by Ann Hulbert
It was a traumatic reentry, Stafford wrote to Lowell: “I went to Bard to lecture and nearly died of terror (for no humane reason Mary McCarthy and Bowdoin Broadwater [McCarthy’s husband] came on and sat in the front row grinning like cats)…. I hated it all and vowed never again to leave my red room for a public appearance.” As she described it, McCarthy fulfilled her fears about the ruthless condescension of the “Rahv set.” “Her one comment on my lecture, delivered with all her ignited ice, was ‘your speech had a great deal of charm.’ I wanted, almost, to reply that I was glad, that to be a charming woman was my principal ambition.” Stafford’s imagined reply was not simply sarcastic. In the wake of her collapse, she spoke up increasingly for civility and decorum, which seemed to her antithetical to the style of her old company. She wanted, as she wrote to Lowell at one point, to live henceforth at a “low pitch.” Among her aims was to avoid the raw confrontation and scrutiny, and the intellectual intensity, that she had known all too well with the Tates and then the PR circle.
At the same time, she wasn’t ready to be dismissed by them as merely charming, and worried about the reception of her lecture. She protectively played it down as a trifle, though clearly seeking approval. “[My lecture] is so foolish and unmeaning that I am ashamed to show it to anyone, but I am obliged to and I promised them that I would write and ask you if you would take a look at it,” she wrote with overeffusive modesty to John Crowe Ransom, inquiring about the possibility of publishing it in the Kenyon Review. He accepted the piece, and she wrote to Lowell, obviously proud but still playing the apprehensive critical amateur: “Uncle Ransom is printing the lecture I gave at Bard and I am thoroughly unhappy about it because it is so awfully bad.… He wrote a very nice note on a penny postal saying it was ‘belletristic if not academic.’ I dread your reading it.”
The lecture certainly made no pretense to rigorous argumentation. In it there were signs of the persona that was to acquire more caricatured proportions in Stafford’s nonfiction writing later in life: the arch, opinionated commentator who took pleasure in bucking the contemporary tide, airing her old-fashioned views with vigor and humor. Stafford presented herself not as a professional critic prepared to make an erudite, abstract case, but simply as a writer who had briefly emerged from solitude to share some personal thoughts. But she was by no means interested in claiming creative-soul status for herself; she was a craftsman with down-to-earth advice and thoughts about her métier. And she was also a civilized reader in search of good literature and impatient with indulgent displays. With her characteristic blend of ornate and colloquial language, she managed at once to sound like a fusty older lady and a clear-eyed, unpretentious scout for the literate public.
Above all, what she didn’t sound like was a neurotic writer—“loutishly well-adjusted,” she referred to herself at one point—which was in itself a comment on her theme. The fact that novels deal in human psychology should not, she argued, mean that they become occasions for exposing personal perversities. “It is fashionable to be forthrightly and ungraciously autobiographical as if Freud had come as the emancipator of the skeleton in the closet,” she chided. “It would be hard to count the novels of recent years which have been strip-tease acts in the psychiatric ward or on the psychoanalyst’s couch.” From that it followed (by way of a droll anecdote about a mailing she received requesting her to become a contributor to a new quarterly called Neurotica) that she had no truck with the assumption that writers are by definition animated by “the drive toward being a misfit” (one subject on which Neurotica proposed that she write). Thus Stafford obliquely entered the Trilling-Barrett debate and aligned herself with Trilling, who argued that the artist is unique not by virtue of his neurosis but
in the respect of his relation to his neurosis. He is what he is by virtue of his successful objectification of his neurosis, by his shaping it and making it available to others in a way which has its effect upon their own egos in struggle. His genius, that is, may be defined in terms of his faculties of perception, representation, and realization, and in these terms alone.
