I was stunned by the magnificent opening sentence of my first encounter with Jean Stafford in Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience” - A Short Story set in Paris first published June 17, 1955 in The New Yorker.
"There was a hole so neat that it looked tailored in the dead center of the large round beige velours mat that had been thrown on the grass in the shade of the venerable sycamore, and through it protruded a clump of mint, so chic in its air of casualness, so piquant in its fragrance in the heat of mid-July, that Mme Floquet, a brisk Greek in middle life, suggested, speaking in French with a commandingly eccentric accent, that her host, Karl von Bubnoff, M. le Baron, had contrived it all with shears and a trowel before his Sunday guests arrived at his manorial house, Magnamont, in Chantilly."
Now that is an opening sentence!
A gambling casino in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, a grubby down-scale version of Monte Carlo, nonetheless exerts an almost preternatural spell on a young woman named Abby in “The Children’s Game” who succumbs to the hypnotic frenzy of roulette: She was still ahead when the wheel was spun for the last time; and when everything was finished she was giddy as she struggled out of her cocoonlike trance. The croupiers’ fatigue humanized them; they rubbed their eyes and stretched their legs and their agile hands went limp. Abby was a little dashed and melancholy, let down and drained; she was, even though she had won, inconsolable because now the table, stripped of its seduction, was only a table. And the croupiers were only exhausted workingmen going home to bed. So appalled is Abby by the “monstrous” Belgian town, her appalled fascination inspires Stafford to a tour de force of description as charged with kinetic energy as Dickens’s most animated city scenes: [Knokke-le-Zoute] possessed houses that looked like buses threatening to run them down and houses that looked like faces with bulbous noses and brutish eyes … The principal building material seemed to be cobblestones, but they discovered a number of houses that appeared to be made of cast iron. In gardens there were topiary trees in the shape of Morris chairs and some that seemed to represent washing machines. The hotels along the sea were bedizened with every whimsy on earth, with derby-shaped domes and kidney-shaped balconies, with crenellations that looked like vertebrae and machiolations that looked like teeth, with turrets, bow-windows, dormers and gables, with fenestrations hemstitched in brick or bordered with granite point lace. Some of the chimneys were like church steeples and some were like Happy Hooligan’s hat. The cabanas, in the hot, dark haze, appeared to be public telephone booths. Even the flowers dissembled and the hydrangeas looked like utensils that belonged in the kitchen … The plazas were treeless plains of concrete where big babies sunned … There was an enormous smell of fish.
There are 65 stories in the Library of America volume. I do have in mind reading them all in 2024 and posting on some
Wikipedia has a good account of Stafford's Life
You are the reason I bought a collection of her stories in Toronto, and I've just checked to see that this one is included. It is!
ReplyDeleteThis is such a dense story, isn't it. Like you've said, I'm not sure I'll post on all of these stories either, but I do plan to read them all this year. It would get a little tedious, perhaps, typing out all the striking descriptions and somehow each passage leads to the next so it's hard to choose them. This is quite different from other stories I've read about gambling, overall.
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