by Ann Hulbert
St. Teresa’s tolerant, practical attitude as a teacher was mirrored by her tone as a writer, which made her a particularly good guide for Stafford. Teresa’s style was marked by its wit and colloquial intimacy. She was not an intimidating adept delivering gnomic insights, but a woman struggling to give some expression to the ineffable, some structure to amorphous mysteries. Sympathetic to the weaknesses of her students, she acknowledged versions of them in herself—or at any rate set out to accommodate them in her own methods. Thus she made no pretense to rigorous intellectual presentation. Instead, she emphasized her humble role as amateur thinker, putting pen to paper only because she had been instructed to do so, and even then being constantly distracted from her task by all sorts of other business. Throughout her most famous work, The Interior Castle, she lamented how often she had been interrupted and she apologized for losing her place, for repeating herself, for failing to be clear.
But the greatest distinction of St. Teresa’s style was its metaphoric profligacy. Though all mystical writings necessarily work through concrete symbols and analogies, Teresa was renowned for her extravagant recourse to elaborate imagery—certainly compared with her follower John, whose poetry employed spare, archetypal symbols and whose prose tended to more abstract terminology. (“To judge by his language alone,” the editor of his complete works commented, “one might suppose at times that he is speaking of mathematical, rather than of spiritual operations”) Where John devoted himself, in a large proportion of his classic, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, to urging a vigilant mistrust of the imagination and its visions as impediments to true communion with God, St. Teresa based her classic, The Interior Castle, on a trust in vision. She urged her readers to imagine “our soul to be like a castle made entirely out of a diamond or very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many dwelling places.” And she proceeded to describe the edifice, its dangers and its potential delights, in vivid detail.
St. Teresa’s colloquial welcome to the wayward spirit and her invitation to the imagination clearly spoke to Stafford as little else on Lowell’s Catholic reading list did. She was looking for some form in which to conjure with the pain of consciousness, the sense of estrangement that was the emerging subject of her fiction—and the persisting fact of her life. In The Interior Castle she found a powerful set of images to help her translate the kind of psychological agonies she had visited upon her character Gretchen into the terms of a spiritual ordeal. Teresas supremely tantalizing and inaccessible castle—a series of glimmering, receding chambers, beset by wicked serpents at its walls—provided Stafford with a central symbol: the bounded circle of the self, in thrall to darkness without and in search of illumination within. Teresa taught the way from the outer, cloudy chambers where the senses were besieged to the inner, irradiated room where the soul met God. For the devoted and blessed among her students, the prison house became a transcendent palace.
The castle was an encompassing mystical metaphor for Stafford to work into her own, more mundane writing. As she acknowledged to Hightower, her first efforts were “obscure, allegorical.” But she was striving for greater concreteness, and it seems clear that William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (a title she later considered borrowing for a novel she never finished) helped her make the crucial bridge between the empirical and the spiritual. It is no surprise that she would have turned to him in her religious travails, for she, like so many others in the 1940s, was avidly reading his brother; it was the peak of the Henry James revival in America. William James’s acute description of the physical, psychological, and epistemological qualities of religious consciousness offered a perspective that might well have spoken to Stafford as she tried to adjust to life with Lowell the convert. In particular, James’s chapter on mysticism seems to have provided one footnote that was evidently just what she needed.
The chapter turned to St. Teresa, whom James cited as “the expert of experts” on the ultimate mystical state, but first he paused to probe a more accessible stage of mystical experience. “I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol,” he explained, and elaborated: “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.… It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core.” Stafford certainly would have recognized this route to illumination, or at least warmth, through alcohol. She had been drinking far more than casually ever since college. But it was James’s reflections on more presentable, medical anesthetics that seem to have pointed her toward a profane, literary approach to divine Teresa. In a lengthy footnote James quoted the firsthand account of “a gifted woman [who] was taking ether for a surgical operation”—a woman, clearly, with whom Stafford had something in common. “I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remembered having heard it said that people ‘learn through suffering,’ ” the woman began, “and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much that I said aloud, ‘to suffer is to learn.’ ” She then proceeded to describe what she saw, which “was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words.” Her experience was of merciless torture suddenly issuing in enlightenment:
A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway.… I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain.… He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I saw. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity.
Stafford too was a gifted woman who had become well versed in the varieties of anesthetic experience, and of pain, thanks to operations on her head after the accident. While her skull was aching as she worked on Autumn Festival, she explored the path from physical suffering to some kind of metamorphosis of the spirit, however fleeting. There was a curious trial run of the notion of anesthesia as revelation in the manuscript of that novel. The passage stood out, an incongruous digression in her narrative. Stafford didn’t try to integrate it, but was intrigued by its possibilities:
Time was passing slowly. It was like ether coming down, coming spicy blue in a downward surge, and the anaesthetists saying, don’t struggle, don’t struggle, don’t trouble yourself and the roaring drunken sleepiness. Or it was like half awake dreaming when the conscious mind almost meets the unconscious on its threshold, that sort of sixth sense that can discover the essence of things. The awake mind can name the mystery of the naked thing only in terms of what its five senses behold: darker than darkness, lighter than light. But the other mind sees, understands, knows what is inside. Now some people describe this mystery by such terms as no-thing, Nirvana. Heaven is the Christian word.
Almost two years after the accident, in the fall of 1940, Stafford’s memory of the pain, and doubtless also of anesthetic release, was refreshed. On a trip to New Orleans with Lowell’s school friends Blair Clark and Frank Parker, who were down in Louisiana for a visit, Lowell hit her, breaking her nose again. A surreal, horrible night, it seems to have stunned them all, including Stafford, into an oddly understated appraisal of the event: arguing with his wife about something (no one remembered what), excitable Cal had simply forgotten his own strength. In the rush to get Stafford to a hospital—Clark, as usual, came to the rescue—none of them paused to consider at all seriously what it might suggest about Lowell and about their marriage. If worries surfaced afterward, they were kept quiet. Stafford made no mention of the incident, or of the ordeal of further surgery on her face, in her letters to Hightower. But it seems she was working on her experience of suffering, recently renewed, turning it in an unexpected direction. Her story about her “queer room daydream,” which built on the accident, was a story about a votary, not a victim. Putting St. Teresa’s metaphor to use, Staffo
rd found metaphysical meaning for her travails. She charted the soul’s path from bodily woe to a moment of spiritual release.
The story was divided into two parts, two stages in the lessons of suffering. The progression loosely followed Teresa’s Interior Castle and is worth tracing in some detail, for the story’s structure, themes, and style laid the groundwork for much of Stafford’s fiction to come. In the first section, the nameless patient lay silently in her hospital bed, cultivating aloofness from the outside world and alertness to the motions of her mind. It was an all-consuming occupation, which required a willed self-absorption but promised some ultimate repose. “She fancied the consummation would resemble her present obliviousness to all but the abstract exercises of her mind, but that the external world would be altered; it would no longer be necessary to discipline her privacy, for the trespassers would be exterminated. But she forever pondered what the steps to this treacherous Nirvana would be.” Memory, as Teresa instructed, played a crucial role in the progress of the soul away from the distractions of the world. It summoned up reminders of the contingency of material things, strengthening the soul in its determination to turn away from them. In the opening half of Stafford’s story, her patient dipped down into ether dream states where she drifted among memories, some recognizable, others mysterious. One image in particular stood out, and here St. Teresa’s metaphor of chambers entered explicitly. In her mental meandering, the patient stumbled upon a room, soothingly shabby and bathed in a restful autumnal light—a vision of material decay that seemed to offer sanctuary:
The room was a refuge like a church which she had impetuously deserted only to find better comfort nowhere else.… The inspiration was without passion but it nonetheless partook of the atmosphere of religion in its calmer weathers. However, though the temptation to construe the room’s meaning as religious was strong and, at times, even irresistable [sic], she withstood it, feeling that the process of arriving at this explanation, had been too simple, at least too slovenly.
For Stafford’s patient, this reddish room, though alluring, remained somewhat elusive: permitted no further than the threshold, she continued to inspect the apparition like a psychologist, resisting any religious interpretation. The process turned up a disturbing memory that was perhaps its source—of a real room in New York where a moment of “tranquil mortal melancholy” was suddenly transformed into an experience of loneliness, of cosmic homelessness. Though all the furnishings seemed to connote death and decay, and an eerie isolation, the patient was calmed by the chamber:
This she knew: if it were anything more than a phenomenon which could be clinically dismissed, it was a sanctuary whose auspices were merciful. Having rejected a supernatural agency in those auspices, she came to look upon them as belonging to herself: that for her instincts she had made a tamed-down sitting room, that as an architect and decorator aware of the needs of his tenants, she had been scrupulously somber in her choice of appointments.
But like St. Teresa’s pilgrims in the preliminary stages, Stafford’s protagonist was in a precarious position, her progress away from the world still only tentative. She had managed to will her detachment only because the external world—a quiet hospital room, with a chilly landscape beyond its windows—“made on her so few demands, distracting her so little from herself.” Similarly, she had found that her will could take her only so far in her journey toward the interior world: “Though the room was ready and was appropriate, as far as she could judge, in every respect, she could not gain entrance to it again. Her dilemma was exasperating: she could not destroy the room and neither could she evoke it.”
In the transition to the second section of Stafford’s story, the will’s true trials began, as St. Teresa instructed they must on the route to salvation: “Doing our own will is usually what harms us.” The will was chastened by greater physical suffering: an assault from without enabled the necessary surrender within. For the path to God, the mystics taught, was passivity. The soul did not gain entrance to God; it was admitted if he so willed. For Stafford’s patient, the liberating ordeal came at the hands of her nose doctor, who barged in one morning, disturbing her meditations, and announced that it was time to operate. Forced to endure anesthetic cocaine packs stuffed into her injured nostrils—a procedure that Stafford described in excruciating detail—the patient lost all capacity to concentrate on her beloved room. Her crisis began to convert her from a psychological to a spiritual perspective on her plight:
Because her nose was palpable and her room was hallucinatory (or would be called so by this nose-bigot and his sedulous acolytes) the removal of cartilage was to take precedence over her salvation. Now when there was no hope of recovering the room so long as she was in the possession of pain imposed upon her from the outside … the need to enter it, to do more than observe it from the threshold, became as acute and raw as the pain itself.
The second section of the story was a meticulous description of the surgery on her skull and a metaphorical evocation of the seizure of her soul. As the doctor cut close to her brain, piercing tissue unprotected by the anesthetic, the patient in her agony was suddenly delivered into her room. Stafford’s effort to put that moment, that decisive turn, into words recalls William James’s “gifted woman” who strained to find adequate expression for her experience. Like her, Stafford groped after geometrical imagery: “Her solitude was pyramidal: its peak was the snarl of unsheathed nerves. It was a naked pain, a clean and vivid pain, causing her to be reduced to a focal point. She had no existence beyond it.” And then she tried again: “Her solitude was a sustained shriek, an infinite line, a light of incommensurate intensity. It was a minute sharp edge, a metallic malice, a flame from the hottest fuel.”
In the room itself, the calm seemed almost anticlimactic: “She was so loving she felt she could not ever leave.” Stafford’s vision of faded grandeur was quite different from Teresa’s brilliantly sparkling inner chamber, but she closed her story with the image of a jewel familiar from the saint. In her commentary on imaginative visions, Teresa likened the culminating revelation to sudden admission to a secret reliquary that housed a precious stone. Stafford’s patient came into possession of a pearl: “Now she lay upon her gentle bed with her aches stroked out and her fever cooled by the pacific maturity of her room. Her bleeding brain was sealed and rounded, was like a loaded, seamless ball, the agony’s wonderfully perfect pearl.”
Stafford’s story was the map of her formative efforts to find some accommodation between writing and religion—an accommodation implied but not spelled out by the New Critical teachers with whom she was now so closely associated. Lowell had already blurred the line when he began not only sprinkling his poetic terminology with words like “heresy” and “Gnosticism” but exploring some connection with the Church. He had barely begun to prove that he could be Eliot’s “classicist in literature” when he turned to the other element of Eliot’s equation, becoming “Anglo-Catholic in religion”—and not just in theory but in single-minded practice. For Lowell in 1940 the terms of the accommodation were temporarily clear: he wasn’t writing poetry at all. His religious convictions explicitly took precedence over his literary craft and would dictate its direction when (and if) he resumed. His piety was a matter of fierce will, and so would his poetry be, its formal structure and its metaphors the occasion for yoking together the abstract and the concrete, the spiritual and the material.
For Stafford the terms were not so straightforward. Faith eluded her, and her will tended to be fickle. She explored her predicament, stylistically as well as thematically, in her story. She introduced the central subject of her fiction: the isolation of the self. Her outwardly passive patient was in a sense the extreme archetype of many of her future protagonists, under assault from without yet also secretly plotting an escape within. And Stafford focused on the double-edged faculty that dominated her characters: the imagination. In a world of opaque selves, it was the only power that permitted any semblance of interpenetration, an
y possibility of transparency. Thus it could claim near omnipotence. And yet, inescapably subjective, the imagination wasn’t simply to be trusted. Following St. Teresa, Stafford suggested deep ambivalence about its status. The most seductive of faculties, the imagination granted vision, but it also increased vulnerability. To see into the alien world was not necessarily to master it; to be at its mercy was perhaps more likely. The imagination threatened entrapment at the same time that it promised transcendence.
The other faculty that complicated matters was the will, if anything even more unsteady than the imagination. On the one hand, it helped define the rootless self, establishing its identity in embattled relation to the rest of the world. Stafford’s patient, all alone in the hospital, deliberately ostracized herself from her surroundings and consciously worked at cultivating a private, self-protective realm. On the other hand, the chief allure of that realm seemed to be that it offered a respite for the will—a place of repose. Moreover, ultimate access to that realm required a surrender of the will. In her story, Stafford introduced the uncanny dynamic at work in so many of her characters. They start out on the arduous route to self-creation, which turns out to be the path of passive self-abnegation.