The Interior Castle Page 4

  Yet with Twain as an intermediary and model, Stafford could suggest a kind of camaraderie of irony: she was drawing on an approved tradition of mockery, to which her father himself subscribed. And she closed the essay with a lesson that suggested solidarity with her nonconformist father. She refused to let the disillusioning world convert her to censorious realism or genteel hypocrisy. She too could cultivate rebellious distance. Here she was, after all, winning the state essay contest with a piece that slandered the state. “Sighing, we accepted the conventionalities of the lied-about state, sealed the wounds of our disenchantment.…” The self-proclaimed tragic members of this family had learned to minimize their material disappointment and to be “celestial spirited”—a lesson her unconventional, head-in-the-clouds father himself might have taught.

  THROUGHOUT HER LIFE, Stafford’s invocations of Twain, explicit and implicit, were an important part of her attempt to make some sense of the legacy of literary eccentricity and provincial poverty bequeathed by her father. Twain’s spirit and his satiric, colloquial American voice preside over her juvenilia, the short stories about Adams, Colorado, of her middle career, and some of the journalism of her last years.

  She went so far as to suggest, directly and indirectly, affinities between her cowpuncher-newspaperman-writer father born in Missouri, and the steamboat pilot–newspaperman–writer from the same state who had become famous while John Stafford was a boy. In an outline of the “people of the narrative” for In the Snowfall, she described the character modeled on her father this way:

  After his schooling (and it must be observed that despite his cantankerous and disobedient nature, he is an excellently educated man, and if only he had been wise as well as intellectual, he might have been someone one would be ambitious to know) he went to New York and spent his heyday working on newspapers.… His real aspiration was to write short stories—he had met Rex Reach at a champagne party and had seen Mark Twain in the lobby of a hotel in Boston.

  The kinship with Twain, sketchy as it was, could help clarify and dignify her father’s dilemma and thus her own heritage. Stafford continually emphasized the incongruous mix of redskin and paleface in her inheritance—vigorous Stafford and tame McKillop—and Twain showed the way to one appealing resolution: a kind of literary hickness. His career demonstrated that the tradition of frontier humor to which John Stafford turned could be fertile ground for something other than mere hack fiction. Twain, the champion of the vernacular, had faced the disapproval of his wife (to say nothing of such genteel mentors as his friend Mary Fairbanks, who at one point got Twain to swear, “I will rigidly eschew slang and vulgarity in the future”). John Stafford could similarly be cast as the victim of the prim McKillops. It was a tension Stafford suggested in the author’s note to her Collected Stories, juxtaposing When Cattle Kingdom Fell with another element of her family literary legacy, memory books from her mother’s more decorous side of the family. She elaborated on the McKillop literary style in an article for Vogue, in which she excerpted a little meditation on slang from her mother’s memory book. It sounded like Mary Fairbanks’s censoriousness—and like the sappy girls in Tom Sawyer’s class:

  Some persons may ask what is the harm in using “slang,” but there is a great deal of harm in it; for if a person would use it long enough, it might lead to swearing and from swearing to drinking and gambling and all from the use of a few harmless words as “Rats” or “Chestnuts.” Some young ladies think it gives them an air of smartness to use slang just as some boys think it is smart to chew tobacco.

  This, as Stafford tended to see it in her moods of solidarity with her father, was the sensibility that the two of them were up against. They were in Twain’s camp.

  Suggesting a parallel between her father and Twain helped justify the man who sat in the basement talking to himself as he typed. Her father could be hailed as an admirable original who scorned material comforts and laughed at prevailing pieties, who had decided simply to write straight from his own quirky soul. But the parallel also inspired a less generous judgment. Was her father simply a thwarted man who had betrayed his vigorous inheritance and then been beaten down by a genteel world, reduced to a bitter, clowning caricature of an artist? Throughout her life, Stafford took sides, switched sides, was filled with gall, then with guilt.

  In fact, Twain’s own reputation, whether Stafford knew it or not, was also the subject of a debate that heated up in the 1930s during her adolescence, when she felt most intensely ambivalent about her father. In 1932 Bernard De Voto published Mark Twain’s America, largely a response to a book that had roused controversy a decade earlier, Van Wyck Brooks’s The Ordeal of Mark Twain (which had appeared in 1920 and was then reissued, slightly revised, in 1933). A salvo in the attack on the genteel tradition, Brooks’s analysis debunked the prevailing hagiographic view of Twain. Far from America’s heroic writer, Twain was a “frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested development,” a mere humorist who had been diverted from fulfilling his true satiric promise by stifling social and psychological pressures. Thanks to his Calvinist mother, his crude western surroundings, and his genteel wife, among other influences, “the poet, the artist in him … had withered into the cynic and the whole man had become a spiritual valetudinarian.” De Voto countered with an attack on Brooks’s crude psychologizing and a defense of Twain as a brilliant humorist whose devastating send-up of the Gilded Age was built on a tradition of frontier comic writing that blended ballads, tall tales, and folktales.

  IN STAFFORD’S last published work, “Woden’s Day,” which appeared in 1979, after her death, she again tackled the subject of her father in fiction, but she had switched sides. Mocking tolerance, even admiration, had given way to much sterner treatment. The story was excised from the manuscript of the unfinished autobiographical novel she worked on at the end of her life, The Parliament of Women, but it drew on earlier fictional efforts as well: Stafford’s long silence about her father over the years was not for lack of trying to turn him into a workable character. Like “Disenchantment,” “Woden’s Day” addressed his downfall in Twainian style, but her youthful exuberance had turned into more high-strung, almost surreal satire. Certainly the old innocent irony had long since faded from her father’s style. John Stafford had hung on, not dying until 1966, and his always dubious literary career had been derailed for decades. “Of course there’s no market for the Thud and Blunder which in palmier days once brought me enough checks to pay about half the rent while that faithful saint, your mother, made our living,” he wrote to Jean in 1963. Instead, he had devoted himself to pamphleteering against the stupidity of humanity. He had plans for peace, for deficit reduction—and even for a deadly weapon he called a Hell Ray that would make all such meliorative schemes unnecessary.

  But there was also an ever-present note of bitter self-irony in his presentation of his obsessions. In his letters—which his daughter dreaded getting—he frequently acknowledged his own errors along with the rest of mankind’s: “Only a few people have brains enough to get down to brass tacks on fully desirable and practicable enterprises. The overwhelming majority please themselves with daydreams of a helluva big something for nothing and generally return from their expeditions sadder, but instead of wiser more determined than ever to continue in the practice of their congenital imbecility.”

  In “Woden’s Day” Stafford delineated a lurid “ordeal” of Dan Savage, her name for the character inspired by her father, and his “arrested development.” Whether or not she had Brooks’s portrait of Twain in mind when she started, it’s clear that when she ended Twain wasn’t far from her thoughts, for the figure based on her father evokes Huck Finn’s pap, as she herself observed in In the Snowfall. Again, her fiction was far from factually accurate: Stafford omitted the California chapter of their lives, staging the whole story in Missouri. There she conjured up an unhappy valley, called Graymoor, where Dan Savage began to go wrong.

  The account was full of colloquialisms and caricature and
bustle, as crowds of Savage (Stafford) and McKinnon (McKillop) relatives of her grandparents’ generation made unexpected entrances and dramatic departures, all in period dress and mode of transport. But Stafford paused over two portraits of Dan, which together anchor the busy story. The first was a picture of Dan the cosseted writer son, who was funded by his dead father and fussed over by his mother. She had summoned a photographer to commemorate the sale of his first story:

  There was a photograph of him sitting at his writing table beside an open and uncurtained window: some flowering tree is in bloom just outside and through its white, enclouded branches, the sun lies full upon a huge dictionary held closed by flanges on a stand.… The table is strewn with papers, on one of which Dan is writing with a long-stemmed pen; his other hand is relaxed, the fingers (how filled with ease they seem!) touching another sheet. He is in profile and because his sharply aquiline nose is in shadow, his face looks delicate and young. How young, how unlined, how cleanly his high forehead reaches up to meet the dense curls of his dark hair. He has taken off his collar … and the sleeves of his shirt look uncommonly full, they look as full as bishop sleeves, and the starched cuffs are closed with oval links; his galluses are wide. In the foreground, on the floor or perhaps on some low stool, there is a jardinier of branches bearing flowers. It is a portrait of youth in the youth of a year. You read his mortal vulnerability in his lowered eyes (he does not yet wear thick glasses) and in his bent, clean-shaven neck.

