Kat Meads

Critical Essay

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An essay by Issue Five Featured Writer Kat Meads. Read a conversation with Kat here.

On assignment for McCall’s magazine, for three days in May 1965 in hot and stormy Texas, author Jean Stafford interviewed Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, the dead, accused assassin of John F. Kennedy. The interviews took place in Marguerite Oswald’s Fort Worth home, one half of “a tidy, unexceptional little house, on an unexceptional block of similar houses” that Stafford deems “seedy, but … not squalid.” 

Jean Stafford came to the task as a lauded novelist and short story writer, who published her first novel, Boston Adventure, in 1944 at age 29, and whose short stories first appeared most often in The New Yorker. Compounding her own artistic prominence and fame, Stafford twice married famous men: poet Robert Lowell and journalist and critic A.J. Liebling. During Stafford and Lowell’s literal and figurative car wreck of a relationship, a drunk Lowell drove into a wall, a collision that splintered Stafford’s nose, fractured her cheekbones, broke bones in the back of her skull and required numerous reconstructive surgeries. (Lowell escaped unscathed.) Although Stafford’s union with Liebling had run into its own bad patch by 1960, the pair remained married until Liebling’s death in 1963. 

When Stafford set off for Texas, she was two months shy of 50, her long-awaited fourth novel, now under contract to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, was overdue, and she had not published a story in The New Yorker for eight years. At Liebling’s death, Stafford inherited the country house in East Hampton, N.Y., but little cash. As much as Stafford disliked accepting magazine assignments that took her away from her fiction, in the spring of 1965 she needed an infusion of funds. The $2,500 offered by McCall’s proved too tempting to pass up. Begrudgingly and newly, precariously, sober, Stafford got on a plane for Texas. 

Marguerite Oswald welcomed Stafford as eagerly as she welcomed anyone willing to listen to her version of the Kennedy assassination, her son’s involvement and subsequent murder, and her own hard luck story. In a handwritten note to Stafford, Oswald invited her guest to choose “whatever time” would be “convenient” for their first meeting on May 4^th, adding: “Please make a schedule to suit your needs. I am happy to oblige.” She signed the note: “Sincerely, Marguerite Oswald, Mother of Lee Harvey Oswald.” (When Marguerite felt a cash pinch, one of her solutions was to roam Dealey Plaza, selling, for five dollars each, business cards that carried the same maternally focused autograph.) 

McCall’s would not have sent Stafford to Texas expecting a scoop—Marguerite’s penchant for barely coherent, fantastical ramblings and the unvarying content of those ramblings were by then well known to both press and public. The draw was Stafford: Stafford’s reputation, talents, style and the delicious possibilities of how Stafford would portray the woman. Stafford’s magazine articles were dependably sharp-eyed in detail and language rich, the reviews of books she disliked threaded with invective. As a novelist, she dealt in atmospherics. In theory, the matchup promised spark and bite. Stafford titled the article “The Strange World of Marguerite Oswald.” In the slightly expanded book version that followed, the author went with the title A Mother in History, one of Marguerite Oswald’s self-assigned monikers. In retrospect that capitulation suggests a certain fatigue. Marguerite Oswald said strange things strangely, but repetitive strangeness eventually loses its fascination and grip on a listener. Almost sixty years after its publication, A Mother in History scans as a tale encapsulating a wishes-she-were-elsewhere interviewer, a deluded interviewee and the creep and crawl of interviewer boredom—a boredom peevishly endured.  

Whether by preset design or onsite inertia, Stafford’s interviewing method (as presented in the finished text) was to give Oswald the floor. Many journalists have made fine use of the tried and true indict-them-with-their-own-words strategy. In A Mother in History, it is a tactic taken to wild extremes. Individually, Marguerite’s recitations can run for pages; collectively those soliloquies comprise the bulk of Stafford’s 121-page book. 

For her part, Marguerite performed as expected, the content of her chatter ranging from aggrieved to resentful to grandiose to unhinged with a few stops in between. Scattered highlights:

• “Now maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. But does that make him a louse?”
• “Why don’t I go to Washington? Because they’ve been so ugly to me.”
• “I am in twenty-six volumes of the Warren Report, which is all over the world.”
• “I think (Lee’s) coming out in history as a very fine person.”

Among Marguerite’s wall hangings: a copper scroll, etched with the capitalized phrase: “Lee Harvey Oswald even after his death has done more for his country than any other living human being.” The sentiment and quote are both Marguerite’s. Also on the phrasemaker’s agenda, the writing of many, many books. The first volume, Marguerite shares, will be called One and One Make Two. (In a later reference, the title mutates to One and One Don’t Make Two.) On the subject of her daughter-in-law, Marguerite wants the world to know that conniving Marina is “not a true person.” Nor is she Russian. Marina, Marguerite suspects, is French.

And so goes the logorrhea, captured by Stafford’s tape recorder on interview days two and three and by Stafford’s notetaking, day one. During those moments when Marguerite wanders off into the kitchen to rustle up coffee or iced tea to sustain the marathon, Stafford jumps at the chance to inspect Marguerite’s lair, “looking around the room in the snoopy way women do when they are in other women’s houses.” According to biographer David Roberts, Stafford delighted in revamping the various homes and apartments she occupied and scrubbed bathtubs with zest. As a snooper trained in housecraft, Stafford’s reports on Marguerite’s domestic setup are both thorough and evocative. The kitchen door of Marguerite’s homebase “debouched onto a common back porch” connecting two rentals, one vacant. A picture frame on a wall whose color “can be called beige or ecru or bone or buff or oatmeal” contains a print of Whistler’s “Mother” and shows every sign of having been “daily treated with polish and a chamois skin.” Marguerite’s “middle-aged” furniture has been “nondescript all its life” with the exception of a chair “upholstered in carroty polyethylene.” Despite “limited space,” Marguerite has arranged her living room furnishings “adeptly.” Left alone in the Marguerite Museum, assessing structure, décor, and housekeeping practices, Stafford’s attention revives. But then Marguerite returns. 

During their three days of intimacy, Stafford records two attempts to correct a Marguerite error of fact: John Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease, not “Atkinson’s,” and, no, William Manchester was not the author of Profiles in Courage. If, in Marguerite’s company, a scrappy Stafford did repeatedly derail the prattle with pointed questions, by including so few of those probes in the text Stafford plays up the futility of the entire enterprise. Following Marguerite’s claim that the Oswalds are “actually an average American family,” Stafford fishes for Marguerite’s definition of same and is ignored. Stafford asks why Marguerite thinks Marina is French; she asks about the last time Marguerite saw her son before he was killed. All to no avail. Each inquiry is met with evasions and non sequiturs. It is a battle of attrition. 

In the book’s early pages, Stafford treats the mismatch comically: “I felt like a flop on a junior high debating team who hadn’t a prayer of reaching the semifinals.” Farther along, she records irritation: when Marguerite uses up tape talking to herself in Stafford’s absence; when Marguerite repeatedly misstates Stafford’s point of origin; at Marguerite’s practice (a regional custom) of addressing Stafford as “honey,” “sweetheart,” and “dear heart”; and (rather oddly) because the interviewee “at no time” voices “the slightest curiosity” about the interviewer. Occasionally Stafford embeds some snark: Marguerite, notes Stafford, would undoubtedly be able to “go directly to the one appropriate thing on a rack of cheap clothes.” Very, very occasionally Stafford snaps to and skewers a particular performance failure, as when Marguerite’s “outrage” appears to be “put on like a false nose.” But, ultimately, to be persistently combative in the moment and critically inventive in its aftermath requires engagement. Predictable, repetitive Marguerite did not engage Jean Stafford; she induced mental torpor. 

By the morning of day three, Stafford longs to take a sleeping pill and remain under the bed covers in her “frigid” hotel room until the hour arrives when she can get the hell out of Texas. However, “committed” to finishing the assignment, she rouses herself and travels through “infuriated lightning” and “niagaras that roared down … baffling the windshields” to Marguerite’s house for the final meet-up, preparatory to a joint trip to Lee Harvey Oswald’s grave. In Marguerite’s bathroom, Stafford makes faces at herself in the mirror. In the passenger seat of Marguerite’s blue Buick Skylark, Stafford stares out the window toward “fumy fields … mouth(ing) the words, ‘Miz Oswald, I don’t get the point.’” Marguerite, on the other hand, has bonded and concocted big plans for the two of them. Come summer, Stafford should return to Texas, “rent the other side of the house” and serve as Marguerite’s amanuensis. Once Stafford is installed, they will “wander back and forth” via the connected back porch in their “housecoats” and complete an exposé that will net the two of them “millions.” Stafford’s mute response to this fantasy briefly—but only briefly—silences the fantasist. 

At the cemetery, lingering near the accused assassin’s grave are five male teenagers Stafford depicts as “simianly long-armed … all wearing dirty dungarees, dirty T-shirts, dirty sneakers, shaggy, dirty hair.” Surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald’s granite stone are “half-drowned yellow pansies.” It is Mother’s Day. “On some Mother’s Day,” Marguerite declares, “I think it would be wonderful for the United States to come out and say my son was an agent”; that “he died in the service of his country.” 

And then it’s a wrap. Marguerite heads off solo in her Buick, Stafford in the company of her chauffeur, the cemetery left to the dirty boys. Stafford’s next-day flight out of Dallas is delayed by another “preposterous storm,” but once airborne the plane ride east becomes “smooth as sleep.” In real time the reprieve was short-lived. As much as Stafford might have wished to be done with Marguerite Oswald and all things Texan, a box of tapes travelled with her to New York. She was not yet done with Marguerite Oswald.

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A Mother in History, published in 1966, received mixed reviews, sold well and the royalties, according to biographer Roberts, permitted Stafford to “financially … coast for a while.” In Stafford’s East Hampton country house turned full-time residence, the author resumed drinking and suffered numerous health setbacks. She died of cardiac arrest in 1979, age 63, her fourth novel still unfinished. Marguerite Oswald died of cancer in 1981, age 73, and was buried alongside her infamous son. Marguerite’s dream project, One and One Make/Don’t Make Two, remained only a dream and died with the dreamer. The weather in Texas continues hot and stormy.

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Kat Meads is the author of three essay collections, most recently These Particular Women. She lives in California.

Photo Credit: Jim Curtis received his BA from Vanderbilt University and his PhD from Columbia University. He taught for 31 years at the University of Missouri, where he is now Professor Emeritus from that institution. His goal as a photographer is to create images that look like a merger of painting and photography.