by Ann Hulbert
Stafford herself was discouraged and disoriented, despite her efforts to forge ahead in her new life on her own. She wrote to her friend Bill Mock about a sense of frightening stasis. She was “stifled by the terrible rush of time,” and by the feeling that she was getting older “without ever maturing.” The past was very much on her mind, not least because she was wrestling with In the Snowfall. As she wrote to Joe Chay, who chided her about her reluctance to return to the West and her past, “Alas, alas, I live within it and if I could run away it could be ever so much better for me.” She moved to a new apartment, at 32 East Sixty-eighth Street, hoping that quieter surroundings might help spur her stalled work along, but soon she decided that she really needed more distance from New York, a city of rootless souls among whom she saw herself fitting all too well. She began planning a trip to Europe, and The New Yorker was happy to commission some articles to make it possible.
But such a large step away from familiar surroundings suddenly seemed more than she could handle when her former life came back to haunt her. By the spring of 1949, the dark side of Lowell’s “fabulous life” became starkly, clinically clear in a way that it had not been before, at least not to his friends, some of whom have wondered in retrospect at how long it took them to see Lowell’s enthusiasms as a sign of real imbalance rather than mere zeal. After several months of increasingly strange behavior, Lowell suffered the first of his recurrent violent, manic attacks and was committed to the hospital. He was taken first to Baldpate in Massachusetts, then to Payne Whitney when he moved to New York with his new wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he had gotten to know shortly before at Yaddo and had married on emerging from Baldpate.
Stafford was greatly shaken by the news of his troubles, though she was the rare intimate of Lowell’s who had long suspected that “Cal is crazy,” as she had told Eileen Simpson, remembering the fall in New York when he was in prison. But it was a suspicion that she had barely allowed to become conscious. That diagnosis had probably been meant to sound like her typical hyperbole. The truth was that she rarely knew for sure where the imbalances in their marriage began and ended, and she tended to play down the violence she knew firsthand. (Lowell’s friend Frank Parker remembered her as remarkably cool as she recounted the “incident” in Maine.) With her own fears of going mad, and her final collapse, it was she who had assumed the role of radically unstable partner. Now suddenly there was external evidence that she was not alone, which doubtless prompted memories of precisely the high-pitched life she had vowed to escape. The saga of Lowell’s breakdown, which Stafford apparently retold avidly, echoed some of the more manic moments in their life together. In the wound-up weeks that preceded Lowell’s entry into the hospital, he abruptly became a zealous Catholic again, insisting that his marriage to Stafford was still valid. At a later stage, he confronted his father figure, Allen Tate, in a scene reminiscent of Stafford’s battle with Caroline Gordon in Maine: he announced Tate’s infidelities and bullied him, and Tate ended up calling the police.
At the same time, Stafford was deeply relieved by Lowell’s collapse, strange though she knew that might sound, and she was even more intent on preserving her own precarious calm. She tried to explain the weight that was lifted from her with the revelation that the trials in their marriage had not been the work merely of her perverse will and mind. “Cal is in a sanitarium now, very ill, and while I grieve for him, I feel a kind of liberation at last in knowing we were both such emotional wrecks when we married we didn’t have a prayer,” she wrote to Paul and Dorothy Thompson in April. “It is an awful irony that perhaps out of this tragedy will come my happiness,” she observed in a letter to her sister Mary Lee, and revealed how much she counted on her doctor for support: “I am going to stay here where Dr. Sherfey is and finally somehow liberate myself from my guilt over that poor boy.”
