by Ann Hulbert
Fanny and Max, the lost souls, were similarly dampened; there was a world-weariness to their alienated agony. “I haven’t any politics and I haven’t any ideals,” Max told Fanny, and then outlined the barrenness of his life with unsettling resignation: “It would be wonderful to be a Christian or entirely to love one’s country. Entirely loving oneself would be the best of all.” The young Fanny made the motions of rebelling against his fatalism, but as recounted by her older self, her protestations of hope and love rang hollow. When he died, she studiously insulated herself against any real feeling: “There had always been the danger that I would mourn Max, that I would miss him, would become inward about him. It had been necessary to get back to America to return to the exterior.”
It was a bloodless portrait in disengagement, and yet Stafford ostensibly granted the middle-aged Fanny a kind of liberation in the novella’s conclusion, which returned to the framing story. Her survey of memory accomplished, the past was erased—and Fanny announced: “I am exalted; I believe that I am altogether purged.” Yet it was an eerie purgation, which left a woman who still seemed detached from her present detached now from her past as well. At least that Heidelberg memory had once kept alive a sense of conflict in her life. As Fanny and her husband looked forward to a trip to Bermuda, that “sun of summer” she was escaping to seemed as bleached as the “weary light” she claimed she had escaped from.
The novella suggested that for Stafford, too, the resurrection of that German memory and plot was not the creative inspiration she might have hoped. Doubtless she was pleased to be encouraged by Mary Louise Aswell, but a sense of her own disengagement pervades the story. Though rewritten into the first person, it was studiously constructed so that the narrator was as aloof as possible. And though Stafford had clearly worked at including more dramatized action, the scenes in A Winter’s Tales were stagy rather than immediately moving. Finally, she had expanded the original story, but it was evident from the result how far Stafford was from a theme and characters adequate to a novel, which was once again the challenge facing her.
IN THE SPRING of 1953 Stafford’s first collection of short stories, Children Are Bored on Sunday, was published to general acclaim, and after a dispute with Harcourt, Brace (over foreign rights), she signed a contract with Random House in the fall of 1953 for another book of stories. The contract also called for a novel, due by the beginning of May 1955, only slightly more than a year and a half away. But Stafford had trouble getting down to work on the book. Practical considerations, she emphasized, had something to do with her evasion of the novel. She was more worried than ever about money, which had been a preoccupation since she had emerged from Payne Whitney. Her recourse, now as then, was to turn out stories for The New Yorker, along with occasional articles for women’s magazines. Sickness, too, made sustained work on a large undertaking more difficult. Among many other complaints, Stafford contracted hepatitis in the fall of 1955. (It was in Westport that she acquired one of her treasured possessions, a hospital bed.) Those were the explanations she gave her editor, Albert Erskine, when she failed to meet her deadline, but she knew the trouble went deeper: “It’s mainly indolence, stupidity and a fundamental lack of talent,” she wrote to him, full of self-recrimination.
It was a typically hyperbolic catalog of indictments, but it suggested a crisis of confidence not unlike her experience with In the Snowfall, when she also had trouble facing her daunting project and worried that her talent had deserted her. As for her “stupidity,” she might have been alluding to the fact that she found herself doing again what she had vowed, in “Truth and the Novelist,” not to do. It is clear from the manuscript fragments that remain that she was trying to write a novel based quite closely on her own life, focusing on her fate in the East but also ranging back to her Colorado childhood. “I’ll tell you this much,” she revealed to an interviewer two decades later when the book was still unfinished, “it is my first autobiographical novel. It’s about Mommy and Daddy and Missouri and Colorado and Massachusetts and New York, all places where I’ve lived. A well-known American poet, with whom I was once closely associated, is petrified. And well he should be! I’m cutting up the poets to a fare-thee-well.”
Her jaunty confidence in that interview was not at all characteristic. It was a pose put on for precisely the public relations machinery that she detested and that she had eerily predicted in “An Etiquette for Writers” would come to hound her during fallow times. Already in the 1950s, when the novel was not yet the albatross it later became, she was worried about its future, as she confessed to her intimates. Katharine White was especially sympathetic and encouraging, sending Stafford reassurances in the summer of 1955 (shortly after the Random House deadline had come and gone): “I do hope the novel gets going. Don’t worry about it, though, for if you would just write some short stories that would start you off.”
It was a natural suggestion, for until then, Stafford had been fruitfully turning out short stories. Before Christmas of 1954 (which she spent in the hospital with pneumonia), she had been “absolutely on top of the world, so healthy, so happy, so productive,” she wrote to the Thompsons. Her short stories, unlike her novella or her novels, were a real source of satisfaction. But they did not serve to start her off on the novel. Rather than catalysts, the stories represented another recourse altogether, an alternate way of dealing with the substantive and stylistic challenges she faced in the novel. In the group of western stories she had been producing, she found a very different route around the troublesome autobiographical terrain. Shifting to a comic tone and making childhood her subject, she discovered that she could return to her home ground without succumbing to memories that overwhelmed her imagination. And a newly confident ironic distance enabled her to revisit other parts of her past as well in the nonwestern stories she continued to write.
Her strategy in the Colorado stories is a stark contrast to The Catherine Wheel. Where her baroque manner predominated in that book in almost exaggerated form, she drew on her Mountain Lion style for the central group of stories she wrote during the 1950s. In fact, in these stories, set in a town called Adams, a fictionalized Boulder, she looked even more explicitly to Twain as a model than she had in her earlier novel. Here she overcame the “quarrel with the landscape” of the West that had partly stymied In the Snowfall, and she also dealt successfully with people she had met, in fact with her own kin (who had also stymied that novel). It was a strictly literary breakthrough, for her actual relations with her Colorado past had become, if anything, more strained. She had ended up in the hospital after her reunion with her father at her sister’s ranch in the summer of 1951. And as she wrote to the Thompsons in 1954 when they urged her to come for a visit, her father and his increasingly hopeless predicament remained an insurmountable reason for avoiding the West: “I’m still no better able to face it than before,” she confessed. To Blair Clark and his wife she was more vehement, after a visit in the fall of 1954 from her sister Mary Lee, who came bearing more tales of her father’s misery: “I have never had an encounter with my family that did not fetch me up in the hospital with one thing or another. I hate them.”
Of course it was not that simple. She stayed as far away as she could, but not without guilt for her negligence. “I dreamed that I never visited my parents although they lived in Westport and I went often to other friends,” Stafford had written in her journal in 1947. “I woke to lie an hour in a torment of guilt and then, as if my dream had been prophetic, there was a letter from my father in the mail, heartbreaking, relentlessly pitiful. He is inconsolably lonely, but he will live on and on, the sad, senile child.” During the 1950s, her father wrote more frequently, two-to-three-page letters in which the full extent of his eccentricity was on display in a style strangely reminiscent of Stafford’s own epistolary manner. In long, ornate sentences sprinkled with colloquialisms and exaggerations, he described one harebrained scheme after another (including plans for an outlandish novel about a prehistoric modern c
ivilization) and vented his spleen on some of his favorite topics, such as the degradation of the American public, the national debt, and the virtues of the country over the city.
There was an undercurrent of irony throughout, as though he were drawing on an old comic homespun parlance he had shared with his daughter during her youth, and yet also acknowledging the great distance that now loomed between them. “Jean, why the Sam Hill don’t you jump a plane some day and come out here for at least a few days,” he wrote to her in 1955. “You and I could have a good visit, reminiscent of our great summer at Mrs. Meyer’s house in El Dora.” It was an invitation that made Stafford cringe and stay East (in real life), and yet it helps explain her ability to make the trip back in her fiction. John Stafford was recalling a retreat to the mountains that the two literary Staffords, father and daughter, had made in the 1930s, both of them full of plans to write.
It was the trip that Jean had commemorated as a child in her story “Fame Is Sweet to the Foolish Man,” in which she good-humoredly mocked both herself and him: “But each knew that the other was weakening—that his thoughts were turning from the philosophy of the short story and the movement of the drama to the extraordinarily inviting snow-capped peaks and cool shaded lakes.” They had been united in a Twainian world of well-intentioned delinquency, and the delight was doubled because here the father, far from an authority figure, was a companion in dereliction. Together they had escaped ordinary society for independent adventure, which they conceived in solitary, high literary terms. They planned to spin out their imaginative fantasies on paper amid the peaks. But distracted by each other and by their surroundings, they had settled for more mundane experience—in the end, the experience of failing to find the perfect creative retreat. That was not a great frustration, as Stafford told it. Instead, it was an ironic comeuppance that both of them were able to take in stride.
During the 1950s, Stafford found herself able again to draw on that mocking comic treatment of the anticlimactic Colorado adventures of her childhood, adventures that otherwise seemed to overwhelm her. It was as though she had discovered a way imaginatively to recover the spirit of her childhood before she had felt her father’s shadow everywhere. Stafford wasn’t writing purely autobiographically by any means (in several of the Adams stories, the father was the stolid manager of Safeway, an ironic inversion if there ever was one). But she was staking a claim to her western heritage, and indirectly addressing enchantments and disenchantments from her past. On the surface, it was a significant departure from her New Yorker-style stories, with their sophisticated manner and comparatively enervated characters. In the central group of Adams stories, Stafford was writing about rambunctious children, and like Twain, she was definitely not writing for genteel grown-ups. Her aim was, like his, “to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in,” as he put it in his preface to Tom Sawyer. Despite the stylistic novelty, Stafford’s underlying theme drew on her persistent preoccupation—the impossible dream of escape, which expressed itself contradictorily in a desire for solitude and a dread of loneliness. The notable difference was that in these stories, as in “Fame Is Sweet to the Foolish Man,” the failure really to flee, either oneself or society, was not a psychic crisis but a comic adventure.
“The Healthiest Girl in Town” (1951), Stafford’s first Adams story, signaled the shift in tone in an outspoken way. Its very title suggested that she had in mind an ironic commentary on herself and her neurasthenic reputation as well as on her fiction. (After all, Stafford was well known as one of the least healthy girls in town. Describing the literary crowd at a New York party in the late 1940s, the eclectic writer and artist Weldon Kees gave her a starring invalid role: among the guests were “people you thought were permanently settled in sanataria, like Jean Stafford, looking more ravaged and nervous than you had thought possible”) She hadn’t yet introduced the protagonist who regularly appeared in subsequent stories, Emily Vanderpool. But young Jessie, who told the story in the first person—a rarity for Stafford—was Emily’s forerunner, a tomboyish girl who stood out for her vigor in a town heavily populated by tuberculars.
In the story Stafford reversed the usual pose of alienation. This time it was the sturdy exiled from the weak. Arrived in Adams with her mother, a nurse, Jessie felt left out among “the ailing citizenry.” And the drama took the opposite turn. Rather than retreating to resigned isolation, Jessie in the end triumphantly asserted her independence and affirmed the energetic pursuit of experience: she was healthy and happy to be that way. But she was not granted her zest without first suffering the familiar insecure desire to belong, which Stafford played for all its comic potential. She satirically portrayed illness as an elite social category and developed her character’s class anxiety in clever episodes that also perfectly captured the cadences of childhood—and were very funny. Jessie made an incongruous aspiring invalid. She was ridiculed by the spindly, sickly Butler girls (from Boston), who vaunted their invalidism in a succession of well-paced scenes:
I do not think that Laura and Ada [Butler] despised me more than they did anyone else, but I was the only one they could force to come home with them. “Who wants to be healthy if being healthy means being a cow?” said Ada one day, looking at me as I reached for a third insipid cooky. I withdrew my hand and blushed so hotly in my humiliation that Laura screamed with laughter and cried, “The friendly cow all red and white, we give her biscuits with all our might.”
There was obvious self-mockery involved in the story. After all, Stafford, unlike Jessie, did in a sense succumb to the romantic allure of illness to escape her hickness—and she ended up in a different kind of sanitarium. (Young Jessie, like Stafford from childhood on, pored over medical tomes, studying symptoms in hopes of developing them; but whereas Jessie got over the fixation, Stafford didn’t.)
Emily Vanderpool was a still more autobiographical protagonist, whose salient characteristic was not her health but her “awful tongue.” Stafford explicitly admitted her affiliation in her introduction to her second story collection, Bad Characters (1964):
Emily Vanderpool … who acknowledges that she has a bad character, is someone I knew well as a child; indeed, I often occupied her skin and, looking back, I think that while she was notional and stubborn and a trial to her kin, her talent for iniquity was feeble—she wanted to be a road-agent but she hadn’t a chance. Her troubles stemmed from the low company she kept, but she didn’t seek these parties out: they found her. It is a widespread human experience.
Emily was the good-hearted “bad” girl with a susceptibility to dubious associations, which led her into adventures that discomfited the conventional world—and that backfired on her. She was at once a rebel and a show-off, eager to stir up her family and the townsfolk, but also dying to be a star; she was alternately “possessed with a passion to be by myself”—which was when her malicious tongue came into play, antagonizing all those nearby—and desperate for companionship. But this girl Tom Sawyer had no Huck to escape with. (“Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance.”) Instead, as Stafford depicted her predicament in the two best Vanderpool stories, “Bad Characters” (1954) and “A Reading Problem” (1956), Emily stumbled on inadequate substitutes—outcasts who were indeed gaudy, but who were not the seriously subversive influence that Huck was.
Emily’s brushes with the unwashed—in “Bad Characters” she got mixed up with Lottie Jump, an eleven-year-old shoplifter from the wrong side of the tracks; in “A Reading Problem,” she crossed paths with a preacher con man and his scrawny daughter—introduced excitement into her life, but they didn’t really threaten her connection with the “respectable” world of Adams and her family (a far more conventional clan than the real-life Staffords). The willful girl who
se taste for solitude had gotten her into trouble ended up somewhat chastened and more sociable. In fact, the ironic moral of the stories was that it was Emily’s very anti-sociability that made her a good citizen: a high-spirited, independent girl could prosper in dull Adams after all. Not that she was going to stay there: “Yes, sir, Emily, you’re going to go places,” the local sheriff told her admiringly in “A Reading Problem” But in the meantime, she could happily settle for escapades instead of true escape—as Stafford had done with her father in the mountains.
As in her youthful fictional efforts, Stafford was busy experimenting with dialects, again in Twainian style. In “Bad Characters,” it was Lottie Jump’s tongue that especially enthralled Emily: “I had never heard such gaudy, cynical talk and was trying to memorize it all.” Equally enthralled herself, Stafford devoted a great deal of attention to capturing accurately the telltale vernacular of her low characters. In “A Reading Problem” Evangelist Gerlash and his daughter Opal spent twelve pages trying to talk Emily out of some money or food in a comical hybrid of stentorian sermonizing, huckster talk, and backwoods slang. Occasionally a hokey, inauthentic note crept in, but Stafford managed to make much of the humor—and pathos—of the stories ride on the dialogue, coupled with her flair for the perfectly placed detail.