Standing in the spacious lobby of a New York apartment building, waiting for the doorman to call upstairs and announce my arrival, I find it impossible not to marvel at the distance Julia Scully has traveled. From Nome, Alaska, to Manhattan's Upper West Side is 3,780 miles, give or take, but Scully's journey has been so much longer. As an 11-year-old girl, she served whiskey to goldminers in the Alaskan roadhouse her mother ran. Today, she lives in a comfortable, book-filled home after three decades as a writer and magazine editor.
Scully, '51, (née Julia Silverman) relives her early days in Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood. Published last year, the book tells the story of a hardscrabble Depression-era childhood -- from Scully's earliest memories in a small San Francisco apartment through her father's business failures and suicide followed by her mother's departure for Alaska and her two lonely years in a San Francisco orphanage. At age 11, she rejoins her mother, who runs a roadhouse in Taylor Creek, north of Nome. Billie, as Scully was known, comes of age during World War II. It's a time when Nome, an unexciting outpost, is enlivened by its strategic value and by the soldiers stationed there -- young, handsome and frequently as taken with young Billie as she is with them. As the memoir closes, she makes an unexpected choice: to go to college. Her mother has finally found a good job and, with some earnings of her own, Billie leaves Alaska, never to return. She's off to "the campus with the sun-warmed stones."
Stanford was the bridge from that first world to her current one. Scully, the backwater girl among prep-school kids, never felt she fit in well socially. But academically she found Stanford exhilarating after Nome High School, with its graduating class of 10. Armed with a degree in English and training in the creative writing program, she wanted to be a magazine writer. Sunset, then about the only Bay Area-based magazine, wasn't hiring. So, she tells me, "I just got on a train and went to New York."
There she found a dearth of openings for beginners. Scully instead went to work as secretary to the pictures editor of Argosy magazine, where she first became interested in photography and photographers. She moved from there to U.S. Camera and then hopped to Camera 35, all the while climbing the editorial ladder.
She joined Modern Photography as editor in 1966. During her 20-year stint there, she wrote and edited articles on photographers and camera equipment and techniques. For two-and-a-half years after her retirement, Scully produced the weekly AP-syndicated column, "Picture This," for which she'd find an interesting photograph and report the story behind it.
In 1996, she started a second career. She put together a book of works by a powerful but reclusive photographer, Mike Disfarmer, who captured the face of rural Arkansas half a century ago. Disfarmer: 1930-1946 Heber Springs Portraits was called one of the best photographic books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.
Outside Passage is Scully's first work unrelated to her field, but she says it won't be the last. "This book," she says, "is something I've been wanting to do and trying to do all my life." The life she has created for herself is so different from the world of her youth, Scully says, that "I felt a need to bring those two parts together."
It sometimes seems as though author and protagonist are two different people. Unlike more "confessional" memoirists, Scully commands the self-possession and introspection needed to write such a book. The young protagonist seems almost numb, a passive player in her own harrowing story. Events happen around Billie; Scully, simply by creating this book, seems able to make things happen for herself. At the orphanage in San Francisco, she writes, "I crawl between the tall hydrangea bushes and find a piece of clear ground just big enough so that if I scrunch down, knees under my chin, I'm completely hidden." Scully the writer has no need of a hiding place.
The critics were fond of her book, which was widely reviewed, especially for a first-time author. "The props are few, the poses are natural, and the mood is one of unforgiving acceptance," wrote the New York Times critic in a full-page, admiring essay.
Scully says she has succeeded in reconciling the difficulties of her early life with the comfort and achievement of her later years. She's developed a deeper respect for her mother, whom she now sees as "a victim of the times." And she's come to realize that even some of the more shocking experiences -- like being an 11-year-old barmaid -- had a silver lining. ("It sounds horrible," she tells me, "but it was the best time in my childhood.")
A long trip, to be sure, from that world to the life of a New York writer. As readers, we're lucky that she made it.
Jesse Oxfeld, '98, is an intern at Newsweek and a frequent contributor to Stanford.
