43. Jean Stafford

 “(No, but go on.)” -Jean Stafford

 

               There, in four words—given their own paragraph and set off in parentheses—is the journalist’s ultimate expression of contempt for her subject. It’s 1965 and Jean Stafford, retired novelist and short story writer, is in Fort Worth to interview Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey. She is there, she tells us, under the premise that the “child is the father of the man” and that by speaking with her about Lee’s upbringing, she can gain deep insight into the mind of the deceased killer. Marguerite, meanwhile, is determined to clear her son’s name and is happy to spin her muddled musings for anyone who will listen.

                And so, as detailed in Stafford’s 1966 book A Mother in History (much of which originally appeared in McCall’s the year before), they sit down in Marguerite’s house, modest but clean, and Marguerite talks. She tells Stafford that her son was willingly sacrificed by the U.S. government and should be proclaimed an American hero. She claims to have reams of evidence that she will produce in time and shake up the world. She finally invites Stafford to live at her house and write up her material into a book. And Stafford sits there, non-comprehending and dismissive. She admits her confusion to the reader but she doesn’t make any attempt to sort out Marguerite’s admittedly tortuous logic. She signals her dismissiveness frequently. When Marguerite pauses her breathless monologue to ask rhetorically, “Am I making it plain?” Stafford gives us her flippant parenthetical before returning to dutifully jotting down the rant of which she doesn’t believe a word.

                The present-day reader may be inclined to be a bit more generous. Stafford is decidedly non-conspiracy minded, as she tells us more-or-less explicitly early on and by her attitude throughout, but it’s hardly a radical position any longer to disbelieve in the official narrative of the lone gunman. What isn’t clear is Stafford’s motivation in taking on the project. Do we take her at her word about the Wordsworthian child/father/man business and her quest for understanding? Was it simply an assignment for pay? While Stafford does find things to admire about Marguerite (mostly her neat housekeeping, Southern manners, and competent driving), she extends little sympathy or real interest to a woman who is definitely interesting and is probably, in spirit if not in fact, largely correct. Perhaps, today, we expect a certain degree of fellow feeling in our celebrity profiles that Stafford simply didn’t feel bound by, but even if you find Marguerite’s ramblings not worth engaging at any level, her obsessive efforts can’t help but reveal her in another, far more piteous light: that of a woman driven to distraction by the death of her son.

                The real clue to Stafford’s attitude may come in the brief epilogue, probably the best part of her strange little book. As she catches a plane from Texas to New York, her mind turns, as she tells us it always does while flying, to matters of life and death, and for her, this means to the day of the Kennedy assassination two years earlier. She recalls the streets of Manhattan being deserted, the phone lines all tied up, the despairing voice of her sick husband when she finally gets through to him at his office. She sleeps badly and doesn’t recover her equilibrium. “For days we went about our business like somnambulists,” she writes. The whole thing takes on a quality of cosmic despair, an aggrieved reverie, and we understand, in that moment, Stafford’s perspective, for even those of us who didn’t live through the assassination have had occasion to witness more recent analogous events. Embarking on her project with the stated goal of understanding, Stafford, haunted by the twin horrors of the assassination and her husband’s decease just a month later, can only be expected to bend so far. It is, we understand finally, an attitude born of grief. A Mother in History is death-haunted through and through, even if it doesn’t become fully apparent until the very final page.