by Ann Hulbert
The cheerful mood of infatuation was fleeting. During a stopover in Boulder, her erstwhile mentor Edward Davison was less than encouraging, observing that her career wasn’t going anywhere and counseling marriage as the alternative, and the Thompsons remarked that she seemed completely at loose ends. Then, after an uncomfortable train ride, Stafford arrived in Oswego, to confront again the marriage and the career that most depressed her. Her father, who worked as a carpenter in the Portland shipyards, seemed to her more eccentric than ever, and her mother more infuriatingly conventional, urged on in her banal domesticity by her sister Ella, who had come to live with them. Stafford’s spirits were low as she awaited replies to the job applications she had sent out, but she did her best to rally by turning to her writing. In despair she checked the empty mailbox every morning, and with discipline she sat down at her desk each day to work, mostly on her Stephens novel. She emphasized the strictness of her literary regimen to Hightower: “I have a desk here and privacy. My books are available. The light is good. The desk is a large, rectangular table.… I cannot work when I feel I am living in a week-end; I am not a success when I am writing on the arm of a chair or on a front porch. I have to be inside at a stationary desk.”
She also stressed her efforts to impose structure on the novel about Stephens, lamenting the laxness that came too naturally. “I am doing in it exactly what I did in Which No Vicissitude and it’s no good,” she wrote to Hightower at one point. “I realize that what Whit Burnett says is true—words, merely, unsupported by thought or action are utterly dull.” She was making a concerted effort to establish a sense of distance from and control over her material: “It is funny and insofar as possible I am going to keep it on the comic side as I feel that is healthier and probably a more effective vehicle for satire,” she informed Hightower, and then described her specific strategy, which was to steer clear of an autobiographical perspective. “The desperate, soulful elements will be introduced through a student. I just got that idea and think it is a good one. My protagonist is not an artist.”
From the chapters of the manuscript that remain, it’s clear that Stafford had real trouble sustaining her satiric distance in her portrait of Stephens. She began with well-etched comic scenes of elegantly robed teachers and scantily clad girls lining up for the opening-day procession at Neville, as she called the school. But Stafford’s caricature of commercialized education was cut short, for she succumbed to the temptation to plumb the disoriented soul of Gretchen Marburg, her autobiographical protagonist, an unhappy teacher at the school. Abruptly her language loosened, the momentum slowed, and the comic edge was dulled as alienated, persecuted Gretchen took over the narrative. Perhaps sensing the problem, Stafford tried another tack on the subject, a nonfictional treatment, which would presumably enforce greater objectivity. A visit from her brother, now a forest ranger, may have helped inspire it. “A rather nice gent,” as she wrote to Hightower, Dick Stafford breezed in as a model of contented anti-academicism; “the original critic of colleges,” he did not “believe in working except with his hands.” During the summer, alongside the novel, she wrote an article entitled “A Manicure with Your Diploma,” which she sent off to the Atlantic Monthly—only to receive one more rejection, on the grounds that the magazine had already printed its quota of acid commentary about education.
Stafford’s subject and her self-consciously disciplined literary approach to it were in stark contrast to her own predicament. She was hard at work lambasting an educational system that coddled young women who upon graduation would be supported by their fathers until they lured husbands with their cosmetic and homemaking skills. Meanwhile, she—with her advanced degree—was without a job and flailing, and her father was certainly not a protector. John Stafford was unable to support himself and his wife, much less Jean, but the trouble went further than that. He loomed as an image of the hapless, hopeless life dedicated to words. As for marriage, Stafford had begun to think about that prospect but was confronted with too many suitors to pick from. Again, though, the difficulty was more profound. Balancing art and love, she discovered, did not come easily or naturally to her.
In the one piece of published writing that emerged from that visit home—a thinly fictionalized portrait of those slow summer months in 1938 when she was in Oregon with her parents and Aunt Ella—Stafford addressed the ever-troubling subject of her father and her family. “And Lots of Solid Color,” which appeared in American Prefaces more than a year later, in November 1939, was her fictional debut. The story shows her struggling for perspective on the subject that deprived her of any distance and inspired romantic despair. In fact, a recurring theme of Stafford’s letters to Hightower toward the start of the summer was the impossibility, or inadvisability, of writing anything down about her father and his life among his womenfolk. Yet she was preoccupied with him and with the way his fate seemed bound up with hers. Her repeated resolutions to stay silent were admissions of her need to find words for her struggle with her family.