Stafford’s formulation was not so impersonal; she was not simply defining but prescribing, as much to herself as to her audience. Distance from one’s psychological and spiritual unhappiness was essential, she proclaimed, urging “detachment from our characters’ eccentricities and mis-adventures that prevents us from making them into improbable prodigies but that, on the contrary, enables us to be psychologically sound.” Her own early fictional efforts (which Whit Burnett had denounced as a “pocket of exhibitionistic self-abuse,” calling her characters “repulsively damned”) no doubt lurked behind this advice, which she amplified: “We must be experts in the study of reality and cool judges of our own natures.… If we … are wanting in irony and are servants of our own pride and prejudice rather than of our sense and sensibility, we may bog down in self-pity or we may distort our personal misfortune into polemic or our idiosyncrasy into gospel.”
Though she hastened to say that she didn’t mean that fiction should be circumscribed and tame, Stafford emerged as a champion of civility—and of charm. “Naturally I go on the assumption that I am in the society of people who want to be charming and who want to be good,” she said, sounding her gentlewoman’s note. Just as she had counseled against personal exhibitionism, so toward the end of her lecture she warned against zealous social engagement. The disorder both of psyches and of the times called for formalist discipline, not full expression:
It is true that if we ignore the horrifying wounds of our society, we will be irresponsible, but we will be equally irresponsible if we do nothing but angrily probe them to make them hurt all the more.… As human beings, and therefore as writers, we are confronted by wars and the wickedness that makes them, and the famine and disease and spiritual mutilations that follow them, by the ship-wreck of our manners and our morality, by an almost universal sickness of heart.… Still, we are not entitled to be slovenly and hysterical because the world is a mess nor to be incoherent because governments do not make sense.
As Stafford recognized, her message to writers implied a message to readers as well: that a writer’s work not be taken as autobiography. Defending one of her models, Henry James, against the critic Clifton Fadiman’s reductive reading of “The Jolly Corner,” she lamented that his interpretation “lowers the story from its great stature as an imagined and constructed work of literature to … a public exhibition of James’s private life. I do not say that Fadiman is altogether wrong but that he is not precise.”
It was a far from systematic aesthetic, but Stafford’s lecture foreshadowed a shift in her literary associations, an artistic parting of the ways with Lowell. She was distancing herself from the milieu and some of the artistic ambitions they had shared during their marriage, and so was he, though moving in a very different direction. The outlines of the shift look stark. Toward the end of 1947, Stafford began her decade-long close association with The New Yorker, a world away in sensibility from the Partisan Review and the quarterlies. During the 1950s she wrote one more novel, The Catherine Wheel, a circumscribed exploration of mental and emotional isolation, but her specialty became meticulously crafted short stories, renowned for their stylistic and structural polish, for their mercilessly ironic, detached treatment of states of alienation. She was moving further and further from Boston Adventure, her sprawling debut. By the last third of the 1950s, she had encountered a block and all but stopped publishing fiction.
Meanwhile, Lowell was turning away from the formalist vision of Tate and toward the more flexible notions of style and content he found in a new mentor, William Carlos Williams. Lowell struggled with a block through the 1950s after the publication in 1951 of The Mills of the Kavanaughs, in which it was clear that his early, fiercely formal style and religious themes were no longer the source of inspiration they had once been. By 1957, when he suddenly began feverish work on Life Studies, he had discovered a radically different style and subject matter, breaking a
way from the prosodic restraints that had guided his early poetry and turning to undisguised autobiographical themes. “At forty I’ve written my first unmeasured verse,” he wrote to Williams of the breakthrough. “I’ve only tried it in a few of these poems, those that are the most personal. It’s great to have no hurdle of rhyme and scansion between yourself and what you want to say most forcibly.”
