The Echo and the Nemesis" - A Short Story by Jean Stafford - included in The Complete Short Stories and and Other Writings of Jean Stafford - 2019

 

Jean Stafford 

Born - July 1, 1915 - Covina, California 

Married 1940 to 1948 to Robert Lowell . One of three marriages.

She published three novels but most now regarded for her wonderful short stories, most of which were published in The New Yorker or The Psrtisian Review as her Glory.

1970 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 

Died - March 26, 1979 - White Plains, New York

Today's story, "The Echo and the Nemesis" is a delightful story.  I am quickly becoming enraptured by Stafford's exquisite prose, the brilliant way she incorporates her characters reading life into the stories.

I do not want to give away much of the extraordinary plot of this story. It is set in the late 1930s in Heidelberg, Germany:

"Sue Ledbetter and Ramona Dunn became friends through the commonplace accident of their sitting side by side in a philosophy lecture three afternoons a week. There were many other American students at Heidelberg University that winter— the last before the war— but neither Sue nor Ramona had taken up with them."

The relationship of Sue and Ramona is complex, sometimes seeming like just a convenience, sometimes the core of their lives.

"Soon after the semester opened in October, the two girls fell into the habit of drinking their afternoon coffee together on the days they met in class. Neither of them especially enjoyed the other’s company, but in their different ways they were lonely, and as Ramona once remarked, in her highfalutin way, “From time to time, I need a rest from the exercitation of my intellect.” She was very vain of her intellect, which she had directed to the study of philology, to the exclusion of almost everything else in the world. Sue, while she had always taken her work seriously, longed also for beaux and parties, and conversation about them, and she was often bored by Ramona’s talk, obscurely gossipy, of the vagaries of certain Old High Franconian verbs when they encountered the High German consonant shift, or of the variant readings of passages in Layamon’s Brut, or the linguistic influence Eleanor of Aquitaine had exerted on the English court. But because she was wellmannered she listened politely and even appeared to follow Ramona’s exuberant elucidation on Sanskrit."

Ramona comes from a very wealthy family. She is obsessed by food and extremely heavy.  We gradually learn about her parents, brothers and twin sisters.

"The Children’s Game" - A Short Story by Jean Stafford - included in Jean Stafford: Complete Stories and Other Writings- published by The Library of America - 2021

This story is my second venture into the work of Jean Stafford.  It will, I hope, be far from my last. 

  I was stunned by the magnificent opening sentence of my first encounter with Jean Stafford in Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience” - A Short Story set in Paris first published June 17, 1955 in The New Yorker.

"There  was a hole so neat that it looked tailored in the dead center of the large round beige velours mat that had been thrown on the grass in the shade of the venerable sycamore, and through it protruded a clump of mint, so chic in its air of casualness, so piquant in its fragrance in the heat of mid-July, that Mme Floquet, a brisk Greek in middle life, suggested, speaking in French with a commandingly eccentric accent, that her host, Karl von Bubnoff, M. le Baron, had contrived it all with shears and a trowel before his Sunday guests arrived at his manorial house, Magnamont, in Chantilly."

Now that is an opening sentence!

A gambling casino in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, a grubby down-scale version of Monte Carlo, nonetheless exerts an almost preternatural spell on a young woman named Abby in “The Children’s Game” who succumbs to the hypnotic frenzy of roulette: She was still ahead when the wheel was spun for the last time; and when everything was finished she was giddy as she struggled out of her cocoonlike trance. The croupiers’ fatigue humanized them; they rubbed their eyes and stretched their legs and their agile hands went limp. Abby was a little dashed and melancholy, let down and drained; she was, even though she had won, inconsolable because now the table, stripped of its seduction, was only a table. And the croupiers were only exhausted workingmen going home to bed. So appalled is Abby by the “monstrous” Belgian town, her appalled fascination inspires Stafford to a tour de force of description as charged with kinetic energy as Dickens’s most animated city scenes: [Knokke-le-Zoute] possessed houses that looked like buses threatening to run them down and houses that looked like faces with bulbous noses and brutish eyes … The principal building material seemed to be cobblestones, but they discovered a number of houses that appeared to be made of cast iron. In gardens there were topiary trees in the shape of Morris chairs and some that seemed to represent washing machines. The hotels along the sea were bedizened with every whimsy on earth, with derby-shaped domes and kidney-shaped balconies, with crenellations that looked like vertebrae and machiolations that looked like teeth, with turrets, bow-windows, dormers and gables, with fenestrations hemstitched in brick or bordered with granite point lace. Some of the chimneys were like church steeples and some were like Happy Hooligan’s hat. The cabanas, in the hot, dark haze, appeared to be public telephone booths. Even the flowers dissembled and the hydrangeas looked like utensils that belonged in the kitchen … The plazas were treeless plains of concrete where big babies sunned … There was an enormous smell of fish.

