by Ann Hulbert
Her distance did, however, introduce a new note of skepticism into the story. There was irony in Stafford’s perspective on Pansy’s arrogant zeal for retreat, a suggestion that the glorious inner chamber she visualized was perhaps not the ideal escape from pain and the lesser distractions of the mundane world that Pansy assumed it would be. At the same time that Stafford lavished perfect prose on the chamber, she implied a solipsistic inadequacy in it:
What Pansy thought of all the time was her own brain. Not only the brain as the seat of consciousness, but the physical organ itself which she envisaged, romantically, now as a jewel, now as a flower, now as a light in a glass, now as an envelope of rosy vellum containing other envelopes, one within the other, diminishing infinitely. It was always pink and always fragile, always deeply interior and invaluable. She believed that she had reached the innermost chamber of knowledge and that perhaps her knowledge was the same as the saint’s achievement of pure love. It was only convention, she thought, that made one say “sacred heart” and not “sacred brain.”
There was something loveless in Pansy’s worship of her own head, and the conclusion of her quest took a turn rather different from Stafford’s original ending. Pansy’s revelation was the product of resignation, as St. Teresa instructed, but this time it was not eager acquiescence to God’s will but reluctant acquiescence to the claims of the world. Pansy’s glimpse of her inner treasure came only after she had bowed to the doctor’s designs, recognizing that “the time would come when she could no longer live in seclusion, she must go into the world again and must be equipped to live in it; she banally acknowledged that she must be able to breathe.” She had her moment of ecstatic repose, her visit to the “red room”: “This time alone she saw her brain lying in a shell-pink satin case. It was a pink pearl.… It grew larger and larger until it was an enormous bubble that contained the surgeon and the whole room within its rosy luster.” Unlike the story of six years before, which left the patient with her “agony’s wonderfully perfect pearl,” Pansy was only granted a moment to marvel that “never had the quiet been so smooth.” The self-important world intruded, and in the closing sentence, Pansy was left disenchanted: “She closed her eyes, shutting herself up within her treasureless head.” Transcendence or retreat could only be transitory relief, Stafford suggested with great ambivalence; the story conveyed bitter impatience with life in the trivial world, yet also doubt about life in the solitary head.
A therapeutic realism had diluted her former spiritual rigor, as Stafford acknowledged in an article that stands as a companion piece to “The Interior Castle.” Aside from two other short stories (“The Hope Chest,” about a crabbed old woman’s loneliness, which appeared in Harper’s in January 1947, and a story set in the West called “A Slight Maneuver,” which Mademoiselle printed a month later, both interesting mostly as variations on themes Stafford dealt with more successfully elsewhere), the only writing of hers to appear that year was in a new vein: journalism. As she did later in life, she turned to outlets worlds away from the Partisan Review end of the magazine spectrum, obviously with money foremost in mind.
The piece she wrote for Vogue, which came out in the October 15, 1947, issue, shortly before she was released from Payne Whitney, was hardly a conventional women’s magazine article. An account of her battle with insomnia, “My Sleep Grew Shy of Me” was a short tour of St. Teresa’s Interior Castle, to which Stafford credited her cure—not exactly the sort of thing Vogue’s readers were used to. It was a harbinger of some of Stafford’s later journalism, in which she domesticated her own ordeals, transforming personal difficulties into occasions for idiosyncratic advice columns. In this case, her mental breakdown was reduced to a sleeping problem, which certainly had been a part of her agonies, but hardly the whole.
Stafford wrote as though her troubles were long behind her. It was a confident tone adopted for her audience, and it glossed over the sense of precariousness she acknowledged to friends on leaving the hospital that fall. Her style was deliberately archaic and poetic, the appropriate accompaniment to her anachronistic cure: “And now that my insomnia has passed, I have liked to borrow [St. Teresa’s] divine figure in my profane reflections and similarly to see myself moving at a snail’s pace from the exterior wasteland where I kept a violent vigil to the safe place where I now sleep.” Stafford traced her progression from mansion to mansion, describing the transformations in her attitude that permitted her gradual penetration to the inner sanctums.
It was as though she were laying bare the outline that guided the shaping of “The Interior Castle,” doing the close reading of St. Teresa that preceded her far freer use of the saint’s work in her fiction. She explicitly addressed the analogies she used to such powerful effect in the story: the relation between a literary and religious perspective on the one hand and a medical approach on the other, between illness as a figurative and as a physical state. Her article described the evolution of her views that seemed to be reflected in the second version of “The Interior Castle,” a journey toward greater acceptance of a therapeutic, psychological understanding of her plight. It culminated in an embrace of the merciful science she had discovered: “I honored the good practice of psychiatry as I had heretofore only honored religion and the arts, and [began] to see that its intention is profoundly moral in the most splendid and intelligent sense because it aims to create happiness.”
Its aim, she understood, was to return her to the world, which meant that she could not linger in the Fifth Mansion, of “convalescence, the charming antechamber to health.” Its allures were great, and Stafford recognized her special susceptibility to them. She needed urging to relinquish its lovely oblivion: “Perhaps this is the happiest house of all to live in because there is an immediate contentment, a sort of rapturous anaesthesia.” But she did move on, and her description of the final chamber avoided the ambivalence in her story. She offered the upbeat resolution suitable for Vogue. The chamber was neither a dangerous cloister nor a mere way station before rejoining the clamorous world. Instead, there was a perfect poise: “Tumult seldom penetrates the walls of the interior castle which is, I find, in an ambiguous situation for, although it is very much within and I am very much the sole owner of it, the prospect it commands is of reality and of the world and of all the possibilities of experience which I had believed I had forsworn forever.”
This public, confident optimism of the cured patient, ready to reenter the world, was in stark contrast to the private fears Stafford confided to her journal in the spring: “I have been here now seven months. Certainly I did not dream that I would see the leaves turn green when I saw them red in the fall. And even now, after all this time, I do not know where it will end nor how. I do not remember how one starts again and this is the hardest time of all, since I have left behind no life-lines.” Death had evidently not been far from her mind. Returning to life was not going to be easy.
AS SHE PREPARED to leave the hospital, Stafford sounded less certain in her letters about her readiness to face “the possibilities of experience” than she had in Vogue. Understandably enough, she was on the defensive. She was worried about money, burdened by medical bills she couldn’t possibly pay and bitter about an estranged husband from whom she could expect next to no alimony (at that point Lowell had agreed to five thousand dollars over ten years). And she was anxious about the reception she could expect from her and Cal’s friends. Supplanted by Gertrude Buckman (whom Lowell talked of marrying) and tainted by her psychological troubles, would she now be the woman everyone wanted to avoid? In a particularly distraught letter to Lowell, she put her predicament in extreme, general terms. She would be emerging “without money and without friends and this is harder for a woman than for a man,” she wrote. She despaired of being able to pick up where she had left off: “A man who is called a scoundrel remains, to most people, attractive.… A woman who has spent nearly a year in a hospital with a sickness of the spirit has, with the people she has known before, an ineradicable
black mark. Who would wish to know me? Because I am defeated and miserable, I cannot be appealing.”
But she was leaving the hospital because her doctors judged her to have surmounted the worst of her defeat and misery, and in her more self-confident moments Stafford managed a quite different perspective on her situation. She announced that a break with that past was precisely the liberation she needed. Essential to her cure, she decided, was distance from the close-knit literary circles she and Lowell had been caught up in since their marriage. She had never felt comfortable as part of a literary cabal, as she now characterized both their friends from southern days and from the Partisan Review set. The competitive, claustrophobic spirit of those associations, she concluded, had played no small part in bringing on the troubles she was only now slowly recovering from. (“Bring a number of talented people together in a close area, and the neurotic tremors begin vibrating,” William Barrett commented of the PR crowd. “Americans, who have less of a tradition of the salon or literary circle, fling themselves at the business with greater innocence—and violence”) In a letter to Peter Taylor over the summer, Stafford credited her new understanding of her unhappiness to her doctors. In fact, the revelation was not new. Long ago—in Baton Rouge—she had linked her fevers and her thirst for alcohol with too many intimidating friends who were obsessed with books and were brutal, or at least not gentle, with people. “I have been grateful, in this year, to be treated by my doctor as a human being and not as a writer and not as an outsider,” she wrote to Taylor; “if I can only remember how wonderful this relationship has been, I think I shall be able to protect myself from those situations in which I become shy and suspicious that I am being battened on because I have a small reputation or in which I am tormented because I do not ‘belong.’ ”
Not uncharacteristically, Stafford was overstating a transition in her life. To be a writer and an outsider had not simply been the destructive identity she suggested. On the contrary, it had been a mark of distinction. She had struggled for years to put her imagination and sense of alienation to creative use, and in her heady literary life with Lowell she had found a path that led not to the frustrated marginality she saw in her father but to an influential elitism. She had deliberately sought connection with Lowell’s “very fabulous life,” as she had confessed to Hightower; she herself had battened on associations that carried with them some reputation, social or literary. Once arrived, she had mostly wittily, sometimes anxiously, cultivated the acerbic profile of outsider.
The question facing her was how to follow the counsel that Peter Taylor had given her a year before, which fit with her own diagnosis—how to find “a community … where people would care for [her] as a person not as a writer, [how] to develop an interest in a career other than writing … to begin to make a life of [her] own.” As she had acknowledged in her article for Vogue, her convalescent dependence on doctors had to end, or at least significantly diminish. She left Payne Whitney in November 1947 and moved to an apartment at 27 West Seventy-fifth Street, reassured that her sessions with Dr. Sherfey would continue, but unclear about what shape the rest of her life might take, whether she could control her drinking, whether she would write again. Lacking a new circle to turn to, she was immediately preoccupied with gingerly adjusting her relations to her old friends, determined to avoid her former role.
Cecile Starr was once again the loyal, nonliterary friend whom she counted on for help through a difficult transition, and who readily obliged. She had already been preparing the way before Stafford’s release, holding a party for her in the spring. Stafford’s poise had been precarious then and continued to be tenuous. She crumbled when Caroline Gordon unexpectedly appeared (her promised absence, Stafford claimed, had been what convinced her to venture out). Just how unsettling the encounter was for her was suggested by a letter about the gathering that Stafford wrote to Lowell, with whom she was still in frequent, but now much calmer, contact. “It was more than just seeing Caroline,” she explained:
it was realizing how you and I together, unable to grapple with the enormous complexity of our problems, took refuge from them in other people—and often it did not matter who the people were. We could not be blamed for that; the Tates, when we first knew them, were delightful company, they were wise critics, they were helpful, they seemed really fond of us, and I think that in a way, Caroline is still fond of us … and that her questioning me about where I lived was not altogether malicious. I remembered the anguish of the year in Tennessee and I was struck in a heap to think of how Caroline had always said she thought of us as her children, because we were children, we have been everyone’s children.
Running into the Rahvs evoked comparably bad memories. When Stafford saw Natalie on the street one day, she had “a fit of trembling and terror,” she wrote to Lowell. Meeting Philip on another occasion, she promptly wrote to Peter Taylor that the encounter “returned to me a whole world of tiresomeness, of a thousand and one nights of nothing wonderful but only the most sterile talk about writers and their private lives.” They invited her to a party to meet Arthur Koestler, and she realized with great relief that there was no reason she had to go or feel guilty about not going; she could, and did, decline and counted it a major step in her development.
But the biggest step was cultivating another community. Out of the hospital, Stafford began going to Columbia to take science courses, which she explained in part as research for her Lucy novel, In the Snowfall—a refresher course on collegiate life to help her with her setting. But the new regimen seems mostly to have been a determined effort to sample the nonliterary life. “I am studying Botany and genetics and I enjoy it very much indeed,” Stafford wrote to Lowell. “I find scientists much more interesting than writers and my favorite new word is ‘skeptical.’ ” As she no doubt hoped, her preference roused Lowell to a defense of literature, but she was undaunted, and quite entertaining, in her newfound love of the laboratory: “I have never felt so liberated in all my life and some time I should like you to be introduced to the glories of my new study: you would see what I meant if you were to watch a great blob of plasmodium feeding upon a fungus.” In fact, her studies didn’t last very long. Toward the spring of 1948 she confessed to Lowell that the experiment hadn’t really taken: “You will be as pleased as I am to know that I have had to give up the science. I was not understanding White-head and was feeling sick with guilt for not doing so (as I was always guilty for not reading Catholic apologetics even after you’d given up trying to improve my mind) so that I was getting no writing done.”
More important was her friendship with Dr. Alfred Cohn, a cardiologist in his late sixties who was affiliated with the Rockefeller Institute. He knew several friends of hers—he had published a book with Robert Giroux and had been a teacher of Henry Murray, the doctor whom Stafford counted as “the first of [her] saviours” during the fall of 1946 (and whom she also saw several times after leaving the hospital). “Dr. Cohn,” Stafford reported to Lowell, “is directing my scientific re-education,” but the relationship was more lasting than her dabbling at Columbia. Cohn was smitten with Stafford, who in turn was flattered by the attentions of the older, elegant man, and the two of them took to having tea at the Plaza regularly. Owner of a great library (which he bequeathed to the Rockefeller Institute), Dr. Cohn was hardly an unliterary companion. But he was part of the medical world and he was a careful, unthreatening friend. He seems to have understood that Stafford didn’t need yet another judgmental mentor—understood it better, in fact, than Stafford sometimes did, lapsing into her old insecure role. “Before we meet on Friday I must prepare you for the fact that I am a strict contender for your friendship,” he wrote to her with the formality of a suitor, “but that I cannot accept the responsibility of being a superego—and so I am not for anything that betters you or interferes with the free play of your faculties.”
Stafford was far from sure that she had found a haven to replace the hospital, and her confidence ebbed and flowed. “It
has been rather rough and on the whole I hated the loss of all that calm and all that protection,” she wrote to Lowell after being out of Payne Whitney for about a month. “Terribly slowly and terribly wonderfully, I am growing up. I have days of terror and on those days I talk only bombast to Dr. Sherfey (at last she has really used that word and said—but most compassionately—that my rhetoric frequently slows up the interviews)…. But on the whole I am happy, or, at least, I know what happiness is.” She resisted grand claims of recovery, recognizing that the year was a transition, not an arrival. She acknowledged that she was balanced uneasily between new friends and old ones. “I cannot truly feel that this life of being made over by men old enough to be my fathers and grandfathers is the right one, but it is a pleasant and a very safe stopgap,” she wrote to Lowell, while admitting to Taylor that she hadn’t left the old dangerous life behind: “Alas, I am still weak and foolish, and I still have a mortal fear of such people from the past as Allen and Caroline and all the cut-throats from Partisan Review.”
STAFFORD’S REACTION to her insecurity was not, however, to retreat; she did not play the fragile convalescent that year. In fact, in the writing she immediately began doing, she took on precisely the difficult subjects she might have been expected to evade: her hospital experience and her ambivalence about her old friends and mentors. And she did it in settings that seemed least likely to put her at her ease. Right after emerging from Payne Whitney, she shared the podium with Lionel Trilling at Bard College’s Conference on the Novel and delivered a lecture entitled “The Psychological Novel.” She never liked speaking before the public. The critic’s authority didn’t come naturally to her even under the best of circumstances. Yet she ventured in front of an audience featuring some of those Partisan Review cutthroats to offer her views on a general subject—creativity and psychological instability—that not only was a live debate in that magazine’s pages but also touched very close to home for Stafford. Trilling’s “Art and Neurosis” had appeared in PR two years before, and William Barrett’s “Writers and Madness” in the January-February issue of 1947. They were intimidating predecessors who had scrutinized Freud with a rigor she hadn’t. Her claim to special expertise on the subject was a highly sensitive one: she was a writer who had just spent a year in Payne Whitney.