~JONATHAN HOLDEN~
WILLIAM STAFFORD:
GENIUS
IN CAMOUFLAGE
In
1972, five
years before driving to Missoula, Montana, to interview Richard Hugo, I
was a student in the Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado.
I was driving into Denver with my friend Reg Saner to conduct a
Poets-in-the-Schools
program. We had turned off U.S. 36 onto I-25 and were heading
straight
toward downtown Denver when, in one of those moments James Hillman
discusses
in The Soul's Code, dictated, perhaps, by one's daemon, I
realized 
what
I should do with my studies ÷ with my life. I should drop
the pathetic
idea of doing a thesis in medieval literature to please some father
figure
and instead do a thesis in twentieth-century American literature, about
William Stafford. My thesis would be immediately publishable, for
there were no books about him. Best of all, I could drive out to
Lake Oswego and interview him for the book. I could actually meet
him.
The first
time
I met him was in July 1972 at his house. He was
fifty-eight.
It was thrilling to meet him, but it was daunting, too, because he was
so much like my own father, Alan. Wiry, elfin, with the face of a
fox, Stafford was curious about everything around him, absolutely
alert.
Alan had graduated from Harvard with a B.S. in chemistry in 1925, the
year
after Stanley Kunitz had. They both graduated summa cum
laude.
All my life I had been surrounded by Bell Labs physicists gossiping
about
who was in line for the Nobel Prize this year, who was at Cal Tech, who
was at Cambridge at the Cavendish Laboratory, who was at M.I.T.
(The
gossip of scientists is depressingly similar to the gossip of
writers.)
Like the Bell Labs scientists, Bill was on the leading edge of his
field,
lecturing everywhere, everywhere in demand. He was a
genius.
From being in the presence of Bell Labs geniuses for my entire
childhood,
I'd learned to recognize them, like a bird-watcher. I had
to.
It was a kind of survival technique, to avoid making a fool of oneself
in the presence of some of the most high-powered intellectuals in the
world.
Some of them had worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan
Project.
Los Alamos had been their vortex.
In his
book Alone
with America, Richard Howard refers to the "arrogant otherness" of
the persona in Stafford's first poetry collection, West of Your
City.
It has been pointed out by the poet/critic Judith Kitchen that "West of
Your City" alludes to Frost's title North of Boston.
"Your
city" is Boston. "You" is Frost. Howard, the quintessential
New Yorker and European traveler, is right, but only partially.
Stafford's
"otherness" wasn't arrogant. It was the otherness of every major
mind I've had the privilege to observe. It was the neutral,
appraising,
canny posture of intellectuality ÷ an appetite that is
aesthetic, amoral,
and endlessly curious. And cold. What must have it been
like
having Stafford as a father? Not easy. It is now legendary
how Stafford, so as not to disturb his family, would get up well before
dawn to write. He described the routine in his poem "Mornings":
Quiet,
rested, the brain begins to burn
and glow like a coal in the dark,
early÷four in the morning, cold, with
frost on the lawn.
We are
familiar,
too, with Stafford's cooperative venture with his son Kim: the book Braided
Apart. We are less familiar with the fact that Stafford's
eldest
son, Brett, killed himself. Brett must have felt as I did:
compared
to Alan, I would never measure up. Virtually Alan's last words to
me ÷ we were discussing Wittgenstein ÷ were, "Son, until
you know German,
you'll never understand Western culture."
When
Stafford's
son Kim visited Kansas State in the fall of 1998, as the primary
speaker
in a conference in honor of William Stafford, he and I talked about
Brett's
suicide in 1988. Kim said that the suicide had been about a love
affair and that his father had said of Brett: "He wasn't mean enough."
Meanwhile, the
mistaken identification of Stafford as a "regional" poet continues: In
the New York Times obituary of August 31, 1993, the headline
read,
"William Edgar Stafford, Professor and Poet of the West, Dies at
79."
The writer, Wolfgang Saxon, wrote:
Both his life and his writing looked westward or to the Northwest,
and he found his themes in small-town family life and in nature.
His work was infused with the vast expanses of desert and prairie,
mountain ranges and sky.
Like a
fox, like
a wildcat, Stafford lived his life in camouflage. He camouflaged
his true nature. A poem which for me epitomizes this camouflage
is
his poem "For the Governor" in Someday, Maybe:
For the
Governor
Heartbeat by heartbeat our governor tours
the state, and before a word and after a word
over the crowd the world speaks to him,
thin as a wire. And he knows inside
each word, too, that anyone says,
another word lurks, and inside that...
Sometimes we fear for him: he, or someone,
must act for us all. Across our space
we watch him while the country leans
on him: he bears time's tall demand,
and beyond our state he must think the shore
and beyond that the waves and the miles and
the waves.
On the surface, the poem
is about
a man campaigning for the governorship of a state like Kansas.
But
read closely, the poem yields a second meaning. The poem is about
the relation of the mind to the body. "Across our space / we
watch
him while the country leans / on him: he bears time's tall
demand."
The mind is able to conceive of its end, the body's eventual
death.
Moreover, the mind is able to conceive of itself: consciousness of
consciousness
is what makes us particularly human. This, the poem's true issue
÷ Stafford's intellectuality ÷ has been
camouflaged. I asked him
about a female figure named Ella who appears in some of his poems about
rural Kansas life. He remarked that "Ella" is a female
third-person
pronoun.
A second
well-known
poem, "Report from a far place," camouflages its sophistication in a
way
that is also typically Staffordian. The poem reads:
Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.
They creak, sag, bend, but
hold, over the great deep cold,
and they turn up at the toes.
In war or city or camp
they could save your life;
you can muse them by the fire.
Be careful though: they
burn, or don't burn, in their own
strange way, when you say them.
At first glance, this
poem appears
to be about writing, "making word things." Read closely, however,
it appears to be more about reading than about writing, especially the
lines "In war or city or camp / they could save your life; / you can
muse
them by the fire." The cleverest line, though, is the offhanded
remark
"and they turn up at the toes." Often, in Stafford poems, casual
asides are profound. If we think of the way in which the
turned-up
toes of skis or snowshoes deflect the snow, deflect the world, we find
a metaphor for the way in which the abstract nature of words deflects
the
world from us and thus keeps us from suffocating in existence, allowing
us to ride "on top of" things momentarily. The title puzzles us,
until we remember that in Stafford's symbolic vocabulary "near" means
"kindred"
and "far" means "different." The "far" place which imposes "word
things" upon the world is the mind.
There is
another
side of Stafford, though, that dispenses with camouflage. It is
not
affable. It is fierce. We glimpse this side, at the end of
"Our City Is Guarded by Automatic Rockets," where he says:
There is a place behind our hill so real
it makes me turn my head, no matter. There
in the last thicket lies the cornered cat
saved by its claws, now ready to spend
all that is left of the wilderness, embracing
its blood. And that is the way I will spit
life, at the end of any trail where I smell any hunter.
The last piece Stafford
published
before his death was a review of the anthology Against Forgetting:
Twentieth-Century
Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forche. His approach to
the anthology is prickly:
But there are inherent problems in a collection like this.
For
instance,
the individual glimpses that create the distinction
of poetry
put
a strain on the thesis of the book; books that
buckle
down to
the thesis can hardly attain the shiver of the
unexpected that
distinguishes lively discourse. We can be
informed;
we
can encounter the thoughts and emotions of
significant people...but
it takes something more to validate
the
poetry experience.
And later in the review
he writes:
A
further problem
above achieving authenticity in a survey
like this
one
lurks everywhere in the selections: quality is
primary,
but
the need for wide representation put a strain
on that
criterion.
And how vividly do you have to suffer
in order
to qualify?
