Mother Knows Best?

A MOTHER IN HISTORY by Jean Stafford. 121 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $3.95.

Jean Stafford (The Mountain Lion, Children Are Bored on Sunday) has a reputation for writing impressively about all sorts of unpleasant human woes and misfortunes--accidents, operations, psychic fear in children. But this is by far her most thoroughly unpleasant book--perhaps the most abrasively unpleasant book in recent years--and it required no writing talent at all.

On three successive days, Author Stafford merely set a tape recorder whirling and asked 58-year-old Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, to talk nonstop. She complied readily, for a price of course ($1,500). Anybody who read anything at all about Mrs. Oswald after the Kennedy assassination will know what to expect. For the rest, a minute of her motherly monologue ought to suffice:

"Lee Harvey a failure? I am smiling. I find this a very intelligent boy, and I think he's coming out in history as a very fine person ... I can absolutely prove my son innocent. I can do it any time I want by going to Washington, D.C., with some pictures, but I won't do it that way. Because they've been so ugly to me and my boy . . . Now maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. But does that make him a louse? No, no! Killing does not necessarily mean badness. You find killing in some very fine homes for one reason or another. And as we all know, President Kennedy was a dying man. So I say that it is possible that my son was chosen to shoot him in a mercy-killing for the security of the country. And if this is true, it was a fine thing to do and my son is a hero.

"Tomorrow is Mother's Day and I will go to Lee Harvey Oswald's grave, but I will be a mother alone, a mother in history alone on Mother's Day . . . And let me tell you this, if you research the life of Jesus Christ, you find that you never did hear anything more about the mother of Jesus, Mary, after He was crucified. And really nobody has worried about my welfare."

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