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.