by Ann Hulbert
THIS TRAUMA gave Stafford a tenacious fictional subject. At the same time, the experience left her without the detachment and style to execute it successfully. In her discussion of the unfinished In the Snowfall in “Truth and the Novelist,” an article she wrote for Harper’s Bazaar in 1951, Stafford indicated that she had hoped to elevate her story from the personal to the generational: it was to be an “explanation of myself as a specimen of my generation in the formative years.” What is striking is how much that impulse to generalize seemed to be inspired by the writers of the preceding decade, the Lost Generation, and how much her portrait of the thirties in her novel overlapped with theirs of the twenties. As she had envisaged the novel while she worked on it in the late 1940s, it was to be her definitive work—much as, she said, The Sun Also Rises (1926) was probably Ernest Hemingway’s and The Great Gatsby (1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s.
The comparisons were not pulled out of a hat. Those were disillusioned novels by the younger postwar writers of the 1920s, who didn’t share the political hopes or the Victorian burdens of the older, engaged writers of the decade—Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill. The younger writers’ comparative political apathy and wild dedication to the life of art earned them some condescension from their elders, who were skeptical of the idea of the uncommitted artist. In his famous Nobel Prize speech of 1930, Sinclair Lewis (the first American winner) voiced some doubt about the art-for-art’s-sake zeal of the postwar literary generation, even as he pronounced the end of American literary gentility and provincialism. “Most of them,” he observed of those writers, “were a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce.”
But it was just that insanity—increasingly febrile and dissolute for both Fitzgerald and Hemingway —that seemed relevant to literary college students like Stafford, for whom politics was at most a peripheral hum, and it was the younger writers of the 1920s who seemed most accessible. Hemingway had quickly become a spokesman for the war generation among those who had missed the war. Fitzgerald, though less popular in the 1930s, was the chronicler of the Jazz Age. They were both emblems, not just individual writers, and the Lost Generation they belonged to was a mythic creative community. Its influence was enormous, not least over young aesthetes at college during the 1930s, who were coming of literary age as the first portraits of that previous generation were beginning to appear. (Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, a memoir of the expatriate literary scene in Paris during the 1920s, came out in 1934.) Stafford’s era of literary students felt they lacked the sense of solidarity that had inspired and united their predecessors. Among their responses was to replay the artistic ferment of the previous decade. “The aroma of Bohemianism” was thick during the 1930s, as one of Delmore Schwartz’s classmates recalled of that time on another college campus, the University of Wisconsin. “Except for the gray mass of average students, 1931 was a year of vast experimentation, in which the experiences of the hip-flask decade were condensed into nine months.”
Stafford intermittently invoked the larger generational context as she struggled with her traumatic material in the various drafts of In the Snowfall. It was an effort to tame, to distance the story of Joyce Bartholomew and her seduction into the depraved world of Maisie Perrine. Joyce entered the gates of the university in search of a life that fulfilled an inchoate desire for artistic distinction: “Maisie herself was a symbol, but rather an atavistic one as if she had been held over from the jazz age. She and her household were composed in the earlier decade by Fitzgerald, Huxley, and Coward. And Joyce, feeling herself to be identified with no time, wanted to examine these figures of history at first hand.” But entering the precincts of the household, where “Bohemianism … must dictate every event, even the most commonplace,” was not so easy for penurious, studious Joyce. “From the beginning she was called scholarly, and it amused Maisie to point out what a rare combination she was of the blue-stocking and the Bohemian.” The true incongruity was internal. Joyce guiltily betrayed her father and her intelligentsia friends, who were “consumed with indignation at the unfair order of things,” by being herself consumed with envy of the rich and desiring “nothing so much as to imitate their ways.”
