The Interior Castle

by Ann Hulbert

  It needed a good deal of work as well, and home improvement was a preoccupation that Stafford was eager to introduce into her life. For the next six months, she coordinated repairs and renovations, often at long distance, since it was clear that she and Lowell couldn’t live there through the winter. In fact, they didn’t envisage living there full-time for quite a while, as Stafford explained to the Thompsons: “I imagine it will be some years before we can live in it the year round—we can’t afford to yet and we’re frightened about isolation anyway.” Their Connecticut year had been surprisingly calm, given their less than placid marriage, but a small village in Maine was a true rural retreat—and the nearest city, Boston, was more problematic than New York. As the home of Lowell’s parents, it hardly provided a welcome relief for either Cal or Jean.

  So at the same time that Stafford undertook elaborate home-improvement plans, the Lowells undertook elaborate house-sharing plans with the Tates once again. They decided they would spend the fall and winter in Sewanee, Tennessee, with the Taylors for company along with the Tates, while work was under way in Maine. “Two families living together always get in each other’s hair,” Gordon wrote jauntily in August, “but as far as we are concerned we would love to have you and Cal living with us again. We like living with the Lowells better than anyone else we’ve ever tried.” “The winter of four books” was the galvanizing memory.

  The Monteagle sequel never happened, though amid the disarray that ensued instead, it proved to be a winter of two books. In December of 1945 Lowell sent off the manuscript of Lord Weary’s Castle to Philip Rahv, who forwarded it to Lambert Davis at Harcourt, Brace a few weeks later; Stafford had previously shown the poems to Giroux, who became the book’s editor. Then in January of 1946 Stafford herself signed a contract with Harcourt, Brace for The Mountain Lion. She had shown a draft to her editors, and she finished the novel that spring.

  In retrospect, the collapse of the Sewanee arrangement—in fact, the whole course of that fall and winter—looks like an augury of troubles to come for Lowell and Stafford, as the Tates showed the way toward domestic chaos. All of a sudden in September Caroline and Allen announced that they were separating, so the Tennessee plan was off. Though unexpected, the abrupt separation (soon to be just as abruptly reversed) was not a total surprise. If anyone knew the Tates’ stormy marriage, it was the Lowells, and Allen’s girlfriends were legendary. For the next couple of months the Lowells heard all about the marital troubles—a divorce was planned for December—in letters from both Tates as well as from endless secondhand gossip.

  In November Stafford was drawn into the drama. The Lowells had invited Gordon to camp out at Damariscotta Mills while they were in New York and Boston, and Stafford joined her one late weekend around Thanksgiving while Lowell stayed on in Boston. Doubtless abetted by drink, the visit unraveled into violence in a scene that outdid the traumatic fight between them in Monteagle. Gordon quizzed Stafford about Tate’s infidelities, and Stafford made the mistake of all too willingly supplying the names she knew. “Everything crashed in a most terrifying event,” as Gordon began throwing and breaking things, prompting Stafford to call the police in a panic that once again seemed out of proportion. When her intimates (now Gordon, in the past Lowell) lost control or perspective, she was seized by the fear that it was she who was losing her grip. “I shouldn’t tell you all of this, for it will frighten you,” Stafford wrote to her sister Mary Lee in great distress, “but Cal will protect me and if I crack up, I will go to a sanitarium.” Her dread that she was losing her mind seemed outlandish—a Sonie Marburg nightmare—but in retrospect it, too, looks like a warning of troubles in store.

  One extended literary family had been disastrously shaken. In mid-January of 1946 the Lowells tried another arrangement while they waited for winter to subside. They joined Delmore Schwartz and his cat (he had been divorced from his wife, Gertrude Buckman, two years earlier) on Ellery Street in Cambridge. “One might think that this was not a household but a literary movement,” Schwartz wrote to Helen Blackmur, exulting in the trio’s productivity. In “To Delmore Schwartz” in Life Studies more than a decade later, Lowell was fondly, grandly nostalgic. It was a household in disarray—the poem was filled with drinking—but the poets were possessed, which was what they were convinced poets should be. The image of the mad artist prevailed in the poem, which implicitly predicted greatness and, as important, agony for its heroes. “Underseas fellows, nobly mad, / we talked away our friends,” the speaker recalled. And Schwartz was given the dark variation on Wordsworth’s lines: “We poets in our youth begin in sadness; / thereof in the end come despondency and madness.”

  Stafford the prose writer, though conspicuously absent from the poem, smoked and drank and typed along with them. And she joined in the talk, about their friends’ lesser fates and their own momentous ones. As John Berryman later wrote about his own sojourn in Cambridge with Schwartz, the heady expectation of fame was never far from their thoughts. Glory was to be not simply a reward for their labors but a guide for their lives. Berryman described the intoxicating ambience in a “Dream Song” addressed to Schwartz:

  … You said “My head’s on fire”

  meaning inspired O

  meeting on the walk down to Warren House

  so long ago we were almost anonymous

  waiting for fame to descend

  with a scarlet mantle & tell us who we were.…

  They fed each other’s ambitions, anticipating a public dimension for their private lives. Schwartz, who had already known success, relished the role of the encouraging mentor (he was trying to arrange a Briggs-Copeland lectureship at Harvard for Lowell). And it is safe to say that he led the way in conceiving of his life in heroically representative terms and in suggesting by example that autobiography could be the center of art. With his long poem Genesis (1943), he had aspired “to ‘express’ the ‘Spirit of America.’ ” His autobiographical protagonist proclaimed: “No matter where he was, what he felt, what event, he was to himself / The center of the turning world.” The mythologizing was not all golden. The poets, “nobly mad,” thought of themselves as in some sense in tune with the dark currents of their time, a theme Lowell later developed much more fully.

  Stafford, who had tasted fame too, was caught up in the dramatic generalizing about themselves and about the Zeitgeist, as she recalled five years later. Among her contributions to the discussions was her Lucy story, a “suicide that had come at the end of a spectacularly ugly life”—a dark tale that struck her and the poets as emblematic of the thirties: “The actions were motivated by the dislocations of the twenties that had still not been set right, by the depression, by the end of prohibition, by the New Deal.” It was her life written large, and “my friends said I must write it down, that it was obviously my next novel and that it was, so to speak, ready made. I should write it, they said, just as I had told it to them.” She couldn’t start right away, since she was trying to finish The Mountain Lion, but she was inspired, as they were, by the prospect of tragic generational portraiture.

  The manic harmony on Ellery Street lasted roughly two months. After a visit to the elder Lowells on Marlborough Street, Schwartz’s lurking envy of Lowell’s background turned to open resentment. The Brahmin surroundings and the implicit anti-Semitism were too much for him. The mentor became a tormentor, endlessly mocking the Lowell family. More serious, he began, according to his biographer, “circulating malicious rumors” in an effort to undermine the Lowells’ marriage. (His gossip was apparently about Stafford’s supposed interest in other men, among them him, which few friends credit as being serious.) To judge from a letter Stafford sent to Cecile Starr from Cambridge, this was not the first sign of tension. Dental work was keeping her in town, but Stafford had been feeling jittery in their temporary household for some time and was ready to leave. In fact her letter, which progressed incongruously from jauntiness to bleakness, suggested a state of real agitation:

  We shall probab
ly go home as soon as I am through with the dentist. The carpenters are through and I am perishing to see the new kitchen floor, to say nothing of my fabulous desk. We have had a really splendid time here, but I am working very badly and in a state of depression, I really need my house to keep me from stultifying gloom. My new book seems hideously pallid and loose-jointed and to escape the thought of it I have been visited lately with my really neurotic sleeping, hours and hours of such oblivion that I don’t even dream.… I am in an untrustworthy state and if my depression continues, I will be fit company for no one.

  It is a revealing letter, which sets up correspondences among Stafford’s house, her work, and her health that are central to an understanding not just of this formative phase of her life with Lowell, but of the rest of her life as well. The house seemed to be the key element, which could distract her from and yet also support her in her creative and physical ordeals. Both she and Lowell were preoccupied (in significantly different ways) with the image of the castle at this point, a metaphor that points to the contrasting visions that seemed to be guiding their lives and work during this unsettled stretch. Stafford had been reading St. Teresa’s Interior Castle again during the summer of 1945 and probably reworking her accident story, in which she developed the analogy between chambers in a mansion, or castle, and the head. The castle, though under assault, offered refuge; the head, though buffeted by distractions, contained the safe inner sanctum where the soul could experience transcendence.

  Lowell’s book of poems took its title, Lord Weary’s Castle, from an old English ballad, which he understood to tell a very different story from St. Teresa’s—the story of the apocalypse, as Steven Gould Axelrod has explained. In the ballad Lord Weary denied payments to Lamkin, the man who built his castle. Spurned, Lamkin came to the castle and killed Lord Weary’s family. The allegory Lowell intended, according to Berryman in his review of the volume in Partisan Review, was the end of days: Lord Weary’s castle was the modern world, a “house of ingratitude, failure of obligation, crime and punishment,” and Lamkin was the Lord who destroyed “the faithless house He built.” On the title page of the manuscript, Lowell wrote, “Death comes when the house is built.”

  The Lowells called the house at Damariscotta Mills Lord Weary’s Castle, though for Stafford—at least at first, while it was being fixed with her money and her loving attention—it promised liberation. For Lowell, always more ambivalent about domesticity, it seemed to mean imprisonment. He and Stafford were increasingly tense around each other that winter, her drinking and his efforts to curb it a source of constant quarreling. Her obsession with the Maine house meant her withdrawal from him, and he found as many pretexts for escape as he could. He went on another Trappist retreat in late March, began taking long bird walks when he was at Damariscotta Mills, and went as often as possible to New York, where both Taylor and Jarrell were living. On his return from one trip to the city, he certainly didn’t repay his Lamkin in gratitude. Stafford described his reaction to her improvements in a letter to Taylor: “When he came back and found the house fresh with all its wallpaper and its new paint, he exploded and said that it was cheap, that it was immoral, and that I had done the whole thing out of a sadistic desire to stifle him.”

  Stafford by contrast was rejuvenated. Her letters about the ordeals of life in her unfinished house were filled with exhilaration and an uncharacteristic hardiness. She flipped the metaphor around: she likened the castle to her body, rather than her body to a castle—except that where the house was touchingly infirm, its habitually sickly proprietress was suddenly flourishing: “We have had a taste of really rigorous country life: our pipes freeze and burst in the most heart-rending fashion,” she wrote to Allen Tate in January when they spent some time in Maine before going to Cambridge.

  We were without water for two weeks until an ingenious plumber came and moved every vital organ in the house. It has been between 17 and 20 below several times. But I have never been in such top-notch shape in my life and do not even complain of the cold, a transformation in myself I do not altogether understand.

  She used similar anthropomorphic imagery for her invalid house in most of the homesteading letters she sent her friends that winter and early spring.

  And though she wrote to Cecile Starr, in terms similar to those she used for her house, that her new novel was “pallid and loose-jointed,” the truth was that she was nearly finished with the most vivid and taut novel she ever wrote. Her work, like her body, seemed to be thriving while her house was convalescing. As Stafford herself later said of her first and second novels, “They were entirely different books, those two.” She could hardly have strayed further from the sequel to Boston Adventure she had initially planned. As she explained it,

  There wasn’t any basic change in me; the material was so different in each and required different treatment.… The first one is leisurely, a good deal more embroidered. It’s contemplative. I think Boston Adventure is old-fashioned; it’s filled with digressions, for example. The Mountain Lion is a more symbolic book. The symbols are apparent, though I didn’t know what they meant at the time I wrote.

  Though she emphasized the contrast, Stafford recognized that her second novel did not represent a radical transformation in her as a writer. On the contrary, she felt that the two books expressed two poles of her imagination, equally important. “What I would like eventually to do,” she said, “is to fuse the two manners.” From James she had traveled to Twain, an incongruous pair of models who had seen nothing in each other but in both of whom Stafford found a great deal.

  The Mountain Lion was Stafford’s emphatically American book. She had discovered a colloquial voice that could barely be glimpsed in the elegance of her earlier prose, and she had perfected her gift for staging small epiphanies in her choice of concrete details. In her trim new novel she let those details do their work and dispensed with the discursive integuments she had favored in Boston Adventure. She was “less inclined,” as Lambert Davis at Harcourt, Brace praised her, “towards some of those baroque effects that we talked about in connection with the first book.”

  At the end of that book, she had left Sonie on the brink of maturity after what amounted to a protracted adolescence, in which Sonie watched but did not participate in a decadent drama of another woman’s coming-of-age. In fact, each fateful step Hope took toward sex and marriage meant greater passivity for Sonie, who was deprived of Philip and exiled to the periphery. Hope’s death left her facing adulthood, disillusioned and disoriented. Sonie’s future seemed to require some form of transcendence, but Stafford left it far from clear that art was the answer. Her subsequent plans suggested that she had decided religion might hold out hope for her.

  But from the start Stafford had trouble pursuing her Boston Adventure plot: she couldn’t carry Sonie forward into the future. Instead, she ended up replaying the past, with a new set of characters, in The Mountain Lion. It was a novel about childhood, and about the death of childhood. In a sense, it was a radically revised version of Book One of Boston Adventure, with a denouement that solved the larger question: for Stafford’s new heroine, there would be no maturity. The key to the revision of Sonie’s childhood was Stafford’s shift from a mythic rendition of the ordeals of childhood to a much more directly autobiographical treatment. Set in California and Colorado and drawing on her own family lore, the novel was nonetheless far from nakedly confessional: she did not abandon the edict of impersonality. But like Lowell, who was beginning in some of the poems of Lord Weary’s Castle to attempt more personal themes, Stafford now seemed more prepared to consult her own experience. Still, it had to be experience at some remove, and her childhood proved to be an accessible subject. By contrast, she evidently had difficulty drawing from her more immediate, mature life of religious and marital turmoil—and of artistic success—as she contemplated her original sequel. It was a problem that had first presented itself years before in her initial unpublished efforts, Which No Vicissitude and Autumn Festiva
l. Writing about her recent past—her college and German adventures—she had found herself struggling unsuccessfully to overcome a solipsistic self-loathing.

  In The Mountain Lion Stafford discovered a new comic and symbolic clarity with which to tell a tragic story. The shaping vision, as she said more than once, came almost unbidden. The novel does seem to have been written more directly from the subconscious than Stafford was used to, certainly more than her first book was. Begun in the summer of 1945, it was finished roughly nine months later, in April of 1946—remarkably rapid progress, especially given the many distractions of that fall and winter. To be sure, it was not half the length of Boston Adventure, but it was written with a degree of polish that suggests longer labors, particularly for as dogged a reviser as Stafford. When she wrote to Cecile Starr in March about its loose jointedness, she gave no hint of arduous readjustments she had already made—and made with astonishing swiftness. Between January and April (she had one particularly productive stretch alone at Damariscotta Mills, while Lowell was off on one of his trips), she apparently reconceived the basic structure and dynamic of the novel in a radical way. This time, the transformation was definitely not to tame her story—as she had needed to do with Boston Adventure, correcting for its melodramatic tendencies. Instead, she reworked the novel so that it addressed even more directly a theme that had lately surfaced as an especially fraught one: her relationship with her brother, whose death had evidently roused powerful memories.

  In a letter early in 1946, Robert Giroux, back from the navy and again her editor, exclaimed over Stafford’s revision and offered a quick reading of the newly aligned novel. His analysis makes a good introduction to the strange and poignant love story of ten-year-old Ralph and eight-year-old Molly Fawcett, brother and sister, whose path to maturity led them away from their California home to the rigors of Colorado—where, when the story closed six years later, they were lost to each other: