Rereadings

by Anne Fadiman

  In the summers I read on that generous porch, in other seasons in my bedroom. My parents had given me a dark green easy chair that I placed against the window overlooking the backyard—a spot from which, unseen, I could watch the neighborhood kids ringing the kitchen bell and hear my mother calling, “Barbara and Mary want you to play!” I usually wanted to read instead. I think I first encountered Sue Barton in that easy chair, but I’m not certain. The intensity of reading made its own place; I entered the pages and became oblivious to my real surroundings. How many times did I read the books? It seems improbable that the almost-clairvoyant precision with which I recall Boylston’s dialogue and descriptions was the result of only one or two readings, but it may well have been. The time-altering passage a child makes into the landscape of certain books may inscribe them permanently in a single journey

  When I reread them, the smallish library books still fitted neatly into my hands, as if I were shrugging into an old jacket that preserved the memory of my elbows and shoulders. I knew those thick pages with their deep bottom margins and dash-filled dialogue, even their smell—an amalgam of paper, thread, libraries, and young girls. The nursing tradition and the life of a great hospital they evoked were as rich as I remembered. The repartee between Sue and Bill Barry, while not up to Noel Coward’s standards, still struck a stylish but authentic note:

  Then Barry said, smiling, “You do like me a little—still, don’t you?”

  “I can bear you,” said Sue, lightly. “I even admire you—sometimes—though I’m sure it’s presumptuous of me, when there are so many and better nurses to worship at your feet.”

  He grinned. “I was hoping you’d noticed that!”

  “Dear me, how you do hate yourself! And would you kindly tell me what you think you’ve got except your elegant black hair? Where would you be if you were bald—or even if it were rumpled? All women would flee from you.”

  “You might rumple it, and find out if you want to run,” he said, bending over. His dark head was very close—a well-set head on broad shoulders.

  “No, indeed,” hastily. “I wouldn’t dream of it.” She was laughing a little.

  —Sue Barton, Senior Nurse

  In spite of lively dialogue, characterization, and atmosphere, the Sue Barton books aren’t Shakespeare. They aren’t even Madeleine L’Engle or P. L. Travers. Creations of their time, they come with nuance-free stereotypes. Italians are always excitable, Jews worried, “coloured people” willing and gullible. I still enjoy the prank played on a know-it-all student who is sent to procure a neck tourniquet for a thyroid case (“and hurry!”), but the plots of the individual chapters, typically a “scrape” involving Sue and her pals, are often unconvincing. Although my hunch that these were superior juvenile novels was vindicated, they are, like the curate’s egg, excellent only in parts.

  While I marveled that I knew these novels better than the book I read last week, I was equally surprised by the things I did not remember—or had never consciously noticed. Indifferent to weather and natural settings as a child, I had failed to appreciate that Boylston is a poet of climate and landscape. “At noon the sky came suddenly down,” she writes, describing a snowfall on the New Hampshire coast. “It came endlessly, falling straight, and silent except for a little pelting whisper, an interminable sigh. There was no breath of wind—only that white curtain piling downwards forever on sheeted roofs and cotton trees.”

  Another aspect that had escaped my attention forty years ago was the current of worry that runs through the series, a to-and-fro rumination about a woman’s difficulties in combining an independent life with marriage, a profession with a family. When Dr. Barry asks the twenty-year-old Sue, not yet a nurse, if she is “still grimly intent on a career,” my eyebrows shot up. How could I have missed that? As a girl, I loved Sue’s devotion to her work and her relationship with Bill Barry, and didn’t notice that she hardly ever had both at once. Something similar would play out in my own life and in the lives of many women in my generation. But when I first read Sue Barton, I did not even know it was a dilemma.

  Helen Dore Boylston did, and the timing of her novels is suggestive. The first was published during the Depression, when nursing was one of the few professions immune to the accusation that women were taking jobs from men. Almost from the start, Dr. Barry (whose charm I still cannot resist) wants Sue. She balks, wishing to live before she settles down. Besides, the most fully expressed romance in the series is Sue’s attachment to nursing. The encounter quoted above, in which Bill invites Sue to rumple his hair, continues with Sue feeling something close to panic. After she laughingly refuses, Bill asks, “Why not?”

