Jean Stafford

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A Forgotten Near-Classic: Jean Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel

Jean Stafford

Jean Stafford (1915-1979) , an American writer who won the Pulitzer in 1970 for her Collected Stories, wrote elegant, convoluted fiction  reminiscent of that of Henry James. Born in California, raised and educated in Colorado, the daughter of a writer of Westerns, she met the poet Robert Lowell at a Writers’ Conference, married him, and mingled with New York writers and editors.  (Many of her short stories were published in The New Yorker.)  Her work is bold and resonant:  A refined spinster in Maine reads Virgil’s Georgics aloud, translating as she goes along; an obese philosophy student in Heidelberg eats whole cakes, uses a sucker as a bookmark, and ominously talks about a dead thin twin, who, of course, turns out to be herself; and a young woman undergoes facial reconstruction in a hospital (as did Stafford after Lowell crashed their car into a wall while driving drunk).

Why is Stafford, the female James, as I call her, neglected? NYRB reissued The Mountain Lion a few years ago, but my favorite of her novels is The Catherine Wheel, published in 1951.   Brace yourself: the heroine of The Catherine Wheel is a well-bred spinster, with more than a  dash of Dickens’ Miss Havisham.  And Katharine has a secret:  she is having an affair with her cousin Maeve’s husband, John Shipley, the man she has loved since her teens. And all these years she has been furious that he preferred the insipidity of  Maeve to her brilliance.

Set during a summer in Maine, this superb book is lyrical and compelling: Katharine spends the summer at the family house in Hawthorne with Maeve’s three children, while Maeve and John travel in Europe. John, a mediocre architect, has assured Katharine that he will leave Maeve at the end of the summer, but Katharine has doubts.  And we learn about the doubts in the form of two intertwined narratives:  one from the perspective of Katharine, frightened of change; the other from that of Andrew, a prep school misfit who had looked forward to the summer playing with his best friend Victor, a village boy who has dropped him to nurse his older brother, Charles, a sailor who has returned to Hawthorne with a mysterious illness.  (I kept thinking gonorrhea, but it is probably typhoid.)

Are you ready for a Staffordian Jamesian passage?

Katharine had endeared herself to the halt and stooping citizenry because not only did she continue to return loyally each year but also intrepidly to withstand the inroads of what Mr. Barker, in spite of his worship of fast automobiles, called “these ultra-modern times.” The customs in Congreve House remained the same that they had been in her father’s day.  She had conceded to electricity, to modern plumbing and the telephone but to no ungainly fads like radios or vacuum cleaners, canned soups or boisterous evenings of The Game…  The servant hall was smaller, the tennis courts had given way to an herb garden, new objects had been introduced into the rooms, but nothing else had changed upon this lordly hill since her father, whom she had idolized, had died.

Katharine and Andrew are engulfed by hatred, fear, and near-madness:  Katharine has wasted years being in love with John and now has her chance; at the same time she realizes that he is not the brilliant man she thought he was when young, that he is having a midlife crisis, and that the affair could destroy his family.  Andrew has no idea about Katharine’s affair with his father, but he is obsessed with fantasizes about killing Charles to get his friend, Victor, back.  And he is terrified of the fantasies.  No one is aware of what is going on with Katharine or Andrew.

I admire this novel very much.  Are there flaws? Yes.  Perhaps the spinster sensibility of Katharine goes too far, though I only noticed this on a second reading.   I happen to like literary spinsters, so it didn’t bother me–much.  And Stafford is  a brilliant writer.

I enjoyed this hugely, though I prefer her short stories.

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Still Pertinent: Women’s Lit of the ’60s & ’70s

Women are marching for their rights. Wait, didn’t we do that decades ago?

And I wonder:  will Betty Friedan’s classic The Feminine Mystique (1963) EVER be out of date? Does it mean as much to women now as it did then?

I read it in my pink bedroom when I was 13 or 14.  I borrowed it from a friend’s mother, a  political activist. I had never read anything like it. “Far out,” as I occasionally said back then.  (No one ever said, “it blew my mind, ” except the Mod Squad.)   Friedan was inspired to do research  when her survey of Smith College classmates for their 15th anniversary reunion revealed they were unhappy housewives.  And so she wrote about history, the psychology, politics, the media, and the image of women in American society.  Although it may not have changed my life, it did change my ideas about possibilities.

It wasn’t just  sociological and political feminist books that influenced me then:  I was always a narrative person.  Popular literary fiction of the ’60s and ’70s had a great effect.  American women were writing literature about rebellious women experimenting with sex roles and sex.  Think Sue Kaufman’s The Diary of a Mad Housewife, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room.

Here is a list of some less well-known books of the time that have stood up surprisingly well.  And please let me know your own favorites!

1.  In Sheila Ballantyne’s brilliant out-of-print novel, Norma Jean the Termite Queen (1975), housework is driving the heroine, Norma Jean, crazy. Her husband, a professor, thinks her place is in the kitchen, and her three children are non-stop needy unless she parks them in front of cartoons.  She hasn’t been alone in six years, nor has she made any art.  Ballantyne’s bold style and attention-deficit shifting of Norma Jean’s consciousness make this immensely entertaining.


2.  Alix Kates Shulman is best known for Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, but my favorite is her controversial novel, Burning Questions (1978), which inspired three fascinating letters to the New York Times defending the book after a reviewer trashed it.

Told in the form of a memoir, this bildungsroman is the story of a woman from Indiana who moves to New York in the  ’50s s, then  marries a lawyer and lives in square Washington Square in the ’60s,  and  then rebels and joins the Women’s Liberation movement. Some of it is serious, some of it is comical.  And since it has been a long time since I’ve read this, I will leave you with a quote from the opening chapter.

What makes a rebel?

If you had seen the flags waving in front of each frame house set on its neat carpet of lawn on Endicott Road or any of the surrounding streets in Babylon, Indiana, on a Flag Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, V-J Day, or even a particularly fine Sunday after the War (World War II), you would never have guessed it possible that a fanatical radical was incubating there.

There is much humor, as well as an insightful description of the inspiration and confusion of the feminist movement.

3. Gail Godwin The Odd Woman (1974).  This small masterpiece explores a Southern woman’s personal and academic life in a time of unstable  jobs. Godwin’s sympathetic portrayal of a bookish heroine, Jane Clifford, a visiting English professor whose teaching contract  is soon to expire, is utterly realistic (Godwin herself has a Ph.D. and taught at the University of Iowa). But what can Jane do? Hers is the plight of thousands of instructors with Ph.Ds.  She  is an odd woman at the midwestern college, single and in her thirties, reading George Gissing’s The Odd Women. Her married friend Sonia, a tenured professor, is in her corner, but there are no openings at the college. And the rest of her close relationships are long-distance.

Such a great book, one of Godwin’s best.

4.  Lois Gould’s novel, A Sea Change (1976), is edgy, shocking, radical, and anti-male, and would never be published today.  This allegory about violence against women captures the  anger of radical Second Wave feminists (which, believe me, never translates well).  But I found it fascinating.

The protagonist, Jessie Waterman, a former model, lives in a brownstone in a dangerous neighborhood in New York with her sexist husband, Roy, who frequently refers to her as a “crazy cunt.” When a black man robs the apartment and rapes her with his gun, she decides ironically that they are intimate enough for her to refer to him as B.G.   Traumatized by violence, she moves with her daughter and stepmother to a summer home on Andrea Island, where Roy visits on weekends by helicopter. And when he goes away to Europe, Jessie is relieved to be free of him, and she and her best friend, Kate, become lovers.  How will they survive a hurricane and a male intruder?  Jessie plays (becomes?) the man.

You can read the entire post I wrote about this strange book at my old blog here.)

