The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford

Rating:
Summary: Treasures of the Interior Castle
Review: This is one of the few books of lasting literary merit to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, which it received in 1970. Jean Stafford wrote primarily about women, about alienation and feelings of powerlessness. She rarely indulged in sentimentality; and though she sometimes drew on painful experiences from her private life, she never wrote in a self-pitying confessional manner. There are a few excellent stories about children and love, but what makes several of the other stories so intense is the masterful way that Stafford generates tension in the contrast between her ironic, detached narrative voice and the characters who are often filled with rage, hunger, and growing madness. You can enjoy her charm and wit and then be abruptly startled by the terrible images that shatter the polished surface. "The Interior Castle" is, among other things, a harrowing tale about a woman who must remain conscious while a surgeon's scalpel probes her fractured skull. (Stafford was once married to the mentally unstable poet Robert Lowell, who was responsible for fracturing her skull and twice breaking her nose.) She wrote her own wry, disturbing variation on Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." And no matter how many times I've read her famous "In the Zoo," I'm always upset by the pet monkey's fate. I'm grateful that Jean Stafford wrote these memorable stories, all of them preserved in a prose style as vigorous and elegant as the Brandenburg concertos.