But Stafford quickly abandoned any serious effort at generational portraiture in the ill-disguised fictional drama of her own ordeals. She couldn’t sustain the social focus on an experience that had shaken her so personally, thoroughly undermining her sense of integrity and independence in the world. The various drafts of In the Snowfall are remarkable not for their social sweep or emblematic action, but for the vivid immediacy with which they reflect Stafford’s imaginative enthrallment to Lucy, as if that trauma had only recently happened. Despite the intervening years, Stafford still wrote with the adolescent passion and lack of balance that belonged to her younger self. While she worked on the manuscript, which reads like a disjointed, self-dramatizing journal, she graphically relived the memory of Lucy’s perverse power and of her own degrading submission to it.
It is no coincidence that Joyce’s great and fatal temptation was essentially the same one that doomed her author’s efforts to shape her novel successfully: unguarded confession. It was the price of admission to Maisie’s society—as well as the temptation that Stafford herself in retrospect couldn’t resist and that she found sabotaged her imagination. The danger of self-exposure was a theme she returned to again and again in her life and in her writing, as she careened between the urge to exhibitionism and the desire for isolation. Joyce’s ethic at the outset was studiously circumspect: “My own morality was eccentric and purblind. My only code was practical, and I believed that integrity was the result of reticence, that silence was insulation and that calamity followed when protection was stripped off; secrecy was the flesh that sheathed the nerves.” But in Maisie’s circle, the nerves were not to be sheathed, either from experience or from the recounting of it, and Joyce was wooed by the wild words: “Maisie’s history, told to Joyce, is of affairs, gonorrhea etc. Joyce is innocent, understands no society but her own family … believes Maisie’s to have been the complete life, and her own to have been insipid and unrealistic.”
Under the supervision of Maisie, Joyce spiced up her pallid experience, and she renounced her reticence. “Joyce had learned that night to drink.… [And] quite forgetting her lifelong habits decided she had been foolish to be a listener and not a talker, for the talkers seemed to have much the better time of it.… [T]he former clean stinginess of her life was gone now that she had broken her pledge of self-concealment.” Alcohol offered a rescue from marginality, but it also meant vulnerability. Finally Joyce’s tenuous sense of integrity was utterly lost: “She did not want to know Maisie but wanted to be her; it was a suicidal thought and she shuddered. If only she could exist as vividly in the minds of those people as they existed in hers!” It was also a murderous thought, which appallingly found fulfillment in Maisie’s suicide.
Stafford’s fictional portrait of Lucy’s circle was something of an exaggeration of the facts (of the sexual adventures, almost certainly; of her own drinking, perhaps less so). But it was not, it seems, an exaggeration of the couple’s impact on her as she was drawn into a self-punishing vortex and watched Lucy drown in it. Her relationship with Lucy was a terrifying experience of the power of the imagination to shape life in destructive ways, which was to be a recurrent theme of both her difficult life and her art. She had been lured to Lucy’s entourage by a vision of a decadent aristocracy of art, only to be confused about whether the derangement she discovered was the sign of a gift or a disease. Her fascination with Lucy’s antibourgeois daring, with her courting of chaos, was accompanied by fear. It was a confusion that Stafford, in precarious psychological and physical health for much of her life, took to her doctors and came back to again and again in disguised form in her fiction: Does the imagination that creates art also destroy life? Does it liberate or merely isolate the self?
STAFFORD TURNED to the first of a career’s worth of indirect treatme
nts of the subject barely six months after Lucy’s death. The only public literary accomplishment of her college years was a play entitled Tomorrow in Vienna, centered on Beethoven’s death, which won first prize in the university’s Original One-Act Play Contest in 1936 and was performed on campus that April. In it Stafford revisited the suicide in altered form and dramatized her ambivalence about the relation between art and a “badly lived life.” Her highly declamatory scene was staged at a safe distance, in another country and another century. The spokesman of philistine, bourgeois common sense was Beethoven’s doctor: “Artists are great fools. They starve their bodies to nurture their minds and what do they have … bad liver, murmuring heart, crotchety disposition.” His hierarchy of value was clear: “Health is the most precious thing you have.”