5.  The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer in 1970.  The masterly stories in this collection were published between 1944 and 1969. It was the era of the polymath, of a love of arcane multi-syllabic words. These perfectly-wrought stories, set in Europe, New England, and the West, are both subtle and shocking; her descriptions and dialogue are precise and pellucid. Does she go too far for our pseudo-sensitive smiley-face sensibilities? Are her New England spinsters too rich, mean, and snobbish for the modern reader? Is the shocking culture clash between Americans and Germans after Nuremberg too graphic? (It is a horrifying story.) Are the pretentious teachers with new master’s degrees too condescending? (Yes, they are, but that’s so realistic!) Is the obese philology student in Heidelberg too monstrous: she eats whole cakes, uses a sucker as a bookmark, and ominously talks about a dead thin twin. ( I’m fat, and not at all offended!) What about the cruise captain who exaggerates his racial prejudice (or does he?) to tease a liberal young woman described as “a natural victim”? (At the end, she is far from a victim.) These characters are vividly portrayed, realistic, and are sometimes as obnoxious as people we know in “real life.  You can read the rest of my blog here.

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The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford

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I love The New Yorker.  I always look forward to the fiction.  Stars rise and fall. I wonder whether even  publication in The New Yorker can ensure a writer’s future.

Jean Stafford is a neglected New Yorker writer.  Her books are still in print, but her name is seldom mentioned.  One of her stories, “The Interior Castle,”  was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike, but she is missing from the new anthology, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore.  Stafford died in 1979, so  perhaps we have to skip back a few generations to find fans of Stafford.

The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer in 1970.  I love her work. I used to drink coffee and read her stories  as I sat on the bank of the Iowa River behind my (now defunct) high school.

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Scotch tape is the answer: the pages are loose!

Stafford’s stories are Jamesian, powerful, comical.  How can such a brilliant writer be so little-known?

The masterly stories in her Pulitzer-winning collection were published between 1944 and 1969.  It was the era of the polymath, of  a love of arcane multi-syllabic words.  These perfectly-wrought stories, set in Europe, New England, and the West, are  both subtle and shocking; her descriptions and dialogue are precise and pellucid. Does she go too far for our pseudo-sensitive smiley-face sensibilities?  Are her  New England spinsters too rich, mean,  and snobbish for the modern reader?  Is the shocking culture clash between Americans and Germans after Nuremberg  too graphic? (It is a horrifying story.) Are the pretentious teachers with new master’s degrees too condescending?  (Yes, they are, but that’s so realistic!)  Is the obese philology student in Heidelberg too monstrous:  she eats whole cakes,  uses a sucker as a bookmark, and ominously talks about a dead thin twin.  ( I’m fat, and not at all offended!)  What about the cruise captain who exaggerates his racial prejudice (or does he?) to tease a liberal young woman described as “a natural victim”?  (At the end,  she is far from a victim.)  These characters are vividly portrayed, realistic,  and are sometimes as obnoxious as people we know in “real life.”

Rereading Stafford’s stories is a delight. In the Jamesian story “Life Is No Abyss,” Lily, a young woman whose pilot parents ironically died in a plane crash, is scandalized by a visit to 80-year-old Cousin Isobel in the poorhouse.  Lily has vivid memories of Isobel and her ancient father, the Judge, entertaining the whole clan in their rich, elegant North Shore summer house.  Yhe elderly Cousin Will, described as “the worst and most ingratiating investor who had ever lived,” has ruined Cousin Isobel through bad invesments, and she insists on living in the poorhouse to get revenge.  She refuses to move into the apartment on Will’s renovated third floor, or the even more opulent apartment in rich Cousin Augusta’s house.

Cousin Isobel is hilariously, if nastily, eloquent.  She is as astute as a social worker when she desribes the conditions of the poorhouse  where she doesn’t have to live.

“The whole place is a scandal. It is a public shame.  If they would give me pen and paper–don’t ask me why they won’t, for their regulations are quite incomprehensible to my poor brain–I would write to people in high places, where I daresay the name the name Judge James Carpenter has not been forgotten.  I have never gone in for seances; I have never been taken in by the supernatural; if she telephoned me personally, I would not believe that Mary Baker Eddy was ringing up from her tomb in MOunt Auburn Cemetery.  But I swear I know that good man, the august Judge, turns in his grave when his immortal soul considers where I am.  He never liked Will Hamilton.  Small men are shifty.”  Before arthritis had shortened her, Cousin Isobel had stood six feet in military heels.

I love these stories.  My copy is starting to fall apart, though.  The cover is torn and the opening pages are loose!  I’ll have to find another copy after this reread.