The Interior Castle

by Ann Hulbert

The Vanderpool stories painted a surprisingly cheery picture of childhood in Adams, and the grown-up Emily who narrated the stories seemed to have turned out to be a very witty character with a wholesome perspective on her past. There was no hint of the real trauma of Stafford’s youth, or at least what she later came to see as the trauma: her strange father, whom she saw in a different light after a period of childish adulation—as a version of Huck Finn’s pap, the man who kept his family forever on the margins of respectability. He was the figure who made escape imperative and yet also impossible, the character she tried to limn in In the Snowfall. Stafford had real trouble writing about him, though she did allude, however indirectly, to problematic paternal influence in her one other collected story (aside from “The Darkening Moon”) about young children, “Cops and Robbers.” Published in 1953, “Cops and Robbers” was a story notably not set in Adams but in Westport, and the tone was completely different from the spirit of her western stories. She drew on an incident from her own childhood that loomed large years later, at least in the memory of her sister Marjorie. In his penury, John Stafford had started cutting his family’s hair himself, to the mortification of his youngest daughter, who once rebelled midway through and sported a ragged look for months. In her story, young Hannah’s golden locks—which were just like her mother’s extravagantly admired hair—were shorn by a barber at the instruction of her father, who was wreaking indirect revenge on his wife. It was a devastating portrait of a child’s fall from innocent security into loveless anonymity: “She felt that she was already shrinking and fading, that all her rights of being seen and listened to and caressed were ebbing away. Chilled and exposed as she was, she was becoming, nonetheless, invisible.”

  In two very different Adams stories that appeared the same year as “Cops and Robbers,” sandwiched in among her Vanderpool tales, Stafford again alluded, again indirectly, to that darker version of her past. Here the “children” were grown-up, and the stories she told were of entrapment. They shared the vernacular vigor of Stafford’s sunnier Adams stories but reversed the Vanderpool plot line of progress toward healthy maturation. She avoided fathers altogether, making her characters orphans. The narrator of “In the Zoo” and Polly Bay, the protagonist of “The Liberation” (both published in 1953), could hardly have been less like resilient Emily, who prospered rebelliously in Adams and then presumably moved on, well prepared for abandoning her provincial past. Here Stafford portrayed an insidious destruction of spirit that rendered her characters, when they finally did manage to leave, anxious souls ill equipped to face the world.

  In the antipastoral Adams stories, Stafford’s protagonists were passive creatures who couldn’t fight back against the influences that oppressed them but could only try to flee. In “In the Zoo” two middle-aged sisters, meeting in Denver, were suddenly overcome by memories of the dismal past they had spent fifty miles north in Adams, where their view of the world and of themselves had been eroded by Mrs. Placer, their foster mother. A Dickensian figure, she ran a boardinghouse and dedicated herself to proselytizing a view that echoed John Stafford’s bleaker attitude, that “life was essentially a matter of being done in, let down, and swindled.” Polly Bay in the ironically titled “The Liberation” finally worked up the courage to escape the tyrannical provincialism of Adams to marry an Easterner, only to learn, just as she was ready to depart, that her fiancé was dead. Bravely, she set off anyway, but Stafford deftly conveyed the naïveté of her valor in the concluding sentences of the story: “How lonely I have been, she thought. And then, not fully knowing what she meant by it but believing in it faithfully, she said half aloud, ‘I am not lonely now’ ”

  What was striking in Stafford’s Adams stories was the distance she established from the troublesome landscape of her past, which not so long before had frustrated her efforts on In the Snowfall. With her roguish girls, she had discovered a comic voice that was a welcome counterweight to the highly wrought prose of The Catherine Wheel. Even in the darker stories about older “children”—the intimidated orphans—Stafford managed to convey psychological suffocation without getting caught in the tortuous narrative of introspection that had tangled her third novel. Instead, she found a tragicomic approach that worked. She turned to drama and above all to dialogue, direct and indirect, as the external clues to casts of mind. Her virtuosic style was ideally suited to capturing the nuances of speech, and in these stories she found a way to make language itself one of her main subjects, without succumbing to mere surface preoccupation with style.

