Ammonia coke
In Jean Stafford’s novel The Mountain Lion (1947), a brothel owner asks a boy to go to the drugstore and get her “a package of Luckies and an ammonia coke.” Luckies still probably need no footnote, but what’s an ammonia [C]oke?
“She wasn’t fit to be seen”
A story that has, or should have, a place alongside James Joyce’s “Counterparts” and Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend.
Word of the day: cubeb
Why is someone with tuberculosis smoking anything?
“The hash of that Paul Pry”
So reminiscent of Eudora Welty’s 1941 story “Why I Live at the P.O.”
“The five-and-dime !”
“Five-and-dime” or “ten-cent store”?
Grand old plays and sewing machines
The student as customer.
“Tin yars in Versales, Mazura”
From Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure.
“Flatteringly, like the dentist”
Sonie Marburg — who’s never, so far as we know, read Proust — drops into the Proustian “we.”
No Remington, Ticonderoga
From Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure.
“Oh, piffle, you dumb-bells”
From Boston Adventure.
“The odors”
The first moment of involuntary memory in Boston Adventure.
A pallet on the floor
The opening sentence of Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure announces the key signatures, so to speak, of the novel: D and P. The novel is Dickensian, beginning as the story of a girlhood spent in poverty, and Proustian, beginning with sleep.