by Ann Hulbert
Yet it was far from a therapeutic confession of insecurity, sensitive though the subject must have been for Stafford that fall. Instead she managed to make it the occasion for, among other things, a detached portrait of her place in a larger literary and social setting. Stafford welded anecdotal fragments into an ironically accurate sociology of the New York literary milieu that both Schwartz and she knew well. What Stafford demonstrated in her story was the peculiar power of her outsider status to liberate her even as it isolated her. Neither an authentic intellectual nor really a rube, she could pass for either but wasn’t herself fooled by her poses (in her fiction, at least, she wasn’t fooled) and so could capture the view from both sides. The tension between the rustic and the sophisticate, the colloquial and the refined, had been a theme of her fiction since Boston Adventure and continued to be. In “Children Are Bored on Sunday” she addressed it in more explicitly literary terms than she had before, at a time when her own literary direction and style were newly in question. Distinctly not a New Yorker staple, Stafford’s story examined the intellectual insecurities that urbanity was designed to deny.
The factual source of her fiction was apparently to be found in the autumn of 1946, in a chance encounter with Delmore Schwartz on the day she entered Payne Whitney. As she wrote to Lowell, it crystallized her predicament perfectly and hauntingly:
The day I came in here, I had gone out of my hotel to get a blouse from the cleaners and I ran into Delmore. I walked to Washington Square with him and we sat there for a little while. He tried to find out where I had been and what I was doing, but I would not tell him. Would I have dinner with him that night? I said I was going somewhere at four o’clock. He said, “Where are you going? Maybe you shouldn’t go there. You have been among strangers for a long time.” I looked at him (he looked dreadful) and it seemed to me that he was the stranger, he was the embodiment of all the strangers I had been with for years and years.
It was one of those events that seem too literary to belong to real life—and yet it did. Still, it was too literary for literature, as Stafford wisely saw. In the story she ended up writing, the portentous tone was gone, the event itself was stripped down and relegated to the last third of the story, and the moral was transmuted. The face of Alfred Eisenburg, the Delmore Schwartz character in the story, “the last familiar face she had seen before she had closed the door of her tomb,” evoked more complicated reactions in Emma, her autobiographical protagonist, than melodramatic recoil.
Writing in a more explicitly comic vein than she had before, Stafford called on perfectly chosen details to convey Emma’s fascinated estrangement from “Eisenburg’s milieu … of composers, of painters, of writers who pronounced judgments, in their individual argot, on Hindemith, Ernst, Sartre, on Beethoven, Rubens, Baudelaire, on Stalin and Freud and Kierkegaard, on Toynbee, Frazer, Thoreau, Franco, Salazar, Roosevelt, Maimonides, Racine, Wallace, Picasso, Henry Luce, Monsignor Sheen, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the movie industry.” Amid this intimidating company, Emma moved “shaky with apprehensions and martinis, and with the belligerence of a child who feels himself laughed at”—and she watched everything. Along with a child’s belligerence, she had the childish innocence that Stafford had proclaimed was the key to irony and to a kind of naïvely devastating insight.
In the first of the story’s three sections, Emma was the bemused observer, wandering one Sunday through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she unexpectedly caught sight of Alfred Eisenburg. An old friend, he had dropped from view for a long time, and now his presence thoroughly distracted her from the paintings. She was invaded by thoughts of him and his “cunning” set, “on their guard and highly civilized, learnedly disputing on aesthetic and political subjects”—just the people Emma had hoped to put out of her mind and her life. But on this day, though she was still shaky at even the thought of her old company, she was suddenly and newly detached, able to play anthropologist. In a central passage she dissected the main ritual of the clan—the cocktail party, at which merciless gossip and deadly drinks flowed, and all too often “the cream of the enlightened was horribly curdled, and an argument would end, quite literally, in a bloody nose.” Emma missed nothing:
These cocktail parties were a modus vivendi in themselves for which a new philosophy, a new ethic, and a new etiquette had had to be devised. They were neither work nor play, and yet they were not at all beside the point but were, on the contrary, quite indispensable to the spiritual life of the artists who went to them. It was possible for Emma to see these occasions objectively, after these many months of abstention from them, but it was still not possible to understand them, for they were so special a case, and so unlike any parties she had known at home.
The key to Emma’s perspective was her origins, which emerged in the second section of the story, as Stafford took the sociology a step further. As Emma saw it, the fact that she had grown up in a house and played among lilacs instead of living in an apartment accounted for the chasm that divided her from the New York intellectuals. While she was innocently savoring the simple pleasures of experience, they were cultivating “opinions on everything political and artistic and metaphysical and scientific.” Her insecurity had a satiric edge. The humble hick poked some fun at the New Yorkers’ poses as she lamented her lack of them: “Her pretensions needed brushing; her ambiguities needed to be cleaned; her evasions would have to be completely overhauled before she could face again the terrifying learning of someone like Alfred Eisenburg, a learning whose components cohered into a central personality that was called ‘intellectual.’ … This being an intellectual was not the same thing as dilettantism; it was a calling in itself.”
But the real interest of the story was that Emma’s perspective was not simply that of the rustic innocent. As she acknowledged, “she was not even a bona-fide rube,” which explained her keen insight into her erstwhile company. More important, her uneasy sophistication explained her identity crisis, and that was what, it turned out, this deceptively casual story was about. She blamed her education, which though it “had never dissuaded her from her convictions,” had nonetheless “ruined the looks of her mind—painted the poor thing up until it looked like a mean, hypocritical, promiscuous malcontent, a craven and apologetic fancy woman.” Stafford summed up Emma’s dilemma with comic poignancy, mixing vernacular and formal styles:
Neither staunchly primitive nor confidently au courant, she rarely knew where she was at. And this was her Achilles’ heel: her identity was always mistaken, and she was thought to be an intellectual who, however, had not made the grade. It was no use now to cry out that she was not, that she was a simon-pure rube; not a soul would believe her. She knew, deeply and with horror, that she was thought merely stupid.
In the final section Stafford revealed the depth of Emma’s crisis, drawing on her own nightmarish autumn—“the months of spreading, cancerous distrust, of anger that made her seasick, of grief that shook her like an influenza chill, of the physical afflictions by which the poor victimized spirit sought vainly to wreck the arrogantly healthy flesh”—and on the encounter with Delmore. Emma had been suffering from psychological and spiritual woes far deeper than social insecurity—and so, she suddenly realized, had Alfred, who had the telltale shaky look. She was seized with the desire to commune with him, but Stafford was strict about the limited terms of the rapprochement. Ravaged rube and intellectual could innocently share their loneliness over an afternoon drink, but they shouldn’t imagine that neurosis was the ground for some ennobling union: “If only it could take place—this honeymoon of the cripples, this nuptial consummation of the abandoned—while drinking the delicious amber whisky in a joint with a jukebox, a stout barkeep, and a handful of tottering derelicts; if it could take place, would it be possible to prevent him from marring it all by talking of secondary matters? That is, of art and neurosis, art and politics, art and science, art and religion?”
Wary of weightiness, Stafford studiously aimed at lyrical irony t
o culminate her story: “To [Emma’s] own heart, which was shaped exactly like a valentine, there came a winglike palpitation, a delicate exigency, and all the fragrance of all the flowery springtime love affairs that ever were seemed waiting for them in the whisky bottle.” It was a tone, not unlike the style of her Bard lecture, that seemed on the surface designed to deflect expectations of ambition. In her talk, she was in effect saying, I’m not the PR kind of critic, and she was right, she wasn’t. Her story was a more complicated case. She was not writing mere pallid memoir, as Schwartz accused her. Yet her larger social portrait looked like a case perhaps of even more explicit co-optation: it was as though she were offering up her credentials for joining the New Yorker family in the very theme of her first story for the magazine—the witty evocation of a charming, not crude, anti-intellectual sensibility.
But that is to overlook the extent of Stafford’s irony, which was trained as much on Emma as on the intellectuals. And it is to miss a dark undercurrent beneath the playful, agile surface. In writing about social poses, Stafford was treating not mere antics but deep anxieties about identity. Emma “never knew where she was at,” Stafford wrote with disarming casualness, and skimmed over the specific cause of her protagonist’s “collapse.” But it was precisely the understated tone that helped convey just how precarious Emma’s situation was, how unsure she was “in the territory of despair” where the world and the self had become misaligned—and how comparably disoriented Alfred was, despite all his knowledge and confidence. Stafford’s sociological tour de force unobtrusively proved to have spiritual implications. The same writer who showed herself acutely attuned to the subtlest social distinctions by which one claims one’s place in the world also saw through them to the soul’s abiding sense of homelessness. She looked into that darker realm in deceptively demure fashion—true to her Bard lecture’s stricture against waxing “hysterical and slovenly” in the face of confusion.
But the story was summarily dismissed by more than Schwartz: Stafford’s New Yorker debut created a stir, according to her report to Peter Taylor. The move to the magazine was treated as something of an apostasy, as Taylor himself was to experience later. (At one point he responded firmly to Lowell’s condescension: “If you think your snide remarks about the New Yorker and its ruination of writers could affect me you need to come home and refresh your memory of your friends.… The trouble with most people is that they can’t tell the difference between good and bad New Yorker writers.”) Stafford’s story seems to have elicited an especially vehement reaction from John Berryman, and she quavered some under the onslaught:
John Berryman came to New York a few days after [“Children Are Bored on Sunday”] was published and spent one entire afternoon berating me for printing it. The cardinal sin was printing it in the New Yorker; it was, he said, the weakest story he had ever seen of mine; he said that I had no “right” to print so “lazy” a piece of work and that I should be perpetually ashamed of myself. It went on and on and on and as a result of it, I got terribly drunk. I thought, “He is right and I must allow myself to be judged only by my peers and the compliments I get from people who are not my peers are meaningless, foolish and inaccurate.”
As for Schwartz, “he announced that this was proof positive that I was going after middle-brow success and that presently I would turn into a second Fannie Hurst.” But Stafford was quickly bolstered by praise from two other peers, Taylor and Randall Jarrell, and her confidence in her independent course rallied—though she admitted that she wouldn’t mind a little of the old company in her new surroundings, urging Taylor to submit work to The New Yorker: “Please consider it: it would comfort me very much to have you as a co-author in the NYer and as an ally, therefore, against my ex-friends and enemies like John Berryman.”
CHAPTER 11
Peace and Disappointment
UNEASILY yet eagerly launched among new company, Stafford had two larger projects in mind. She wanted to finish In the Snowfall—for which she had signed a contract with Harcourt, Brace in November 1947—and she wanted to remarry. She was starting over with the familiar foundations in view: a book, a husband, and a house. But she also had a new aspiration. From the Virgin Islands, where she went in late April 1948 to get divorced from Lowell, she wrote to him about immediate, practical arrangements (he was to sign papers allotting her $6,500, due in a single installment); and she also made a declaration about the more distant future. Her letter sounded breezily resilient (by this time, they were “good friends … and feel no bitterness toward each other, but only toward our bungling lawyers,” Stafford claimed to her sister). First she broached the remarriage question—“I want us both to marry again, don’t you?”—and then she announced her new attitude: “We’ll be so much wiser and so much calmer. It is my ambition to live the rest of my life at a low pitch.”
Compared with the eight years that had just ended, the next eight—from the end of the 1940s to the middle of the 1950s—were in fact relatively peaceful for Stafford as she moved from her early to her late thirties. That did not mean that she lived calmly by ordinary standards. Nor did it mean that she smoothly fulfilled her aims: both marriage and writing proved to be, once again, much more difficult enterprises than she had hoped. But she was consciously struggling against the pressure that had enticed and yet overwhelmed her with Lowell. And it was a struggle. No longer “part of Cal’s very fabulous life,” she was both let down and liberated. Her aim was now to usher in the time when, as she had predicted to Cecile Starr from her hospital bed, she would be “glad that [her] role was taken away.” The implication was that a different Jean Stafford—with a real, not a fabulous, life of her own—would have a chance to step forth. But Stafford knew herself too well to believe in such a simple transformation. As she wrote to her old Boulder friend Joe Chay in July, after her return from the Virgin Islands, “I am now divorced, at loose ends, trying as hard as I can to pull my life together into some sort of order, but it is a vast undertaking.”
Through the spring and summer of 1948, Stafford went about the business of setting up at least the outlines of her post-Lowell life with energetic resourcefulness. Far from being in eclipse, she was happily reminded that she had her own reputation to rest on. She applied for a second Guggenheim to work on her novel, and she won it. She also received a National Press Club Award, presented by President Truman in Washington. Wittily, she described herself as being in a flurry about the trip to the capital, worried about city clothes and about the intimidating company (Rebecca West, Ingrid Bergman, to say nothing of the president and his wife), but she came back clearly pleased that the event had gone well. It “was a triumph in a way for me,” she wrote to Mary Lee, “because I didn’t get nervous and for the first time in my life I was able to eat soup in the presence of more than four people.… I liked Rebecca West and talked a good deal with her.”
The divorce was mostly her burden to bear, and she did so gamely. Having decided with Lowell that six weeks for her in the Virgin Islands was the least disagreeable course, she did her best to write him jaunty letters and to entertain her other friends with corrosively humorous descriptions of the exotic scenery and the thoroughly unappealing company—the divorcées-to-be, the Rotarians, the unwholesome sybarites. And then through connections of Robert Giroux’s, she met some completely congenial company, Nancy Flagg Gibney, who wrote for Vogue, and her husband, Robert. “For the three of us it was love and jokes at first sight,” was the way Nancy Gibney remembered it. Stafford spent a happy weekend with them on St. John, the start of a lifelong friendship with Nancy. But beneath the surface cheer and wit, as she confessed to Dr. Sherfey, with whom she was in constant correspondence, Stafford was miserable. She had a fever, and she was drinking too much, which prompted some stern instructions from her doctor: “Pull yourself together and take it easy and say no to everybody. Live your life not theirs. Nothing is more important. I expect you to do it. Keep writing.”
On her return, though she felt at “loos
e ends,” she kept up the bustle of activity and the tone of jauntiness. She ran into Lowell and declared in a letter to Peter Taylor that the encounter had been therapeutic: “He is an altogether magnificent creature and I am so glad that I never have to see him again that I could dance.” She was dating a man named Chris Merillat, an editor at Time whom she had met in the spring and whose picture she had taken with her to the Virgin Islands, though she seemed to know this wasn’t really the match she had in mind. Her social life was active as she mixed with a new crowd at Time and saw her old friends, less insistent now on steering clear of her former company.
And her name was frequently in print. Her profile of Newport, originally written on assignment for Life, was accepted by The New Yorker and appeared in August. Two stories were published in the fall, “The Bleeding Heart” in Partisan Review and “A Summer Day” in The New Yorker. Both were tales of dislocation in which Stafford chose protagonists far removed from herself—a Mexican girl from the West transplanted to Concord, Massachusetts, and an eight-year-old Cherokee Indian sent from Missouri to Oklahoma—whose travails nonetheless struck close to home. They were stories of orphanhood, which was clearly on Stafford’s mind, and the conclusions were bleak. Rose Fabrizio, who dreamed of being adopted by an elderly New England man, was profoundly disillusioned when she glimpsed his sordid life. Poor Jim Littlefield’s arrival at a grim orphanage, full of sick children, was even more terrifying: dreaming of escape, he succumbed to a deathlike sleep in the heat.