Animals Drunk and Sober, Famished and Dead in the Fiction of Jean Stafford

Summary

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Jean Stafford was famously a part of the alcoholic post-World War II generation of American writers that F. Scott Fitzgerald passed the torch to. Toles examines the literary works of Stafford.

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Animals Drunk and Sober, Famished and Dead in the Fiction of Jean Stafford

Once to prove to herself that she was not a crybaby, she took a still live wood mouse from a trap and drowned it in a milk bottle half full of water, rejoicing brutishly in the swimming and the squealing which became slower and fainter and at last ceased while the small speckled body swelled and the sharp teeth showed themselves in an angry grin.

Was there anything in the world, he wondered, that did not make you think of something else?

Jean Stafford, The Mountain Lion

They drank whiskey high-balls made with ginger ale, out of glasses decorated on the outside by a horse's head which, on the inside, underwent a sly metamorphosis into a naked woman.

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure

IN THAT NOT SO LONG AGO ERA OF Herculean drinking, the 19505, nearly all of the grown-ups I knew in my small home town south of Buffalo began their nightly regimen with 5pm cocktails (to help them "unwind" from work). After a brief intermission for the family dinner, they carried on with more boisterous beak-dipping (Scotch on the rocks separated the serious fun-lovers from the faint of heart) until close to midnight. Throughout this same period, I had an untrained, unhousebroken, and largely unapproachable fox terrier named Pal as my pet, and he became firmly linked in my mind with the loud, laughter-plated downstairs revels that sang me to my sleep on countless school nights and weekends. In his perverse habit of preferring living room furniture and carpets to the trees and grass of our all but pointless walks, Pal had filled the party goers' gathering place with fierce, cleaner-resistant blemishes. Everywhere one looked on the long suffering, gray wall-to-wall carpets there were small and large stains, so that the floor designated for happy mingling bore a striking resemblance to a map of the Finger Lakes. Before the guests arrived, my mother and I would try to put the best possible face on this hopelessly soiled room by reducing the wattage of light bulbs and shifting around some of the chairs and sofas to cover those blotches which, due to Pal's repeat visits, seemed embarrassingly immense. I liked to run a speeded-up film in my head of the guests arriving at the stage of blind intoxication, so that the undoubtedly severe peer review of my parents' shabby quarters would not be too prolonged.

Once the giddy laughter erupted and the group smoke cloud thickened, I assumed that the covert exchange of disapproving glances (and the nose-wrinkling efforts to block out the lingering smell) would abate in favor of heavy-limbed adult capers. On many mornings after, I remember surveying Pal's irksome effusions in the oppressive early daylight, as they comfortably blended with the overflowing ash trays, scattered glasses and unappetizing gobs of food stuff that were the corpse of the get-together. The urine stains felt like the natural symbol of everything unspoken that brought this frantic, lonely assemblage into being. They were the unpalatable thing that the party goers perhaps secretly aspired to get to the bottom of-even cryptically communicate to their friends after a few drinks-but couldn't. Or if they could, refused to recall afterwards.

Animals are everywhere in the work of Jean Stafford, and their actions typically "speak" in the way that Pal's did to the human turmoil unfolding in their vicinity. It would not be an exaggeration to say that animals are assigned as much of the burden of illuminating psychology in Stafford's fiction as the muddled primary characters, who struggle with very limited success to know themselves. When a crisis looms in a Stafford plot, it is usually signaled by the human participants suddenly remembering or being brought near to animals in distress. Animals are made the secret sharers of the many wounds and agitations that cannot quite surface in the "throttled" social realm.

Jean Stafford was famously a part of the alcoholic post-World War II generation of American writers that F. Scott Fitzgerald passed the torch to. Among the male members of this loose literary federation of gifted drunks were John Cheever, Delmore Schwartz, James Agee, and John Berryman. Although the plots of Stafford's novels and stories seldom make drinking their main focus, and although she was consistently scornful of writers who used fiction as a platform for self-serving, self-pitying confession, I believe there is a special border territory established early on in her narratives, and maintained throughout her career, for a veiled exploration of the alcoholic portion of her identity. It is a territory chiefly reserved for wild life-including birds, insects and reptiles, as well as mammals-but it could hardly be described as a sanctuary, since so much animal suffering and killing take place there. Domesticated pets, sometimes lacking in conspicuous wildness, are also frequent visitors to this...

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