  An odd sensation, almost like fear, stirred within her. “I—I don’t know,” she said, and looked up at him with eyes in which there was no trace of laughter.

  There was a silence.

  Then Sue turned back to the window.

  “Look,” she said a little unsteadily, “the lights are on in the ward now. In a little while the girls will be getting out the supper trays. It’s strange, isn’t it, to think how many years that has been going on? The people come and go, but they’re just the same, really.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, watching her.

  They talked for a few minutes: of the hospital; of the work that was being done in the laboratories on pernicious anaemia; of the differences between medicine and surgery. But when Barry went away at last Sue remained, staring out of the window with a troubled face.

  It’s a finely observed scene—the girl stirred but reluctant, turning in a flurry from what she may love someday to what she loves steadily, the ongoing life of the hospital.

  Ultimately love triumphs—temporarily—over Sue’s passion for nursing, but Boylston continues building roadblocks to her domestication. Sue dithers, stalls, breaks the engagement; family crises cause further delays. Finally, at the beginning of Sue Barton, Superintendent of Nurses, the fifth book, she marries Bill Barry. At the end of that volume, pregnant with “Bill Junior,” Sue hands in her resignation. Boylston declared the series over: a married nurse was iffy, a nurse with a baby out of the question. She turned to a new series about a stagestruck girl named Carol Page.

  For some reason, Boylston returned to Sue Barton in 1949 and 1952. In two books written at a time when society wanted women at home after the tumult of war, Boylston’s ambivalence is unresolved. Trying to accommodate a stay-at-home heroine with three children in Sue Barton, Neighborhood Nurse, Boylston reduces her to helping a troubled teenager and improvising the odd tourniquet. (Sue hasn’t lost her old sense of humor, though. After one of her plans goes awry, she tells Bill, “Next time remind me to stay at home and edge the dish towels with tatting.”) Three years later, in desperation, Boylston gives Dr. Barry a double dose of pneumonia and tuberculosis that conveniently exiles him to a sanatorium, permitting his wife to return to work in Sue Barton, Staff Nurse.

  As a child, I never wondered about the writer behind the books, but now I was curious. A little research, including the happy discovery of a Sue Barton home page, filled in some of the picture. Born in 1895, Helen Boylston was, like Sue, a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and a doctor’s daughter. After graduating from the Massachusetts General Hospital nursing school in 1915, she nursed in France during the First World War. Boylston’s “Sister”: The War Diary of a Nurse appeared in 1927. The central figure—an edited self-portrait, no doubt, but a self-portrait-can contrive an armchair from boards, box covers, and a fence rail (“Thank God Daddy taught me to use carpenters’ tools”) and falls in and out of love with dispatch, flirting energetically but far from sure she wants to marry. Of one beau, a young officer almost certainly doomed to die, Boylston writes coolly, “We finally parted with all the necessary drama.”

  In her twenties and thirties, Boylston seesawed between working as a nurse and magazine writer in America and courting adventure in Europe with her friend Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was not yet famous as the
author of the Little House series. Boylston’s nickname was Troubles or Troub, and she did her best to live up to it. “She once made the Albanian Prime Minister carry her trunk off the boat and tried to tip him, not knowing who he was,” her publishers wrote. “She was shot at for two hours in a ditch in southern Albania owing to a mistake in identity.” After two years in Tirana, Boylston was drawn home by the “irresistible lure” of a photograph of a baked potato in an American magazine, and in 1936 she launched the Sue Barton books. One of the first “career series” for girls, they went into multiple editions and translations and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

  In 1942, Current Biography illustrated its full-page article on Helen Dore Boylston with a photograph of the forty-seven-year-old holding up a puppy. Short-haired, slim, wearing a military-style jacket, she looks like Greta Garbo playing Queen Christina. Current Biography described her as “handsome and youthful, with strong features.” Miss Boylston’s leisure activities, according to this account, included wood carving and training dogs. “Her favorite sport is long motor trips. She is unmarried.”

  Were any of those terms—“unmarried,” “handsome,” “strong features,” “wood carving”—Current Biography’s code for gay? A twenty-first-century question, and probably a pointless one. Boylston may well have been a heterosexual who realized that for a woman born in 1895, marriage and a yen for adventure made a bad combination. Her last book, a biography of Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was written when she was sixty. She died in 1984, in a nursing home, leaving few personal papers.

  The triangular relationship among three doctors’ daughters—Sue, Helen Dore Boylston, and me—is an unstable one. Sue is the most constant of the three, although even she evolves from book to book. Boylston is the most enigmatic, because there are significant gaps in my knowledge of her. Did she ever want to marry? Why did she resume the series in 1949? Did she change her mind about what would constitute the fullest life for Sue? Chances are I’ll never know the answers. As for me, there is no single reader of Sue Barton. Each time I open one of the books, I put on my current spectacles.

  When I was a girl, I imagined I would live as my mother did: marry a doctor or a professor and run a household, read, raise children, and read some more. In 1963, when Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique was published, I argued that rearing children while keeping house was not the dreary round Friedan described. Three years later, engaged and enrolled in a Ph.D. program, I had gone over to the other side. Or, more accurately, I had embraced both sides. I was confident that, armed with a doctorate, I would read to my children every night before cooking maddeningly complex recipes from Julia Child. If I had reread Neighborhood Nurse and Staff Nurse then, I would have scoffed at Sue’s dilemma and Boylston’s uncertainty Why couldn’t Sue manage nursing, husband, and children?

  Predictably, my superwoman period proved impossible to sustain. My husband and I, each raised by a full-time wife and mother, hadn’t a clue how to build a home without a dedicated housewife. As we were separating, he remarked that a marriage probably couldn’t survive two demanding careers. At that, Bill Barry might well have adjusted his pipe and nodded agreement.

  These days, with one side of my brain, I read the last two books in the series as social documents, smiling at their unsubtly conveyed values. With the other side—to my surprise—I read them with considerable emotion. Certain contrived scenes can actually bring a lump to my throat.

  Neighborhood Nurse, in particular, is Boylston’s most enthusiastic hymn to family values, vintage 1949. Almost every chapter centers on a minor miracle worked by Sue: a bit of improvised nursing or social work, the discovery that a fractious child has a serious musical talent, the conversion of an unmaternal artist into the “real mother” her daughter needs.

  Treacly and implausible—and yet at some level it works, at least for me. Partly it’s because even when Boylston tips into propaganda, she’s too fair to render it completely in black and white, partly because Sue is as wry as an Angel in the House could be. But mostly, I admit, I respond to the idyll—the intelligent, happy mother in the big white house, always available to decipher a tantrum, devise a picnic, haul an errant twin in from the roof. A rosy-colored picture, but familiar to someone whose nurse-mother ran a big gray clapboard house for her doctor-husband and five children. I now see that the Barrys were a wittier version of my own parents, just as I see that the medical background struck more chords than I was capable of acknowledging in the 1950s. The hospital is, after all, part of the Ashenburg family romance.

  The family romance continues, only now my father—who, remarkably, has fully recovered—is the nurse. The wife whose Phi Beta Kappa key he pointed to proudly (his own marks were never as high as hers) has Alzheimer’s. These days my father cooks and cleans for her, doles out her pills, makes sure she uses shampoo when she washes her hair—the kind of age-old, compassionate care Sue Barton gives her patients.

  So my mother’s situation gives me another reason to appreciate Neighborhood Nurse. But even without that motive, I suspect I warm to it because the life it describes was, if not a good idea, at least a good dream. For my mother, the choice to stay home seems to have been relatively uncomplicated; for Sue, more complicated; for me, even more so. For most women of my generation, whichever decision we made was tinged with regret—faint or strong. Regret is probably inevitable when one is balancing two such fundamental things as work and child rearing, and I say that without wanting to re-do my daughters’ childhoods with a working mother.

  And Helen Dore Boylston’s position remains unknown. In the last of the series, she goes to extraordinary plot lengths to get Sue back in the hospital. She sacrifices Bill Barry’s health to Sue’s temporary return to her career, but he recovers. At the end of the book, before Sue knows that his release from the sanatorium is imminent, he has a conversation with her old friend Kit. She assures him that Sue will quit her job on his return. He asks if staying home will be enough for her.

  “I don’t know,” Kit said honestly. “After all, that’s up to her—and you.”

  “It’s up to her,” Bill said.

  And there, after a final scene of Bill’s happy return to domestic mayhem, the matter rests.

  JAMIE JAMES

  “You Shall Hear of Me”

  Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad

  As look down the mental shelf of books that formed my taste and thinking when I was a boy, I find a tame assortment of titles almost entirely predictable by the year of my birth: in addition to such classics as Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper, Little Women and Little Men, I also read sentimental drivel along the lines of Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Little Lame Prince, books I expect must now be forgotten except by deluded grandparents. The first trend in my reading that suggests an individual taste was a fascination with books about the seafaring life, particularly pirate tales. It began, of course, with Treasure Island, which thrilled me in a way that no book after it was ever able to match. It shivered my timbers. Then I made my way through Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae, moved on to Stevenson imitations such as Moonfleet, by J. Meade Falkner, and The Coral Island, by R. M. Ballantyne, and embarked on my first voyage into nonfiction: Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, which enraptured me as much as my favorite make-believe books.

  With my love of tales of the sea, I inevitably found my way to Conrad, but my discovery of his books happened early, perhaps before I was ready. I was thirteen when I read Lord Jim. It came to me in the guise of a gaudy paperback, published to profit from the release of a new film version starring Peter O‘Toole, with a breathless blurb promising a lusty tale of adventure on a tropical isle. Lawrence of Arabia, which I had seen two years earlier, was my first important experience at the cinema: when I saw young O’Toole, with those soul-impaling pale blue eyes, pirouette in the desert in his Arab robes, my heart stopped, seized by the deepest throes of romantic hero worship. Richard Brooks’s film version of Lord Jim, w
ith O‘Toole in the title role, came out a few years later. I never saw it, but I understand that it was a failure, among both the Conradians and the adventure-film set; if it came to my neighborhood theater, it was gone before I had a chance to persuade my father—a cinematophobe with a particular aversion to British accents who was still recovering from the sitting marathon of Lawrence of Arabia—to take me to see it. Yet flop or not, the movie had a tie-in paperback with Peter O’Toole’s beautiful, enigmatic face on the cover, which grabbed me and my fifty cents.

  I find it difficult to reconstruct a chronology of my reading habits with any precision; I tend to organize my memories as a reader around themes. I know exactly when I read Lord Jim: it was the summer of 1965, the year the movie was released. But I have no idea whether it came before or after, for example, The Catcher in the Rye or A Tale of Two Cities, two other books I read that year. Looking back on my early-adolescent reading, I see those three books as the beginnings of different long-term reading projects: Dickens, contemporary American literature, and modernism. I’m certain that when I read Jim for the first time, I had never heard of modernism, but I knew at once that I was encountering a book quite different from Treasure Island in technique and intent.

  It was my first experience with ambiguity, a literary quality that Robert Louis Stevenson avoided. It also involved a much more complex delivery system than I was accustomed to. The book started off with the comforting, familiar presence of the omniscient narrator, but by the fifth chapter he was gone, replaced by someone named Marlow, who continued the tale in the form of an endless after-dinner storytelling session on the veranda of a hotel in Singapore. The description of cigar ends burning in the tropical dark made a vivid impression. Then the ending came in the form of letters from Marlow to one of the men who had listened to his monologue on the porch. It struck me that in its narrative structure, Lord Jim was similar to Wuthering Heights—the beginning of another lifelong reading project, romanticism.