by Ann Hulbert
Stafford’s novel was not religious in the same sense that Lowell’s contemporaneous poems were. She was not working with explicitly Christian symbolism, aiming to articulate an apocalyptic religious myth, as he was. (He said later that he had been “much more interested in being a Catholic than in being a writer”) But her basic inclination, like that of her teachers Tate and Ransom (and, behind them, T. S. Eliot), was to see, as Taylor observed in his letter, mankind as fallen and art as a kind of redemptive witness to that plight. And like Lowell, Stafford was fascinated by the opposition between Catholicism and Boston. Dividing her novel into two parts, she juxtaposed an Old World vision of spiritual damnation with a New World vision of social salvation. Sonie hoped to escape her lowly, blighted past and redeem herself amid high Boston society. But Stafford didn’t grant her such a simple pilgrimage. Boston was hardly the salvation Sonie expected, and Stafford offered another alternative, the life of art—only to deny her that as well. Stafford was not proposing Sonie’s tale as a portrait of the artist as a young woman. The only prospect of transcendence she held out for Sonie was a contemplative, not a creative, retreat from the corrupt world—a retreat that threatened to mean losing her mind rather than finding her soul.
Sonie’s spiritual and social journey began in Chichester, a little village across the bay from Boston where she lived in near destitution with her tormented German father, Hermann, a lapsed Catholic, and her histrionic Russian mother, Shura, immigrants with nothing to cling to in the New World. Her odyssey took an unlikely turn when her childhood fantasy was fulfilled. She was invited to live in the well-appointed Pinckney Street house of Miss Pride, the embodiment of Boston propriety (and, it turned out, of petrifaction) who regularly vacationed at the Hotel Barstow in Chichester and had become Sonie’s idol. For years the child had been consumed with admiration of the impeccably bred visitor, and with envy of Miss Pride’s niece, Hopestill Mather, Sonie’s age and a lucky inhabitant of Pinckney Street. The image of the spinster’s old house—hallowed in Sonie’s mind by tradition, by association with some vague ideal of civilization—emerged as the presiding symbol of the book. In her daydreams Sonie adorned those solid, orderly rooms with concrete details, drawing on her knowledge of Miss Pride’s immaculate Hotel Barstow room, which the child cleaned when her mother, the chambermaid, wasn’t feeling well. But the cruel recognition crowning Sonie’s quest was that darkness and isolation existed in the aristocratic order of the Boston elite too. Her life with Miss Pride proved to be anything but a liberation. Garbed in civility and enlightenment, the solitude there was even more chilling.
For the Southerners, the North, especially New England, played a crucial role in the drama of deracination, and both Stafford and Lowell were fascinated by the myth of the “abstract-minded, sharp-witted trading society” of New England versus the “simple … personal and dramatic … sensuous” southern mind, as Tate put the contrast in his essay in I’ll Take My Stand. But their allegiances were, understandably, not so clearcut. Though Stafford, the Westerner (and now a New Englander by marriage), was acutely aware of the formative power of place, she could also become exasperated with the dogmatic views of her hosts. She had listened to countless conversations about the importance of regionalism, a favorite topic among the Tates and the assorted company that gathered at Monteagle. The chauvinism was sometimes expressed in an appealingly humble style. “Thank God for being a Southern writer,” Caroline Gordon exclaimed to a friend in 1937, citing the Civil War as a rich source of inspiration. “I do feel at times that in comparison with the rest of you we are sitting in at a game where the cards are already stacked.… Our stuff due to the upheaval of ’64 is lying around loose for any fool who has a big tow sack to pick it up.… If you are from other parts of the country it seems these days that you have to use much more skill to strike a vein of the real stuff and get it out.” But sometimes the smugness roused Stafford to indignation. “We had this statement ‘I cannot feel that anything out of the south is of any consequence,’ ” she reported in a letter to Taylor:
What appalls me is not the statement but the fact that it was said in dead earnestness, not under the influence either of alcohol or chauvinism. It was declared that nowhere but in the south are people conscious of the land and when we objected, we let loose a storm against New England. All of this reads like a book to me and not such a damned good book.
Like Lowell, whose ambivalence about New England emerged in the poems he was writing at the time, Stafford was evidently inspired in part by the southern prejudice about the North to write about the place herself—make a better book of it. Unlike her husband, however, she wasn’t writing from the inside. In Baton Rouge, Stafford had written to Hightower announcing that her new novel was her “first un-autobiographical” effort, which was in an obvious sense true. It was not as though she could portray New England from intimate knowledge: she had lived in Cambridge and skirmished with the Lowells only briefly, and her reaction had been confused. She had been at once enthralled and repelled by the clannish elite that had given her such a cold shoulder. But if Sonie’s lurid Chichester childhood and her frigid Boston coming-of-age bore little resemblance to Stafford’s actual life, the progress of Sonie’s mind reflected the growth of Stafford’s own. Boston Adventure was the portrait of an adventurous yet vulnerable imagination struggling to make sense of the world. It was steeped more in literature than in life—especially in Proust and James, an intimidating tradition but one that Stafford wasn’t afraid to turn to her own uses.
In an important essay on James published in Partisan Review during Stafford’s Monteagle spring, “The Heiress of All the Ages,” Philip Rahv focused on the development of James’s principal heroine, his daring young American woman. She was the star of his international drama, which turned on issues of central interest to the southern critics, who were among the first advocates of the James revival. James offered not merely a model of formalism but a version of the conflict of values they identified in their own national drama. His juxtaposition of innocent, idealistic Americans with sensuous, experienced Europeans was not so different from the Agrarians’ opposition between Northerners and Southerners, for as both Tate and Ransom made clear in their contributions to the Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, the South was America’s Europe, the repository of tradition, of landed attachments, in an otherwise shallow-rooted country. James’s contrast was evidently helpful to Stafford as she worked to complicate the conflicts in Sonie’s Boston adventure.
Not that she simply followed his lead. Instead of a Jamesian heiress, a “passionate pilgrim” sent forth from innocent New England to encounter in Europe the “social successful worldly world,” as Rahv called it, Sonie Marburg was a pauper on what looked like the reverse journey. She started out across the water from Boston with her European parents. Physically she was not far away: “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,” Sonie began. But spiritually she was miles away, her life in Chichester a socially unsuccessful impoverished world. Sonie ended up in the heart of New England, but it was far from innocent.
If James was one lurking literary model whose international theme Stafford in a sense transposed, Proust was the presiding influence. Here too Stafford inventively adapted. “With its first page, tuned to the glazed and dying night-music of Proust’s Overture,” Alfred Kazin wrote in his review, “ ‘Boston Adventure’ brings us into the mind of a young girl so high in her style and so low in society that one’s first impression is that Gorky’s tramp characters have stolen into the cork-lined room.” The strange tension at the center of Stafford’s novel was the disjunction between Sonie’s sensibility and her circumstances. She sounded, as Stafford herself said early on, like C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust—elevated and archaic—yet her origins and her destiny were a world away from Marcel’s. Although Boston Adventure, narrated
in the first person, was proof of Sonie’s prodigious imagination, Stafford emphatically denied her character the fruitful circuit that Proust granted Marcel. Sonie was Miss Pride’s disillusioned secretary—an amanuensis charged with a hopeless project, the old lady’s memoirs—not a real writer. She never enjoyed Marcel’s miraculous triumph of simultaneously renouncing the corrupt world and possessing it in the creation of a work of art.
That is what made Sonie such a peculiar, and powerful, heroine. Stafford’s Proustian and Jamesian ingredients resulted in an idiosyncratic mix. Sonie was neither an artist nor really an heiress. What stood in the way of art was that she aspired to be an heiress—that she wanted to be, and then was, adopted by Miss Pride—more than she wanted to pursue a literary life. What undermined her role as heiress was that she had the ironic spirit of an artist, the imagination to see the distance between pretension, aspiration, and reality. She made not only the opposite of James’s journey, but also the opposite of Proust’s journey—that is, she chose society over art, even though society was an imprisonment. Yet Stafford shared with both writers a focus on disillusionment, on spiritual alienation and social subjugation. In fact, her vision was completely dark. She allowed no bridging of American and European values, no synthesis of art and life.
Neither heiress nor artist, Sonie was an odd combination of dreamer and critic. She was a rather mystifying narrative presence, as Lambert Davis, Giroux’s successor as Stafford’s editor at Harcourt, Brace, pointed out to her that spring in Monteagle. He sent Stafford a preliminary editorial report, which was full of praise but also posed questions about her elusive heroine. How does Sonie, he asked,
become the master of a polished and intricate prose style and a cool ironic insight into character?… Sonie as she appears in this book is a curiously passive creature.… One asks to know why she is telling this story: what springs of pride or frustration or anger or ambition or love lie at the source of this outpouring, what violent inwardness is under the cool surface of the style?
These were not questions that would have been asked of Stafford’s earlier, heated style. That Davis asked them now was a sign of how far Stafford had moved from the subjective agonies of her first efforts and from more conventional psychological portraiture in general. Her answers did not make for a standard saga of developing identity. Instead, Stafford unfolded a sort of mythic progress of the soul, or rather of the imagination.
IN BOOK ONE, “Hotel Barstow,” Stafford set in motion Sonie’s liberation from Chichester and traced her problematic imaginative heritage. She lived surrounded by—suffocated by—disappointed hopes. Her mother, brought up in horrifying misery in Russia, berated her father for sabotaging her dreams of a lavish life in America. Her father, once a proud craftsman and now a poor shoe repairman, was tortured by self-hatred and shame at his fall, not only from his vocation but from Catholicism. As Edmund Wilson wrote of Proust’s Combray residents, “all are sick with some form of the ideal.” As a child, Sonie knew all too well the symptoms of this sickness. Violence and hatred rocked the Marburgs’ dilapidated cottage, especially at night, when from her pallet on the floor she heard her parents rail at each other in bed. As the narrator, she understood the different sources of the common affliction: “My mother believed herself persecuted by everyone she had ever known.… But [my father] knew, and was powerless to rectify the fault, that all his torture came from his own flabby will which swung him like a pendulum between apathy and fretful indecision.”
