by Ann Hulbert
AS 1967 OPENED, Stafford sent her agent a dramatically bleak letter: “Things grow grimmer and grimmer. Anger alone keeps me alive.” Settling down in her Springs house the year before had not been a cozy retreat. She had had plenty of physical ailments (including pinched nerves, which meant an immovable arm), and she had done little writing. She was very upset at her doctor’s instructions to quit smoking, and then at her utter failure to buck the habit, which was clearly dangerous in more ways than one: dropped cigarettes had already set two fires in her bedroom. Judging her acutely depressed, Dr. Roberts advised her to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Jacques M. Quen, and though the sessions didn’t last very long, his impressions of her state of mind are revealing. His general diagnosis echoed those of countless doctors before him, and of Stafford herself: “There is a markedly passive, perhaps even a masochistic element prominent in her personality structure.” But in a report back to Dr. Roberts, he went on to remark on the unexpected high-spiritedness she also conveyed: “I am intrigued by a sense of vitality and energy which she transmits, despite the severity of her depression.”
It was thanks to that energy that she ventured out into the world in 1967. She managed to be quite funny about one brief emergence into the limelight that summer, a passing appearance in a Time cover story about Lowell, in which—to her surprise—she found little to get angry about. (She had been “intense, beautiful, a gifted writer of fiction” when he met her.) Far from betraying any pangs at the gulf that loomed between them, she wittily played the part of the scrounging ex-wife of the famous poet in a letter to Peter Taylor about the article:
I was, to tell the truth, quite sorry that I came off so well; I had partly hoped that they’d be so scurrilous about me that I could sue them for huge sums. (There seemed to me a note of reproof in the statement that we wrote in separate rooms. How else is it done?) I counted nine factual errors just in the part I figured in.
Stafford’s real entry back into the literary bustle and city life came in the fall, and it was not so diverting. No huge sums forthcoming from anywhere, she had agreed to teach creative writing in the master of fine arts program that had just been founded at Columbia, and she had rented an apartment on East Eighty-seventh Street for the year. She was evidently more than a little ambivalent about what lay ahead, as she wrote to her agent at the start of September:
It has been a most monstrous summer (including for me a savage attack of peripheral neuritis thought to have been brought on by arsenic poisoning from sprayed fruits or vegetables—I ended up in the local hospital sobbing)…. I dread Columbia and in certain ways I dread New York. In others I greatly look forward to being back. Lately I have been trying out my city shoes, changing them every hour; my wig is extremely successful, but I’ve nothing at all to put on myself between my feet and my head.
She was the rural lady in a dither about going to town. (“I am so rustic,” she wrote to Nancy Flagg Gibney, “that when I go into town once in a blue moon my feet hurt and I am afraid of the traffic and my clothes look as if I’d snatched them off my cleaning woman.”) It was a manner that could hardly have been less in step with the times. Prim in her city shoes and gloves, she was an almost comic contrast to her Columbia colleague Edward Dahlberg, who, though not young, had a much more fashionable reputation: an eccentric writer admired by the Beats, he had been described by Esquire in the early 1960s as one of the heroes of the American literary underground. It was quickly clear that Stafford and her students were confronting each other across an enormous divide, and though she listened with her typical curiosity to the cadences of their complaints, she couldn’t begin to imagine responding to them. She wryly recalled her experience several years later:
“I have nothing to say about ‘A Rose for Emily,’ ” said Y one day. “I read two paragraphs, and it didn’t turn me on. I don’t dig Faulkner.” And a few weeks later, X said, “Of course I didn’t read Heart of Darkness. Do you seriously think I’d read anything by a pig who wrote a book titled The Nigger of the Narcissus?”
I was stopped in my tracks: I could be neither collaborator nor disputant, and my role of teacher was canceled out, as were Y’s and X’s roles of students. I was a servant who had not divined what services I was to render.
In the calmest of times, Stafford had not found teaching easy, and now her ordeals in the classroom were a sign of more than professional unease. They captured her broader sense of alienation from the surrounding culture. When students staged a sit-in during the spring of 1968, the turmoil roused Stafford to some general reflections on the state of society that revealed her growing cultural conservatism. It was part of her curmudgeonly style to strike reactionary poses, but her declarations were usually more rhetorical than substantive. Now, in a letter to Peter Taylor, she made a more serious effort to gather her thoughts, and the result was a surprising, sweeping defense of the institution of the family. “I am out of my element in a debate like this one, primarily because I believe our society is an utterly decadent one,” she began, meaning the society in convulsions around her:
And I believe so because I believe any society is decadent in which the family is not the basic unit—the basic moral, social, economic unit.… In opposition to this idea is that of individual freedom. The rights of the individual must be put before everything else! But the family is just as organic as the individual, say I,—more so—and its rights should be put first. How can one speak of the brotherhood of man if one does not really know what a brother is? Of course families cause us great pain, but unless we are decadent we must be willing to suffer for principles. Today more than ever before, we can know what a permanent relationship is only through our families.… We have abandoned the ideal of the family, which is humanity, for the ideal of the individual, which is not quite human.… It is not enough to think of a man or a woman simply as a lover. A man must also be a son, a brother, a father. A woman must be also a daughter, a sister, a mother. Otherwise, we are all either enemies or lovers, and I don’t believe that. I won’t have life so simple minded.
It was an analysis that she elaborated a couple of years later in an article for McCall’s about Charles Manson and his followers, whom she took as an extreme specimen of the anomie to which society had succumbed. “It is not entirely surprising that the girls in California drifted into Manson’s community, out of the instinctive (though often inadmissible) need to belong to someone and to own someone, to have brothers and sisters and, above all, a father—to have, in short, kinsmen under the skin if not by blood,” she wrote in “Love Among the Rattlesnakes.” “The horrendous perversion of the moral code and of the traditions of protectiveness, guidance, and support that accrued to Manson as pater-familias was not just a cry for love but a desperate shriek in the wilderness.” Here she made clearer that in appealing to the traditional family, she did not intend to romanticize it, but simply to claim it as the best available civilizing force: “The structure of the family, of whom the woman is the architect, has been weakened to the point of debility, and in our waifdom, our orphanhood, we sue total strangers—we sue, indeed, our enemies—to be our teachers and our protectors. Nothing obliges us to love our parents or our cousins; and, so far as I know, no authority has ever proposed we like them; but, plainly, the individual must be nurtured within an edifice, within a form.”
Stafford defending the family as a source of stability and strength is a long way from the young Stafford battling against her clan, and a long way from the novelist struggling to explore the darker side of kinship. There is a strange undercurrent of self-denunciation in Stafford’s indictment of rebellious youth for overthrowing the family. After all, she had abandoned her own family and championed a ruthless individuality in the face of their persistent efforts to claim some kind of permanent relationship with her. She had spent much of her life chafing at the roles of daughter and sister, and motherhood had never been a very serious prospect for her; her bond with her brother had not been as continuously close as she suggested in retrospe
ct. In her concluding assessment of the dire implications of the sixties ethos in her letter to Taylor, she was perhaps alluding to her own decisive youthful break with her family: “The direct appeal to youth for youth’s sake will always be the making of just so many little Hitlers” she wrote. “They love nobody but themselves and their cry is I want mine!” Years before, Stafford had escaped from home to Hitlerian Germany, where—to judge by the ordeals she arranged for her autobiographical character Gretchen Marburg in Autumn Festival—she had been trapped by egocentric desires and, though appalled by Nazi youth in Heidelberg, had been profoundly adrift herself.
Now Stafford was adamant about sticking to her own, anachronistic cause. The student rebellion at Columbia in the spring of 1968, however disorienting, did little to intimidate her into playing along. On the contrary, as she contemplated returning to teach in the fall, she was emphatically uncompromising, as she explained in a letter to Frank McShane, the director of the creative writing program:
Peter Taylor and I talked the other night … and, as I understand it, you have asked him to meet with the students before his talk so that the students can tell him what they want him to talk about.… This policy of appeasement is, to me, intolerable and I will have no part of it. I intend to talk to my students about the short stories of Chekhov, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Kafka and so on. I intend to make absolutely no reference to the troubles.… If I find a switch-blade at my jugular, if my ears are assailed by rude language, if, in short, I find myself in the eye of a storm irrelevant to education, to writing, to civilization, and to my life and my work, then I shall have no choice but to quit the premises.
That letter made clear the underlying consistency of Stafford’s emergence as a cultural conservative in the scattered journalism that by now eclipsed her fiction. Though her traditionalist discontentment with contemporary culture consorted somewhat uneasily with her own rebellious, bohemian youth, and though her defense of conventional decorum looked a little odd in light of her own psychological turmoil, there had been a steady allegiance at work. From the outset Stafford had felt the need to embrace order in the struggle with unruly experience, and to buck the tide of majority opinion—however much tension was entailed.
As usual, there was plenty of tension. When her first year at Columbia was over in the spring, she didn’t feel much relief. She returned to East Hampton only to face more physical ordeals (further trouble with pinched nerves) and to continue to vent her spleen at the state of the world. A letter she wrote that summer to the local newspaper, the East Hampton Star, is a typical example of the humorously peevish journalistic manner she increasingly adopted and the arch populism it expressed. (It was the sort of letter she often had Miss Stackpole pen for Miss Stafford.) In it, a sampling of her characteristic crotchets was on display:
I have it in for all public utilities, for all businesses, for all businesses that use computers, for all petitioners for all causes who come to my door, have the unconscionable brass to call me on the telephone, and fill my letter box with their matter. I am down on Mark Rudd, John Wayne, Cassius Clay, modern inconveniences, the United States postal service, The New York Times with its interminable essays which I believe are called “think pieces,” and its wholehearted participation in the debasement of the English language.
While she was cultivating her out-of-date image—often wittily, sometimes more indignantly—she was also keeping track of Lowell, who was energetically abreast of the times. It was easy enough to follow him during the late 1960s when, as his biographer has put it, his “public persona achieved its remarkable apotheosis.” He had been protesting prominently—refusing to accept an invitation to the White House from President Johnson, marching on the Pentagon—and now he plunged into electoral politics, campaigning with Eugene McCarthy. Though he must have seemed to be on the other side of the barricades most of the time, Stafford was for the most part fondly humorous, and sarcastic, about Lowell’s high profile. “It is a little hard to keep up with R. T. S. L., Jr. these days,” she wrote to Taylor in the spring of 1968, “but I’ll try to run this clipping service as efficiently as possible. I like the image of a president-maker lolling about with his loafers off (you can imagine what condition they’re in) and fetching up with that definition of acedia.” It all seemed outlandish, but in a half-familiar way. “The whole business sounds like the mythology of the Wuberts,” she commented, remembering Lowell’s role as Arms of the Law, the sheriff-like bear who scripted elaborate parts for all of his friends in the game of “berts” that Lowell and Stafford had played during their marriage.
Amid all the turmoil, there was one interlude of peace, when her friend Jean Riboud spirited her away for a visit to his château in France. There she escaped the rude modern world for a brief taste of old-fashioned gentility. As she wrote in an article several years later, “Why I Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” an amusing catalog of her horrifying travails every time she set forth from her beloved house, her visit to France was her last trip abroad. It had been so uncharacteristically painless that she took it as an omen not to press her luck: “I doubt that I will ever go abroad again, unwilling to challenge that record and come a mighty cropper.”
As she went on to say in the article, she was occasionally tempted against her better judgment to venture out in her own country. Invited to participate on some panel or other, “compulsively I accept because, I tell myself, I will see a part of the country hitherto unknown to me; the fee is attractive; the date is so far in the future that it will never come.” Instead, she found the experiences yet more rude confrontations with an uncongenial world. “Far from broadening, travel in this unenlightened age has narrowed my mind to a hairsbreadth. Chatty seatmates on planes, trains and buses have made me misanthropic; motels and hotels with no or with lackadaisical service have made me undemocratic.” Her experiences at Columbia were her most extended exposure to the unenlightened age, and on her return to teaching in the fall of 1968, she found herself even more out of her element than she had felt the year before. Eager to be back in East Hampton, she arranged to have another writer take her place for the spring term.
Stafford’s retreat roughly coincided with the sudden emergence of her fiction in print. Her story “The Philosophy Lesson” appeared in The New Yorker in November of 1968. It was apparently drawn from work she had done long before on In the Snowfall, which had since then migrated into the autobiographical novel that was still giving her so much trouble. The story was set at a university clearly modeled on her alma mater, and its plot also linked it to In the Snowfall, though Joyce had been renamed Cora Savage. Like the protagonist of The Parliament of Women, she confronted a familiar, Lucy McKee–inspired trauma: while posing for an art class, Cora heard the news of a fellow student’s suicide. In exploring Cora’s consciousness as she meditated on the death and watched the snow start to fall, Stafford included a moment reminiscent of the bilocation that she was experimenting with in her new novel—the disorienting shift between vivid present and dreamlike past. But in this version, rather than aiming for unsettling disjunction, she smoothed it into a relatively tame moment of memory. Looking out at the snow, Cora was suddenly transported back to her childhood in Adams by thoughts of the danger she had associated with winter when the sleds came out: “Once Cora lost control and went hurtling into a barbed-wire fence. It seemed to her, on reflection, that she had slowly revolved on her head, like a top, for a long time before the impact. Then, too frightened to move lest she find she could not, she had lain there waiting for her brother.… Afterward she had been afraid of the ski jumps.…” The vision of cold loneliness haunted her again as she found herself all too able to imagine what had driven her fellow student to death. “A darkness beat her like the wings of an enormous bird and frantic terror of the ultimate hopelessness shook her until the staff she held slipped and her heart seemed for a moment to fail.” This story about the terrors of an isolated consciousness within an alienating body was a carefully shaped work,
whose very artfulness served to underscore the dangers of disintegration.
Stafford’s appearance in The New Yorker after so long was soon followed by an announcement in Time of a forthcoming novel (“her first … in seventeen years”), a misleading report, though her public revival did continue. The Parliament of Women was nowhere in sight, but in February of 1969 her Collected Stories was published. Here, too, Stafford was obviously riding on old work: almost all of the stories had been published at least a decade earlier. It was a consolidation of her career that clearly meant a lot to her, though it was also a potentially difficult reemergence. She hadn’t managed to produce much since those stories, and meanwhile literary tastes had moved significantly beyond the sensibilities and standards that informed much of her work. But Stafford betrayed no apprehension, in fact took the occasion to emphasize her nonconformist, out-of-date literary allegiances. Studiously resisting any “relevant” packaging of her reentry into a literary scene that she disparaged as undecorous, she paid homage to Twain and James in the author’s note, borrowed from those unfashionable mentors for the section titles of the collection, featured the elegant New Yorker in a cover collage of the magazine’s pages, and dedicated the book to Katharine White.
Her confidence was well rewarded. However unenlightened she judged the times, she herself was judged very favorably. Enthusiastic reviews appeared promptly and prominently. The daily New York Times declared, “Everything that we desire from a collection of short stories, from the art of fiction, in fact, can be found in this gathering of Jean Stafford’s work”; Guy Davenport in the Sunday Book Review heralded it as “an event in our literature,” and others followed suit. Early in 1970 Stafford was at last elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, after years of not quite making it. When the most unexpected recognition of all, a Pulitzer Prize, was announced that spring, Stafford was taken by surprise, and so, apparently, was the New York Times. The newspaper’s editorial about the awards—after saluting Seymour Hersh’s prize for reporting on the My Lai massacre and noting that “in the arts and letters section, the judges appeared to be aware of what’s new”—was caught up short by the anachronistic air of the fiction prize winner. “And if Jean Stafford’s stories are more traditional than adventuresome,” the editorialist rather lamely observed, “they are surely among the best of their kind being written today.” Stafford herself commented in an interview on the incongruous timing of her elevation. “I find it awfully heartening that a writer as traditional as I can be recognized,” she said—and then took the opportunity to vent her typical impatience with the prevailing aesthetic: “Do we really need a poem about a banana that is set in type to form the shape of a banana?”