To do justice to the stories of Jean Stafford, even to her recent ones; we need a degree of historical sympathy. They take us back to a time in the 1940's when Henry James was an insurgent influence among American writers, when ethnic writers had not yet transmitted the brooding vitality of their subcultures into the center of our imaginative awareness. Miss Stafford's elegant and sad Wasp Manhattan is closer to Washington Square than to Seize the Day. Her lonely Americans abroad match their gauche innocence against European civility and corruption. She writes Jamesian social comedies and Jamesian horror-stories and tales as monitory and symbolic as his artist-fables, part observation, part parable. Her stories are not exactly derivative—she has a special if fragile vision of her own—but they can be readily atomized into the influences that shaped them: besides James, Dickens, Mark Twain, Mann, a touch of E. M. Forster.

To the genre itself she contributes little that is new. Though never less than competent, she has none of the exuberant formal inventiveness through which original perception usually expresses itself. Like many other American writers of the 40's and 50's she inhabits a form that might be described as domesticated modernism. Her stories do not primarily focus on men and events; instead an atmosphere is created, a situation explored; we are granted not a conclusive action or denouement but only the significant word, the telltale gesture, the small illumination. She lays hold of her characters like an antique-hunter, scrutinizes them from every angle, exhibits their subtle defects and beauties.

In the process, however, she tends to manipulate the reader as well, to offer him only those meanings that she intends. The meanings themselves, like the world they are said to illuminate, are often rarefied to the point of inconsequence. In James, everything is conveyed through a finely spun web of consciousness, but it is always consciousness of something; it serves the reality of its object. Isabel Archer's great fireside reverie toward the end of The Portrait of a Lady is more than a triumph of "pure motionless seeing," as James later described it. She has tasted her Madeleine; her marriage, the whole action of the novel comes flooding through her mind, alive with meaning. Miss Stafford refines Jamesian consciousness (if not his style) into an abstract manner, which lacks a solid world from which to emancipate itself.

To be sure it is a rare pleasure these days to read fiction so gracefully professional, so eloquent and disciplined. Especially in comic stories like "Caveat Emptor" we hardly object to a touch of preciosity, a certain thinness and insubstantiality. The characters are carried along by the wit, gusto and buoyancy of the language. But in the more serious stories, where deeper insight is demanded, style tends to expose itself as mere style.

Among the best of the serious stories are those in which Miss Stafford makes her predicament her subject. Like James she is superb at portraying characters imprisoned by their own civility, trapped in an existence rich in style but poor in what one story calls "the miscellany of life that irritates but also brings about the evolution of personality." In "The End of a Career" Angelica Early—the quasi-symbolic name is typical—has dedicated her life to the facade of her own beauty; in the process, like Marcher in "The Beast in the Jungle," she has forgotten to live. The magnificent Mrs. Ramsey in "The Captain's Gift" is an island of bland serenity in a neighborhood swarming with unruly immigrants and a world torn apart by war. In the end that world makes a slight but (to her) brutal incursion. Another woman concludes a story (ironically called "I Love Someone") with her own bittersweet epitaph:

"My friends and I have managed my life with the best of taste and all that is lacking at this banquet where the appointments are so elegant is something to eat."

Miss Stafford herself often falls victim to this condition. Marriages wax and wane without touching upon sexual life. Private violence, war and the world of the last 25 years are as little attended to by Miss Stafford as by Mrs. Ramsey. She remains caught in the very world of decorous appointments which she satirizes.

The key to the paradoxical role of society in these stories lies in Miss Stafford's rich ambivalence toward the pre-social world of childhood. In a prefatory note she describes her own Western childhood, and tells how she eventually "hotfooted it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean." On this autobiographical base the stories somberly erect a version of the "international theme" more personal than that of James, more retrospective, focused on the mind of the child rather than on life out West.

A boy is orphaned, sent to an alien place, enveloped by an epidemic. He means to run away. Instead, tired, he falls asleep, "and something as soft and deep and safe as fur held him in a still joy." Warmth and terror, protection and entrapment, callous parents who often die, Dickensian guardians, picturesque but malignant—these elements co-exist poignantly in the childhood stories. Two brilliant examples are "In the Zoo" and "The Liberation" (in which the "child" is almost 30), both visions of entrapment and escape.

Miss Stafford's characters flee from childhood and from the provinces to an adopted East or Europe which they never quite believe in, where the price of freedom is anonymity and a sense of dislocation. To them "society"—adulthood—is at once a refuge and a sham. Only rarely do they find enough love to overweigh their sense of loss. More often they become permanent exiles, trapped in a world of surfaces. Or they long for withdrawal into an "interior castle" of the self, a schizoid projection of the ideal childhood they never had.

"That way madness lies," says Lear. Madness and lobotomy, says Miss Stafford's famous story "The Interior Castle." A steely tour de force, only ostensibly about a nose-operation, it carries her farthest along this surreal psychic terrain, and has a shattering urgency her writing does not often achieve. Here is the concealed abyss beneath the New Yorker manner, an original poetry of catatonic isolation and social subjugation, a horror-story that matters.