by Ann Hulbert
Molly, repulsed by the physical world in all its corruption—its “fatness,” as she named it—wanted to waste away to spirit. Stafford once again blended religious and psychological perspectives on her character’s spiritual, social, and sexual alienation. Molly was the austere novitiate and the incipient anorexic, the fanatic creative soul and the confused preadolescent. Stafford’s skill in this colloquial novel was to evoke Molly’s metaphysical dilemma in idiosyncratic detail, to seize on the comic particulars of her tragedy: “For the most part, [Molly] was not conscious of her body (she was never conscious of it as a body and had never spoken this word aloud and almost died when one of her sisters would jokingly say, ‘Don’t touch my body’; Molly thought of herself as a long wooden box with a mind inside).”
Similarly, Molly’s category of “fatness,” which applied to the rest of the world—all body and no mind—was at once her own droll childish curse and a metaphor with well-established religious and psychological associations. St. Teresa’s style and teachings seemed to lurk behind Stafford’s portrait of asceticism. In the ongoing war between the flesh and the spirit, the world and the word, the concrete and the abstract, Stafford, like Teresa, was a committed materialist as she wielded her pen. The flesh must be acknowledged in all its grossness and weakness. Concreteness was crucial in her account, and the strength of a symbol lay in its specificity. However archetypal their journey might be, Molly and Ralph were two children whose souls and pains were imagined by someone who had never forgotten what the loss of childhood felt like.
“In some respects it is a better book than Boston Adventure,” Philip Rahv wrote to her after he had read The Mountain Lion, and his praise called attention to what a model of New Critical tautness the novel was:
Though less ambitious and narrower in scope and invention, it is more unified, more complete and convincing as a work of art. What is particularly admirable is the density of detail, its rightness and completeness. The various motives of the story are articulated through the detail with great naturalness and ease; and the symbolic meanings come through the experience you describe without strain or distortion. The ending is wonderful, and not only for its dramatic power—it integrates plot and meaning in an extraordinary way. Here for once is a novel about childhood and early adolescence which goes beyond genre painting, overcoming the limitations of personal biographical experience and converting its theme to the larger and more fundamental uses of literary expression.
Stafford “had gone all the way back,” but what is remarkable is the distance she maintained from the “angry, wounded child.” As the first part of Boston Adventure had shown, childhood was a subject that liberated Stafford’s great gift: irony. She told an interviewer years later that “My theory about children is my theory about writing. The most important thing in writing is irony, and we find irony most clearly in children. The very innocence of children is irony.” And echoing her New Critical teachers, she added, “Irony, I feel, is a very high form of morality.” In The Mountain Lion Stafford had mastered a wide range of irony, from the broad social satire with which she developed the Bonney/Kenyon dichotomy to the self-irony she granted Molly. As a child writer, Molly was blessed, or rather burdened, with a double dose of alienation—from the world and from herself. “I know I’m ugly. I know everybody hates me. I wish I were dead,” Molly told Ralph not histrionically but “in a cold, level voice.” That moment of awful self-condemning clarity culminated in the proclamation that echoed throughout Stafford’s fiction: “I haven’t got a home.”
Stafford’s return to the Covina and Colorado of her childhood was another exploration, as Boston Adventure and before that Autumn Festival had been, of her sense of homelessness—written, very quickly, in the midst of arduous homesteading. Later in life, far smaller bouts of energetic housekeeping served as lengthy distractions from her work, but the whirlwind of restructuring and redecorating at Damariscotta Mills seemed to carry over into her creative life, not to detract from it. That’s not to say that the writing was easy—or, for that mater, that the renovations went smoothly. The Mountain Lion was the product of considerable tumult, but it seems that the exploration of her past and the construction of her present and future in Maine were linked in an important way for her.
In a letter to Lowell from the hospital a year later, the same letter in which she poured out her feelings about Molly, Stafford ruminated far more explicitly, and darkly, on the connection between her writing and her house—and her marriage and her father:
Dick Stafford and his sister Jean riding a bicycle. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.
John Stafford.
Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.
Sketch of John Stafford, presumably a self-portrait, on the fly-leaf of his thesaurus.
Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.
Ethel Stafford with her son, Dick, in Covina, California. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.
Andrew Cooke and Lucy McKee in the Colorado Rockies, 1931. Courtesy Andrew Cooke.
Jean Stafford at sixteen. Courtesy Robert Giroux.
Jean Stafford at the University of Colorado. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.
Jean Stafford’s first passport photograph, 1936. Courtesy Robert Giroux.
Jean Stafford and James Robert Hightower in Europe, 1936 or 1937. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.
Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Robert Giroux in front of the Lowell’s house in Damariscotta Mills, Maine, 1946.
Photograph by Charles Phillips Reilly. Courtesy Robert Giroux.
Jean Stafford and Peter Taylor in Sewanee, Tennessee, 1942. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.
Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell in Damariscotta Mills, Maine, 1946. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Jean Stafford and her sister Mary Lee Frichtel in Westport, Connecticut, 1950. Photograph by Oliver Jensen. Courtesy Oliver Jensen.