The graphic evidence that she was not alone in her “sickness of the spirit” helped ease her fears that the “ineradicable, black mark” of the asylum inmate meant ostracism. The mark even sometimes beckoned as a sign of election. The mad artist theme was a familiar one, championed by Schwartz, taken up by Berryman and later by Lowell, who became the main mythologizer of the collective angst that distinguished their tragic generation, Les Maudits, as Lowell later labeled his poetic colleagues in “For John Berryman.” Stafford was briefly tempted by the self-dramatizing identity herself, spurred by Berryman’s anointment of her as a tormented soul in his poem “A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away,” a meditation on the artist’s ravaged lot prompted by her Payne Whitney stay. When Berryman sent her his new book, The Dispossessed, in 1948 she had singled out that poem for praise: “Is it wrong (Randall, at any rate, would say it was uncritical) of me especially to like, among my especial favorites, my own which makes my heart bleed for us all?” She was echoing Berryman’s prediction about his creative friends elsewhere in The Dispossessed: “analysands all, and the rest ought to be.” It was a prediction that Lowell confirmed many years later, in a letter to Theodore Roethke in 1963: “There’s a strange fact about the poets of roughly our age.… It’s this, that to write we seem to have to go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning.” If the romanticizing tone was in any doubt, Lowell settled it by musing: “There must be a kind of glory to it that people coming later will wonder at. I can see us all being written up in some huge book of the age.”
But for the most part Stafford’s tone was quite different. She was determined to resist that romanticism as she set out on her life apart from the poets. Although she admitted a bleak comfort, and even a certain mystique, in knowing that she was not alone in her psychic fragility—especially in knowing that Lowell’s intensity and violence transcended his involvement with her—she was disinclined to ennoble neurosis. As her Bard lecture had suggested, she shied away from elevating her ordeals as a sign of the artistic spirit, as the key to her gift. Noting the surge of unhappiness on all sides, she was caustic in a letter to the down-to-earth Thompsons. “It is not news to me that everyone is cracking up. I’m glad, since it was on the books for me to do so, that I cracked up this year instead of ten years from now,” she had written to them from the hospital. “All my friends in the outside world are, most of them, entirely miserable and are all drinking themselves out of their minds and everyone is getting divorced and no one is getting any work done and they are all consumed with this universal rage that has swept the country.”
DESPITE THE TURMOIL, by the summer Stafford was ready to leave the country, thanks to help from Dr. Sherfey and encouragement from The New Yorker. She set off for England, France, Germany, and Scotland, buoyed by the magazine’s confidence in her as a nonfiction correspondent, not simply a fiction writer. Filing stories from abroad, she proved herself an able reporter and a prompt writer—and she had a very good time. She cabled a last-minute “Letter from Edinburgh” about the International Festival of Music and Drama, which was hurried into print. She also produced a more substantial “Letter from Germany” for a December issue that year, in which she sketched an acutely ironic portrait of the Allied occupation, drawing on her prewar memories for contrast. Her approach was clear-eyed observation and calm assessment: the ravaged country inspired pity, not rage. But her imagination was clearly roused at being back on formative ground, and the writing was metaphorically charged, beginning with the sinister image of a rat and closing with a monkey disappearing into the huge mouth of a rhinoceros.
The trip was a success, but it was also in a sense an evasion. Stafford had managed to find a style and to regain momentum working on non-fiction, which was a welcome change of pace. But as she admitted, she was turning away from the real challenge, which was to reestablish her creative writing life. Above all that meant tackling her novel. What kind of fiction writer Stafford would be seemed a newly open question during these “low pitch” years after she emerged from the hospital. In “The Psychological Novel” she had declared a decorous aesthetic, suggesting that her re
sponse to the chaos of her life would be increasing order in her work, an avoidance of exhibitionism. But in fact she was probing a new, more autobiographical direction in In the Snowfall, her large and finally unsuccessful project during the late 1940s. This was not the domesticated memoir genre Schwartz accused The New Yorker of encouraging, but a much more ambitious effort to write about a generation—students in the 1930s—and, more importantly, to confront the major demons of her past: Lucy McKee and John Stafford.
She described the toll that enterprise took on her in an essay, “Truth and the Novelist,” which appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1951. The account is not the definitive analysis of Stafford’s difficulties during this time—she was not thoroughly baring her soul in the glossy magazine. But the article is a useful guide to her thoughts about writing during years that for her, as for Lowell, proved to be an important transition. In the late 1940s and early 1950s—after their marriage, their mental stability, and their faith had all come into question—both of them, in very different ways, faced a tension between the formalist lessons they had learned at the start of their careers and the experiences of their disorderly lives.
