When I began this column, a Famous Novelist got in touch to urge me to try the short stories of Jean Stafford. Shame on me, but I’d never heard of Stafford, who died in 1979, nine years after receiving a Pulitzer prize for her Collected Stories (it’s the centenary of her birth this year). Still, I did as I was told, and ordered a copy online – an American edition, because she seems not to be in print in the UK. I’m so happy I did. Stafford, it turns out, is just my bag. Not only is she allergic to what she calls, in one story, “familial piety”, she has such a delicious tone. She writes, as she once put it, in “the voice of an undertaker”, by which I assume she means that she tends to sound wry even as she lays her bodies out.
It’s great, discovering a new old writer like this. In addition to the stories, there are three novels and a non-fiction book about Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother. (“Remarkable,” says Joyce Carol Oates of this.) Perhaps I’ll read a biography, too. Stafford’s life was sad and complicated. Her first husband, the poet Robert Lowell, seriously injured her when he crashed their car while drunk. Her face was disfigured, and she subsequently endured reconstructive surgery, an experience that informs one of her best-known stories. In The Interior Castle, Pansy Vanneman is still in hospital six weeks after a car accident. Having woken up to the sound of a priest administering Extreme Unction to the patient next to her, she must now – this may be even worse – endure her surgeon talking of “our nose” and how “we” will be a new person when “we” can breathe again. Though reluctant to get into the business of administering unction myself, I do feel quite fervently about this. Stafford is touched by greatness, and I want everyone to know it.
