by Ann Hulbert
The profiles Stafford wrote, which fall into roughly two categories—grandes dames and alarming eccentrics—can also be read in an autobiographical light. They reflected, as the editors who assigned them must have felt, two contrasting impulses obviously central to her self-conception. Miss Prides, in more or less intimidating versions, had long figured in Stafford’s life, in her aspirations to a sense of social connection At the same time, her fascination with propriety never obscured her iconoclastic inclinations. Both are easy to trace to her past, to the ambivalence she felt about her provincial roots and her colorful father. But her magazine articles are notable for glossing over any confused allegiances. Stafford gushed shamelessly over the aristocratic ladies (Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post; Lally Weymouth, her daughter; Millicent Fenwick; Mrs. Warren G. Topping, founder of the Hampton Day School), adopting the tone of a refined woman appreciating another rare specimen in a crass, democratic world. In a letter to Nancy Flagg Gibney, Stafford complained that “the Fenwick caper did me in as the Katherine Graham one did last year” and swore that she would never write for Vogue again. Still, she proved herself remarkably adept at producing the fawning pieces, and the result was reminiscent of Sonie Marburg’s blind infatuation with her starchy mentor. The end of the piece on Mrs. Graham, a long digression on the theme of family loyalty inspired by a reunion of the wellborn clan at Christmas, suggested Stafford’s lurking preoccupation with her own family origins, so different from the patrician Grahams’. As in her previous defenses of the family, she seemed notably unhindered by the irony of her own situation—she was a woman who hated Christmas, and who kept her relatives at a distance:
Christmas has come to be … a ritual to honor or, at any rate, to recognize the family, the household; … and while there may be schisms within the order … there should be a truce at least once a year to remind the fractious fractions of the integer from which they derived. We can transplant ourselves from home and native ground, but our bloodroot cannot be extirpated. Whether we’re glad or sick at heart about the matter, we were born and we were born by some woman and to some man. Our feeling about these two and any other creatures they may have created can be as various and as shifting as the sands and as fragile or tough, or lovely or teratoid as the shells upon the seashore. But not a blessed thing can alter the fact of our origin.
Stafford was closer to her familiar, acerbically witty self in her treatments of eccentrics (Mrs. Oswald, the filming of The Misfits, Martha Mitchell, the pathological Charles Manson), though as her portrait of Mrs. Oswald showed, her articles often lapsed too quickly into condescension toward her curious subjects. It was her own idiosyncrasies that she seemed to take more seriously, devoting increasing energy to a form of self-portraiture that had a lineage in her family: the outraged, beleaguered, peeved, appalled letter or short piece, which her father had specialized in toward the end of his life as well. As she admitted in an article in Esquire, “Somebody Out There Hates Me,” “the venting of spleen and bile is relieving and, if it offends and is sourly returned, perversely delicious.” In the diatribes she clearly relished, she mostly defended the unfashionable views that often riled her readers, and elaborated her fusty persona, complaining about miniskirts, illiteracy, malapropisms, and other offenses of the undecorous times—often in a less-than-decorous way. Or, as in a long battle with Con Ed over an erroneous bill, she adopted the pose of the aggrieved little person—often in an arch, less-than-populist way. The first and longest of the letters she exchanged with the electric company, and later wrote about, was a seven-page document of manic name-dropping, itemizing the famous people with whom she had socialized over the course of a month (proof that she had not been at home using electricity). There were moments of real amusement in the epic self-mockery, but the energy she devoted to it seemed bizarre:
I find that on April 28th I dined at Le Pavilion (dreadfully overrated) with M. Jean Riboud, the distinguished president of Schlumberger, Ltd and went with him to the opening of the Royal Ballet. (The dancing engaged us—up to a point—but oh, Good God, that opera house. Those chandeliers—lighted, of course, by Con Ed—could be, were they flesh and blood, haled into court and charged with criminal vulgarity.) On the 29th, I dined at Gino’s (excellent food but much too noisy) with Stephen Greene, the celebrated painter.… On the 30th and the 1st, I dined with slightly less (but only slightly less) luminous friends.…
More poignant were the letters to her editors in which she complained about the treatment that her pieces had received at their hands. Once more she was the defender of the language and of her own history of stylistic polish, and it was clear how much was at stake for her even in her less substantial journalism: she cursed it as hackwork and then, as if in compensation, became the imperious author. “Digression is integral to my style. Parenthesis is my middle name,” she lectured Shana Alexander at McCall’s. “I have been assiduously at work on my style for a great many years. Style is the morality of language, and I look upon myself as a moral writer.” Describing another editing ordeal, this time at Cosmopolitan, she invoked the by now familiar metaphor of the body to describe her sense of linguistic violation: “I knew they would [greatly cut] but I was nevertheless sickened to see all the flesh stripped from the bones and the bones, in general, dislocated.”
There was an exception to the journalistic constriction that Stafford courted and yet chafed under. For six years, from 1970 through 1975, she wrote the Christmas roundup of children’s books for her old patron, The New Yorker. Not that it was a thoroughly liberating, fulfilling project by any means. She dreaded the arrival of the holiday season, when the books that had been steadily accumulating finally had to be tended to, and she was far from impressed by the caliber of the writing she was commenting on. But appearing in The New Yorker was a welcome return to the ground of her earlier success, and writing about children’s books offered a way to tap into an otherwise daunting past. Much as her Adams stories had opened a door onto her childhood, in these reviews she could and did write as an adult enlightened rather than entrapped by her vivid memories of the state of innocence, its fears and its exhilarations. She began her first review with a declaration of her critical perspective and standards, which was also one of her best statements of her own imaginative debt to her childhood:
Writers of books intended to be read by children can be placed in two general categories. There are those who took childhood seriously as they lived through it (the jokes and the razzmatazz together with the terrors, the mysteries with the disenchantments, the profits with the losses) and respected themselves as children, so as adults they can remember the early ways they took through experience. Some of these ways were plain and sunlit, others were bosky, and some were harsh and tangled and ominous, but all of them, travelled for the first time, were surprising and important. These writers remember how they collected and inspected information and why they were gluttonous for certain kinds and stupefied by others. Above all, they remember the books that pleased them and the writers whose worlds they could inhabit with full franchise and without embarrassment. As children, they were devout and incessant readers.… They savored unexpected words like truncheon and blunderbuss, cohort and constable, samite, brougham, comfit, curmudgeon. They can recall the emotions of childhood and the sensations, the cabals of it and the ethics. Childhood is not a tolerant time of life, but it is governed by a rather grand and reckless integrity: the child goes headlong to the root of the matter—if he is not deflected—although he has not yet discovered the heart of it. This first group of writers maintain a tact, a courtliness of address to their audience, no matter how colloquial or extravagant or absurd or soberly instructive their performance may be. They are good writers.
The others are bad. They seem to have gone through childhood so swiftly and heedlessly that they had no time to master the runes of the language (which cannot be picked up later on) or to record the weathers and landscapes of their Hells and Utopias.
Staff
ord’s past was very much on her mind as the 1970s progressed and her health declined, but she was rarely able to maintain that kind of poise about it. Although a visit to her alma mater in the spring of 1972 to receive an honorary degree went very well, and although her survey of her career in her lecture “Miss McKeehan’s Pocketbook” sounded satisfied (she even talked of collecting her miscellaneous nonfiction writing), it was clear that the sense of accomplishment and equilibrium she conveyed was more than a little fragile. Just how fraught the prospect of a return to Colorado was for Stafford is suggested by a letter she wrote to Mary Lee, who had evidently expressed interest in seeing her when she came West. In it the youngest, bitter sister spoke as though still a defensive adolescent, as though her lifetime away had brought no distance:
Come if you like: I can’t imagine it would give you any pleasure. And if you do come, do not expect any long private talks. If it gratifies you to know that you still exert over me the most remarkable power, rest assured that since our conversation I have not slept, eaten, or done a tap of work. And, as very often in my long and troubled life, I have wondered why in the name of God I did not, once I got to Germany, change my name and establish for myself a brand new identity.
Unfortunately, Stafford’s failures to eat, to sleep, and to work were far from a merely passing fit occasioned by her sister. Several years later, Stafford was ready to acknowledge that she had arrived at a disheartening turning point. Despite regular free-lance work (she took over Malcolm Muggeridge’s slot reviewing for Esquire in 1975) and intermittently hopeful mentions of her novel, the truth was that her writing was not going well. In 1975 she wrote a dismal, prophetic letter to her agent James Oliver Brown, suggesting that she leave him: “I am so unproductive (I’ve had a miserable and long siege of bronchitis with the asthma that goes with it and just before Christmas I was in the Hospital for Special Surgery for treatment of the arthritis with which I will be stuck for the rest of my life) that I can’t think I will ever bring you anything but small, unprofitable nuisances. The novel is still miles and miles in the future.” It was the first time she had been so explicitly hopeless about the book.
She turned to Lowell for help, and though the tone of her letters was jaunty, her mission must have been uncomfortable: she was asking him to autograph some of his books for her to sell. If part of her enjoyed playing the importunate ex-wife, part of her clearly didn’t. “Do you loathe me for this? Do I wound you?” she asked him, questions probably half directed at herself. “If you do, tell me and I’ll stop,” she said, though she admitted her desperation for some money with which to buy time. “I do so want to finish my novel. I do so hate to have to interrupt it to write reviews and articles. I wasn’t put on the earth to be a journalist. I’m sure I wasn’t.”
As she went on to confess to Lowell, she was leading an even more reclusive life, and if she lied to him about drinking alone only “occasionally,” her general description of her ambivalently antisocial life was painfully true:
One of the principal reasons I have become so reclusive is that I don’t want to drink, and I find that I can’t not drink when I’m with people—I use booze as insulation against boredom and impatience, or to exalt my feeling of camaraderie to the point of mania. Moreover, it makes my stomach ache and brings on monstrous insomnia. If I drink alone—and sometimes I do occasionally—I fall down and break something—either an irreplaceable piece of something breakable or one of my bones. And on those occasions, my solitude becomes loneliness and I may plan a dinner party and telephone invitations. And then I have to cancel it with some heavily documented excuse, the details of which I can never remember.
In a mock memo several years before, sent from Henrietta Stackpole to Dr. Roberts, Stafford had been even more forthright about the central place that alcohol played in her increasing unhappiness. The colloquial, lighthearted style of her confession only added to its poignancy:
Old though she is, and outstandingly wise, she is as tough as a mule and my sorrowful prognosis is: Extensive Longevity.… If she stays away from John Barleycorn, she is, in our opinion, an OK kid, and to tell you the honest truth, I think JB is basically the root of her problem … who, in conjunction with J. Calvin and J. Knox, have mucked up this poor woman to a fare-thee-well.… We wouldn’t mind (after all, we’re not strait-laced) if she and Barleycorn stole a few kisses from time to time. It’s this going all the way that causes so much trouble.
The metaphor was all too accurate. That dominant attachment, along with her many troubles, took its toll on Stafford’s other relationships. A demanding friend at the best of times, she became increasingly unpredictable and difficult as her health worsened. She went into New York Hospital in 1975 shortly before her sixtieth birthday with heart trouble and chronic lung disease and left it with all the accoutrements of a perpetual invalid (but none of the improved habits: she continued to smoke and to drink). She had to clear out her lungs regularly with a machine, and she was dependent on supplementary oxygen, which tethered her to a tank of air several times a day.
Her predicament tested her ties with her friends, of whom she had a large circle in East Hampton—the artist Saul Steinberg; the New Yorker writer Berton Roueché and his wife; Wilfrid Sheed and Miriam Ungerer; the poet Richard Howard and Sanford Friedman; Eleanor Hempstead across the road and the Guedenets, friends of Liebling’s, not far down it; Craig Claiborne; the comedian Dick Cavett and his wife, Carrie Nye; Ralph Carpentier, a local sculptor, and his wife, Hortense; Jeannette Rattray, the publisher of the East Hampton Star, and her son Everett, the editor, and his wife, Helen; a retinue of locals, including her housekeeper, Josephine Monsell, and handymen, the taxi driver, and many others. She also had plenty of friends in other places, who had gotten used to her late-night calls, which were often long and not always totally lucid.
Now those calls became longer and more of an ordeal, and Stafford clearly felt ever more ambivalent about actual visits, as she acknowledged in a letter to Hightower, who was still teaching at Harvard and with whom she had been in intermittent touch. She rebuffed an invitation from him with a moving mixture of deluded optimism about her work and undeluded realism about her life. “All of this valetudinarianism has its advantages: the [health] regimen (not as time-consuming as it may sound) has driven me into work as an escape from the nuisance of it and I am at work almost altogether on my novel,” she told him, and then elaborated her reasons for staying home: “Even if I could bring all my gear with me, even if I were not so well at work, you would find me no fun: I am too egocentric, too preoccupied with my disorders and my novel.” Wittily she explained that she couldn’t sit by an open fire, due to her oxygen tank, couldn’t laugh because of her heart—so how would they have fun? “Ten million thanks, ten million apologies for being as mindlessly quixotic as the day I was born.”
Often her quixotic dealings with friends and the world had a more desperate tone. Soon after her humble proposal to leave James Oliver Brown, she turned on her agent, accusing him of failing her time and again, complaining of his “peevishness,… irascibility,… paranoia.” A late relationship she formed with a young East Hampton couple, Kenneth and Maria Robbins, was perhaps the most dramatically problematic, and it suggests how her mounting dependence and egocentricity skewed her social life. When Stafford first met Maria Robbins, a children’s book writer, in 1975 during a ride on the East Hampton jitney, she was thoroughly enamored of her and quickly took up the couple as her special intimates. Such infatuations were Stafford’s style: one of her friends described her as a queen at court, who collected suitors with zeal. But her favors were fickle, as she herself knew, and it was ambivalence about her reliance on her courtiers that seemed to underlie her disorientingly unstable affections.
When she gave the Robbinses an acre behind her house in 1976, she saw the deal quite clearly. They had become her tacit caretakers, tending to her and her house, to say nothing of offering companionship—all of which she knew she needed. Her aim was to make an
offering in return, one that would ensure assistance without undue intrusion. But she also knew that however clear the terms of the relationship, she was bound to feel intruded upon at some point: when she urged the land upon them, Kenneth Robbins remembered, she warned that they should hurry up and take it before she had a turn of heart. And indeed she did, when her dignity and privacy seemed to her violated. Perhaps the most degrading exposure came when Robbins found her, bloodied, at the bottom of the stairs in her house one night, and insisted on sending her to the hospital, against her protestations. Helpless to fend off unwanted help, she felt deeply betrayed. The Robbinses were abruptly and absolutely exiled from her graces, a fate visited upon one set of friends after another in her last years.
On November 8, 1976, Stafford’s health took a drastic turn for the worse, following the bleak course that her doctors had warned her of—and a revised version of the course that she had outlined for her character Beatrice Trueblood years before. Stafford had a stroke, which was the physical blow she feared most. Where Beatrice Trueblood, the expert listener, lost her hearing, Stafford, the virtuosic talker, lost her speech. Her note to her sister Mary Lee about the catastrophe must be the most linguistically acrobatic announcement of aphasia ever composed. “Since my speech is gone altogether now I have to write you,” she explained to her in May of 1977. “My fine labials and lenes are lean, disabled.” It is tempting (not least in light of such feats as that) to extend Stafford’s own psychosomatic analysis of Beatrice Trueblood to herself. Her close friend Nancy Flagg Gibney gave it a try during her last visit to East Hampton in 1977 and described the occasion in a short reminiscence of Stafford: