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Authors: Ann Hulbert
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Self-destructive hedonism was the theme of Lucy’s household, and it entailed perpetual disequilibrium. Just how self-destructive became clear on November 9, 1935, when Lucy, who had been increasingly unwell (she had recently had surgery for ovarian cysts), shot herself in the head with a revolver in the kitchen of her house. Andrew was in the bathroom. Jean, worried about what her friend might do, had gone to the phone to call a doctor.
T HIS TRAUMA gave Stafford a tenacious fictional subject. At the same time, the experience left her without the detachment and style to execute it successfully. In her discussion of the unfinished
In the Snowfall
in “Truth and the Novelist,” an article she wrote for
Harper’s Bazaar
in 1951, Stafford indicated that she had hoped to elevate her story from the personal to the generational: it was to be an “explanation of myself as a specimen of my generation in the formative years.” What is striking is how much that impulse to generalize seemed to be inspired by the writers of the preceding decade, the Lost Generation, and how much her portrait of the thirties in her novel overlapped with theirs of the twenties. As she had envisaged the novel while she worked on it in the late 1940s, it was to be her definitive work—much as, she said,
The Sun Also Rises
(1926) was probably Ernest Hemingway’s and
The Great Gatsby
(1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s.
The comparisons were not pulled out of a hat. Those were disillusioned novels by the younger postwar writers of the 1920s, who didn’t share the political hopes or the Victorian burdens of the older, engaged writers of the decade—Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill. The younger writers’ comparative political apathy and wild dedication to the life of art earned them some condescension from their elders, who were skeptical of the idea of the uncommitted artist. In his famous Nobel Prize speech of 1930, Sinclair Lewis (the first American winner) voiced some doubt about the art-for-art’s-sake zeal of the postwar literary generation, even as he pronounced the end of American literary gentility and provincialism. “Most of them,” he observed of those writers, “were a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce.”
But it was just that insanity—increasingly febrile and dissolute for both Fitzgerald and Hemingway —that seemed relevant to literary college students like Stafford, for whom politics was at most a peripheralhum, and it was the younger writers of the 1920s who seemed most accessible. Hemingway had quickly become a spokesman for the war generation among those who had missed the war. Fitzgerald, though less popular in the 1930s, was the chronicler of the Jazz Age. They were both emblems, not just individual writers, and the Lost Generation they belonged to was a mythic creative community. Its influence was enormous, not least over young aesthetes at college during the 1930s, who were coming of literary age as the first portraits of that previous generation were beginning to appear. (Malcolm Cowley’s
Exile’s Return
, a memoir of the expatriate literary scene in Paris during the 1920s, came out in 1934.) Stafford’s era of literary students felt they lacked the sense of solidarity that had inspired and united their predecessors. Among their responses was to replay the artistic ferment of the previous decade. “The aroma of Bohemianism” was thick during the 1930s, as one of Delmore Schwartz’s classmates recalled of that time on another college campus, the University of Wisconsin. “Except for the gray mass of average students, 1931 was a year of vast experimentation, in which the experiences of the hip-flask decade were condensed into nine months.”
Stafford intermittently invoked the larger generational context as she struggled with her traumatic material in the various drafts of
In the Snowfall
. It was an effort to tame, to distance the story of Joyce Bartholomew and her seduction into the
T HIS TRAUMA gave Stafford a tenacious fictional subject. At the same time, the experience left her without the detachment and style to execute it successfully. In her discussion of the unfinished
In the Snowfall
in “Truth and the Novelist,” an article she wrote for
Harper’s Bazaar
in 1951, Stafford indicated that she had hoped to elevate her story from the personal to the generational: it was to be an “explanation of myself as a specimen of my generation in the formative years.” What is striking is how much that impulse to generalize seemed to be inspired by the writers of the preceding decade, the Lost Generation, and how much her portrait of the thirties in her novel overlapped with theirs of the twenties. As she had envisaged the novel while she worked on it in the late 1940s, it was to be her definitive work—much as, she said,
The Sun Also Rises
(1926) was probably Ernest Hemingway’s and
The Great Gatsby
(1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s.
The comparisons were not pulled out of a hat. Those were disillusioned novels by the younger postwar writers of the 1920s, who didn’t share the political hopes or the Victorian burdens of the older, engaged writers of the decade—Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill. The younger writers’ comparative political apathy and wild dedication to the life of art earned them some condescension from their elders, who were skeptical of the idea of the uncommitted artist. In his famous Nobel Prize speech of 1930, Sinclair Lewis (the first American winner) voiced some doubt about the art-for-art’s-sake zeal of the postwar literary generation, even as he pronounced the end of American literary gentility and provincialism. “Most of them,” he observed of those writers, “were a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce.”
But it was just that insanity—increasingly febrile and dissolute for both Fitzgerald and Hemingway —that seemed relevant to literary college students like Stafford, for whom politics was at most a peripheralhum, and it was the younger writers of the 1920s who seemed most accessible. Hemingway had quickly become a spokesman for the war generation among those who had missed the war. Fitzgerald, though less popular in the 1930s, was the chronicler of the Jazz Age. They were both emblems, not just individual writers, and the Lost Generation they belonged to was a mythic creative community. Its influence was enormous, not least over young aesthetes at college during the 1930s, who were coming of literary age as the first portraits of that previous generation were beginning to appear. (Malcolm Cowley’s
Exile’s Return
, a memoir of the expatriate literary scene in Paris during the 1920s, came out in 1934.) Stafford’s era of literary students felt they lacked the sense of solidarity that had inspired and united their predecessors. Among their responses was to replay the artistic ferment of the previous decade. “The aroma of Bohemianism” was thick during the 1930s, as one of Delmore Schwartz’s classmates recalled of that time on another college campus, the University of Wisconsin. “Except for the gray mass of average students, 1931 was a year of vast experimentation, in which the experiences of the hip-flask decade were condensed into nine months.”
Stafford intermittently invoked the larger generational context as she struggled with her traumatic material in the various drafts of
In the Snowfall
. It was an effort to tame, to distance the story of Joyce Bartholomew and her seduction into the
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