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.”