Alice Munro\u2019s Nobel Prize last fall was hailed as a victory for the novel\u2019s neglected stepsister, the short story. What struck me most about Munro\u2019s win was how well she has fared by following a heavily beaten path. She faithfully adheres to the rules Edgar Allen Poe set out for the genre in the 1840s: singularity <\/i>(every word in a story must serve one purpose), brevity<\/i>, and maximum effect on the reader (remember \u201cThe Telltale Heart\u201d?) are sine qua non. Poe thinks stories go astray when they aim to make readers conjure up a whole life or figure out how an episode fits into some unseen bigger picture. At their best, short stories are notes tossed into the ocean (like his \u201cMS Found in a Bottle\u201d) printed with pain, sorrow, despair, or, more rarely, with hilarity or joy.<\/p>\n
Munro\u2019s victory set me wondering about these conventions. Can a single set of rules have held sway over the short story for 180 years? The history of literary genres contains inflection points, moments when a long slow curve heading in one direction pauses, changes its mind, and slopes off in another. Chekhov, with his beautiful but cold commitment to the impersonal nature of art, may be one such point in the short story\u2019s history; Kafka another. And Nick Dames has recently argued in Public Books<\/i>1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0that \u201conline venues such as Fictionaut, Five Chapters, or 365 Tomorrows\u201d have let \u201cthe garrulous, the bizarre, the embarrassing\u201d flower in the short story in ways impossible in the era when \u201cthe upper-middlebrow weekly\u201d was the genre\u2019s home base. If the short story\u2019s rules went into temporary free fall for several years in the \u201940s and \u201950s, Jean Stafford deserves some of the credit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n In \u201cThe Echo and the Nemesis,\u201d (1950) Stafford writes<\/p>\n Ramona Dunn \u2026 always carried a pair of field glasses, in a brassbound leather case that hung over her shoulder by a plaited strap of rawhide; she looked through the wrong end of them, liking, for some reason that she did not disclose, to diminish the world she surveyed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Why does Ramona Dunn like to diminish the world she surveys? That\u2019s what it means to be a Jean Stafford character: to be curious about one\u2019s surroundings but anxious not to be mistaken for an active participant in them. On the one hand, Stafford\u2019s characters dream of a world without social anxieties; on the other, they\u2019re persuaded no such world exists. They sneer at what they see through those field glasses, yet they keep right on spying, creeping closer and closer until they suddenly look up and realize they\u2019ve become part of the scene. (Louise Fitzhugh\u2019s Harriet the Spy has a healthy dose of Stafford in her.)<\/p>\n From a certain perspective all fiction is about peering in without getting involved. Austen\u2019s perilous courtships and Raymond Chandler\u2019s killings let readers drop in on other people\u2019s lives without repercussions while remaining well above the fray. Still, I can\u2019t think of any other writer who comes close to Stafford\u2019s exhaustive anatomy of the allures and pitfalls of social surveillance.<\/p>\n I have never understood why Stafford\u2019s star sank so quickly. The world would be a poorer place without her mordant wit and beautiful periodic sentences. She is terse when epigrams are called for, but capable of sinuous expostulation at just the right moment. Like James Thurber, she worshipped Mark Twain; copying Twain\u2019s \u201chumorous writing\u201d she learned to attend to quicksilver idioms and dialect words, to capture the delightfully odd phrases that are tomorrow\u2019s clich\u00e9s being born. Most of all, though, Stafford ought to be judged by characters like Ramona Dunn, who find themselves trapped in a world that they both revile and want desperately to take by storm.<\/p>\n Jean Stafford was born 1915 in California, raised in Colorado, and flourished as a writer in New York, especially in the pages of the New Yorker<\/i>\u00a0between 1940 and 1969. Today, she has nearly vanished from the shelves, while her worthy (Carson McCullers, John Cheever) and not-so-worthy (Richard Yates, really?) contemporaries are robustly republished. The trajectory of her critical reputation is painful to contemplate. Critics gushed over her debut novel Boston Adventure\u00a0<\/i>(1944); praised her gently when her stories were among the reliable warhorses in the New Yorker<\/i>\u2019s stable (\u201cThe Interior Castle\u201d and \u201cChildren Are Bored on Sundays\u201d [1948] were her Derby winners); called her back to mind when her Collected Stories<\/i> won a Pulitzer and national acclaim in 1970; turned on her caustically when she stalled over an unfinished and perhaps unfinishable novel late in life; forgot her after her lonely, alcoholic death in 1979; published six summative books about her between 1985 and 19962<\/a><\/sup>; and then forgot her again.