There are 65 stories in the Library of America volume. I do have in mind reading them all in 2024 and posting on some

Wikipedia has a good account of Stafford's Life

 

Two Short Stories by Jean Stafford “The Interior Castle” and “A Reading Problem”

Two Short Stories by Jean Stafford

“The Interior Castle” and “A Reading Problem”

Jean Stafford 

Born - July 1, 1915 - Covina, California 

Married 1940 to 1948 to Robert Lowell . One of three marriages.

She published three novels but is

  now most regarded for her wonderful short stories, most of which were published in The New Yorker or The Partesian Review.

1970 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 

Died - March 26, 1979 - White Plains, New York

A few days ago I was very kindly given a copy of Library of American Edition of The Complete Stories and Other Writings of Jean Stafford.  

My first venture into her work was “Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience” - A Short Story set in Paris 

- first published June 17, 1955 in The New Yorker. It contains one of the most wonderful sentences I have ever read.

“There  was a hole so neat that it looked tailored in the dead center of the large round beige velours mat that had been thrown on the grass in the shade of the venerable sycamore, and through it protruded a clump of mint, so chic in its air of casualness, so piquant in its fragrance in the heat of mid-July, that Mme Floquet, a brisk Greek in middle life, suggested, speaking in French with a commandingly eccentric accent, that her host, Karl von Bubnoff, M. le Baron, had contrived it all with shears and a trowel before his Sunday guests arrived at his manorial house, Magnamont, in Chantilly.”

Now that is an opening sentence!

The Interior Castle”

“The Interior Castle” The Interior Castle" was first published in Partisan Review in 1946, later anthologized in five collections, including The Best American Short Stories of 1947, and collected in Children Are Bored on Sunday in 1953.

This story is said to be partially based on time Stafford spent in the hospital after a car crash which sent her through the windshield.  In the imagined  wreck, the cab driver was killed.  In real Life she was badly hurt when riding with a drunken Robert Lowell at the wheel.

Set over a good bit of time, ths narrator has suffered some memory loss and needs surgery on her nose to breath normally.

Stafford shows us the narrator trying to recover her identity.

“[The surgeon] had now to penetrate regions that were not anesthetized and this he told her frankly … The knives ground and carved and curried and scoured the wounds they made; the scissors clipped hard gristle and the scalpels chipped off bone. It was as if a tangle of tiny nerves were being cut dexterously, one by one; the pain writhed spirally … The pain was a pyramid made of a diamond; it was an intense light; it was the hottest fire, the coldest chill, the highest peak”

The story takes place entirely in Pansy Vanneman’s stream of consciousness as doctors, nurses, and hospital workers are  floating in and out of her mind.  Nurses try to draw Pansy out with magazines  and radio.  Pansy’s biggest concern is the integrity of her mind.

The hospital is described as bland, like a bank where her mind is focused on Beauty.  The story takes us deeply into her struggle.  There is an interesting section on her nose surgery where she thinks about how handsome and vain The doctor seems to be.

“A Reading Problem”

This story was first published  in The New Yorker June 22, 1956

“One of the great hardships of my childhood—and there were many, as many, I suppose, as have ever plagued a living creature—was that I could never find a decent place to read. If I tried to read at home in the living room, I was constantly pestered by someone saying, “For goodness’ sake, Emily, move where it’s light. You’re going to ruin your eyes and no two ways about it,” or “You ought to be outdoors with the other youngsters getting some roses in your cheeks.”  

For sure i heard this sort of thing often 

during my early days and I bet others in the forum did  also.

 it turns out the local sherriff loves to read and lets her read in the jail as long as there are no prisinors locked up. She enjoys it and the sherriff is very kind and supportive of her Reading”. Then one days he tells her some very Rough sellers of illegal whiskey, moon shine, are coming in and she must stay out until they are gone.  An intersting story that gets much more interesting as she reads by the roadside.  She encounters a man, a traveling preacher, and his daughter, her age.  They see her Reading so they offer her book, meant to save souls, for $1.00, a fortune to her.  They reduce price to fifty cents.  They insist she get The money from her parents.  What ensued from here is Right out of a perfect southern Gothic classic.

The ending is a joy.

I selected these two stories because they are so adifferent from each other.

I am confident other great stories await me.

 

“Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience “ - A Short Story by Jean Stafford - set in Paris - first published June 17, 1955 in The New Yorker

 

“Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience” - A Short Story set in Paris 

By Jean Stafford - first published June 17, 1955 in The New Yorker

This story in included in The Library of American Edition of The Complete Stories and Other Writings of Jean Stafford 

This is part of my participation in Paris in July - 2021- hosted by Thyme for Tea

Works read so far for Paris in July 2021

1. Lost in Paris by Elizabeth Thompson - 2021
2. Loving Modigliani by Linda Lappin - 2020
3. Russian Émirgé Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky - edited by Bryan Karetnky. 2018 - an overview 
4. Pancakes in Paris - Living The American Dream in France by Craig Carlson - 2016
5. The Paris Apartment by Kelly Bowen- 2021
6. The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure - 2013
7. “Requiem” - A short story by Gaito Gazdanov - 1960
8. The Ice Swan by J’nell Ciesieski - 2021
9. Two Short Stories from the 1920s by Teffi
10. “Dimanche” - A Short Story by Irene Nemirovsky - 1934- translated by Bridget Patterson 2015
11. “The Life of Madame Duclos” -1927-  A Short Story by IRINA ODOEVTSEVA 

Jean Stafford 

Born - July 1, 1915 - Covina, California 

Married 1940 to 1948 to Robert Lowell . One of three marriages.

She published three novels but most now regarded for her wonderful short stories, most of which were published in The New Yorker or The Psrtisian Review as her Glory.

1970 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 

Died - March 26, 1979 - White Plains, New York

A few days ago i was very kindly given a copy of Library of American Edition of The Complete Stories and Other Writings of Jean Stafford.  I was delighted to discover that The lead story in her first collection, Innocents Abroad, “Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience” is about a young woman from Tennessee first trip to Paris.  Stafford acknowledged a literary debt to Henry James and Edith Wharton as one can see in this wonderful story.

This story is my first venture into the work of Jean Stafford.  It will, I hope, be far from my last.  I was stunned by the magnificent first sentence, as I am sure the editor’s of The New Yorker were:

“There  was a hole so neat that it looked tailored in the dead center of the large round beige velours mat that had been thrown on the grass in the shade of the venerable sycamore, and through it protruded a clump of mint, so chic in its air of casualness, so piquant in its fragrance in the heat of mid-July, that Mme Floquet, a brisk Greek in middle life, suggested, speaking in French with a commandingly eccentric accent, that her host, Karl von Bubnoff, M. le Baron, had contrived it all with shears and a trowel before his Sunday guests arrived at his manorial house, Magnamont, in Chantilly.”

Now that is an opening sentence!

Paris in 1955 must have been a very powerful experience for a girl from Tennessee even if her parents could afford to send her to France by herself.  She learned French so she could,she hoped.fit in.

Just when she is regretting her trip she encountered an Englishman she had met in London

“Her parents, who had had to be cajoled for a year into letting her go to Europe alone, had imagined innumerable dreadful disasters—the theft of her passport or purse, ravishment on the Orient Express, amoebic dysentery, abduction into East Berlin—but it had never occurred to them that their high-spirited, self-confident, happy daughter would be bamboozled into muteness by the language of France. Her itinerary provided for two weeks in Paris, and she had suffered through one week of it when, like an angel from heaven, an Englishman called Tippy Akenside showed up at her hotel at the day of the Baron’s party”.

Tippy offers to escort her to party, He knows the Baron and assured her everyone at the party Will speak English. Of course it turns out no one does.

“Tippy introduced them he had smiled in the friendliest possible way and had said, in English, “How nice of you to come,” but then, when rotten Tippy said, “Miss Weriwether is the American girl I told you about on the phone,” the Baron thereafter addressed her in highly idiomatic French until, encountering nothing but silence and the headshakes and cryptic groans that escaped her involuntarily, he began to pretend, as the others had done from the start, that she wasn’t there.”

The rest of The story, full of so many besutiful sentences, is kind of a satire of French post war gentility.or maybe a parody of how Americans saw the French.

Mel u

The Reading Life.