I feel a bump when the explanatory note says, "the Germans
decided."
All Germans? And similarly when Carolyn Forche
says, "My
new
work seemed controversial to my American
contemporaries."
(Who, me?) The labels in the book...put a
torque on
me,
snagged my attention, kept me wary of living on
the
emotional
high of atrocity hunger.
Morally and intellectually
exacting as Stafford's mind was, there was a softer side to him.
I glimpsed it most vividly in the summer of 1987 when he and I were on
the staff of the Port Townsend Writers Conference. Several of us
were being driven back to Fort Worden State Park from dinner at a
restaurant.
Stafford was in the front seat, Marvin Bell was beside me in the middle
seat. As we drove past a brightly lit bar that was the students'
hangout, Marvin called to the driver to let him out there.
Stafford
burst out to Marvin: "Must you?" It was a motherly gesture, pure
reflex, like a mother instinctively reaching out to stop a toddler from
walking into a busy street. I realized that he loved Marvin.
When, the
day
after Stafford suffered his heart attack at home, Henry Taylor called
me
with the news, my first thought was, "How lucky to go like that, that
cleanly,"
and that Stafford had indeed led a lucky life. He himself had
told
me as much, years ago at Stephens College, when I had invited him
there.
I don't remember what I was mumbling to him, but he suddenly faced me
and
glared at me, pure wildcat: "You don't understand." He hissed it.
"I
was just lucky." He took nothing for granted. And I
thought,
also, of Willa Cather's famous story "Neighbor Rosicky":
The
old farmer
looked up at the doctor with a gleam of
amusement
in
his queer, triangular-shaped eyes.... Rosicky's
face had
the
habit of looking interested ÷ suggested a
contented
disposition
and a reflective quality that was gay
rather
than grave.
This gave him a certain detachment,
the easy
manner
of an onlooker and observer.
The end of the story
describes Rosicky's
friendship with his daughter-in-law, Polly:
She
had a sudden
feeling that nobody in the world, not her
mother,
not Rudolph,
or anyone really loved her as much as
old
Rosicky did.
It perplexed her. She sat frowning and
trying to
puzzle
it out. It was as if Rosicky had a special gift
for
loving people,
something that was like an ear for music
or an eye
for
colour. It was quiet, unobtrusive; it was merely
there....
After he dropped off to sleep, she sat holding his
warm,
broad,
flexible brown hand. She had never seen another
in the
least
like it. She wondered if it wasn't a kind of gipsy hand,
it was so
alive
and quick and light in its communications ÷ very
strange
in a
farmer. Nearly all of the farmers she knew had huge
lumps of
fists,
like mauls, or they were knotty and bony and
uncomfortable
looking, with stiff fingers. But Rosicky's hand
was like
quicksilver,
flexing, muscular,...it was a warm brown
hand,
with some
cleverness in it,...and something else which
Polly
could only
call "gipsy-like" ÷ something nimble and
lively
and sure,
in the way that animals are.
I would like to imagine
that William
Stafford died as Rosicky did, as described by Willa Cather:
After he had taken a few stitches, the cramp began in his
chest,
like yesterday.
He put his pipe down cautiously on the
window-sill and
bent over to ease the pull. No use ÷ he had
better
try to
get to bed if he could. He rose and groped his way
across
the familiar
floor, which was rising and falling like the
deck of a
ship.
At the door he fell. When Mary came in, she
found him
lying
there, and the moment she touched him she knew
that he
was gone.
In my experience, Cather
is the only
author to describe accurately, without sentimentality, in the figure of
Rosicky, the mysterious, inexplicable quality of human goodness
÷ its elusiveness,
its disinterestedness, its absence of vanity. William Stafford
understood
all this. He lived it. Determined to keep the truth of his
genius from embarrassing us, he camouflaged it as carefully, as
considerately
as he could.
© by Jonathan Holden
