The Interior Castle Read online

CHAPTER 3

  Mentors

  STAFFORD’S SENSE of her personal identity had been shaken at college as she made her way among the bohemians. Her literary identity had barely begun to take shape: for all her experiments in living, she had not yet done much writing. Her literary apprenticeship started in earnest when she left Colorado for Germany in 1936, and it reached a new stage two years later when she surfaced in Boston. It was a far more tumultuous beginning than she later liked to suggest. She arrived in Heidelberg an aspiring student of philology, determined to master the science of language under the tutelage of the renowned scholar Johannes Hoops. By 1938 she was an aspiring student of fiction, struggling for a hold on the art of language and contending with the contradictory lessons of teachers ranging from Thomas Wolfe to John Crowe Ransom.

  In the lecture she delivered at her alma mater in 1972, Stafford’s reminiscences about Germany centered on anxiety about her grasp of language:

  In Heidelberg, tongue-tied, amazed, dumbfounded to be attending a university that had been established a century before the discovery of America, innocently drinking beer with young Brownshirts who soon would constitute the Enemy, totally at sea, I clung stubbornly to my imagined career [of philology] amid the nut-brown groves of the Indo-Germanic languages; I heard myself lecturing on Verner’s Law and the High German Consonant Shift and, for the edification of awed classrooms, tracing the word “rope” back to the Sanskrit.

  (At the same time, she was fumbling with German, which she found eluded her as soon as she arrived in the country.) This tension between the chaos of experience and the control of language was a central, troublesome one for her.

  In retrospect, Stafford the meticulous stylist suggested that she had stood back from the flux of life early on, diligently striving for mastery of form instead. Her self-portrait in her 1972 lecture was of a rather pedantic, not passionate, young apprentice. She maintained that she started out a committed philology student who, after a year at the University of Heidelberg, wrote to Professor McKeehan to request a recommendation to “Radcliffe or Bryn Mawr or some other college for brainy women.” Told by her teacher that she did not have “the makings of a scholar” and should perhaps try writing instead, Stafford claimed that she had reacted with skepticism. She was worried about earning a living, so she came home to America to look for a teaching job in 1937, and it was a year later, she said, that her literary career truly and laboriously began in Boston. “I worked and was patient with myself and by and by I got a little better and started being published”—thanks to “Miss McKeehan’s blunt demolition of an impossibly silly daydream.” Presenting fiction as the sober alternative to frivolous philology, Stafford made it sound like a dour discipline indeed.

  In fact, Stafford’s literary apprenticeship was considerably more impetuous. Between the fall of 1936 when she sailed to Germany and the fall of 1938 when she arrived in Boston, the struggle between unruly experience and the rules of language consumed her. The obedient student first of philology and then of writing whom she described in 1972 is at best a partial portrait, distorted by time. Just how skewed is suggested by her friend Hightower’s alternative account of her fateful conversion from philology to fiction. According to his version of events, Stafford did indeed start out as an eager young academic, but in no time she had plunged into an unfocused creative career.

  Initially a favorite of Professor Hoops at Heidelberg, Stafford received encouragement to publish her M.A. thesis and evidently plenty of his attention in class. Early in the term Hoops gave a party for his students and gallantly postponed opening the wine when his acolyte failed to show up on time. (Stafford was the rare woman in the program: she later said she thought she had gotten the fellowship because the Germans mistook “Jean” for a man’s name.) She never arrived. As Hightower remembered it, she decided she simply didn’t feel like going. When Stafford next appeared in class, she might as well not have existed as far as her once-attentive professor was concerned. Exiled from Professor Hoops’s graces, she stopped going to his classes in early November—barely a month after she had arrived. Instead, in a skylighted room at the top of the Hotel Haarlass, where she and Hightower had found rooms, the two friends dedicated their days to writing and to reading aloud what they had written—copious journal entries, excerpts from Stafford’s novel in progress, snatches of Hightower’s poetry.