It is easy to make the divergence sound too schematically symmetrical, as if to suggest that before their separation, Stafford and Lowell were in some sort of literary tandem, and that they faced comparable creative challenges in their development as writers after that. That couldn’t of course be said of any two writers, let alone a poet and a writer of fiction. And it would mistakenly imply a marked swerve in Stafford’s literary allegiances and intentions that year after she emerged from the hospital. She clearly was aiming to reorient her writing life, but her sense that she hadn’t been in her element, that she needed a change of scene, was hardly new. Beneath the witty, poised writer who had so impressed young Lowell, there had always been the girl from Colorado who felt she wasn’t suited to compete in the ruthless literary circles of the New Critics and the New York intellectuals. What was new was Stafford’s attitude toward her own discomfiture. The old insecure defensiveness had subsided somewhat. She was readier to take the ironic offensive and expose what seemed to her the heartless egotism and maliciousness too often associated with the intellectual intensity of her friends. The claims of genius, Stafford suggested, should leave room for gentility, or at least civility. She was prepared to assert the simpler values and more modest tone of the clear-eyed rube.
It was at The New Yorker that Stafford found a new circle where the ambience and expectations were more congenial. In December she sold a story to the magazine and signed a first reader agreement, giving the editors right of first refusal of pieces for a year and Stafford 25 percent above their usual rates. When she began writing for it, the magazine had emerged from World War II a considerably more serious publication than it had been when Harold Ross founded it in 1925, though there were plenty—including a fair sampling of Stafford’s friends—who criticized its abiding frivolity. In The Years with Ross, James Thurber described the sensibility Ross brought to the place, a spirit that lingered on long after him. Although Ross “secretly enjoyed being thought of as raconteur and man about town, [he] was scared to death of being mistaken for a connoisseur, or an aesthete, or a scholar, and his heavy ingenuous Colorado hand was often laid violently upon anything that struck him as ‘intellectual.’ ” His favorite genre was the “casual,” and as Thurber explained, “the word ‘casual’ indicated Ross’s determination to give the magazine an offhand, chatty, informal quality. Nothing was to be labored or studied, arty, literary, or intellectual.”
Yet Ross also understood that for the magazine to be suitably urbane (it was, its prospectus had declared, “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque”), it required a defter touch than his own. He found the more cultivated collaborators he needed in Katharine White and later William Shawn, who nudged the magazine beyond humor to more serious, and lengthy, reporting and fiction. (Under Ross, Shawn recalled, “for many years the word ‘literary,’ applied to some piece of writing—including fiction—was a house pejorative.”) Still, Ross and his original conception of the magazine were far from overshadowed. The tone of ingenuous urbanity, of the quaintly innocent provincial in the big city, continued to exert real influence. Shawn acknowledged the anti-intellectual ambience in his obituary for Ross, characterizing the founder’s shaping hand and describing a substance and style still recognizable in the magazine today: “Because Ross was suspicious of ‘thinking,’ the magazine that he founded and edited did not publish either essays or what are called articles of opinion. It was, fundamentally, a magazine of reporting, humor, fiction, and criticism.… Ross was an editor who doted on immaculate writing and on stylish writing, which is to say writing that had style.”
Shawn and Thurber obviously admired and helped perpetuate the urbane qualities they described as Ross’s legacy, and it is not hard to imagine the rapport that seems to have sprung up between Stafford and Ross, who still had five years of editorship ahead of him when she began writing for the magazine. Displaced Coloradans, they both relished the incongruous identity of colloquial hick and obsessive stylist, rube and sophisticated raconteur, and Ross appreciated her wit. But Stafford’s most important relationship at the magazine was with Katharine White, whose Bostonian gentility exerted a very different appeal. In her, Stafford found a devoted editor and a mother of sorts; and in Stafford, White found “one of her best friends among the contributors”—and “a remarkable reviser. Stories would come in with very hopeful material that hadn’t quite jelled; and … over and over again I [would] ask her to rewrite a story, and over again she [did] so successfully.”
The association was more than merely professional, as it was for most New Yorker writers. It was familial in a peculiar way that suited Stafford well. New Yorker writers were treated as though they were shy recluses in need of cosseting—that is, as though they were close relatives of the quintessential New Yorker character (“a vague, little man helplessly confused by a menacing and complicated civilization,” was the way Wolcott Gibbs, an editor, described the typical, Thurber-inspired protagonist in the magazine’s stories). It was very different from the cutthroat literary company Stafford was used to. Ross considered writers an exotic breed, usually crazy and certainly oversensitive, who had to be indulged. Katharine White, herself one of the breed, specialized in commiserating. She and her husband were well acquainted with suffering, real and imagined: their psychosomatic travails were legendary, but they also always had time to hear about others’ troubles. She and Stafford sometimes conferred as intently about ailments as they did about fiction. It was a friendship that seems to have offered Stafford just what she needed after her experience with Lowell and the tragic rebel school: the solicitude and approval of a well-bred Bostonian with taste.
But as Stafford was well aware, her new affiliation was greeted with skepticism among some of her friends. It wasn’t a great surprise when the old intimations of philistinism and middlebrowism that had been in the air after the success of Boston Adventure surfaced again. The New Yorker came in for a good dose of condescension and criticism from the Partisan Review and the literary quarterly writers. To be sure, as an influential and comparatively lucrative outlet for writing, it was not entirely dismissed: plenty of writers crossed the line by the 1940s. But even they were often ready with scorn. Edmund Wilson, who was reviewing books regularly for the magazine, delivered an unvarnished assessment of its shortcomings at just about the time Stafford was signing on. In a letter to Katharine White in November of 1947, he was merciless in his judgment of her fiction department, dismissing “the pointless and inane little anecdotes that are turned out by The New Yorker’s processing mill and that the reader forgets two minutes after he has read them.”
Delmore Schwartz gave a similar critique in an essay called “Smile and Grin, Relax and Collapse,” which came out three years later in Partisan Review. “It’s easy to make fun of The New Yorker,” he began, “especially since The New Yorker has taught us how to make fun of anything and everything.” But he intended more serious scrutiny: the magazine’s effect on literature, he announced, was “powerful and pernicious.” He echoed Wilson on style, lamenting that “in The New Yorker you are supposed to be chatty, relaxed, not very serious, and certainly never (God forbid!) intellectual”; the point is to “seem elegant, charming, sophisticated, full of good manners and good taste.” His indictment of the content of the magazine’s fiction specified what he saw as the source of the “anecdotal” wanness of the genre: “The chief recent tendency … has been to break down the short story as such into some form of memoir, reminiscence, or anecdote, especially about childhood or about ones dear, foolish, pathetic, and comical elders,” he observed, arguing that the impulse affected even the best writers:
“When good writers write for The New Yorker, they adopt attitudes and mannerisms which are absent from their serious writing elsewhere.… Most of these writers are striving in one guise or another—or none at all—to write their memoirs, although they are writers who in their writings elsewhere manage to distinguish very well between fiction and personal history.” He was ready to acknowledge that autobiography couldn’t be banished altogether: “It is probably needless to say that personal experience, memory, and conversation, are often the beginning of fiction. But in The New Yorker it is swiftly becoming the end of fiction, in more ways than one.”
Schwartz cited Stafford as one of the writers so afflicted (he also cited Peter Taylor, Vladimir Nabokov, and Carson McCullers, among others), and he may well have had in mind her debut in the magazine, “Children Are Bored on Sunday” (actually the second story she submitted), which appeared in February 1948. The story seems to have had as its inspiration an episode in Stafford’s personal history that involved him, and rough autobiographical contours are easy enough to discern. But Stafford’s accomplishment was precisely to avoid confining her account to chatty memoir. It is true that its ingredients are among the most transparently autobiographical Stafford ever used. She wrote about literary people, which she did nowhere else in any detail except in “An Influx of Poets,” and she alluded to her breakdown. Her theme was close to home. In her protagonist Emma, she described a young woman’s wary reemergence into New York life after an unspecified trauma, convinced that a “rube” like her was always going to feel “in alien corn” among her former intellectual set.