2/1/2023

Reference: Hilton Als discusses Jean Stafford and her story “Children Are Bored on Sunday” with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman and a reading of the story by Eliza Foss. Spoilers for the story below. Eliza Foss does an outstanding job reading the story with just the right amount nuance.

In the short story, Children are never bored on Sundays, by Jean Stafford the main character named Emma was raised on a farm feels that she isn’t adequate to talk to people who she considers to be intellectuals. She is recovering from a long illness which actually turned out to be a car accident. Her husband damaged her face in a car accident from which he walked away unscathed. His name was Robert Lowell. I also read that later he rebroke her nose by hitting her and they divorced each other. I am only mentioning this because I feel it’s important that we understand exactly what type of illness or infirmity she is recovering from because of the story it isn’t clear what is wrong with her.

Another writer who disparaged her decision was Delmore Schwartz, a drinking buddy, a confidant, and possibly her lover—or so Lowell and several of his friends believed. (Lowell, for his part, hastened the end of his marriage to Stafford by openly having an affair with Gertrude Buckman, Schwartz’s ex-wife.) -The New Yorker

Jean Stafford who plays a character named Emma in the story is inside the Metropolitan Art Museum in Manhattan on Sunday afternoon. She doesn’t expect she’ll run into any people that she knows. Daily she tries to walk for exercise so she can sleep well at night but eventually she always makes her way down to a bar and gets very drunk. In fact she’s so much of an alcoholic that she barely eats at all and is almost anorexic. I also read that when she died she became very thin and anorexic on this all could have been from the abuse of alcohol or perhaps she had other psychological problems.

As Emma looks at the paintings she starts to think about and then she decides perhaps that because his appearance is disheveled that he has also been in ill health. She wonders if they could bond over their mutual afflictions which she calls ill health but are in fact probably symptoms of using alcohol and drugs. As she’s looking at the paintings she decides that she really does want to go out and have a drink with him after the museum is about to close. It’s interesting to note that she appears to see the actual Salvador Dali inside the museum which I suppose was not impossible. I wondered if she was only referring to one of the portraits of Salvador Dali in the museum or it was the actual Salvador Dali? That would certainly be a surreal experience for her because Salvador Dali is considered the father of Surrealism. She thinks that Salvador Dali is merely famous and that is why she recognizes him but she isn’t interested in him and she doesn’t try to talk to him. Emma wants to talk to Eisenberg but she’s afraid if she does that she will be rejected because of her lack of knowledge about what she considers to be intellectual topics such as Ezra Pound. It is not really so much Eisenberg she is refrained will reject her but his friends who are very snobby she feels will mock them if they were to go on a date or to be seen together holding hands. She recalls that the last time she saw Eisenberg at a party she flirted with him for a full 7 or 8 minutes.

She decides to leave the museum without talking to him at all because she is so embarrassed and as she’s starting to leave the museum he happens to notice her and he takes her hand and immediately her heart melts. She think of her heart as being shaped like a Valentine. She doesn’t feel that she loves him, but she does want to go have a drink with him. When he suggests they go have a drink together at first she plays coy because she doesn’t want to seem to be too easy. But after she feels that he is sincere she tells him that she would absolutely love to go for a drink, but they’ll have to walk down Lexington to go to a bar where they will not run into anybody they know. This is because she wants to get extremely drunk on very strong whiskey. Maybe she’s ashamed of running into some of the people she knows? He seems to be disheveled and ill and she knows that he also has had financial problems, a divorce, and he can’t even afford to continue to see his therapist. She feels that they could sneak away together like children going off to play and then she changes her narrative. Before her change of heart she felt that Eisenberg was an important person and she wasn’t sure what he did for a living. Was he a writer, he composed. music or was he a painter? She had decided that college had ruined her mind because it made her feel inadequate. Before college she thought her mind was fresh and unspoiled and then she could just pretend to be an unsophisticated country girl. Unfortunately college had given her enough education to know that she was lacking in education compared to the other New York intellectuals such as Eisenberg.  Had this story not taken place in the late 40s she would have been able to likely use Wikipedia on her phone and quickly look up the particular artists in the museum and find out information about them and even find out Eisenberg’s profession. The shift in what she’s thinking about is when she allows herself to go have that drink with Eisenberg because she realizes after all they are only children and she just hopes that Eisenberg will not ruin their conversation by discussing things that she doesn’t find interesting and then she lists a number of topics that she hopes that he won’t talk about when they drink together.

