by Ann Hulbert
Stafford’s sudden prominence pleased her, though true to her retiring rural-lady style, she liked to play down her success, treating the fanfare as a rude intrusion into her life. “For a few days my privacy was outrageously invaded by telephone calls,” she wrote to Mary Lee, “but now everything has quieted down.” In fact, the flurry over the award did subside relatively quickly, and if she was disappointed, Stafford could also claim she was not at all surprised. Before the Pulitzer she had written caustically to Allen Tate about the complaints of her less sympathetic readers: “I’m now getting very snippy reviews—I’m not ‘relevant,’ I’m not involved with issues, I’m not a Jew and I’m not a Negro, I deal only with the human heart and that has been transplanted.” After the prize, she was invited to be a writer-in-residence briefly at the University of Pennsylvania and was similarly under no illusion about her relevance: “None of them [her students] had ever heard of me and certainly had not read me, but this was understandable enough since neither had their teachers.”
As those declarations suggest, Stafford’s sense of marginality inspired indignation and resignation, depending on her mood and depending on her audience. In the 1970s, in the journalism that now constituted her literary output, she mostly kept her disgruntlement within decorous bounds. “I could wish that the 1970s came to be known as the Age of Order” she wrote in McCall’s as the decade began, and the demure tone and glossy venue were typical. “I would like to see government once again informed by statecraft and education dignified by humanism; I would like to see a straightening up of the language and the removal of rubbishy jargon and solecisms.” Rather than veering into extreme bitterness, she seemed almost consciously to be holding herself in check, carefully taming her personal turmoils, present and past, and curbing her critique of public disarray. Of course, the style was partly the product of the places she was writing for—women’s magazines, for the most part, where she had a hope of making some money. But the gentility of her rage perhaps reflected deeper constraints as well. Stafford knew all too well the direction in which old rural recluses could incline: she had written about addled isolates, and she had known her father.
It was in five lectures that she was invited to give at Barnard in the early spring of 1971 that Stafford gathered up her ruminations on the state of the times. Her ambition was not to work up a systematic discussion. As always, the prospect of the podium inspired real nervousness, and she skirted all pretenses to being anything but an amateur proud of her colloquial touch. The material was derivative of earlier work; she plundered freely from previous journalism (and later she plundered freely from the lectures, reprinting versions of them as articles and spinning off new pieces on the same themes). She gave the series an imposing title, “Tradition and Dissent,” and located a unifying preoccupation in her opening comments: “For the next two weeks I’m going to be talking on a number of subjects, although as I look back on what I’ve written, they all seem to be variations on the same subject: the upheaval of our traditions.” But the titles of her individual lectures are a better clue to the more informal, quaintly old-fashioned cast of her undertaking: “The Felicities of Formal Education,” “The Present Afflictions of the American Language,” “The Teaching of Writing,” “Sense and Sensibility,” and “The Snows of Yesteryear.”
As she had done in the past, beginning with her first public-speaking effort, “The Psychological Novel,” Stafford pursued her themes in an anecdotal, autobiographical manner—all the while shying away from confession. It was sometimes a curious tactic, as it had been in that youthful lecture: she would approach painful truths (back then, psychological breakdown), only to round them out in a resolutely conventional perspective (years earlier, her message was that fiction writers should avoid baring their psyches). Here she explicitly invoked the memory of her father and his curmudgeonly complaints against the times, only to declare her independence from him. He was a “man embattled from his bassinet,” convinced “the world was going to hell in a handbasket.” She professed much more optimism.
Although Stafford did not in fact have very much hopeful to say, she was evidently taken aback when a student who interviewed her for the Barnard Bulletin halfway through the series commented on how bleak the lectures sounded. Stafford hadn’t intended a screed, told the student she feared she had “muffed” the lectures, and spent the interview speaking as a very approachable if unfashionable lady of letters, the edge all but gone from her tone. “The lectures almost seemed a harking back to the nineteenth century,” her interviewer observed, and Stafford replied serenely: “Well, what I’d like to call myself is not a conservative, but a conservationist. I want to preserve everything that is good, dignified, and that is an adornment to the country, including the language.” She emphasized that she was feeling far from fierce: “I don’t feel bitter, I feel satiric,” she explained. “I felt much bitterer when I was younger, but now I’m mellowing. No, that isn’t true. I’ve no way to test myself, because I’ve retired to a sort of hermit’s life, and I get awfully cross when I read the New York Times, but I live such a pastoral life.…” In “Sense and Sensibility” she made the same point, turning it into an implicit critique of the current reverence for youth, a familiar theme: “I look back upon the years of my own young life with a certain admiration and with a certain embarrassment and with no desire whatever to live them over again. I am glad that I was once obliged to be intransigent, but I am even more glad that I am now mollified and slowed down by the obliquities of old age.”