The odds were heavily weighted against this half-Russian, half-German child, whose lineage was even more outlandish than Gretchen Marburg’s had been. To be half Hun was “infamous beyond pardon,” but to be part Russian was “utterly improbable.” Sonie was in unwilling thrall to her big-eyed histrionic mother, whose story of betrayal was “so fantastic that not even I, a little girl, could believe it.” Stafford’s great accomplishment was to convey Sonie’s enraptured resistance to Shura’s lunacy. The two inseparable figures, mother and madwoman, loomed over Sonie, unbelievable yet unquestionable.
Shura Marburg grew more and more fantastically disoriented as the novel progressed, Dickensian in its exaggeration. Impregnated and abandoned by Hermann, she gave birth to a son, Ivan, whom she detested and destroyed, while Sonie struggled in vain to protect the epileptic child, a little monster grown hateful from hate. The scenes—Shura shivering with cold in front of a blazing fire, embroidering birds without tails on every cloth surface she could find, painstakingly picking lint from wicker chairs at the hotel with a hairpin, staring at her son until his eyes rolled back and he succumbed to a foaming fit—made no pretense at realism, but were compelling in their symbolic intensity:
I looked upon my mother with sheer fright. It was as if I looked upon naked evil in the person of that woman whose beauty so far surpassed any other I had ever seen that it was almost divine, as if she had come directly from the hand of God, but had, immediately afterwards, been inhabited by a ravenous and indefatigable fiend. Or perhaps she was not alive with wickedness but was dead with it: an empty vessel, or an excellent hull holding a withered fruit. I wondered how deep she was and if my own depths … were the same.
Where her mother was an incarnation of the dark urges and fears that Sonie was strong enough to restrain, Hermann Marburg embodied the ambivalent desires and needs that threatened to undermine Sonie’s determination, as they did his own. “My father was not a man whose misery could be mitigated by a change of environment or an increase of worldly goods or an establishment in a society,” Sonie judged, and ascribed his suffering to his sensibility, “refined by what influences I could only conjecture. And this sensibility had led him away from the traditions of his religion and his work and neither the one nor the other could stand alone.” The artisan was tormented by what Stafford suggested was a deep, and hopeless, desire for transcendence. His scenes, too, turned into tableaux of high drama, which Stafford often deftly undercut. This damned man spoke a variety of tongues, but only one tone—a desperate rhetoric that left his daughter reeling, sometimes from physical blows that accompanied his verbal violence:
Then he put his head down until his forehead was in his greasy plate and shouted, “Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, Beatae Mariae, semper Virgini …” but he could not go on. He rolled over until his face was pointed upward to the ceiling and he wailed, “Gott! Gott, warum hast Du mich verlassen!”
“Papa, do you want some cheese?”
“Cheese? Yes, that’s the remedy! Give your father a spoonful of cheese and that will get him out of hell!” He took me by both arms and shook me until my dizzied eyes began to hurt. “We’re fit for nothing!” His eyes, afire and yet still as cold as ice, looked upon me with such hatred and so terrible a threat that I commenced to cry.
He fantasized that the American frontier was his escape from hell. His favorite book was Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, which he loved to read to Sonie (if he wasn’t urging Latin on her). When, sixty pages into Boston Adventure, he fled his wife and family, he was presumably headed out West.
Thus Stafford gave plenty of evidence of the “violent inwardness” that lurked under Sonie’s cool style, though it didn’t come packaged in familiar psychological form. This was not subtle introspection at work, but a kind of poetic projection, a drama that called attention to its mythic, religious dimensions. Her parents were not simply the source of certain symptoms in her, but symbols that dramatized her divided nature. In casting Sonie’s predicament this way, Stafford couldn’t avoid a static, almost surreal quality in the first section of her novel.
What suspense there was in the plot lay in the question: Was Sonie, unlike her father, someone whose misery could be mitigated by “a change of environment or an increase of worldly goods or an establishment in a society”? That was certainly her dream as a child, as she announced on the first page of the novel. Huddled in the same room with her haranguing parents, her secret wish, cultivated in great detail in her head, was “that I might have a
room of my own, and the one I imagined was Miss Pride’s at the Hotel Barstow.” With the echo of Virginia Woolf, Stafford was playing off the expectation that Sonie’s transcendence might lie in literature, and she continued to point tantalizingly to that path for Sonie.
But as the soulless nature of Miss Pride’s room suggests, Sonie’s primary aspirations were, in fact, the opposite of aesthetically liberating. Her fantasies were of a potentially suffocating order. The Boston grande dame displaced Shura in Sonie’s dreams, an antimother if there ever was one. Miss Pride was repression incarnate, which the child interpreted as desirable aristocratic rigidity. Surrounded by violent passions, Sonie yearned for a kind of serene passivity that seemed ominous. “It was not until then, in the summer of my 10th year, that I learned, in what terms of childhood I cannot remember, that peace was to be desired above all things,” she announced, and showed herself eager to submit to Miss Pride’s tyranny.