The Interior Castle Page 5

  In one first-person draft of In the Snowfall, Stafford placed her autobiographical protagonist Joyce Bartholomew in a similar predicament in Dr. Rosen’s class: “In my chronic inability to relate the profane to the divine, to allow the marriage of a mind which ate up Plato … to a body which with equal ardor ate up the sensuality of evenings in mountains, I had continued to look upon this class, philosophy, as having the atmosphere in which I was the most at ease, the happiest, the closest to fulfillment.” Stafford encountered psychology in Cohen’s class as well, which must have seemed to shed further light on some of the disjunctions in her life, and on the more dramatic turmoil she encountered in her college friendships. But to judge by Joyce’s fictional experience, Stafford couldn’t help associating Cohen with her father, even though her teacher was a far more satisfying intellectual guide than John Stafford, with his “wild pastiche of learning,” could possibly be. The mental preoccupation was familiar and daunting: though “the splendor of [Dr. Rosen’s] intellect did not make [Joyce] restive as her father’s did,” she “most secretly, despite her present situation as a candidate for an academic degree … wondered if society would not be simpler and happier if learning were left altogether to the men.” It was a thoroughly uncharacteristic hint—but only a hint—of allegiance with her mother.

  Stafford was not about to act on whatever secret reservations she may have had about her scholarly aptitude, but she did ultimately turn from philosophy to study with a woman, Professor Irene P. McKeehan of the English department. In her classes Stafford seemed to find less aggressive but no less rigorous guidance. Professor McKeehan was an intimidating character of a completely different kind, a radical contrast not just to men like Cohen and her father but, perhaps even more important, a contrast to Jean’s round, beleaguered mother—though her teacher was equally fastidious. In a lecture Stafford delivered at the University of Colorado in 1972, she described her starchy mentor: “Miss Irene Pettit McKeehan was the size of her middle name if her middle name had been spelled ‘petite.’ Her tailleurs and her hats and her shoes were accurately cut, sewn without error, and impregnable to blemish or to disarray. Her learning was so prodigious and so terrifying that during the first week of my first class with her—The Victorian Age—I could not look at her but addressed my eyes to my notebook in which I wrote down, lickety-cut, every word she said.” In Stafford’s third year, this Victorian guide to Victorianism led her student even further from daily confusions, introducing her to the Middle Ages and medieval languages, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English—“equipment as useless as any I can think of for our own Dark Age of the depression,” Stafford commented later. She wrote her master’s thesis on “Profane and Divine Love in English Literature of the Thirteenth Century” and showed that, at least within the confines of a scholarly paper, she was perfectly capable of relating “the divine to the profane.” In the process she acquired a smattering of Vulgar Latin, Old French, and Gothic—and a desire, she said, to become a philologist.

  But Stafford’s more consuming desire, as she said later, was to “express [her]self in the way [she] really wanted to, with friends”—and in her writing—which proved to be more difficult than excelling at scholarly tasks. This self-proclaimed “democrat of the most radical species” who inveighed against “gangs” also came to college eager to discover some kind of distinctive, artistic community in which to lose or find herself—or, ideally, both. (Her literary entourage at Boulder Prep, with its Voltaire dinners and advanced reading lists, had appealed to a similar urge.) She wasn’t sure just what kind of community, and her confusion was both personal and, as she emphasized in retrospect, generational.

  Her maverick father was still the main source of her private confusions. His embarrassing poverty was a practical obstacle to elite fraternizing, and his inclination to asceticism was a spiritual admonishment against such a conventional, comfortable goal. At the same time, John Stafford was himself the model for her sense that there was an aristocracy of art, even if his rendition of it seemed ever less admirable. Years later, in the fragment of memoir in which she described the family’s collusion in his deluded visions—“my mother spared his feelings and we believed he was an artist”—she bitterly recalled the rationale for their indulgence of him: “We understood why it was our father would not work in a mine or an office. He was sensitive and he was aristocratic.” What had once been respect for her father’s version of the elect life turned to resentment. His isolated intellectual and literary obsessions meant constant financial worries and a sense of social ostracism—at least they had for most of her self-conscious life with him, however idyllic the past before that might have been.

  Stafford’s response in college was to long for wealth, or some connection with wealth, which she associated with a refined conception of culture at odds with her father’s increasingly crabbed complaints about the profligate world. In a passage of In the Snowfall she described her protagonist Joyce’s vision of elegant civilization: “ ‘Culture’ was a word that inhabited her like a truth or a taste; it was the agent she believed … could quarantine such people as her parents (her father was crazy, her mother was silly)…. It would permit upon the premises of its marble-halled and rose-decked estates no untoward noises, no ugly appointments, no barbaric speech, no rough manners.” At the same time, she evoked Joyce’s ambivalence about the allure of money:

  She is persuaded that only with wealth can there be peace of mind and that it is only amongst the poor that are to be found quarreling, hatred, misanthropy and violence, and yet she believes—because her father taught her this in her bassinet—that only this very turbulence and misery can produce things of value, that the intellectual can thrive only in want.… [T]o her, who cannot understand him and cannot repudiate him and cannot love him, he is—and he really is, more than he represents—the capricious principle of life, and no matter how valiantly she tries to pursue order, the random element disrupts her plans.

  Understandably, Stafford’s plans for seeking out friends when she arrived at college were far from orderly. The preoccupying question was where she belonged, or wanted to belong. Her first impulse was to gravitate toward the bohemian set among the barbarians. She had a reputation, according to a fellow student and temporarily infatuated admirer, as one of the literary libertines. She wore jeans at a time when they were hardly the vogue. More shocking, she modeled nude for art classes at the university. The contrast could hardly have been starker: the rumpled student was unveiled as a strikingly attractive young woman. In a studio portrait taken during college, her neck is gracefully arched, her features delicate; a much more amateurish nude sketch by a classmate shows an equally well-proportioned body, slender yet nicely rounded. Stafford was studiously nonchalant about her rather sensational employment; thanks to her impecunious father, she had to work, and this was merely a high-paying job.

  Yet modeling also seemed to be a dramatic expression of deep uncertainty about her identity, as her subsequent fictional treatment of it in her story “The Philosophy Lesson” suggested. There was a real gulf between the student who sat raptly in awe of her buttoned-up Victorian professor and the avant-garde girl who posed nude for her artistically inclined (and philistinely curious) classmates. In fact, her story, extracted from In the Snowfall and published in 1968, implied even more profound tensions than that. Teetering naked on the podium was a perfect emblem of her efforts to find some balance between her sense of isolation and her desire for connection with a wider world; it captured her fears that an escape from loneliness might entail an equally alienating exhibitionism.

  For her autobiographical protagonist (renamed Cora Savage in “The Philosophy Lesson”) to stand up on the platform undraped was at once a declaration and a denial of her independent existence in the world of other consciousnesses: she presented herself as an object of others’ scrutiny, only to see herself disappear in their subjective renderings of her. Cora was disturbed by that invisibility: “Then she wandered about through the
thicket of easels and saw the travesties of herself, grown fat, grown shriveled, grown horsefaced, turned into Clara Bow. The representations of her face were, nearly invariably, the faces of the authors of the work. Her complete anonymity to them at once enraged and fascinated her.” Profoundly unsettled, Cora resorted to bleak Berkeleian meditations: “She concluded that she would be at peace forever if she could believe that she existed only for herself and possibly for a superior intelligence and that no one existed for her save when he was tangibly present.”

  This sterile vision of detachment was precisely what Stafford was looking to escape at college. When she put her clothes back on and joined her fellow barbarians, the dilemmas were posed in less abstract form. In pursuit of her artistic aristocracy, she tried out different versions of belonging as she mingled with the bohemian intellectual and literary set that was avidly discovering modernism, pretending that Boulder was Paris and the early 1930s were the early 1920s. It was an exhilarating introduction to the possibilities of creative art.

