Stafford, Jean (1915–1979)

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Stafford, Jean (1915–1979)

Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and journalist. Born in Covina, California, on July 1, 1915; died of cardiac arrest in White Plains, New York, on March 26, 1979; daughter of John Richard Stafford (a writer, reporter, and rancher) and Mary Ethel McKillop; attended the University of Colorado, Boulder, 1932–36 (received B.A. and M.A. degrees); studied philology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, 1936–37; married Robert (Cal) Lowell (the poet), on April 2, 1940 (divorced 1948); married Oliver Jensen (an editor at Life magazine), on January 28, 1950 (divorced 1953); married A.J. Liebling (the writer), on April 3, 1959 (died 1963); no children.

Taught at Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri (1937–38); had first story published (1939); published Boston Adventure (selected for People's Book Club, 1944); awarded Guggenheim fellowship and National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant (1945); received second Guggenheim fellowship and National Press Club Award (1948); received O. Henry award for "In the Zoo" (1955); named a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University (1964–65); awarded Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1965); taught at Columbia University (1967–68); received Pulitzer Prize for Collected Stories (1970); elected to National Academy of Arts and Letters (1970); suffered a stroke (1976).

Jean Stafford, like St. Teresa of Avila , lived in her own "Interior Castle" where dwelt her imaginative, creative, private self. She was ambitious, egocentric, mentally and physically fragile, socially timid, the perennial outsider who suffered from "a sense of 'dislocation' that had no cure." Stafford hated her father for his inadequacies, dismissed her mother as irrelevant, and disliked the West where she was born and brought up. It has been noted that the misfits, the irascible, the unloved and unwanted females in her fiction vividly reflect the stages of her own disordered life and of her quest for a new identity—to be an orphan free of all familial ties would have suited her just fine.

Jean Stafford was born in 1915 in Covina, California, the youngest of four children. Her father John Richard Stafford had been a newspaper reporter and a rancher, but after he squandered his inheritance, he sold their large house and land and moved the family to Colorado. Her mother Mary Ethel Stafford converted their new home in Boulder into a boardinghouse which embarrassed Jean, despite the fact that her mother's efforts secured college educations for all four children. Moreover, Jean resented her father's inability to provide for his family; a failure as a writer of stories and a novel about the Old West, he became bitter and reclusive. After her father died, Jean wrote to her sister Mary Lee Stafford that John Stafford "was completely undisciplined and completely lazy and completely self-indulgent and I can't forgive him." And she never did. Alienation from family was not all that made Stafford want to escape her surroundings. As she recalled, "the Rocky Mountains were too big to take in, too high to understand, too domineering to love." Her rejection of family and environment caused Stafford to turn inward and to writing.

At age six, Stafford wrote a poem, "Gravel, gravel on the ground," which later appeared in her book The Mountain Lion. She also wrote stories and produced a novel set in the British Museum. Her early writing reflects her incredible command of language; in a story, she described a man's black hair as "oleaginous." Stafford was a good student and at age 15 won the annual state high school essay contest with a story that mocked her father. Attending the University of Colorado on a scholarship was Stafford's first step towards independence and creating an individual persona. She wanted to attain respectability, but did not join a sorority. Instead, she associated with fellow students who were interested in literature and the rather bohemian campus lifestyle of the 1930s. However, despite her achievements and abilities, Stafford suffered from loneliness and insecurity. Reserved and secretive about herself, she avoided intimacy and romantic encounters.

At the university, Stafford worked as a model for life-drawing art classes, posing nude, she wrote, while she was "grimly sketched in charcoal and viscously painted in oil." By the time she was a junior, she had developed an interest in medieval languages and wrote her master's thesis on "Profane and Divine Love in English Literature in the Thirteenth Century." In four years, Stafford had earned B.A. and M.A. degrees, and she decided to become a philologist. Education, she hoped, would help her acquire wealth and culture where "no untoward noises … no barbaric speech, no rough manners" were allowed. This may explain Stafford's friendship with Lucy McKee , a rich, intelligent, sexually promiscuous young law student whose hedonistic lifestyle attracted Jean. In 1935, Lucy committed suicide. Stafford tried throughout her literary career to write about Lucy and campus life in the 1930s; "In the Snowfall" would undergo many revisions but never be completed. Like McKee, Stafford's physical and psychological health were unstable during much of her adult life, and alcohol compounded these problems.

Writing is a private, an almost secret enterprise carried on within the heart and mind in a room whose doors are closed.
—Jean Stafford

In a play written in 1936, which won first prize and was performed on campus, Stafford had already discovered that "You search the four corners of the earth for love and warmth, and your soul yells out in anguish. But the world is hostile eternally, even to those who make the most beautiful things." With a frightening prescience, Jean Stafford had written her own life scenario. No person or place ever lived up to her expectations, no love ever satisfied her need to belong, and she battled a hostile world, often of her own making, while writing her incomparable prose.

After earning two degrees in four years, Stafford received a fellowship to study at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, allowing her to escape from her "benighted family" and to savor the beauty of Old World culture. Germany was in the throes of Nazification, and at the university each class period ended with a "Heil Hitler," which Stafford also said. Without approving of the Nazi ideology, she admitted she was glad to have been there in that "alarming time," living in "a nation of madmen in the third stage of paranoia, believing sincerely that they are the New Messiah." Stafford attended classes for only one month before losing interest in her studies. Instead, she began working on a novel which she failed to get published, but she slowly realized that she was not attracted to a scholarly life. Heidelberg did, however, provide Stafford with material for her later short stories and with a lifelong friend, James Robert Hightower, who had a fellowship to study Chinese and became a professor at Harvard University. Their relationship was platonic and intellectual, never as intimate as Hightower would have liked. Jean was, and remained, fearful of personal involvements, even with her three husbands.

Knowing she had to earn a living, Stafford returned to the States in April 1937 and attended a writers' conference in Boulder in July. This gave her the opportunity to meet established writers and to show them some of her poems, a short story, 105 pages of a new novel, and her journal from Heidelberg. These contacts did not result in publication, but Stafford was not discouraged, and one contact changed her life: Ford Madox Ford introduced Jean to the future well-known poet, Robert (Cal) Lowell, a member of elite Boston society. He would provide Stafford with entrée into his world through marriage.

However, marriage was a distant prospect, and Jean had to find a job. It took her only one year to become disillusioned with teaching freshman English at Stephens College, a "charm school" for women as she portrayed it in her short story "Caveat Emptor." The girls were "frivolous," she wrote, and nearly all were "dumb but beautiful." As they prepared for their roles as future wives and mothers, they knitted in class and wrote term papers on the advantages of long engagements and "A Short History of Fingernail Polish." The faculty was hardly less mediocre; they were, Stafford recalled, "not evil, simply foolish and misguided. They were academicians who scorn intellectuals—and are proud of it." Stafford's complaints about her students to the administration led to her dismissal. Disenchanted with academia, she turned to her writing. In early 1938, she submitted a novel about Lucy McKee to a publisher. The manuscript was rejected; her use of stream of consciousness was "too meandering," they said, and the sex scenes were not convincing. Ford Madox Ford had advised Stafford to avoid employing autobiography in fiction. But she ignored his advice at this time and in the future. Jean Stafford wrote using her own experiences, her fears and desires, and her fantasies.

In the summer of 1938, Stafford's personal and professional lives were in complete disarray. She had two men, Hightower and Lowell, in her life, but she was afraid that "she was a frigid woman doomed to love from a distance and to betray." Moreover, she refused to abandon writing to become a wife like her mother, whom she deemed vapid. A visit to her family left her repulsed: "I hope that I will not remember how it is how ugly it is how tragic how heartbreaking." But she did remember, and the gulf between Stafford and her family was never bridged. She realized "that the price of pursuing the life of the mind was the loss of a home," of her home with her family. In the fall, Jean had a fellowship at the University of Iowa to teach and participate in the Writer's Workshop. Once again, she hated the academic atmosphere and teaching, and one night in mid-semester she boarded a bus and fled to New York, her imagined cultural nirvana. Marriage to Hightower could have solved her problem of what to do next, but Jean could not answer the question "do art and love mix?" at the time—or at any time in her life.

From New York, Stafford moved to Boston and resumed her acquaintance with Robert Lowell. After leaving a nightclub one evening in December 1938, Lowell lost control of his car and crashed; Jean suffered serious facial lacerations and internal injuries. She sued Lowell and his family for $25,000, but the lawsuit did not end their courtship. Lowell's parents never approved of Stafford; she lacked "pedigree" and was an unsuitable match for a Lowell. Indeed, Robert Lowell represented the social and cultural class that Stafford envied, but she expressed reservations about marrying a man who "scared" her and often "got savage." And even though she loved Hightower, she confessed to him that "my selfishness is so all consuming that I can't help hurting you." Stafford married Lowell

in New York in April 1940, thus achieving her desire to become an "insider," to belong to elite Boston society. But she was still ambivalent about marriage and about Lowell. As she wrote to Hightower, "Poor Cal! What a life he will have with me." Ann Hulbert questions whether Jean would have married if her novel, Autumn Festival, had been accepted by the Atlantic Monthly Press. The focus of the novel was the experience of a girl at the University of Heidelberg who took up with the Nazis, embracing her ancestral fatherland—not a popular subject in late 1939 as the real-life Nazis spread through Eastern Europe.

Stafford and Lowell soon left for Baton Rouge where he would pursue graduate work at Louisiana State University while Jean worked as a secretary at the Southern Review. She enjoyed the intellectual stimulation at the university, keeping house, and attempting a different style of writing. A short story based on her experience in the hospital after the car crash eventually became part of her first published novel, Boston Adventure. From reading the mystic St. Teresa of Avila, Stafford "found a deep symbolic landscape" which influenced her writing; Jean's short story "The Interior Castle" utilizes St. Teresa's belief that "our soul [is] like a castle … in which there are many rooms." Finally, Stafford had discovered the symbols and images that gave structure to her work.

Her marriage was a less solid structure. Lowell had become a zealous convert to Roman Catholicism which consumed his creative energies. "Impious habits" such as smoking and drinking were no longer allowed, an injunction Stafford ignored. Lowell's piety did not preclude his being physically abusive. He hit Stafford and broke her nose which required further surgeries. As she confided to Hightower, "I'm boxed up and I'm hopeless and there is no one to talk to." Reflexively she became ill, took to her bed, and began writing Boston Adventure.

Returning to New York in the fall of 1941, both Jean and Cal worked for a Catholic publishing house, and they had frequent contact with the New York literary crowd associated with the prestigious literary journal, the Partisan Review. Novelist Caroline Gordon and her husband, the poet Allen Tate, introduced them to other well-known figures, such as Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, and Robert Giroux, a young editor at Harcourt, Brace. At Cal's insistence, Jean also did Catholic volunteer work, encountering "discomfort both with faith and with the vulgarity of the physical world." But in New York, Stafford could still withdraw into her own interior castle and produce fiction. In April 1942, she signed a contract with Harcourt, Brace, and in July, she and Cal went to live with the Tates in Monteagle, Tennessee. During the year with the Tates, Stafford worked on Boston Adventure while Lowell finally began writing the poetry that would make his name. The Tates and Lowell were merciless in criticizing Jean's novel, but it was creative, not malicious, criticism. As Hulbert notes, this year was Stafford's "first extensive and intensive exposure to life devoted to art."

From Monteagle, Stafford went to Yaddo, the writers' colony in Sarasota, New York. She was anxious to finish her novel, but she was not happy at Yaddo and her typical response to a stressful situation was to become ill. Stafford felt "a sense of alienation from the literary company" there whom she labeled "abject souls." She quickly abandoned Yaddo and went to join Lowell in New York. In September 1943, Lowell was to be inducted into the army; when he refused to serve, he was sentenced to a year and a day in prison. Lowell's mother Charlotte Winslow Lowell unfairly blamed Jean for her son's predicament. Alone again, Stafford continued to revise her novel and renewed her contacts among the local literary circles whom she described as "cut-throats … ambitious and bourgeois frights." But she needed these contacts for without them she felt "abandoned and uncreative." Lowell was paroled in March 1944; in prison he had become a more zealous Catholic which worried Stafford. Their marriage was severely strained already, and they had not had sex since Lowell's religious conversion. But their creative energies were enhanced, it seemed, by their proximity to one another.

Despite their personal problems, they rented a house in Connecticut and resumed their writing. Stafford's short stories were being published, and Lowell was writing poetry, which pleased Jean. Boston Adventure appeared in September 1944 and was an immediate success: over 200,000 copies were eventually sold. This led to a new worry—how would her literary friends react to a commercially popular work? Would substantial royalties denigrate the literary value of the novel? On the other hand, Stafford hoped the money would enable her to buy a house, a large house set in beautiful, natural surroundings, a refuge where she could settle down and develop roots. With this in mind, she often published in popular magazines rather than the more distinguished literary journals. She also took a position teaching creative writing at Queens College in Flushing, New York, in the spring of 1945. Stafford was never comfortable in front of a class, but she wanted the additional income.

That same spring, Jean received a $1,000 prize from the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Boston Adventure and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation to work on a sequel to the novel. A few months later, she bought her house in the village of Darmariscotta Mills, Maine, which required extensive renovation, so Stafford and Lowell lived with Delmore Schwartz for several months. Schwartz envied Lowell's social background and created ill feelings between Stafford and Lowell. Jean was depressed, drank excessively, and suffered from insomnia, all while trying to write her second novel, The Mountain Lion, for which she already had a contract with Harcourt, Brace. She needed to live in a house that belonged to her. But to Lowell, the house "seemed to mean imprisonment," and he accused Stafford of trying "to stifle him" with her domesticity.

The Mountain Lion took only nine months to write. It is an important part of her literary output; the novel, Molly (the main character), and her own life were "inextricably and tragically connected," she told Lowell. As Stafford noted, "I was so much Molly that finally I had to write her book." The themes of the "disunity of the American identity" and the "conflict of social values that warps personal identity" were based on Jean's life experiences in the West. Like the novel, her fine short story "An Influx of Poets" is based on her and Lowell's lives during the horrendous summer of 1946, when Stafford, Lowell, and several literary friends shared the house in Maine. Lowell became physically abusive, and Jean drank, had debilitating headaches, and trouble sleeping. Moreover, Lowell openly flirted with Stafford's friend Gertrude Buckman , ex-wife of Delmore Schwartz. Jean lamented to her sister Mary Lee, "Being a writer and being married to a writer is a back breaking job and my back is now broken." However, Stafford never blamed Lowell for their situation. She lost her husband and her house after that terrible summer, and she thought she was losing her mind.

Stafford was hurt and felt insecure as a writer. In the fall of 1946, she signed herself into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York Hospital. Again Jean was "dislocated" and sought a safe haven and a stable environment. But she was ambivalent about being "cured" of her anxieties; if her mental state were stabilized, would this destroy her creative abilities? Stafford also feared that she had "no objective existence." She wanted assurance "that I am a woman, that I am a reality and not an abstraction." Lowell had cruelly informed her that no one could love her, and Jean admitted that she had difficulty with intimacy. This was obvious when her mother died. When she joined her family in Oregon, she was again treated like the youngest child. Further, her father was boring, and her sister Margie Stafford told her she was fat. Jean felt unloved and unwanted. Returning East, she had to sell the house in Maine which saddened her even more.

After a year in the hospital, Stafford was uncertain about her future; she had medical bills, a broken marriage, and no home. In November 1947, she moved to an apartment in New York and began to take science courses at Columbia. To make money, she wrote articles for Vogue and still struggled with her novel based on Lucy McKee's suicide. Stafford needed to find a new niche, a new outlet for her creativity. Thus began a decade-long association with The New Yorker magazine and the acquisition of new friends. In one of her stories, "Children Are Bored on Sunday," which was largely autobiographical, Stafford dealt with "the tension between the rustic and the sophisticate, the colloquial and the refined"—her own Western self versus her Eastern persona. Old friends, such as the poet John Berryman, told her the story was weak, and she should be ashamed of herself for writing it. Moreover, The New Yorker was too middlebrow, too philistine for the Partisan Review crowd. Stafford had signed a contract in November for "In the Snowfall," her Lucy novel, but she would never finish or publish it.

In April 1948, Jean spent six weeks in the Virgin Islands to get a divorce from Lowell. Her story "A Modest Proposal" reflects her reaction to the women who "littered the terrace and the lounges of the hotels, idling through their six weeks' quarantine." When she returned to New York, Stafford continued to publish her short stories and to receive awards, a second Guggenheim and a National Press Club Award. She set out on a trip to Europe in the spring of 1949, on assignment for The New Yorker. She proved to be "an able reporter" and enjoyed her new role. Back in New York, she again had to confront the "demons" she faced each time she attempted to work on "In the Snowfall"—her father and Lucy McKee herself. Stafford feared that psychiatry might have dulled her "gift" for writing: "If it has, God knows what will become of me because it is the only thing in the world I have." She reluctantly set the novel aside and began work on a new novel, The Catherine Wheel. While the book is stylistically one of Stafford's best pieces of writing, it is obvious that she was not fully "engaged in her material."

There is little doubt that Stafford was creative but rather neurotic, admired and successful but dissatisfied with her life. She wanted to marry, to have a real home of her own; in January 1950, she acquired a husband and a house. Oliver Jensen was an editor at Life magazine, Yale educated, and well-off financially. However, living at "a low pitch" quickly lost its appeal for Stafford. She drank heavily, complained about Jensen's "tedious friends," and had trouble writing. Relations with her own family were also strained. Following a family gathering in Colorado, Stafford wrote: "I am amazed that all of us did not commit suicide in our cradles." She returned to New York and entered the hospital, her escape from emotional traumas. Normal human relations seemed impossible. At the end of 1952, Stafford took up residence again in the Virgin Islands to obtain a divorce from Jensen. As with Lowell, she did not blame Jensen: "I am all you say, a liar, a breaker of promises, an alcoholic, an incompetent … a hypochondriac."

Personal failure was the result of her inability to be "overtly loved," she told a friend. But her literary career and reputation were still widely acclaimed. She won three O. Henry awards for her stories, and The Catherine Wheel sold well. In 1953, her first collection of short stories, Children Are Bored on Sunday, was a great success, and she had another contract for a novel. Despite her literary successes, Stafford "was terrified by the patterns of her life, … by the fact that she had imagined and had written much that had happened later." As Hulbert notes, "Stafford's own existence imitated her art, rather than the other way around." Although she had two to four stories published each year and would receive a Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Stories, Stafford fretted over what she feared most, loss of her creativity.

She needed to escape from her usual haunts, and in the summer of 1956, she went to London. Her writing had become a crushing burden, and she needed to separate herself from Lowell with whom she had remained in touch. Lowell had had a second mental breakdown, and Stafford was emotionally drained herself. In London, she socialized with writers and intellectuals, drank too much, and consulted a psychiatrist. And she met A.J. Liebling who also wrote for The New Yorker. He was what Stafford needed, a protector, and he admired her. After reading her work, he wrote her that "really you are a better writer than almost anybody I know." They were married in April 1959, and contentment began to take precedence over writing for Jean. She claimed she was happy for the first time in her life. But she continued to drink and to worry about how to balance marriage and writing. Conflicts soon arose over Stafford's "highbrow PR [Partisan Review] pedigree and the lowlife reporter tastes that Liebling liked to cultivate." By July 1960, they were often going their separate ways.

In a dream, Stafford conceived the idea of writing a novel about her Scottish ancestors. She traveled to the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde and then to Samothrace, following her dream. Inertia overwhelmed her desire to write the story, however, though she did publish numerous articles, interviews, satirical pieces, and book reviews for Vogue, McCall's, Esquire, and Mademoiselle during the 1960s, including an article for Horizon on the film The Misfits starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. After a short trip to Europe in the summer of 1963, Liebling became ill and died on December 28. The next month Stafford was hospitalized with numerous, serious medical problems. In April, she had a mild heart attack. When released from the hospital, she moved into Liebling's house in East Hampton, Long Island.

Stafford maintained contact with former friends and with Lowell. He was instrumental in securing a fellowship for Jean at Wesleyan University in 1964. Here, surrounded by scholarly academics, Stafford hoped to revive her creative energies. However, she soon realized she could not write in an academic environment. Her collection Bad Stories appeared while she was at Wesleyan and received good reviews. She also went to Dallas, Texas, to interview Marguerite Oswald , mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, for McCall's magazine. Unable to relate to "the assassin's peculiar mother," Stafford wrote an unflattering portrait of Mrs. Oswald. A year later, her only nonfiction work, A Mother in History, was published. This elicited a barrage of hate mail which accused Stafford of being a Jew, a Communist, a member of the right-wing John Birch Society, anti-Catholic, and having besmirched the "sacred throne of motherhood."

As she aged, Stafford became a quarrelsome curmudgeon. When her father died, she did not attend the funeral; her sisters had called her collect to inform her of his death, and Jean was furious that she had to pay the $1.75 for the call. She severed relations with her family forever. To Jean, the 1960s were too disorderly, too individualistic, too "me" centered. This was evident in a class she taught at Columbia; the students had no interest in or appreciation of classical writers, and Stafford could not relate to the current popular culture. As she remarked on the youth of the time, they "love nobody but themselves and their cry is I want mine!" The social upheavals repelled her: "Things grow grimmer and grimmer. Anger alone keeps me alive." Teaching was not her forte, but she gave invited lectures and wrote articles on the state of society, the use of incomprehensible jargon, on manners, etiquette, and the women's movement (she denied being a feminist). To avoid direct contact with the unenlightened outside world, Stafford created an alter ego, Henrietta Stackpole, who wrote letters for Jean and served as "an intermediary with a vulgar world." Stafford accepted an honorary degree from the University of Colorado in 1972, but discouraged her sister Mary Lee from attending the ceremony. Jean did, however, remain in touch with both Hightower and Lowell. In Lowell's poem "Jean Stafford, a Letter," her former husband wrote, "You have spoken so many words and well,/ being a woman and you … someone must still hear/ whatever I have forgotten/ or never heard, being a man." Angrily dismissing his assessment of her, she vowed she would have nothing more to do with him. But Robert Lowell was the subject of her last published story, "An Influx of Poets" (1978).

A stroke in December 1976 robbed Stafford of the ability to speak; a friend told her, "You can't speak because you find everything unspeakable. You can't talk because you see no one fit to talk to." In over forty stories and three novels, Stafford's female characters were often orphans, social misfits who suffered from culture and class "dislocation." Similarly, Stafford had become a recluse, an orphan of her own making. Before she died in March 1979, she ordered her tombstone engraved with a snowflake, the symbol of "In the Snowfall," the novel she never wrote.

sources:

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 2: American Novelists Since World War II. Edited by Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1978.

Hulbert, Ann. The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Walsh, Mary Ellen Williams. Jean Stafford. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1985.