by Ann Hulbert
But in these stories, and in The Catherine Wheel, the novel she turned to when she abandoned In the Snowfall, Stafford was writing autobiographically in a thematic sense, as she worked through a transition in both her life and her writing. She was trying to find out whether living at a “low pitch” was a possibility for her, and what kind of price it might entail. Was she capable of sustaining a level of peace and detachment that could spare her the turmoil she had known during her marriage to Lowell? And she was trying to find out just how immediately from life she could draw her fictional material. How much could she afford to immerse herself in the drama of her past and of troubled personal relations, and how much did she need the distance and decorum of style to tame it? She addressed the dilemma in different forms in her fiction, where her inclination seemed increasingly to detachment.
In the early 1950s the dilemma was also surfacing with renewed intensity in her life, as the first year of relative calm in her marriage with Jensen began to give way to trouble. The acclaimed writer he had married on very brief acquaintanceship was, he discovered, far unhappier than he had ever dreamed. Drinking heavily and plagued with medical troubles, Stafford was in and out of the hospital. And her past continued to haunt her with an intensity that Jensen, whose exposure to her father and Mary Lee had been entirely cordial, found difficult to fathom. Her sessions with Dr. Sherfey seemed to him counterproductive; at least her depression only increased. During a rare trip out to Mary Lee’s ranch in Colorado in August of 1951, when her father was visiting as well, Stafford summoned up a bleak hope that she might be able to explain the torment of her past and perhaps overcome it. “I think maybe at last I shall be able to convey to Dr. Sherfey and to you exactly what this blight has been that has twisted and hallucinated me all my life and perhaps you, Oliver, will finally understand my unnatural feeling toward my father,” she wrote to him as she was about to return to Westport. “Seeing him again I am amazed that all of us did not commit suicide in our cradles. Maybe at last I can get rid of some of the poison.”
When she got back, she retreated to the hospital, thoroughly shaken by her visit with her father and clearly not eager to return to Jensen. “I don’t want to go,” she wrote to Mary Lee about the prospect of leaving the hospital, which was once again her asylum. “I never want to leave this simplicity and the utter freedom of this small space in which there is nothing superfluous.” She did come home, and she managed to finish The Catherine Wheel that fall, but there was no real rapprochement between her and Jensen. They were a world apart, as had seemed so obvious to many of their friends when they married, and now the distance meant strife. Stafford was scathing about his middlebrow journalistic crowd. (He left Life soon after they married, and became associate editor at American Heritage in 1954.) Jensen was equally dismissive of her literary circle, convinced that the company was unhealthy; he was impatient with their eccentricities, their excessive drinking, and put off by all the backstabbing. The quarrels between the two of them—which usually began, Jensen remembered, with “the three big topics of our era: Communism, the Catholic Church, Psychiatry”—were fierce.
When Stafford went out West again in the summer of 1952, invited by the Writers’ Conference in Boulder to deliver the keynote lecture (the speech she had heard Ford Madox Ford give fifteen years earlier), she took advantage of the geographic distance to initiate a separation from Jensen. Thus her second marriage unraveled where the first had in a sense begun, in her encounter with Lowell at the Writers’ Conference in 1937—and her literary career arrived at a plateau at the site where she had started the climb upward. Her letters to Jensen from Boulder were letters of retreat. She had no more energy for involvement, she wrote to him, echoing her passionless protagonists: “I feel a desperate fatigue and I should think you would too—a fatigue that comes from an expenditure of emotion. We cannot do that anymore.” In a letter a week later, she tried to explain her resigned embrace of loneliness, which she both dreaded and yet needed:
I cannot give you the kind of help that a wife should give a husband.… [I]t is useless for me to say, the fault is mine and I will correct it. I cannot correct it because it goes so deep and is bound up with my writing which I cannot in any way relinquish. A woman so isolated by nature as I am, so terrified of possessiveness, cheats when she marries and I shall not soon forgive myself even though I did not mean to cheat.
