Source of book: I own this
One of my ongoing reading projects is to go back and read classic books from the 20th Century that were not part of my high school curriculum. As I have mentioned, while my high school education was rigorous, it was video courses and curriculum from a conservative religious school in Florida, and as far as I could tell, other than Steinbeck and a few others, the 20th Century was ignored. Likewise, my mom, who supplemented our curriculum with classic literature that she liked, had very little experience with 20th Century literature, so we never really experienced it.
I do not mean this to be a criticism. First, now that a few of my own kids have completed high school, it is obvious that even the most secular of curricula have a lot of gaps, simply because there is insufficient time to read hundreds of books. And, for whatever reason, the middle to late parts of the 20th Century get left out.
Second, regarding my parents, they both introduced me to great literature early, and kept us supplied with books at home and from the library - they were better than the vast majority of parents at this, and inculcated us kids with a love of literature and reading. This is very much to their credit and one of the best things they did as parents.
But, what is true is that there has been a bit of a gap, and I am working to fill that, particularly through my growing collection of used Library of America hardbacks, of which this is one.
Jean Stafford was popular during her prime - the 1940s and 50s. However, changing taste and her own alcoholism led to a decline in her reputation, and she seems rather less read these days than a number of contemporaries. She only wrote three novels, but many short stories. I own those as well, and will have to read some of them next.
The Catherine Wheel is her last completed novel, published in 1952. The title is a double reference - both to the horrific method of torture and execution associated with Saint Catherine, and to the firework. Both of these are alluded to throughout the book, sometimes in a bit heavy handed manner. The final tragedy of the story becomes a sort of blending of the two images.
I mentioned the use of the metaphors as the part of the book that I felt was a bit, not so much preachy, but a bit much. That really is my only complaint about the book. The writing overall is solid, and the inner lives of her two main characters are superbly written.
Jean Stafford’s writing in general is highly misanthropic. However, unlike many misanthropes who consider themselves as superior than the rabble, or some such self-righteous position, Stafford sets forth her argument that we are all this bad. The loathing of humanity is also self-loathing.
The plot revolves around two main characters, who more or less alternate chapters from their points of view. The two are linked by family relationships, but also by their secrets and inner trauma. While they to a degree connect with each other, their refusal to disclose these secrets while making assumptions about what the other knows leads to profound isolation and compounded psychological damage.
Katherine is a middle-aged woman, who never married. As we find out, her parents took in an orphaned young girl, Maeve, and the two of them grew up together. As young women, both fell in love with John, who is a bit of a rich prick and definitely unworthy. Everyone assumed he would marry Katherine, but he married Maeve instead. Unrequited love has done a number on Katherine, although she keeps her agony secret from everyone.
From that union came the other main character, Andrew, a young boy, who, with his older twin sisters (Honor and Harriet) spends his summers at Katherine’s summer estate. Andrew’s trauma is the loss of his best summer friend, Victor. On previous summers, the two of them went everywhere together, and were best of friends. At least from Andrew’s side, the obsession borders on sexual.
The problem is that Victor’s love and adoration is for his older brother, Charles, who is in the navy. When Charles gets gravely ill and has to convalesce for the summer at home, Victor throws Andrew over so he can care for and fawn over his brother. Like John, Charles is a total dick - arrogant, mean, vulgar - and unworthy of emulation and admiration.
Andrew becomes filled with hatred toward Charles, who has, as he sees it, stolen his friend. As the book goes on, he becomes consumed with it, wishing Charles would die, and half believing that he will indeed be able to kill Charles with his thoughts.
In the meantime, Catherine has a significant shock. While it has been obvious that Maeve and John are not happy together anymore, it turns out that the trip they have taken in an attempt to rekindle the romance has failed. John writes Catherine and says he is in love with her, and offers to take her away to live on an island away from anyone they know. (Another man makes Catherine an offer, which she finds even more vulgar than the one from John.) For Catherine, she realizes John isn’t worth it, but is overwhelmed with her emotions to the point of ordering a headstone.
Andrew and Catherine are, in their own way, close to each other, but neither comes out and states what is bothering them. Catherine assumes that Andrew has read her diary and realized that she wanted to marry his father. Andrew hasn’t, and never puts together the hints he has heard about the relationship. So, when Andrew asks Catherine if hating someone enough to wish them dead could kill them, Catherine assumes Andrew hates her, because of her desire for his father.
In the meantime, Andrew assumes that Catherine knows of his hatred for Charles, and hates him for being such a bad person. Catherine could have picked up on this, but she is too distracted by her own issues. They come so close to connecting and revealing what is in their heads, but instead pass each other without knowing, and thinking the other hates them.
The tragic ending, as I noted, gets a bit heavy on the symbolism, and is rather melodramatic. I believe that is a bit of a trademark for Stafford’s writing. But up until that point, I thought the book was excellent - the paired psychodrama is all too believable, and Stafford creates parallels throughout, letting the twin narratives unwind and become increasingly entangled.
There are a host of secondary characters which all contribute to the themes of alienation and dark fantasies. Stafford isn’t particularly kind to her characters the way, say, Eudora Welty or Anthony Trollope are. Some of the descriptive lines are quite cutting and even vicious. Check out this poisonous line.
