Proust on Pinckney Street

BOSTON ADVENTURE--Jean Stafford--Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

Every now & then, since Marcel Proust's death in 1922, a young American writes urbanely and philosophically about his or her past in long, rhythmic, qualified sentences and is forthwith called "the American Proust." Miss Stafford is the latest to be thus crowned. But while Proust was from birth an accepted member of the decadent Parisian society about which he wrote in Remembrance of Things Past, Miss Stafford's proxy, Sonia Marburg, is rather painfully not a socialite. Sonia is the dreaming, sensitive daughter of a German shoemaker and a Russian chamber maid--as unlikely a person to circulate among Boston's rigid elite as could be imagined.

Boston Adventure attempts not only the Proustian sentence structure and philosophical overtones, but also the use of fantasy as a literary method. Sonia, who spends a disturbing amount of her childhood sleeping on the floor on a pallet, dreams about a wealthy, untouchable Boston spinster named Miss Pride. She met Miss Pride while working as a chambermaid in the Hotel Barstow in Chichester, just outside Boston. "Over and over again," dreams Sonia, "until my eyes closed, I imagined the day on which my parents would die and Miss Pride would come to take me to live at the Hotel...." Eventually Sonia's fantasy is outdone by reality. Miss Pride condescendingly takes her to Boston, to live in her own strict Pinckney Street house, as a kind of amanuensis.

Russian Interlude. The interval between Sonia's wild daydreaming and her actual departure for Boston is less Proustian than Russian. Her father, a frustrated, hard-drinking man, pulls out one night, never to be heard of again. (The family is sure he headed West, since he practically lived on Riders of the Purple Sage.) Her unwanted, sensitive, epileptic younger brother Ivan dies after spending several hours lying in the snow. Then her mother, a luscious, emotional woman, loses her sanity and is packed off to an institution.

In whisking Sonia from dreary Chichester to delicious contemporary Boston, Miss Stafford tries to do the job Proust did in Guermantes' Way (third volume of his interminable autobiography).

"I could not evaluate accurately the aspects of this select world," reflects Sonia, "whether the personal connection of these people with the immortals, or their poised arrogance in regard to such issues as the contemptible political machine in Boston, or their stylish language, or their blue-blooded ugliness was the more impressive. ... It was not, I concluded, that what they said and the judgments they passed were [profound] . . . but that the manner of these pilgrims' heirs was so fearless and direct that one was not struck with their fatuity."

The Atlantic & the Bible. Once settled in Boston, Sonia really hits her stride. In fairly rapid succession, she charms the eternal Admiral Nephews (his grandfather knew Matthew Arnold's mother), overwhelms the Countess von Happel ("And now, goodby, come back to me. I love you!") and fascinates three or four Harvard deep thinkers. Miss Pride merely stands around polishing her with rather sharp criticism. The tension between the two--as patron and protege--is very deftly handled by Author Stafford. But unfortunately the situation remains implausible.

That, by & large, is Boston Adventure's chief deficiency--plausibility. Author Stafford is forever at a window sipping tea and day dreaming. Her best characters--Nathan Kadish, an impetuous Jewish intellectual, and Sonia's brother Ivan--are only technically alive, and never have any particular depth. The most amusing character in Boston Adventure is the Countess. "Really," she once remarks, "I never read The Atlantic. I just skim through it the way I do the Bible."

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