SOURCE: "Checkmate: Jean Stafford's 'A Slight Maneuver,'" in Western American Literature, Vol. XXI, No. 2, August, 1986, pp. 99-109.

[In this essay, Leary relates the story "A Slight Maneuver" to the break-up of Stafford's marriage to Robert Lowell.]

During the waning days of 1946, Jean Stafford's life must have appeared to her to be waning, too. Her six-year marriage to Robert Lowell lay in ruins. Her self-esteem was dangerously diminished, her psyche badly disordered, and her body ravaged by the drink and drugs she had turned to as anodynes for her pain. At this critical moment she sequestered herself in the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York City Hospital where she consented to undergo a "psycho-alcoholic cure."

She could not have made a wiser move. The combined medical and psychiatric help she received there produced in good time a pleasant transformation in both her attitude and her appearance. She learned how to eat and sleep normally again. She took a renewed interest in her grooming and dress. She began to knit up the raveled sleeve of all those cares that had made her grow desperate shortly before. With Jean Stafford it is not necessary to add that she also recovered her sense of humor because she had never lost it. From her unhappy childhood to her stricken last days Stafford's comic gift seems never to have failed her. If her body was confined behind the locked doors of the Payne Whitney Clinic, her waggish tongue still had free play. Her friend, Eileen Simpson (then Berryman), recalls Jean's referring to the courtyard used by the inmates for exercise as "Luna Park." Another time she acknowledged Eileen's compliment on her improved appearance by quipping, "For dinner I put on pearls—like a Smith College girl."

During this rather desperate period, when she was struggling to regain her equilibrium, Stafford had an even more important lifeline to hold on to—her talent. Like her comic sense, this seems never to have failed her. Throughout her tempestuous life, whenever she seemed to be foundering, she sought and found refuge in her art. Interestingly, she appears to have developed this strategy as early as her childhood, which she later remembered as a period "when I was unhappy and afraid." It was then she discovered how to allay her unhappiness and fear: she became, as she says, "a secret writer." Later on, when the secret was out, when all the world knew that she was a writer, and a good one, Stafford continued this pattern, finding relief from the pain of her life in the pleasure of her art.

But in the fall of 1946 it was not just her fractured psyche and her abused body that needed restoring. Her purse, she feared, was nearly as empty as her life. Worse yet, she could expect no help from what should have been the most likely source. It seemed to her that her husband, whom perversely she still loved, had walked away not only from his marriage but from his responsibilities as well.

At this time Robert Lowell still received money from a family-established trust fund, but the income from it was not very large at best and his mother had always taken a cold-eyed view of his bestowing any of it on Jean even during earlier, happier years. Compounding her sense of injury was Stafford's awareness that she had been the breadwinner since late in 1944 when her first novel, Boston Adventure, had proved to be a surprising best seller. But that source of money, too, had its limits. Much of it had gone to purchase and refurbish a handsome old house in Damariscotta Mills, Maine, at first Stafford's heart's delight, but now, alas, as derelict as her marriage. She could not even raise a mortgage on it to pay her medical expenses since she had put the house in their joint names and now Lowell refused to sign a quit claim. This from the husband who had taken his leave exclaiming, "I don't want a wife. I want a playmate."

To grant Lowell the divorce he was seeking and that she was reluctant to give was bitter enough. But to do so with no likelihood of a settlement that would give her even modest security was frightening. The chilling prospect of living alone was compounded by her fear of a possible return to the stultifying poverty that had scarred her youth in Depression-haunted Boulder, Colorado.

It did not help matters that Stafford's immediate prospects as a writer were uncertain. To be sure, she had recently completed her second novel, The Mountain Lion, but there were no guarantees that it would repeat the commercial success of her first (and, in fact, it did not). Moreover, the market for short stories, then as now, was seldom lucrative, especially for a serious writer. Of the nine stories Stafford had so far published, six had appeared in the literary quarterlies, which confer much prestige but little money; and two others had been published in a "quality" magazine whose rates did not begin to match those of the slicks. To date, only one of her stories had appeared in a popular magazine and that in the same year as her bestselling novel.

So, late in 1946, Stafford faced a double problem. First, she had somehow to compose her mind and spirit. Then she had to compose a story that would sell. Which came first in this delicate balancing act, psychic control or artistic control, I don't suppose even Stafford knew. But she brought it off and the resulting story—which she called with an irony that will become clear, "A Slight Maneuver"—impressed the editors of Mademoiselle who published it in February of 1947. The sale of this story to a magazine that commanded a market at once popular and literate must have been reassuring to Stafford. With it she demonstrated that she could reach a wider audience without seriously compromising the severe literary standards she imposed on herself. As it turned out, although she may not have recognized it at the time, she was within a year of reaching the most lucrative market for serious short fiction that exists in America—the pages of The New Yorker.

What Mademoiselle's readers discovered in "A Slight Maneuver" is a story whose ironies are sharp, whose tone is often deliciously acerbic, whose plot is shapely, whose action is unambiguous, and whose resolution is gratifying, an altogether pleasing combination of fictional graces. An examination of its plot will make clear both why and how this story pleases.

As is true of many of Stafford's stories, the plot of "A Slight Maneuver" is slight enough to be easily summarized. Theo (no last name is supplied) has been spending the summer on a dude ranch somewhere in New Mexico as the guest of her fiance, Clyde Tompkins, and his aunt, Naomi Heath. Aunt Naomi, "a manly woman," owns the ranch and manages it with the savage efficiency that had long since caused her husband to flee for his life. In the same relentless way she manages the daily activities of the docile dudes who are her paying guests.

The beginning of the story coincides with the ending of the tourist season at the ranch. Mrs. Heath, freed from her supervision of the paying guests, may for the first time cast an appraising eye on her non-paying guest, Theo, who until now, has not felt the weight of her managerial hand. Tomorrow is to be Theo's last day before returning to her home in the East. True to form, Aunt Naomi plans the engaged couple's last day together as though they were children enrolled in a Camp Fire Girl activity and she their redoubtable leader. They are, she decrees, to spend their final hours together visiting the Carlsbad Caverns, an obligatory tour for any visitor to New Mexico. They will be permitted to use the ranch station wagon the better to adhere to the precise schedule she has laid out for them: arrival at the Caverns in the late morning; lunch at noon in "the bowels of the earth"; departure before sunset so as to connect with Theo's departing train (the only flaw, this, in Mrs. Heath's otherwise perfect plan: her minions will perforce miss the celebrated "exodus of the bats" at dusk); and, finally, boarding the train in timely fashion so that Theo may dine there while Clyde, wending his way homeward, may pick up the vermouth (three sweet and one dry) needed against the imminent arrival of the Sawhills, Mrs. Heath's autumn guests whose expected visit begins with the departure of the summer dudes.

Until this critical moment, Theo and Clyde have been idling away a pleasant summer in a kind of romantic stupefaction responsible to no one but each other. Now they respond very differently to Mrs. Heath's marching orders—Clyde with disquieting docility, Theo with mounting fury. During the few remaining hours between Mrs. Heath's edict and its inevitable execution, Theo's heretofore blinded eyes are opened to the true character of the man she thought she was in love with. For the first time she sees him clearly as an aunty's boy in two senses: actually deferential to his bullying aunt, and potentially a bully toward herself. For the moment she resolves at very least to prolong their engagement. The two retire to their rooms for the night, more like boxers going to their respective corners than like lovers who find parting such sweet sorrow.

Predictably, the forced march through the Caverns next day is a disaster. Theo grows successively petulant, quarrelsome, and finally coldly incisive; Clyde, successively irritable, stubborn, and fawningly conciliatory. By the time they emerge into the light of day, following the tour's climactic event—the singing in a blacked-out amphitheatre of "Lead, Kindly Light" by the all-male chorus of government guides—and Theo's expressed contempt for Clyde's conciliatory gesture made while darkness enveloped the imprisoned tourists, they both realize that their engagement is irretrievably broken. Theo now feeling triumphantly emancipated, and Clyde unexpectedly relieved, they take their final leave of each other with the ritualistic courtesy each has been bred to. This code of good manners, however, does not prevent the feisty Theo from taking a parting shot. Stafford's account is characteristically wicked:

And still Theo, who died hard and died always with her boots on, could not help crying from the vestibule of the moving train, "Don't forget the vermouth. Three of the sweet and one of the dry." And Clyde, before he took in the disdain in the concluding voice, nodded, smiled, and cried back, "Thanks for reminding me. I had almost forgotten."

This is neatly turned, but "A Slight Maneuver" possesses more than the virtues of good narrative. It possesses also in full measure those qualities of Stafford's prose style for which she has always been admired—the apposite image, the startling diction with its surprisingly successful blend of the high style and the colloquial, and the arresting psychological insight provided by a character's unconsciously revealing allusion or turn of phrase. The enthusiasm of Mademoiselle's editors is easy to understand. Here was a top-drawer writer who had made herself accessible to a popular audience without writing down to them.

What neither the editors nor the readers suspected, however, was that Stafford's fictional confection concealed something very bitter at its center. Just as writers living under a political tyranny grow clever at contriving a fable whose double meaning confuses their censors, so Stafford, strongly feeling the need to strike out at those she visualized as tyrants bent on destroying her domestic happiness, created a comedy with a serious hidden meaning, one designed to relieve her anger while at the same time preserving her privacy. With good luck, she must have thought, the targets of her wrath would recognize themselves. That would be satisfaction enough without admitting the public to her game. Indeed, she could obtain a kind of emotional catharsis by just playing the game for its own sake.

Today, equipped with a knowledge of many critical experiences in Stafford's life, we may watch her playing her game and follow each move. Thus what appears on its surface to be a pleasing social comedy involving a highspirited young woman who turns the tables on a pair of social bullies seeking to jerk her about as though she were a helpless marionette, is actually an allegory with a darker meaning. Examined closely in the light of available biographical information, the story turns out to be an artful vehicle by means of which Stafford delivers some deadly thrusts in the fierce duel of mighty opposites in which she was engaged with Robert Lowell when this story was written. Nor is she dueling with a single adversary. Behind the cruelly self-centered son lurks the unlovely figure of Charlotte Lowell, Robert's possessive mother. But her position behind him does not leave her unscathed. Like him she is made to feel the point of Stafford's darting foil. Watching the author take aim at these two targets, it is not difficult to imagine her exclaiming from time to time, "A hit, a very palpable hit!"

If she had two adversaries, Stafford also had two purposes to serve. When she set about writing "A Slight Maneuver," she knew that she must contrive an attractive story that would sell in a popular market. We have seen how well she succeeded. But, recalling the painful circumstances under which it was written, it is not difficult to understand why she wanted this story to work in double harness. Not only would it help to earn her keep, it would also do something to ease her hurt.

Like her motives, her narrative strategy was also twofold. She would draw on her own experiences as a young woman raised in the West for her story's two principal settings—a dude ranch, and the Carlsbad Caverns of New Mexico. She would deck out her three main characters—Theo, her fiance, Clyde, and his aunt, Naomi—in appropriate western costumes and move them around against a deliberately grotesque western landscape. But all the time she would employ this trio in an allegory of her own devising, acting out her own recent bitter experiences with Robert Lowell and his mother. And the cream of the jest would be to transplant the woes she was experiencing in the East at the hands of a pair of Boston Brahmins to a menacing western setting where "the deformities of nature" could prove appalling to the uninitiated. It is as though she had resolved to fight out this battle on her own ground.

Stafford's notion of using a dude ranch as the physical setting for the first half of her story, and making its female proprietor one of her three principal characters, stems from her own very considerable experience working for several summers in her teens on a dude ranch. It was situated near Ward, Colorado, a tiny hamlet about 30 miles west of her home in Boulder. Called Lodge of Pines, this ranch was operated by two women who employed (one might say exploited) both local mountain girls and needy college students from Boulder as waitresses and chambermaids. In "A Slight Maneuver," she transplants the ranch from Colorado to New Mexico, casts just one of the proprietors in the role of the "manly" Naomi Heath, and changes the name from Lodge of Pines to the Lazy S. K. This name she borrowed from the cattle brand, Lazy S. T., used on the ranches of Richard Stafford, her paternal grandfather.

Stafford's interest in names was not limited to those assigned to ranches and cattle brands. Ever-mindful of her hidden allegory, she names her heroine Theo, the diminutive of Theodora, which in Greek means "god's gift." And on Theo's older antagonist she confers the last name Heath, which is intended to suggest—as it does in Macbeth—wasteland. Mrs. Heath's first name, Naomi, is also significant, recalling (he mother-in-law of the Biblical heroine, Ruth, the Moabite who gleaned "amid the alien corn."

This brings us close to the nerve center of Stafford's concealed, bitter satire. Although Charlotte Lowell was not "manly" like Naomi Heath, she was as unpleasantly domineering and inconsiderately willful as the proprietor of the Lazy S. K. And Mrs. Lowell's tyrannies, like those of her fictional counterpart, spared no one. They extended to her husband and son as well as to her daughter-in-law. Although, unlike the prudent Mr. Heath, Robert Lowell, Senior, did not run away from his wife, he probably should have. Robert Lowell's pitiless portraits of his feckless father in Life Studies and elsewhere give cruel exactness to the ugly metaphorical term emasculated. And "Bobby" himself, as he was called by his parents, although the dominant figure in all the other well-publicized relationships in his life, acknowledged in several unsparing self portraits the extent of his mother's influence on him. Even when he saw through and despised her behavior, he seemed, like Clyde Tompkins, incapable of shielding the woman he loved from the pernicious effects of this female bully's attacks. As for Stafford, she has left us in no doubt as to how she viewed Mrs. Lowell. In a series of bitterly witty accounts, principally in letters to Peter Taylor, we become acquainted with the monstrous behavior of the woman Stafford came to call Charlotte Hideous.

The parallels that exist between Robert Lowell and Clyde Tompkins, though not many in number, are very significant. Theo discovers in Clyde two attributes which disqualify him forever from being an acceptable husband: his feckless subservience to his aunt; and—the sleeve of this subservience turned inside out—the selfsame bullying disposition which he was prepared to direct against herself. It was precisely these qualities that Stafford discovered in Lowell. He could never really declare his independence from his mother, especially where Stafford's happiness was concerned. And he could be as domineering as his mother. The hectoring bully in Lowell manifested itself to Stafford in two ways. As a Roman Catholic convert turned zealot, he tried to compel her to follow him in even the narrowest practices of his temporary fanaticism. And as the arrogant poetic genius who required to be first among equals in the marriage of two great talents, he demanded that Stafford interrupt her own activities to type up endless versions of his poems; and, when she was not typing them, she was conscripted into hearing him read them aloud.

If it seems that up to now we have directed our attention exclusively to the injuries suffered by Stafford at Lowell's hand, it is only fair to acknowledge that she probably gave as good as she got in her battles with him. Admirers of these two immensely talented young writers can easily become partisan in assessing the blame for their quarrels and ultimate failed marriage. My own judgment is that, whereas Lowell must be made to bear the greater burden of guilt for his deeds, Stafford may have been the greater offender with language.

It is certainly Stafford's language that Lowell recalled most vividly years later in a poem he titled punningly (and sardonically) "The Old Flame."

My old flame, my wife!

how quivering and fierce we were,
there snowbound together,
simmering like wasps
in our tent of books!
Poor ghost, old love, speak
with your old voice
of flaming insight
that kept us awake all night.
In one bed and apart. . . .

If Jean Stafford's employment as a waitress-chambermaid at the Colorado dude ranch in Ward provided her with the backdrop for the first act of her little domestic comedy, her jaunt as a tourist through the Carlsbad Caverns one summer in the thirties with her sister, Marjorie, provided her with the setting for the second and last act. The "fourhour ramble through the vast gruesome cavity," which appalls Theo, was made to order for Stafford's comic gifts. Like one of her favorite writers, Mark Twain, she knew how to wield hyperbole. So we are treated to a description of "groves of white and green stalactites, patinated with damp and with obscure electric lights." This is followed by a reference to "darkness of a hellish impenetrability, a darkness too awful to scream against." Next we are told of "unplumbed pits of the same primeval darkness that lay behind the tusks and fangs . . . made by an eternity of revision, shaped by a million years." Persons acquainted with Stafford's childhood will recognize in these passages more than a writer's delight in hyperbole. Jean as a child—and, indeed, as an adult—was given to many fears and revulsions which she did not outgrow. So, when we read that Theo "walked gingerly as if she trod on something nameless and alive, and when once her shoulder brushed against a horny stalagmite, she exclaimed in horror," we are listening to Jean Stafford dredge up some unpleasant recollections of her own "ramble" through the caverns.

What brought Stafford on this spelunking expedition? It seems she had been persuaded by her sister, Marjorie, to take a much-needed holiday. Stafford had been following a punishing regimen of year-round study, ambitious to acquire an A.B. and an M.A. in the four-year period normally devoted to the baccalaureate. It was time for a break. Marjorie proposed that the two young women see the Carlsbad Caverns, visit some border towns in Texas and Mexico, and wind up in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where she taught in the Indian school there.

A comparison of Marjorie's account of their tour of the Caverns with Jean's is instructive. Marjorie thought the caverns "truly beautiful with their amber stalactites and stalagmites," whereas Theo likened the trip to "the worst nightmare of one's whole life." Marjorie recalled that the long lines of tourists doubling back on themselves in the enormous chambers looked like biblical processions; but Theo remembered her "fellow pilgrims" at lunch, "bemused, nibbling their dry bread, their faces green in the dim light." And Stafford projects her own attitude when she remarks that Theo "found the deformities of nature appalling."

But it was not only scenery that Stafford recalled when she came to give body to her story. She drew on other, quite different aspects of her own life to give immediacy to "A Slight Maneuver." For example, running through the story in almost antiphonal fashion are repeated references to Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. It will surprise no one to be told that Wharton was one of Stafford's favorite women authors. In her story she uses Wharton's novel as a test of a person's mind and taste. Predictably, Naomi Heath, who is constantly seen clutching the novel but almost never reading it, flunks the test. Theo pronounces judgment: "She will never finish The House of Mirth. Besides being hell on wheels, she's illiterate." With the artistic economy that marks the complete writer, Stafford at once finishes off Mrs. Heath, pays her compliments to a respected author, and provides her readers with a neat example of her fondness for juxtaposing western colloquialisms with standard English in the same sentence.

When Theo finally blows up in front of Clyde and calls his aunt an illiterate, Stafford describes her behavior with remarkable realism. She writes: "And inexplicably, both to herself and to her staggered young man who could not utter a word, she took off her huaraches and padded angrily barefoot across the patio and up the stairs to her own room." It is the homeliness of the imagery that makes this description so convincing. And the homeliest of the images is that of the Mexican shoes called huaraches. Revealingly, Stafford was introducing as a property here her own favorite footwear during her college days and immediately after. So closely had she become identified with these Mexican shoes that Peter Taylor, writing a story which he called "1939" about Stafford and Robert Lowell and himself in their youth, singled out these very huaraches as one of the significant means used to identify his Jean Stafford figure.

Finally, some consideration of why Stafford called her story "A Slight Maneuver" is in order. The most obvious explanation is undoubtedly the right one, if we are willing to admit that the "right one" need not be the only one. With no knowledge of the biographical and autobiographical elements to which we have been calling attention, a reader has no difficulty in understanding that Mrs. Heath, intent on breaking up her nephew's engagement to a girl she does not approve of, maneuvers the two into a situation calculated to expose to each the precise qualities which neither could abide in a marriage partner. Stafford comes close to spelling this out nearly as directly as I have. But, because she is a prose poet writing fiction, and not an earnest commentator writing exposition, we shall turn to her own words for the explanation.

Speaking of the final indignity inflicted on the hapless tourists—having to sit imprisoned and listen to the fullthroated, all-male chorus bellow out "Lead, Kindly Light" in total darkness—Stafford writes: "The shock was maiming." But a greater shock awaits Theo as "her mind, lagging far behind her physical perceptions, finally understood that Clyde has fumbled over her face with his lips until he found hers: he had planted a kiss on her absolute void of a mouth, and this kiss was as stupid, as temporary, as messy as the orange rinds on the cavern floor. She was as repelled as if it were Mrs. Heath kissing her." Like her heroine, Stafford is unsparing of both nephew and aunt.

. . . she drew away, the voices died, the lights went on and everyone moved toward the elevators. But the time, filling up the vacuum, did not blur the moment of his doglike attempt to fawn away his offenses, and she, looking with willful courage into his eyes as the lift shot upward, knew that he had experienced what she had done, what Mrs. Heath in her brilliant subconscious mind had known they would do, and that the moment, rotten, black and round, ran up and down the channels of his mind, finding no outlet.

So much for the right explanation for the story's title, the one that fits the story that Stafford had skillfully prepared for the audience of Mademoiselle's readers. But one who has read the foregoing discussion will have no difficulty arriving at another explanation. Confined to her medical sanctuary, her physical movements radically restricted, Stafford had been engaged in late 1946 and early 1947 in a war of words with her disaffected husband. In her letters to him she had tried everything: persuasion, logic, appeals to pity, vituperation, high dudgeon. All to no avail. If these verbal strategies would not work, at least she had one alternative left—the best one, her art. Until now she had been playing a losing game. No matter what gambit she tried, her husband checked her. But an artist writing a story may play all the roles, may take both sides, may control all the moves. Playing out her game on this literary chessboard, Stafford no longer had to lose. By means of "a slight maneuver," she could successfully put her intransigent husband into checkmate. And in the process she could capture his queen as well.