Jean Stafford in front of the mountain lion cage at the zoo. Courtesy Robert Giroux.
Jean Stafford at the beach in Jamaica during her honeymoon with Oliver Jensen, 1950. Photograph by Oliver Jensen. Courtesy Oliver Jensen.
Oliver Jensen and Jean Stafford. Photograph by Kay Bell. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.
Jean Stafford in Westport, Connecticut, early 1950s. Photograph by Oliver Jensen. Courtesy Oliver Jensen.
Jean Stafford with her cat Elephi, early 1960s. Photograph by Janet Malcolm. Courtesy Janet Malcolm.
Jean Stafford doing needlepoint, 1956. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. Courtesy Life magazine, © Time Warner Inc.
Jean Stafford and A. J. Liebling sitting out behind their house in East Hampton, 1961. Photograph by Therese Mitchell. Courtesy Joseph Mitchell.
Jean Stafford, 1975. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd. Courtesy Newsweek magazine.
For ages (and indeed until now) I have not known what you meant by saying that my success was bad for me. I am not sure that you know exactly how it was, but I see it in this way: that suddenly, having got money and comfort, I remembered with all the bitterness and hatred of my childhood my early poverty which had been needless; I remembered all the humiliation, the half-hunger, the shabby, embarrassing clothes, the continual oppression, my mother’s tears and my father’s dreadful laugh. And when you cautioned me to be prudent in my spending, I whipped around as if you had insulted me; I thought that you were trying to deprive me of all pleasure just as my father had done when I was a child and out of defiance of my father, I spent the money wildly and I began to drink more and more, still paying him back.
The absent father haunted, and inspired, both her book and her house frenzy. She was writing the story of children in search of a father figure, of a force to mediate between effete Bonney values—the McKillop side of Jean’s family—and harsh Kenyon standards, the Stafford side. Molly’s idiosyncratic choice of a misanthropic, literary course was in fact the childish version of the course embraced by John Stafford. Th
e role model Molly didn’t have was the model that Jean herself did have, and far from clarifying her life, he profoundly confused it. Admiration for her father’s uncompromising, cantankerous path continued to be mixed for Stafford with ever greater doses of bitterness, and even hatred. He had perversely chosen to abandon the responsibilities of maturity, leaving his family to suffer the consequences. Molly’s fate was in a sense a comment on his failures: the young writer died on the brink of maturity, prevented from repeating them.
But Jean Stafford’s own fate was quite different. She had grown up and written a best-selling book, and she found herself, as her letter to Lowell acknowledged, reacting quite differently to her father’s failures. She threw herself into establishing a home, precisely what John Stafford had never been able to do once he had embarked on his writing career, consigning his family instead to a succession of boardinghouses. It was her McKillop moment, her gesture of solidarity with the feminine world of stability and domesticity. And it was her replacement of the Covina idyll that her father had squandered. Jean’s Utopian dreams for Damariscotta Mills echoed her father’s response to his first windfall, inherited in his case rather than earned. Her drama of triumphant defiance was spurred by Lowell’s ascetic reaction, which was the perfect stand-in for the paternal stringency she was rebelling against. Yet guilt undercut the triumph. Her success couldn’t help being a devastating comment on her father’s failure, and lurking in her utopian dreams was an urge to have it all fall apart, as it had for him—at least this was how she saw it a year later, as she wrote to the Thompsons in the spring of 1947: “I felt perpetually accused and guilt-ridden and it was partly the guilt itself that made me spend all the money and so madly, to get as quickly as possible back to the familiar state of poverty, of literally not knowing where the rent was coming from. I was accused both by Cal and by my family, particularly by my father who wrote me (and writes me now) that he was glad of my success because he himself had been such an awful failure.”
STAFFORD FINISHED The Mountain Lion in the spring of 1946, as the house too was being completed. She wrote to the Taylors early in April, full of the familiar plans for a communal literary idyll, this time on her own territory: “Come as soon as you can and plan to live with us for at least five years,” she wrote, her confidence perhaps masking a sense of desperation. She then went on to address the practical details, obviously aware of the precariousness of the proposal:
We shall have to work out some sort of domestic arrangement, as I do not intend that Eleanor and I shall get cross with one another.… The house is really quite a convenient one and I think we shouldn’t have the least bit of trouble. We are much too fast friends, the four of us, to run risks at all and consequently—as I know you both will agree with me because we’ve discussed it before—we must be frank from the start. Then it will be nothing but pure pleasure and profit.
But true to the epitaph of Lowell’s draft of Land of Unlikeness, death did come when the house was built. The troubles began in the spring, and they culminated in “That awful summer!” That was how Stafford opened the short story, three decades later, in which she presented a version of the events that led to her collapse, and the collapse of her marriage to Lowell.