The essay reveals a struggle between Stafford’s principles and her instincts. She had been taught, and she herself had preached, that writing should not be personal. Moreover, she had early on had arduous firsthand experience of the perils of intensely autobiographical writing. Her first published fiction reflected the lessons she had learned. In Boston Adventure her imagination had carried her far beyond her own experience, and in The Mountain Lion irony and a symbolizing impulse had transmuted powerful memories. But ever since her stay in Cambridge in the winter of 1945 to 1946, she had been brooding on two subjects that were much closer to her—and much closer to her earlier fictional efforts: her own adolescent turmoil, precisely what Sonie sublimated in her pilgrimage to Miss Pride and what Molly avoided by her death; and her father, the figure who quickly disappeared from Boston Adventure and who was dead from the start in The Mountain Lion. Writing in retrospect in “Truth and the Novelist,” Stafford acknowledged that she had strayed from the advice given her by, among others, Ford Madox Ford, who had told her long ago that portraiture straight from life “is impolite and it’s not fiction.” Once again she adopted the tone of the critical amateur:
After years of attacking from ambush and throwing up smoke screens, I made the same tactical error I had made in the beginning, and did so unconsciously. It is my intention to tell you about this, a problem completely autobiographical. I am no teacher and I could not teach anyone the first thing about writing: the most I can do is to seek my own creed in the conclusions I hope to draw from this rather depressing and instructive story.
As Stafford told the story, it was the urging of “two poets” in 1946—Schwartz and Lowell (later joined by Berryman)—that convinced her to undertake her saga of “college life in the thirties and the shocking event that had altered the whole course of my existence and had loitered horridly as a nightmare for eleven years.” She didn’t exactly blame them for the advice that led to her writing troubles (she respected the “taste and wisdom of the poets,” she said), but she made clear that their aesthetic concerns and hers diverged. The implication was that they failed to understand a fundamental requirement of fiction: the necessity of emotional distance. She did understand it, but misjudged her own objectivity, wrongly assuming that “the experience had sunk deeply enough to rise again as literary experience, and now that the immediacy was removed, I could examine its components judiciously and disclose its meanings.” Instead she discovered that she was consumed all over again by the miseries of those years. She felt driven not to fictional creation, but to confession about past turmoil, and was sickened by her “ubiquitous self.”
She turned to work for The New Yorker as a release from the large-scale ordeal of In the Snowfall: “Probably the most ingenious of my escapes was this: I declined an advance from my publisher and therefore, in order to live, I was obliged to write short stories and articles which naturally consumed my time and claimed my attention.” In fact, she had received an advance from Harcourt, Brace, but there were still financial pressures to serve as a rationale for distraction from more ambitious, problematic fictional endeavors—as they did again and again in later years. Finally, in December 1950, her response was, she claimed, to burn the pounds of manuscript that she had accumulated during more than three and a half years of work—a reaffirmation of the aesthetic from which she had temporarily and disastrously strayed by being “more personally omnipresent than coolly omniscient.” She concluded “Truth and the Novelist” in her old-fashioned, prim tone, reiterating the decorous standards she had announced in “The Psychological Novel”: “There are times when I wish we might return to the reticence of my parents’ era when people kept their secrets.… I dare say it was sometimes unkind to hide away relatives of unsound mind in upper bedrooms, but still that seems to me more becoming than to brag in public about the lunatic heritage that can explain our own misdeeds.” And she announced a happy ending: she was now at work on a new novel, she said, which “deals with people I have never met and with a permutation of circumstances that has no counterpart in my own life.”
Stafford’s account in the essay was deceptively well rounded. The interlude of In the Snowfall was a major creative crisis and not so cleanly overcome as she suggested in her article. Her hopes for the novel were extremely high: it promised to be her book, her testament, the one in which she would “reveal the quintessence of [her] talent,” achieve “the crystallization of what I, as a writer, want to say.” And her fears, when she had trouble, were great. Almost in passing, she admitted that she worried that “whatever gift I once had had was gone forever.” When she spoke up in favor of reticence, she was not simply being anachronistic but was addressing a real anxiety nowhere explicitly confronted in the article: that her experience of psychiatry was perhaps to blame for destroying her gift. She had spent months talking with her doctors, trying to exorcise the demons who were also her fictional subjects—Lucy and, even more important, that relative of “unsound mind,” the source of her possible “lunatic heritage,” her father (though she never named him in her article). Perhaps the constant exhuming of memories had undermined the role her imagination needed to play. Certainly plumbing the pain on the written page had no therapeutic benefits: “Take with a grain of salt the cliché that it is possible to rid oneself of a grief or a guilt or an ugly memory by writing of it,” she counseled in her article. More important, the scrutiny bore no literary fruit.
Stafford was also skirting the truth when she said that she destroyed the manuscript, or when she said that the novel she then turned to (The Catherine Wheel) was progressing like a breeze. She saved drafts of In the Snowfall, which she kept returning to over the years, unable to admit complete defeat with the novel for which she had had such hopes. And The Catherine Wheel, though the writing of it progressed quickly enough during the spring and summer of 1951, proved to be a labor of another kind: Stafford had to work hard for a sense of passionate engagement with her material, precisely what had come all too readily with In the Snowfall.
Several letters shed more intimate light on the struggles Stafford publicly presented in “Truth and the Novelist.” She had her moments of high expectation. In the spring of 1949 she wrote optimistically to Taylor about In the Snowfall, saying that she was “very hard at work. I have achieved the final tension because now at last I know what this book is about and I know how to write it. The plot has revealed itself and I can finish it in this last sitting. And I have got to finish it now because I am so sick of it, having lived with it for so very many years.” But only a couple of months later, as she was about to leave on her European trip, she gave an entirely different report to Mary Lee, sounding distraught: “I feel that I have lost all energy, all courage, and, worst of all, all talent.… My book goes so badly that I am in despair half the time and my insomnia has returned in full force. There are
times when I feel that it is psychiatry that has destroyed my gift, but perhaps the gift isn’t gone yet, I don’t know. If it has, God knows what will become of me because that is the only thing in the world I have.”
It is clear that Stafford talked to Dr. Sherfey about her fear that, despite what she had said in “The Psychological Novel,” her neurosis might well be the key to her gift, and that bringing her secrets to light in session after session might be the destruction of it. That same summer Dr. Sherfey wrote to her in Europe, reassuring her of the psychological and literary liberation that therapy should bring by enabling her imagination to take in not just the “hidden pathological tortures of mans soul,” but also “those aspects of life which make it good.” Sherfey emphasized that she wasn’t invoking insipid wholesomeness: “You will never lose that capacity for remembering and experiencing the darknesses; it is a vital, moving part of you. You will but add to it the capacity to remember and experience the lightness.” She acknowledged that the new capacity wouldn’t come easily. But she was confident that she and Stafford together would succeed at “the job [which] is to make that capacity not a superficial part of you—so that writing about it would be frivolous—but a part as integral as the other. When that happens you will be quite ‘Well.’ And I have no qualms nor concern about the kind of writer you’ll be.”
STAFFORD CLEARLY did have qualms, and on her return from Europe her response was to find distraction from her creative anxieties in energetic socializing. She was apparently no longer dating Chris Merillat, but at a party during the fall of 1949 she found a new beau, Oliver Jensen, a thirty-five-year-old editor at Life. He was a ruggedly attractive man, Yale educated, well paid, and gallantly solicitous of Stafford, then thirty-four, whose wit appealed to him and whose literary fame impressed him. Stafford in turn was thrilled to be wined and dined by a conventional man whose gracious wooing was such a welcome change (Alfred Kazin remembered her amazement, and gratitude, at being sent roses). Jensen arrived as the embodiment of the reliable protector she needed, the man with whom she might be able to live calmly. For it was a desire for security, rather than romantic longing, that inspired her eagerness for remarriage, which evidently peaked that winter. “I so terribly want to marry,” she wrote to Peter Taylor in December. “I so desperately long for the orderliness and the security of marriage and the end of my intolerable loneliness.”