<\/p>\n Stafford has been burdened by critical comparisons to the gentler Eudora Welty and the stranger Carson McCullers. Even when the right comparisons are made\u2014to Twain, to short story antecedents like James Joyce and Chekhov, or to contemporaries like Cheever\u2014the game frequently feels rigged, doomed to find Stafford wanting in comparison to the authoritative male writers whose aesthetic company she sought. Her marriages to Robert Lowell (short and miserable) and the doughty New Yorker<\/i> writer A. J. Liebling (longer and happier) also sometimes make her cannon fodder for biographical accounts that reduce her work to one long roman \u00e0 clef.<\/i><\/p>\n Stafford\u2019s novels are sometimes taken as the measure of her art, but the short stories are her true legacy. In them she weighs herself, her world, her readers, and finds all three a terrible disappointment. As you make your way through Stafford\u2019s Collected Stories<\/i> (here\u2019s to Farrar, Straus & Giroux for keeping it in print!) you\u2019ll notice certain Stafford ground rules. Her stories are virtually all about childhood or old age, or young to middle-aged characters who are somehow marginalized in the same way that the old and young are. They generally open in a damaged, often drink-sodden milieu anywhere on the social spectrum\u2014Stafford\u2019s rich and poor are equally scarred. Most center on a child or an old crank who is scraping by despite the unpleasantness of her environment and so-called friends. Three quick examples: in \u201cThe Bleeding Heart\u201d (1948), the shy young Rose Fabrizio begins to imagine that a dignified silent gentleman at the library will adopt her and open the world of letters to her; in \u201cA Modest Proposal\u201d (1949), Mrs. Fairweather, a \u201cborn victim\u201d waiting for her divorce to come through in the Florida Keys, looks for a way to demonstrate her superiority over her loutish, bigoted host; and in \u201cBeatrice Trueblood\u2019s Story\u201d (1955), a woman who has been jilted by her fianc\u00e9 goes deaf and her retreat into spacey rumination is witnessed enviously by an unhappily married man. Stafford\u2019s novels are sometimes taken as the measure of her art, but Some of Stafford\u2019s finest stories, however, do speculate tentatively about what a real escape from society might look like. In \u201cThe Interior Castle,\u201d the accident that leaves Pansy bandaged and immobilized produces a mystical experience of contentless tranquility. In \u201cBeatrice Trueblood\u2019s Story,\u201d deafness seems to offer Beatrice a way out of a horrid engagement and an almost equally horrid set of \u201cfriends.\u201d These retreats are odd and engaging: Beatrice seems \u201cproud and secret-living as a flower\u201d to an envious onlooker and Pansy \u201cbelieved she had reached the innermost chamber of knowledge and that perhaps her knowledge was the same as the saint\u2019s achievement of pure love.\u201d<\/p>\n These escapes are also, however, very temporary. The bandages come off of Pansy\u2019s \u201ctreasureless head\u201d and the innermost chamber is empty. Beatrice learns how to read lips, regains her hearing, and marries a \u201cresearch chemist\u201d; in the story\u2019s final paragraph he\u2019s overheard bullying her in just the same ways her first fianc\u00e9 had. In \u201cThe Maiden\u201d (1950), an elderly German couple\u2019s love story consists of their delight when the husband\u2019s first client is executed in front of his eyes\u2014delight because completing his first case, even if it ends in his client\u2019s beheading, qualifies him to get married. In \u201cThe Bleeding Heart,\u201d Rose discovers that the old gent she admires from a distance in the public library is in fact the horrible sadist she\u2019s heard screaming violently at his senile mother through her bedroom wall; soon enough she finds herself trapped in his front hall listening to his obscene proposals. Stafford\u2019s world is populated, you might say, with imaginary kindly old gents, and actual lechers. The trick is not to distinguish between the two, but simply to accept that whoever looks like the former in your dream world turns out to be the latter in our real world.<\/p>\n All this nastiness may make it sound as if Stafford has a higher realm in mind by way of contrast, something like the \u201crepublic of the spirit\u201d that Lawrence Selden offers Lily Bart in Edith Wharton\u2019s House of Mirth<\/i>. In Stafford\u2019s remarkable stories, however, those who recoil from society\u2019s murk nonetheless come to recognize that they too (and, yes, we readers too) have been swimming in it all along. In \u201cThe Maiden,\u201d the American ingenue\u2019s horror at the German lawyer\u2019s tale stems from her realization of how much she wants and needs to believe that Europe is much more civilized than her own vulgar country. And in \u201cThe Bleeding Heart,\u201d Rose realizes that her library daydreams of a kindly old father figure were no more than a creative misdescription of the world she actually inhabits.<\/p>\n Though Stafford herself spoke of her stories as Western, almost all were written in New York between 1940 and 1970, and Stafford swam in the same intellectual milieu that produced Lionel Trilling\u2019s The Liberal Imagination<\/i> (1950), David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denny\u2019s The Lonely Crowd<\/i> (1950), William Whyte\u2019s Organization Man <\/i>(1956), and Betty Friedan\u2019s The Feminine Mystique<\/i> (1963). It is tempting to read Stafford\u2019s own work as a protest against corrosive social conformity, and to find in her fiction the same protest against the heavy, dead air of the Connecticut suburbs that runs through the stories of John Cheever.<\/p>\n The comparison between Stafford and Cheever is a revealing one, but the divergences are as telling as the similarities. Both successful, and both fearful of being unmasked as impostors in the dog-eat-dog New York literary scene, Cheever and Stafford made their livings anatomizing those who woke up to discover themselves outsiders to their own lives\u2014Kafka\u2019s \u201cMetamorphosis\u201d is surely one of their common ancestors. But there is a real difference in scope between their works. Cheever\u2019s characters are winners, well-fed and well-housed, yet nonetheless enveloped by some diffuse evasive misery. Every wave that jostles the limpid swimming pools, every clinking glass at cocktail hour is a dimly audible cry for help. Every train that leaves the station seems to carry hopes away with it, or to bring emptiness back home in the evening. The Stepford Wives<\/i> suburbs that Lewis Mumford scathingly indicted as \u201ca collective effort to live a private life\u201d were Cheever\u2019s terrain and his mortal enemies. Blessed with a clearer eye and a sharper tongue than his epigones (John Updike, Rick Moody, and Tom Perrota) Cheever sends his characters gliding down the mainstream, which serves up empty marriages, spoiled children, embittering jobs, and unrewarding affairs like so much flotsam and jetsam of the Eisenhower administration. Though Stafford herself Other postwar fiction writers shared Stafford\u2019s appealing and unsettling preoccupations: think of Patricia Highsmith\u2019s almost sociopathic chilliness or Mary McCarthy\u2019s animosity toward a sanctimonious social world. But Highsmith lacked Stafford\u2019s ability to depict credible interiority, and McCarthy\u2019s social critique depended on her condescending certitude about her own superiority to the pinheads around her, which contrasts with Stafford\u2019s glum assumption that we are all in the soup together. Stafford casts a cold eye on the mandarin revulsion at mass consumer culture, and asks whether the mandarins are really any different from the plebs. We have met the enemy\u2014and it turns out to be us, at a cocktail party.<\/p>\n One final peer-to-peer comparison. I recently read a wonderful collection3<\/a><\/sup> of Maeve Brennan\u2019s \u201cTalk of the Town\u201d pieces from 1953 to 1968, Stafford\u2019s era. \u201cLast night, at a quarter past nine, I saw two full-grown city children\u2014middle-aged people\u2014walking together on Sixth Avenue,\u201d the first recollection begins, so I was primed to expect something Stafford-like. Except that where Stafford gives us the public look of things and then the heartbreak beneath, Brennan offers only perfectly glimpsed public moments. A woman who looks at the other patrons in the University Restaurant, for example, \u201cas though she were looking at a wallpaper painted to look like the University Restaurant, a wallpaper painted by a careful artist who had got everything just right.\u201d Stafford would have followed that woman home after her carefully husbanded Scotch and water is drunk; Brennan simply ends the sketch ends there. A perfectly rendered account of Brennan\u2019s first refusing, and then accepting, and then refusing again a subway seat that a slumping, glum man has offered her pulls up painfully short with a non-moral: \u201cSometimes it is very hard to know the right thing to do.\u201d Stafford would have Stafford doesn\u2019t let ladies who look at her as if she were wallpaper out of her sight\u2014not until she figures out whether they are stupefied alcoholics, malevolent artists, or just myopic. The stomach-jolting misanthropy that so often concludes a Stafford story stems from a Pandora\u2019s box principle, a willingness to suffer misery after misery while looking for a glimmer of hope in that dark furthest corner. It\u2019s less that Brennan knows better than the inhabitants of her sketches than that she\u2019s capable of not knowing better, of heading home and sitting down at the typewriter. Stafford, though, will hang around in the bushes under the living room window waiting for a clue. She is a perennially disappointed explorer of unpredictable inward reaches of other people\u2019s minds who nonetheless goes on looking. When two of her out-of-the-way failures, her middle-aged children bored on Sunday, do manage to find something to celebrate, even if it\u2019s only the prospect of a drunken but unmistakably well-meaning carouse, the pleasure is all the sweeter for its rarity.<\/p>\n Another lapidary Stafford story, \u201cThe Captain\u2019s Gift\u201d (1946), begins with an admiring sketch of \u00a0the elderly, distinguished Mrs. Chester Ramsey. \u00a0In 1945 old-fashioned Mrs. Ramsey goes her solitary way in a lower Manhattan neighborhood that has become ethnically muddled and raucous. In her \u201cimpregnable\u201d \u201civory tower,\u201d she shuts out the fuss, proclaiming \u201cI have never liked change and now I am too old for it.\u201d Her perfect reverie is only broken when, from \u201csomewhere in Germany,\u201d her grandson in the Army sends her a \u201cbraid of golden hair\u201d: hair that was cut, \u00a0the reader suddenly realizes, \u00a0from the head of a gassed Jewish child.<\/p>\n Finally, something has reached Mrs. Ramsey:<\/p>\n It is thick and it seems still so vital in the light that streams through the windows that Mrs. Ramsey feels its owner is concealed from her only by a vapor, that her head is here beside her on the love seat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Convinced as she is of her capacity to stand apart, Mrs. Ramsey is forced to admit that the world can sometimes touch her\u2014a messiness signaled in part by the way that Stafford awkwardly piles \u201cher head is here\u201d next to \u201cbeside her on the love seat.\u201d<\/p>\n Elizabeth Bishop ends one of her poems with the famous lines \u201cAll the untidy activity continues \/ awful but cheerful.\u201d In Stafford that logic is reversed: the untidy activity turns out to be cheerful but awful. Stafford loves to overdo it in these moments of revelation. The appearance of a relic of the Holocaust, or of sudden death by beheading or accidental gunshot, the tales of roasted edible babies\u2014these all bespeak Stafford\u2019s effort to show that nobody can finally remain untouched by social disaster in some form and that nothing in our human world lacks that touch of the exploitative, the macabre.<\/p>\n Perhaps the reason that \u201cChildren Are Bored on Sundays\u201d remains Stafford\u2019s most anthologized story is the way it seems to offer its protagonist Emma an unlikely and unlooked-for bit of happiness. The story begins with Emma killing time in a museum for lack of anything better to do. Finally, she and a fellow sufferer head off to a bar (\u201cthe place where the bottle was, the peace pipe on Lexington\u201d), a narcotizing analogue to the museum they flee together. If they can drink themselves into agreement, the story promises, they can achieve a happiness that need never leave that alcoholic oasis. Good luck with that, the reader thinks, but smiles nonetheless.