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Authors: Ann Hulbert
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ulcers and their hearts were cynical.” Later in life, Stafford was usually more oblique about this darker side of her bohemian life. In fact, in her 1952 talk she explicitly denied any but the most innocent of literary intentions: “We would have been shocked and disbelieving if anyone had even jokingly suggested that we were disinterring and exposing derangements and unwholesome desires.”
The truth was that at some point during her junior year, Jean joined Lucy and what Stafford later called her “limp, disreputable entourage” in exploring just such derangements and unwholesome desires in a “terrifying modus vivendi.” It was evidently Stafford’s literary talent that attractedLucy, who also had aspirations to write, but their companionship was rarely quiet or creative. Stafford was soon a regular guest at the wild parties held at the house where Lucy lived with her husband and fellow law student, Andrew Cooke—whom she had married in 1933, reputedly after a friend took out a marriage license for them as a joke. Certainly marital vows weren’t taken very seriously among the circle: Lucy presided over and participated in a kind of frantic dissolution, sexual and alcoholic. (She had come to the University of Colorado afterbeing expelled from Northwestern University, where she had been notoriously promiscuous and had contracted a venereal disease.)
Stafford was mesmerized by Lucy and the antibourgeois style of the household, which grew more extreme during the two years of the friendship. Before long she was a favored initiate. Stafford moved in with the Cookes,leaving the local boardinghouse where she had been living (her parents had evidently given up trying to keep her at home).Her enthrallment entailed plenty of self-abasement. As Andrew Cooke remembered it, Stafford and another friend who lived in the house often played the roles of maid and butler—and the joke was telling. For all her elect status as Lucy’s close friend, she was rarely allowed to forget her lowly origins with this high-living pair. Her central place in some of the party “games” (which included wine enemas for the guests) was often quite literally painful. She was Lucy’s most accommodating subject in the hypnosis sessions that she liked to stage; Stafford’s role was to remain impassive as her friend skewered her hand with a needle to prove the depth of her trance.
Lucy was a mentor in dissipation for everyone in her entourage, but she took a special interest in corrupting Stafford. Jean drank a great deal and,according to another friend, tried ether. At the urging of her hosts, she occasionally slept with the fourth occupant of the house, a friend of Cooke’s, and she became ever more dizzyingly entangled with Lucy, who knew she had an impressionable recruit.Just how entangled was the subject of various rumors, which implied that she was sexually involved with either or both of the Cookes. Stafford herself, in the draft of her novel, set a scene of deep sexual confusion and unhappiness. She portrayed Joyce as ready to agree to a jointsuicide pact with the husband of Maisie Perrine (the Jamesian name she gave to her Lucy character), and described Maisie, desperate to escape that husband, as ready to announce a sudden voyage with Joyce as her lesbian lover.
The truth seems to have been that there were no shocking sexual liaisons among the three of them. In fact, Stafford took up with Lawrence Fairchild, a premed student who was worlds away from their circle, in the summer of 1935. Still, her relations with the Cookes apparently acquired an imaginative vividness for her that transcended physical fact. For Stafford, life with them was a frightening yet intoxicating experience, as her identity—none too firmly defined to start with—was threatened even more radically. If she retained her sexual independence, shenonetheless felt herself succumb to Lucy’s manipulation and glimpsed the potential for thorough disorientation.
The truth was that at some point during her junior year, Jean joined Lucy and what Stafford later called her “limp, disreputable entourage” in exploring just such derangements and unwholesome desires in a “terrifying modus vivendi.” It was evidently Stafford’s literary talent that attractedLucy, who also had aspirations to write, but their companionship was rarely quiet or creative. Stafford was soon a regular guest at the wild parties held at the house where Lucy lived with her husband and fellow law student, Andrew Cooke—whom she had married in 1933, reputedly after a friend took out a marriage license for them as a joke. Certainly marital vows weren’t taken very seriously among the circle: Lucy presided over and participated in a kind of frantic dissolution, sexual and alcoholic. (She had come to the University of Colorado afterbeing expelled from Northwestern University, where she had been notoriously promiscuous and had contracted a venereal disease.)
Stafford was mesmerized by Lucy and the antibourgeois style of the household, which grew more extreme during the two years of the friendship. Before long she was a favored initiate. Stafford moved in with the Cookes,leaving the local boardinghouse where she had been living (her parents had evidently given up trying to keep her at home).Her enthrallment entailed plenty of self-abasement. As Andrew Cooke remembered it, Stafford and another friend who lived in the house often played the roles of maid and butler—and the joke was telling. For all her elect status as Lucy’s close friend, she was rarely allowed to forget her lowly origins with this high-living pair. Her central place in some of the party “games” (which included wine enemas for the guests) was often quite literally painful. She was Lucy’s most accommodating subject in the hypnosis sessions that she liked to stage; Stafford’s role was to remain impassive as her friend skewered her hand with a needle to prove the depth of her trance.
Lucy was a mentor in dissipation for everyone in her entourage, but she took a special interest in corrupting Stafford. Jean drank a great deal and,according to another friend, tried ether. At the urging of her hosts, she occasionally slept with the fourth occupant of the house, a friend of Cooke’s, and she became ever more dizzyingly entangled with Lucy, who knew she had an impressionable recruit.Just how entangled was the subject of various rumors, which implied that she was sexually involved with either or both of the Cookes. Stafford herself, in the draft of her novel, set a scene of deep sexual confusion and unhappiness. She portrayed Joyce as ready to agree to a jointsuicide pact with the husband of Maisie Perrine (the Jamesian name she gave to her Lucy character), and described Maisie, desperate to escape that husband, as ready to announce a sudden voyage with Joyce as her lesbian lover.
The truth seems to have been that there were no shocking sexual liaisons among the three of them. In fact, Stafford took up with Lawrence Fairchild, a premed student who was worlds away from their circle, in the summer of 1935. Still, her relations with the Cookes apparently acquired an imaginative vividness for her that transcended physical fact. For Stafford, life with them was a frightening yet intoxicating experience, as her identity—none too firmly defined to start with—was threatened even more radically. If she retained her sexual independence, shenonetheless felt herself succumb to Lucy’s manipulation and glimpsed the potential for thorough disorientation.
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