by Ann Hulbert
Stafford told a little more of the story, in a similarly oblique but more literary way, in the author’s note to her Collected Stories in 1969, which turned out to be a more definitive autobiographical statement than she perhaps expected. The collection was her last book and a Pulitzer Prize winner. There she implied that a deep homesickness propelled her writing, yet her nostalgia was anything but straightforward. Beneath her breezy salute to the West, where she had been born and raised, there was real disenchantment about her family, especially about her father, which she clearly felt had flavored both her life and her art.
She opened the author’s note with a double-edged tribute to him: “By the time I knew him, my father was writing Western stories under the nom de plume Jack Wonder or, occasionally, Ben Delight,” she wrote. “But before that, before I was born, he wrote under his own name and he published a novel called When Cattle Kingdom Fell.” In case anyone might mistake this for a loyal bow to her literary heritage, Stafford emphasized that it was only her father’s title, not his text (which “to [her] regret” she never actually read), that inspired her, and then only in her youth, when she too wrote about Colt .45s and men with steely blue eyes.
Stafford’s page-long note slyly undercut the conventional author’s dedication. Perhaps she even had her father’s inscription to When Cattle Kingdom Fell (1910) in mind. (She had surely gotten that far in the novel.) John Stafford had dutifully dedicated his only book to his father, Richard Stafford, “whose life-long interest and success in the cattle business, whose ideals and purposes in the world of men, furnished me with the materials from which this tale is drawn.” Her own father’s legacy was radically different: he had furnished droll, unworldly pen names and odd titles (she was fond of citing a work of his called “The Transmogrified Calf”).
Stafford liked to suggest that her father’s fanciful creations entranced her as a child and amused her in 1969, but the rest of the author’s note revealed that the transition from discipleship to detachment was not so smooth. After a brisk sketch of her career—“as soon as I could,” she wrote, “I hotfooted it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean”—Stafford’s preface wound down on a more uneasy note: she had hurried away from home after college hoping to discover her identity, only to lose it. She rejected the romanticized Old West her father wrote about and also the more recent “tamed-down” West of her youth. Yet she never completely escaped. “My roots,” she wrote, “remain in the semi-fictitious town of Adams, Colorado,” a less than idyllic place that played an important role in her fiction. And she wasn’t sure where her whole self belonged: “The rest of me may abide in the South or the Midwest or New England or New York.” The truth was, she didn’t “abide” anywhere. Invoking Mark Twain and Henry Adams as incongruous literary kin, she confessed to a sense of “dislocation” that had no cure. She was like her characters, who “are away from home, too, and while they are probably homesick, they won’t go back.” Stafford made sure that she returned home rarely: between her graduation from college and her parents’ deaths, she saw her father four times, briefly, over thirty years and her mother twice in ten years.
In private, Stafford exposed the real animus behind the backhanded acknowledgment of paternal influence in her preface. In a letter to her oldest sister written in the same year as the author’s note, 1969 (three years after John Stafford’s death at the age of ninety-one), she was outright belligerent on the subject of her father, as she often was with her two older sisters, Mary Lee and Marjorie, who had stayed out West and been steady daughters to the end. “When Cattle Kingdom Fell is back from the binder,” Stafford reported to Mary Lee, who lived with her husband, Harry Frichtel, on a cattle ranch in Hayden, Colorado. “I am still unable to read that book and I’m not going to try again. What a waste! Obviously he was gifted but he was completely undisciplined and completely lazy and completely self-indulgent and I can’t forgive him.” Stafford could hardly have been less eager to praise his “ideals and purposes in the world of men.”
John Stafford’s literary legacy was only half of the burdensome inheritance he bequeathed his daughter. His eccentric writing career had gone hand in hand with financial disaster, which had radically unsettled his family’s life. The other part of the story, which Stafford left out of her preface and to which she silently alluded in her letter to her sister, was that her father had squandered his inheritance from his father, a prosperous cattleman who died in 1899—and it had been considerable. (In 1920, her father’s stocks, bonds, and real estate, she later estimated, were worth almost three hundred thousand dollars.)
In 1910, when he wrote his grateful dedication to Richard Stafford in When Cattle Kingdom Fell, John Stafford was still in clover. He was, as he said, well furnished with the materials from which his tale was drawn. He had plenty of Wild West lore to propel his plots. And thanks also to the exploits of his father, an Irishman who had emigrated at eighteen and amassed cattle land in the Texas Panhandle, in Arizona, and in Missouri, John Stafford had money and land to support a leisurely writing career—as well as a family. Three years earlier he had married Ethel McKillop. He had met her in Tarkio, Missouri, while she was taking summer courses and he was living there in a rented house with his mother, Phoebe Ann Wilson Stafford, a severe woman committed to the temperance movement, women’s suffrage, and later Christian Science. Their marriage took place in nearby Rock Port, where Ethel had grown up and where her father, Malcolm McKillop, had been a prominent lawyer and served as mayor and a member of the Missouri legislature.
Born in Canada, the son of Scottish Presbyterians who had left the Isle of Arran around 1830, Malcolm McKillop had abandoned the farming life of his father. With his wife, Carrie Lee Thurber McKillop, he had raised four daughters in a Victorian house called Maple Lawn, in surroundings as genteel as John Stafford’s youth had been rugged. (John liked to claim that one day when he was a boy Jesse James had arrived in the Staffords’ dusty yard asking for a place to sleep.) The marriage of thirty-one-year-old Ethel and thirty-two-year-old John, as Jean Stafford later portrayed it, was a union of paleface and redskin clans—of prim pillars of the community and independent-minded adventurers. Like his daughter, John Stafford was inclined to be condescending about the tame McKillops. But as he settled down to family life and the pursuit of fiction in 1907, the provincial gentility of his new circumstances must have been appealing. He had every reason to think that a lifelong interest and success (to echo his tribute to his father) awaited him in his business, which would be writing rather than ranching.
It seemed that he was at last on his way, after a somewhat meandering start. John Stafford had majored in classics at Amity College in College Springs, Iowa, and then spent some time as a cowpuncher in the Texas Panhandle. Following a stint as a reporter for the Chicago Sun and a New York City newspaper, he had returned to Missouri in 1899 when his father died, and had worked briefly for the telephone company in Tarkio. A fellow journalist and friend urged him to come back to the big city and “get down to what he called business,” John Stafford remembered later, but he “couldn’t see it.” Instead, blessed with land and money from his father, he stayed on with his mother and tried his hand at writing in a more imaginative vein. He managed to sell some stories, which marked his debut in the genre of frontier adventure and humor. John Stafford clearly enjoyed his pen names; it’s not hard to detect an ironic streak in the cowboy fiction of this erstwhile classicist who took evident pride in avoiding ordinary “business” for a more eccentric career path. Eleven years later he had a novel, full of quick-on-the-draw drama and a dash of comedy, to show for his pleasant labors, and he had a very solicitous, proper wife and a family.
Ethel McKillop, who after two years of college had begun teaching school, first in Rock Port, Missouri, and then in Salida, Colorado, had been more than ready to embark on married life. The Staffords settled in Tarkio and began having children almost immediately, first Mary Lee in 1908, then Marjorie in 1909. John Stafford con
tinued his agrarian existence, scribbling away and supervising the family lands from a distance, while his wife tended an immaculate house, cooked energetically, and kept in close touch with her relatives. A son, Dick, was born in 1911, and soon after that John Stafford left Tarkio with his family and headed for California, part of the more general migration westward at that time. The Staffords evidently had in mind a fresh start that nonetheless didn’t mean abandoning kin altogether. John’s mother and sister had already moved to Los Angeles, and an uncle and two aunts of Ethel’s (Malcolm McKillop’s siblings) lived in San Diego. With some of his inheritance, John Stafford bought ten acres of land in Covina, not far from Los Angeles, on which he planned to start a walnut farm.
