own work, but for the most part we read from the writers we had just discovered: Joyce, Proust, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Gide, Hemingway,Faulkner. Our prejudices were vitriolic and our admirations were rhapsodic; we were possessive, denying to anyone outside our circle the right to enjoy or understand
The Waste Land
or
Swann’s Way
or
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. We were clumsy and arrogant and imitative, relentlessly snobbish and hopelessly undiscriminating. We did not know where we were at but wherever it was we heard the thunderous music of the spheres. It made no difference at all that we were for the most part tone-deaf. Perhaps I do my friends an injustice and they were less befuddled than I, so I shall speak only for myself when I say that I was so moonstruck by the world of modern writing that had opened up before me that I saw no difference at all in the intentions of Thomas Wolfe and Marcel Proust or those of James Joyce and Thomas Mann: all of them were godly and inviolable.… [T]he ivory tower (a phrase that did not seem tarnished to us) that we occupied was being ceaselessly assailed by the Zeitgeist (another term we found fresh and apt). In spite of our airs and posturings and greed, we were serious and knew that ours was no golden, carefree age: we had been reared in the Depression.…
But hope and energy and political illiteracy safeguarded us against any real emotional involvement with these issues and while we heard the Zeitgeist wail and rattle our windowpanes, we stayed snug a while in that mild, crepuscular saloon and quoted
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
.
Two friends from the circle remembered her role as more peripheral than she suggested in her lecture, and Stafford’s own portrait of the intelligentsia’s gatherings in
In the Snowfall
placed Joyce Bartholomew insecurely on the outskirts. “She did not really listen to these poor, proud, scholarly boys and girls when they talked of lofty matters or read aloud … from T. S. Eliot or from their own works-in-progress … novels that sounded like Proust, poems that sounded like Pound, but she was happier with them than she was at home with her father.” John Stafford apparently hovered not far in the background for Stafford even as she abandoned him for fervent conversations over beer with her new friends. In fact, the values and stance of the intelligentsia, a gathering of the poor social outsiders on campus, were in a broad way not so different from his. (In a revised version of that passage about “poor, proud, scholarly”students, featuring Cora Savage and her father, Dan, Stafford wrote: “All of [the intelligentsia] were writers, and they read aloud from … novels that sounded, usually, like Wolfe, poems that sounded, usually, like T. S. Eliot with undertones of Donne, and political tracts that sounded, to Cora, like Dan.”) She had found an escape from her father that wasn’t entirely a repudiation of him.
With greater surreptitiousness, Stafford was also exploring a more dramatic, dissolute escape. In her junior year she became a close friend of Lucy McKee, who was one of the few women studying law and a very visible presence on the campus. Nicknamed “the red-haired queen” by one of Stafford’s friends, Lucy was rich and talented and presided over a distinctly different scene of daring experimentation. She was elected judge of the student disciplinary court in 1935, but it was her unofficial role as arbiter of a glamorously decadent code of behavior that apparently fascinated Stafford. Lucy’s circle carried to much more sophisticated extremes the punishing libertinism that prevailed among the barbarians, whose habits Stafford described this way in
In the Snowfall:
“It was the fashion amongst [the barbarians] to scorn athletics and all other forms of physical experience since, except for sex … they had no uses for the flesh.… [B]y the time they had got their degrees … their stomachs were ready for
The Waste Land
or
Swann’s Way
or
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. We were clumsy and arrogant and imitative, relentlessly snobbish and hopelessly undiscriminating. We did not know where we were at but wherever it was we heard the thunderous music of the spheres. It made no difference at all that we were for the most part tone-deaf. Perhaps I do my friends an injustice and they were less befuddled than I, so I shall speak only for myself when I say that I was so moonstruck by the world of modern writing that had opened up before me that I saw no difference at all in the intentions of Thomas Wolfe and Marcel Proust or those of James Joyce and Thomas Mann: all of them were godly and inviolable.… [T]he ivory tower (a phrase that did not seem tarnished to us) that we occupied was being ceaselessly assailed by the Zeitgeist (another term we found fresh and apt). In spite of our airs and posturings and greed, we were serious and knew that ours was no golden, carefree age: we had been reared in the Depression.…
But hope and energy and political illiteracy safeguarded us against any real emotional involvement with these issues and while we heard the Zeitgeist wail and rattle our windowpanes, we stayed snug a while in that mild, crepuscular saloon and quoted
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
.
Two friends from the circle remembered her role as more peripheral than she suggested in her lecture, and Stafford’s own portrait of the intelligentsia’s gatherings in
In the Snowfall
placed Joyce Bartholomew insecurely on the outskirts. “She did not really listen to these poor, proud, scholarly boys and girls when they talked of lofty matters or read aloud … from T. S. Eliot or from their own works-in-progress … novels that sounded like Proust, poems that sounded like Pound, but she was happier with them than she was at home with her father.” John Stafford apparently hovered not far in the background for Stafford even as she abandoned him for fervent conversations over beer with her new friends. In fact, the values and stance of the intelligentsia, a gathering of the poor social outsiders on campus, were in a broad way not so different from his. (In a revised version of that passage about “poor, proud, scholarly”students, featuring Cora Savage and her father, Dan, Stafford wrote: “All of [the intelligentsia] were writers, and they read aloud from … novels that sounded, usually, like Wolfe, poems that sounded, usually, like T. S. Eliot with undertones of Donne, and political tracts that sounded, to Cora, like Dan.”) She had found an escape from her father that wasn’t entirely a repudiation of him.
With greater surreptitiousness, Stafford was also exploring a more dramatic, dissolute escape. In her junior year she became a close friend of Lucy McKee, who was one of the few women studying law and a very visible presence on the campus. Nicknamed “the red-haired queen” by one of Stafford’s friends, Lucy was rich and talented and presided over a distinctly different scene of daring experimentation. She was elected judge of the student disciplinary court in 1935, but it was her unofficial role as arbiter of a glamorously decadent code of behavior that apparently fascinated Stafford. Lucy’s circle carried to much more sophisticated extremes the punishing libertinism that prevailed among the barbarians, whose habits Stafford described this way in
In the Snowfall:
“It was the fashion amongst [the barbarians] to scorn athletics and all other forms of physical experience since, except for sex … they had no uses for the flesh.… [B]y the time they had got their degrees … their stomachs were ready for
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