by Ann Hulbert
Still, Stafford thought she had succeeded in her journalistic pilgrimage, even if readers were less sure about what to make of her profoundly unsympathetic portrait of Mrs. Oswald. “It seemed to me and it seemed to the editors I worked with, and it seemed to my friends,” she wrote in “Truth in Fiction,” “that I had presented the case of Mrs. Oswald without slant or analysis, and that the irony derived from the facts rather than from any commentary.” But there was a note of defensiveness in her claim. In fact, the book showed her succumbing to a version of the same trouble that dogged her in her novel: she couldn’t seem to get her sensibility out of the picture. If the problem in her fiction was that self-loathing deadened her imagination as she tried to conjure with characters too close to herself, here the problem was her obvious loathing of a woman with whom she had nothing in common. Hardly impartial or invisible, Stafford could not resist the opportunity to comment witheringly on her hapless subject and to bemoan her own deep fatigue (“I was tired and headachy”) during her nine-hour ordeal.
It was an unfortunate pose. Rather than letting Mrs. Oswald’s tape-recorded outpouring speak for itself, Stafford constantly interrupted the bizarre monologue to add snobbish visual detail and heavy-handed ridicule of the malapropisms, grammatical lapses, and other embarrassments and inanities of Mrs. Oswald’s homely efforts at high rhetoric on behalf of her son. The woman’s often incoherent harangue was plainly outlandish: “they” in Washington had decided that her son was the sole, evil assassin, Marguerite Oswald claimed, but if only they would listen to her, she would reveal the “truths” to set the story straight: “I’ll write a book and the title of it will be One and One Make Two or This and That. Oh, I could write three books or five books! I could write books and books on what I know and what I have researched.” Out of the haze of misinformation and non sequiturs, Mrs. Oswald’s case came down to a pathetically bizarre defense, which made for unsettling comic reading:
Now maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin.… But does that make him a louse? No, no! Killing does not necessarily mean badness. You find killing in some very fine homes for one reason or another. And as we all know, President Kennedy was a dying man. So I say it is possible that my son was chosen to shoot him in a mercy killing for the security of the country. And if this is true, it was a fine thing to do and my son is a hero.
Stafford’s piece was finally a cruel portrait, executed pitilessly. As if Mrs. Oswald’s own deranged self-exposure were not damning enough, Stafford insisted on intruding in the role of merciless judge. As Martha Gelhorn suggested in her review of A Mother in History, Stafford seemed under pressure to proclaim her own eminently sensible perspective in the face of Mrs. Oswald’s megalomaniacal persecution complex: “Perhaps Miss Stafford puts herself in the picture too often, as if to remind herself that she is still there, still sane; and this is a journalistic error.”
The heartless mockery of a misguided mother is a curious permutation of Stafford’s youthful plan, sketched out in letters to Hightower decades before, to transcribe the damning evidence of her parents’ benighted vision of life. She had been avid to ridicule her own mother’s clichéd expressions and hopelessly banal, optimistic outlook, much as she made fun of Mrs. Oswald’s refusal to face the facts; and she had listened intently to plenty of her father’s long accounts of conspiratorial persecution by “them.” As she had half admitted to Hightower back then, fear lurked behind her ruthless project—fear that there were deep bonds and similarities linking her to the pathetic parents she desperately hoped to escape. In her Oswald piece, she expressed the same apprehensive curiosity about the ineradicable traces of kinship. The quest for the roots of character, she explained, was the motive for the profile:
I had come to Texas to see Mrs. Oswald because she is, as she was frequently to tell me, “a mother in history,” and while she remains peripheral to the immediate events of the Dallas killings, she is inherent to the evolution of the reasons for them. She is inherent, that is, if we accept (as I do) the premise that her son had something to do with the assassination and accept the further premise that the child is father of the man: we need to know the influences and accidents and loves and antipathies and idiosyncrasies that were the ingredients in making up the final compound.
… Relatives are often (perhaps more often than not) the last people on earth to know anything about each other. Still, there was the possibility, and I had come down from Connecticut to explore it.
A version of the same quest motivated the novel she was having such trouble writing. Where did she come from, what had been the influences and accidents and loves and antipathies and idiosyncrasies that had helped to shape her? What secrets might those ignorant relatives, especially her father, hold? To ask the questions in a radically different context, for the Oswald article, was perhaps a relief of sorts. The writing of the piece apparently proceeded smoothly and promptly, and Stafford also expeditiously enlarged it into a short book A Mother in History, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux was happy to publish in 1966, even if it wasn’t the work they were waiting for.
STAFFORD HAD BEEN BACK in East Hampton for half a year, settling into a new, rustic life (her Rockefeller grant in hand), when her father died in January of 1966. It was the liberation she had been impatiently awaiting for years, as she had bluntly told even her loyal sisters, who had been shouldering most of the burden of caring for him. But not surprisingly, her reaction to his death was not the simple sense of release she had hoped for. Distance had never been as easy to establish as she liked to pretend. She had resisted her sisters’ pressure to visit him and found every excuse not to write to him, but he was clearly very much on her mind, not least perhaps because she had set herself the task of writing about him. She had begun to help contribute to his support when he was moved, unwillingly, into a nursing home near Marjorie in Oregon, where his health deteriorated quite rapidly. (He apparently suffered several strokes and started rambling incoherently toward the end, and bronchitis made breathing difficult.)
Stafford didn’t go to his funeral, and she proceeded to be the thoroughly recalcitrant daughter and sister. Confronted with the overwhelming fact of her father’s death, she seemed to feel compelled, out of guilt and a fear of facing the loss straight on, to stir up a petty family squabble as a pretext for severing ties. A letter to Peter Taylor, written “in a winter mope” shortly after John Stafford’s death, offers a glimpse of the extent of her guilty conscience and of her ambivalence about the bonds of kinship:
My father died about a week ago. He was an old, old man and in the last month or so, he’d been uncomfortable to the point of awful pain. Up until that time he’d been as peppery as ever and his letters were still crotchety, semi-learned, blasphemous little glades of Mark Twainish kind of wit. He died in Oregon and my Colorado sister was out there with my Oregon sister. If I’ve never told you anything about those two, this is all you need to know: they called collect to tell me that my father had died.… They are wanting in some terribly important human quality. It scares me to death to think that I am too. But now I’m through with both of them. To calculate, at such a time, a toll charge of perhaps $1.75.
It is queer and unproductive to live this completely alone.
The question of the heritability of inhumanity had been the theme guiding her investigations of Mrs. Oswald: Was her discovery of the mother’s chilling absence of empathy a clue to the son’s act? Here Stafford almost ludicrously trivialized the fear of being “wanting in some terribly important human quality” by linking it to her sisters’ reversal of telephone charges, but in fact it was a fear that had haunted her relations with her father for a long time. That was evident in her ruminations in In the Snowfall on Joyce Bartholomew’s father, his misanthropic bitterness as a man and his coldness as a father, and on Joyce’s fears of her own profound detachment. In her letter to Taylor, apparently without any sense of irony, she offered an almost pathetic instance of her susceptibility to precisely the traits she least admired. S
he abstractly admitted the possibility that she was as coldhearted and petty minded as her sisters, but she seemed unaware of her own actual display of just those qualities. If it was astounding that they, “at such a time,” should have called collect, it was hardly less notable that she should have magnified that lapse into cause for a complete rupture. And no sooner had she celebrated the break than she acknowledged the barren isolation she had created for herself.
Stafford was alone in a more profound way than she had been for a long time. She was right that living so completely on her own, as she continued to do in East Hampton, didn’t turn out to be productive, and she was right to characterize her existence as “queer.” But the oddity of it was not entirely new. More than a decade earlier, after her divorce from Oliver Jensen, she had set up house alone in Westport and cultivated the role of the spinsterish literary lady. It had been an old-fashioned pose that covered up a reality that was not in fact so cozy: then Stafford had been quite sick and often drunk. Her style this time was similarly fusty, though a new fierceness began to surface. Her stylized eccentricity looked less like an entertaining act and more like an effort at symbolic caricature of the kind she had once undertaken in her fiction.
The fact that she was no longer successfully writing fiction seems to have meant that Stafford became more absorbed than ever before in crafting a protective persona. The reclusive spinster role in the 1950s had served as a playful deflection from her personal troubles, while she was hard at work writing her way out of her literary troubles. She had been more than ready to drop the pose, as her susceptibility to Liebling showed. Now the role was more central to her life, more firmly established every year. And for all of her steadfast rejection of the claims of kinship, avoiding her father’s funeral and feuding with her sisters, the alternately crotchety and demure provincial style that Stafford perfected after Liebling’s death looked like a belated embrace of her “hick” origins. It was as though she was trying to work out some of the themes that thwarted her in her fiction, to find some accommodation with her Colorado past.
A curious loyalty to the memory of her reclusive, embittered father is reflected in her retreat to her Springs house and in much of the indignant writing that emerged from her downstairs study, where, she said, “I wear pants and boots and a green visor and I turn into a journalist.” That was an echo of her descriptions of her father the cowboy free-lancer, pounding away at his old typewriter. Describing her attachment to her haven in the article “East Hampton from the Catbird Seat,” she acknowledged that she, “a Westerner,” was hardly a native, but then spent most of the piece demonstrating that her heart was with the locals and with the other curious characters who had come not to find the chic parties but to flee the ordeals of contemporary urban life. It was an evocation of an eccentric agrarian life not unlike the existence she sometimes described her father aspiring to. Among its great virtues was, she claimed, freedom from conventional sociability. “I can be a grasshopper for two weeks running and then I can be a mole for the next three months. I am not obliged to see anybody who bores me or anybody who disapproves of me and nobody whom I bore and nobody of whom I disapprove is required to keep my company.”
Similarly, when Stafford took off her visor and became a bustling lady of the house, her allegiance to her mother’s domesticity showed through. She was happily preoccupied with homey pastimes like making potpourri and doing needlepoint. She admitted that “I’m a compulsive housekeeper. I even go into corners with Q-tips”—an echo of Shura Marburg’s obsessive poking with hairpins at the dust on the Hotel Barstow furniture. Though Stafford acknowledged that these “explosions of orderliness” were signs of the doldrums, she played down the dark side: “They’re better than staring-into-space depressions.” She was unabashedly house-proud once again, as she had been in Maine: “I give presents to my house—gave it a cedar-closet last year, gave it a new study this year—and when the workmen have finished for the day, we cut up a few touches over a Bud.” Much of Stafford’s renovation entailed gradually turning extra bedrooms in her house into studies to avoid having guests, whereas her mother had been forever looking for more room to sleep another boarder. The effect, ironically, was not so different: whirlwinds of domestic energy, yet no real family hearth. And there were plenty of studies, yet next to no work was getting done in them.
To keep her company in her house, she resurrected an imaginary alter ego, named Henrietta Stackpole after Henry James’s feisty journalist in The Portrait of a Lady, whom she had originally invented when she lived in Westport. Her role then, as Stafford explained Miss Stackpole’s inception, was to be an intermediary with a vulgar world that too often and rudely intruded on her treasured, civilized retreat. This fictional character played the role of secretary, sending out letters under her own name for her refined companion. Stafford pretended that the name had fortuitously sprung to mind, but in fact her amanuensis was more carefully chosen and helps shed light on the persona and perspective that Stafford cultivated during the last decade and a half of her life.
The juxtaposition of Jean Stafford and Henrietta Stackpole showed Stafford at work borrowing from her literary mentors in fashioning a style, this time for her life rather than for her fiction. In appropriating Miss Stackpole as her secretary/alter ego, Stafford was invoking James, but she had picked his most Twain-like character. James himself, in his preface, apologetically explained the uncharacteristic Henrietta as his effort at “the cultivation of the lively,” to counteract the danger of “thinness” in the rest of the refined novel. James’s heroine Isabel Archer gave a fuller account of her blunt friend, whom she appreciated as an exemplar of American virtues for which she felt a real nostalgia. It’s not hard to see why Stafford kindled to Isabel’s portrait of the less-than-ladylike Henrietta Stackpole. “I know enough to feel that she’s a kind of emanation of the great democracy—of the continent, the country, the nation,” Isabel said, defending Henrietta to her cousin Ralph Touchett, who had fled his native ground for England:
I don’t say that she sums it all up, that would be too much to ask of her. But she suggests it; she vividly figures it.… I like the great country stretching away beyond the rivers and across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading till it stops at the green Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta—pardon my similes—has something of that odour in her garments.
Settled in comparative solitude on the eastern tip of Long Island, Stafford was eager to welcome the West back under her roof. As a pair, Stafford and her invented companion encompassed the tensions that had long animated her distinctive style. In the drama that Stafford scripted between the two of them, she juxtaposed the established lady and the combative journalist and played on the contrasts entailed by that paleface-redskin dualism—between refined and colloquial, elitist and populist, retiring and “lively.” The letters that the loyal Miss Stackpole penned for her employer carried Stafford’s own idiosyncratic, indignant voice to extremes, ridiculing the stupidity of her correspondents in a vein that John Stafford would have appreciated.
Yet “Miss Stafford,” who stood behind this blunt amanuensis, was no less outraged by the world, only more detached and polished. The tone of their collaboration—and their common sensibility—is captured in a withering letter Henrietta wrote to a poor young man who had happened to write Stafford for advice about his love life. After a dose of contempt, Miss Stackpole informed him that her employer might find his letter “sufficiently outré to include in her Dunciad which she has been compiling over the past 25 years.” Sent a sexually frank novel by some hapless and apparently none-too-talented writer, with a request to write a blurb for it, Miss Stafford had her secretary respond fiercely; her employer, Miss Stackpole explained, “would undergo a most grievous curdling of the blood” at the prospect. Apparently Stafford was amused enough by the correspondence to send it to several friends, including Ann Honeycutt, who wrote a note back to Stackpole, making fun of her purer-than
-thou employer:
Thank God you are there to protect Miss Stafford. Had that book and title and portrait of the author fallen into those fine, unsullied, but too delicate hands of hers, she might well have swooned away for her last time on this earth and be by now in heaven. I often think—and frequently say—that Miss Stafford is on loan to us poor mortals here below from the saints on high.
The merciless disdain of Misses Stackpole and Stafford is reminiscent of the young Stafford, scathing about Babbitt-infested America in her letters to Hightower soon after she had returned from Germany. But a significant transformation had occurred. Then she had been full of impatience toward her philistine country and family and had dreamed of modernist adventure. Now Stafford was still inveterately opposed to philistinism, but she was more inclined to associate it with the disorder of “this so-called 20th Century” (one of her favorite Waugh phrases) and especially, as she confronted the 1960s, with contemporary turmoil.