At the Covina ranch he set about custom designing an agrarian idyll. He ordered a large house built, installed solar collectors on it, put prismed glass in the big front door, and planted a line of midget palm trees along the front of the land. There was a Japanese servant to help with the walnuts, the wash, and the housework, about which Ethel Stafford was fanatical. Inside, rough-hewn native trophies—Indian baskets and an old Indian tomahawk, Mexican serapes, a pair of sabers, John Stafford’s cowboy spurs and wide cartridge belt—were displayed next to shelves of Dante, Dickens, Shakespeare, Balzac, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, lots of children’s books, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. While his wife dedicated herself to the domestic order, John Stafford continued to write, not only stories but also short diatribes on assorted political, social, and economic issues, which editors routinely rejected. He read his work aloud as he went along (to himself or to any listener he could corral), undistracted by the hens that sometimes flew in the window of his room. In that house, on July 1, 1915, Jean Wilson Stafford was born and lived for the next five years.
“Our days on the ranch were idyllic,” is the way her sister Marjorie Stafford Pinkham remembered Covina in an account of their youth, the fullest record of those early years. Her memoir conjured up a portrait of childhood bliss, siblings at play in a natural paradise presided over by a dreamy but not impractical father and a nurturing mother. The older sisters doted on their pretty baby sister, lavishing attention on her and only occasionally teasing her. Dick was quickly fond of her, though he was famous in the family for having greeted Jean’s arrival into the world with “She’s all right, I guess, but I wish she’d been a dog.” (As family lore had it, all the children, unaware that their plump mother was pregnant, were told that a surprise awaited them; a dog was Dick’s hope, and Mary Lee and Marjorie had a long list of treats in mind.) The two younger children shared a room in the big house and became devoted companions.
Jean’s version was different. Though late in life she too described a scene of “pastoral serenity” in a draft of a speech she never gave, a hint of family disharmony and personal estrangement cast its shadow. The Staffords were in California because her father had “uprooted himself and my mother and my sisters and my brother,” and she, though the coddled baby, was also disappointed:
On the lippia lawn there grew an umbrella tree under which I could stand in the afternoon waiting for Dick and Margie and Mary Lee to come home on the bus from the one-room school-house, bringing me presents of stolen paper-clips and rubber bands. I collected the paper-clips like the pampered daughters of doting daddies in the fatuous books my sappy sisters read; these little princesses, on birthdays and at Christmas, were given a pearl; eventually, if they lived long enough, they had an Add-a-Pearl necklace. By the time I was three, going on four, I had two and a half full-length Add-a-Paper-Clip necklaces.
The slightly mocking tone of the portrait indicated Stafford’s retrospective sense of the inadequacy of the idyll. The small girl she described made do with mere paper clips and had no hope of pearls. In much darker memories, Stafford’s most remote past was haunted by a lurking fear that perhaps everyone in the family had been wanting something very different from a new baby.
Her real fall from innocence, she suggested in a short story she wrote as an older child, came after Covina. “There is a drama in the life of every child, and tragedy that grownups can never know,” she wrote grandly in one of her youthful, autobiographical efforts at fiction. “He who has not felt the sharp edge of drama cutting clean through his body between the ages of three and eight has never had the right to call himself experienced.” For Stafford the decisive drama of loss began when she was five. In 1920 John Stafford sold the walnut ranch. Convinced he could make a killing in the stock market, he moved his family to a house in San Diego so that he could be near the exchange there. Within a year, he had lost all of his money. In 1921 the Staffords packed up and headed for Colorado in a heavily laden car. The trip was billed as adventure and a quest for a healthier climate, but it looked more like flight from the scene of catastrophe. And as Stafford remembered it later in an essay, the new physical setting struck her as anything but bracing: “The Rocky Mountains were too big to take in, too high to understand, too domineering to love; the very spaciousness of the range and of the limitless prairies to the east turned me claustrophobic.”
After a brief pause in Pueblo and four years in Colorado Springs, the family moved to Boulder in 1925 so that Mary Lee—and then Marjorie and, in 1932, Jean—could afford to go to the University of Colorado there. (Dick went to Colorado A & M in Fort Collins.) Granted scholarships, they lived at home—in a full house. To help make ends meet during hard times made harder by the Depression (and by Grandmother Stafford’s growing disinclination to help out her son), Ethel Stafford at first thought of running a tearoom, then began taking in students as boarders. What her mother undertook in a spirit of mostly cheerful resourcefulness, well practiced over the years since they had left California, Jean Stafford suffered with deep embarrassment. Much of her mortification was social: renting out rooms to condescending sorority girls was hard for an acutely status-conscious adolescent to bear.
But what Stafford saw as the undermining of her home also roused a deeper sense of humiliation. She blamed her parents, though she was hardly consistent in her condemnations. She was full of resentment toward her unintellectual, supremely domestic mother, who seemed too reconciled to a lot that her daughter deemed beneath them. At the same time, she herself knew the allure of fastidious domesticity; years later she wrote of a character, drawn from her own experience, that “in truth [she] would have liked to pause here in this female precinct where the winter sunlight discovered her [mother’s] impeccable housekeeping.” However philistine, Ethel Stafford’s carefully tended domain of order stood in striking contrast to John Stafford’s increasingly disheveled life and futile literary labors. He sold less and less of his work, and in Boulder he became more bitter and reclusive. As Stafford later described it, he was always holed up in the basement venting his spleen or spinning out some fantasy while the rest of the family coped:
My father … cursed the stock exchange … and cursed the editors who would not buy his stories. My father believed … that his failure could be attributed to the degeneracy of the modern world.… My father, a small poor friendless man, believed he cut quite a figure in the world.
For fifteen years he sat before the typewriter, filling page after page.… We bought our father postage and paper; my mother spared his feelings; we believed he was an artist.
Stafford started out as an admirer of her father. That didn’t preclude ambivalence, as it rarely does for complicated children, and certainly John Stafford was a complicated father. He was the artist in the family, and he was its betrayer. He was the high-minded scholar-in-residence (“his mind was an orderly and vast storehouse of information on almost any subject,” Marjorie wrote in her memoir), and he was the increasingly moody, irascible character in the basement. He had been a man with a mission—an agrarian ideal of life—who had been reduced to a man haunted by visions of persecution. And yet he himself seemed unmoved by the disparities: he just kept on typing, as though at some point deliverance would come and he would be discovered. �
�She was nearly always furious with him or afraid of him and nearly always admired him, but she did not associate these feelings with hate or love,” Stafford wrote later of her autobiographical persona in a draft of In the Snowfall, the novel about her life that she began in the mid-1940s. She never finished it, largely because she failed to establish imaginative or emotional distance from her material—which makes it a particularly revealing biographical source. The raw novel, though hardly a repository of reliable facts about her youth, is one record of her struggle for perspective on her family, especially her father. “It was not a question of loving or not loving him (what that meant precisely she didn’t know); he was a fact, or rather a set of contradictory facts as permanent a feature in her life as the trees in the backyard.”
It was, however, a question of imitating him: “It never occurs to her that she will not be a writer and only occasionally does it occur to her, depressingly, that she is going to grow into a woman, not a man.” According to Stafford’s usual version of the family alignments, there was a battle of the sexes, and of sensibilities, and she sided with the men. For the most part, her mother—whom she cast as the genial, prosaic housewife in the novel—was a model of what Stafford strove to avoid, down-playing any inclinations in that direction (though she clearly had them: she zealously tended her bedroom, which shifted depending on the number of boarders in residence, re-creating a corner of cozy domesticity every time). She was the family’s “problem feeder,” the alienated last child who resisted maternal nurturing and sisterly bonding. Instead, she struggled for the affections of her brother and the approval of her literary father.