At the same time, Stafford delivered a lecture of retreat in Boulder. The conference, at which she was expected to talk to prospective writers and read their work, as well as give the main speech, was precisely the kind of spotlight she was eager to avoid. Her reluctance apparently showed in her bearing, as she mumbled and stood or sat hunched in front of her classes (the students had been primed by Stafford’s friends to ask questions, to spare her mortifying silences). And her address was devoted, paradoxically, to the theme that writers should be read and not seen or heard. Once again, to an even greater extent than in “The Psychological Novel” and “Truth and the Novelist,” she adopted the anecdotal style of the amateur—and, as if to emphasize her fusty approach, called her talk “An Etiquette for Writers.” Boulder disarmed her with nostalgia, she explained, and she “concluded at last it would be impossible for me to speak here with academic detachment of the art of the novel, or the state of the novel, or the future of the novel, or the novelist and society, or the novelist and psychoanalysis. I knew that I should be able to do little more than peregrinate amongst personal meanders.”
Her theme was familiar: that a decorous distance ought to be maintained between art and life. Where she had previously argued against exhibitionism, she now took commercialism to task. Her target was the transformation of the writer into a huckster for the big business of publishing. She disapproved of “the private-made-public life” of authors, this time not within their own pages but on the promotion circuit that had become a routine part of publication. She spoke as a disillusioned innocent, who had started out with visions of writing not as a profession but as a pure end in itself, and had been rudely awakened to the book business by her first publishing experience.
It was hardly an original indictment, though Stafford’s version was charming enough and gave her an opportunity to do some reminiscing about her college days. But it is possible to read the talk in a more personal light, as a comment on the state of her own career as much as on the state of the publishing business. Especially in hindsight, her reflections seem to betray a sense that she, the once much-hyped writer, was entering a phase in which she hoped (and feared) that the pressure would be off. She sounded as though she was somehow trying to prepare the way for a second act considerably less celebrated than her first had been. She was being lionized by her hometown, and her latest book, The Catherine Wheel, was selling quite well, but she was determined to downplay her stature and her future. The burden of reputation was heavy, she told her audience, and though she wasn’t speaking directly of her own experience, her anecdote spoke prophetically, and poignantly, to what lay ahead for her:
In recent years we have seen the birth and flourishing of literary reputations months and sometimes even years before the writers to whom they belong ever appear in print. They have acquired a solid status on the strength of their intention, on their charm and their wit and their presentableness at dinner parties.… I know of a man who has been called a writer all his life—and he is nearing sixty—who has, nevertheless, published nothing except an excerpt from his “forthcoming novel” in an obscure and ephemeral magazine.… It is a full-time job to be a non-practicing writer and I suppose that it is an honorable enough profession but it should get itself a new name.
Of course Stafford’s reputation had been founded on a truly unusual book. But she had felt the burden of reputation nonetheless, and from two sides: she had known not only the pressures of publishers, but also the disdain of her poetic friends and colleagues for the mass success and celebrity she had enjoyed. At the same time, even among that company, cultivating a lit
erary persona was part of the game—an especially intimidating part. As she well knew, her charm and wit, her conversational virtuosity, her “presentableness at dinner parties,” had played a role in establishing key connections for her fifteen years earlier when she had so impressed the visiting faculty at the Writers’ Conference, and those social gifts had been part of her public literary profile ever since. She felt increasingly ambivalent about that—an ambivalence perfectly embodied in her speech. Certainly the role of author on the dais ill suited her; she wasn’t just being modest when she complained in her speech that she was not very good at it. And yet here she was, relying on precisely the superficial qualities she had impugned—giving a charming, witty, after-dinner sort of speech. Stafford may have disdained the public performance that she was called upon to give (in particular now that she had dedicated herself to her “low pitch,” post-Lowell life), but even more she dreaded anything that approached real personal disclosure. The anecdotal charm was her defense against confessional revelation—especially now that her writing was not going as smoothly as it once had.
She alluded to her troubles in one sentence that stands out in her speech as a revelation, however oblique. It was Stafford’s declaration of privacy:
Writing is a private, an almost secret enterprise carried on within the heart and mind in a room whose doors are closed; the shock is staggering when the doors are flung open and the eyes of strangers are trained on the naked and the newborn; one’s doubts and misgivings and fears should be allowed to rest in sick-room quiet for a while.
Stafford was drawing both on a universal metaphor—linking literary creativity and birth—and on her own, idiosyncratic chamber imagery. The result was a rather unsettling portrait of the writing process, a striking contrast to the pure youthful zeal for expression that she had recalled earlier in the talk. The progression she described here could hardly be further from the conventional birth sequence: mysterious gestation followed by miraculous arrival in the world and a proud presentation by parents. Stafford evoked an unnatural, almost sinister gestation, followed by an exposure that seemed above all to entail shame. She emphasized doubt and fear, rather than relief and joy. Stafford’s imagery conveyed a sense of failure, or at least trepidation, not just about her future as a writer but also about her fate as a woman. There was no vision of fruitful procreation, literary or biological. Instead she came close to accusing herself of a kind of perversity.
Back from the conference, Stafford stayed in Westport for a couple of months, working up her resolve to leave, which she did in the fall of 1952, having prepared Jensen for it in a series of self-accusatory letters from Boulder. “I am all you say, a liar, a breaker of promises, an alcoholic, an incompetent … a hypochondriac. Do you imagine that knowing this and knowing it full well—I can also love myself and wish to go on living, making your life an incessant disappointment?” One day in early November she called a friend to drive her to the train, and she went to New York, where she disappeared in another nightmarish week of solitary hotel living and drinking. In a letter to her sister Mary Lee after her flight, Jensen confirmed Stafford’s own bleak reading of her fate as a woman. Whatever possibilities literature still held for her, her life looked unhealthy and barren, and he acknowledged that he was not a husband who could help:
Her pessimism, catholic and profound, and her memory, which is photographic only, alas, in respect of unhappy things, hold her in thrall. She believes in diseases but not in cures. She is convinced she cannot live with me and also write.… What in God’s name is to happen to Jean, Mary Lee? I wish she could find some joy in life, some mode of existence sans all the violence, sickness, and mental self-torture. I can’t provide them. Cal Lowell couldn’t. Psychiatry, and it is not all nonsense whatever Jean thinks I believe, hasn’t done much for her in six years. Catholicism couldn’t help. She is 37 but the road is dark and the destination obscure.
Jensen had by then discovered that Stafford had ruled out one avenue of creativity. Not long after she arrived in New York, she retreated to her familiar asylum, the hospital, to tend to the uterine fibroid tumors she had been diagnosed as having. While she was there, she told her doctor to go ahead and perform an unnecessarily drastic treatment—a hysterectomy.
It was as though Stafford needed to make a dramatic statement of disillusionment with the ordinary, domestic plans with which she had begun her post-Lowell life. On emerging from Payne Whitney in 1947, she had written to Cal of her hopes that “I will soon be loved and married so that I can have a child before it is too late.” Now she was ready to be divorced again (before she left Westport she had already written to the Gibneys about a return trip to the Virgin Islands), and she was explicitly acknowledging what she had implicitly realized long before: that she could not imagine a life stable enough to have children.
Her assessment of her literary life during the early 1950s tended to be bleak as well. At least that was her judgment of the two longer pieces of writing she did then, after she had abandoned In the Snowfall, the biggest disappointment of all. (Her short stories, by contrast, kept coming and mostly escaped her ruthless self-condemnation.) Of The Catherine Wheel, which appeared in early 1952, she wrote disparagingly to Mary Lee: “All I ask you, when you read it, is to remember that this is only the present book, and I will write a better one.” She urged Caroline Gordon, with whom she was briefly back in touch, not to read it at all: “Please do not read my new one coming out in January. It is no good.”
And she was dismissive of her novella, A Winter’s Tale—which she had reworked from a story that in turn harked all the way back to Autumn Festival and to the sequel, featuring a monk named Dom Paternus, that she had once envisaged for Boston Adventure. “I only refurbished the dull thing to help Mary Lou [Aswell, at Harper’s Bazaar] get a collection together [it appeared in New Short Novels in 1954], since it’s far from my favorite story,” she wrote to Jensen, who had praised it. And to Lowell, who had evidently mentioned hearing about something she had written, she was even more self-effacing (after saying how proud she was of Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell for their recent successes): “I don’t know what new novel you mean unless it’s a nasty little rent-payer in a paper back. I’m not going to send you a copy because I don’t want you or anybody else to read it.” By the time she wrote that, toward the middle of the decade, she had reason to wonder whether her promise to Mary Lee that she would write a better novel had been in vain.
WHEN STAFFORD HAD BEGUN The Catherine Wheel—at least as she told it in “Truth and the Novelist”—she had had high hopes. Her renunciation of autobiography was a liberation, she claimed. As she described it, her project sounded like a confident effort to follow Dr. Sherfey’s prescription, to exercise a new “capacity to remember and experience lightness” and to avoid the ordeals she had encountered with In the Snowfall. She wrote of her new novel that “It deals with people I have never met and with a permutation of circumstances that has no counterpart in my own life, and it is set in a part of the world that bewitches me. (I had always quarreled with the landscape of the other.)” And she emphasized what relief that distance had brought: “I am not required to resuscitate any black humors and therefore to suffer again; and because my protagonist is not myself, I am kindly and uninhibited.”
The first half of her statement was true enough. The setting of The Catherine Wheel was New England, a town called Hawthorne that Stafford modeled more or less on Damariscotta Mills and that, as an exotic commingling of locals and summer intruders from Boston, was also a kind of inland, upscale Chichester, Sonie’s birthplace. The characters were not based on friends or relatives. As in many of the stories she had been writing, Stafford drew only thematically, not explicitly, from her own life. In fact, The Catherine Wheel blended essentially the themes of those stories in its two interwoven plots.
In the portrait of the summer agony of shy, twelve-year-old Andrew Shipley, who was tormented by the sudden indifference of his erstwhile best and only friend,
Victor Smithwick, Stafford found a new incarnation of the alienated youth who yearned to participate in the world but was instead overwhelmed by it. The counterbalancing portrait of Andrew’s spinster cousin, Katharine Congreve, a generation older than he, was perhaps Stafford’s most polished tale of an ossified heart. Katharine’s usual passionless calm had been disturbed when Andrew’s father, who two decades earlier had betrayed her to marry her orphan cousin Maeve instead, suddenly declared his love anew. Depositing his three children with her and setting off on a summer cruise with Maeve, he pleaded with her to marry him on his return.
During the summer spanned by the novel, which passed slowly on Katharine’s graceful Hawthorne estate, Andrew’s and Katharine’s preoccupations undermined what had for years been a special sympathy between them. In fact, suffering side by side, each was made only more miserable by intimations of the other’s unhappiness. While Andrew guiltily dreamed of killing Victor’s brother, Charles (to whom Victor now devoted all of his attention), Katharine guiltily nursed resentments of Maeve—and their guilt was compounded by the conviction that the other had somehow glimpsed their secret, shameful desires. Both were visited by the fear Stafford evoked so well. They were convinced that the mind could all too easily tyrannize the world (their evil wishes had for them the status of murderous deeds), and yet they were also convinced that the mind could be all too easily tyrannized by other minds. Katharine “was looking right through the back of his head,” Andrew was sure, “reading everything written there.”
As that summary suggests, Stafford had not been quite accurate when she implied that it was a novel of airiness and light. To be sure, she wasn’t plunging into the black humors of her own past, but she was again writing about the ravages of gentility and about the masochism of the mind, about social and psychological entrapment. At the same time, as in some of her stories about the perils of experience and the allure of detachment, the novel also encourages a self-reflexive reading. This all but plotless, painstakingly crafted book is an illustration of literary entrapment, of the encroachments of style on substance. But it is harder to tell how consciously Stafford had fashioned a mannered, static book to reflect the lives within it. To judge by her own comments on the novel, she hadn’t started out intending such a detached and coolly wrought book, even if she was aiming to avoid the immediacy of In the Snowfall.