Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit: “Man proposes but God disposes”. This daunting aphorism, which became a vernacular proverb in most of the languages of Europe, apparently first appeared in print in the widely read Imitation of Christ of Thomas à Kempis in the early fifteenth century. But surely by then folks had already long known that the best-laid plans of men, as well as of mice, often go astray. The whole proposed drive to Montreal described in last week’s essay never happened. Whited out, so to speak. Instead we had a marvelously mellow Christmas Eve in an apartment on frozen and empty Washington Square in Manhattan, a drive-by Christmas morning greeting with the family in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and a delicious afternoon onion soup for seven of us around the fire in Princeton.
An unanticipated Christmas present had come early. It is the latest arrival (volume 324) from the Library of America, the Complete Novels of Jean Stafford. I had never read a word of Jean Stafford (1915-1979), though of course I had a vague “name recognition.” Though she has now mainly disappeared from literary conversations, she was a writer both popular and highly regarded in my own literary infancy. Her most famous book, and the one in which I am currently wholly engrossed, was Boston Adventure, published when I was eight years old (1944). She later appeared in my literary education as having been the battered wife, during the 1940s, of the bi-polar Boston Brahmin poet Robert Lowell. She had her own mental health and substance abuse problems. She also has connections with the southern Agrarians, and their adherents, especially Allen Tate and Peter Taylor, names frequently bandied about Sewanee in my time there.
I have not yet finished digesting Boston Adventure, but I find it remarkably good, and good in ways that are not common even in our most highly respected novelists. This novel is a kind of sour Bildungsroman—the fancy German word literary scholars use for a “a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education.” It is the history of a highly sensitive and intelligent young girl, Sonia (Sonie) Marburg, who dreams of transcending her miserable material and cultural circumstances only to discover….The background details are rich and engaging but still a little slippery, and occasionally melodramatic and surreal. Geographically, the novel is split between two Boston locations, defining the book’s two long narrative movements—a fictional, grubby working-class community called Chichester on the water, and the posh Pinckney Street dwelling of a Brahmin spinster, Miss Pride. Miss Pride summers at the Hotel Barstow, a fading Chichester beach hostelry at which both Sonia’s mother and the young girl herself work as domestics. It is there that Sonie becomes fascinated by her imagined vision of Miss Pride’s cultural and social elegance. Sonia’s father is a disillusioned German immigrant, an ineffectual cobbler, who met her mother, a shallow-minded and neurotic Russian, on the boat from Europe. The family lives in a kind of physical and spiritual hovel. The marriage is poisonous, a cauldron of failed daydreams and recriminations, and early in the novel the husband simply walks away from his daughter and his pregnant wife and is never again heard of. After much storm and stress, Sonia almost miraculously wins the favor of Miss Pride to such a degree that the spinster takes her into her private city home as combination secretary, companion, general dog’s body, and pile of clay to be molded to her patroness’s design.
Stafford’s style is strikingly realistic. The descriptions of the bleakness of the Marburg menage—a kind of shabbiness to which frank squalor would actually be preferable—is bone-chilling. The revelation of character, at least of most of the characters, is brilliant and subtle. Yet there is a dimension of the fantastic, and at times of the grotesque, in the presentation of the worlds both of the shanties and of the mansions. The narration is brilliant but problematic. The narrator is Sonia, but at what point in her life one cannot say. Most of the section entitled “Hotel Bristow” takes place when Sonia is in her earliest ‘teens. She reaches an indeterminate very young womanhood in the second half, “Pinckney Street.” The novel seems to begin about 1919 or 1920. One would expect some prominent presence of the Sacco and Vanzetti affair at the end of the Twenties, but very little happens in the "real world" in this book. The thoughts and general sensibilities attributed to the young Sonie seem far beyond her age. Are they coming from the somewhat older self on Pinckney Street—or a considerably older self long after both movements? Does the narrator realize the tragi-comic meaning of her story, or is that for Stafford’s readers alone?
Boston Adventure was a big best-seller, meaning that it must have captured a large “popular” audience, but it is very high-brow in its literary ancestry. It’s a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, so you can’t miss a whiff of James Joyce. But there’s more than a whiff of two other great modernists—Henry James and Marcel Proust. This is a book about the subtle interactions of memory, desire, and “art” very broadly conceived. Early in her acquaintance with Miss Pride, and in hopes of perhaps being able to impress her, Sonia borrows James’s The Awkward Age from the library. Awkward, indeed! “After a tormenting evening of poring over the completely unintelligible sentences of the novel…I did not try again to read Miss Pride’s favorite authors…” I myself was forty before I could grasp Henry James.
The quality of the writing is superb. Stafford’s verbal versatility seems inexhaustible. Whole paragraphs are gems. Even her short sentences can have a punch. Mac, Miss Pride’s chauffeur, brings her car around to the hotel entrance. “He was a thin, sharp, silvery young man who, in his gray livery, looked like an upright rat.” And the quality of the imaginative achievement is extraordinary. In the current moment the limits of the artistic imagination seem to be defined by the categories of identity politics. Only women can write about women with “authenticity”, only blacks can write about blacks. What actually makes literature possible are certain universally shared facts of the human condition. What makes it engaging and illuminating is the nearly limitless cultural variety amid which those facts are displayed. Sonia’s quest for self-realization and cultural salvation is obviously the author’s “own” experience in a sense partially real as well as symbolical. But the way in which a highly educated mid-century, middle-class Anglo-American can imagine both the exterior and interior lives of failing European immigrants of a rapidly vanishing earlier generation is extraordinary. If you are going to write a book about whalers it undoubtedly helps if you have actually seen a whale-hunt; but seeing a hundred whale hunts won’t expose the greatness of Moby Dick any more than the jagged rocks behind the Mona Lisa explicate her enigmatic smile.
In Monday’s newspaper a front-page article documented an early result of the great educational abdication of the Pandemic: the expanding need for remedial literacy courses in many American high schools. Perhaps I could do worse in the first essay of 2023 than once again to encourage all patriotic Americans who love our language and literature to acquire during the coming year a volume or two of the Library of America. The LofA is a non-profit enterprise that produces splendid and affordable editions of important American writers who have passed the test of time or are making their serious bid to do so. There is a lot of clucking these days about our “endangered democracy,” as though democracy’s vulnerability were some new thing, and that democracy can be rescued with more relaxed voter registration laws. American democracy was born in daring and in vulnerability. It has been in danger since the get-go. When Franklin said (allegedly) that he and his colleagues had come up with a Republic if you can keep it –he was worried less about the redcoats than about the very hard work involved in being and remaining free. There is no greater defense of democracy than literacy, robustly exercised. So defend democracy. Read a good book.