  A similar comic distance liberated Stafford to conquer other terrain that had proved difficult in the past. In two of her lighter non-Adams stories of these years, “Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience” (1955) and “Caveat Emptor” (originally published as “The Matchmakers” in Mademoiselle in 1956), she turned to themes that she had tried to treat in, respectively, Autumn Festival and her Neville novel. Now she had the satiric perspective that she had lacked then, and she was able to draw on two ironic genres—the tale of the innocent American abroad and the campus spoof—in putting resistant autobiographical material to fictional use. In fact, Stafford demonstrated a kind of double distance: at the same time that she drew on the conventions of the genres, she stood back and satirized them.

  Admittedly, Stafford’s comic approach meant domesticating the themes that had overwhelmed her novelistic efforts years before. Nashvillian Maggie Meriwether’s mortifying afternoon among decadent European aristocrats was an echo of Gretchen Marburg’s ordeal among the Germans. But Maggie’s identity crisis was a mere superficial episode, where Gretchen’s disorientation led to a radical convulsion of consciousness. That was precisely Stafford’s point: the richness of Maggie’s experience was not really in the experience itself, but in the telling of it. For in this verbally acrobatic story, the central subject was language. High-spirited Maggie, off on a European lark, was unexpectedly “bamboozled into muteness by the language of France,” which rendered her an embarrassed outsider among the voluble guests gathered at M. le Baron’s manor house. But the story’s happy ending declared Maggie’s alienation on this outlandish afternoon to be the perfect source for lighthearted storytelling, once “the most sophisticated, the most cosmopolitan, the prettiest raconteur of middle Tennessee” was back among her fellow Americans and in command of her tongue. By then Stafford had already shown how to tell the tale with a display of her stylistic repertoire. She mocked the varieties of vacuous chatter, relishing the occasion for exotic words, serpentine sentences (she opened with a ten-line extravaganza), colloquialisms, and daringly manipulated similes and metaphors.

  Stafford called on the same tone and technique in “Caveat Emptor,” turning what had been a heavy-handed diatribe against Neville into a deft satire of Alma Hettrick College for Girls—and of two scholarly misfits there, new members of the faculty, who were appalled by the silly school. Standing back from earnest Malcolm and Victoria (whose thesis—Some hate Borrowings from Provençal fin amour in Elizabethan Miscellanies and Songbooks—recalled Stafford’s own on thirteenth-century love motifs), she identified the problem in her first attempt at a takeoff. “They were far too young and their principles were far too vernal for them to rise above their circumstance,” she observed of her characters and implicitly of her youthful self; “their laughter was not very mirthful but was, really, reflexive.” This time Stafford had no trouble rising above the circumstance. Appropriating details from her abandoned Neville manuscript, she shaped another comic drama about clashing vocabularies and values, as her two high-minded teachers rebelled against their banal surroundings.

  Stafford relished incongruity in these stories, turning it into comedy that was mirthful precisely because it wasn’t reflexive. She had the distance to make the most of juxtapositions and tensions that had once seemed threatening. And in writing about language, she was in a sense commenting on her own stylistic experiments, her efforts to intermix the polished and the colloquial, to avoid precious refinement in t
he first and facile contrivance in the second. Her stories reflect an appreciation of the ways in which style can betray its supposed masters. Pretensions don’t last long: appearances can be deceiving, but the way people sound tells more than they may want others to know—or than others may want to know.

  The frightening, rather than amusing, implications of that theme emerged in two roughly contemporaneous but radically different stories, “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story” (1955) and “The End of a Career” (1956). The farcical tone that marked so many of Stafford’s stories of the 1950s was gone here, and so was any trace of her own past experience. Instead, Stafford seemed to be drawing on the conventions of fable in these stories, which both had a prophetic cast. “The End of a Career” reads like a parable about the future of Stafford’s own art. “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story” can’t help looking in retrospect like an uncanny foreshadowing of her personal fate.

