come off as labored, but occasionally there’s a glimmer of genius. These days, Stafford’s submergence into psyche is so démodé as to feel refreshing, a contrast to what often seems the default obliqueness of the contemporary novel.

The novel’s first section grows stranger and more fevered than its opening pages suggest; Shura is not histrionic but truly mad (manic, she breaks into the Barstow, shuttered for the winter, to clean the sand out of its woven chairs—one of the best scenes in the book). I won’t spoil what befalls Sonie’s little brother, and you probably wouldn’t believe me even if I did.

•

Sonie is transported from Chichester to Boston—to Miss Pride’s Pinckney Street mansion, the very place she’s long dreamed of—as we know she must be, since it’s the explicit promise of the novel from its first page. It’s impressive plotting by Stafford, confident enough to know that readers will mostly go wherever she leads them.

Stafford’s talents align with her ambitions more tidily in the latter half of the novel, where she moves on to channeling James. She does him one better, I think; rather than wry or ironic or suggestive, Stafford can come out with it and be funny.

Sonie observes: “I had noticed, from the beginning, that Miss Pride was extremely frugal of her laughter.” Sonie overhears party chatter: “She has two spurious Watteaus which are so charming one doesn’t mind their being frauds.” Sonie reports and we decide. Here’s Miss Pride again:

When I was your age, I deplored race prejudice. To my dear, single-minded Papa’s chagrin, I used to seek out your Israels and Rachels, the bigger the nose the better. But at last I admitted to myself that I was just like everyone else. I didn’t get on with them . . . their aggressiveness distressed me in public and their money mania at last got the better of my idealism. Now, while I say “live and let live” I must confess I sympathize with that particular of Hitler’s program.

Stafford is unafraid to make light of the truly horrific. She’s willing to look at Lucy Pride directly.

The second act shows the first to be preamble, and overlong, though I don’t especially mind that. It’s just that Stafford is good when she’s spinning story, to which the latter half of the book gives itself entirely. It’s Wharton, it’s James, it’s soap opera: appointments and assignations, secrets and surprises. Such is my affection for Boston Adventure that I’m fond even of its most leaden gestures, like the fact that Miss Pride has a cat locked up in her private room at home, an animal she refuses to show to Sonie. The cat’s name? Mercy. I’ve not even mentioned that Pride’s niece is called Hopestill!

This can all be forgiven. Stafford is aiming for Proust because she knows how lovely it can be to be in his company. She’s attentive to what language can accomplish: A teacher has the smell of “yeast, sachet, and a slight mildew.” We recognize what she shows us, as when Sonie meets her newborn brother: “I longed to hold him myself and to kiss his bawling, cockled face, and to bestow upon him all the tender services that were the right of anything so supremely helpless.” And she can be wicked, as in this observation of Miss Pride’s: “Bending over as if to inspect the plate of lemon slices, she said in a much lower voice, ‘I think you should be more sparing of lip rouge.’”

I’m talking about simple pleasure, and sometimes that’s all I ask of a novel. If I tell you Boston Adventure is a diversion, I know how rare that is. The novel of ideas is spoken of as distinct from the novel that entertains. What if one book attempted both? Sonie gets to the title city but does Sonie save herself? Late in the book, she tells us of the panic that settles over her in an empty house: “It was a fear I could describe only approximately as a fear of myself.” With her slender body of work, Stafford is one of those writers I wish had left us more. Then I read her words, and am reminded that what we have is enough.

—Rumaan Alam

BOSTON ADVENTURE

BOSTON ADVENTURE

For Frank Parker

BOOK ONE

Hotel Barstow

ONE

1

Because we were very poor and could not buy another bed, I used to sleep on a pallet made of old coats and comforters in the same room with my mother and father. When I played wishing games or said “Star light, star bright,” my first wish always was that I might have a room of my own, and the one I imagined was Miss Pride’s at the Hotel Barstow which I sometimes had to clean when my mother, the chambermaid, was not feeling well. I knew its details so thoroughly that I had only to say to myself the words “Miss Pride’s room” and at once my feet stood on the tawny rug with its huge faded peonies, and before me was the window seat covered with flat, flowered cushions, at one end of which was a folded afghan, at the other, three big soft pillows on which cherubs floated amongst blue daisies, holding up in their dimpled hands a misty picture of a castle. And I could gaze through the windows which overlooked the bay. On a clear morning, looking across the green, excited water, littered with dories and lobster-pots and buoys, I could see Boston and its State House dome, gleaming like a golden blister.