“An Influx of Poets,” extracted from Stafford’s last, unfinished novel, The Parliament of Women, and published in The New Yorker in November 1978, has understandably enough been mined for facts. It was clearly an autobiographical story, an appropriately stylish record of a season that in retrospect stood out as a turning point not only in Lowell’s and Stafford’s lives but in the collective life of a loose literary circle—the promising writers whom the newly established Lowells overeagerly invited to come visit. The Rahvs and the Blackmurs were part of the literary Maine circuit that year too, but the ferment was taking place at Damariscotta Mills. It was a summer when the younger writers were on their own turf, away from their mentors, declaring their ambitions to one another—a memorable moment of high hopes. John Berryman, one of the steady stream of visitors (which included the Taylors, Robert Giroux, Patrick Quinn, Eileen Simpson, Delmore Schwartz, Gertrude Buckman, and others) called it his “last summer of innocence.” From the exhilarating heights of the crowded summer, the Lowells’ subsequent fall seemed to mark the border between promise and reality: with their house in 1946 and then with their second books in 1947, they stepped into their own—and it was clear that the way was not going to be smooth. Their books were successes—Lowell’s won him the Pulitzer Prize; Stafford’s was well reviewed—but their lives were difficult.
Stafford’s story merely alluded to the spring, which was the traumatic start of the troubles between her and Lowell. It was such a harrowing time, perhaps, that it could not be tamed into a story. “It has been the most confused and difficult spring of my life, I do believe,” she wrote to Cecile Starr as it ended. “I have got so accustomed to the confusion that now, when there is quiet and little to worry about, I am still unable to be calm.” Her letters gave only a general clue to her distress. For the most part, she played the role of long-suffering but resilient hostess. But shortly after she finished The Mountain Lion, there seems to have been a violent scene between her and Lowell, who had just returned from a Trappist retreat. She called it “the incident,” as distinct from “the accident,” the other memorable shake-up at the hands of her husband (the New Orleans episode, when Lowell broke her nose, never seemed to figure in her memories): she claimed that Lowell beat her up and threatened to kill her. Clearly something happened that was disturbing enough to surface later in one of her stories, “A Country Love Story,” in 1950 (originally titled “When the House Is Finished, Death Comes”), and in Lowell’s The Mills of the Kavanaughs. The scene was strikingly similar in both (though Stafford excised it from her final story): the husband, in a seizure of jealousy, tried to strangle his wife in bed. So were the details of the setting—the Damariscotta Mills house looming, as Stafford put it, “as if it were their common enemy, maliciously bent on bringing them to disaster,” the snowplow clanging in the quiet night, its lights ominously blinking. And a larger theme lurked behind both of their portraits of marital crisis: the fear of mental collapse.
Whatever actually happened between Lowell and Stafford, they were profoundly estranged. The tensions of the winter had mounted to a breaking point. All the distractions they created for themselves and all the energy they devoted to their writing could not, evidently, cure or deflect their unhappiness with each other. As she wrote in the story, “it seemed to her that love, the very center of their being, was choked off, overgrown, invisible.” Her novel finished, her husband aloof (and then, immediately after “the incident,” his parents in Maine for a visit), Stafford lost what equilibrium she had had. During the spring she was “seized with the terror of losing my mind,” as she wrote to Lowell a year later. “This is not a casual statement nor is it a common experience, and it is, of all the terrors I have had, the very worst.” She was drinking a great deal (Lowell was not), tensely dependent on her trips to and from the nearest liquor store in Bath. (They had no car, but the local sheriff was her willing chauffeur.) Insomnia returned, and she was plagued by terrible headaches. At the recommendation of a doctor she was then seeing, she left to rest at a farm in Pennsylvania but quickly fled what she described as a “nest of ex-Communists.” After spending a few lonely days going over the galleys of The Mountain Lion in a hotel across from the Algonquin in New York, she returned to Maine—and “that awful summer” began.
“An Influx of Poets” is remarkably free of bitterness. It had taken a long time—decades—for Stafford to find the right tone and perspective to write about what had happened in Maine. The immediate circumstances had been galling: her husband’s flagrant flirtation with one of her erstwhile best friends, Delmore Schwartz’s ex-wife, Gertrude Buckman. The repercussions had been long-lasting. Stafford’s marriage to Lowell always loomed as the formative chapter of her life, its collapse as a traumatic event. It would not have be
en a surprise had she, with her “tongue of an adder,” dedicated the story to fierce revenge. In fact, that was the hope, or at least the expectation, of many of her friends (some of them remnants of that old literary circle, others of them allies from subsequent, very different, milieus). Certainly her anecdotal tendency, with rare exceptions, was to cast Lowell as the villain, herself as the victim. But on paper, she once again discovered the detachment that so often eluded her in life—and that enabled her imagination to work, dramatizing a more complicated account.
Her inspired narrative strategy was to juxtapose her younger self (Cora Savage in the story) with an older Cora who was telling the story many years later. Both were subjected to the same satiric irony that informed the story as a whole, and the facts were altered just enough to give the two of them a philistine air to set off the poetic pretensions of the rest of the company. Thus young Cora was not a writer, though she had an ornate style. She was merely the wife of a poet, and she had bought her house with a legacy from her aunt, rather than with the proceeds from a best-selling novel. Not that authorship would have elevated her much. In a survey of the Maine literary scene, Stafford made clear that prose writers were at the bottom of the heap in any case: