More on Stafford's elegant prose style

About halfway through Jean Stafford's Collected Stories (1969), I'm struck by her reluctance to write in the first person. As noted in yesterday's post, her style is antithetical to that of most contemporary writers of short fiction, most of whom follow in the wake of Carver minimalism or Barthelme/Saunders surrealism and satire. Stafford was one of the last of the elegant stylists, and as such almost all of her short fiction - unless the final two sections of this collection change my view - are in the third person, w/ few or no sentence fragments, and never in the present tense, a favorite mode of contemporary writers. The one first-person story in the first half (first two sections - Innocents Abroad and Bostonians) of the the collection is a slight piece about a young woman who accompanies a cranky, older man as he gahers wild plants and bemoans the deforestation of his land. The last piece in the Bostonians section - The Interior Castle (had to look up the title; most of her story titles don't stay w/ me, and apparently not w/ Stafford either, as she changed several for inclusion in this volume) - is really striking: a close examination of the state of mind of a woman badly injured in a car accident, which smashed up her face, as she prepares to and undergoes reconstructive surgery. One would think that nobody could write about such excruciating pain and such weird associations - waves of hatred for and then love of her operating physician - w/out having lived through this kind of procedure. And Stafford had: Apparently she was badly injured in car accident as her then-young husband, Robert Lowell, was driving; she disguises the incident through alteration of key facts, but today most readers know the back story, and how this accident and her recovery pushed her apart from her Lowell. This seems a natural story for first-person narration, but Stafford's commitment to 3rd person makes the story more profound and sorrowful, less of a plaint. Of course readers today will also be struck by the antiquated medical care, which seems more 19th century than 20th (let alone 21st) - limited options for anesthetics, extensive stay in the hospital before and after surgery. Looking forward to reading the 2nd half of the collection, particularly the New York stories (the Bostonian, btw, has little to do w/ Boston - but it could well have been called New Englanders? - most take place in Maine), though I am still frustrated by the editors' decision to leave out information on publication dates.