The Interior Castle Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1992 by Ann Hulbert All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material can be found following.

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-5123-8

  LC 91-22978

  v3.1

  FOR STEVE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  I

  Cowboys and Indians and Magic Mountains

  1915–1936

  1. CALIFORNIA AND COLORADO

  2. THE UNIVERSITY

  II

  The Innocents Abroad

  1936–1938

  3. MENTORS

  4. MEN

  III

  The Bostonians and Other Manifestations of the American Scene

  1938–1946

  5. BOSTON

  6. CATHOLICISM

  7. THE TATES

  8. CONNECTICUT

  9. MAINE

  IV

  Manhattan and Other Islands

  1946–1979

  10. PATTERNS

  11. PEACE AND DISAPPOINTMENT

  12. ISLE OF ARRAN AND SAMOTHRACE

  13. LONG ISLAND

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  “I AM SO SICK of … feeling that nothing I can possibly say ever can convey what it’s like to be inside this particular skull,” Jean Stafford once wrote to a close friend. She was sighing over the futility of psychiatry, to which she had had plenty of exposure, but her skepticism about the power of confession is also a warning about the difficulty of biography. Stafford’s “interior castle,” the image she borrowed from St. Teresa of Avila to symbolize the secret recesses within the skull, was a well-barricaded place.

  What to make of her sense of isolation was perhaps the centrally painful, and inspiring, question that Stafford faced in her life, which began in 1915 and ended in 1979. Her characteristic stance was to be intensely protective of her privacy and solitude. That didn’t mean she was quiet and retiring. On the contrary, she was readily distracted by friends, of whom she had many, and by larger social gatherings, at which she was renowned for telling long stories in her low, gravelly voice. But she saw to it that sociability was not the same thing as easy intimacy. Stafford had a “predilection for masks and disguises,” as her close friend Howard Moss was far from the only one to notice. He was speaking literally, remembering one occasion when she had come to the door in a mask with a big red nose, and another when she appeared wearing a cocktail waitress’s outfit, but he also meant it metaphorically. Stafford devoted a great deal of energy, some of it anxious but much of it comical and high-spirited, to playing out different personas.

  Her “Lowell-to-Liebling-to-dowager mask,” as another friend, Wilfrid Sheed, summed up her long-running public performance, mostly took the form of variations on the innocent child and the ironic spinster. When Stafford looked back on her first marriage in 1940 to the poet and New England scion Robert Lowell, she generally cast herself as the provincial girl from Colorado. But after her divorce from Lowell in 1948 she also mastered the arch Bostonian lady, the well-pedigreed, imperious Puritan grande dame she never really had a chance to be. During her marriage to A. J. Liebling, the New Yorker writer, she was the innocent-savvy “reporter’s moll, a kid you could take anywhere,” as Sheed put it. And then when her husband died in 1963, she jokingly called herself “the Widow Liebling” and set about cultivating the pose of the eccentric rural recluse in East Hampton, where she lived out her life in a house that he had left to her.

  Well practiced at maintaining a certain detachment in her personal life, at making intimacy an intricate and entertaining game, Stafford was even more vigilant about independence and self-protection in her literary life. It was again a somewhat paradoxical mission, since she certainly made no effort to avoid literary company. But whenever she faced an occasion to present some public statement about writing (which, though she disliked it, she intermittently did), she ended up delivering a lecture on the dangers of exhibitionism, the virtues of reticence, the snares of the literary world. She announced that she was against the fashion of being “forthrightly autobiographical,” and that the most important lesson she had ever learned, from Ford Madox Ford, was that portraiture drawn too directly from life was “impolite and it’s not fiction.” In yet another talk, she attacked “the private-made-public life” of authors on the promotion circuit. And indirectly invoking St. Teresa’s metaphor of the many-chambered inner castle, she offered her own vision of the quintessentially solitary act of creativity: “Writing is a private, an almost secret enterprise carried on within the heart and mind in a room whose doors are closed.”

  In a commemorative tribute given at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters after Stafford’s death, her longtime friend Peter Taylor perhaps best summed up her often perplexing determination to remain aloof. “Although it often may have seemed otherwise to those who didn’t know her well,” he said, “Jean set little store by the literary world.… It was only her work, not herself, that she wanted to deliver into the narrow ways of the literary world.… She remained a ‘private person’ (her phrase).” And as if that were not caution enough to a literary biographer, he went on to confess his suspicion that finally Stafford’s private person remained a mystery. “Actually, what she was like when she sat down to write her wondrous novels and stories may be something beyond the comprehension of any of us,” Taylor suggested as he looked back over her career. “In a sense, her literary personality remains her best kept secret. Perhaps it was in that role that she was the most private of private persons, and perhaps, in order to preserve that role, it was necessary for her to have the privacy she was always seeking.”

  My aim is to pursue the mystery of Stafford’s literary personality, which means confronting just how complicated her creative identity was. Without claiming to penetrate that best kept secret, I hope the search casts some clarifying light into the rooms of her imagination. The route I have taken is through her writing, which suggests again and again that isolation is a state as much to be feared as sought after, and through her writing life, in which, despite her professed desire for distance from the literary world, she in fact energetically courted close literary connections. Stafford struggled outwardly to defend the quiet chambers of her castle, but she also struggled inwardly against a terror of loneliness and a destructive urge to succumb to the peace of isolation.

  Charged by this tension, her life, though not publicly dramatic, and her work, though not prolific, continually strain against their ostensibly circumscribed boundaries. Beneath the carefully crafted surfaces, there are chasms; and the neat dichotomies—inner and outer, self and other—keep threatening to dissolve. Stafford resolutely refused to follow literary vogues, with the result that she wrote fiction that is anachronistic in the best sense. At the same time, both the independent course of her literary career and the idiosyncratic life of which it was a part offer a revealing perspective on an American literary generation in the middle of the century. In probing the problems of subjectivity, she avoided the confessional route favored by many of her much-read poetic contemporaries, which may have made her work seem dated then but has subsequently had the opposite effect. She couldn’t help being wary of the notion of the declaratory self;
she wasn’t ready, however, simply to embrace the now-fashionable notion of the fragmented self. In her explorations of the mysteries of identity, Stafford managed to maintain a sense of their complexity, to resist facile confidence or skepticism about the power of the imagination. She was obsessed by the idea of an autonomous self at war with the outer world, but she also dared to admit the potentially illusory nature of that idea.

  To understand the sense of marginality, personal and creative, that was at once a source of strength and a cause of deep insecurity for Stafford in her life as well as her art, it helps to situate her career in a wider literary milieu. The assertively maverick Stafford, whose provincial origins in the American West played such a large part in her self-definition, also saw to it that she found a place among writers who were shaping literary and critical debate and expectations in America. At twenty-four she married the promising poet Robert Lowell, and like him came of literary age with the New Critics as mentors and with a circle of intense young writers as friends. While their older guides—Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom—were transforming the study of literature in American universities, Lowell and his contemporaries—Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell—were embarked on feverishly creative but ill-fated courses, paths that hauntingly converged, earning the group the status of a tragic generation. Later Lowell wrote of himself and his fellow poets, “Yet really we had the same life, / the generic one / our generation offered.”

  Stafford’s place in the circle, biographically and creatively, was an uneasy one. In a sense her life was not so different from that generic one of exhilarating heights and troubled depths. Like the poets, she stumbled early into fame. At twenty-nine she published Boston Adventure (1944) to great success, just before the start of Lowell’s spectacular rise. By the time she left Lowell, her life looked as tragic as the rest of the poets’ would soon look. Having smashed her skull in a car accident with Lowell a year before they married, she was in Payne Whitney with a mental breakdown two months after they separated. The insomnia, suicidal urges, emotional and physical illness, marital trouble, and alcoholism that in different ways plagued Lowell, Berryman, Schwartz, and even Jarrell never ceased to afflict her. Like them, she didn’t hide her suffering; she could and did disrupt lives around her with her difficulties.

  Yet her art, and her subsequent creative life, took a different direction. For Lowell and Berryman, suffering and writing became inextricably connected, the one unimaginable without the other, the turmoil fueling and fueled by the writing in an exhausting cycle. Stafford instinctively resisted any conflation of her life and her art or, just as important, of her identities as a woman and as a writer, as she made clear in a despairing letter to Lowell in 1947. “What do I care if Randall [Jarrell] likes my book?” she wrote to him:

  Or anyone? Why should it console me to be praised as a good writer? These stripped bones are not enough to feed a starving woman. I know this, Cal, and the knowledge eats me like an inward animal: there is no thing worse for a woman than to be deprived of her womanliness. For me, there is nothing worse than the knowledge that life holds nothing for me but being a writer.

  After a brief unsuccessful marriage to Oliver Jensen, an editor at Life and then American Heritage, Stafford found a third husband in a literary enclave worlds away from the one in which she had begun. When she married A. J. Liebling in 1959, she was a happy woman for the first time, she said—and she all but ceased being a writer.

  Clearly the divisions in her life were not actually as stark as she made out. Though she resisted conceiving of herself as a “woman writer” and made little effort to cement ties with other women writers or with anything that might be described as a feminine literary tradition (and though she was acerbic about the feminist movement late in her life), Stafford was intimately conscious of the pressures that male influence and expectation exerted on her. Her response was far from straightforward, which is just one reason to avoid schematically reducing her plight to the paradigm of victim and victimizer. She knew full well the allure of victimhood, as both her life and her fiction show. Yet for her, oppression raised questions first of all about the often perverse ways of the individual will, and only then about the peculiar susceptibility of women to domination.

  Stafford’s ambivalence about the power and the vulnerability of the isolated imagination is the presiding theme of her three novels, Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1947), and The Catherine Wheel (1952), which were highly acclaimed when they appeared. It was also an underlying preoccupation of the short stories that she published regularly during the 1940s and 1950s, mostly in The New Yorker and then in several collections, The Interior Castle (1953), Children Are Bored on Sunday (1953), Bad Characters (1964), and finally The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (1969), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. Close to home though that theme was, Stafford consistently resisted the urge to frame it in confessional form. The work that she produced before she faced troubles with her fiction in the 1960s was worlds away from the increasingly autobiographical, less formally structured writing to which Lowell turned.

  Perhaps the most disturbing and memorable quality of Stafford’s art, which has won growing attention since her death, is the stylistic composure with which she unfolded a vision of profound psychic disequilibrium. “The esthetic distance she keeps between us and the untouchable otherness of her characters,” Guy Davenport observed, is the source of great power in her evocations of disenchantment; “she does not allow us to violate their essential privacy with sentimentality or an easy understanding.”

  Insisting on impeccable formal control of her material, she probed the depths of private consciousness with psychological acuity, spiritual rigor, metaphorical inventiveness, and well-aimed wit. She also ventured onto social terrain, where again no detail escaped her scrutiny. There great temptations and even greater entrapments awaited her characters, who could hardly have been further from the image of the poète maudit made famous by her poetic contemporaries. Her protagonists—many of them female, all of them precariously poised, hungry for hope and a sense of belonging, and almost always disappointed in both—stand out for their ironic innocence, or more accurately for their innocent irony. With a childlike calm and clarity, Stafford looked into the abyss—and then wrote terrifying, tragicomic stories with titles like “Life Is No Abyss” and “Children Are Bored on Sunday.”

  And yet to emphasize only that concerted, accomplished effort at detachment is to simplify Stafford’s effort to find both privacy and inspiration in her interior castle. All the while that she proclaimed loyalty to an impersonal aesthetic, learned from the New Critics among whom she began her career, she also waged an unceasing struggle to find fictional shape for some of her most troubling personal experiences—a struggle that helps explain why she all but stopped publishing fiction during the last two decades of her life. Though she knew her own imagination was threatened by her efforts to draw immediately from life, and though she disapproved of others’ readiness to do just that, she couldn’t resist trying again and again to convey more directly what it was like to be inside her “particular skull.” For years she worked intermittently on a novel she called The Parliament of Women, which she described as her most autobiographical fictional endeavor, one that she promised would (among other things) cut up “the poets to a fare-thee-well.” Gleefully she reported that “A well-known American poet, with whom I was once closely associated, is petrified. And well he should be!”

  As it happened, that comically scathing account of her marriage to Lowell and its collapse was the only part of the stalled manuscript that was published during Stafford’s life. Her longtime editor and friend Robert Giroux helped her excerpt it for publication as a story, “An Influx of Poets,” in The New Yorker in 1978. By then Lowell was dead, so he never had a chance to read her version, which bore little resemblance to the assorted memories of their life together that he himself had committed to poetry over the years. The merc
iful nostalgia that often moved Lowell in memorializing his past was not a mood that came easily to Stafford.

  But neither was “An Influx of Poets” simply a vehicle of revenge, as she had humorously hinted it might be. The struggle to free her imagination from bitterness, to find a liberating aesthetic distance, was all-consuming, and the last story that appeared in her lifetime was proof of the dauntingly high standards she had always set for herself. She ventured closer than ever before to intimate, painful facts of her life; and amid ruthless satire, of her young self and of the young poets, she found a way to cast a light of comic forgiveness on the scene. She wasn’t after factual veracity, and she wasn’t after agonized self-dramatization, and yet because she wasn’t, she found both truth and tragedy.

  Stafford’s words, in her fiction and in her eloquent streams of talk, were rarely transparent windows onto anything so simple as the facts, which is one of the triumphs of her art and one of the frustrations and fascinations of her life. Those words are well worth listening to carefully, as Lowell himself, not long before he died, urged in a late poem, “Jean Stafford, a Letter”:

  You have spoken so many words and well,

  being a woman and you … someone must still hear

  whatever I have forgotten

  or never heard, being a man.

  PART I

  Cowboys and Indians and Magic Mountains

  1915–1936

  CHAPTER 1

  California and Colorado

  TOWARD THE END of her life Jean Stafford claimed that she had a terrible dream eight nights in a row. In it she was coming downstairs to join her family for breakfast. The Colorado day was bright, and all the faces at the table were smiling at her. “If I have that dream again” she told her friend Wilfrid Sheed, “I’ll go ab-so-lutely crazy.” It was an ironic nightmare, perfect grist for the wry anecdotes at which Stafford excelled. But it was also truly a nightmare. Her exclamation was a rare confessional moment on a subject—the family she had left behind out West—that she usually did her best to skirt, either quietly or comically. It was hardly the whole story, of course, but the simple breakfast tableau summoned up Stafford’s long, complicated past and her bitter ambivalence about her family. She couldn’t forgive them for a hapless optimism that she felt had ruined all of their lives: those smiles masked disappointments that she, at least, had never gotten over. And yet there was also a hint of wistfulness about her exclusion from the circle in the kitchen. She stood apart, impatient to disown her past but lonely in her rootless pessimism.