  This was the Victorian gentleman writer, overeager to pose for conventional praise, vulnerable in his false vanity. The “good” son, Dan had been granted his inheritance in capital, not in trust, and he had in mind a suitably dignified agrarian existence, disdaining exertion in more worldly enterprises. But Dan couldn’t resist the shine of the Gilded Age altogether, especially if the glow came from gold without sweat: he proceeded to lose all his money in the stock market.

  The second portrait was of Dan after his downfall, and it calls to mind one of E. W. Kemble’s illustrations of Huckleberry Finn’s pap, the frighteningly disheveled disgrace of the town of Hannibal, Missouri, for the first edition of Huckleberry Finn:

  Dan’s bilious moods came oftener, his “spells” were terrifying: one time he went into Hubbard’s Dry, where both Aunt Jane and Aunt Amy clerked, and inveighed against his father-in-law with such blood-curdling invective, such heart-splitting blasphemy that Mr. Hubbard himself ushered him out of the store like a hobo. And he looked like a hobo: barefoot, his long underdrawers showing beneath his unlaced cavalry britches; his hair was as long as William Jennings Bryan’s and he hadn’t shaved in a week; tobacco juice oozed down his chin from the quid he held in his cheek.… The town was appalled and off its head with delight; the school-children imitated Dan’s limp and spat imaginary tobacco juice at the Savages’ feet and made up tirades with nonsense words to scream at them until Abigail, with mysterious and quietly theatrical power, one day at recess stood on the top step on the stairs leading to the main door and commanded silence. “My father is a genius,” she said. “My father is poetically licensed by President Wilson to do anything he likes. Hark to my words and from now on cease and desist this persiflage.” It worked.

  This man, whose “laughter strangled him; his eyes screwed up like a bawling baby’s and the veins on his forehead swelled and pulsed, a dreadful blue,” had betrayed his father, been abandoned by his mother, and was then trapped by his wife’s father, a blistering Scottish Presbyterian who tyrannized his kinsmen. It was only at the close of the story, when Grandfather McKinnon died after a stroke brought on by an apoplectic rage, that Dan could escape to Adams, Colorado, with his family. It was hardly a triumphant journey westward.

  BETWEEN “DISENCHANTMENT” and “Woden’s Day,” Stafford struggled to find a satisfactory portrait for a character based on her father, trying to reconcile the man she described in In the Snowfall as this “figure, this replica (save that he was not a drunk) of Huck Finn’s pap, with the figure I had never seen but heard about”—the man whom “someone once in my hearing had called … a genius,” who had cut a civilized profile in Missouri. These two pieces of writing were as close as she could come to publishable portraits. Although her father was the original inspiration for her style, he was only rarely its successful subject.

  Distance was apparently not the solution to her troubles. Soon after she wrote “Disenchantment,” Stafford began envisaging an escape from home, and eventually she managed to leave her family behind. But even safely far away, she was stymied in her efforts to portray this haunting character, who was addled by words rather than by drink: “He got up at dawn and he began before the light was full, softly orating a wild pastiche of learning and approximation with all the nouns leaping forth like pointing fingers and all the bilious adjectives insisting on their naked menace as he cherished them in a long pause.” Until her last story, her explicitly autobiographical attempts went unpolished and unpublished. But the Twainian style, Stafford discovered later, offered a way to tap her roots in the “semi-fictitious town of Adams, Colorado,” without facing her father directly. She ran away, and when she came back in her fiction, in her western stories and in her second novel, The Mountain Lion, fathers were notably absent from that childhood world, with comic and tragic results.

