by Ann Hulbert
CHAPTER 12
Isle of Arran and Samothrace
STAFFORD ENDED UP taking a trip to London in the summer of 1956, and her spirits were low. The spring in America had been dismal, to judge from a letter that Katharine White sent her soon after she arrived in England. “Your last letter was wonderfully funny,” White wrote, “in spite of the hell you must have been going through, what with the heat, the getting off, the telephone calls from ‘Cal’—if I can refer to him so to you—and your present dissatisfaction with the novel.” She went on to offer encouraging advice on both counts, emotional and literary. She reassured Stafford that she was dealing maturely with Lowell: “That marriage [between Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] is amazing but even more the fact that he is out of the sanitarium. I am distressed that you had to be stirred up all over again and think you were right to tell him not to write or call you direct.” More importantly, she expressed breezy confidence about Stafford’s book: “I’m sure the book is not as inchoate as you think now and that when you come back it will fall into place to please you.”
The key was distance. Stafford needed to detach herself from disturbing reminders of Lowell, who had suffered another breakdown after his mother’s death in 1954, and she needed a respite, too, from her uncooperative novel. A London visit the summer before had been therapeutic, though cut short by financial worries. This time the trip was shaping up as a disaster. Stafford was sick with bronchitis after a grueling boat crossing, and her rented flat at 20 Chesham Place faced a noisy construction site—not an ideal convalescent spot. Despite her health, she socialized with energy (and with well-connected company: George Orwell’s widow, Freud’s grandson, and Walker Evans one night; Dorothy Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, on several other occasions). As was her habit when she was unhappy and convivial, she was drinking too much, with the usual bad results: her frame of mind was hardly better than the state of her body. Her physical and psychological trials were oppressively familiar, as Stafford lamented in a letter to her friend Ann Honeycutt:
I have eaten nothing since I arrived.… I have started with a psychiatrist, but I don’t intend to deliver this intelligence to anyone but you.… I think maybe it’ll work, except that I am so sick of telling the same dreary story and having to stop and control the disgusting tears and feeling that nothing I can possibly say ever can convey what it’s like to be inside this particular skull.
Once again, the past all too easily engulfed her. Looking ahead, she confessed that her hope of somehow mastering that “dreary story,” with a doctor or on paper, was fading. And as she wrote to another friend, at forty-one the energy to plunge into the present eluded her: “After the age of 22, the search for experience is narrowing and harrowing.”
But her trip took a welcome turn when she met A. J. Liebling, a fellow New Yorker writer who was also in London and who looked her up at Mrs. White’s urging. He couldn’t rescue her from her past, nor did he succeed in reinspiring her about her literary future. What he did do, though a decade older than she and not as energetic as he had once been, was to show her how the search for experience could be very different from anything she was used to. Attend to your appetites and avoid literary intellectuals were among the first principles of this voracious eater and prodigious journalist, who wrote about the war, New York City lowlife, food, the races, boxing, politics, the press, and anything else that struck his wide interest. His precepts were hardly familiar ones for Stafford.
Let me take care of you was Joe Liebling’s dominant tone with her, which was equally unfamiliar. The invitation was one she was thoroughly ready to accept, as was clear from a letter Stafford wrote to Honeycutt with further news of her London psychiatrist and her state of mind. The letter offers perhaps the best insight into the seemingly odd but immediate bond between huge, prolific Liebling and Stafford, the “problem feeder” and now problem writer. So often the defensive victim, Stafford described a new willingness to acknowledge her vulnerability, and an unapologetic desire to depend on someone. That someone could not, obviously, continue to be her doctor, though she had seized on to him as her temporary guardian. Her new psychiatrist, she wrote to Honeycutt,
is so much more articulate than any of the others I’ve ever seen, and it’s a new and extremely good and astringent experience for me to be with a man.… I think I am in love with him.… I don’t know his status, whether single or married, but I want him to adopt me.… On the whole, I’m more for adoption than marriage.… I think he thinks I’m losing my mind and I’m with him there. It’s the food (absence of) and drink (superabundance of) syndrome that inspires him to this drastic move [he advised her to spend a week in a nursing home]…. When I told him at one point that I was indestructible, he said, “Balderdash, have you ever tried a .45 Colt?” I said no, what I meant was that I’d been told I was indestructible and he said, then why hadn’t I said I was really fragile and wanted to be taken care of.… I do honestly think he could set my feet on a safe path.
Liebling, in his gallant, gluttonous way, knew how to court fragile women (his first wife, Ann McGinn, turned out to be schizophrenic), and Stafford was ready to be scooped up: he was an ideal emissary from The New Yorker, for which she had such strong familial feelings. The fantasy of adoption was not a new one; orphans surfaced in her fiction, and in “The Bleeding Heart” she had spun out a young woman’s delusory fixation on a father figure. (In a letter to Nancy Flagg Gibney, Stafford tried to explain her sense of needy estrangement: “I have looked on myself all my life as an orphan who had siblings and living parents … and have spent a great many of my years being involved in some aspect of rejection: dying a thousand deaths over being rejected or dying a million over rejecting.”)
Nor was the reality of finding refuge with protective men new—Dr. Cohn, and Jensen even, had played that role. But where Stafford had always been acutely aware of the dangers of dependence (father figures in her world were not to be relied upon—rejection always lurked around the corner), with Liebling there was romantic fondness as well and hope for a “safe path.” It was a well-grounded hope. Liebling was a notably clear-eyed rescuer, confident in his reassuring powers but never overconfident or condescending. He sized himself up in a letter during a moment of trouble for Stafford while they were apart:
As to the word waif, please don’t take it away, I’d be speechless without it. Since 1945 … I’ve been using it to describe the only kind of women I attract, and that attract me. I am a Symbol of Security, but I have feet of clay with broken arches. Still, since I love waifs, I try to live up to their ridiculous misapprehension of my characteristics. I am really just a he-waif, what never had no mammy.…
If you were near me and let out a wail like that, I’d either yell that I had troubles enough of my own, or, much more probably, cuddle you and soothe you and reassure you, and it would be all over in an hour either way.… I want to be needed, but by God I need you.
That summer Liebling was more than a year into a trial separation from his demanding second wife, Lucille Spectorsky. It had been her idea, after years of difficult relations between them, and though Liebling hadn’t quite made an explicit break, he was clearly in need of company, physical and emotional. While he waited on Lucille’s whims, he pursued women, many of them much younger than he, with what one of them, Nora Sayre, the daughter of a New Yorker writer, described as “the abrupt lunge of a man who rather expects to be rejected.” Stafford, another New Yorker daughter, was a different case. When he called into the magazine’s London office from his rooms at Dukes Hotel to check on a piece and found Stafford there, picking up her mail, he invited a woman to tea who promised to be more than an acolyte likely to rebuff him before too long. She was a colleague, a writer whom he had long admired and who, he had reason to know from the Whites, admired him. And he doubtless also knew from them that she was lonely.
For Liebling, their first meeting over drinks at Dukes was probably a tantalizing glimpse of Stafford’s uneasy mix of fragility an
d toughness, as the raffish, hard-drinking side of the impeccable prose stylist emerged. Appropriately enough, the two of them broke the ice by making fun of their matchmakers, the valetudinarian Whites. They took to each other right away, and the courtship proceeded in high style. In England, Liebling swept her up into his life—escorting her in a hired Rolls-Royce to the races, entertaining her in pubs and at plentiful meals. At some point she paid a solo visit to Heidelberg, and she arranged her own side trip to Brussels for a congress of poets (not Liebling’s kind of event). The active summer was exactly what Stafford needed, as she wrote to her agent, James Oliver Brown: “I’ve been having far too good a time and never want to come home or work or do a blessed thing except to be pleased in just the way I’m being pleased.”
But Stafford did sail home in October, and Liebling set off traveling for The New Yorker—continuing to woo her attentively during the year they were apart. His letters reveal how fascinated, and curiously intimidated, he was by her dramatically literary life, for all of his commanding, confident style. Above all, he was full of praise for her writing, which he was reading and rereading as he traveled to Italy and the Middle East on assignment. “I seem to have held a very great lady in my arms at all those race meetings,” he wrote to her just after she had gone. “It was a very great honor! I’ve been reading ‘Children Are Bored on Sunday,’ and really you are a better writer than almost anybody I know.”
But he also admitted to quick jealousy about her emotional past, which for him was entangled with her literary history. Her life among the literary quarterly writers elicited what was for him a habitual defensive mockery of a cultural milieu so different from his own. In two decades at The New Yorker, he had distinguished himself as an artful stylist and a journalistic innovator, but his loyalties and temperament allied him with the newspapermen among whom he had begun his career; “intellectual” for Liebling was a term of scorn. His reading of Boston Adventure gave him an occasion to stake his claim against those wan men in Stafford’s high literary past: “All through the last 100 pages I was wondering who was going to get Sonie … prepared to be jealous of any one of them. You can see how impersonally I take literature, and how completely I detach fictional characters from reality,” he wrote to her from Naples, mixing flirtation and criticism. “You couldn’t fool me for a minute with the black hair. When the book ended with Sonie uninvaded, I wanted to go back and beat up all three of them for passing up such an enchanting bet.”
It was a flattering combativeness, but Liebling warned Stafford that he was prone to carry it too far:
I began to write you a letter about that book, The Good Soldier [which Stafford evidently had urged him to read]…. I tore up the letter because I found I was using the book as an excuse to tease you about literary people, as I used to tease Lucy about Southerners. In time this becomes damn wearisome. The chain of causation is flattering enough, but it is necessary for the woman to understand it from the beginning. I’m jealous of the people who have been around her before she met me. So I belittle them (especially in contrast to myself). There’s nothing rational about it—I don’t really despise men of letters, or Southerners, or doctors, except when I’m in love with a writer, or a Southern woman, or a lady doctor (that has happened, too). The dame, eprise de moi, pretends to agree completely and then when she gets fed up with the badinage she feels it would be inconsistent to speak up, until she blows up. Don’t let me pull your tail, Jeanie, ever. (This is like a boy who has had bad luck keeping rabbits, which die on him one after another. He decides to take the next rabbit into his confidence. God knows what good it will do.)
Most of the time, Stafford didn’t mind having her tail pulled about her past. As Wilfrid Sheed, the son of her former employers, the Catholic publishers Frank and Maisie Sheed, observed, “Liebling and his set had supplemented the back-biting of the poets with the jaunty irreverence of the sports press box and Jean absorbed this too, and I think felt very American about it.”
Still, both of them clearly were aware of a tension between Stafford’s highbrow, PR pedigree and the lowlife reporter tastes that Liebling liked to cultivate. He faced it head-on and with fond praise always encouraged Stafford’s literary course. At the same time, he seems to have disarmed her physically. His wholehearted embrace of her was more than figurative, and despite Stafford’s long-standing fears of sexual aloofness, she welcomed him in bed. They enthusiastically overlooked the incongruities between them—not the least of which was the almost comical physical contrast, well-rounded Liebling and well-worn, angular Stafford. “I want you to write because you’re a great woman, and I love what you write, and because you’ll never be happy—for more than one afternoon or one night at a time—unless you do yourself justice,” Liebling saluted her, and then got down to more concrete details. “I’ll not give you up, and I’ll combine things to have you together with me as soon as possible, and I’ll make love to you as much as I want, which is certainly as much as you’ll want, and we’ll see wonderful things together and mortise our minds like the rest of us.”
In fact, what was more notable than the disparities between them, at least from the outside and at the outset, was this mortising of their minds. There was a convergence in the broad direction of their literary course at this stage of their lives, when middle age was clearly weighing heavily on them: they were both drawn to nostalgic efforts at memoir. It was also the enterprise on which Lowell, the literary man they both made a show of disparaging, had embarked. They took early note of his explorations, which were quickly to acquire a kind of representative significance for a literary generation, as Lowell’s personal agonies became the archetypal ordeal of the artist, the social outcast.
Liebling and Stafford watched the emergence of Lowell’s Life Studies with, it seems fair to say, at least a preliminary sense of identification. No sooner had Liebling confessed his jealousy of the PR circle in early 1957 than he reported to Stafford (whom he often fondly addressed as “Cat”) that he had found an issue of the magazine in his hotel in Israel, immediately delved into it, and actually liked a piece by his rival:
The bookstore in the hotel had a copy of Partisan Review, Fall Number, on display. The lead story was a part of 91 Revere Street, Lowell’s autobiography, so I bought the PR and sat down in the lobby to see if he had anything to say about Cat.… The installment got him only about as far as the age of ten, but most of it was about his father and mother, and I must say that I liked it.… But you’ve probably read it. The rest of PR was outrageously funny as ever.
When Stafford read “91 Revere Street,” she complained to Giroux that Lowell had deliberately parodied her own writing. Although there was nothing about her in it, there was more than a faint trace of her own literary style and voice. Boston Adventure lurked behind the cadences and texture of Lowell’s prose and the mythographic scale of his portraiture—or perhaps it was the other way around: here were versions of stories that Lowell must have told Stafford back in the days when she was at work on her own Boston tableau. Certainly the young Lowell looking “forward to the night when my bedroom walls would once again vibrate, when I would awake with rapture to the rhythm of my parents arguing, arguing one another to exhaustion” recalled Sonie on her pallet in Chichester, listening to the storm between her similarly beleaguered father and resentful mother. The echoes between that novel and Lowell’s almost surreal narrative reverberated back and forth in his images and in his sentences, crammed with detail and alliteration: “On the joint Mason-Myers bookplate, there are two merry and naked mermaids,” he wrote, and then let his tongue chase his observant eye in extravagant Staffordesque style as he described them, “lovely marshmallowy, boneless, Rubenesque butterballs, all burlesque-show bosoms and Flemish smiles.…”
In a letter to Peter Taylor after his autobiographical story “1939” appeared, Lowell characterized his own radically new effort at memoir. Taylor’s portrait had wounded him, he confessed, but also deeply impressed and influenced him: he was r
eady to mine his own past overtly. Stafford and Liebling would have recognized the lure of melding truth and fiction:
Well, I stand off, hat in hand, and thank you with grudging bewildered incomprehension. But were we really quite such monsters? Seriously, though, the whole thing fascinates me—I have been trying to do the same sort of thing myself with scenes from my childhood.… I want to invent and forget a lot but at the same time have the historian’s wonderful advantage—the reader must always be forced to say, “This is tops, but even if it weren’t it’s true.” I think you’ve done the trick.
The struggle to find a creative balance between inventing and forgetting was one that Stafford knew all too well after years of trying to transform her life into a novel. So did Liebling, who had been impatient with the simplistic journalistic distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity since the start of his career. Both of them, not unlike Lowell, were ready to try a new strategy, which meant turning more explicitly to autobiographical memories than they ever had before.
FOLLOWING UP on his fond courtship by correspondence, Liebling came back briefly to the United States at the beginning of 1957 for a visit with Stafford, who was in the process of leaving Westport and setting up house in an apartment at 18 East Eightieth Street. (“I was moving so that the confusion was perpetual but, on the whole, sweet,” she wrote to a friend.) He also came back to sign a contract with Simon and Schuster for a book, Normandy Revisited, in which he made his present and past self the subject of his reporting. He agilely shifted between his tour of France as a well-seasoned writer in the mid-1950s and his earlier visits as a student and war correspondent. Digressive in the extreme (Liebling alluded to the great meanderer Laurence Sterne, one of his favorite writers, in his subtitle, A Sentimental Journey), he was ironic about himself as the aging tourist in calm times and nostalgic about the younger intrepid Liebling. The project was the natural culmination of his experiments in more ruminative journalism, as his biographer, Raymond Sokolov, has emphasized. Liebling was still the objective reporter, but he was on new subjective terrain as he probed his memories and juxtaposed versions of himself.