by Ann Hulbert
In the next few days, I was to meet my skeleton and its integument many more times, sometimes as they had been and sometimes as they were to become. One off-islander, a salty old topper in the public room of the Corrie hotel, observed to me that I looked a true Arranite. The hallucination, though interesting and exciting, was unseating: it was like coming face to face with the ghost of a stillborn twin of whom I had never heard.
She then rejoined Liebling, and they flew to Athens and from there sailed for Samothrace, where they seem to have had a very good time, guided around the island by a young Greek with whom they became friends. After her Arran adventure, Stafford wrote a letter to her agent, James Oliver Brown, brimming with an optimism she hadn’t felt in a long time: “The trip was fantastically, thrillingly fruitful.… If I don’t get a story out of this, I’m not and never have been a writer.”
She and Liebling came back inspired to write, only to be disappointed. The early 1960s turned out to be less fruitful, certainly for Stafford, and they could no longer claim that distracting companionship was the main obstacle to work. They were drifting apart somewhat, but not into solitary productivity. Liebling was discouraged by the comparatively poor sales of his books, worried about money, and felt less and less well as kidney troubles and gout took their toll. In the summer of 1960 he went by himself to do more work on Between Meals at the house in East Hampton, Long Island, that he had bought with his second wife.
That same summer Stafford headed out to Reno on an assignment for Horizon to write about the filming of The Misfits, and she stopped for a visit with her sister Mary Lee in Hayden. That was a calm reunion, and Stafford’s analysis of why it went smoothly perhaps sheds some light on her literary struggles. “My weekend in the bosom of my family wasn’t really bad at all,” she wrote to Nancy Flagg Gibney. “I like my sister in her own house but can’t stand her in mine—I can slip back into my western girlhood with no trouble at all, but she is completely irrelevant to my eastern adulthood.” It was linking her past and her present that posed the real problems, and as she was leaving she sounded anxious about her still-unfinished work: “Really, when I come back, I’d like to settle down to Samothrace and the novel and not interrupt these two projects until I’m finished.”
Such purposeful declarations were common (and often well publicized: in 1960 a magazine called the Griffin announced that Stafford’s novel, billed as a sequel to Boston Adventure, was due out the following spring). She had reason to hope she might face fewer distractions from her work. She was spending less time gallivanting with Liebling and his friends, and in a letter to Peter Taylor, she emphasized her sense of estrangement from her old literary circle: “It’s been so long since I’ve seen any specifically literary people. To be sure I hear about them—hear about Cal all the time and how Philip Rahv and Allen and everybody else has taken a new lease on life now that he’s got a new girl and he and Elizabeth for the dozenth time are talking divorce.” But the truth was that Stafford was not close to done with her novel or with her Samothrace project. As in the past, comparative peace was not as conducive to work as she had hoped.
Instead, she seemed to feel dispirited by her isolation, and by her own sense of inertia. As if to compensate, in 1962 she stirred up unhelpful commotion with her publishers: she decided to break with her editor at Random House, Albert Erskine, whom she had owed a manuscript for seven years, and to sign up with Robert Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Erskine was an old friend from Southern Review days, and it was clear from the drama of the rift that Stafford was projecting her sense of failed promise onto him. She explained in a letter that she wanted to be released from her contract “for a number of reasons,” and went on to say that “the only one that needs to be stated is that, in spite of all our making a joke of it, I have an eccentric but ineradicable sense of being still your not very competent secretary, subject to scolding and I hate being scolded.… Nor can I help feeling very strongly that this has contributed to my block.” It was all rather implausible, as she half acknowledged in this letter (but forgot as their correspondence heated up): Erskine had in fact been a studiously unaggressive editor. In bitterly recalling her secretary days, she was really lamenting her stalled career, not his scoldings.