It was alarming and disarming and sad to see how like that Edmund the young St. Denis was, limber and tall and fair, his oval, olive face full of poetic and boyish solemnity that would go - oh, how rapidly it would go! - when he had reached the man’s estate of real-estate and fortune-building and surrender to the second best; when the skin-deep college education or the Wanderjahr had paled like the tan of a winter holiday and the mind was left to rust and blunt like a knife left out in the rain and reflex replaced imagination.
It’s not a kind picture of the future, but I bet we all know someone like that, who once seemed full of imagination, but the gloss of education and experience never changed them at a deep level, and by the time they are middle aged, their minds have essentially rusted and blunted. Perhaps one reason for this ominous premonition is the history of John.
A sigh like a sob shook her as she thought how, in the end, the patience of her charm and her rigid rejection of the second best had finally won her a Pyrrhic victory. For John Shipley, grappling in his forties for his twenties, had been fooled by his needless need and, greedy as Ponce de Leon, imagining a source of rejuvenation, a new start, a rebirth, a second chance with no strings attached, had returned to her. Except he did not look upon it as a return; he believed he was seeing her for the first time and the bitterest pill of all the galling pills she had had to swallow was the knowledge that he had scarcely been aware of her those years ago but had only been impressed, snobbishly, by her situation as the only daughter of a remarkable man in a showplace of a house.
Now, though, he must divorce his wife, must marry Katherine, must - this is how he stated it - “save himself.” Must, ought, words dear to the Puritan tongue telling lies between its veiling teeth and coating the vile mendacities with an ethical vocabulary.
That certainly isn’t what Katherine had hoped for - there is something deeply insulting in saying “I must marry you to save myself.” Yuck. Definitely not worth all those years of pining.
The second amorous proposal is likewise rather vulgar, as Katherine sees clearly.
It was a gross and platitudinous burlesque of John Shipley’s protestations, and the man was neither better nor worse than John in his effort to struggle out of his boredom and his disappointment in himself by pleading with her to build him a castle in Spain and take him on a magic carpet to the end of the rainbow.
I think that Stafford is on to something here. Leaving aside all of the fully defensible reasons for leaving a marriage, there are too many that I know either personally or professionally who left essentially out of boredom and the mistaken belief that a new lover will rescue them from their ennui.
Another unpleasant character is Billy the blacksmith, who hates government and women (particularly his wife.) One of these lines sounds so much like the toxic masculinity crowd of our own time as well as their orange messiah.
Anything that was low or uncomfortable or dishonest or ugly was, in Billy’s mind, either womanly or governmental and he liked to confound the two abominable species by speaking of “all those women in the White House and in Congress” and calling Mayor Curley “a damned flapper.”
There are also, fortunately, some lighter and humorous moments in an otherwise rather dark book. I like this exchange as a few of the old folks are talking about the young folks.
“And I repeat, I’d give my worldly goods and all my expectations to be a kid again.”
“I wouldn’t give a farthing,” snorted Mr. Barker. “I like being old. Would you want to be sixteen again, Katherine? Sweet sixteen and never been kissed?”
She shook her head and gasped, as he had expected her to do, and said, “Lord, no! What an appalling thought!”
As I have been wont to say, there is a price that could convince me to repeat my high school years - and if you have to ask how high, you can’t afford it. No amount of money could ever convince me to repeat my Jr. high years. Nope, nope, nope. What an appalling thought.
There is also a moment where the officious doctor - who people think Katherine should marry - engages in some truly egregious mansplaining.
But when she came back after seeing him out she sharply fanned up the fire with the bellows as if she were attacking someone and said, “Cut the stems indeed! I know of nothing that annoys me more than to be instructed in matters I took in with my mother’s milk. The curse of being female, Andrew, is that we must pretend to be quite incapable of grasping the self-evident.”
Katherine is quick on the uptake about a lot of things, and she comes so close to realizing what Andrew is feeling. Near the end of the book, the bored Andrew dresses up in Katherine’s late father’s clothes, and she has a momentary flashback and calls him John - the family resemblance strikes her. But Andrew too fails to notice, even though Katherine is sure he grasped the significance. This line is interesting to me:
One knew as much at twelve as one was ever going to know. Even more perhaps, since at that age one was still, philosophically if not practically, in a state of nature and could cleave through the toughest tissues to the heart of the matter. Certainly she had known, known even before she was twelve, how rickety was the scaffolding of her parents’ marriage; she had proceeded from just such a slip of the tongue as she had made to Andrew a little while ago, to the knowledge that her father had a mistress. It had been through some process infinitely more direct than logic, something instantaneous and unquestionable, that she had perceived that the reason her father had often seemed to prefer Maeve was that Maeve was not the daughter of his wife whom he did not love. Later, when he grew accustomed to his guilt, he had begun to lavish on Katherine the fruits of his cool heart.
That’s quite the twist at the end. I must admit, I have long wondered why it was that my parents made an instant bond with my sister in a way they never did with me, and I remain unclear - there is no obvious reason, although perhaps as a first-born child and a male I remind them of their difficulties with their own first-born fathers and older brothers. (It definitely isn’t the same thing as the one in the book, though.) It is interesting what kids know at age twelve, to be sure.
I have been reading a lot of heavy books lately, so this one perhaps felt darker than it would have otherwise. I am due to read some lighter fare (like, say, Margaret the First) and clear my head before reading more Stafford - and I will read some of her short stories next time. But I did find the writing and storytelling compelling, and am a bit puzzled why she fell out of favor. Oh well. At least a few of us are reading her still.
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