Sometimes she simply went ahead and wrote, reporting to Hightower that she was starting work on her autobiography (Evelyn Scott’s Escapade, published when she was twenty-seven, helped inspire the precocious undertaking). Stafford was also busy jotting down notes for a novel about her “poor benighted father,” a long-term project “that can wait, I think, because I can never forget the details of his misery and I can write them down bit by bit for a long time. The McKillop girls are in league against him.” She was appalled by his predicament: “He sits in a corner of the couch with his legs drawn up and looks like a dwarf. He is a combination of the oldest man in the world and the youngest child. I am sick to death to look at him and to know what hell he has lived with this dreadful woman.… My only hope is that he will die pretty soon.” More often she endeavored to banish the obsession—only to be caught in the trap of writing about precisely what she vowed to avoid. “I wish to keep to my resolve that I may have already mentioned that henceforth I am not going to write about the trivia that vex me,” she wrote to Hightower in August in a particularly anguished letter about her parents, which then went on in a tumultuous stream of consciousness:
Oh God I pray that when I am away I will forget some of it I hope that I will not remember how it is how ugly it is how tragic how heartbreaking. She is not a bad woman I am so fond of her for her foolishness and I wish he would not be so cruel and I wish she would not be so cruel and I wish they would die in peace because they have never had anything but savage hostility oh it is a stone wall and my head is aching from beating myself against it and I hate unhappiness for other people I can stand my own because it proceeds from things that sometimes I can rectify.… I am unkind and they neither reproach nor criticize me and I understand them and they do not understand each other, oh, Robert, I want to cry forever. I said I would not write these things if I continue to put them down how will I ever forget them.
Implicitly Stafford acknowledged that she could not help putting them down, and her letters were full of ambivalent outbursts. Sometimes she was bitter about her “psychopathic” father and his delusions about his writing and pitied her mother for having to tolerate his brutally condescending treatment of her even as she worked to support his preposterous existence. Sometimes she defended him, praising his prose (which she sent to Hightower for a look) and lamenting his predicament, suffocated by his wife and sister-in-law; Stafford herself could be cruelly condescending toward them (she was recording her mother’s and aunt’s clichés for a projected anthology of banality). And sometimes she was resigned, even tenuously fond. She was trying out alternate tones and styles, looking for some perspective that could mediate between detachment and identification.
In another letter, written in a much more composed frame of mind, Stafford confronted with ruthless lucidity the bind she was in with her father. “I don’t laugh any more. Not at all. Not about Dad I don’t laugh,” she wrote to Hightower:
Look, what consoles me is this: I am unpublished, and
I hope to Christ that when I am published, he will be dead. What else consoles me (and this does still make me laugh) is that the same thing that has happened to him will happen to me. Will you be the watcher?
… I cannot explain the relationship. It is not that he is my father, my kin, but it is almost as if he were symbolic, as if he were the essence of despair and loneliness. In writing the words down I am afraid I make it worse. It is as if his presence, that pervades the whole house, were aware of what I was writing.
Yet the “consolation” of being unpublished was also a tribulation and a challenge. For Stafford to publish words would be to best—and to shame—her father, which she claimed she was loath to do. At the same time, it could be a kind of vindication of the life he had led badly, an answer to what she perceived as the philistine McKillop disdain for a literary vocation: “Today Mother said she did not understand how I could write, having witnessed Dad’s thirty-year miscarriage.” And of course it would be a vindication of herself.
As the story Stafford wrote that summer suggests, the resolution of her bind was far from simple. She took as the situation of “And Lots of Solid Color” the most immediate, sensitive stage of her life: she juxtaposed her own insecurity about her literary future with her family’s perpetual insecurity, thanks to her father’s literary past and present. That summer, on the brink of leaving home for good, Stafford was preoccupied with the question of reconciling domestic, practical values and intellectual, artistic aspirations. Her Stephens novel and article expressed one clear vision of their incompatibility: those frivolous girls would tend a house but nothing higher than that. “And Lots of Solid Color” conveyed another daunting prospect, that the price of pursuing the life of the mind was the loss of a home.
That was the theme of the simple plot, which was transparently autobiographical as few of Stafford’s subsequent stories are. (Many of her observations of and indirect quotations from her family were lifted nearly verbatim from letters to Hightower during those months.) What saved it from being a self-dramatizing diary, “words, merely” atop a surge of agonized sensibility, was the prose, which was unexpectedly simple. Her protagonist, Marie Charles, awaited the arrival of the mail on a Saturday and then a Monday late in August, desperate for a letter offering her a teaching job for the fall, dreaming of the adobe house in New Mexico she would buy, with “bright solid color bathtowels … orange teacups in blue saucers and red candlewick spreads for the beds.” The other members of the family—father, mother, and aunt—hovered obtrusively in the background, each of them presenting an implicit, or explicit, commentary on Marie’s predicament.
Both of her parents kindly but pathetically played along with her delusions. Her emaciated father wished Marie’s predicament away: “Well, we’ll be riding in a Packard pretty soon if I sell this article. I’ll buy a farm and then we won’t have to worry about teaching jobs. You can just read and write all the time.” Her “fat, rosy” mother listened to her pipe dreams with friendly, foolish optimism. It was only Aunt Eva who spitefully punctured Marie’s fantasies, sure she wouldn’t be invited to live in the house should it miraculously appear—which of course it didn’t. The old woman’s disenchantment was doubly intolerable to Marie because it was a wizened version of the hopelessness and selfishness she herself harbored as she waited in vain for an offer. “Nothing for a college graduate,” Marie lamented bitterly as she scanned the want ads and mail, “no food for them, hell, no, they could eat their educations, live on words as her father had done all his life.”
TWENTY-THREE THAT SUMMER, Stafford worried about finding a fruitful balance between her personal and artistic desires not simply as a daughter but also as a potential wife. The story she wrote confirmed the fatalistic thrust of her letters—that she, the prodigal daughter, finally wouldn’t be able to vindicate her prodigal father, let alone herself. Instead, she was tempted to take revenge, out of guilt and resentment, on the whole family. Such a possibility lurked beneath the surface of the story: that Marie, if she had her adobe house, would fill it with her “beautiful friends, happy and rich, not worried,” rather than with her poor, unhappy relatives. She would selfishly retreat.
Stafford had an even greater fear as a lover: that she was a frigid woman doomed to love from a distance and to betray. That same summer, outside of her family, Stafford was navigating another confusing course between the competing claims of love and art, one that she didn’t try turning into fiction. Not that love won out over art. The contest was far from clear. The drama was played out in letters, in which she abruptly vacillated between emotional commitment and artistic detachment. Responding with her “whole being” seemed to be impossible.
Job offers were scarce during the summer, but suitors weren’t. Stafford had three. William Mock, her colleague from Stephens, was eager to marry her, but friendly though they had been that year and fond though their subsequent correspondence was, she didn’t take the courtship very seriously. Robert Lowell had written to her that summer and during the rest of 1938 “wooed her something fierce,” according to a friend, although none of the correspondence remains. (One possible oblique comment on the courtship, in a letter from Lowell to his friend Frank Parker that year, suggested that Lowell had decided that his work took precedence over love. “Whenever you uncover the growing flowers [of art],” he instructed his friend, “you must chew and suck them, rembering [sic] that they are your staple. Women until you surpass puberty are sweets, not to be ignored, not to be lived on.”) The most serious, long-standing suitor was Robert Hightower, and the frequent letters between him and Stafford are a revealing record of her confusion about her identity as a woman and as a writer.
They are also a disconcerting record, for Stafford expressed her ambivalence as a violent swerving between extremes. Those fluctuations could be bewilderingly abrupt, as she suddenly switched from aloof writer defending her solitude to romantic lover pleading for emotional and physical intimacy. In part, her unsettling inconsistency toward Hightower can presumably be ascribed to deceit: she was concealing something from him—her interest in Lowell. But it also seemed to be the honest expression of a woman who truly didn’t know her mind, heart, or body—whose ambivalence was so deep that the surface signs were radically unsteady. Clinging to a precarious sense of herself as a writer, Stafford was confused about the implications of aspiring to “womanliness,” as she intermittently—and a little too vehemently—declared she did. Was fulfillment as a woman (whatever that might mean) a necessity or an impossibility, a prerequisite to writing or an alternative to it? Or to put the question differently, as Stafford’s evident anxiety about her femininity suggested might be appropriate, was writing perhaps an alternative to committing herself to full engagement as a woman, a justification of aloofness?
To Hightower’s disappointment, Stafford had started out the summer, during their trip out West, insisting on distance. Her rebuff in Geneseo was not personal but profound, she took pains to convince Hightower somewhat later, sending him a spring entry from her journal, in which she had agonized over her sense of alienation. Tacitly acknowledging his confusion, and suspicion, about her fickleness, she obviously meant the soul-baring as special proof of her openness and sincerity. In it she both condemned and excused herself in self-dramatizing style:
Always I will be thinking what shall I do, where shall I go to get away from the uneasiness, what, where, uneasy, oh, and sick inside, queer, afraid, unrelated. I won’t ever marry anyone now and my desire to love someone is desperately futile because I have destroyed everything in my soul. I will not because of Ruprecht [a nickname for Hightower, after the founder of the University of Heidelberg] and I cannot marry him because he would be unhappier with me than he is without me.
In the course of July, as she settled into her writing regimen and struggled for tolerance toward her family (“Really, I don’t mind it. I feel sort of good about being kind and unprofane. I feel sort of clean”)—and perhaps received yet more letters from Lowell—her res
istance to Hightower became more self-assured. He was eager to arrange a meeting in the course of the summer and to plan the future after that; the life of a scholar of Chinese was not the creative adventure he had had in mind, and he was ready to abandon Harvard and set out with Stafford. Her explanations and justifications for holding back suddenly were not those of a wistfully doomed woman who had “destroyed everything in [her] soul,” but of a purposeful writer. “It is not that I do not love you,” she wrote to him in early July. “It is that I love both you and my novel and for the time being any marriage of the two is out of the q[uestion].” She rather coldly cited the unfavorable working conditions in Salida as her main reason for postponing a visit.
In a letter two days later she lectured Hightower about the longer-term difficulties of the marriage of the two—of him and her novel—in unexpected and convoluted terms. Domineering demands that she renounce her writing and make Hightower a home were certainly not what stood in the way of a union: there were no such demands. On the contrary, it was precisely his willingness to sacrifice his scholarly career and make her a home, without seriously weighing the implications for his own possible artistic career, that seemed threatening. Rather than a declaration of her independence, her letter was designed to goad him into asserting his own ambitions. Above all, she didn’t want a house and marriage on the compromised terms that had trapped her parents into unions that she and Hightower agreed were stifling. “I will put it coldly like this,” she summed up: