Notes from the Literary Road: How a Biography Grows

On November 13, 2024, near the end of a two-week research trip to the Stafford Archives, in the Watzek Library at Lewis and Clark College, I started musing. Like this:

A real Portland rain this morning. As dreary as it gets. But I’m back at the library early enough to snare one of the more convenient parking spaces. I’ve been thinking about where this project is headed and what still needs to be done.

There are many series of papers in the Stafford Archives that I’ve not yet inspected, most having to do with book publications that come along later in the 1970s, ‘80s and beyond. As of now, and as an example of what that means, I’ve got a decent picture of how the 1970 collection, Allegiances, came together and am on the verge of weaving that into a chapter that closes the 1960s and leads up to Stafford’s Library of Congress year of 1970-71.

There are said to be more than 100,000 pages of correspondence on the storage shelves nearby, and while it seems I’ve already paged through that many, I’ve only barely scratched the surface. My practice over the last three years, which I think is the right approach, has been to make surgical forays into the correspondence boxes to gather material relating to a specific month or year or, especially, to gather Stafford’s correspondence to (if there are carbons) and from certain people.

This week, for example, I wanted to find letters to and from two of Stafford’s Lewis and Clark faculty colleagues, Vern Rutsala and Bob Dusenbery. There aren’t a lot of letters involving each, but the process, aided by the searchable Finding Aid online, means asking for multiple boxes (only two at a time) in order to pull out the one folder that might have one letter often, though not always, identifiable by a particular date. I make notes or digital scans of the letters that have usable material. This, of course, takes a considerable amount of time for what essentially is a small return.

Inevitably, just having one of those folders open in search of a single letter, my eyes will settle on a name (one of the Stafford children, say) or a subject that causes me to stop and scan. These unexpected digressions are gratifying, but they do add time to the process.

Occasionally, I have paged through folder after folder in a certain period in order to get a good sense of Stafford’s travels, speaking invitations, or activities that bear a closer look as I work on chapters involving certain times in his life and career. This turn-every-page procedure adds up, as well, and the research clock ticks. I’ve found myself spending an hour or an hour and a half in a single folder. Consider this: Stafford’s general correspondence spans more than 70 boxes, each of which contain as many as five or six folders stuffed with paper representing roughly a month or more of Stafford time.

The incoming correspondence, except that from known figures, poets, and friends, tends not to be of much use—random people asking Stafford to read their poems, organizations seeking his participation, hosts and hostesses thanking him for an appearance, itinerary planning, etc. Then again, you never know. Surprises and unexpected finds can occur around any bend. Without getting into details here, I was stunned one day to find a note from Dorothy Stafford chastising her husband for a perceived affront.

Incoming letters, especially from friends and writing or publishing colleagues, also tend to contain references to a Stafford letter they’d received or to notable events that demand following up. In the last few days I’ve been inventorying a cache of Stafford letters to the poet Donald Hall that have only recently become accessible from the University of New Hampshire library. I first tried to poke into that collection more than three years ago. Now, my reading of Stafford’s connections with Hall have become far more layered and meaningful.

As researchers we live for miracle moments. They don’t happen often, but they are elating when they occur. Shortly after drafting the first version of this essay, I was surprised to find, in an unexpected box of material, a package of letters that Stafford sent home from his two-month State Department tour of South Asia and the Middle East in 1972. This and other “new” material from this journey provided a welcome revelation that a chapter soon to be written will now be enriched with details I didn’t expect to have at this point.

Aside from chasing miracles, biographers are also faced with the frequent dilemmas that enormous amounts of material present. Just yesterday, when chasing down a single piece of paper, I learned that the meticulous record-keeper Stafford, and his subsequent archival ranchers, amassed a box full of three folders holding 1,057 (by someone’s count) notebook pages of what Stafford called his “Tired Poems”—they’d wandered around the market so much, rejected here and there, that he set them aside. It’s possible that some of these poems eventually did get published, but I’ve at least momentarily decided that figuring that out is not my job right now.

Still, knowing this detail is quite enough to help tell the Stafford story as it unfolds elsewhere on my laptop.

Research Discovery: Stafford in 'Aperture' Magazine

As my manuscript progressed through the early 1960s I came across a reference to a Stafford contribution to Aperture, the photography magazine. In the James Pirie Stafford bibliography it’s item E285. As I build my chronological spine for the project I consult and usually make a copy of Pirie’s year-by-year listings of Stafford’s appearances in journals, periodicals and the like. This item intrigued me because of Stafford’s own attraction to photography (as well as my own) and for the somewhat unusual alignment (for him at the time) of poems with visual images.

It’s still unclear how the connection was made, but Stafford’s stature had risen when he won the National Book Award in 1963 and by early 1964 he was corresponding with Minor White, the magazine editor, and others at Aperture. I’m inclined to think White invited Stafford to respond to a series of photographs, and Stafford eagerly complied. No matter how useful it could be, I decided I needed to have a copy of the magazine and had little trouble turning up the issue online.

White introduced the issue with a note about “transactional photography,” which seems to suggest that the photographer and ultimate viewer are present together in the moment. It seems as though the phrase these days implies more of a commercial arrangement between photographer and customer. I’ll let my friends in the photography world mull over the finer philosophical points here. I do seem to recall that pairing photos with poetry was not uncommon in the 1960s. In researching my Evan S. Connell biography, I found at least two photography books from the early 1960s and ‘70s to which he contributed or compiled selected poetry and prose. It must’ve been a thing. As the whole poetry-in-the-schools movement took root in the U.S. in the mid-1960s I think we were inundated with volumes of poetry, made to go down easier alongside photos and art works. In my personal “archives” I still have a little sprial-bound “book” of my own photos of Boston alongside samples of my insipid poetry. But enough about that.

In a letter to Stafford dated Feb. 19, 1964, Minor White responded to Stafford’s submissions: “Straw, feathers, dust, will work very well for the inside front cover,” he wrote. (See images below.) And he emphasized that each text, as with each photograph, would speak for itself and “should just be there.”

White chose to end the volume with a single line from Stafford: “The centers of stones need your prayers.” White’s comment: “WOW!…Hardly need the rest of the poem.” Curiously, while listing the six preceding untitled poems and fragments in his bibliography, Pirie missed this last one.

For his part, Stafford seemed fully absorbed by the idea of this project. As he wrote to an Aperture staffer earlier that month, “it would be great to achieve an inevitable and beautiful coherence which would loom for the viewer without being driven at him.”

Not sure at the moment whether any of this will find its way into my Stafford biography. The chapters from this period are already crammed full (of all good stuff, I might add).

Remembering William Stafford: An Update

Last summer (in 2023, that is), I wrote a piece for Literary Hub on the 30th anniversary of William Stafford’s death. I think I meant to post it or a link here as well, but, blimey, I guess I didn’t, so I’ll drop the link in down below.

More than three years into the project, my biography of Stafford moves like a snail, or as Evan Connell once referred to his writing of stories, grows like a starfish. At the moment I’m closing in on 100,000 words overall and in the process of finishing drafts of the first 10 chapters to join drafts of four later chapters completed (mostly) earlier.

Above is a shot of the well-organized Stafford papers, giving readers here an idea of the mountainous task I’ve taken on. Will I turn every page, as the research saying goes (thanks to Bob Caro)? Doubtful; but I will turn very many of them. I’ve been in the archives for a total of about six weeks, most recently a week in April 2024, scanning documents, correspondence and the like, and getting my head around and inside the not-so-easy-to-comprehend head of Stafford.

I should say a quick word about the parallel project called the Stafford Challenge, which was launched early this year by a Portland poet who was inspired by Stafford to inspire others to write every day. Reportedly some hundreds of people signed up to participate, vowing to write a poem a day for the next year. Stafford didn’t exactly write a poem a day, though he scratched out something—notes, dreams, the beginnings of poems, and even occasionally complete poems—almost every morning for nearly 50 years. I became a passive participant. I don’t churn out a poem a day, though I write almost daily on this book and other projects. I have produced a few decent poems, however. An informal discussion group that I passively joined and Zoomed with early in the Stafford Challenge fell apart rather quickly, so, as a poet I remain mostly a bubble boy in my lonely silo.

I’ve had some issues with posting links on this Squarespace site, so hoping this one to the LitHub article works OK:

https://lithub.com/remembering-william-stafford-whose-poetic-region-was-all-the-world/

The Pacifist Poet, the Nuclear Physicist, and a Moment in Literary Time

Christopher Nolan’s new movie, “Oppenheimer,” has sparked a boatload of newsy and literary chatter. As I was reading one of biographer Kai Bird’s recent essays on his role in the Oppenheimer project, it occurred to me I had a small slice of life connecting Oppenheimer with William Stafford, the subject of my own project, now in its third year of research and writing.

By STEVE PAUL

(c) 2023

            When the little-known Oregon writer and teacher William Stafford won the National Book Award in Poetry in 1963, he strangely crossed paths with the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Strange because the so-called “father of the atomic bomb” gave the keynote speech at the award ceremony in New York and Stafford was a committed pacifist, some of whose recent poems reflected his and the nation’s nuclear anxieties of the day.

            Given that Oppenheimer’s new cultural moment in the U.S. coincides with my current work in progress, a biography of the Kansas-born Stafford, a few words about their mutual brush with fame seem timely.

            In developing his new film, “Oppenheimer,” the director Christopher Nolan turned to a majestic biography of the scientist published in 2005. The book, American Prometheus, was the product of an enormous amount of research conducted by the historian Martin Sherwin. Some 20 years into it, Sherwin was paired with the writer Kai Bird, who spurred the project toward completion. (Sadly, Sherwin didn’t live to see the film’s completion. He died in October 2021.)

            The New York Times recently told the story of the long-in-the-making project, and Bird himself wrote an essay for The New Yorker, which recounted a drawn-out and only recently successful campaign to restore Oppenheimer’s reputation. Nearly 70 years ago, in the midst of the Communist-hunting hysterics stirred by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a tribunal of the Atomic Energy Commission accused Oppenheimer of spying for Russia and stripped him of his security clearance. As Bird writes, Oppenheimer “had to be silenced because he was opposing the development of the hydrogen ‘super’ bomb. Ever since, historians have regarded him as the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism.”

            Yet it took the passage of nearly a dozen presidential administrations before Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, in December 2022, responding to a persistent consortium of historians and scientists, including Bird, nullified the humiliation of 1954.

            Oppenheimer is said to have been publicly diminished by the episode. He “lived out his life a broken man,” the New York Times wrote while reporting on Granholm’s decision and seeming to skim over the fact that that in subsequent years Oppenheimer continued to serve as director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University. He died in 1967.

            And yet, there he was, on March 12, 1963, in front of a thousand book people at the National Book Award ceremonies in the swank ballroom grandeur of the Americana Hotel. Sherwin and Bird make no mention of this event in American Prometheus. When I reached out to Bird in October 2021 wondering if the authors’ files might have details, he told me that he had learned just that morning that his co-author had died. I rather awkwardly backed away and let it drop.

            Nevertheless, archival documents and media coverage helped fill in some blanks.

            Stafford’s Traveling Through the Dark, published by Harper & Row in August 1962, prompted the award judges to conclude, “William Stafford’s poems are clean, direct, and whole. They are both tough and gentle; their music knows also the value of silence.”

            Stafford and the other honorees—the novelist J.F. Powers (Morte D’Urban) and Leon Edel, cited for the first two volumes of his biography of Henry James—received their one thousand dollar checks and made their remarks.

            At a news conference that day in New York, Stafford, who was a soft-spoken professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, recalled his book-hungry family and their frequent treks to the library as he was growing up in the 1920s in Hutchinson, Kansas. And he hinted at a key source of his pacifism: “Though my mother thought the Boy Scouts too militaristic, my brother—the reckless one of the family—joined; and we could all use his official canteen when we picnicked.” When World War II arrived, Stafford’s brother, Bob, joined the Army air corps. Stafford registered as a conscientious objector and spent the war years in a series of Civilian Public Service camps, building roads, fighting forest fires and writing his way into his future life as a poet. And Oppenheimer, of course, led the secret mission at a laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop an atomic weapon that could bring a swift end to the war.

            As the NBA’s featured speaker, Oppenheimer seemed to blend science and faith under a theme of human responsibility. In speaking about technological progress and mysteries that lay ahead, he also invoked Saint Matthew: “And which of you taking thought can add to his stature by one cubit?”

             Oppenheimer concluded with this anecdote, according to a reporter, William D. Snider: “Three weeks ago a high officer of the National Book Committee asked for a title for this talk. I did not have one, but promised to call back shortly, and gave the title that is before you (‘The Added Cubit’). The officer protested that my title was indeed puzzling and uninformative. I said that it had a history and when the officer asked, I quoted St. Matthew. And then the officer asked, ‘From what book is that?’ The National Book Committee still has a lot to do.”

            Snider’s article failed to note whether the room erupted in laughter. Stafford, for one, would have appreciated Oppenheimer’s spiritual reference as well as his impish humor in the moment, just like his own.

            Stafford and Oppenheimer certainly would have bonded, if only through their bearing as men of conscience and witness. Stafford had written of war’s vast destruction in a poem even before Hiroshima: “There are more cities going into the sky,/ helplessly, than ever before” (“These Mornings,” 1944). One of Stafford’s most enduring poems, first published in 1957, is “At the Bomb Testing Site.” It’s unclear whether Stafford was channeling Trinity, that first atomic bomb test of 1945, or representing the ongoing bomb testing in the desert West in the 1950s, which continued spewing radioactive materials into the atmosphere. Yet, in reading the poem, one can’t help but think of that New Mexico scene in 1945, the mushroom cloud ascending and Oppenheimer thinking of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Stafford’s take is much more subtle and glancing; it closes with a lizard gripping the desert sand. (see the full text below.)

            The poet Sir Stephen Spender, interviewed in 1987, recalled how he’d run into Oppenheimer sometime in the 1960s. Oppenheimer pointed to a book he was reading. Poems by Stafford—though we can only imagine it was Traveling Through the Dark, the NBA award winner. Spender regretted he’d never told Stafford the story before. As he put it, Oppenheimer told him Stafford’s work was “the real thing.”

In the Stafford Archives: A View from the Vietnam War

On one of my research trips to the Watzek Library Special Collections room at Lewis & Clark College, I unearthed a remarkable letter to Stafford from a soldier in Vietnam. Trouble was, the correspondent’s name was missing. I told the story in this article for the Friends of William Stafford in October 2022.

Little Did I Know 30 Years Ago...

I began researching a potential full-life biography of William Stafford in early 2021 as I was awaiting production and publication of my book about Evan S. Connell. I knew there was no biography of Stafford, though his son, Kim, had written a memoir focused much on his father, Early Mornings, published in 2002. Others had written critical works and poetic studies over the years. But no biography, per se. As is my usual practice, I plunged in recklessly, “recklessly” I would eventually learn being a favorite Stafford expression of jolly communication, gossip, and creative expression. I had met Stafford a couple of times in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. And, in researching in his papers at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, I even found a photograph of me and Stafford together at a book event in 1992. It took a while of poking around before I reminded myself that I wrote about the poet after his death in August 1993. Reading that article recently turned out to be a revelation. I was finding some of the same phraseology and ideas about Stafford that I was using again today. Could it be that I actually began this project 30 years ago? Weird to think so. But as I think about what this new blog will end up doing, even as I continue to peck away at this potential book, it seemed a reasonable place to start. Of the published article, Sept. 5, 1993, in The Kansas City Star, I’d say that there are a couple of sentences I would probably correct now that I know much more than I knew back then. But, as know, journalism is the first draft of history. Many revisions await.