Jean Stafford by Charlotte Margolis Goodman

Author:Charlotte Margolis Goodman [Goodman, Charlotte Margolis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 1990-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

Nine

The Catherine Wheel

Fall 1949–Spring 1952

Man’s life is a cheat and a disappointment;

All things are unreal, unreal or disappointing . . .

—T. S. ELIOT, MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

. . .all that she had had, and all that she had missed were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered loss.

—KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, “THEFT”

WHEN JEAN STAFFORD sailed for Europe during the summer of 1949, she still did not feel completely secure about her status as a writer. Nevertheless, she was no longer the novice who had arrived in Europe in 1936 with aspirations to become a writer but grave doubts about whether she would ever succeed. She had published two well-received novels, twice had been the recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and had also published short stories and articles in literary quarterlies such as the Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Sewanee Review as well as in more popular magazines such as the New Yorker, Mademoiselle, and Vogue. In 1949 alone three of her stories appeared in the New Yorker: “The Cavalier” in February, “Pax Vobiscum” in July, and “Polite Conversation” in August. The latter two stories were products of her marriage to Lowell, while “The Cavalier” was the first of a series of stories that referred back to her first trip to Europe and the months she had spent in Heidelberg in 1936 and 1937. The protagonist of “The Cavalier,” a lonely American college student from Arizona, goes to Heidelberg to study Anglo-Saxon, as Stafford herself had done in 1936. Now, in 1949, thirteen years after her Wanderjahr, she would be able to revisit the very places in Heidelberg that she had recently described in this story. Once she had fulfilled her obligations to the New Yorker by writing an account of the Edinburgh Festival, she would finally have the opportunity to retrace her steps through Heidelberg, as she had longed to do ever since she had left this quaint German city in 1937.

In an article entitled “Why I Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” which appeared in Esquire in 1975, Stafford presents her “case against travel”: “Getting there is about as much fun as riding a condemned roller coaster and there, if revisited, is unrecognizably altered for the worse or, if seen for the first time, is having an unseasonable heat wave or a general strike.” Admitting that she is a nervous traveler at best, she points out, however, that after returning from each of her trips, she always realizes that, despite inevitable mishaps along the way, she has been “exhilarated and ennobled” by the things she has seen. As a result, she says, she is always able to persuade herself that her assorted misadventures en route had “really been larks.”1

The two articles in the New Yorker describing her trip abroad in 1949 reflect her ambivalence about travel, focusing as they do both on its pains and pleasures. The first article, “Letter from Edinburgh,” summarized the events that took place at the “multi-ring circus” of the Edinburgh Festival.

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