  In her later writing about her college years, Stafford was eager to evoke the high excitement of the intellectual scene. She conjured up memories of her bohemian circle at some length in a lecture she delivered at the 1952 Writers’ Conference in the Rocky Mountains, held at her alma mater:

  In my last year at the university, I was a member of a small group who wrote and hoped eventually really to write and who, making no bones about it, called ourselves “the intelligentsia.” We had no sponsorship and no organization and our meetings were sporadic. But once every week or so we gathered on the mezzanine of a melancholy sandwich and beer establishment on 13th Street … where, for the Mermaid Tavern’s hock or sack, we substituted attenuated and legal three point two. Occasionally we read aloud from our own work, but for the most part we read from the writers we had just discovered: Joyce, Proust, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Gide, Hemingway, Faulkner. Our prejudices were vitriolic and our admirations were rhapsodic; we were possessive, denying to anyone outside our circle the right to enjoy or understand The Waste Land or Swann’s Way or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We were clumsy and arrogant and imitative, relentlessly snobbish and hopelessly undiscriminating. We did not know where we were at but wherever it was we heard the thunderous music of the spheres. It made no difference at all that we were for the most part tone-deaf. Perhaps I do my friends an injustice and they were less befuddled than I, so I shall speak only for myself when I say that I was so moonstruck by the world of modern writing that had opened up before me that I saw no difference at all in the intentions of Thomas Wolfe and Marcel Proust or those of James Joyce and Thomas Mann: all of them were godly and inviolable.… [T]he ivory tower (a phrase that did not seem tarnished to us) that we occupied was being ceaselessly assailed by the Zeitgeist (another term we found fresh and apt). In spite of our airs and posturings and greed, we were serious and knew that ours was no golden, carefree age: we had been reared in the Depression.…

  But hope and energy and political illiteracy safeguarded us against any real emotional involvement with these issues and while we heard the Zeitgeist wail and rattle our windowpanes, we stayed snug a while in that mild, crepuscular saloon and quoted Sweeney Among the Nightingales.

  Two friends from the circle remembered her role as more peripheral than she suggested in her lecture, and Stafford’s own portrait of the intelligentsia’s gatherings in In the Snowfall placed Joyce Bartholomew insecurely on the outskirts. “She did not really listen to these poor, proud, scholarly boys and girls when they talked of lofty matters or read aloud … from T. S. Eliot or from their own works-in-progress … novels that sounded like Proust, poems that sounded like Pound, but she was happier with them than she was at home with her father.” John Stafford apparently hovered not far in the background for Stafford even as she abandoned him for fervent conversations over beer with her new friends. In fact, the values and stance of the intelligentsia, a gathering of the poor social outsiders on campus, were in a broad way not so different from his. (In a revised version of that passage about “poor, proud, scholarly” students, featuring Cora Savage and her father, Dan, Stafford wrote: “All of [the intelligentsia] were writers, and they read aloud from … novels that sounded, usually, like Wolfe, poems that sounded, usually, like T. S. Eliot with undertones of Donne, and political tracts that sounded, to Cora, like Dan.”) She had found an escape from her father that wasn’t entirely a repudiation of him.

  With greater surreptitiousness, Stafford was also exploring a more dramatic, dissolute escape. In her junior year she became a close friend of Lucy McKee, who was one of the few women studying law and a very visible presence on the campus. Nicknamed “the red-haired queen” by one of Stafford’s friends, Lucy was rich and talented and presided over a distinctly different scene of daring experimentation. She was elected judge of the student disciplinary court in 1935, but it was her unofficial role as arbiter of a glamorously decadent code of behavior that apparently fascinated Stafford. Lucy’s circle carried to much more sophisticated extremes the punishing libertinism that prevailed among the barbarians, whose habits Stafford described this way in In the Snowfall: “It was the fashion amongst [the barbarians] to scorn athletics and all other forms of physical experience since, except for sex … they had no uses for the flesh.… [B]y the time they had got their degrees … their stomachs were ready for ulcers and their hearts were cynical.” Later in life, Stafford was usually more oblique about this darker side of her bohemian life. In fact, in her 1952 talk she explicitly denied any but the most innocent of literary intentions: “We would have been shocked and disbelieving if anyone had even jokingly suggested that we were disinterring and exposing derangements and unwholesome desires.”

  The truth was that at some point during her junior year, Jean joined Lucy and what Stafford later called her “limp, disreputable entourage” in exploring just such derangements and unwholesome desires in a “terrifying modus vivendi.” It was evidently Stafford’s literary talent that attracted Lucy, who also had aspirations to write, but their companionship was rarely quiet or creative. Stafford was soon a regular guest at the wild parties held at the house where Lucy lived with her husband and fellow law student, Andrew Cooke—whom she had married in 1933, reputedly after a friend took out a marriage license for them as a joke. Certainly marital vows weren’t taken very seriously among the circle: Lucy presided over and participated in a kind of frantic dissolution, sexual and alcoholic. (She had come to the University of Colorado after being expelled from Northwestern University, where she had been notoriously promiscuous and had contracted a venereal disease.)

  Stafford was mesmerized by Lucy and the antibourgeois style of the household, which grew more extreme during the two years of the friendship. Before long she was a favored initiate. Stafford moved in with the Cookes, leaving the local boardinghouse where she had been living (her parents had evidently given up trying to keep her at home). Her enthrallment entailed plenty of self-abasement. As Andrew Cooke remembered it, Stafford and another friend who lived in the house often played the roles of maid and butler—and the joke was telling. For all her elect status as Lucy’s close friend, she was rarely allowed to forget her lowly origins with this high-living pair. Her central place in some of the party “games” (which included wine enemas for the guests) was often quite literally painful. She was Lucy’s most accommodating subject in the hypnosis sessions that she liked to stage; Stafford’s role was to remain impassive as her friend skewered her hand with a needle to prove the depth of her trance.

  Lucy was a mentor in dissipation for everyone in her entourage, but she took a special interest in corrupting Stafford. Jean drank a great deal and, according to another friend, tried ether. At the urging of her hosts, she occasionally slept with the fourth occupant of the house, a friend of Cooke’s, and she became ever more dizzyingly entangled with Lucy, who knew she had an impressionable recruit. Just how entangled was the subject of various rumors, which implied that she was sexually inv
olved with either or both of the Cookes. Stafford herself, in the draft of her novel, set a scene of deep sexual confusion and unhappiness. She portrayed Joyce as ready to agree to a joint suicide pact with the husband of Maisie Perrine (the Jamesian name she gave to her Lucy character), and described Maisie, desperate to escape that husband, as ready to announce a sudden voyage with Joyce as her lesbian lover.

  The truth seems to have been that there were no shocking sexual liaisons among the three of them. In fact, Stafford took up with Lawrence Fairchild, a premed student who was worlds away from their circle, in the summer of 1935. Still, her relations with the Cookes apparently acquired an imaginative vividness for her that transcended physical fact. For Stafford, life with them was a frightening yet intoxicating experience, as her identity—none too firmly defined to start with—was threatened even more radically. If she retained her sexual independence, she nonetheless felt herself succumb to Lucy’s manipulation and glimpsed the potential for thorough disorientation. Self-destructive hedonism was the theme of Lucy’s household, and it entailed perpetual disequilibrium. Just how self-destructive became clear on November 9, 1935, when Lucy, who had been increasingly unwell (she had recently had surgery for ovarian cysts), shot herself in the head with a revolver in the kitchen of her house. Andrew was in the bathroom. Jean, worried about what her friend might do, had gone to the phone to call a doctor.