Often at night, I pretended that I was sleeping in the big brass bed, under the fringed white counterpane, my head upon the inflexible bolster. Turning over, I imagined I could hear the rattling of the loose balls which decorated the foot-rail and which, when I tucked in the sheets, gave the Spartan bed, with its hard mattress and thin blankets, a kind of saucy vitality. Suddenly, as if it were borne on a wind, there came to me the fresh, acrid odor of Miss Pride’s costly soap which she kept in a large carton under the bed. She was part owner of a soap factory, I had heard, and so, of course, it cost her nothing.

Some nights, though, my vanities were driven off, and I could not hold in my mind a picture of the room nor could I summon up the rich old lady. For on those nights, I lay terrified at the sound of my parents’ quarreling voices. I mocked the deep breathing they expected of me, but the air would not go down into my lungs and was caught like a hiccough in my throat. There was a raw-edged blade of pain straight through my chest to my backbone as though fear had laid back the sheath of my nerves. Anxious for morning, I lay on my back staring at the invisible ceiling or cautiously I turned over on my side, making out the contours of the sagging bed where my mother and father were enormously sprawled out and humped up, hissing their fury at one another. Until I was about ten years old, though, my distress did not continue after their voices had ceased and, exhausted as much by being an audience as they were by being the actors, I would fall asleep at once. It was not until then, the summer of my tenth year, that I learned, in what terms of childhood I cannot remember, that peace was to be desired above all things. The upraised voices, the bitter blasphemies, the profound outcries of hatred carried through the day. If at the end of it there was a silent night, I lay awake for a long time waiting for the storm to break, and in the morning got up fretful for my vigil.

Our poverty was my mother’s excuse for perpetuating the old anger. Although she had never been anything but poor, for her life in Russia before she married had been a tale of privation and suffering, still she had dreams of what it was like to be rich and, as she accused him, my father had promised her the finest of goods when he asked her to marry him. And what had she instead, she demanded. A two-room house in a fishermen’s village where the sand seeped in the doorways and across the window sills, where the winter winds gained access through the cracks in the walls, and where in the summer time the heat descended from the low beaverboard ceilings in a steady, unmerciful blast. And had she to eat the fowl, the caviar, the strawberries and melons and pears he had promised? Our fare was no better than the poorest peasant’s: day-old bread, pokhlyobka, side meat, and on great occasions, eggs. And did Shura Korf have a servant girl to go to the wine-cellar and fetch up champagne, Malaga, Rhine wines and Scotch whiskey, vodka and kümmel? Perhaps four times a year my father bought a bottle of corn whiskey from a bootlegger, and in the sordid kitchen they drank it in hot toddies which neither pleased their palates nor elevated their spirits and made them waken the following day with headaches, biliousness, and intermittent vertigo. Where were the yellow dresses, the summerhouse and the island in the lake, the solid silver samovar and the little black dog and the chestnut mare? What a brazen liar he had been! He was not the clever, ambitious man he had said he was when on the boat, caressing her as they leaned against the rail of the third-class deck, he had told her how he would have a great shoe business in the United States, selling only shoes made by hand and of the best leather money could buy. Why, he had declared he would have ten workmen under him! He would have commissions from the millionaires of New York City and Washington and Boston!

But see how it was instead: after ten years he was a nothing, a nobody. He repaired boots for the poor fishermen; he did not make them for the millionaires. He had not made a single pair for anyone but her, himself, and me.

My father, his pride lacerated, his shame festering would, at this point, retaliate. He would call on God as witness to his wife’s failure to observe the laws of marriage: she did not honor him nor love him nor obey, but had made for herself a stifling little box of a life where she did nothing but slothfully brood and cry because she had no yellow dress. What man on earth would want to work for a creature like that?

I remember one of these quarrels especially well, not because it was different from any of the others, but because of what followed it on the next day. It was in September, the week before the Hotel Barstow was to close for the season, and I was awake, sorrowing that Miss Pride would soon go back to Boston and that all winter long I would have nothing to do but go to school. My father had gone off to the Coast Guard house where he often spent the summer evenings, playing checkers and drinking home-brew with the men off duty. I was always glad when he went, for usually it meant that my mother would be asleep by the time he came in. But tonight she was restless and several times she spoke to me, “I can’t sleep. Sonia, are you awake, darling?” I did not answer and I heard her turn over, sigh, and murmur to herself, “Too hot.” It was always either too hot or too cold for her, and not even in the spring or the autumn would she admit that the temperature was pleasant. She would present her perspiring face to my father, or, in December, would hold out her blue hands and say, “You want to kill me!”

For some time I had been living with Miss Pride, first in her room at the Hotel and then in her unknown Boston house and I was either half-asleep or else so preoccupied with my thoughts that I did not hear my father come in and it was only when I heard my mother whisper, “I hate you! Christ God, I hate you!” that I realized he had got into bed and that the close room was full of his breath.

“Let me alone,” said my father. “I’m drunk.”

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