by Ann Hulbert
Stafford was having less luck with her obstinate autobiographical novel, arid back in New York, she made the most of the distractions, attending plenty of parties, going to the opera with Robert Giroux, being escorted to dinner by various men. During the spring, feeling frustrated by how little she had accomplished, she evidently wrote to Liebling that she might not join him in Europe in the summer of 1957 as they had planned. Liebling sympathized with her troubles: “The book’s the thing to think about,” he agreed. With his usual directness, he addressed her fears of what companionship might mean for their work; he was evidently thinking beyond a summer rendezvous to longer-term arrangements, and he had some worries about productivity himself. He was willing to go slowly, and put work first. “It may be all for the best,” he wrote to her in early spring, “if we don’t constrain each other to depart from our respective courses—we’re stars of such fiery portent and Roman-candlescent magnitude—and if I make you come to Europe when you want to be writing in Eightieth Street, or if you woo me to the Gideon Putnam Hotel when I want to be in Djerba, the one who concedes may catch with a slow burn difficult to extinguish.” It was revealing imagery—ostensibly celebratory of their careers, but in fact clearly anxious: the stars risked falling, the Roman candles might sputter. In a similar half-facetious but frank tone, Liebling touched on their other worry besides work—health. He had had bouts of renal colic, and Stafford had been in the hospital again with a series of complaints: “I don’t understand why you are sick all the time. Maybe you are a hypochondriac? Did you ever hear of them? They are like a Christian Scientist in reverse.…”
But in early August, though Stafford still hadn’t made it to Europe, they both had work published in The New Yorker, and Liebling took it as an auspicious portent: “The New Yorker married us again in the August 3 number …; a big story by you, then a long fact piece by me. As you have it, we complement each other, and it makes a fine New Yorker, but I wonder whether it’s pure coincidence, or matchmaking” Whatever the Whites had in mind, Stafford did finally head for England not long after the issue appeared, to enjoy two months of unproductive pleasure, only somewhat marred by a severe bout of Asiatic flu for Liebling. When he was up to it, he wined her and dined her and kept her entertained (he met her at Southampton in a Rolls, took her to Paris to the races at Longchamp). When they returned home together in November, they took separate rooms at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, though they were clearly a couple. A concrete obstacle to marriage remained, since Liebling’s second wife kept stalling on a divorce.
Even when the divorce came through, they didn’t get married for another year and a half, both evidently hesitant about the prospect—though that wasn’t what they said. Stafford claimed they “kept getting too busy to get married,” and their life certainly was rarely dull. Stafford enjoyed the unfamiliar ambience of Liebling’s crowd, especially Walt Kelly and John Lardner of the self-described “The Formerly Club,” who gathered at Bleeck’s (once the Artists and Writers Club, the New York Herald Tribune hangout). Perhaps it was the lack of bustle in their literary lives that gave them pause. Stafford wasn’t writing much, only a few articles and a weak story, and Liebling’s Normandy Revisited didn’t sell well when it came out in 1958. But they finally got married, on April 3, 1959, and they launched their wedded life in Liebling’s well-known style: the reception was held in his favorite haunt, Tim Costello’s bar, and they moved into an elegant apartment at 43 Fifth Avenue.
The question of how to balance work and life in each other’s company had by no means disappeared. In fact, Liebling and Stafford were headed for comparatively dry stretches in their careers. Companionship, at least during the first years they were married, was an exhilarating distraction. Liebling was avid and eclectic in his interests and in his friends—he loved the curious corners of New York, he adored France. He was devoted to his friend Jean Riboud, whom he had gotten to know in New York, where Riboud had come after emerging from Buchenwald and where he had since become a great success as an investment banker (and later became president of Schlumberger); and Liebling was devoted to his bar cronies. The couple was energetically social, eating out often, serving elaborate feasts in their apartment (Liebling had a loyal housekeeper, Madella, to help), keeping up with Liebling’s cast of eccentrics—and Stafford fell for the combination of high style and low living. She had always yearned to be drawn out of herself, and he succeeded in keeping her entertained and extroverted as no one else had.
For the monumentally productive Liebling, his literary output in the late 1950s and early 1960s was still impressive: along with piecework for The New Yorker, though somewhat less of it, he wrote two more books. Most of Between Meals, another nostalgic memoir, this time of his youthful appetites, ran in The New Yorker during 1959 and the whole appeared in 1962. In 1961 he published The Earl of Louisiana, a book about Earl Long, the governor of Louisiana, which had been prompted by a suggestion from Stafford, who had been intrigued by the place and its peculiar natives ever since she lived there with Lowell. For Stafford, the record for writing was bleak. She wrote some book reviews, none of them major pieces; a few articles, the most substantial of which, “Souvenirs of Survival,” was a chatty memoir of coming of age during the 1930s; and several movie reviews for Horizon in 1961. In 1962 Farrar, Straus and Cudahy published Elephi: The Cat with the High IQ, an engaging children’s story that sometimes verged on whimsy. Stafford also retold two tales from the Arabian Nights for a Macmillan series, another less-than-full-scale fictional effort for her.
Only two more stories appeared during this time, neither of them in The New Yorker. Her exile from its pages coincided with the retirement of Katharine White, her longtime patron and champion at the magazine, but the stories—“The Children’s Game” and “The Scarlet Letter”—were both weaker than her best (as White herself frankly told her about the first, which was based loosely on her Brussels trip). Even “A Reasonable Facsimile,” the story that had appeared along with Liebling’s piece in the August 1957 New Yorker, showed a certain strain as Stafford groped for material, skirting autobiography. Set in Colorado, it was an unusual story, about an old professor whose peace was destroyed by a predatory acolyte who invaded his life. It was far from her Vanderpool vein, and she explained to the Thompsons that it was pointless to mine it for personal clues: the model was not a teacher from her alma mater—or, for that matter, one of her subsequent mentors. The story was born of more detached inspiration: she had been reading the correspondence between Harold Laski and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
In retrospect, Stafford tentatively traced her creative block to contentment: “During our marriage, which was short, I was extremely unproductive. It was a source of woe to Joe. I could never figure out why it happened. Perhaps it’s too simple an explanation, but I was happy for the first time in my life. He thought that if I wasn’t writing, it meant I was unhappy with him.” Years before, during her sessions with Dr. Sherfey, she had tried out the same analysis: that suffering was the source of her inspiration, that a “cure” might mean the end of creativity. But she had also expressed skepticism about the portrait of the artist as neurotic, and she knew that happiness was not her imagination’s only enemy by any means. Some literary strain may have lurked between Stafford and Liebling. She told Blair Clark that she feared her own writing might inhibit Liebling’s productivity, which can’t help sounding farfetched, but perhaps served as a partial excuse for silence.
What is more plausible is that Liebling’s productivity daunted her; certainly with Lowell, she had known the frustrating rhythm of fallow times for herself during his fertile stretches. But above all now it was more mundane, domestic distractions that slowed her down. These had always exerted a powerful lure, and her bustling life with Liebling gave her plenty of pretexts for avoiding her typewriter. Drinking, which Liebling alone of her husbands did little to discourage (he was hardly in a position to police appetites), now plainly encroached on her work—both as a source of her troubles with writin
g and as a solace in the face of them.
Another source of her creative block was, however, literary. Her difficulties, after all, had begun long before she met Liebling—and they were not very different from troubles she had had with another, much earlier novel, In the Snowfall. She herself had offered a revealing analysis of that struggle: her material had consisted of memories too powerful to work with. Back then, she had acknowledged what was plain from her unfinished pages, that Lucy McKee frustrated all her efforts at imaginative distance. Stafford hadn’t quite faced up to her father as an even more unmanageable figure lurking in the background of her story. But he clearly was an unwieldy presence—begging to be reshaped in her fantasies, yet stubbornly resisting it—and he continued to be unwieldy a decade and a half later as she floundered on her fourth novel. Lowell seems to have presented similar problems.
The surviving manuscript of her attempt at a novel is a tangle, encompassing several different drafts—or, rather, abortive starts of drafts, the same opening chapters rewritten again and again. In a version that was envisaged as a sequel to Boston Adventure, usually titled The Parliament of Women or The Dream of the Red Room, she struggled to transform her life with Lowell into Sonie’s pilgrimage toward a terrifyingly empty maturity and to mix social satire of suburbia (modeled on Westport) and spiritual tragedy. In a draft labeled The State of Grace, generally subtitled Varieties of Religious Experience, Stafford was evidently trying a broader autobiographical novel. She had abandoned Boston Adventure as her base and was instead building on her Colorado past, opening with fiercely caricatured scenes of life among characters inspired by her Stafford and McKillop grandparents.
Making chronological sense of the jumble of pages is difficult, but it was apparently during her years with Liebling that Stafford shifted from efforts to build on Boston Adventure to an attempt to shape her book around a more explicit family memoir. It meant turning from comparatively recent memories—of her marriage to Lowell—to the more distant past. That may have made the enterprise seem safer, though it was still an unnerving psychological step: she was testing her aesthetic strictures against personal exposure and was clearly ambivalent. Watching Lowell at work in Life Studies, dramatically flouting the principles of impersonality, stirred her up. She wrote to Peter Taylor in early 1958 that she was appalled at the direction in which Lowell’s work was heading: “You will have read Cal’s new poems in Partisan Review. I cannot think why they were published. He has been sick again and I dare say you know this too. I feel terribly sorry for Elizabeth.… The poems made me really very angry, not only with Cal but with all the people that further this obscene egocentricity in him—and, of course, angry with myself for being even now affected by recollections of him.”
It was no surprise that the PR sampler of Lowell’s poems agitated her. The grand proportions of his autobiographical project were clear, and so were its intimate sources. In two of the poems, “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” inspired by his prison term back in 1944, and “To Delmore Schwartz,” a portrait of the winter of 1945 to 1946 in Cambridge, Lowell revealed how high he was prepared to elevate his own experiences; he raised two episodes during his life with Stafford to emblematic historical status. In two more of them, “Man and Wife” and “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” he showed how close to the heart he was prepared to probe. The declamatory confessional style went against all of Stafford’s instincts, but her denunciation perhaps also masked a certain defensiveness. After all, she was notably absent from all the poems, near though they came to her life.
Whether or not Stafford’s reaction to Lowell’s poems directly affected her own work, it seems to have been around this time that she abandoned, at least for a while, her efforts to draw on her past with him for her novel. In turning to her family instead, she was embarking on a project that was grandiose in its own strange way. Her inspiration came in the form of a dream that she took surprisingly seriously. It was as though she hoped that by following half-conscious associations she might find a pathway into terrain that had so far resisted more direct exploration. Stafford had long made a habit of scribbling down fragments of her dreams in stray notebooks and on scraps of paper. More recently she had become a devotee of the Ouija board, entranced by the game of coaxing testimony from unplumbed depths of the mind, a pastime she took quite seriously. Among certain friends, she would pull out the board when she had been drinking, and together they would summon voices, everyone hoping that Liebling wouldn’t intrude, since he firmly disapproved of the séances. Her brother’s name often materialized on the board, his spirit trying to make contact, Stafford was certain. Similarly, the dream that suddenly inspired her new literary project was a quest for her kin. “On a winter night, I dreamed these words,” she jotted down: “ ‘Look anywhere and you will find roots. Samothrace. Gadopolis.’ It was then revealed to me, through an intelligence existing outside me in the upper air, rather like a disembodied history professor, that my Scotch ancestors had arrived at the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde only in the seventeenth century and that they had come there by a circuitous route from Samothrace.”
Stafford seized on this strange message as a guide for her next project, which she aimed to pursue alongside her novel. “My dreams are … rarely so instructive as this one or, indeed, so autobiographical,” she explained in some notes. “I was pleased that after years of serving me nothing but travesty and tomfoolery my unconscious mind had at last yielded up something I could cogitate and, conceivably, check.” She knew it all sounded outlandish and took pleasure in the oddity of her enterprise. Her literary goal was as counterintuitive as her inspiration: “I am going to put this material to two uses: the provable and factual aspects of it I am incorporating into a novel; the mythical, the fictitious parts of it will comprise a work of non-fiction.” In the end, her curious investigations blurred into her continuing efforts to reshape her novel. Her mythological memoir never fully materialized, though some friends saw tantalizing pieces.
Before she was ready to write anything, however, she had research to do. The dream led her first to amateur genealogical sleuthing, something this would-be orphan had never imagined herself doing. She wrote letters to relatives, asking for information and memories of the McKillop and Stafford clans before and after they had come to America. Her inquiries didn’t bear much fruit, but what news she received she used to buttress her long-standing archetypes of her ancestors: the adventurous Staffords, the deadly prim McKillops, “plain, thrifty, law-loving United Presbyterians who went to church all day on Sunday and read Foxes Book of Martyrs with outraged pleasure.”
Stafford then moved on to slightly more scholarly investigations, dabbling in the archaeological findings of Phyllis Williams Lehmann and Karl Lehmann, director of the excavations on Samothrace. Again her method relied on intuitive associations rather than rigorous study. With her eyes closed, she opened Samothrace, the Ancient Literary Sources, the first volume in a series about the dig, and came upon a discussion of exporting rites involving Demetore and Core to an island near Britain. “Why shouldn’t the island have been Arran?” Stafford asked, undaunted by the unprovability of her hypothesis. She plunged ahead, making other tenuous connections. Excitedly she linked Core, the goddess, and Corrie, a village on Arran, and Chora, the main village on Samothrace. Her reaction when that thread snapped was calmly to acknowledge the pre-posterousness of all her speculation, and then to carry on with it anyway: “I learned to my disappointment that Core simply means ‘maiden,’ Corrie means ‘cauldron,’ and Chora is no more than the word for ‘village.’ No matter, I was by now deep in my myth and so, indeed, was my husband.”
When Liebling left for Europe in the fall of 1959 to cover the British elections, Stafford was ready to go with him and follow her fantasy even further. The plan was for her to go to Scotland by herself first and then head for mainland Greece and Samothrace with Liebling. On the eve of their departure, she got a letter from Karl Lehmann that helped put the adventure i
n a perspective that suited Stafford’s own inchoate but obviously high expectations for her bizarre project. “As an old student of Greek mythology, I am much amused with your ancestral dream,” Lehmann wrote in answer to a letter in which Stafford had evidently described her quest. “I have often wondered how long it takes for a legend deriving mortals from divine or heroic ancestry to form itself, and what the processes involved are. I now see that dreams, poetic imagination, and adventurous travels all play their part in it, and that it might just happen within one person’s lifetime.” Taking that somewhat jocular comment as the imprimatur of expertise, Stafford noted down that she “felt now that I had been issued a legal hunting license.”
Traveling was, as usual for Stafford, an ordeal—especially a grim boat ride to the Isle of Arran in the early morning. But once there, she was greeted by shocks of recognition, which were really what she had come to find: she had transformed the search for a home from the metaphorical theme it was in so much of her fiction into an actual undertaking. On a stroll through the main village, she was taken aback by the sight of a nine- or ten-year-old girl tying her shoelaces. “I was at the castle gates before I knew who she was: she was the replica of myself as I had been in grammar school and she and I were one, pausing in the early autumn sun to re-do the shoelace that presently would come undone again and catapult us to our knees to wound us freshly.” It was a freighted image of vulnerable childhood, and Stafford was excited but also unnerved by the exposure of her identity as she stumbled upon so many familiar faces: