Vol.11 No.4 1944 - page 478

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476
PARTISAN REVIEW
ment; if the jailor were not Miss Pride it would be another ; for Sonie's
seems to be not malformation induced by a social situation, but by her
own private temperament.
Yet it is this private temperament, I should insist, which makes the
quality of the book. For Sonie's endurance of her lot gives her a detach–
ment from it which is the proper climate for a reflective critic of society.
"It takes an outlander to trap us alive," says Hopestill to Sonie; and
Sonie (like Proust's Marcel, it may be noted) is an outlander not merely
socially because she is born outside it, but spiritually as well because of
her protective refusal of identity with it.* And since the other charac–
ters are screened through her perception, the tone of the book is the
tone her temperament gives it: ironically observant, satirically detached,
resignedly understanding.
The vehicle of this tone is the style of the novel, a style which is in
itself enough to distinguish
Boston Adventure
from the run of the print–
ing mills. That style is grave
1
a little formal, rather nineteenth-cen–
tury in its affection for die highly wrought complex sentence: I do not
think that I can better describe it than by saying that it reads very like
Scott Moncrieff's translation of Proust. The resemblance to Proust by
no means stops with the words and sentences; such a passage as this
is typical:
"It can be said that memory is a sort of
entrepot
serving the busy traffic of
the unreflective mind, and that its stores, behind an unlocked door, may be
rummaged through and plundered at any time; thus I had found the foot–
steps of the old ladies walking in the sand at Chichester to match the lame–
ness of Philip's grandmother in Miss Pride's drawing-room, and thus, also,
confused by the music and by the stranger in the Countess' lobby, had
brushed off the dust of the forgotten incident and by a misapplication of
the styles of sensation, compared the music to the sunlight of that past day,
and remembered
Regenpfeifer
because I h ad been .addressed in German."
I do not know what to call this if not a S2ntem ora domest–
ication of Proust. There is the same use of the elaborate and extended
Image, the same fascination witl1 the arbitrary planes for time and
memory, the same leisurely use of the plot to provide occasions for
psychological generalizations about humanity. In
Boston Adventure
it
is the incidental reflection even more than the plot itself which keeps
a long novel eminently readable.
Plainly,
Boston Advf!nture
is by no means the traditional first novel.
It is not autobiographical, it is not full of sound and fury, and it is not
at all the careless composition of wild and untutored genius. O n the
*There are a lot of other perhaps not acciden tal parallels between Miss
Stafford's "I" and Proust's. Both begin by gazing with wonder and longing at
symbols of society which they later occupy only to dissect. It is Miss Stafford's
adroit domestication of Proust that makes Sonie's Meseglise Way the dome of
the Boston state house, her Duchesse de Guermantes the impeccable Pinckney
St. spinster, Miss Pride.
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