Arts and Letters

One of the great satisfactions derived from a life of reading fiction and poetry and looking at pictures and listening to music is the satisfaction of watching an individual artist grow and become a better and better artist through the years. Because some artists do that—grow and become better and better—especially those who were very good to begin with.

In one respect it was not pleasant to know Jean Stafford personally when she was twenty-two. Not, that is, if you were approximately two and twenty yourself and were one of those serious young persons of the thirties who aspired to become fiction writers. It was not pleasant because she was such a damned excellent writer to begin with and didn't seem to have the hard work ahead of her that the rest of us did. Of course it turned out that we were wrong. Because always, through the years, Jean Stafford would work harder than any of the rest of us and she would keep getting better and better and better. It was not obvious to most of us that she was doing so. Perhaps it was not clear to Jean that she was, though I suspect in her heart of hearts she knew. Her knowledge of her own capacity for work and of her own worth as a writer was a knowledge she kept hidden from her friends, especially from those friends who also wrote fiction. Perhaps it was a knowledge she kept hidden from herself as well as she could.

Since her death last March, I have read through her work again. I did so because I thought that is what she would have liked best for her friends to do after she was dead. For though she seemed modest in her own opinion of her ultimate worth as a writer, she never tried to conceal her wish for attention and respect—for her work, that is—from her literary friends and from the most serious literary minds of the time. For the rest of it she didn't care a bit, of course—for fame and glory, that is to say, as it is represented on the book page and in the book sections of newspapers and national magazines. She actually gave little thought to that sort of attention, only enough to say sometimes that the hacks would at last follow the lead of the best literary minds in their judgment of her work.

Although it often may have seemed otherwise to those who didn't know her well, Jean set little store by the literary world. She had a puritanical loathing for it. The fame and glory that held an interest for her was of the larger sort. It's true she gossiped about literary people unceasingly. Even her letters were full of literary gossip. But in her letters and in her talk she gossiped also and just as happily about all other people at the center or on the periphery of her life. All breathing people interested her. The great world interested her. Especially any backwater of the world interested her. But it was only her work, not herself, that she wanted to deliver into the narrow way of the literary world. She sent her work forth to have its own career there. But she was no careerist, herself. She remained a "private person" (her phrase). She was not, as she said, in "showbiz." She "abhorred" (her word) the idea of the culture hero or heroine. She "loathed" (her word) giving readings—considered it something for amateurs and careerists—and never read or spoke in public except when there was a desperate need for money. What she seemed to most of the world and what she actually was in that privacy she was forever trying to maintain were as unlike as the outward appearance and the inner life of some character in the novels of Marcel Proust.

Her students, one year at Barnard College, could see so plainly how she hated the role of "resident writer" that they—the most intelligent of them—begged her to give it up. She would have done so if she hadn't needed the money or imagined she needed it. She felt that teaching creative writing was the proper work for fools and charlatans. At Iowa, where she was teaching one year, she took permanent leave on a bus in the middle of the semester—in the middle of one winter night, in fact. The only way she could explain her unannounced departure, afterward, was to say that while reading her students' papers she discovered that in her class she had a Mr. Mahoney and a Mr. O'Mahoney. That made her understand once and for all, she said, how ridiculous the whole business was. She hated appearing "on the platform" alone or with other writers. Whenever she was dragged kicking and screaming—almost literally sometimes—into a public forum or a panel discussion she would cling to some friend who was a fellow member of the panel and try to turn the "discussion" into a private exchange between two private people, as though the audience were not out there and did not exist. 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. She wrote those pieces always under pressure from some friend or from a real or imagined need for money. And the pieces themselves were memorable primarily for the remarkable vocabulary of the author, as indeed are some of her less serious works of fiction, as indeed are passages in some of her more serious works of fiction.

When one settles down to read Jean Stafford's novels and stories one advisedly has a dictionary—a big dictionary—close by. For she was a literary artist in the most literal sense. Her most profound and her wittiest effects alike are got through words themselves. And her remarkable diction, her complicated syntax, her elaborate sentence structure all spilled over into her conversation (if it wasn't, as a matter of fact, the other way round) and were to some degree responsible for making her conversation the delight it was. In life—as a conversationalist, that is—she sometimes seemed at once the most articulate and the most inarticulate person one can imagine. She seemed to talk as she sometimes seemed to write (in retrospect it is often difficult to distinguish between the two), seemed to talk or write round and round a subject, dazzling you with her diction; but finally when she stopped (and it was hard to stop her) you realized that somewhere back there in her discourse she had penetrated the tough integument (as she might have put it) and touched the core of truth she had been probing for, had done so without your ever having realized that she had got to the heart of the matter. It was as though she wished always to conceal anything in her narrative so vulgar as mere purposefulness—her narrative spoken or written. Sometimes it was only in retrospect, and long after the conversation or the story was finished, that you saw what she had been saying. And somehow her statement was the more effective because of that.

In life Jean was, in a sense, always playing a role. She had many roles, roles like those in her written fiction—a grande dame, a plainspoken old maid, a country girl from the West, a spoiled rich woman—her diction always changing to fit the role. And sometimes she played the role of a writer, a woman writer. This surely entailed as much play-acting as the other roles. For it no more represented the real Jean than did those other roles, although many people—allegedly sophisticated people—mistook her play-pretend Manhattan bluestocking for the literary genius who wrote under the name of Jean Stafford. Actually, what she was like when she sat down to write her wondrous novels and stories may be something beyond the comprehension of any of us. In a sense, her literary personality remains her best kept secret. Perhaps it was in that role that she was the most private of private persons, and perhaps, in order to preserve that role, it was necessary for her to have the privacy she was always seeking. One thing is certain. With her close friends she ever avoided the role of the professional writer, avoided any semblance of professionalism. Contrary to impressions she may often have given, Jean Stafford was not ever a professional writer—not in the bad sense of that phrase. (I am not sure there is a good sense of that phrase for literary artists.) Instead, she was first and last an inspired writer, a poet. She wrote because she had to, and not for professional advancement. She was keenly aware that it is but one easy step down from professionalism to commercialism and that therein lies inevitably the ruin of art of any kind.

One remembers Jean Stafford for her literary art, the art at which she labored during her entire adult lifetime, the art which she labored on for its own sake. One remembers her for her rages against stupidity and insensibility, for her expressions of passionate devotion to whatever of nobility and serenity can be salvaged from the ugliness of most lives, remembers her for her wit, for her humility, her modesty, and for her responsiveness to one's own ideas and feelings. Yes, how often one remembers her responding to something one has oneself said, with: "Oh, yes! That's the way it is! Oh, God, yes, yes, yes!"

In the very private life which she insisted upon for herself she developed many domestic interests and accomplishments. During her last years she became so involved in the care of her house and acreage at Easthampton that she would sometimes go for weeks without leaving that neat little retreat of hers out there on Fireplace Road. During the past ten years of her life she had lived there alone, had lived there in privacy during what she sometimes termed her "final widowhood." For despite her concern for her privacy and for her work, she never forgot those she loved, certainly never forgot for a moment that she had been married three times. In 1940 she married Robert Lowell. They were divorced in 1949. She was married for less than a year to Oliver Jensen. This marriage also ended in divorce. In 1959 she married A.J. Liebling. Probably the years of that marriage were the happiest years Jean Stafford ever knew. And it is a satisfaction to her friends to remember that she and Joe Liebling are buried beside one another in the little graveyard at Easthampton and under the handsome, gray tombstones that Jean caused to be designed five years before her death.

But finally, against Jean's rage for privacy, against all her great personal warmth, against this persistently unprofessional Jean Stafford, one must place the cold facts of the successful career of those books and stories that she sent out into the world to have their own career. And one must make whatever one will of the contrast. I think that's what she would have said to us about the contrast of the privacy of her life and the public life of her literary work. Her first novel, Boston Adventure, was published in 1944, when she was twenty-eight. With its publication her reputation was established. Her second novel was The Mountain Lion, published in 1947. Her third novel, The Catherine Wheel, appeared in 1952. From that time her literary genius was devoted almost entirely to writing her incomparable short stories. In 1970 her Collected Stories received general acclaim and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. When she died she was at work on a fourth novel, one chapter of which has since appeared in The New Yorker. Another portion of it will appear this winter in a Jean Stafford memorial issue of Shenandoah magazine.

Born at Covina, California, in 1916, Jean Stafford grew up, according to her own depictions, in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. She graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and attended the University of Heidelberg, in Germany. She lived at various times in New York City, in Boston, in Tennessee, in Louisiana, and on Long Island. She died on March 26 of this year at White Plains, New York.