The Interior Castle

by Ann Hulbert

  The spirit in the Southern Review offices was similarly combative. “The place is revealing,” she wrote to Hightower the same month. “Letters from contributors are rec’d with shrieks of laughter, mss are sneered at, rejection slips go out furiously. The Atlantic Monthly looks like a bunch of kind old ladies.” The quarterly was gearing up for a major offensive in the New Critics’ campaign to convert the academic world, or at least to establish a respectable place for their kind of criticism in it. During Stafford’s year at the Southern Review, its issues were crowded with articles making the case against historical scholarship and in favor of close commentary and the modernist approach to literature. The culmination of the campaign came in a symposium entitled “Literature and the Professors,” conducted jointly with the Kenyon Review in the autumn 1940 issues of the two magazines.

  At LSU, Lowell experienced the pedagogical and critical ferment firsthand. His initial response, like Stafford’s, was a degree of detachment from all the academic earnestness. “I am not looking for a vocation or marking time,” he wrote to his grandmother, sounding nonchalant. “If war comes and they want me, I’ll gladly go; if not, I’ll continue in this peaceful and sedentary occupation of university work. I suppose writing is something of a career, something that steadily grows more secure and substantial.” In a letter to Robie Macauley, one of his Kenyon housemates, he began in a similarly aloof manner: “About L.S.U. I have taken as my motto, ‘In Rome consort with the Romans and never do as they do.’ Here reign the critical approach, ‘the aesthetic approach,’ ‘metaphysical poetry,’ ‘drama in the lyric’ etc. The students are weak and worthy.” But then his letter took an unexpected, elliptical turn:

  Brooks and Warren / Brooksandwarren are excellent. Especially Warren; result: I am reading English theology.

  This, as perhaps Randall Jarrell would say, is not as crazy as it sounds, but it’s pretty crazy and must not be amplified. My poetic terminology using: heresy, diabolic, frivolous gnosticism etc, should worry the solemn and liberal English majors.

  The letter was an oblique augury of what was to come: chafing in the role of student, Lowell was inclining toward discipleship, a discipleship that went beyond the expectations even of his English teachers—and beyond his own. Contrary to what he had claimed to his grandmother, he was looking for a vocation; evidently it was not so easy to wait patiently while his writing efforts grew steadily (or unsteadily) “more secure and substantial.” He needed a calling, not “something of a career.”

  At first Lowell found a satisfactory mission in distinguishing himself from the “weak and worthy” students. He quickly earned the respect of Warren and, especially, of Brooks. He was not one of the dilettantish college boys but a colleague engaged in the project of establishing criticism as a profession, for that was essentially the New Critics’ intent: to stake the claim for the study of poetry that was implied in Eliot’s claims for the writing of it—that it was not a personal, impressionistic, belletristic endeavor, but an occupation anchored in tradition and guided by exacting, prescriptive principles and techniques. It was a discipline that demanded total dedication and required a pure, formalistic approach that historicist and other critics failed to appreciate. “The opposite of the professional, the enemy, is the man of mixed motives,…” Eliot wrote. “Surely professionalism in art is hard work on style with singleness of purpose.” That was the kind of uncompromising prescription that Lowell thrived on.

  Stafford’s predicament was rather different, and so was her perspective. Rather than musing about her writing career, much less about a literary vocation, she was starting a job, which right away meant hard work on shorthand. Her assessment of her situation was a wry echo of Lowell’s report to his grandmother. “My life seems annually more fogged and my retrogression is steady—now I’m a secretary,” she wrote to Hightower in June. “And will the next be a telephone operator or will I be the receptionist in a city laundry? This is not gloom, merely curiosity.” Wryness continued to dilute resentment. She was quite amusing, and cutting, about her labors and her colleagues. She followed the critical controversies from her clerical perch, then wrote letters that mixed skepticism with obvious excitement at being in the midst of the ferment.

  She readily assumed the role of housekeeper as well as breadwinner. Though she enjoyed complaining about unpacking in the heat, fixing up their apartment was a preoccupation that gave her pleasure. As the wife of a promising young poet in 1940, Stafford fully expected that domestic distractions would hem in her own writing life. She was prepared to be the comparative amateur, to dilute artistic motives with practical ones. But her role was not simply socially ordained. Stafford found domestic details and duties very seductive—she was, as she acknowledged, her mother’s daughter in her willing absorption in the homely sphere of orderliness. She sometimes suspected that her nesting zeal was a reaction to the sense of uprootedness she had felt as a child, thanks to her father’s fantasies. Her domesticity was doubtless also encouraged by Lowell’s utter abstraction from such concrete concerns, his penchant for high, austere discipline. Not least important, there were models for their respective roles: cerebral Allen Tate and capable Caroline Gordon, who was renowned for running crowded households with one hand and writing crowded novels with the other.

  Renowned but not, for the most part, doubly respected. The writer wife had to be intense about her literary work (or she would never get any done), and yet according to a critic whom Stafford herself admired, the competing pressures of home and writing meant that she was unlikely to be intellectual enough about her art. “To be intellectual,” Ransom wrote in “The Poet as Woman,” “is to be disciplined in technique and stocked with learning, a very great advantage for every purpose, and even for fertilizing the pleasures of imagination.” It was, he continued, an advantage largely denied women “because they are not strict enough and expert enough to manage forms,—in their default of the disciplines under which men are trained.” Granted, there was a certain compensating literary gift that accrued to women as the keepers of the house, as Ransom acknowledged in his essay “Sentimental Exercise”:

  It will probably be agreed that women have much more aptitude for cultivation of sentiments than men do.… A good housewife … makes a point … not to have merely useful or abstract relations with the things and persons of her ménage, but to seek in addition a delicious knowledge of them as individual objects.

  But it was a gift that women writers, lacking discipline, were in danger of indulging to excess, he suggested. At least at the outset, Stafford threw herself into the management of her ménage, which in true Tate fashion quickly became crowded and complicated. There were problems with the woman whom they hired to clean. There was lots of socializing, not just with the Warrens and Brookses, but with numerous friends and literary figures passing through—among them the Jarrells and, awaited with some trepidation, the British critic I. A. Richards and his wife.

  And there were two boarders—“a great gauche lummox of a girl from Memphis who is my assistant,” Stafford wrote to Hightower, and Peter Taylor, who was by comparison “considerably more attractive but wants a brain.” In fact, that fall Stafford and Taylor became the close friends they turned out to be for life. Though they and Lowell proved to be a sturdy trio, relations were not without strain, especially at the start. There was an obvious and immediate affinity between Stafford and Taylor that, as Robie Macauley observed, left Lowell feeling slightly excluded. The two of them were great talkers, their style witty where Lowell tended to tongue-tied ponderousness. In the prevailing literary hierarchy, their interest—prose—was less elevated, and they could both joke about their want of brains as no poet, or certainly not Lowell, would.

  The emotional ease and directness between them doubtless stood out as Lowell grew ever more intellectually preoccupied—but not too preoccupied to notice and finally to intervene. Stafford’s description of the scene, in a letter to Hightower in October, was flippant but revealing: “Peter &
I got incredibly drunk and exchanged words over the extent of Peter’s love for me & the peril of it so that Cal, who spent the evening talking with Mr. Brooks about belief, did not speak to Peter for 1 week thereafter.” Lowell was the stern pedant in the household—though he also had a comical streak, too often overlooked. In Baton Rouge he introduced Stafford to one of his favorite games, featuring a humorous cast of animal characters called “berts,” pronounced “bear” in French fashion. He was Big Bert, she was Bigless Bert, alter egos through whom they could be wittily expressive with each other—and droll with the friends whom they initiated into the game.

  But as the fall progressed, Lowell’s preoccupation with belief intensified as he read theology, plowing through Étienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophical Experience and his Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, then turning to E. I. Watkin, John Henry Newman, Jacques Maritain, Blaise Pascal, Gerard Manley Hopkins. He began to take instruction with Father Shexnayder at LSU. The leap from reforming the English curriculum to reforming the soul was not as large as it looked. Implicit in the formalist literary mission, as Eliot’s own conversion had already suggested and Tate’s would later, was a religious conception of the word as the way to truth. Though the critics didn’t play up the religious dimension of their views as they vied for influence in English departments, it was perhaps no surprise that Lowell readily fastened on to it. “The religious mind would seem, in the end,” the critic W. K. Wimsatt wrote much later, “to be more hospitable to the tensional and metaphysical view of poetry than the naturalistic mind is able to be.” Elsewhere he and Cleanth Brooks summed up the perspective lurking behind their literary position as “the vision of suffering, the optimism, the mystery which are embraced in the religious dogma of the Incarnation.” And as Lowell’s teacher at St. Mark’s, Richard Eberhart, had remarked years before, his protégé’s early efforts at poetry showed that “his mind was heavy and that it was essentially religious.”

  Lowell was increasingly adamant about the new order and direction in his life and insistent that his devotional regimen embrace the whole household. That meant two rosaries a day, Mass in the morning, benediction in the evening, only suitably serious books, fish on Fridays. A pious attitude was required, and impious habits (smoking and drinking) were fiercely discouraged. Stafford, not surprisingly, was deeply ambivalent. She too had recognized religious inclinations in herself and had acted on them. But her sessions with Father Agatho during college (a failure, thanks to her “indolence”) had led her to suspect her mind wasn’t naturally “heavy” and disposed to rigorous discipline (as her English teacher Miss McKeehan had also gently suggested in another context). In the last story published in her lifetime, “An Influx of Poets” (1978), the most directly autobiographical she ever wrote, Stafford put more emphasis on the desperation of her youthful search for faith, but still there was an air of futility about it:

  My mission had not been accomplished, despite my fervor and my need. Later on, from time to time, I tried again in different churches of different towns at different seasons of the year and different hours of day and night. But I was God-forsaken; the shepherd could not hear my bleating, for I was miles astray in the cold and the dark and the desert. And at last I vanished without a trace; with a faint shiver and a faint sigh, I gave up the Ghost.

  In Baton Rouge, a deep passivity seemed to come over her in the face of Lowell’s fervent mission. This time, instead of straying from the path, she was pulled along by Lowell. “An Influx of Poets” dramatized her unconsciously acquiescent detachment as her husband, whom she called Theron in her story, swept her up in his all-consuming new cause:

  Like Father Strittmater [Father Agatho], Theron’s instructor was Pennsylvania Dutch—a coincidence that only mildly interested me but one by which my husband set great store: Our Lord (he adopted the address with ease) had planned likenesses in our experience.

  Stafford’s protagonist was both observant and distracted, accurately sizing up Theron’s teacher but then stunned to discover her own situation: the priest’s “austerity was right up Theron’s alley, and before I knew what had happened to me, I had been dragged into that alley which was blind:”

  What Stafford left out of the story was her own alternative mission, writing. She was groping there, too, but it was clear that she felt her efforts at literary discipline, at greater control of her craft, offered a more congenial route to order and meaning than the religious observances that Lowell urged ever more forcefully. She was also skeptical of the emphasis on criticism. She worried that Lowell was neglecting his poetry: “Cal is to make a new edition of Herbert which will be published by LSU Press. He is immensely respected here, particularly by Cleanth Brooks who asks his advice on all literary questions,” she wrote to Hightower proudly, but she went on to express apprehensions. “Cal has not written any poetry for five months and I would rather have him a poet first and by his merit establish his invulnerability.” She knew how difficult it was to claim writing as her priority amid her many mundane preoccupations, and yet it was an important source of stability and self-definition for her; she was afraid of the effect of divine preoccupations on Lowell—and on herself. Through the winter and spring, while her daily life with Lowell became more difficult and the devotional routine more demanding, Stafford was at last experiencing a literary breakthrough of sorts. Her faith was frail, and a source of conflict with Lowell, but her religious struggles proved to be important inspiration for her writing.

  EARLY IN THE FALL, Stafford evidently tried to explain to Evelyn Scott something of her newly structured approach to writing. To judge by Scott’s alarmed reply, Stafford emphasized impersonality—not what her former teacher wanted to hear. Apparently she didn’t, however, mention the growing role of Catholicism in her life with Lowell. Her quest for some external discipline and vision to guide her writing seems to have been cast in more general terms. As she had at the Writers’ Conference, Scott urged rebellious independence and vigorous self-expression:

  I can’t bear hearing you say it [Stafford’s fiction] sounds “heavy.” I’m getting horribly fed up with the way people with gifts are being shaken everywhere in their determination to be expressive in terms of the experienced and not in dictated terms of some externally compelled pattern invented by others. If you don’t stay soundly adamant on this core, I will build a wailing wall, and weep for the whole generation—generations!—born after 1905.

  But Stafford was clearly in a humble, methodical frame of mind about her writing. She was prepared to be a ruthless judge of the inchoate outpourings that had so far proved unpublishable. She was determined to address a creative dilemma: she needed a larger framework of meaning and symbolism for her writing, yet also a closer focus on concrete detail. In the same letter to Hightower in which she had worried over Lowell’s neglect of his writing, she calmly assessed her own literary situation. She was heartened by progress on a story that drew on a daydream of a peaceful room that she had obviously discussed with Hightower before:

  As for myself, I am writing at a tortured snail’s pace.… I worked 7 months on the suicide story and it, I was very proud of, but although the style was sustained and the rhythm carried, it lacked, still, much precision and all imagery. But the present one—you remember my queer room daydream—is almost successful, though it is awkward. It is obscure, allegorical, and the prose is loaded. I am a great fool to write you this way, but this way is habitual and I, under no illusions about myself any longer except that I have a gift, want you most particularly to know that at this stage of my life, the note is steadily sanguine.

  She was right that the “present” story was a turning point. Based on her experience in the hospital after the accident with Lowell two years earlier, the twenty-seven-page manuscript (never published) was in a sense her answer to Lowell’s poem “On a Young Lady Convalescing from a Brain-Injury but Unable to write a novel in Concord, Mass.” It was a story about that convalescence, in which she discovered a key scene for he
r first novel, Boston Adventure, and sketched a draft of what was to become perhaps her best-known story, “The Interior Castle” (1946). She had, in fact, found the deep symbolic landscape that informed her fiction for many years.

  St. Teresa of Avila was her inspiration. Stafford’s account in “An Influx of Poets” of her discovery of the saint is revealing. “Theron once told me that I was going through the dark night of the spirit and I should meditate and read John of the Cross. I did, with a certain kind of recognition, read St. John’s friend Teresa’s ‘Interior Castle.’ …” The emphasis was on a disobedient independence of mind: told to read St. John, she read St. Teresa instead. Her need was less for abstract meditation than for some sense of empathy, and she gravitated to the more accessible Spanish saint, and a woman, to find it. It could hardly have been more symmetrically scripted. While Lowell set about mastering the intellectual intricacies of Catholic doctrine, Stafford made her way to a mystic—and not to the Thomistic St. John recommended by her husband but to untutored, colloquial Teresa.

  St. Teresa was a very suitable teacher, well known for her merciful concern about recalcitrant creatures. In particular the saint sympathized with certain weaknesses of the soul that Stafford felt she knew well. St. Teresa didn’t assume a focused, contemplative intellect, and she was notably lenient about two other handicaps, a wayward will and a vivid imagination. In fact, she took pains to explain that she was not writing for those with methodical minds and good concentration. “It would be a mistake if you pay attention to what I say about prayer,” she told the clearheaded, recommending instead the standard texts about discursive meditation as useful instruction for them. Her audience, she emphasized, consisted of those with “souls and minds so scattered that they are like wild horses no one can stop.” And she understood that discipline, though essential, was best applied less stringently to these at once fierce and fragile wills.