The final kicker that made this story really interesting was that she and her husband Robert Lowell allowed Delmore Schwartz (Eisenberg) to stay with them in their New York apartment for a time. I’m not sure what the duration was. Then I began to imagine that Jean Stafford had just run into him somewhere in her apartment and maybe she didn’t know if she wanted to have a drink with him or not or maybe she just wanted to move around the apartment without talking to him.

Delmore Schwartz came to a sad end because of his drinking and drug use. He wasn’t able to capture the glory of his early days as a poet. This short story was also the first fiction story that she got published in The New Yorker.  Delmore Schwartz did not like “Children are never bored on Sundays” when it came out and he actually wrote a tirade against The New Yorker. Although I haven’t been able to find the article he wrote, the gist of it was that The New Yorker forced new writers to write with a level of artificiality in order to be accepted into The New Yorker which made them less fresh and spontaneous.  Delmore Schwartz is reported to have suffered from bipolar disorder which they used to call manic depression but back then they didn’t have psychiatric medication. Although I’m not sure that that would have helped him at all. Some of the commentary about her is particularly harsh as they call her an anti-feminist who wants the man to take the lead. Maybe that’s why she feels that she can’t go up to him and suggest that they have a drink together because that would be too forward. Of course it would have been a terrible blow to her ego if she had asked him instead of he her and he had refused. Because both the characters are Alcoholics they will find solace in having somebody to drink with instead of drinking alone every night.

Jean Stafford found happiness with her third husband A. J. Liebling. Unfortunately they were only married for four years until he died. While she was married to Liebling she stopped writing. I believe this is probably because the alcoholism became too powerful and she was happy so she didn’t feel the need to write. Perhaps some of her writing was caused by her unhappiness and finding fulfillment took away her need to write? A. J. Liebling also wrote extensively for The New Yorker.

Bonus Story “The Echo and the Nemesis” was suggested by Hilton Als as another story that expressed the true Jean Stafford. The story is about two college girls studying in Heidelberg.  Jean Stafford plays the role of Sue who is very shy. Her only friend is Ramona who horrifies her due to her obesity. There is a terrible secret behind Ramona’s weight gain.

Spoilers: When Sue discovers what the secret is she is forced to flee away from her friend who at the same time rejects her. She is so upset that she becomes anorexic and unable to eat for fear of ending up like her fat friend Ramona. On one hand Sue is jealous of Ramona’s self-confidence and outgoing personality, but she is afraid if she gives in to self-indulgence she herself will end up gaining weight. Perhaps some unspoken trauma in Sue’s own life precipitates the odd mental breakdown?

Updated: 11/15/2023

Interior Castle

Because I wasn’t finding older The New Yorker stories easy to read in spite of my digital subscription, I decided to focus more intensely on Jean Stafford. I am now in the process of reading every possible story that can find by Jean Stafford This might require me to go back into the archives of The New Yorker, where it’s very hard to read. But I have The Collected Short Stories of Jean Stafford and of course the first one I wanted to turn to was Interior Castle because it was mentioned by the ladies at The New Yorker who were speaking about “The Children Are Bored on Sundays” Story. There’s so much interesting content in her stories, each of the stories in the book has enough interesting material for me to create a separate blog on it. But there’s something really important I noticed about this story “Interior Castles.”

Her first husband, poet Robert Lowell, was driving the car when Jean’s face was injured in a car accident, and later on she wrote her experience into a fictional story about a young girl named Pansy who’s in the hospital because her nose has been injured in a car accident. Masking the unfortunately details of the accident, she doesn’t want to say, “Oh, it was my ex-husband driving it.” So instead she makes the car into a taxi cab. In the story the cab driver of the taxi cab was killed. Her first husband, poet Robert Lowell, was driving the car when Jean’s face was injured in a car accident, and later on she wrote it into a fictional story about a young girl named Pansy who’s in the hospital because her nose has been injured in a car accident. So for the details of the accident, she doesn’t want to say, “Oh, it was my ex-husband driving it.” So instead she makes it into a taxicab. In the story the cab driver of the taxicab was killed. And maybe This is why she’s doing a little bit of voodoo magic on her ex-husband, who was still alive when Jean Stafford wrote the story in 1953.  On September 12, 1977, at the age of 60 Robert Lowell died in a taxicab in New York City.  He was traveling to New York to accept a teaching position at Harvard. When he landed, he asked the cab driver to drive him to the House of his second Ex-wife. Her name was Elizabeth Hardwick, he died in the taxi cab of a heart attack.

In 1972, Mr. Lowell’s life went through its third major upheaval. His second marriage came to an end with divorce, and he married his third wife, Caroline Blackwood. They moved to England for the birth of their son, Robert Sheridan.” It’s from a book called The Dolphin Letters.

I can see from the photo that Robert Lowe would be very attractive to women because not only is he a good looking man, but he obviously has the sensitive soul of a poet and because he was bipolar, lots of women who would have wanted to take care of him and help him.

“In 1970 Lowell took up a fellowship in Oxford, leaving Hardwick and their teenage daughter behind in New York. A week later, after a party in London, he began an affair with the rackety bohemian heiress Lady Caroline Blackwood.”

He was leaving Blackwood and returning to Hardwick and to teach again at Harvard, but he never made it there. Jean Stafford died shortly afterwards in 1979, but she outlived Lowell. I think they both died from lifestyle consequences specially smoking, drinking and never exercising. But, its interesting to think her story was in someway involved.

Updated: There are biographies of Jean Stafford, but no eBooks. I had to order a used book. Ideally I need all of her biographies, but I could only find one of them. I may have a better understand of her characters if I read her biography.

Updated: The Biography had small fonts. I need to run the pages into my Snapscan Scanner and enlarge them. This is challenging. The pages feed fine, but the text needs editing and work to create an editable Microsoft Word document. The scanned text comes out faint and needs clarification.

Updated: I scanned the first 70 pages and sat down to read it. The subject is interesting, but the writing is boring. The main problem is too many tiny details which are charming when Jean writes about them, but fail because he is a poor writer. I am not giving his name or the title of the book therefore. Only details that are relevant should be giving in a biography. I want a more scientific approach in a biography, as this is not novel that I am reading to enjoy the stylized prose. Updated I wasn’t giving the authors name to preserve his dignity. Then I found out that according to his Facebook page he has passed away. But the book is way too long like he’s trying to stretch out the material because he doesn’t have quite enough information and this is probably because she didn’t really like to give information out about her life. The book says she was a very private person.

As it turns out, he never actually met Jean Stanford, because she died before he decided to start writing the biography. His name was David Roberts, and he wrote mostly for the Boston Globe about mountaineering so it seems to me that he was not an appropriate choice to write a literary biography.

Not only is the biography, ridiculously long, but it actually hides some things under secrecy. The biggest example is in the part in which her husband leaves her because he’s having an affair with the wife of the same man that she was hanging out with in the museum. David Roberts changed her to a guest.

At the end of their troubled year in Maine, Lowell had begun an affair with one of their last summer guests.

Concealing the name is a great oversight, because one won’t be able to understand the true stinging meaning of the above story “Children are bored on Sundays”. Maybe it was a different guest, but if he’s concealing the details, I have to double check each of his statements.

Lucy Suicide 12/14/2023

Update regarding the Biography: The author David Roberts had never met Jean Stafford. Therefore he didn’t know how Jean met a red headed girl named Lucy. It seems that they had had an argument. I don’t know whose fault the argument was. Lucy and Andrew who was her husband were home at the time in the middle of the argument Lucy rushed into the bedroom to get the revolver to shoot herself and her husband Andrew dashed after her but he couldn’t get to her in time and she quickly put the gun to her head and shot herself and then died later at the hospital. Apparently this was so shocking and upsetting for Jean that she wrote an entire novel about it but she didn’t manage to finish the novel. The novel called Snowfall is unfinished and forever lost. Jean said at first she wanted to write a revenge novel but then she felt like she just couldn’t. She said Lucy has killed even my desire for revenge. Jean was present at the time of the suicide but she was not having an affair with Andrew which is what everybody assumed. Andrew did not find Jean attractive because her hands and ankles were too big. It also said that Lucy likely committed suicide due to some sort of health issue which could have been an abdominal tumor. Although Lucy’s motivation is not known, it had something to do with excessive drinking. Maybe she thought the gun wasn’t loaded and she was doing this for some sort of dramatic effect? But this is all pure speculation. But I can see how this would have affected Jean terribly. She was a very sensitive person who was very prone to being upset and went through all kinds of mental illness issues.

The supposition in the biography is that Lucy ruined Jean’s literary life because she spent too much of her writing prime years drafting the incomplete novel Snowfall. In a comparable situation William Burroughs’s publishers wanted him to write about the incident in which he accidentally shot his wife Joan. Unfortunately, Burroughs was never able to describe the incident in a literary piece. Lucy’s Suicide is also not addressed so therefore the book could never come to fruition. Apparently Jean was so haunted by the incident and she was not able to get it down on paper. Unfortunately, the biography does not explain the reason why Jean was unable to describe the incident.

It is not possible to read Snowfall because it’s never been published in any form.  There was some supposition that Jean had burned the novel herself.  Even though she may have missed her potential as a novelist, its fortunate enough that she’s at least a short story writer.  There’s no point to lamenting that she was not a novelist because maybe that was not meant to be? The author of the book seems convinced that everyone who reads it would want to know why she never became a great novelist  and not that her readers would merely appreciate her short stories.

Savage Heart Jean Stafford is a much better biography. I also go both on Kindle and Audible a biography of Delmore Schwartz Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet  which is my new favorite book. The narrator has a good voice with no weird fake English accent. Delmore Schwartz lead an outrageous life, and died in the corridor of a hotel called Columbia. Some sources say he died at The Hotel Dixie, but he had left there for the Columbia, but the reason he did is not clear. Delmore Schwartz was attractive and he charmed women like Jean Stafford, but could change his mood quickly and become difficult. He felt Robert Lowell Jean’s husband was too entitled and wanted to fight him.

The Hotel Columbia is reported to be the hotel in which he died by the Biography but I can’t find any evidence of a hotel by that name. I want to see the hotel in which he died in the hallway as a tourist attraction, but I can’t find it. I don’t know if the name is wrong or if the hotel is now under another name. Maybe it was torn down and replaced, but Delmore Schwartz died in 1966, so I think I should be able to find a trace of it on a website for historical hotels in Manhattan. The location of The Hotel Columbia is listed as West 46th Street near 6th Avenue. I plan to go and investigate the location. Updates will follow on what is there.

Updated: 12/28/2023

I’m really disappointed in the Delmar Schwartz book because the author (James Atlas) who was also recently passed away did not get into very much personal stuff. There was too much information about his literary life of Delmar Schwartz and not enough about his personal life. I was investigating him from the point of view is that he is somebody who Jean Stafford met in the Art Museum and then developed a crush on after first being repelled by him. The author of the biography wrote a second biography which it’s supposed to possibly get more into his personal life so I’ll have to get that fairly soon. But the second biography is also about Saul Bellow.  Saul Bellow is an interesting writer I’ve read some of his stuff and it’s adequate but I have a hard time paying attention to it. But I don’t really see why I should have to buy a biography of Saul Bellow just to read more about Delmar Schwartz. I would rather just look at all the letters and source material that the biographer had at his disposal.  Now I just have to view Delmar Schwartz through the filtered cloudy lens of this author.

 What I really hated about the biography is the author continually describing Delmar Schwartz as insane.  He didn’t even take into consideration that he was taking a lot of amphetamines which were legal at the time and he was combining this with heavy drinking. Delmar Schwartz was not insane he was merely an addict. If he had gotten some help I bet he could have recovered mentally, but we’ll never know. The hotel Columbia where he died has been torn down and replaced with something else and so there’s no point in even going to look at it anymore. Amphetamine psychosis is a real thing. I know there’s more information that the author did not include because I read The New Yorker Article (behind paywall) about the second book and it says that Delmore Schwartz always wrote down what drugs he was taking, he recorded everything faithfully in diaries. James Atlas now feels to me more like a betrayer than a biographer.

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