  Both were, once again, stories of retreat. “When Beatrice Trueblood was in her middle thirties and on the very eve of her second marriage, to a rich and reliable man—when, that is, she was in the prime of life and on the threshold of a rosier phase of it than she had ever known before,” Stafford began, and then gave the conventional opening the twist of a dark fable, “she overnight was stricken with total deafness.” Beatrice’s affliction, it became clear, was psychosomatic: she desperately wanted to shut out the “whole menagerie of passions—fire-breathing dragons and bone-crushing serpents and sabertoothed tigers” that seethed within marriages. Stafford once again called on the imagery of St. Teresa’s besieged castle: Beatrice, the ever-patient listener haunted by the “humiliating, disrobing displays” that she witnessed between her parents and endured with her first husband, did what Pansy Vanneman in “The Interior Castle” in the end denied herself—sought escape into that inner chamber by willing deafness. But then Beatrice found herself trapped. “She had not bargained for banishment, she said; she had only wanted a holiday.… And now,” she explained, “I’m sorry because I’m so lonely here, inside my skull. Not hearing makes one helplessly egocentric.”

  Stafford was explicit here as nowhere else about the nature of psychosomatic travails, though the mind’s struggle with matter and with other minds was the preoccupation of most of her stories. The whole point of the fable was to look behind fate to find psychological forces working with an incredible, fairy-tale-like potency. Wishes were granted, and the wisher was overwhelmed. Stafford expertly balanced psychological realism and a sense of the mind’s fantastic powers. “My God,” Beatrice exclaimed, incredulous that she had actually chosen deafness, “the mind is diabolical!… Even in someone as simple as I.”

  Stafford seems to have had similar trouble putting much stock in psychosomatic explanations in life—despite her brilliant exploration of them in fiction. “I have had two rather good days during which I felt that I was on the verge of a revelation: what Sherfey was trying to get across to me was the meaning of ‘psychosomatic’ and there have been moments when I’ve almost understood,” she once wrote to a friend, “but I listen to everything she says with no more than the skin of my mind.” She acknowledged the inconsistency of her skepticism in a letter in the spring of 1956 to another friend, Nancy Flagg Gibney, about a conversation with her “groper.” They were discussing the possible psychological causes of a tearing eye that began after her trip to the Virgin Islands to divorce Jensen, when she had been enchanted by Gibney’s baby:

  If one can accept the premises [sic] that the trouble is psychogenic (and it’s very hard for me to do so; she said, “You wrote a story about psychological deafness so why can’t you accept this?” and my reply, the only possible one, was “Yes, but I don’t believe it”) things fit neatly into place—the hysterectomy and immediately afterward my first experience with a baby. But it’s too neat and even if we’ve found the cause, how can the symptoms be removed?

  Twenty years later, Jean Stafford’s story took a turn not unlike Beatrice’s: overnight she, the virtuosic talker, was suddenly struck dumb. Too neat though it may seem, it is hard not to be reminded by this story (which was originally entitled “Patterns”) of Stafford’s eerie guidance to a biographical reading of her work in her sketch years before: “She was terrified by the patterns of her life,… by the fact that she had imagined and had written much that had happened later.”

  The silencing of Stafford’s speech was still decades away. It was her writing that was worrying her during the mid-1950s. In December of 1955, Stafford confessed to Katharine White that she was having trouble producing stories, never mind the novel. It was not a confession she was making widely (on the contrary, an item in the Writer’s Newsletter in the spring of 1956 announced that she was finishing up her new novel in Westport). But the admission lurked within a story that she had sent to The New Yorker earlier in the fall and that was published in January of 1956. True to the story’s title—“The End of a Career”—it turned out to be the last year her fiction appeared with any regularity in the magazine. Only two stories, neither of which she included in her Collected Stories, appeared the next year, and then more than a decade passed before “The Philosophy Lesson,” drawn from In the Snowfall, was published in 1968 and another decade before “An Influx of Poets” appeared in 1978.

