by Ann Hulbert
Stafford may well have conceived of this novel as the fulfillment of the aim she announced in an interview not long after it was published. Her ultimate goal, she said, was to “fuse the two manners” of her first two very different novels—that is, to blend the “leisurely … embroidered, contemplative, old-fashioned” style of Boston Adventure and the more symbolic approach of The Mountain Lion. On the surface she did just that. Stafford’s serpentinely introspective prose, which had become even more elaborate than in her first novel, wound its way to a symbolic ending, which was even more freighted than Molly’s end in The Mountain Lion. The refined diction of the elegant Katharine, more arch than the Bostonian argot, was juxtaposed with the almost caricatured rustic talk of the local folk. Andrew’s first scene, for example, included this “leisurely … embroidered” evocation of his mood: “He waited, in the larger chambers of his being, for the world to right itself and to become as it had been in all the other summers here, at Congreve House in Hawthorne, far north, when he had gathered the full, free days like honey and had kept his hoard against the famine of the formal city winter when he was trammeled and smothered by school and a pedagogical governess and parents whom he barely knew and certainly did not understand.” By contrast Victor, the local boy, inspired a colloquial turn: “Once Andrew had seen a green worm in [Victor’s hair] and when he reached up to brush it off, Victor said, ‘Leave urn be. I put urn there. He’s measuring me a hat.’ ”
The characters, too, alluded back to her earlier novels. Andrew, cut off from his twittering twin sisters, was a cross between the young Ralph and Molly, less brilliantly strange than she was, more uncommon and unmasculine than he. (The boy’s sexual ambivalence, hinted at, was more explicitly suggested in some of Stafford’s earlier drafts.) Miss Pride lurked not too far behind Katharine, whose family physiognomy could almost be lifted from the earlier book. The Congreve portraiture hanging on the walls of the grand summer house in Hawthorne would look fine in Pinckney Street:
These fine long faces were civilized. They were the faces of people so endowed with control and tact and insight and second sight that the feelings that might in secret ravage the spirit could never take the battlements of the flesh; no undue passion would ever show in those prudent eyes or on those discreet and handsome lips. For these was no doubt here, no self-contempt, but only the imposing courage of sterling good looks and the protecting lucidity of charm.
But rather than achieving a successful synthesis of the two manners, or a conjunction of the characters, Stafford ended up succumbing to style. The description of the Congreve gallery could almost apply to her own portraiture, for given the absence of real plot, portraiture was what the book essentially consisted of: alternating tableaux of her two protagonists. The poses that her lapidary prose allowed them to take were stiff, and their passions seemed artificial. Andrew in particular never emerged as remotely the riveting soul that poor Molly immediately was; he seemed to occupy a central place in the novel for reasons more of symmetry than sympathy. In earlier drafts, Stafford had made him an older boy and complicated his unhappiness, with mixed success, by suggesting at once an incestuous fascination with his cousin and effeminate leanings that enraged his father, and by implying a potentially artistic nature. In her final version, Stafford had retreated, deciding to hang the whole of his spiritual malaise on a summer breach with a friend. But Andrew’s circumstances and his crisis inevitably seemed disproportionate, and lengthy abstract introspection only accentuated the difficulty. Since Stafford told so much more than she showed about this boy—slumped in a hammock for most of the summer, Andrew offered little opportunity for action—he threatened to become what so few of her children are: an adult’s idea of a child. The ritualistic, timeless world of childhood that Stafford had captured so well before often seemed simply static here.
Katharine, who “in her rarefied world … countenanced no change”—she drove around in a brougham, among other quaint habits—was a more interesting figure, a social specimen Stafford had limned in Boston Adventure and a psychological type she had sketched in her stories. Katharine was the hypertrophied Puritan, the Bostonian as seen from, in a sense, the southern perspective: she was cut off from all vital sense of the past and from feeling, but was fanatically devoted instead to desiccated notions of history and humanity. And she was the frigid woman, who had sacrificed a life of substance for an existence of appearances. Unlike her Brahmin relatives in the earlier novel but like her aloof predecessor in “I Love Someone,” she saw her chilling predicament: “It struck her … that … she would never participate, that she would read astutely and never write, observe wholeheartedly and never paint, not teach, not marry God. Untalented and uncompromising, she would not commit herself.” But her self-knowledge did not liberate her; in fact, it only added to her resigned complacency.
Stafford had set herself a real challenge in trying to create a changeless yet compelling protagonist. She had demonstrated that she could sustain such a figure, almost fablelike in frozen detachment, over the course of a story, but in her novel, her sense of distance collapsed. The fact that the whole tone and style of the book were so close to Katharine’s tone and style introduced a central problem. In place of the old controlled irony there was a recurring confusion: How much was in fact meant as irony, and how much was romanticization? To what extent was Katharine intended to be a charming anachronism and to what extent an exemplar of petrification? In earlier drafts, Stafford had included episodes to suggest a truly sinister sterility at work: Katharine had wreaked real havoc in the Shipleys’ lives, encouraging Andrew’s deep distraction and actually driving one of his sisters mad.
But by the final version, she was a considerably tamer figure. There was a deeply unhappy woman beneath the unruffled surface—Stafford referred throughout to the image of Katharine’s Catherine wheel of torture—but her tribulations didn’t live up to the metaphor. When Stafford played out the St. Catherine symbolism in Katharine’s end (she was burned to death by a misfired Catherine wheel in a fireworks display at a grand party on her estate), the very melodrama of the conclusion called attention to the absence of real drama until that point. The only resolution for this disengaged life was a final, fantastic flight. Stafford’s epigraph from Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral stood as a kind of endorsement of her protagonist’s rarefied detachment—and a justification of her own slow, oddly hollow novel:
Man’s life is a cheat and a disappointment;
All things are unreal,
Unreal or disappointing:
The Catherine wheel, the pantomime cat,
The prizes given at the children’s party,
The prize awarded for the English Essay,
The scholar’s degree, the statesmen’s decoration.
All things become less real, man passes
From unreality to unreality.
Although the book sold quite well (it even made it onto the bottom of the New York Times best-seller list), the critical reception was distinctly cool, and the emphasis was the same: the masterful formalist had abandoned life. In The New Yorker, the reviewer Anthony West was disappointed in the novel’s preciosity: “At other times, the curse of the catalogue, which Flaubert laid upon the novel, descends, and the characters are held frozen while the oversensitive eye travels slowly over the materials of their clothing, the furniture, the bric-a-brac, the curtains, the wallpaper, and the creepers tapping at the windows.” To be sure, her technique was stunning, but the trouble was that it was too stunning. “Miss Stafford’s prose is so fine and frequently so winning,” Irving Howe wrote in the Kenyon Review, “that it finally becomes a source of fascination in itself, undermining the matter it is supposed to reveal.”
Oddly enough, Stafford herself seemed to offer a similar indictment in her interview with Harvey Breit in the New York Times when the novel appeared. At least it is possible to read her criticisms of current trends as a comment on herself: “You need to get back to even the confusions you had, wh
ich all help. I think the self-consciousness today, the over-editing, is a mistake,” she told Breit. “The writer today is competent. The English writer can’t write a bad sentence, but too often it doesn’t add up. Writers have been directing their talents to tiny things. There’s a fear of making a mistake, of sticking your neck out, there is a finicking.”
Stafford’s great “gifts for language and for details” were, as Peter Taylor rightly saw, “one and the same gift and … inseparable,” and there was real brilliance in the carefully crafted surface: “For me,” Taylor wrote, “the genius shines forth in the selection and use of all the paraphernalia.” But here she seemed to be relying more heavily than ever before on style, and she was using her virtuosic skills less to dramatize than to elaborate abstractly on her characters’ anxieties, which were in any case wan compared with the raw unhappiness in her earlier novels. It was as though, as her own earlier story had predicted, she had laid out an exquisite banquet at which there was nothing to eat.
She was at a crossroads after her troubles with In the Snowfall, and there was an uncanny correspondence between Stafford’s novel and the long title poem Lowell published the year before in The Mills of the Kavanaughs at a broadly comparable stage of uncertainty. His poem and The Catherine Wheel shared the Damariscotta Mills setting, and there was an underlying thematic similarity in the stories both of them told, about fraught love, betrayal, and the threat of madness in an aristocratic New England clan: at shaky midcareer, both recovering from breakdowns, they reached back to the theme of New England decay that had launched their careers, not sure where else to turn. The two works represented transitional efforts for both of them and suggested the very different courses they were embarked on. Lowell was struggling to introduce autobiographical elements and a more direct, dramatic voice into his still formal poetic style. (At the end of her life, Stafford indicated to Robert Giroux that she felt intimately, inwardly, familiar with Lowell’s poem, in which there were clearly echoes of their troubled marriage.) By contrast, Stafford was refining an increasingly oblique approach; she was in search of some way to escape the confessional pressures that had sabotaged In the Snowfall. The result for both of them was oddly analogous: lifeless subject matter and a mannered style. But the creative future that lay ahead for each could hardly have been less similar.
AT THE CLOSE of 1952, the year The Catherine Wheel appeared, Stafford was back in the Virgin Islands, this time ending her marriage to Oliver Jensen. She was in terrible physical shape. A doctor who saw her at the Gibneys’ thought she should be hurried back to New York for medical care, which is exactly where she ended up when her requisite stay in the tropics was over. After subletting an apartment in New York, she decided to go back to Connecticut, despite her derision of the bourgeois bohemianism there. She rented rooms on the top floor at 24 Elm Avenue in Westport, and after a run of illness and discomfort, which she recounted in a letter to the Gibneys in her usual comic, hyperbolic style, she settled in and claimed she was feeling very content.
As Stafford described it, her new existence was the culmination of her retreat. It was a new role—reclusive spinsterhood—that she, echoing her character Katharine, took self-conscious satisfaction in cultivating. In a droll letter to Peter Taylor, she presented herself as a caricature, drawing attention to the continuity between her life and her fiction. Or perhaps more accurately, between her fiction and her life, for the relation once again seemed reversed: Stafford’s own existence imitated her art, rather than the other way around. “I’m very happy. Have you ever heard me say that before? You couldn’t have because I’ve never said it. I am living the life I was destined for: I am a single woman with a cat and when I am not writing crabbed stories of frustration, I am hard at work on needlepoint.”
She was not always so cheerful, but at the outset, even in her darker moods, she continued to emphasize self-sufficiency. Her greater aloofness was not for lack of invitations. Blair and Holly Clark urged her to join them in Europe, assuring her it could be a quiet life of concentration, but she was not persuaded. She was far from totally isolated (she counted on Westport friends to keep her company, sometimes at ungodly hours), but she liked to be able to escape when she wanted. She aimed to avoid the literary-social distractions to which she knew she was so unhappily susceptible, and which inevitably made her feel compromised and insecure. “I see almost no one, really—the P.R. boys are really beyond the pale with their machinations,” she wrote to the Clarks. “Everyone seems to be crumbling away into false positions and inertia—but maybe they’re all having the time of their lives and it’s only I who sit out here glooming away, reminded distressfully of my rooming house in Concord by this establishment.”
