Tag Archives: Jean Stafford

The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford

2 Replies

The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.  This neglected classic, which I have read and reread over the years, is one of my favorite books.  I prefer Stafford’s novels but the short stories are also elegant and dazzling.  Every sentence is so exquisite that one must sometimes pause to admire.  And she is very witty:  I especially love the comical stories.  The stories are mostly set in Colorado, where she grew up, and Boston and Manhattan, where she lived as an adult.

 Stafford’s most famous short story, “The Interior Castle,” is autobiographical.  Stafford and/or the heroine, Pansy, record the intensity of pain after her nose is smashed in a car accident.  (Stafford’s own face was smashed in a car accident caused by the drunk driving of poet Robert Lowell, and she  needed six facial surgeries to reconstruct it.) In “The Interior Castle,” Pansy horrifically describes the painful reconstruction of her nose in surgery, the pain soothed somewhat by cocaine, but there are moments of hell. Although this is far from Stafford’s best story, it is a realistic record of what it’s like to be helpless and in pain in a hospital.

Stafford’s stories about married couples are especially striking. In the comical story, “Polite Conversation,” Margaret Heath, a writer, makes desperate excuses not to go to tea with her neighbor, Mrs. Wainright-Lee, who expects her to come to tea every day.  Margaret’s husband, also a writer, refuses to go point-blank, but Margaret doesn’t want to alienate the neighbors.

And the name, Wainright-Lee, tells us what we need to know.  Mrs. Wainright-Lee is a terrible snob, but doesn’t have good taste.  She may not like Margaret much, but she wants to have a writer at her tea parties. 

Here is an example of Stafford’s humor.  The story opens hilariously with Mrs. Wainright-Lee’s ambiguous greeting.

“It is so good in you to  come to tea,” said Mrs. Wainright-Lee as she plucked one last weed beside a petunia that grew out of the flagstoned terrace.  “I have seen so little of you lately.”

“I know,” said Mrs. Heath, casting about for a new excuse for her unneighborliness, but the effort, on this New England summer afternoon, was too great…

I am also a fan of her brilliant story about loneliness, “The Bleeding Hearts.” Rose Fabrizio, a college-educated Mexican girl, is the secretary to the headmistress of an Eastern girls’ school, and hopes to be “adopted as an Easterner.” But she has no friends, and is extremely lonely, so she  makes  up stories about her neighbors, whom she never sees.

She also spends hours reading at the public library, where she is drawn to a handsome white-haired man in a yellow ascot and scholarly Oxford glasses. She also makes up stories about him.  But when she discovers he is her neighbor, who takes care of his sick mother full-time, and is desperate for a friend – any friend – she scampers away. He is more desperate even than she.

In “A Country Love Story,” we meet another lonely woman.  Her husband has been ill with TB, and absurdly believes she is having an affair with another man. Eventually she is so lonely and persecuted by her husband that she makes up an imaginary lover.

The last story in the collection, “The End of a Career,” is very different from the others; it is reminiscent of  Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.  A beautiful woman, who is not particularly bright, spends all her time maintaining her beauty, and in her forties regularly has plastic surgery.  But she goes to pieces when her hands show her age, because the plastic surgeon cannot do plastic surgery on her hands. In these days, when even “common people” have plastic surgery, this kind of thing may be a serious problem.

This is a delightfully intense collection of stories, but I do recommend skipping  the first part, “The Innocents Abroad.” The stories in the later sections are much more brilliant, and you can always go back to “The Innocents Abroad” later.

Spinster Lit:  Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner & Others

2 Replies

Why Do We Love Spinster Lit? 

 Spinsters, let’s face it, are chic and independent. They have cats, belong to writers’ groups, and play Scrabble. They might not have e-mail. On the other hand, they might be addicted to dating sites. And their Little Free Library stocks only Viragos and Booker Prize winners.

In reality, married women also have cats and play Scrabble, but are frequently annoyed by the chaotic state of their Little Free Library. Why do passers-by dump tatty ancient copies of The Exorcist– sorry, that’s not your kind of book, and you remove it -and once there was a used condom. Very gross. If that happens to spinsters, they don’t mention it. 

Little Free Libraries are often stuffed with romance novels, which are said to account for about one-third of book sales, but I maintain that spinster lit has many followers. For one thing, the spinster novels often include a marriage plot, an unexpected/expected twist that enhances the pleasure of reading.

Barbara Pym is the Queen of Spinster Lit. Her brilliant comic novel, No Fond Return of Love, begins at an indexers’ conference. (Query:  Why is that so hilarious?)   Dulcie Mainwaring, a quiet, whimsical woman who has broken off her engagement to a younger man, hopes to make new friends at the conference.  Viola Dace, a bohemian type, dislikes being among the tweedy, but she has a  crush on handsome Alwyn Forbes, one of the speakers. When Aylwyn faints at the podium, Dulcie, Viola, and other women rush to provide succor, but Dulcie has the smelling salts.

Dulcie and Viola become friends, sort of:  they run into each other in the park, walk past Alywin’s house, which is in the neighborhood, and research his family. They go so far as to spend their Easter holiday at the hotel owned by Alwyn’s mother. Love is in the air, and both are suddenly surrounded by men, but who, if anyone, will get Alwyn? 

In Jean Stafford’s neglected classic, The Catherine Wheel, Katharine Congreve is a tougher, more modern type: the American spinster.  She has never married and believes in “the pleasure principle”  but suddenly faces a sexual crisis.  She has had a long affair with John, who married her cousin, Maeve, and even invited her on their honeymoon.  Every summer her nephew and nieces stay with her while John and Maeve travel.  And now John insists that he wants to divorce Maeve and marry Katharine so she can “save him.”  This is not what Katharine had in mind at all when she embarked on an affair. 

The Booker Prize winner Anita Brookner is the Co-Queen of Spinster Lit. Her heroines remind me of Barbara Pym’s, though she lacks Pym’s humor.  In Brookner’s superb novel, Look at Me, the narrator, Fanny, works in the reference library “of a medical research institute dedicated to the study of problems of human behavior.” (A very Pymish job!) Fanny is also a writer who takes notes every night on the eccentric library staff, including her best friend, an irritable colleague, and the cranky regulars. Writing is her way of saying, “Look at me.” But her life takes a sinister turn when she makes a new friend, who proves to be a dangerous, nasty friend.

On the genre side of spinster lit, I love the spinster detectives in mysteries:  Agatha Christie’s amateur sleuth, Miss Marple; Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver ;  Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, a sexier, younger, modern, American P.I.; and Ann Cleeve’s Vera Stanhope, a lonely, beer-drinking, obsessive detective.  I’m not a great mystery reader, so do tell me some of your favorites.

It is the season to curl up with a cozy book, and all except Jean Stafford’s novel fit that category.  So what’s your favorite spinster lit?  Or your least favorite, for that matter?  And why on earth are we drawn to it?

A Neglected Novel & a Melodramatic Bildungsroman: Jean Stafford’s “The Catherine Wheel” and “Boston Adventure”

6 Replies

                     

Jean Stafford is my favorite American writer, or, rather, she has written two of my favorite books.  She won the Pulitzer in 1970 for her stunning Collected Stories. I also return again and again to The Catherine Wheel, her restrained, elegant, little-known Jamesian novel, set during a summer in Maine. 
 

The Catherine Wheel is a sophisticated, if chilly little book, told from the perspectives of two troubled characters.  

The seemingly tranquil  Katharine Congreve, a middle-aged spinster who believes in “the pleasure principle” but also dislikes change of any kind,  now faces a sexual crisis.  As a young woman, she was in love with John Shipley, an architect who inexplicably fell for her blander cousin,  Maeve.  Weirdly, John and Maeve invited Katharine to accompany them on their honeymoon, claiming that she had made the match.  And now she is having an affair with John, who wants to divorce Maeve, and insists Katharine must marry him to “save him.”  This salvation is not what Katharine had meant by the affair.
         

The Shipley children spend summers with Katharine in Maine while Maeve and John go to Europe, and this summer is no different.  The teenage twins, Honor and Harriet, are excited about having new dresses made and meeting new boys at tea; but 12-year-od Andrew, bullied at prep school and friendless in the city, is crestfallen because his local friend, Victor, has dropped him.  

Victor’s neglect of Andrew seems pathological. Victor is nursing his older brother, Charles, a sailor, who has come home with malaria.  Victor does not even speak to Andrew when he passes the house.  He refuses to allow Andrew into the house to visit him and Charles.


And so  Andrew lies in a hammock all day, violently fantasizing about killing Charles. 


In this small town in Maine, everyone meddles in everyone’s business.  People  gossip when Katharine’s lights are on all night, and speculate that she is ill, or that she was up reading Gone with the Wind.  Katharine feigns calm and pretends she has been making a list for a grand outdoor party, which will end with her favorite firework, the Catherine Wheel,  named after the martyr St. Catherine of Alexandria.

Needless to say, Katharine is no saint, and it is a difficult summer, despite her aristocratic manners and dependence on tradition.  Stafford, who was raised in Colorado and graduated from the University of Colorado, learned the manners not from childhood from her husband, Robert Lowell, who grew up in a wealthy Boston family. 


Ready for melodrama?   Finally I am reading Stafford’s debut novel, Boston Adventure (1946).  It is a little dated, and though it is well-written (okay, anyway), I find it heavy-going.   

Stafford’s debut dud

This 500-page bildungsroman is a dud. There!  I’ve said it! I had my doubts from the beginning, with the narrator Sonia’s simple statement that she “used to sleep on a pallet of old coats and comforters in the same room with my mother and father.”  


Sonia’s family life is violent and poverty-stricken.  Her father, Hermann, a German immigrant shoemaker, has physical fights with his wife, a Russian immigrant, and both of them drink too much.  He deserts them after reading too many Westerns translated into German – to the West, they presume. Sonia’s mother, who possibly killed Sonia’s epileptic younger brother,  is too lazy to work, and depends on Sonia’s after-school earnings as a maid.  Finally Sonia’s mother  is committed to a lunatic asylum.  Sonia is both relieved and guilty.

In the second part of the book, Sonia fulfills her dream of moving to Boston, where she is taken in by Miss Pride, a Boston spinster who spent her summers at the hotel in Sonia’s hometown, Chichester. Now Miss Pride is writing her memoirs, and sends Sonia to secretarial school.  Oh, and there is a Proustian tea party…

I have not finished this yet, but  I am not overly pleased.  It is now my midnight-falling-asleep reading. It reminds me of nothing so much as Nancy Hale’s best-selling blockbuster, The Prodigal Women, the sob story of three women who were friends as girls, and grow apart dramatically as adults.  (Both Stafford’s work and Nancy Hale’s short stories have been published by Library of America). 


Other best-sellers of the time included books I prefer to Boston Adventure: Vera Caspary’s Laura, Olive Higgins Prouty’s Now Voyager, and Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd books.


Stafford is a great American writer, but do start with her later books.