Later that spring she signed a contract with Farrar, Straus and Cudahy for twelve thousand dollars, seven thousand dollars to buy her way out of her Random House contract, five thousand dollars for new work. The deadline for her novel was now set in January 1965; a collection of short stories, to be titled Bad Characters, was due in 1964. There was also talk of her Samothrace project, but her new publishers were less excited about it than she. “Robert [Giroux] is very worried about the Greek-Scotland book (this is very much off the record),” James Oliver Brown wrote to her. “They want a novel and it is a novel for which they are gambling.” Gambling was an accurate though not very kind way to put it: hopes, Stafford’s included, were hedged. She kept a low literary profile over the next several years, though she gave a very visible boost to another career, convincing the jury of the National Book Awards on which she served in 1962 that a novel called The Moviegoer by an unknown novelist named Walker Percy in Louisiana should win the prize. The unexpected award caused a stir, including the charge that it was all really Liebling’s, not Stafford’s, doing. It was true that Liebling had alerted her to the book, but the novel proved to be one she too was ready to champion—a case of collaborative enthusiasm not unlike the fascination, first Stafford’s and then her husband’s, that had inspired Liebling’s book about that other Louisianan, Earl Long.
Two pieces of Stafford’s own fiction were on their way into print in the early 1960s, but neither was a sign of newfound inspiration. Both were stories that she had done earlier, a weak one called “The Ordeal of Conrad Pardee,” which appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, and “The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies,” a sketch that kept finding a place in various unfinished manuscripts, from In the Snowfall to Parliament of Women. Stafford quietly unearthed it to contribute to a commemorative issue of the Kenyon Review, in honor of John Crowe Ransom, and it was a telling revisiting of her past. The story drew quite directly from her life. It was a rare portrait based on Stafford’s mother, the self-deluding optimist, whose refusal to face the dismal facts of her family’s pinched, provincial life inspired the protagonist, her daughter, to dreams of escape from Colorado, “from the spectacle of her eaten father and from her mother’s bright-eyed lies, from all the maniacal respectability with which the landladies strait-jacketed the life of the town.” A tour de force of descriptive detail and colloquial dialogue, the story showed Stafford at a distance from her autobiographical character, leavening her brutal bitterness with comedy. Stafford downplayed the resuscitation of her story, neglecting even to mention it to her agent, perhaps because it was an all-too-vivid reminder of her failures with her larger project—and because its publication was presided over by the spirit of Ransom, who had predicted great things for her.
By the spring of 1963 Liebling too, increasingly ill, had sunk into a depression and was having trouble with his writing. They had moved to a much smaller apartment on West Tenth Street (rent on their grand Fifth Avenue apartment had gotten too steep), and life was not the whirl it had been. “For the first time in his life,” Stafford told his biographer, Sokolov, Liebling “developed a real block. Depression was new to him. Looking back on it, I wasn’t sufficiently sympathetic because I had always had depression with me.” Liebling did his best to rally, visiting fight-training camps, despite painful, advanced gout, and then flying to Algeria, planning a “North Africa revisited” piece and pondering an essay on Camus. While there, he wrote to Stafford in the old gallant vein, proposing another European trip together, but acknowledging in his comically direct way that they would hardly be traveling in vigorous style: “I can show you how beautiful and amusing France is,” he promised her, and then continued: “Your letter indicated that I’d find you more of a wreck than I am. Well, we’ll collapse
in each other’s arms.”
The summer trip to Europe was a memorializing tour. Liebling retraced his steps through France, and Stafford searched for her brother’s grave, and they spent some time with Jean Riboud at his spectacular château near Lyons. They returned home in the fall, and Liebling’s depression didn’t lift, though he went into the New Yorker and tried to work. He had in mind a “Wayward Press” column about Kennedy’s assassination, which had shaken them both profoundly. (The Thompsons in Boulder received a long, late-night call of mourning from Stafford.) Intimations of death were clearly very much with Liebling, though he was only fifty-nine, and with Stafford as she watched his decline. On December 21, 1963, he went into the hospital, suffering from pneumonia.
Stafford apparently informed her family, and her father responded with a peculiar letter of sympathy, commenting on his own longevity, not Liebling’s frailty. He said what his daughter had said for years—that his lease on life was perversely long:
Jean, I am now in my 90th year. I ought to be dead but am on the contrary indestructible and hard as nails. My mother your Grandmother Stafford often told me “John you are too ornery to live and too ornery to die a natural death. You will have to be shot or hanged. Either is too good for you.” She was a woman of discernment, Jean.… Well, my dear, this isn’t the sort of letter a man should be writing his daughter when her troubles may be too great and too real to be borne.
