by Ann Hulbert
Jensen belonged to a familiar journalistic set, and yet he was not one of the intense literary souls among whom Stafford had come of age and whom she had vowed to avoid. For both, that difference between them was part of the initial appeal. While in Europe traveling by himself late in the fall of 1949, Jensen evidently heard plenty about Stafford’s creative gifts, which only increased her allure on his return. And while Jensen was away, Stafford went to Yaddo once again and was reminded of how anxious the place and the writers there made her. One of her fellow guests, psychopathic according to Stafford, completely lost control. Frightened, Stafford promptly got sick (insomnia, asthma), and in a letter to Jensen she reiterated her vow to avoid the miserable milieu. “When the whole thing dawned on me three years ago, I repudiated the company I had kept so long. I abandoned the enemies of serenity and the advocates of self-hatred … and I am cross as a patch that on my return to Life Among the Writers, there is immediately an incident.”
She invited Jensen to come visit, welcoming him as an emissary from a much brighter, calmer world. His presence was just the proof she needed that “all of life is not hideous and that Yaddo doesn’t constitute the world.” Together they sneaked away from Yaddo, went back to New York, and hurriedly got married on January 28, 1950, in Christ Church. Dr. Sherfey counseled against it, and Blair Clark, who hosted the reception after the wedding, did so with a sinking heart. Harold Ross told the Whites that he knew the marriage wouldn’t last. But for the start at least it was what Stafford had dreamed of. She had her first real honeymoon: they went to Haiti and Jamaica. And when they returned and settled in Jensen’s apartment, she played the part of the proper East Side wife. Along with wedding announcements, she sent out engraved cards informing acquaintances that “Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Jensen” were “At Home after the fifteenth of February [at] 222 East Seventy-first Street.” By the summer, they were getting ready to move into another house, closer to Stafford’s familiar vision. They rented a place in Wilton, Connecticut, while the old colonial house they had bought in Westport was being fixed up.
STAFFORD KNEW there was a price to be paid for her new sense of domestic comfort and stability, which she acknowledged was not as solid as it might have looked from the outside. And as she had admitted to Dr. Sherfey, she was worried about what might happen should “lightness” come to prevail in her writing, even as she was struggling with her dark novel, In the Snowfall. In “Truth and the Novelist” the tension between poised, formal detachment and autobiographical immersion seemed to be settled in favor of the former. But that was clearly an oversimplified account. Stafford never resolved the tension; her best fiction demonstrated the possibility of probing psychic confusions in unnervingly controlled prose, of commenting on the disorderliness of experience without succumbing to it. In fact, the tension between immersion and reflection was itself an underlying theme linking the stories she wrote during the late 1940s and early 1950s—years when she was also struggling with one novel, In the Snowfall, in which emotional proximity was the difficulty, and then with another, The Catherine Wheel, in which detachment was the problem. The result was a distinctive group of stories that, among their other accomplishments, indirectly raised questions about both the cool, Olympian style and the confessional, high-pitched approach.
Between her release from the hospital and her abandonment of In the Snowfall at the end of 1950, Stafford was writing quite steadily for The New Yorker. It seems that the stories came easily at first. During the winter, spring, and summer of 1949, three of Stafford’s stories appeared in the magazine, variations on a common theme: a reclusive protagonist, trapped in unwelcome social relations, found himself both an ambivalent participant in and a merciless observer of social hypocrisies. Stafford set one of the stories, “The Cavalier,” in Germany and introduced a character who was to reappear, an intensely shy American student who was confronted with more experience than he had bargained for. She called on more recent memories in the two other, more interesting stories. “A Modest Proposal” was set in the Virgin Islands and was a showpiece of Stafford’s descriptive skills, much as her letters from there had been. Her protagonist, a divorcée-to-be serving out her appointed Caribbean exile, was profoundly aloof from the scene of which she was a part—a gathering of rejected wives on the veranda of a predatory, transplanted Dane. Despite the torpor that overcame her (“it was fitting, she concluded, that one come to such a place as this to repudiate struggle and to resume the earlier, easier indolence of lovelessness”), she succeeded in maintaining a withering distance from the decadence of the assembled company. But Stafford complicated the story by suggesting that the purer, isolated life guarded by her protagonist, freshly bereft of her husband, was a barren one.
In “Polite Conversation,” Stafford took an earlier chapter of her marriage as the occasion for lighter social comedy and for experimentation with dialogue. Her protagonists were the Heaths, a young literary couple newly settled in Maine who struggled only half successfully to avoid the insistent social overtures of the local folk. As a letter several years earlier to Cecile Starr from Damariscotta Mills shows, Stafford was writing this one directly from life:
To be quite frank, I have reached the age when I do not want to meet any new people. This appears quite hard for certain characters around here to believe and we are continually being summoned to swimming, dancing, cocktail and dinner parties and as you may well imagine, Cal is always extremely difficult and either makes me make up some horrendous lie or makes me go alone with an equally horrendous excuse for him.
The real interest of the story was Margaret Heath’s ambivalence as she endured tea with the local ladies. She staunchly defended the reclusiveness of her husband, Tommy, yet there was also a part of her, as there was of Stafford, that agreed with her neighbor’s exclamation: “I think Tommy is gravely mistaken if he thinks one can live by art alone. But I daresay he would call me bourgeois for posing that question!”
The choice between isolation and mingling posed in the stories was not clear-cut. On the one hand, retreat seemed to promise self-sufficient calm, whereas sociability involved self-compromising struggle. On the other hand, there was something ominous about the passivity implied by detachment—a sense that escape into the lonely psyche might well not offer peace or creativity. But Stafford kept these stories light, playing on the social ironies of her theme rather than exploring darker psychological implications. They apparently were not a struggle to write, and The New Yorker was pleased to print them.
Stafford began to have more trouble later in the fall of 1949 and in the course of 1950 as she and Jensen settled down together. Her ongoing struggles with In the Snowfall seemed to cast a shadow over all her work. Progress, which was always uneven at best, apparently slowed disastrously after a visit in the summer of 1950 from her sister Mary Lee. The intrusion of her past must have stirred her up. She felt exposed—it was the first time any member of her family had seen her with house and husband—and she felt judged: her sister came bearing tales of their father’s increasingly sad straits. And though Stafford had held it against Lowell that he had had nothing to do with her family, Jensen’s interest was perhaps threatening. He had initiated a correspondence with her father, who wrote back and even sent along a pair of deerskin gloves. At the same time, her relations with Jensen were becoming strained as she complained of his endless socializing with tedious friends and he hounded her about her drinking, which got worse as her writing difficulties mounted.
Starting in the fall of 1949 Stafford turned to the darker suggestions of her theme in four of her most notable stories. Two of them stood out as exceptions to New Yorker urbanity, as several critics remarked, and the other two were rejected by the magazine. Katharine White was unsettled by “A Country Love Story” (originally entitled “When the House Is Finished, Death Comes”), which appeared in the spring of 1950 (and won an O. Henry Award, her third). It is a “fascinating and poetic and puzzling piece of writing—not too personal I would think if
certain things were done,” she wrote to Stafford. “It fascinates me completely, but also bothers me.” Inspired by “the incident” with Lowell during the spring of 1946 at Damariscotta Mills, the story was about the psychological dangers of submissive retreat. A couple living alone in the country grew increasingly estranged, the husband withdrawing into his work as he convalesced from a long illness, the wife sinking into depression when she was brutally rebuffed by him. Instead of finding peace in their solitude, they were caught up in a self-destructive drama. He accused her of infidelity and was consumed by jealous visions. She internalized the (false) charge and imagined herself adulterous and guilty, slipping into a fantasy world that was a source both of comfort—her imaginary lover was a solace in her isolation—and of fear. Was she going mad? “From every thought, she returned to her deep, bleeding injury. He had asked her if she were going mad.”
Once again, Stafford set up a relation in which passivity invited mental tyranny, isolation invited enslavement. A curious diary entry reflecting on the role she played with Lowell, apparently written in the midst of work on In the Snowfall, suggests that in her story she was drawing on an interaction she knew firsthand. Her journal snippet was a cold self-diagnosis:
Sometime, he said, I would lose my temper and stop letting people knock me about. “As you have always done?” I asked and he replied, “Yes, it’s all that could be done with someone like you.” But I did not know how to refuse to accept the mistreatment. If I fought back with anger, it only made things worse; yet my submissiveness maddened him. I apologized for everything; I had no center and therefore I had no self and therefore I did not lead a real life. His vanity and passionate self-devotion fascinated me evilly.
In “The Echo and the Nemesis” (originally entitled “The Nemesis”), which appeared in The New Yorker in December of 1950, Stafford pursued the theme of tyrannizing selves to a further extreme. It was another unusual story for the magazine, as Granville Hicks remarked in a review of Martha Foley’s 1951 anthology of Best American Short Stories, where it was reprinted. “Jean Stafford’s ‘The Nemesis’ on the other hand is a dark and sensitive study of psychological abnormality, not at all in the New Yorker vein,” he wrote. Stafford took a step beyond “A Country Love Story,” this time probing full-fledged mental illness. The trouble was essentially the same—the lack of a self, the inability to lead a real life—and at first the story seems merely a variation on a familiar subject.
The protagonist, Sue Ledbetter, was another agonizingly shy American student in Germany who half yearned to join the boisterous youthful crowds but who was drawn instead into a friendship with Ramona Dunn, an imperiously pedantic student of philology—and “fat to the point of parody.” Ramona “did not seem to mind at all that she was so absurd to look at, and Sue, who was afire with ambitions and sick with conflict, admired her arrogant self-possession.” Dr. Cohn wrote to Stafford admiringly of the story: “No doubt remains—your craftsmanship is superb. And so is your psychology.” He rightly observed the device of doubling signaled by the story’s title: “Sue and Ramona are mirror images, through a glass darkly, indeed very darkly, a dual person and so of course also one.” But the story took a further turn, as Stafford carried the doubling one level deeper: fat Ramona, suffering from adiposis dolorosa, cultivated schizophrenic delusions in her unhappiness—an unhappiness, the story hinted, that had its origins in incest. She fantasized a thin, dead twin named Martha, who was in fact her old self.
There was nothing wan in Stafford’s portrait of pathology as she unveiled layer after layer of Ramona’s delusions in scenes so melodramatic they verged on dark comedy. In Ramona, Stafford vividly showed innocent Sue and her readers a more deranged version of the victim/tyrant relation than she ever had before. As Ramona announced to Sue at the end, “ ‘I am exceptionally ill.’ She spoke with pride, as if she were really saying, ‘I am exceptionally talented.…’ ” Her obsessional appetite—her vanity and passionate self-devotion, to borrow the terms from Stafford’s diary—led to deep unhappiness, yet once again Stafford complicated her story by suggesting that Sue’s unvoracious outlook on life, her inability to lead a real life on her own, was hardly an ideal alternative. “You have such a trivial little life, poor girl,” Ramona told her, and the story confirmed the verdict. “It’s not your fault. Most people do.”
Ominous though the stories were, Stafford’s protagonists were young and her endings, however bleak, did not rule out all hope. In “The Echo and the Nemesis” Sue—fleeing from a waiter who innocently asked her, “Are you afraid to get fat?”—perhaps had an independent life ahead of her. At the close of “A Country Love Story,” the wife sat “with her hands locked tightly in her lap, rapidly wondering over and over again how she would live the rest of her life.” Was there any escape from this vision of life as a divided self, at once tyrant and victim, at the mercy of an unappeasable hunger for love, or at least for some acknowledgment of one’s existence? That was the question Stafford addressed in two other stories written around this time, both of them about the fate of older characters, neither of which made its way into The New Yorker. Her answers were far from heartening, as Katharine White’s reaction to “Life Is No Abyss” (which eventually appeared in the Sewanee Review in the summer of 1952) suggested. White had clearly discussed the idea of the story—a girl’s confrontation with two crones in a poorhouse—with Stafford before. “As you described your actual visit to me,” White wrote, “your compassion, of course mixed with distaste and horror, came through strongly. If this compassion doesn’t register somehow, one can’t help wondering why the story was written.”
But White failed to understand that precisely the point of the story was to convey spiritual terror at the loveless face of existence as revealed in the two old women. One of them had turned against her relatives in a rage of vengeful sadomasochism. The other, blind and witless, was cut off from the world and consumed by an “empty ecstasy.” Stafford described that ecstasy in a passage reminiscent of William James’s appalling image in The Varieties of Religious Experience of an epileptic idiot in an asylum, an image that overwhelmed him with “a horrible fear of my own existence.” Stafford’s old woman was equally, horrifyingly, vacant:
In that hideous grin and that convulsive dance and that moan of bliss, she had demonstrated something sheer and inhuman and unnamable.… There had been no mistaking it: the look on the thinly covered skull had been one of white-hot transport, but what emotions had generated it? Hope? Gratitude for the heartening assurance that life was no abyss? A desire for love? Could there be in that travailing length of blue flesh and devious bone a longing …? If there was, it was too terrible to contemplate.
And yet by comparison to the other crone, who was perversely settling her scores with the world, this abandoned soul “who can’t take anything and can’t give anything” seemed to inhabit a “state of grace,” however terrifying. The only escape from the cruel complexity of passion, Stafford suggested, was a pure, detached irrationality.
Or else a pure, detached rationality, the alternative she explored in the ironically titled “I Love Someone,” which ended up appearing in the Colorado Quarterly the same summer. It was the monologue of a middle-aged spinster surveying her own life after the shocking suicide of a friend. She described with a chilling calmness an existence devoted to the studious avoidance of any involvement beyond herself, of taking anything or giving anything. “The fact is there has been nothing in my life,” she announced. “From childhood I have unfailingly taken all the detours around passion and dedication; or say it this way, I have been a pilgrim without faith, traveling in an anticipation of loss, certain that the grail will have been spirited away by the time I have reached my journey’s end.” Her state of grace, she acknowledged, was an empty accomplishment: “I, who never act on impulse, know nearly precisely the outcome of my always rational behavior. It makes me a woman without hope; but since there is no hope there is also no despair.” She had paid a high price f
or her placidity and confessed to a curiosity to “penetrate at last the mysterious energy that animates everyone in the world”—except that she knew what it entailed: to venture forth in search of love was to encounter hate. Once more Stafford set out the alternatives of immersion and retreat, and granted retreat a victory at the same time that she revealed how hollow it was. “My friends and I have managed my life with the best of taste,” Stafford’s narrator declared in closing, “and all that is lacking at this banquet where the appointments are so elegant is something to eat.”
STAFFORD WAS NOT, for the most part, writing autobiographically in the most direct, concrete sense. It is fruitless, for example, to plumb “A Modest Proposal” for her sentiments on the occasion of her final break with Lowell. “A Country Love Story” comes the closest to a confessional account of a traumatic personal experience, but here too Stafford pulled back. The husband’s effort to strangle his wife that climaxed an early draft—which was apparently the actual, violent source of the story—was cut in the final version.