  First, however, she had to get away, and unlike Huck she was ready to be seduced by the temptations of civilization and society and wealth: the world to the east—New England and Europe, Henry James country—beckoned. It was a seduction that John Stafford had evidently succeeded in forgetting. Certainly he had determined to repudiate it, as Stafford explained in a passage in In the Snowfall, describing the dilemma of her autobiographical persona, Joyce Bartholomew:

  Much of Joyce’s tragedy lies in her ambivalent attitude toward [her father]; she longs deeply for all the qualities he has not got, for gentleness and a wide, inclusive love, for amiable manners, for the talent to accept the world and to be happy in it (and this says, in a sense, that she longs to reject her father unconditionally), but simultaneously, out of habitual fear and out of the residue of her childhood admiration for him, one aspect of her believes in him implicitly: knows that the world is what he says it is, corrupt, disintegrated, materialistic, knows that only by being alert and ascetic and unforgiving can one escape being corrupted oneself. In pitiable confusion, she hates her father for being wholly intellectual and in all other circles, she despises all those who are not intellectual.… She is able, that is, to recognize the worth of people who will not yield to the temptations of the easier way.… But she returns, as if she were in love, to the contemplation of the habits of the well-to-do and her heart, if not her mind, is in their world.

  Though Stafford continued to live at home, college was the first step of her escape.

  CHAPTER 2

  The University

  AS SOON AS Jean Stafford began to write in earnest, her four years at the University of Colorado, 1932 to 1936, were her subject. She kept returning to them, aware that they were a decisive time in her life, certainly in her imaginative life. But almost none of what she wrote about those years was ever finished. Her manuscript from the 1940s, In the Snowfall, thwarted her, and she wrote several articles in which she discussed her difficulties transforming that chapter of her life into successful fiction. Corrosive memory overwhelmed creative energy every time. Though she tried to stray from the real people and experiences, she explained, she never managed to leave them far enough behind. That wasn’t because her recollections were fond, but because they were frightening. It is clear that she was often appalled by her past self, by how dangerously susceptible to external influence and to self-doubt Stafford the college student had been. Yet she also suspected that the same vulnerable imagination that disoriented her in life could perhaps inspire her writing. The fragmented manuscript, though not a trustworthy memoir, is nonetheless a useful guide to Stafford’s deep confusions about personal identity, which were at the heart of her preliminary explorati
ons of a possible literary identity.

  At the university Stafford faced the typical collegiate dilemma of how to fit in and stand out at the same time. Increasingly resentful of her father, dismissive of her mother, and ashamed of their circumstances, she was well practiced at being a loner. But she was also determined to discover some sense of community and of respectability. As an aspiring writer, she experimented with what it might mean to lead the “life of art” without following her father’s hopeless literary path. Her own experience was far from calm. Stafford’s college career closed with an act of violence—the suicide of her closest friend, Lucy McKee—that haunted her art and her life for years, perhaps until the end. It seemed, as she wrote later, to dramatize for her the fragile boundaries of the self.

  When Stafford entered the University of Colorado in 1932, the beneficiary of a waiver-of-fees scholarship, she had a set of prohibitions to obey, sternly enunciated by her younger self in the guise of Vox Populi. The frivolous route of the “social-climbing sniggering hypocrites” among her classmates, who didn’t deserve a university education in the first place, was forbidden: she was not to join a sorority, flunk out, or emerge a polished young American with a dilettantish collegiate air. On one level, the strictures were easy enough to satisfy, and Stafford confidently did. She was one of the “barbarians” on campus who rarely set foot in the Greek-letter mansions all over the Boulder hillside. She doubled up on courses in order to earn both a B.A. and an M.A. in four years. And she graduated a restless American, looking forward to a year in Heidelberg and a serious scholarly career in philology.

  Stafford’s academic career looked less smoothly purposeful from the inside. Her intellectual intensity, as she freely admitted in retrospect, was matched by real insecurity, intellectual and social. She was “restless, plunging into work, into getting honors because … I could not express myself in the way I really wanted to, with friends.” She started out intending to study philosophy and was in devoted awe of an outspoken professor named Joseph Cohen. She was impressed less by his politics (he was a vocal Marxist, who championed, among other controversial events, a campus appearance by longshoreman leader and prominent radical Harry Bridges) than by his erudition. Cohen was the advanced intellectual on campus, the person who had always read the latest important book and who routinely intimidated the new professors. He intimidated Stafford too, but also admired her, and as philosophy often does for freshmen, his subject seemed to promise the answer to her confusions.