She exaggerated her isolation, especially as time went on, when she made periodic trips to New York to see her friends, often staying and entertaining at the Cosmopolitan Club, of which she was very pleased to be a member. Still, she obviously valued her “spinsterish, rural life,” as she called it, even if the old insecurity was still there. The Concord parallel was a revealing one. Then she had been convalescing after the car accident and feeling ambivalent about the attentions of Hightower and Lowell: the woman who had declared her desire to be loved was wondering if she was after all simply a cheat—of herself, and of others—unable to love. And she had been busily writing, turning out pages of Autumn Festival for Archie Ogden. In Westport, to judge by a diary entry from the spring of 1953, she was in a sense convalescing again, from a depression that seemed to stem from a version of the old fear of frigidity. She was ruefully aware, like her character Katharine, of the self-imprisonment that her remoteness brought:
The depression has commenced to lift a little and possibly I know why. (I am too doctoring and too diagnostic when I begin to heal and my pretentiousness sickens me more than the depression.) My ailment is that I cannot be overtly loved. (Oh, Dr. Sherfey knows that. And if I were to die tonight and this were the only scrap of paper I left it would not be news to her. Probably not to anyone.) I mean: Oliver was worshipful and I was scornful.… Now at the moment of release for which I longed, I see the loss of what I needed.
This time, too, she was “writing like crazy,” working on (among other things) A Winter’s Tale. As Mary Louise Aswell noted in her introduction to the collection of New Short Novels in which the novella first appeared, it was “an example of emotion recollected in tranquillity, a supreme example.” That was the plot and structure of A Winter’s Tale: a middle-aged woman reflecting back on a youthful love affair in Heidelberg from the vantage point of a barren life in Boston. But the emergence of the novella was itself also an example of retrospective revision: Stafford was turning back to a piece of youthful fiction, Autumn Festival, in which she had been unable to establish the right distance, and she was trying to tame it in her reworking of the material. On both levels, the result was not a Wordsworthian synthesis of passion and reason, but rather an unsettling display of a deep tension between the two.
A Winter’s Tale started out as another of Stafford’s portraits in petrifaction. Her infinitely resigned first-person narrator, Fanny, sounded like a close relative of the narrator of “I Love Someone” as she introduced herself in the framing episode that opened the story. Though this wan woman was married and a mother, she was as isolated as a spinster: “I am at peace with my beyondness and the melancholy that it implies … but there do come moments when I wonder if ever again I will prefer the sun of summer to this weary light.” It seemed at first as though recollecting her passionate past would help cure her detachment and reconcile her to her present. But the story did not turn out to be such a conventional tale of middle-aged accommodation. It was a bleak account of disenchantment at the core, as the narrator turned to face the sources of her cynical aloofness.
The love story Fanny conjured up was far from a happy, healthy affair. Though Stafford had seen to it that young Fanny was not the extreme self-hating specimen Gretchen Marburg was, once again Germany served as the settin
g for a punishing mixture of decadence and discipline. Instead of the religious conversion that she planned in the original Dom Paternus story, Stafford staged a revelation in human faithlessness. An unfocused college girl whose loneliness had lately been assuaged by lots of beaux and whiskey, Fanny had been sent by her widower father, “an ascetic Boston Irishman,” to Germany for a term to be supervised by an ex-Bostonian and zealous Catholic convert named Persis Gait—a woman who, it turned out, was having an affair with a young Nazi, Max Rössler. They were a loveless pair, Max long since disillusioned but still entrapped, fearing exposure by Persis, who knew he was a Jew. Fascinated by Max, Fanny was drawn into a secret affair with him, not exactly the careless fling she had planned for her year. “It was not love; it was another thing. I don’t know what,” Fanny reflected, as she and Max tormented themselves before he ultimately left on maneuvers in Spain, only to die on the way.
Compared with the subdued suffering in The Catherine Wheel, A Winter’s Tale is high historical drama. Yet the prose was in the cool style of Stafford’s maturity, far from the fervent overwriting of her first German effort. It showed how she had modulated the paired themes of the sadistic tyrant and the masochistic outsider, desperate to belong and seeking in vain for real love. Frau Galt was a portrait in twisted power lust, with “a lack of talent which she had deceived herself into thinking was a talent for writing poetry or painting water colors or marrying a Bostonian but was really a lack of talent for being good. In the absence of goodness, she had to have power.” She was Miss Pride, with an admixture of Hopestill, yet the old imposing fire was gone.