In her play Beethoven’s sensitive nephew Carl rejected any application of this reductive view to the great composer, but Stafford made him wonder about the justification for his own degenerate symptoms: Carl had just tried and failed to commit suicide, and his uncle had caught a fatal cold coming out in the rain to help him. “Too bad I failed, isn’t it?” Carl moaned. “If I had killed myself I wouldn’t have killed him. My life isn’t worth a farthing and now it’s going to take the place of his, the greatest life in the world.” The greatest life was necessarily a desperately unhappy, lonely one, according to Carl, who castigated the doctor for his fixation on health and celebrated Beethoven’s arduous dedication to fulfilling his genius: “You search the four corners of the earth for love and warmth, and your soul yells out in anguish. But the world is hostile eternally, even to those who make the most beautiful things.… Come death, come death, for the lonely man.”
The implications of the rather stilted play were bleak: either your life is too sordidly insignificant to be salvaged from mundane unhappiness, or it is too great to escape spiritual torment. As the winter of her senior year arrived Stafford had guilty reason to fear the former and no reason to believe the latter: What beautiful thing had she made? In Joyce, Stafford summed up her essentially adolescent dilemma: “She believed herself to be uniquely diseased in spirit and if the fact occasionally made her proud, most of the time it made her miserable.”
Stafford sought solace in religion, though years later she reported that her efforts were in vain. “I think you had left Boulder before I began instructions with Father Agatho,” she wrote almost a decade later to Edward J. Chay, perhaps her best friend among the intelligentsia. “They did not, I’m afraid to say, have the result they should have, not through any fault of Father Agatho’s but through my own indolence …” (It was not the first time, apparently, that she had turned to the Church in her unhappiness. She claimed that during high school she had visited a local priest in secret.)
Then, in the last semester of her senior year, Stafford unexpectedly stumbled, quite literally, first into a more mundane source of daily comfort and then into a chance to pursue her higher literary ideals. One morning in February 1936 she fainted while she was modeling. Worried that her “undisciplined eating arrangements” were the cause of her wooziness, Paul and Dorothy Thompson, a graduate student couple whom Stafford had met through the English department, invited her to have breakfast regularly with them. Their house was a convenient stopping place on Stafford’s route to the campus from her rooming house, where she lived again after Lucy’s death. On Sundays, her breakfast visits would last through dinner, and the Thompsons didn’t begrudge her the time and company. “We both like her,” Paul Thompson jotted in the diary he assiduously kept. “She is terribly lonely, and no one much regrets the loss of study her being here involves.”
The Thompsons could hardly have been less like the Cookes, and their acerbically witty but far from wild household became a refuge for Stafford. The entertainment was Monopoly, anagrams, and clever, amusing literary games—not exactly the artistic life on the edge. Apparently Stafford didn’t talk much about her creative aspirations, for although the Thompsons admired Jean’s play that spring, they didn’t think of her as a writer—wouldn’t have said she thought of herself as a writer. Her bohemian life beyond their house was something of a blur, though friends would come by for her and she would reappear later looking bedraggled and feeling sick. The Thompsons helped tend to her fragile health, which they ascribed at least in part to her unstructured habits—perhaps some dissipation, they suspected. Stafford’s lifelong proclivity to disease had begun, and, it seems clear, her tendency to drink too much. She was notably frail that spring, as Paul Thompson’s diary recorded: a tonsillectomy in March, an attack of appendicitis at the beginning of May and another at the end of the month, and then another in June, shortly before the Thompsons departed to spend the summer in London.
