A Country Love Story by Jean Stafford 10 out of 10

 A Country Love Story by Jean Stafford

10 out of 10

Notes and thoughts on other books are available at:

-              https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEVa4_CsRStSBBDo4uJWT8BSWtTTn0N1E and   http://realini.blogspot.ro/

A Country Love Story is included in the series The Bostonians, and Other Manifestations of the American Scene.

And they are included in the Pulitzer winning chef d’oeuvre: The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford.

This narrative has reminded me of a short story by Thomas Mann.

In it, the protagonist is upset, if not horrified by what he hears people say around him, on important themes.

They keep saying:

-          I love you and my feeling cannot be described in words…it is beyond wonderful…

-          Our friendship…there is no way to talk about it…it will pass any test…

If not exactly in these words, the message was that real love and friendship can be found only in fiction.

In real life, even when declarations of eternal love and everlasting friendship are made, at the first hardship, many feelings will die.

That was a point of view that, if not literally applicable in the case of the Country Love Story, it is poignant and maybe relevant.

Anyway, I thought of Thomas Mann because the initial love is transformed into something else, if not hatred.

Daniel is a professor who works most of the time and is recuperating- or maybe not- from a severe illness.

He moves with his wife, May in the countryside, at a place that has a sleigh which appears a few times in descriptions and May’s thoughts.

When they first saw the house, they were both appalled at the sleigh and determined to get rid of it when they move in.

But they did not.

In fact, depression seems to set it, apart from an ever increasing animosity and tension between the two married people.

If May was convinced that she will see modifications, work and improvements at their new abode, with time she stopped caring.

Reading some lines about the life of the astounding author, who is now one of my favorites, one gets the feeling that A Country Story was inspired from her own experience, married for eight years to Robert Lowell, whom she then divorced.

The doctor has advised that the air and the silence will help the professor to recover from his illness, best treated in Maine.

But it soon becomes an Unbearable Pain of Living for May, who has no one to talk to and is oppressed by solitude.

Indeed, Positive Psychology studies indicate that socializing is crucial for survival and isolation is twice as deadly as smoking!

And even if she lives with her husband, he is always occupied with his work, about which he says nothing.

With his eternal absence and detachment, May is as good as alone in that remote farmhouse and tortured by this morbid atmosphere.

She ends up by imagining a lover, as a sort of defense, survival mechanism, for otherwise, I underline it- she is basically alone.

In fact, instead of supporting her, talking to his wife, Daniel is actually bringing to the table negativity and reproaches.

He says that it is not his fault that he got sick and that is true, but to see this isolation as entitlement is cruel.

May protests in the first instances, saying that of course it was not Daniel’s wish to be ill and they need to stay here so that he will be better.

But he refuses any openings and invitations to walk or say something, even when it is clear how vital it is for May.

And it gets even worse, for this almost permanent incommunicado is interrupted by the man only to attack his spouse.

And she is sinking deeper and deeper into a depression and a parallel world, with her imagined lover that could end up by destroying her…