  No longer clinging to her “imagined career” of philology, Stafford was indeed “totally at sea” as she scribbled away in Heidelberg. She evoked her sense of fundamental disorientation in an article she wrote in 1952 about the experience of being abroad, which was also indirectly a description of the immature creative imagination she first began seriously to explore and express in Germany:

  In a foreign country I know no leisure, for I am one of those visitors driven by a ravening and unselective greed for detail; at the mercy of my peeled eye and my cocked ear and my surprised palate, I do not know what to elide, I haven’t time to contemplate but only to record. Everything in my prodigal picture is in the foreground, immediate, surcharged, larger than life size; the woods can’t be seen for the trees. In my preoccupation with the flotsam on its surface, I am oblivious to the meanders and the depths of the river. And confronted at every turn by strangeness, I become a stranger to myself; my identity is suspended, and phrenetic as I am in my ceaseless harvest, I do not, nevertheless, participate and rapidly as I devour, I am, nevertheless, undernourished. It is not until I am at home again and have calmed down and know where I am at that I can reflect and winnow, reduce, deduce, arrange. I don’t know where I’ve been until I have come back and the edge is taken from my astonishment.

  An unexpectedly complete account of Stafford’s frenetic apprenticeship has survived, largely because Hightower saved it—memories and letters, hers and his. The preservation was a labor of love and also a record of resentment: during those two years, Hightower’s hopes that he and Stafford would become more than literary soul mates were repeatedly raised and disappointed. Deeply fond of him and intermittently flirtatious, she nonetheless kept rebuffing his advances when he worked up his nerve to make them. Their correspondence from the spring of 1937, when Stafford returned to America while Hightower stayed on in Paris, through her arrival in Boston, where he was by then a graduate student at Harvard, sheds rare light on her character and fiction, and on the literary culture in which both were taking shape. It catches her before she had donned what she later described as “the helmets and the masks, the arms and the armor that we take on … [to] protect and socialize us …” and before her writing had begun to acquire the careful style and form that later distinguished it. Open in a way that she would perhaps never be again, Stafford was strikingly impressionable and yet also aloof, isolated. As a young woman, she was both an alluring friend and a frigid mystery, to Hightower’s deep frustration. As a fledgling writer, she was a responsive student as well as an impulsive rebel.

  IN GERMANY, as her description of expatriate disorientation suggested, Stafford felt simultaneously immersed and suspended. She arrived in Hamburg in mid-September, expecting to be met by Hightower, who had sailed earlier in the summer. She was flustered when he wasn’t there, but he left her detailed instructions for making her way to Heidelberg. She managed, and almost immediately they ran into each other on the street. After taking cold rooms in the house of an elderly German woman, Stafford stumbled onto much more comfortable but still affordable lodgings in the Hotel Haarlass on the banks of the Neckar River. This sense of daunting foreignness and a trust in happy accidents seemed to characterize their months abroad.

  The political atmosphere in Germany encouraged a kind of detached dizziness. “The great engines of war are ready, are on the rails, are being constantly enlarged and magnified,” Thomas Wolfe reported on his visit in 1936, and he described “an ever-present fear … a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.” Stafford took a curious foreigner’s interest, certainly at the outset, reading Ger
man newspapers and marveling over native attitudes as Hitler ominously consolidated his power within Germany and prepared to wield it abroad as well. She had arrived at an especially unnerving moment: the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the summer and the pact with Mussolini in the fall unmistakably marked the rise of fascist aggression.

  In her letters to the Thompsons and to Andrew Cooke, Stafford was acute, and darkly comic, about the disturbing behavior of “a nation of madmen in the third stage of paranoia, believing sincerely that they are the New Messiah. Indeed, you cannot help admiring Hitler for commanding the unwavering adoration of almost every man, woman, and child in the country.” But if she was ironic about the extent of Hitler’s sway in October when she wrote that letter, she later had firsthand reason to fear the fascination he exerted. She went to a rally in Nuremberg, and though her subsequent description of the experience—in a draft of a lecture she gave at Barnard in 1971—was again slightly flippant, it was clear she had been shaken:

  It was a grand, operatic, declamatory display. There were the army goosestepping better than the Rockettes, the masses of Storm Troopers in brown, the elite guard in black. There were thousands upon thousands of devout Germans singing “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles” and the Horst Wessel song. I was swept along on the tidal wave of this well-organized collective conniption fit; my cortex ceased to be in charge and the optic thalamus took over. If a recruiter had come by and asked me to pledge myself for the rest of my life to the NSDAP, in all likelihood I would have done so. And then I would have had a messy time extricating myself. My friends were equally bowled over. Once the circus was over and we were in … the night train in the third class carriage back to Heidelberg we came to our senses and were shocked by our primitive behavior.

  Most of Stafford’s time and attention, however, were devoted to her labors high in the Hotel Haarlass. She was slightly dizzy and yet detached about that undertaking as well, which proved more fruitful for her than for Hightower, who worked indefatigably along with her. In fact, her high-powered purposefulness cast something of a shadow over his efforts. Not a domineering man by nature, he was nonetheless discouraged to feel daunted by her in ways that he hadn’t anticipated. She made it clear, insisting on separate rooms at the Hotel Haarlass, that she didn’t want their literary relationship complicated by sex. And her writing, which she read aloud to him daily, began to suggest to him that perhaps he wasn’t a writer, as she obviously was.

  For Stafford, the prose poured forth almost uncontrollably, and she had a goal in view. By November she had completed the novel she had begun during her second stint at the Writers’ Conference in Boulder during the summer of 1936. As soon as her manuscript was done, she mailed it off to Martha Foley, an editor at Story magazine who had been at the conference and had taken an interest in her work. Stafford then followed up in early 1937 with a couple of telegrams. Foley’s response came late in January and is the only clue that remains to the nature of the book at that point. That it was weak on winnowing, reducing, deducing, and arranging is hardly a surprise from a young writer. “It is with reluctance that we do let it go back to you but it is a little inchoate in places,” Foley kindly put it and then went on to offer encouragement: “Whit [Burnett, Foley’s fellow editor] and I feel that it would be better for you to put this aside and go on with other books. We feel too that parts of it parallel a little too closely Joyce and Boyle but that there is enough of your own splendid writing in it to show that you will be doing very important work.”

  Stafford’s reply, evidently like the manuscript itself, reflected both the eager protégé and the independent spirit. “This was the first time I had ever submitted anything to an editor, and the results have been gratifying,” she declared, and went on to elevate Foley to the role of mentor: “If it had not been for the Writers’ Conference I should probably never have typed out the manuscript—I certainly should never have written anything again except possibly a dissertation for a doctorate. However, it’s really the idea of out of the frying pan, into the fire, because writing is about five hundred times harder work than studying what’s already been written.”

  As she confessed, the real difficulty for her was finding the right balance between reading what others already had written and speaking in her own voice, between exercising her imitative skills and resisting them—a familiar enough problem for a beginning writer, for any writer. Stafford professed to feel dangerously susceptible to influence and acknowledged that Joyce was her current tyrant. “I’m at work on a new novel,” she informed Foley. “I’m trying to purge my writing as much as possible of Joyce. Strangely enough, I have never read Kay Boyle, but I’m going to try to get something at once to see what the similarity is. For the time being I’m not reading anything but Shakespeare, the newspapers, and the dictionary. It’s not safe—I’m too much a chameleon.”

  IN APRIL 1937 Stafford sailed for home (at the urging of Lucy’s parents, who were apparently impatient for Stafford to start repaying the loan they had made for her European adventure). Her eight months abroad had not simply been the studious interlude her letters to Foley suggested. Though she had kept to herself and done a good deal of writing, she had also gone traveling in search of impressions. She had taken side trips from Heidelberg, and then after a difficult December when she was repeatedly sick (stomach troubles, evidently, and fevers), she gathered her strength for a solo trip to Italy at some point during the early spring. By then Hightower had left Heidelberg, frustrated by Stafford’s continued rejection of his advances and eager to join his friend Robert Berueffy in Paris. Stafford met up with them in April for a short, very happy reunion on her way home to America. She described it as the perfect expatriate sojourn, an ideal mixture of independent creativity and communal inspiration: “When I think of Paris I go soft in my stomach and want to cry.… We aren’t geniuses, we used to say. But for a while for a few days in Paris we were happy. Oh, very happy in Paris and full of fine dreams, great ones for the three of us, very full of literature and music, and sometimes laughing hard, getting very drunk and reeling in the rain at midnight.”

  Back in America, Stafford indulged in nostalgia for literary companionship but also aimed to find her own way. She courted the danger of influence assiduously during the next year—and yet simultaneously, on some level, she resisted it. The internal course of a creative apprenticeship is next to impossible to chart, but in Stafford’s case, the external cultural contours of this stage of her studenthood are surprisingly stark and revealing. In July 1937, two months after she had sailed to New York from Europe, Stafford went home to Boulder to attend another Writers’ Conference, where the chameleon was exposed to a significant spectrum of literary life. Aside from two familiar faces (Edward Davison, who invited her to come as secretary and participant, and Whir. Burnett), Stafford found teachers, John Crowe Ransom most important among them, who were a living link to the modernist masters—Eliot, Pound, Joyce—whom she had been worshiping from afar. Yet the summer after that, 1938, the writer she extolled as her model was Thomas Wolfe, the idiosyncratic American writer for whom the modernist tradition seemed largely irrelevant. She read his Story of a Novel (ironically, a version of the lecture she had missed at the Writers’ Conference in 1935), which was in essence a declaration of his isolation in the literary landscape, and she announced that she identified completely with his ordeals. Stafford’s year back home was a far from settled one: she was still traveling, no longer the literary innocent she had been when she started out.

  Before going west for the conference, Stafford languished in a hospital in Brooklyn during the late spring of 1937, mysteriously ill. “It’s female trouble which heretofore has always been good for a laugh” she wrote to Hightower at the time. “My uterus is turned over, pressing against the intestine. I have an intestinal infection. I have ovarian cysts. It will be months before I have recovered and until then I’ve got to be a bloody invalid of the E. B. Browning variety.” Several years later, however, she
told Hightower it had been gonorrhea, contracted in Heidelberg, a dramatic claim made even more dramatic in David Roberts’s biography of Stafford, where he argued that in fact it was likely syphilis. The evidence for any diagnosis is thin at best, given that no medical records survive other than Stafford’s letters from that spring detailing her symptoms.

  As usual with Stafford, sorting out fact and fiction is far from simple: throughout her life her illnesses often seemed to inspire imaginative elaboration and collaboration. It is possible to question the truth of her subsequent confession to Hightower, the sole grounds for a specific diagnosis; she was rebuffing an advance from him, and invoking the disease served as a justification for aloofness that salved his ego. Moreover, even as she was confessing, she told him two different versions of how she got gonorrhea—first she claimed that the culprit was an Italian she had met on her trip to Italy, then that he was an American baseball player she had slept with once in Heidelberg. In general, her love life during her year abroad was a mystery she enjoyed embroidering on; she later told a friend of Robert Lowell’s that she had had an affair with a German aviator, almost certainly a lie, according to Hightower.

  Still, Hightower did believe her when she announced that she had had gonorrhea, and it is worth remembering that he of all people knew to be wary of her revelations (as he has been of Roberts’s subsequent, much more speculative diagnosis of syphilis). Whatever the medical facts, Stafford undeniably had dark associations with her ordeal long before her retrospective claim. Being sick stirred up memories of Lucy, herself renowned for a history of sexual diseases and plagued by “female trouble” before her suicide. In physical pain and imaginatively haunted, Stafford was inclined to read her illness symbolically: she was a decadent sufferer stranded among innocent Americans.