Thanks to a second piece of luck that spring, Stafford herself had plans to go to Europe in the fall. Not long after she had collapsed in art class, she had seen a notice on a bulletin board that the University of Heidelberg was awarding fellowships to American students. It looked like a practical answer to the unrealistic schemes of the intelligentsia, who longed for their turn to be a lost generation. As Stafford recalled many years later, “Landlocked, penniless, ragtag and bobtail, we planned splendid Odysseys. Europe was to us the land of opportunity, and more than that, it was the world, not this halfway house in which we dawdled, where the only glory and the only grandeur were what we read about.” She and Lucy had also talked of a trip abroad, and after their daughter’s death, Lucy’s parents evidently agreed to lend Stafford money to see that plan through.
The Heidelberg fellowship was sponsored by the German government, which was eager to refute American denunciations of the nazification of German education, but Stafford was paying no attention to the ominous political signs. It was wider culture she sought. She had had a firsthand taste of it in her own country during the previous summer, in 1935, assisting at the well-regarded summer Writers’ Conference annually held on the Boulder campus under the direction of a resident poet and English teacher named Edward Davison, who had taken a personal and professional interest in her. At his urging, Stafford had mingled with the famous guests (though she missed Thomas Wolfe’s vivid keynote speech, detailing his literary travails). She helped out again in the summer of 1936 after she graduated, mingled with yet more writers, and this time began work on a novel of her own. Now she was ready to go abroad. Her public and rather pedantic claim was that she was lured by the chance to study Beowolf under the great Anglo-Saxon scholar Professor Johannes Hoops. But the real attraction was not so esoteric as that: Heidelberg was the requisite Studentjahr in her literary development, the romantic break with philistine America—and with her benighted family—to absorb the beautiful things of the Old World.
Stafford had company in spinning out her fantasies for her foreign year. She had found a soul mate in James Robert Hightower, a fellow undergraduate and ex-roommate of Lawrence Fairchild, the premed student whom she had begun seeing as a junior and whom, she once announced to the surprised Thompsons, she planned to marry. In fact, Hightower and Fairchild had both met Stafford at the same party in the summer of 1935, had both been attracted to her, and then Fairchild, in the domineering way he had, promptly had usurped the field. (The roommates had never gotten along.) Just what Stafford saw in Fairchild, apparently a less than sensitive and none too literary young man, was far from clear, and she herself was mystified only a year later. Perhaps he represented a reassuringly ordinary contrast to Lucy’s crowd, perhaps also a rebuff of sorts to her father, who hated doctors. Maybe, as she later said disparagingly, it was merely “physical.”
The affinity between Stafford and Hightower was not hard to explain at all. He was as nonconformist as she was. A soft-spoken, attractively studious-looking man, Hightower pretended that he lived in a fraternity to keep his father happy but in fact disdained the conventional Greek-letter types. He had abandoned his own premed plans for a literary path, which he pursued with some flair—and he had noticed Stafford in literary circles and been intrig
ued by her. His competitive spirit was roused: here was a rare woman who posed a challenge to his literary sophistication (and who had made the mistake of taking up with his philistine roommate). But they had lost touch, Stafford swept up not only by Fairchild but also by Lucy McKee. Their only subsequent encounter had been an eerie, totally unexpected one: Hightower happened to be on hand right after Lucy’s suicide when Fairchild was summoned to drive Stafford to see her parents (who had temporarily moved to Denver), and Hightower ended up taking the trip with them.
There was plenty to foster the platonic friendship that arose between Stafford and Hightower in the spring of 1936. They saw each other constantly and talked endlessly over big cheap bottles of wine, discussing their grand literary hopes, their ambitious intellectual plans, and the prerequisite to both: escape from their stultifying surroundings. Hightower, who had been studying Chinese, aspired to flee Western culture altogether, but he was more than ready to go partway. Envious of the plan of his other good friend, Robert Berueffy, to spend the following year in Paris and inspired by the ease with which Stafford had secured her scholarship (she claimed she had been granted it by return mail), he sent off an application himself. Heidelberg was happy to have him too. As the prospective expatriates saw it, life and art could now truly begin.
PART II
The Innocents Abroad
1936–1938