by Ann Hulbert
It was not a poise that came so easily to her in Payne Whitney after the great disenchantment with Lowell. She had lost yet another home, which, as Stafford wrote to Taylor, was much more than a beloved house: “a symbol to me of all I ever wanted, it is the symbol of my marriage to him which I wanted, I desperately wanted to be complete.” She was frantic in the face of her abandonment by Lowell, who apparently came to the hospital only rarely. Other friends did make regular visits, which she awaited eagerly, but she needed some reaction from him, some contact, to stave off thorough disorientation: “I must be believed in,” she wrote to Cal, “you must believe in my objective existence.” She sent the same message to Taylor. “Once again I have been visited by the fear … that I have no objective existence.… I continue to pray … for the realization at last [from Cal] that I am in a hospital, that I am sick, that I am a woman, that I am a reality and not an abstraction.…” (She took one occasion, the publication in The Nation of his poem “Her Dead Brother,” with its suggestion of sibling incest, as a rare communication from him—precisely the kind that proved his utter insensitivity, for she felt he had plundered and slandered her life. The poem “appearing in the Nation a week before the publication of my book with its dedication [to Lowell and her brother, Dick], with its theme of latent incest, at a time when you have left me and I am in the hospital,” she raged, “seems to me an act of so deep dishonor that it passes beyond dishonor and approaches madness. And I am trembling in this presence of your hate.”)
Gone was the child’s self-sufficient objectivity. In the many agonized letters Stafford sent to Lowell, she constantly looked to him for an acknowledgment of her unliterary, feminine identity—an identity she felt he had always rejected. She tried again and again to explain to him the sense of extraliterary integrity that was so important to her, and her insistence suggests that it wasn’t just Lowell she had to convince, but herself as well. “Cal, let me point out one thing finally,” she wrote to him at one point:
In your letter you say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing. I respect myself as a workman and as a human being and what I have done, I have done to save myself for myself. I shall be grateful for whatever praise I get, but I shall never be so confused as to think that this is life or that, if one looks closely, it bears any resemblance to life.
Stafford was struggling to define herself on more stable and ordinary ground as the celebrated Stafford-Lowell literary and marital alliance dissolved. (Their reputation was far-flung: Cyril Connolly, surveying the American scene in 1947, reported that “last year’s authors … are pushed aside and this year’s—the novelist Jean Stafford, her poet husband Robert Lowell or the dark horse, Truman Capote—are invariably mentioned”) She was insecure about sustaining on her own the intense creative ambition that Lowell had brought to their life together. “I am only a part of Cal’s very fabulous life and a time will come when I shall be glad that my role was taken away,” she wrote in an elegiac vein to Cecile Starr from the hospital. But her assertion of simple humanity was far from merely defensive. She was also trying to clarify what she saw as a dangerous confusion between art and life that she identified in Lowell—and that had lurked behind some of the tensions of their marriage. “I have never, as you well enough know, regarded my writing as being as important as yours,” she wrote to him. “But now, while this is still true, I regard myself as being as important as a writer as you. I am, I mean, as valuable a human being whose vocation happens to be writing.” She was trying to assert the existence of values that arguably transcended even the most obsessive dedication to art; not all of life could be subordinated to art, made mere grist for the creative spirit. It was not the last time Lowell heard that plea from a wife.
As perhaps the most painful letter of the painful correspondence suggests, the truth was that Stafford desperately needed some confirmation that she was in fact a valuable human being. “What do I care if Randall likes my book? Or anyone? Why should it console me to be praised as a good writer?” she challenged Lowell, rejecting what must have been his offers of literary praise. Those were no substitute for love withdrawn—were in fact only reminders of what she was missing. “These stripped bones are not enough to feed a starving woman. I know this, Cal, and the knowledge eats me like an inward animal: there is no thing worse for a woman than to be deprived of her womanliness. For me, there is nothing worse than the knowledge that life holds nothing for me but being a writer.” It was a version of the declarations she had made to Hightower years before in the stream of letters she had sent him from Iowa—that within her hid a needy feminine nature, waiting to blossom.
Now, as then, it was as if she hoped that by proclaiming her womanliness, her ripeness for love, she could call those qualities into being. What seemed to lurk behind her pronouncements was a fear that Lowell had put into words. He had left her, Stafford confided to Peter Taylor, saying that she was “incapable of being loved by anyone.” It was a devastating verdict that summed up all of her doubts about any extraliterary life as a wife and, perhaps, mother. Citing those fears, which Taylor the faithful intermediary clearly understood, he urged Lowell to wait on a divorce: “Jean has suffered a lot in her lifetime from the feeling that she is unwanted. It is a theme she returns to in her conversation and in her writing. The effect of a divorce on her might be disastrous.”
The problem, as Stafford recognized, was not one-sided or new. It was another pattern, one she knew all too well. She acknowledged just how difficult she found any real intimacy, and despite her professed interest in children, she must have sensed—as she later said—how ill suited she was for motherhood. (“I love children,” she wrote toward the end of her life, “but I chose to have none because I knew I would be an abominable mother, by turns indulgent and cold”) Not long after her separation from Lowell, she confessed in her journal a sense of fraudulence in her expressions of love. “I have never been able to demonstrate love except when I have been drunk and the love I have shown then has been trumped up out of the bottle.” It wasn’t just drink but also, as her letters to Lowell and to Hightower revealed, emotional crises that brought out the protestations of love so extreme and elaborate that they couldn’t help seeming false.
Stafford had plenty of occasion in the hospital to meditate on the sources of feeling unwanted, and she traced the sense of loveless isolation to her past. That seemed to be Stafford’s dominant memory of her family life—though she was the first to admit, as she did in a letter to Mary Lou Aswell, her friend and an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, that her memories, however intense, were not the most reliable: “Partly because I was born with a monstrous talent for exaggeration and partly because I write fiction, I am never the least bit sure whether I am telling the truth in all these explorations of the past.” And she was prepared to acknowledge that rejection on her part, not just on theirs, had played a significant role in the estrangement she felt.
STAFFORD’S EXPLORATIONS of the past led her outside the walls of Payne Whitney twice in 1947. Both journeys revealed just how ensnared she still was in the unhappy patterns she had hoped to escape, and she hurried back to the protection of her doctors, overwhelmed by the need to drink. In February Stafford received the news that her mother was dying and, full of apprehensions about whether she was up to the trip, she got permission from the hospital to fly out to Oregon. By the time Stafford arrived, her mother had died of malignant melanoma, and she remained to mourn with the assembled family. It was a trauma that brought back her family past even more vividly, and Stafford’s response—like her reaction to so much else during that difficult time—could hardly have been more ambivalent. She said she experienced a transcendent reconciliation with her mother, speaking of it in both mystical and psychological terms. On a page of her diary headed “My mother’s death” she experimented with some lyrical imagery: “A mind, no more inseparable from its body than a
pilot from his plane, sang in its bone-cell: DEUS TE AMO. Purblind it nosed like a mole through splendid mansions, hearing a chorus in ecstasy, within an inch of god.” She clarified her experience in a letter to Lowell: “I received (and I do not use the word inaccurately) a kind of spiritual and consuming rapture that I had never known before in all my life; freed of guilt toward my mother, I was free to love her and to take a most wonderful joy in her peaceful death and I myself felt no fear, no hatred, nothing but this tranquil exaltation and the certain knowledge that I was prepared to die.” To Taylor, she spoke in more standard therapeutic terms: “I grieve that I did not get there to efface my past unkindness, but my guilt is leaving me slowly and this time I am not hurting myself. I know this sounds unfeeling, as if I counted myself the most important person—yet, curiously, in forgiving myself at last, at last I love my mother.”
Yet Stafford’s claim to have been liberated from guilt about her mother had a hollow ring—further protestations of newfound intimacy grounded more in rhetoric than reality. It was clear that she also continued to feel trapped in the old, antagonistic way. A journal entry apparently written shortly after her mother’s funeral, as Stafford looked forward to leaving Oregon, showed how susceptible she was to a return of the intolerance and insecurity that had made her adolescence at home such an ordeal. Despite the years she had spent far from home, her family could still promptly reduce Stafford to the resentful youngest child; the past, however completely she had aimed to put it behind her, was always there just below the surface, poised to engulf her again. She began her journal striving for mature distance—and then failed to find a merciful vantage point:
I try to see under the bad taste to the poverty beneath and under the inhumanity to the misfortune, but it seems as willful and senseless as it ever did. My father has never been more stunningly boring. His larger-than-life-size conception of his role in Mother’s illness maddens me in the terrible and familiar way and I feel a perfect bitch because I am unable to make allowances for his grief and loneliness.… In his egomaniacal hatred of doctors (and I am shaken with fury to remember such things as the sewing machine needle in my finger and the blister he would not believe was anything but a blister and each day he lanced it with a blunted bodkin) he would not give her the medicines that had been ordered.
Her memory was “pitiless,” she had written to Lowell, and as the rest of the passage revealed, Stafford couldn’t help reverting completely to her childhood role:
It is assumed by my father and by Margie that I will come out here to live.… Margie is such a hopeless fool.… She said at once that I had got fat (at this point my father looked at me the way he has always looked at me, as if I were a large dog or a small horse, and observed that I had, indeed, got fat and he fancied I was almost as tall as he. I have been four inches taller than he since I was seventeen years old) and she immediately revived the childhood jokes about rubber underwear for me and reducing pills and phonograph records of reducing exercises and I responded inwardly in the childish way and wanted to pull her hair.… She went on from my obesity to the fact that I was adopted and would presently be kidnapped.
It is not hard to read the journal entry for telltale references to some of Stafford’s lifelong preoccupations and problems—her dependence on doctors, her ambivalence about food, and her search for surrogate-daughter relationships. Her responses to the ancient feeling of being unwanted were open, as Stafford would probably have appreciated, to less-than-subtle analysis. (“Deep-rooted as it all is,” she wrote to Taylor of her propensity to feel rejected, “it appears to me at least to be so clear-cut a kind of perversity, so really up the alley of psychiatry that it shouldn’t be too hard for them to help me.”) Her cold father disapproved and deprived his family of doctors; his daughter sought paternal reassurance in doctors. Her sisters teased her about fatness (while her round mother urged food on her family); she became a “problem feeder.” They suggested that she didn’t belong; she set about proving that she was an outsider.
And yet, as the next few sentences in her journal showed, this defiant self-definition left Stafford feeling as stranded as ever: “There are no pictures at all of me in the album,” she wrote—she had evidently spent time perusing the family record—“except for one in which I am dressed in some man’s clothes … and my father’s hat and am carrying his blackthorn stick. This is my father’s favorite picture in the album.” The picture was the one of Stafford dressed up as a literary agent come to deliver her father to fame and fortune, a picture that he loved more and more as time passed and that Stafford liked less and less.
It was a photograph that exposed his delusions, delusions that she felt had destroyed the family’s life; and it implicated her in his fantasy. Writing to Mary Lee from the hospital shortly after the Oregon visit, Stafford expressed the worst version of her fears: that, like the literary agent in the picture, she should devote her life to her now-solitary father—the nightmare she had tried to escape by leaving home as soon as she could. “I felt awful about Dad and I still do. Wrong as it is and always has been, it still isn’t possible not to feel torn to pieces by the spectacle of his loneliness and I only hope, for everyone’s sake, that it will not last long,” she wrote, sounding more sympathetic than she had in her journal. But even if her embittered seventy-two-year-old father lingered on only a short time, she couldn’t face it, a confession she relegated to a footnote, though the message was clearly more than an afterthought: “PS: I know I should go out there and keep house and I suppose that by not going I will be tormented with the guilt I should feel and won’t as much as I would be if I went. But I know that I couldn’t live with him without drinking.”
The other trauma of the spring was a trip up to Damariscotta Mills to prepare to sell the house, a trip that left her, she wrote to Taylor, “mutilated with woe.” She couldn’t face that without drinking either, she confessed to Cecile Starr, describing her collapse: “Faced with its loveliness (I never owned anything so beautiful, nothing was ever so completely mine as that house and those trees and those marvelous scenes from all the windows) and with all the misery that my pitiless memory disinterred for me, I could feel myself falling headlong and helplessly.…” The journey wasn’t made any easier by the knowledge that Lowell was celebrating great literary success with the publication of Lord Weary’s Castle (he was awarded a Pulitzer that spring, along with a Guggenheim and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters) just as she was commemorating their marital failure with her trip back to the castle. “The pictures of him that one sees in all the papers are not the pictures of my husband but of someone else, a professional poet,” she wrote to Taylor, sounding slightly stunned. To Mary Lee, she allowed herself to sound more thoroughly devastated: “I went alone … and all the anguish of last autumn—and the whole summer and last spring—came back … in all the cold and desertion at the very same time that Cal was coming joyfully into all his national glory.” She retreated to the hospital to mend.
And sometimes, as she wrote to Lowell, even the hospital didn’t seem a remote enough sanctuary. The seductive exile she had created for Sonie in her novel was one that she herself was tempted by. Sonie’s Boston adventure had driven her to seek refuge in her “red room,” a prophecy of Stafford’s own response. But unlike her fictional character, she struggled against succumbing to her desire for total isolation. “It would be, right now, easy for me to enter the Red Room and to shut the door tightly and forever,” she wrote to Cal, knowing that he was familiar with the terrain of her spiritual landscape:
When I told you long ago that if I had been instructed by a particular priest, I could have become a nun, I was not making a school-girlish and self-dramatizing statement, but the truth of it has never been more real to me than it is now. Far as I have retreated already, I wish to retreat ever farther. It is my courage which operates in spite of me that keeps me here where some business, little as it is, of the world intrudes.
THE ALLURES AND DAN
GERS of transcendent retreat were a theme not just of Boston Adventure. In The Mountain Lion, Stafford had created in Molly a far more unworldly ascetic than Sonie; she was a child who might have become a nun, who turned away from the corruptions of the world to the loneliness of her own mind. And the theme was at the heart of her story “The Interior Castle,” which came out in Partisan Review in the winter of 1946, as Stafford was entering the hospital. In fact, it had been in a draft of that story, six years earlier, that she had first begun exploring concrete, literary expression for the symbolic inner chamber that became a centerpiece of her work. Another pattern asserted itself: this story inspired by Stafford’s first hospital ordeal in late 1938 and 1939, after she and Lowell had run into a wall, appeared during her subsequent hospital stint, after she and Lowell had encountered a different kind of wall. It seems likely that she had been reworking the story during the year before, a time of confusion when it was becoming ever clearer that the chambers of Damariscotta Mills were unlikely to offer the refuge she had dreamed of—and when, as “An Influx of Poets” attests in retrospect and various letters suggest, the allure of retreat to the chamber of her own head was irresistible. She had resorted to an anesthetic readily available outside the hospital, alcohol. But her drinking did not, evidently, impede the revisions that produced perhaps her best short story.
In “The Interior Castle” Stafford took the advice that Evelyn Scott had offered years earlier, dispensing with much of the Latinate abstraction and refining the concrete description of the protagonist’s ordeal. It was the author of The Mountain Lion at work, letting symbols emerge naturally from specifics, making an abstraction like pain speak through physical details; with unerring intensity, she worked metaphor and simile hard. Stafford stepped further back from her protagonist, now given the exotic name of Pansy Vanneman, and thus gained objectivity, though not at the expense of vividness: it is difficult to read Stafford’s account of knives ravaging Pansy’s nose and skull without cringing.