Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
In Rough Country (3 page)
With astonishing zeal and steadfastness Higginson was an early advocate of women's suffrage as he was a vociferous advocate of civil rights for Negroes during Reconstruction; he was a quasi-mystical nature-writer, in the mode of his model Henry David Thoreau; his
Young Folks' History of the United States
(1875) became a best-seller. Higginson's first love had been poetry, in which he may have been slightly discouraged by a rejection letter from Emerson at
The Dial
that in its devastating brevity deserves enshrinement like the pithier aphorisms of Oscar Wilde:
[Your verses] have truth and earnestness and a happier hour may add that external perfection which can neither be commanded nor described.
Yet Emily Dickinson seems to have virtually idolized Higginson, having committed to memory much of his published writing in
The Atlantic
and elsewhere and constantly deferring, or seeming to defer, to his “superior” judgment. As Benfey notes, “she told him, twice, that he had saved her life.” Their famous first meeting in August 1870, at the Dickinson family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, is preserved solely in Higginson's prose, in a letter to his wife Mary:
A step like a pattering child's in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a faceâ¦with no good featuresâin a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said “These are my introduction” in a soft frightened breathless voiceâ& added under her breath, Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I sayâbut she talked soon & thenceforward continuouslyâ& deferentiallyâsometimes stopping to ask me to talk insteadâbut readily recommencing. [
A Summer of Hummingbirds
]
And, later, somewhat defensively:
I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so muchâ¦Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her. She often thought me
tired.
Though convinced of Dickinson's originality and of the possibility of her genius, yet Higginson persists in seeing in
her something frankly repugnant; he suspects “an excess of tensionâ¦something abnormal” in her.
Within the loosely constructed space of
A Summer of Hummingbirds
, the epistolary friendship/romance of the self-styled “scholar” Emily Dickinson and her “master” Higginson is but one thread in an entanglement of erotic yearnings, while in the aptly titled
White Heat
the primary focus is a tenderly voyeuristic evocation of the literary couple's relationship, as in these Jamesian elocutions of Wineapple's:
Totemic assumptions about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson do not for a moment let us suppose that she, proffering flowers and poems, and he, the courtly feminist, very much married, were testing the waters of romance. But about their correspondence is its faint hint or, if not of that, then of a flirtation buoyed by compassion, consideration, and affectionâ¦. (Each) of (Dickinson's) notes bursts with innuendo, attachment, warmth, flatteryâ¦. She admired his gravitas. “Your thought is so serious and captivating, that it leaves one stronger and weaker too, the Fine of Delight.” She admired his probity. “That it is true, Masterâ¦is the Power of all you write.”
How crushed Dickinson must have been by Higginson's remarriage, and by his obvious reluctance to visit her, yet, admirably, as so admirably Dickinson weathered any number of personal blows, in some fusion of female stoicism and pragmatism she seems to have re-channeled her attention
upon the elderly widower Judge Otis Lord, a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, to whom she wrote letters of unfettered longing:
My lovely Salem smiles at me. I seek his Face so oftenâbut I have done with guises.
I confess that I love himâI rejoice that I love himâI thank the maker of Heaven and Earthâthat gave him me to loveâthe exultation floods me. I cannot find my channelâthe Creek turns Seaâat the thought of theeâ
At the same time, Dickinson continued to write to her “Master” Higginson in elevated, occasionally elegiac terms, as in this final poem sent to Higginson shortly before her death in 1886:
Of glory not a Beam is left
But her Eternal Houseâ
The Asterisk is for the Dead,
The Living, for the Starsâ
(1647)
The concluding chapters of Wineapple's
White Heat
are a detailed scrutiny of Dickinson's posthumous careerâ“posthumous” being the only career possible for one of such startlingly original gifts, as if, in the midst of the revered Hudson Valley landscape painting of the nineteenth century there might have appeared the unsettling canvases of Cézanne. How
does one
see
what is so radically new, still more how does one draw
meaning
from it? Leaving 1775 poems of varying degrees of legibility and completion, often in teasingly variant forms, Emily Dickinson presented a considerable puzzle for scholars of her work through the decades, and particularly for her first, at times overwhelmed editors Higginson and the indefatigable Mabel Todd, who could not resist correcting Dickinson's punctuation and other seeming flaws in her verse. It may even beâthis would constitute another radical strangeness in Dickinson, amid the staid formality of her eraâthat “her poems were always in progress, meant to be revised, reevaluated, and reconceived, especially when dispatched to different readers.” As Richard Howard suggests, finishing poems may not have interested Dickinson: “her true Flaubert was Penelope, to invert a famous allusion, forever unraveling what she had figured on the loom the day before.” It seems like a simple query, why a poem must be
singular
and not rather
plural
, as musical compositions in the mode of John Cage are not fixed and finite but ever-improvised. Perhaps it's only a convention, that the
gravitas
of print seems to insist upon permanence, and it's the “route of evanescence” so magically embodied by Dickinson's poems that is the truest nature of poetry.
Though critical responses were inevitably mixed, with British critics the most roused to contempt, the first edition of Dickinson's
Poems
sold out rapidly through eleven printings in 1891 and the second, “swathed in white, like its author,” was another best seller later in the same year. Tireless Mabel Todd, thrilled by her new mission of bringing a New England poet
ess of genius to the attention of the public, set on the road as a sort of precursor of Julie Harris in
The Belle of Amherst
, giving lectures and readings throughout New En gland.
Benfey concludes
A Summer of Hummingbirds
with a lyric epilogue titled “Toward the Blue Peninsula” in which, as in a cinematic flash-forward, he breaks the nineteenth-century frame of his gossamer narrative to bring us to Joseph Cornell who, in the mid-1950s, so brilliantly incorporated images from Dickinson's poetryâbirds and flowers and jewels and planetsâin his box-sculptures “with a ghostly majesty and strangeness.” Appropriately, Benfey's ending isn't a critical summing-up or a statement of fact but an evocative poetry: “The window is open. The perch is empty. The bird has flown.”
JEAN STAFFORD
“T
his is the day when no man living may 'scape away.”
Whenever she tried out a new typewriter, Jean Stafford typed this oracular remark from
Everyman
, the medieval morality play in which, as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado in the early 1930s, she'd played the role of Good Deeds. Recalling the experience decades later, in the preface to the 1971 reprint of her novel
The Mountain Lion
, Stafford notes with characteristic irony: “I spoke [Good Deeds'] lines because I had (and have) the voice of an undertaker.”
Of the distinguished short story writers of her eraâone that includes Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, John Cheever, Katherine Anne Porter, and Flannery O'ConnorâJean Stafford (1915â1979) is perhaps the most versatile. Her writerly voice is very aptly described as an “undertaker” voice, never oracular or self-conscious but quite often jarringly jocular in its Doomsday revelations. A virtuoso of that demanding sub-genre the “well-crafted short story,” Stafford is yet the author of several novels of which one,
The Mountain Lion
, remains a brilliant achievement, an exploration of adolescence to set beside
Carson McCullers's masterwork
The Member of the Wedding
. Unlike Welty, Taylor, Cheever, and O'Connor, whose fiction is essentially regional in its settings, Stafford has written fiction set as convincingly in Europe (“Innocents Abroad”) as in New England (“The Bostonians, and Other Manifestations of the American Scene”); in New York City and environs (“Manhattan Island”) as in the semi-fictitious town of Adams, Colorado (“Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains”), that is an amalgam of Covina, California, where Stafford was born, and Boulder, Colorado, where she grew up and attended the University of Colorado. Impatient with all pieties, not least the piety of familial/cultural heritage, Stafford remarks in her preface to these
Collected Stories
that she could not wait to escape her “tamed-down” native grounds: “As soon as I could, I hot-footed it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean.” Though, into middle age and beyond, Stafford lived in the New York/Long Island area, the evidence of her fiction suggests an essential restlessness, or restiveness: “Most of the people in these stories are away from home, too, and while they are probably homesick, they won't go back.”
Stafford's versatility is perhaps most in evidence in the range of tone in her fiction: from the gently melancholic to the savagely comic, from a delicately nuanced mimicry of the waywardness of interior speech to sudden outbursts of shocked clarity (“But the fact is that there has been nothing in my life,” as the narrator of “I Love Someone” confides) and concise images that take us beyond mere speech (“The weather overhead was fair and bland, but the water was a mass of little wrathful whitecaps,” at the conclusion of “Beatrice Trueblood's Story”).
There are numerous animals in Stafford's fiction, always individually noted no matter the smallness of their roles: the fat, comatose tabby cats of “A Country Love Story” who mimic their mistress's gradual descent into emotional torpor over the course of a long New England winter; the pet capuchin monkeys of “In the Zoo” observed as unnervingly humanized, “so small and sad and sweet, and so religious-looking with their tonsured heads that it was impossible not to think their gibberish was really an ordered language with a grammar that some day some philologist would understand” and the foundling German shepherd Laddy, also of “In the Zoo,” who plays a principal, tragic role in the story:
He grew like a weed; he lost his spherical softness, and his coat, which had been sooty fluff, came in stiff and rusty black; his nose grew aristocratically long, and his clever, pointed ears stood at attention. He was all bronzy, lustrous black except for an Elizabethan ruff of white and a tip of white at the end of his perky tailâ¦He escorted Daisy and me to school in the morning, laughing interiorly out of the enormous pleasure of his life.
In “An Influx of Poets,” Cora Savage observes her pet cat Pretty Baby, whose blissful pride in motherhood is an ironic, in time bitterly ironic expression of the vulnerability of Cora's emotional state:
[The kittens] were still blind and [Pretty Baby] was still proud, cosseting them with her milk and her bright, abra
sive tongue and the constant purr into which, now and then, she interjected a little yelp of self-esteem. When she nestled down, relaxed among her produce, I knelt and strongly ran the knuckle of my thumb down the black stripes that began just above her nose and terminated in the wider, blacker bands around her neck, and then I left her to her rapturous business of grooming her kittens, nursing in their blindness and their sleep.
A gambling casino in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, a grubby downscale version of Monte Carlo, nonetheless exerts an almost preternatural spell on a young woman named Abby in “The Children's Game” who succumbs to the hypnotic frenzy of roulette:
She was still ahead when the wheel was spun for the last time; and when everything was finished she was giddy as she struggled out of her cocoon-like trance. The croupiers' fatigue humanized them; they rubbed their eyes and stretched their legs and their agile hands went damp. Abby was a little dashed and melancholy, let down and drained; she was, even though she had won, inconsolable because now the table, stripped of its seduction, was only a table. And the croupiers were only exhausted workingmen going to bed.
So appalled is Abby by the “monstrous” Belgian town, her appalled fascination inspires Stafford to a tour de force of description as charged with kinetic energy as Dickens's most animated city scenes:
[Knokke-le-Zoute] possessed houses that looked like buses threatening to run them down and houses that looked like faces with bulbous noses and brutish eyesâ¦The principal building material seemed to be cobblestones, but they discovered a number of houses that appeared to be made of cast iron. In gardens there were topiary trees in the shape of Morris chairs and some that seemed to represent washing machines. The hotels along the sea were bedizened with every whimsy on earth, with derby-shaped domes and kidney-shaped balconies, with crenellations that looked like vertebrae and machicolations that looked like teeth, with turrets, bow-windows, dormers and gables, with fenestrations hemstitched in brick or bordered with granite point lace. Some of the chimneys were like church steeples and some were like Happy Hooligan's hat. The cabanas, in the hot, dark haze, appeared to be public telephone booths. Even the flowers dissembled and the hydrangeas, looked like utensils that belonged in the kitchenâ¦The plazas were treeless plains of concrete where big babies sunnedâ¦. There was an enormous smell of fish.
And Stafford's characters are a wonderfully motley lot, out-sized and garrulous as cartoon bullies, meekly repressed and virginal as the hapless observers in Henry James; adolescent girls and women who struggle to define themselves against their adversaries, and deeply conflicted, self-lacerating women who seem to have succumbed to sexist stereotypes despite their high intelligence. Here, as intelligent as any of Stafford's characters, yet utterly miserable, is Ramona Dunn of “The Echo
and the Nemesis,” an American graduate student who has come to post-war Heidelberg to study philology:
Ramona Dunn was fat to the point of parody. Her obesity fitted her badly, like extra clothing put on in the wintertime, for her embedded bones were very small and she was very short, and she had a foolish gait, which, however, was swift, as if she were a mechanical doll whose engine raced. Her face was rather pretty, but its features were so small that it was all but lost in its billowing surroundings, and it was covered by a thin, fair skin that was subject to disfiguring afflictions, now hives, now eczema, now impetigo, and the whole was framed by fine, pale hair that was abused once a week by a
Friseur
who baked it with an iron into dozens of horrid little snails.
Of Stafford's three novels, her first,
Boston Adventure
(1944), published when she was twenty-eight, became a surprise best seller and launched her public career (“The most brilliant of the new fiction writers,”
Life
proclaimed, in tandem with a photograph of the strikingly attractive young woman). Subsequent novels
The Mountain Lion
(1947) and
The Catherine Wheel
(1952) were critically well received but not so commercially successful as
Boston Adventure
; Stafford's energies came to be channeled into her short fiction which was prominently published in
The New Yorker
and collected in
Children Are Bored on Sundays
(1954) and
Bad Characters
(1965). Though Stafford wrote books for children and the remarkable
A Mother in History
(1966), a portrait of the mother
of Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, the culmination of her career was
Collected Stories
(1969), nominated for a National Book Award and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
Throughout her career, Stafford drew upon her personal life in her most engaging and fully realized work, but there is virtually nothing in her writing that is self-indulgent, self-pitying or self-aggrandizing. Her most powerfully sustained single work,
The Mountain Lion
, a tragic coming-of-age story set in Stafford's childhood California and Colorado, has elements to suggest autobiography (“what, other than books, could there be for that scrawny, round-shouldered, tall thing [Molly], misanthropic at the age of twelve?”) but is narrated with an Olympian detachment that eases in, and out, of its principal characters' minds to stunning effect. Similarly, Stafford's most frequently anthologized stories, “The Interior Castle,” “A Country Love Story,” and “In the Zoo,” bring us into painful intimacy with their female characters only to draw back at climactic moments, like a coolly deployed camera. Indeed,
Cast a Cold Eye
, the title of a collection of pointedly autobiographical stories by Stafford's controversial, slightly older contemporary Mary McCarthy, would have been an ideal title for Stafford's collected stories.
Stafford seems to have defiantly reversed the westward migration of her family, leaving Colorado for Europe soon after graduation from college, with the grandiose and surely quixotic plan of studying philosophy in Heidelberg. She was known to boast to friends that she'd left home at the age of seven; friends commented on her “desperate” wish to have been an orphan.
Like the doomed Molly of
The Mountain Lion
, Stafford was bookish and inclined to writing at a young age. Her early literary heroes were as disparate as Charles Dickens and Proust, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Thomas Wolfe, icons of masculine literary success. Like Willa Cather before her, though without Cather's wish to invent her writing self as male, and like Sylvia Plath to come, Stafford nursed a lifelong contempt for feminine pieties and “nice” behavior; her fierce dislike of her mother's clichéd optimism is very like Plath's for her self-sacrificing mother Aurelia. Where Plath gritted her teeth and wrote determinedly upbeat letters home to Aurelia from England, after Plath's death to be gathered in
Letters Home
in an attempt to correct “cruel and false caricatures” of the mother-daughter relationship in Plath's poetry, Stafford transcribed her mother's letters to her with jeering annotations, to be sent to her friends for their amusement.
“Nothing can more totally subdue the passions than familial piety” it's observed with a shudder in the Colorado-set story “The Liberation.” Here, a desperate young woman barely manages to escape from her smothering older relatives, who want to appropriate, like genteel vampires, her imminent marriage. On the train headed east, Polly Bay thinks, “How lonely I have been. And then, âI am not lonely now.'” Stafford seems to have both despised and feared her father, by her account an obsessive, brutal, bigoted man from whom escape was imperative; in the preface to the
Collected Stories
she speaks glibly of him as the author of a western novel called
When Cattle Kingdom Fell
, which she never troubled to read. (Nor did Stafford read
A Stepdaughter of the Prairie
, a memoir of a
Kansas girlhood by a cousin.) Yet, ironically, as John Stafford toiled for thirty years on a crank analysis of government deficit spending, so Stafford herself would toil for more than twenty years on a novel unfinished at the time of her death, titled “The Parliament of Women.” Ironically also, though perhaps unsurprisingly, Stafford was drawn to the volatile, domineering, manic-depressive poet Robert Lowell who wreaked havoc in her life even before she married him, remarking in a letter to a friend that, though Stafford sometimes hated Lowell, “he does what I have always needed to have done to me and that is that he dominates me.” (This domination included even such physical abuse as attempted strangulation.)
One of Stafford's most famous stories is “The Interior Castle,” an eerie, hallucinatory account of the ordeal of a young woman named Pansy Vannerman who has suffered a terrible injury to her face and head following a traffic accident in a taxi; like Stafford, who was disfigured in an accident caused by Robert Lowell's drunken driving, Pansy must undergo facial surgery that involves extreme pain:
[The surgeon] had now to penetrate regions that were not anesthetized and this he told her franklyâ¦The knives ground and carved and curried and scoured the wounds they made; the scissors clipped hard gristle and the scalpels chipped off bone. It was as if a tangle of tiny nerves were being cut dextrously, one by one; the pain writhed spirallyâ¦. The pain was a pyramid made of a diamond; it was an intense light; it was the hottest fire, the coldest chill, the highest peak.
In this ecstasy of pain, Stafford's normally restrained prose soars to astonishing heights as if the subject were not pain but an unspeakable violation of the self: “[Pansy's] brain trembled for its life, hearing the knives hunting like wolves⦔ It's significant that in Stafford's story, the driver of the crashed car has died, while in life, Robert Lowell survived relatively uninjured, and prevailed upon Stafford to marry him against her better judgment. Their eight-year marriage, far more tempestuous than that of May and Daniel in “A Country Love Story,” would end in a painful divorce in 1948 from which Stafford seems never to have fully recovered: she would marry and divorce again, twice; during the final twenty years of her life she would make herself and everyone who knew her miserable with her alcoholism, ill health, and highly vocal misanthropy.