Word: stafford
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Marguerite Oswald also nourished Lee with the delusions of grandeur displayed in the celebrated interviews she gave Novelist Jean Stafford: "Lee Harvey Oswald even after his death has done more for his country than any other living human being." Once Lee emerged from Marguerite's cocoon, he seemed to regard himself as a rare and vivid specimen, on the wing in an ungrateful world...
...convert in his 20s-he later renounced the church -and a conscientious objector who served five months in prison for draft resistance during World War II. In his later years, he suffered from manic-depression and was often in mental institutions. He had three wives, all writers: Novelist Jean Stafford, Critic Elizabeth Hardwick and English Novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood. The Byronic drama of his marriages made its way into Lowell's poetry, where he quoted his wives' letters and reproaches, chronicled his infidelities and begged forgiveness. But he portrayed his worldly sorrows with a fervor transcending mere confession...
...balance her womanhood and her career ambitions--Colin finds himself incapable of performing a similar balancing act. As the relationship deepens, he begins to see the poverty and dreariness of his origins through her eyes--clearly enough to understand why she leaves him for his glib, middle-class friend Stafford. But that understanding serves only to deepen his anger and his isolation...
...which Storey's characters move. The landscape Storey describes is not only social, but literary: beside the stolidity of a Lawrentian mining village, he sets the formal rigidity of a Dickensian public school, with its masters almost comic in their severity. Through this landscape flits the mystical figure of Stafford, Colin's foil, who, like Dickens' Steerforth, sloughs off the spoils of his prosperity and talent with the same ease with which they accrue...
...Stafford's facility finds its parallel in Storey's own gift for creating character and scene. Storey's style is unobtrusive; but the sense of reality which eludes Colin is all about him, in Storey's precise depiction of the fictional world he inhabits. The effects in Saville are rarely obvious; our passport into Colin's dilemma is understatement and the slow accumulation of detail. Storey uses strings of adjectives almost lovingly. Writing of Colin's mother, he says: "It was as if her life had flooded out, secretly, without their knowledge, and she some helpless agent, watching this dissolution...