The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Storytime: Jean Stafford’s “The Echo and the Nemesis” is about the tepid, transactional friendship between two 21-year-old American university students in Heidelberg. It is also about morbid obesity’s entombment of a young human being. Sue Ledbetter is the echo, the meeker, poorer, less worldly opportunist of the two who hangs around Ramona Dunn in hopes of meeting her brother. “She was often bored by Ramona’s talk.” But she has manners. Ramona is from a super-wealthy family. She appears super-arrogant, calling everyone Philistines and hanging out with Sue because “I need a rest from the exercitation of my intellect.” She studies philology, the study of languages. She is “fat to the point of parody. Her obesity fitted her badly, like extra clothing put on in the wintertime.” She could spend all she wanted. “She was the sort of person who seemed, at twenty-one, to have fought all her battles and survived to enjoy the quiet of her unendangered ivory tower. She did not seem to mind at all that she was so absurd to look at, and Sue, who was afire with ambitions and sick with conflict, admired her arrogant self-possession.” While they’re having coffee and a chat as they did every morning, served by a “mean-mouthed waiter,” Bach’s Minuet in G plays on the radio. Stafford does not specify whose minuet. She was writing for an audience presumed to know, having herself some of the Ramona in her: if you had to ask, you were a philistine. The New Yorker published the story in the December 16, 1950 issue, back when The New Yorker didn’t even bother telling you what stories by what authors appeared in the issue. The table of contents was always a cursory brief of about five or six lines highlighting the main articles. It made you hunt through the magazine’s 166 pages of advertising, half of it for booze (it was Christmas). The 1950 publication is notable. I don’t know if The New Yorker would publish a story with that theme, or at least with such lines as “from the envelope of fat emerged a personality spirituelle” or “changed from a swan into an ugly duckling,” in our wokier flapping ‘20s. The lines might go, the theme would not, especially with more contemporary–and at the time, avant-garde–lines such as “Please let me tell you what it is that makes me the unhappiest girl in the world,” and “I would not any longer offend that long-suffering family of mine with the sight of me.” Or the way Ramona “ground out a cigarette on one of her downy wrists” in self-loathing atonement for having eaten 12 cherry tarts in a single sitting, breaking her deal with Sue. For they had made that deal after hearing the Minuet, which sent Ramona on a melancholy binge and reminded her of her twin sister, the more beautiful Martha, who died of a terrible illness. Ramona asks Sue to be her food monitor, and promises to bring her along on vacation to Switzerland to meet the family and her brothers, and a prospective catch for Sue. Of course both promises are broken especially after Sue discovers that Martha was none other than Ramona in her younger days, as beautiful as could be, the death of that Ramona having been subsumed under her middle name of Martha, as her former twin. “In a sense,” Sue supposed, “the Martha side of Ramona Dunn was dead, dead and buried under layers and layers of fat.” Again, the sort of line that would probably not survive a contemporary editor’s pen, though for the same reasons that I am uncomfortable with the sanitizing of history in textbooks, in public parks or on street signs, I’d be uncomfortable with that sort of censoring in the name of sensitivity today. But would it be? Republishing the Stafford story–the Library of America published her complete stories in 2021, and Farrar Straus Giroux published the collected stories in 2017–with the sort of sanitary cuts applied to Mark Twain and Faulkner books for coddled students would be a problem. But no one is doing that. I just read that story in its original form, in the LOA edition. There is a difference between removing a Confederate monument of long date and installing one today. A new installation today would be pure revanchism. We’re seeing it. But an editor getting a story written in 2025 about a fat person and choosing to rephrase certain lines would simply be part of the editing process that has taken place since the Cave paintings of Lascaux. We write to our day’s sensibilities, unless there is a certain intention to buck those sensibilities, as Tony Tulathimutte does in Rejection, his 2024 collection of short stories written at least in good part to shock us out of these sensibilities and show us how the other half lives–incels, fat people, morbidly inclined fetishists. I’m a long way from Jean Stafford now. But “The Echo and the Nemesis” to me seems as much about the ache at the heart of the story as it is about the timing of its publication at a midcentury mark in a nation so clearly self-satisfied with itself, and so clearly delusional: the fat back then were part of that mass of minorities the country’s established philistines bypassed, at least until the Civil Rights movement was building, and who now form its majority. At this rate, the obese who are “only” 42 percent, will become the majority as well by the time the country is no longer a majority-white nation, sometime in the next couple of decades. As the friendship between Sue and Ramona ends, now that Sue has nothing left to get from Ramona, and Ramona nothing left to need from Sue, the meek Sue attempts an “I’m sorry.” Ramona’s response: “I’m not sorry. It is for yourself that you should be sorry. You have such a trivial little life, poor girl. It’s not your fault. Most people do.” You know she’s not wrong.

—P.T.

“If she ever got fat, she thought, or if she ever said anything fat, she would lock herself in a bathroom and stay there until she died,” thinks the young protagonist Molly Fawcett. “Often she thought how comfortably you could live in a bathroom. You could put a piece of beaver board on top of the tub and use it as a bed. In the daytime, you could have a cretonne spread on it so that it would look like a divan. You could use the you-know-what as a chair and the lavatory as a table. You wouldn’t have to have anything else but some canned corn and marshmallows. . . .”

–From Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure (1944).

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