The Worlds of Jean Stafford

In arranging these thirty stories for publication, Jean Stafford has divided them into lour groups by their geographical settings: The Innocents Abroad; The Bostonians and Other Manifestations of the American Scene; Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains; and Manhattan Island. She seems indisputably right in doing so, for the stories in each group are related by mood and by range as well as by setting. “In a sense,” Miss Stafford writes in her introductory note, “the geographical grouping is arbitrary”; but in another sense it is not, and she acknowledges this when she speaks of Mark Twain and Henry James, whose titles she has borrowed as “two of my favorite American writers to whose dislocation and whose sense of place I feel allied.” Nor can the reader ignore the hovering presence of these and of others who earlier considered American isolation, American awkwardness, American fantasies, and the price of American innocence.

In a way Miss Stafford’s themes are archaic as well as indigenous, for they are older than today, and they will be newer tomorrow. They are, however, re-examined very thoroughly. If Miss Stafford is still on the side of her Innocents Abroad, she does not take her stand there unequivocally. Innocence can be rather silly, can be adulterated with ignorance and lack of imagination. These qualities shadow the young girls who are the heroines of “Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience” and “The Echo and the Nemesis,” two of the first group of stories. Reading them some years ago one felt a shock in them that has since been lost, and now one identifies less easily with the shocked heroine. It is a tribute to Miss Stafford’s skill that the stories are not dated by this, but instead are changed and deepened. Our present doubts about American innocence, and our uneasy feeling that it contains the seeds of moral irresponsibility, existed already in these stories.

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, §10.00)

Another of Miss Stafford’s strengths can be seen even in a rather slight story like “The Children’s Game”—that is, her ability to tell us exactly what is happening and nevertheless to deepen the mystery of why her people behave as they do. A young American widow who has haunted the hotels of Europe like a ghost since her husband’s sudden death finds herself returning to life by way of a friendly affair (or perhaps merely an idyllic friendship) with an English film director. In the course of a holiday trip together, they stop in a Flemish seaside town where there is a casino. The man reveals himself as an obsessive gambler, and the couple part. But it is not the gambling, or the man’s still-existent though unhappy marriage, which brings this about. He asks the heroine to try an evening at the tables, and she finds herself possessed by the same passion as her lover. The world around fades out. Nothing exists but the insane, lying, seductive promise to satisfy all one’s yearnings which the roulette wheel offers: instant success! Having felt the strength of this morbid translation, the heroine leaves for home, for the lure of gambling is stronger than any love between this pair coidd be. We know what happened, but this brief present event is like a candle which lights up the caverns of past and future to show us glades of stone, flickering shadows, and further grottoes.

The Western stories, and most of those laid in New York too, fall into a different mood. The Innocents Abroad can go home again, but the children and young people caught in the provinces hate their homes and live there as despairing prisoners, aching to leave a world so small and mean it cramps the spirit. Again, this is an archaic American theme, a part (one might say) of the Matter of America, as Arthur and Gawain and Tristan belong to the Matter of Britain. Not only Mark Twain but Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, and Willa Cather have dealt with it. Miss Stafford’s story “In the Zoo” creates magnificently that emotion of waste, impotence, self-pity, self-contempt, and angry hopelessness that we refer to when we say “alienation” but that has never really been named. It haunts the Great Plains, and the slopes of the Rockies, as it haunted the thickets and the steppes of Chekhov’s Russia. It is a way station on the road to paranoia. Even in happy later life, the children who breathed that atmosphere can suffer recurrences of distrust and despair, remembering their years of servitude to a foster-mother worse than Cinderella’s. Indeed the “Gran” of “In the Zoo” is less a person than a local deity, mean as a Snopes but without Snopesian ambition, a Mrs. Grundy of the home, an injustice collector of genius. There are two of her in “The Liberation,” and in other stories, like “Bad Characters,” “A Reading Problem,” and “The Healthiest Girl in Town,” one feels her unseen presence driving desperate children to look for refuge in the exhilarating, anarchic world of real outsiders instead of accepting the shabby community where Gran rules.

It is in the New England stories that one finds an alternative to Gran’s world, and that is why they seem to me the most interesting. From the time she created Sonie Marburg of Boston Adventure twenty-five years ago Miss Stafford has regularly sent forth inquiring and ardent explorers of the one indisputable high culture which the United States has achieved. (The South produced no high art till it was far past its peak of power and reacting to other literatures.) What is it that we made there, in New England? Miss Stafford asks, and it is not a regional or a dated question, but an invitation to study the American identity through its quintessential social artifacts and, perhaps, to divine from these the American destiny.

Here come the outsiders, like Sonie Marburg and Rose Fabrizio in the story “The Bleeding Heart,” drawn by a vision of order and of a civilization worthy of willing obedience. What fires must burn within to have produced the balanced and convoluted perfection without! Sonie sees Miss Pride as a replacement for her mad witch-mother. Rose imagines the handsome stranger site sees reading in the library as a foster-father. Then each penetrates the citadel. Rose finds madness and rot. Sonie’s participation in the rites of civilization is not as priestess but as sacrificial victim. Of the creative fire that once burned, nothing remains but a spark like a maggot in the brain, or an incestuous flame that licks the last hickory logs on the hearth, which will blacken and die if they are separated.

And yet something was there, and something lingers, distorted and eccentric but incontestable. The best story in the book (no easy judgment on a collection containing “Bad Characters,” “In the Zoo,” and that marvelously controlled tale “The Interior Castle”) is a Boston story, “Life Is No Abyss,” which is published here for the first time. It is about eighty-year-old Isobel Carpenter, who has taken up residence in the poorhouse, to the horror of her rich relatives, and who refuses to leave. It is also about the nature of reality, and the value of confronting it, for reality is where Isobel dwells—or, rather, where she reigns —even though her motives for settling herself there are malice and spite. Cousin Will invested her fortune for her after her father, the Judge, died at the age of 103, invested it (says Isobel) “in banana plantations in Winnipeg,” and immediately lost every penny. Horrified, Will invited her to share his home and his purse (and so did half a dozen others of the cousinage) . A lesser woman might have done so, and spent her declining years in luxury and conscientious nagging. But Isobel is capable of the grand gesture. “Will put me in the poorhouse,”she declared, and thither she departed.

There she has been for eighteen months on the day that pretty twenty-year-old Lily comes to call in place of poor Cousin Will, who has come down with bronchitis. Lily has been protected up to now from the sight of Isobel in the squalor of her surroundings, but she is warmhearted and kind, and eager to help Will bear the burden which Isobel’s revenge has thrust on him, for Lily too is penniless, orphaned by her parents’ death in an accident, and dependent on Will’s generosity. It is through her eyes that we see the three-bed ward which Isobel shares with mad, gentle Viola and a series of old women who arrive only to die. The food is awful. Isobel is clothed in a gruesome print uniform. Her arthritis is untreated. A radio plays incessantly, poor Viola croons, a disc jockey jokes. And here Isobel chooses to stay!

She is not crazy, for she judges her surroundings accurately and speaks her mind about them. She’s neither lost her wit nor gained humility by living in conditions which only a saint could endure—and enduring them. Vicious-tongued, opinionated, unkind, Isobel is still alive and awake, for she has preserved the basic right of the individual, the right to choose. It may be a poor choice, Hobson’s choice, but she is where she is by her own will and for her own continuing purpose, which is more than Lily can claim, or rich Cousin Augusta either, who is also calling to offer Isobel her hospitality. And whether she knows it or not—quite possibly she does not, but she may—there is a great deal to be said for her choice, for the poorhouse is where life is. After eighty years under the Judge’s wing Isobel has found the gritty margin of experience where nerves react to real stimuli, where the senses transmit messages from outside, and the mind finds its vocation as an instrument of salvation. Whether or not Isobel will gain a reward for the sufferings she has chosen to endure, whether one can reach sainthood by way of fury and spite, we gain, reading the story of one who is neither an innocent nor yet corrupt.

I must not close without saying how moving these stories are, more austere than Miss Stafford’s novels, but able at their best to reach as far and point as precisely. A particular grace is the dialogue. There is no one else writing today whose people speak more truly, and more surprisingly. This is something finer than “having an ear.” It is the mark of a writer whose perceptions are so immediate and exact that she can use dialogue not just for color or plausibility or character drawing, but to embody and convey the very heart of her intentions.