Stafford also did her best to assure her interviewer that her views on the women’s movement were mellower than the student had surmised. She declared that she was “all for equal opportunity. I think it’s shameful that women with the same credentials and the same ability get smaller wages,” said she could not “think that I’ve ever suffered from discrimination by being a woman,” and concluded by emphasizing that it was the style of the debate as much as anything that she objected to: “I, well, I hate noise, and I think this great brouhaha between, who is it, Mailer and Kate Millett … the awful mudslinging … it’s just an ill mannered, bad public performance.”
Of considerably more concern to Stafford was a clarification of her views on language. She hastened to explain to her interviewer that she was “not opposed by any means to the vernacular, the living language, the colloquial language. It’s something that I love and honor, and I use it all the time. I would be lost in my own writing without the vernacular. What I object to is the jargon of such things as ‘meaningful dialogue.’ ” The full extent of Stafford’s love of and alarm about language was clear in an article derived from her lecture, in which she declared one of her main missions to be vigilance on its behalf. Her carefully chosen figures of speech suggest how important this cause was for her. It was a tribute to her past, a continuation of the work she had once done in her fiction: “Who will carry on the rich oral traditions of New England and the South and the West?” she asked, and her answer invoked her own stories, the bad characters in Adams: “I reckon that convicts and children, who have the most time on their hands, will go on contriving slang and jokes, and, God willing, the wellspring will not be polluted and will not go dry, and hillbillies and pickpockets and able-bodied seamen and timbercruisers and Southern politicians will go on sweetening the pot.”
At the same time, her worries about the state of the language were an extension of her fears about her own future, about her frailty amid contemporary barbarities. Here she invoked the metaphor of an ailing body to describe the ordeals of language, much as she had once used that same figure in writing about her deep attachment to her house. In both cases, her psychological and physical health were intimately tied to those two important refuges, her houses and her words:
Besides the neologisms that are splashed all over the body of the American language like the daubings of a chimpanzee turned loose with finger paints, the poor thing has had its parts of speech broken to smithereens: Setting the fractures and
dislocations has been undertaken by tinkers with tin ears they have fashioned for themselves out of old applesauce cans …; and upon its stooped and aching back it carries an astounding burden of lumber piled on by the sociologists and the psychologists and the sociopsychologists and the psychosociologists, the Pentagon, the admen.… The prognosis for the ailing language is not good. I predict that it will not die in my lifetime, but I fear that it will be assailed by countless cerebral accidents and massive strokes and gross insults to the brain and finally will no longer be able to sit up in bed and take nourishment by mouth.
Her fears for the “ailing language” were an eerie prediction of her own fate, though for the moment Stafford claimed that she was feeling quite hale. In concluding her talks, Stafford announced that she had found this particular encounter with the wide, wild world much less bruising than she had expected. In “The Snows of Yesteryear,” she played the role of rural recluse to the hilt. She was the quiet lady ready to go home, but surprisingly pleased to have ventured forth:
I came here in fear and trembling because in these last years when I have been living in the country, I have turned into such a slowpoke hayseed that I expected every sentence I uttered to be greeted with a Bronx cheer.… But you have been amiable and generous.… You have cheered me. I feel far less acerb. I can’t pretend I want to stay on—in truth I can’t wait to get back home to my own bed and my own cat (and my own work) and to see if there are any signs of buds on the lilac bushes.
BACK IN EAST HAMPTON during the summer, Stafford was less cheerful. That certainly didn’t mean unremitting grimness, as Wilfrid Sheed emphasized. He and his wife were her “share-croppers” in her little bungalow out back that year, and they knew what good company their sharp-tongued landlady could be. During long evenings spent drinking together, they indulged in “manic flights of humor, all gone, alas, by the next day”:
She was cruelly funny [and] … she interwove this with a rare gift for affectionate complicity: you felt just for now that you were the only two people remotely capable of understanding how silly it all was. “Let’s merely see each other every day for the rest of our lives,” she said one morning at five o’clock. It was a handsome exaggeration, definitely not to be acted on. Yet it was always the understanding on which she celebrated: that we could seize a little permanence, a moment of immortality and if it wasn’t art, it would have to do.
It wasn’t art, however, and Stafford wasn’t quite prepared to reconcile herself to that. She wrote to her sister Mary Lee, with whom she was intermittently feuding and confiding, that she was ailing and her work was suffering. It was a familiar complaint, she acknowledged, and it became an ever more recurrent refrain:
Once again back in my orthopedic corset and cervical collar and elastic stocking and excoriating the driver of that automobile that mucked me up 33 years ago, one of my pleasures these days … I am not so much depressed as vexed. I had counted on an enormously productive summer but the weaknesses of the skeleton invade the brain and make it listless.… I’d meant to get the Barnard lectures in shape; I’d meant to write a good many small essays on manners and the works of departed friends; I’d hoped to finish my novel. Now I am immobilized so many hours of each day that I don’t know what I’ll get done.
The plans that Stafford outlined help to put her last years into perspective. Notably, she relegated her novel to last on her list of endeavors and admitted less certainty about it: she merely “hoped” rather than “meant” to have that behind her. She was proved right in her skepticism. Her other projects were considerably more modest and backward looking, and they weren’t fulfilled in the form she probably had in mind. She did eventually get a couple of the lectures in shape to publish, but in less than prestigious places (such as Saturday Review World and Confrontation). And instead of the tidy tribute to the past implied by her plans to write about manners and departed friends, the scattered journalism that she ended up producing over the next five years (under pressure, as Peter Taylor said, of some “real or imagined need of money”) can be read as a curious revisionist accounting of her life.
Her themes were for the most part familiar. She did write about manners in assorted pieces on etiquette for women’s magazines. She continued to write about language and commented intermittently on the women’s movement. (Her most celebrated pieces were a little diatribe against the use of “Ms.” for the New York Times and an article for the same paper entitled “Women as Chattels, Men as Chumps,” in which she declared that “the fustian and the hollering … the strident jokelessness attendant on the movement are woefully unpropitious because they obfuscate a good many justified grievances,” such as unequal pay.) She reviewed books, and she tried her hand at several profiles, mostly for Vogue. And she wrote letters, increasingly full of complaints and despair about the world. As Taylor commented in his tribute to Stafford after her death, a spirit of disappointment infused these miscellaneous writings: “She wrote numbers of book reviews and articles, of course, but frequently with tongue in cheek and always seemingly in a terrible rage, a rage against a life that had contrived to place her in such a ridiculous situation.” This was not what her literary career was supposed to lead to, and the different pieces, though chatty on the surface, suggest that some darker sublimation was at work. There was a good deal of denial and domestication of the real trials of Stafford’s life in the journalistic exercises that consumed her.
Various assignments prompted her indirectly to rewrite her past, taming the creative tumult that she had known. Thus in a review for the New York Review of Books she was condescendingly dismissive of Thomas Wolfe, claiming that she had been disaffected long before she had in fact outgrown her early imitation of him. Her characterization of Wolfe echoed the merciless reactions that her own prose had elicited from her first readers: “The man revealed [in the letters] is infuriating and pathetic, so deformed by self-absorption and self-indulgence, so macerated by his warm bath of self-pity, so worshipful of the physical appetites he deified that he was incapable of deep friendship or deep love.” In another piece for the magazine, commenting on Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle’s Being Geniuses Together, a memoir of expatriate life in the 1920s and early 1930s, she found an occasion to be less than kind about another of her mentors during her early, confusing years—Evelyn Scott, whom Stafford backhandedly rescued from McAlmon’s dismissal this way: “He’s not above taking pot-shots at sitting birds or of being as cheaply cruel as a bad, bright child: of Evelyn Scott he says, ‘She’d be more restful if she would just admit her mediocrity.’ ” If Stafford thought McAlmon’s tone was wounding, she evidently was not inclined to challenge the substance of his assessment.
On other occasions, she wrote with a notable lack of sympathy about women whose troubles were not entirely foreign to her, sometimes adopting an oddly judgmental tone. In a piece about Isak Dinesen, for example, she described an eccentric woman who was often cruel about her husband, cold in her writing, uninterested in food, plagued by ill health, and given to donning unusual masks—a portrait quite close to home, which Stafford concluded with a warning that was perhaps meant for herself: “Such whims (the hat, the kohl), such personal theatricals are to be applauded unless they become too important, unless the personage takes over the personality.”
Stafford’s etiquette pieces, mostly cast in the form of advice columns, were similarly peremptory on subjects that were in fact sources of pain and confusion. She emerged as a crotchety expert on sociability (in such pieces as “Suffering Summering Houseguests” and “Some Advice to Hostesses from a Well-Tempered Guest,” both for Vogue), making a gimmick out of her reclusive tendencies. Her temperamental aversion to company allowed her to be the unillusioned guide to the burdens of conviviality. And her old-fashioned approval of formality made her a stern critic of the vogue of immediate intimacy. Sent by Horizon magazine to cover a course in encounter-group techniques, Stafford was so appalled by the rudeness that her article “My (Ugh!) Sensitivity Training” was al
l about why she simply had to quit going.
The truth was, her solitary streak was not quite the quaint eccentricity she liked to suggest in her slight pieces. While she was telling others how to endure their guests, she was arranging her house so that no one would come stay with her. It was the old, deep lure of isolation and, it seems clear, a desire to hide the life she lived—to escape the drinking she did in company, to obscure the drinking she did alone, to elude advice about her unhealthy habits in general. In “Don’t Send Me Gladiolus,” she gave tips on social protocol with hospital patients, a trivializing treatment of a troubling, chronic subject in her life—sickness, and the vulnerability it entailed. “Cherish but do not pamper me. Treat me as if I were a grown-up temporarily under the weather,” she wrote, and her complicated dependence on doctors and on bouts of invalidism was reduced to a glib maxim well suited to the pages of Vogue.