<\/p>\n Many of us claim to want out of a social realm that makes us perennially unsure how to achieve what Erving Goffman calls footing<\/i>. Yet something still draws us back in. Stafford\u2019s stories give us ways of thinking about the chaotic, unpredictable complexity of the cheerful but awful social life that is our oxygen as well as our arsenic. If her stories don\u2019t turn life with other humans into heaven, at least they sketch out a fresh hell, one where the children are not always<\/i> Alice Munro\u2019s Nobel Prize last fall was hailed as a victory for the novel\u2019s neglected stepsister, the short story. What struck me most about Munro\u2019s win was how well she has fared by following a heavily beaten path. She faithfully adheres to the rules Edgar Allen Poe set out for the genre in the 1840s: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2590,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[17,14,20,170,169],"pbpartner":[],"section":[],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-1111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-fiction","tag-history","tag-literature","tag-secrets","tag-short-story"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\n<\/p>\n\n
\nMuch as I admire Alice Munro\u2019s ardent loyalty to a form that she understands perfectly and practices beautifully, her Nobel mainly makes me think about another might-have-been inflection point half a century ago, during the reign of \u201cthe New Yorker<\/i> story.\u201d If the genre\u2019s rules went into temporary free fall for several years in the \u201940s and \u201950s, Jean Stafford deserves some of the credit. Going back recently to stories like \u201cThe Interior Castle\u201d (1946), and discovering other shockers (a young lover rushing to his beloved with blood from an execution splashed all over his suit, a girl faking mortal illness to one-up a pair of snobbish bullies), I caught a brief glimpse of how different things might have been for the short story if Stafford\u2019s ideas about sociability, intimacy, and what we need from one another had won out.<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/p>\n\n
\nthe short stories are
\nher true legacy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
\nStafford\u2019s characters dream of cutting free from a world they know they couldn\u2019t do without. Mrs. Fairweather, proud of her enlightened Northern views, can\u2019t believe anybody could listen to her host\u2019s leering stories about deciding whether or not to eat a \u201cbroiled pickaninny \u2026 baby … garnished \u2026 with parsley.\u201d She flings down a glass (\u201cit exploded like a shot\u201d) and then sits down and has another drink. Which is more or less what all Stafford\u2019s characters finally do, unable to conjure up a better world than the damned one they\u2019re forced to occupy.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n\n
\nspoke of her stories as Western, almost all were written in New York
\nbetween 1940 and 1970.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
\nStafford\u2019s stories differ from Cheever\u2019s in their wider social ambit, their varied settings and panoply of cripples, misfits, geezers, and oddball Florida racists. However, there is more to Stafford\u2019s variety than that; she notices flecks and wrinkles, variations that elude Cheever, whose accomplishment consists in his ability to universalize one sort of morbid misery, to see it everywhere. The social mantras that, in a Cheever story, are a deadly monotonous hum begin, in a Stafford story, to become audible as an oddly various collection of notes\u2014some false, some piercing. Together, these notes make her an exceptional chronicler of some of the uneasy assumptions of postwar American intellectuals as they strove to define their relationship to the common (or \u201cmiddlebrow\u201d) culture in which they had to swim but in which they feared they might drown.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n\n
\nfollowed that woman home after her carefully husbanded Scotch and water is drunk; Brennan simply ends\u00a0the sketch ends there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
\nBrennan, acid turns of phrase aside, is ultimately gentler by far than Stafford, quicker to forgive these urban passersby whom the reader never really gets to know well enough to judge. Gentler, though, because in the end Brennan doesn\u2019t care; these strangers are fodder for her, occasions to get to work. The most unsettling thing about Stafford is the animosity she manifests toward human sociability on the whole. Yet this animosity is precisely what makes her a great writer, since that dark account of the \u201cskull beneath the skin\u201d ultimately leads to an admirable impulse to follow people home, to look into crevices and under covers.<\/p>\n
\n
\nbored on Sundays.<\/p>\n