  “The End of a Career,” Katharine White wrote to Stafford, “is done in such an interesting style.… Everything is meant to be somewhat larger than life, I take it, since this is a sort of fable in hyperbole.” It was the story of fifty-year-old Angelica Early, “one of the most beautiful women in the world’s history,” and the demise of her career dedicated to the preservation of that beauty. A variation on “I Love Someone,” the story was about the allure and the ultimate hollowness of striving for a life of perfect surfaces. Stafford encouraged an analogy between Angelica’s enterprise and the artist’s vocation:

  Perhaps, like an artist, [Angelica] was not always grateful for this talent of beauty that destiny had imposed upon her without asking leave, but, like the artist, she knew where her duty lay; the languishing and death of her genius would be the languishing and death of herself, and suicide, though it is often understandable, is almost never moral.… If my talent goes, I’m done for, says the artist, and Angelica said, if I lose my looks, I’m lost.

  Of course Angelica did lose her looks as she aged, despite all the craftsmanship that she devoted to preserving herself. In this fairy tale, there was no fountain of youth, no salvation—except for love, as a wise doctor tried to explain to her: “ ‘There is an aesthetic principle,’ he pursued, ‘that says beauty is the objectification of love. To be loved is to be beautiful, but to be beautiful is not necessarily to be loved.… Go and find a lover and obfuscate his senses.’ ” It was a version of the principle that Stafford the artist had poignantly declared to Lowell years before: that literary talent for her held second place to the talent he had cruelly told her she lacked—the talent of loving and being loved. The principle had been a recipe for pain then, when she was lonely and her talent was in full flower, and it was even harder to live by now, when she was leading the solitary spinster life and doubting her gift. (She was also doubting that craftsmanship could compensate—though she tried: White proposed a plot to her, which Stafford turned into “The Mountain Day,” not one of her better stories.) The words that she had written to her sister five years earlier at another creative impasse lurk behind Angelica’s: “If [my gift] has [gone], God knows what will become of me because that is the only thing in the world I have.”

  Though not consciously confronting the end of her career, Stafford was less sure of her gift at this point. She had produced an impressive group of stories, but they didn’t seem to help spur on the novel. She had found a way to write about Colorado, Europe, and Stephens by stepping back and scaling down. Short stories are of course not necessarily minor, but Stafford was quite consciously shaping hers as circumscribed tales—and she was quite consciously counting on producing something longer. Her projected novel, howeve
r, apparently loomed as a loose and baggy monster—more on the Boston Adventure model than her other carefully tailored novels. And as the years went by it seemed to get even looser and baggier as she groped among the different, mostly dark episodes of her life for a plot to propel it, for perspective on her all-too-familiar protagonist.

  When Peter Taylors story about their youthful aspirations, “1939,” came out in The New Yorker in 1955, Stafford was vividly reminded of the early years of making her literary way. Taylor dared her to counter his portrait of her as a young artist with her own version: “If any little detail in it makes you cross, I hope—no I challenge you to write a story giving some impressions of your own of that part of our lives.” To Nancy Flagg Gibney she admitted that the story had made her cross, but Taylor’s challenge was just what posed problems for Stafford, and her poignant reply to him helped explain why: “I thought the story fine and very sad,” she told him, “—at least it was for me because I don’t see much difference in myself from those gauche days although I do dress better. What alarmed me the most, I suppose, was that all of it seemed like yesterday and nearly as important as it was then: so that, on your part, is genius.”

  Stafford was still too close in spirit to that past to turn her impressions into successful fiction. Back then, in 1939, full of insecurity and ambition, she had been anxiously attempting to launch her career; now as her career approached an awkward midpoint, she knew she hadn’t escaped the insecurity. She feared that her peak might be behind her, and a certain ambivalence seemed to have edged out ambition. As she looked ahead, wondering how to make a living, those early, fabulous days cast a shadow. “I’m quite sure [grant applications] will never work in a million years,” she wrote dispiritedly to the Thompsons as she set about applying for them anyway. “It might if I were still married to Cal and were still best friends with the Tates but now there’s scarcely a prayer.”