The letter must have been extremely unsettling. It echoed not only Jean’s death wish for him, but also her own fear about herself, which she had confessed to her doctors: that she too was perversely indestructible. The reminder of her inescapably bleak heritage could hardly have come at a worse time: the letter arrived shortly after her husband died on December 28, and she was left alone in life yet again.
Her father seemed to sense what a disturbing message he had sent, for he wrote again right after Liebling’s death. It was another confession of his failings, but in this letter real distress replaced the stylized self-indictment:
Please forgive me in what I now know that letter inflicted. However that is a large order. Forgiving a man like me calls for more than can be asked of anyone. All my life I have been a pain and a disappointment to all those who had every right to expect every thoughtfulness on my part.
I have been a shock to everyone: in a word the Laughing Jackass. Until lately I couldn’t even suspect it. Now the truth comes home to me like a thousand [sic] of brick. So don’t anyone feel sorry for me. I freely chose my way. But know this Jean, and this for sure:—
This is a good life anyhow, no matter what we may have made of it or imagine we have made of it. We go our separate ways. A few of us are wise enough to choose wisely, most of us are wise enough to let Fortune to be our guide, only a few bone heads like myself deliberately do go the way prescribed for the Idiots from the Dawn of Time and choose it more or less knowingly.
Well enough of this:—
Without Joe you will be lost for a while at least.
In a postscript, he added, “My dear Jean: know that we would all like to help you if only we knew how. Forgive us our ignorance.” A certain reproach perhaps lurked there, a puzzled unhappiness about his unresponsive daughter, who impatiently resisted all such gestures from her kin. But there was also a palpable desire to play the comforting father for once. And he knew what obstacles he had to overcome; that was clear from his awkward efforts to lift at least one burden from his daughter, the burden of her guilt and resentment toward him. In his pre-deathbed confession, he took responsibility for the course of his life, and yet also stood by it, a spirited Stafford to the end. It was probably the most compelling image of himself that he could hope to bequeath: the ancient man acknowledging his folly, but valiantly denying the role of victim and implicitly urging his daughter to do the same.
STAFFORD was beyond fond comforting and cheering in the months after Liebling’s death. As she had once written wittily and prophetically to her friend Ann Honeycutt, “You and I might as well make up our minds that we are going through the rest of our lives—or part of it—buttressed up by doctors, and I know of no better buttressers. We certainly want no family buttressing in on their terms—and that is the only way they would do it—and the friends we admire are largely of such collapsible material themselves they can’t be counted on for any sustained work. Further, they are all amateurs, and when we blow, we need the pros in.…” True to her own prescriptions, Stafford summoned her doctor, Dr. Thomas Roberts, who admitted her to New York Hospital in early January 1964, just after Liebling’s death. She hadn’t blown dramatically, but he described her as “drinking, run-down, and depressed” and listed plenty of problems: a benign gastric ulcer, chronic malnutrition, bronchitis, “reactive depression with excessive alcohol intake,” and fibrocystic disease in one breast. James Oliver Brown wrote to her full of relief that she was in medical hands: “I’m so very glad you are going into hospital. You are worn out. You must get a rest and get out from under this strain or you are going to crack.” Her treatment was hardly high-tech medicine; for sixteen days she dried out and was served real meals in the protective confines of the hospital, which must have seemed even more protective than usual, given the emptiness that awaited her in the world outside.
When she was released, she was well equipped with medicine and well supervised by Dr. Roberts: she was on a regimen of Antabuse (an antialcohol drug) and had tranquilizers to help her sleep and antidepressants to raise her spirits. But she was ill equipped with plans and energy. She had to move from the Tenth Street apartment but didn’t know where she would go. February and March were grim months, and on April 5 while she was having lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club, she was seized “like a bear” by a pain that ran through her upper body. Now she had truly blown: it was mild heart failure, and she was taken by ambulance back to New York Hospital, where she stayed for five weeks.
Feeling thoroughly bereft, Stafford seemed more than half ready to follow Liebling. Months after the worst of her ordeals was over, she wrote to Hightower and itemized her physical travails: along with the heart attack, she had suffered a gallbladder attack and been stricken with pancreatitis, which reanimated an old ulcer—and all this had happened only two days after she emerged from the Hospital for Special Surgery, where she had a tumor removed from her foot and a calcium deposit from her wrist. But the real trauma, she told him, had taken place in the soul. “It was interesting,” she said in the calm of retrospect, “and I learned one thing: the spirit gives up easy as pie, it’s the flesh that fights. I have always suspected this and now I know for sure.” It was evidently a formulation she used with another old friend, for it surfaced more than a decade later in Lowell’s poem “Jean Stafford, a Letter,” in Day by Day (1977); “we learn the spirit is very willing to give up,” he wrote, echoing his ex-wife’s revelation, “but the body is not weak and will not die.”
Stafford was well versed in the complexity of the drama between flesh and spirit. The disenchanted mind, this practiced hypochondriac knew, had the power to undermine the body; but in its turn the body, with its demands and desires, could stubbornly distract the mind from its dreams of escape. That contest had been the theme of perhaps her best story, “The Interior Castle,” and it returned as the theme that preoccupied her during her illness and recovery. Among her many visits to hospitals, this one seems to have stood out as a formative and strangely inspiring interlude—not unlike her painful stay in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge after her car crash with Lowell, and her retreat to Payne Whitney after the collapse of their marriage.
She was indeed “lost for a while,” as her father had predicted, but she was clearly struggling to find some new ways of putting her disorientation into prose. Though it is hard to tell when the work was actually done, much of the labor on the different versions of her novel, alternately called The Parliament of Women and The State of Grace, seems to reflect what she took to be a brush with death during the spring after Liebling died. Her dra
fts show her trying to give some objective form to terrifying subjective experience, as her body and spirit resisted but also courted defeat.
In the remnants of The Parliament of Women, Stafford continually circled around a struggle either to accept or escape the world, a struggle in which the mind and body were now uneasy allies, now enemies. Picking up with Miss Pride’s death, she focused on Sonie’s dilemma as she faced a future without her oppressive patron, searching in the dark for some sense of home: “In the spring I lived in a nebulous atmosphere of homesickness, the more distracted and the more saddened because I had never known, in all my life, what was the home I was sick with longing for, or whose were the faces and the voices that my nostalgia craved to redeem.” Here Stafford experimented with different versions of the “red room” image that had emerged in Boston Adventure, for that was the closest Sonie could come to comfort. Not so secretly, she desired oblivion, suffering from a disease that Stafford described as both physical and mental: “My disappointment was second nature,” the passive girl confessed, “an incurable and bothersome disease that didn’t hurt but so sapped my strength that I had not the energy to change my life.” Her lethargic body accommodated her drifting mind, and she retreated into her comfortably insulated chamber. “What commended [the room] so dearly to me was the quiet and the red of the dusk that imbued it.… Here I was not required to emulate or compete or to contribute.”
Shifting to the saga of Sonie’s troubled courtship with and then marriage to Philip, Stafford aimed for more social vividness and sketched in a claustrophobic community clearly modeled on Westport, which she called Lymington, Connecticut. She also introduced a more concrete, material source for Sonie’s spiritual disorientation: alcohol, Sonie’s vice as well as the plague of all her friends, a “distressful secret” that she at first tried to hide from Philip. Stafford interwove the strands of two stories, Philip’s increasing interest in a neighbor named Daisy, and Sonie’s increasing passivity—stories that eventually coalesced in “An Influx of Poets”—but she couldn’t shape a larger tapestry from them. Instead, some of the most interesting, though always fragmentary, writing returned again and again to the interior of Sonie’s head, which Stafford evoked as a scene of suffocating terror. In one of those passages, Stafford managed to sum up vividly not only Sonie’s hell but also her own literary entrapment. The speaker was Sonie, but her haunted monologue could be Stafford’s description of her own endless, futile attempts to find some way to illuminate her pain in prose: