The Interior Castle

by Ann Hulbert

  I tried to recite the Psalms I knew and the Shakespeare sonnets.… But I could not remember anything and could not extricate myself from the absorbing bear-hug of egocentricity. I wrestled weakly against it, half-suffocated, fevering, unable, in the engrossing struggle, to imagine anything beyond this present pain.… I began, amid the lowering mountains of the night, to yield to the addiction of the sick at heart, that dogged hunt for the wrong turning, that tedious, tireless retracing of the erratic, stumbling footsteps that have brought us to the bottom of our world. Began to marshall my draggled ranks of gnashing guilts and bilious wraths, beginning from the beginning of the history of my woe which, in the amnesia that obliterated all memory of joy, became my whole history. The smithereens of my smashed self lay in a bleeding heap inside my skull, past mending, past miracle. How fantastic was the instinct to preserve these ugly, unworthy ruins. But it was an instinct so brutish and so crafty that I had no power against it; if I had been able to destroy them once and for all, this rubble pile of myriad and miserable selves, it would have been through accident. I could not kill myself; I wished to be dead but I did not wish to die, I was afraid…

  It was an echo of the diagnosis Stafford had made long before in “Truth and the Novelist”: she was trapped by the bitter facts of her life and seduced by the illusion that somehow writing could be therapeutic. But the lesson of that first failed, raw autobiographical novel, Which No Vicissitude, still held, all too tenaciously: the “bear-hug of egocentricity” doomed her imagination.

  She didn’t give up. The State of Grace drafts suggest desperation on the one hand and potentially fruitful experimentation on the other. It seems clear that the two were not far apart for Stafford as she floundered in search of direction. The disparate pieces of the manuscript show her dipping back into the Boulder material she had struggled with in In the Snowfall, as if she couldn’t relinquish the effort to inscribe the ordeal of her childhood in Colorado. Some of the research she had done in the course of her Samothrace project showed through in her portraiture of her family, and above all in the prominent place her father now occupied. Earlier he had loomed over her Lucy story from the periphery, but now a surreal caricature of him was at the center. At the same time, Stafford also drew from her much more recent experience in the hospital after her heart attack. The setting was clear: “I was a sick middle-aged woman and Sam had widowed me in December during the holidays.” She gave Sam the surname Gottlieb, as close as she dared come to Liebling.

  Much as she had done before in Sonie’s ruthless introspective monologues of despair, here she tried again to give shape to her pain. Her prose was a wild variation on the metaphoric description she had tried in “The Interior Castle”; she even called on some of the same imagery of the besieged mansion. She was, her first-person narrator explained, “absorbed with the mythological terrain of my body,” and Stafford let loose with language that mixed the baroque convolution of her earliest style and the intense, symbolic concreteness of her later prose:

  Within such cul de sacs does the mind rummage when hurricanes or wars or plagues assail the castle. It finds some juiceless scar, some desiccated bone or shrivelled rind, and with perseverance worries it, getting by heart each minuscule fissure and node and maggot-tunnel. Though the labor is monotonous and tiring and exasperating, it offers asylum from the responsibilities of pain. Industrious within my blind and private alley, I had no time, I had no need, I had no obligation to discover why I was so sick (or was I hurt?) or when there would be an end to this mysterious dilemma.… The pain presented [fear] to me in an amazing number of guises, and the whole of my anatomy was as clear as a contour map.… It was a violent landscape, a mise-en-scene for the corybantics [sic] of evil spirits; they burned me, these incubi and bogeymen, they pinched me, harrowed me with colic. But for each perfidious roughneck, there was a deputy of my own, tutoring me patiently in how to ride with the waves and how to fall with the blows.

  Aware that such virtuosic rummaging in the mind could lead her far from the world and from the suspenseful investigation of “this mysterious dilemma”—why was her autobiographical protagonist so sick, or hurt?—Stafford tried a radically new maneuver. She took advantage of the surreal landscape she had entered upon and proceeded to visit hallucinations on her character in order to transport her from her present pain back into her past memories. In one sense, it was a facile device for linking the disparate pieces of Stafford’s intransigently fragmentary novel. But it was perhaps also an experiment that could have saved her from retreating into ever more claustrophobic corners of the self. This shifting focus was, after all, perfectly suited to the presiding theme of her undertaking: disorientation.

  That Stafford saw this is clear from the comments on the hallucinatory shifts between inside and out, between present and past, that she incorporated into her story. Her protagonist gave a name to her strange power of schizophrenic perspective, calling it “bilocation.” It offered a potential answer to Stafford’s nightmare of the isolated consciousness, a way of mediating the hidden internal world and the threatening external world. But it also implied a dangerous indeterminacy, as Stafford acknowledged in a subsequent, important passage. “This is not bilocation, I thought (or perhaps said),” her protagonist realized. “It’s dislocation. Every blessed part of me has swapped places and nothing fits anymore. For a quarter of a second I fell asleep and this is what I dreamed: There is a child who knows where an oyster is that has a pearl inside and the pearl will open like an oyster and inside it is a thistle.” It was Stafford’s consummate image of disenchantment: the child’s magical search crowned with painful disappointment. It was her final, desolate variation on St. Teresa’s image of the jewel that awaits the spiritual pilgrim in the ultimate, inner chamber.

  STAFFORD LEFT the hospital in early May of 1964 and moved to Liebling’s place in the Springs in East Hampton, a brown shingle house with modestly sized rooms and ample land extending out to the back. The house, which he had loved and which she had tended with increasing care during the time they spent there together (so much care that Liebling sighed to neighbors about his wife spending all her time on the house rather than on her book), was just about all that he left her and really the only place she had to go. It was a time of mixed hopes and fears, as convalescences usually were for her. The prospect of a fresh start beckoned, but life and the future seemed precarious. Certainly the drafts of her novel that centered on her ordeals suggested that the sense of dislocation was not easily shaken. A letter to her sister during the summer showed Stafford battling the same old demons, entrapped by her past. “I wish, as I have wished all my life,” she wrote impatiently, “that you would stop worrying when you don’t hear from me. When I am sick, I know how to get help, when I am low in mind I want above all to be left alone, when I am working well I dare not interrupt myself.” And then she turned to the most sensitive point and was promptly caught up in the old fury, which she made no effort to hide from her sister: “I’ve not written him [her father] … at all. Each time I contemplate a letter I feel so sick and sad that I find something else to do. That so preposterous a life should be so endlessly prolonged is an unfathomable mystery.”

  Yet she was prepared to take a more merciful perspective on another part of her past as she surfaced from her descent into disorientation. Her revival took an unexpected form: a renewal, of sorts, of ties with her old life. Lowell had apparently been in touch, and full of solicitude, and Stafford was eager to reciprocate. She wrote him a letter from the hospital that couldn’t have been a greater contrast to the messages that she had sent him from the hospital decades earlier, or to the resentment with which she had greeted most of his intrusions into her life since then (and with which she was to greet subsequent ones): “There’s no possible way of thanking you for your concern, for your lovely letters, for the books, the beautiful unpronounceable blue flowers … and for this new splendid gift which I feel I shouldn’t accept but am doing so with all the thanks in the world.�
�� Then, in return for whatever his splendid gift had been, she offered the gift of forgiveness for the pains of the past, about which Lowell had evidently been agonizing. It was Stafford in her most lyrical vein, completely sincere for the moment yet with a hint of precariousness not far from the surface: “My dear, please never castigate yourself for what you call blindness—how blind we both were, how green we were, how countless were our individual torments we didn’t know the names of. All we can do is forgive ourselves and now be good friends—how I should cherish that.”

  Lowell was more than ready to lend a hand, and set about helping to arrange a fellowship for her at Wesleyan University. She reported with some trepidation to Peter Taylor that plans were well under way: “Cal is at work on something for me at Wesleyan but that sounds very scary because there are intellectuals up there. Geographically it would be lovely, half way between Boston and New York, but I don’t know how I’d attend to Edmund Wilson and Dick Wilbur.” It was an ironic end to a stage in her life that had begun with her fatalistic letter to her friends the Thompsons about how hopeless her quest for a fellowship was, now that she was no longer in the Lowell-Tate orbit. Then she had gone to London and met Liebling. This time the fellowship did come through, and she put her fear of intellectuals aside and welcomed this new way station in an unclear future: “All is well,” she wrote to Taylor in the early summer. “Thanks to Cal and Bob Giroux I have been made a fellow at Wesleyan and I’m as pleased as anything.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Long Island

  AS STAFFORD PREPARED to make the shift to a radically new life, she sounded more apprehensive. She wrote to Lowell in the midst of moving from the Cosmopolitan Club, where she had been staying, to East Hampton, before heading for Wesleyan in the summer of 1964: “I’m well and restless and haunted but I think a reunion with my house and my cat will dull my keen desire to be gathered to Abraham’s bosom which probably isn’t as comfy as it’s made out.” The tone was typical: Stafford opened with the standard modernist lament—like everyone, she was restless and haunted—and then switched to her old-fashioned, colloquial style. It was a curious self-portrait that dramatized her unhappiness and at the same time domesticated it: she was dreaming of her cozy house, but she was also dreaming of cold death. The tension was there throughout the remaining decade and a half of her life, as Stafford continued to be restless and haunted—and became increasingly sick. What writing she managed to produce was a testament to that tension. She kept on struggling, or at least she talked about struggling, toward a novel about her sense of dislocation, apparently willing to experiment with less structured prose. Stalled as ever on that project, she lapsed into her colloquial style and perfected a quaintly anachronistic, often curmudgeonly perspective in an assortment of quite modest nonfiction pieces. The manner recalled the provincial tone that she had cultivated early on, only now with an often dyspeptic edge. That domesticated rage, like her raging domesticity in her beloved Springs house, preoccupied her, but neither was a match for her lurking desire to be done with life.

  Stafford anticipated a year of productivity at Wesleyan. “I should be forced to work as I have not done for many years,” she wrote to her sister Mary Lee on leaving for Middletown, Connecticut. “The faculty is bound to be sophisticated and the boys are bound to be bright.” She knew she needed goading to start writing again, and she was probably remembering how she had responded to the pressures of academia the last time she had been there, at Iowa and LSU during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The company (mostly “boys” back then, too) had been intimidating, but for all of her insecurity she had been spurred to write. Her colleagues this time were certainly a far cry from the Liebling crowd, amid whom she had written little: Paul Horgan, the head of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan and an old friend of Robert Giroux’s, and Edmund Wilson and Father D’Arcy, whom she had known before, as well as a larger group of scholars, including Herbert Butterfield, René Dubos, Moses Hadas, and others. And there were few official burdens. The fellows were mostly left alone, except for a weekly gathering and a light load of student conferences.

  Yet when Stafford left Wesleyan in the spring of 1965, she confessed to her friend Nancy Flagg Gibney that during that year she had written “not a word except reviews.” And she told a newspaper interviewer, “There’s something inimical to me about an academic atmosphere—I can’t work at all.” She left Wesleyan briefly to be on a panel at a writers’ conference at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, which was as usual an anxiety-inducing experience. The discovery that Randall Jarrell was deeply depressed didn’t make it any easier; it was the last time she saw him before his death (possibly a suicide) the following fall.

  Back at Wesleyan she apparently kept quiet about her novel, and when her turn came to present some work-in-progress to the fellows, she read from her Samothrace manuscript. Her one larger-scale effort was an assignment from Barbara Lawrence, an editor at McCall’s, to write an article about Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite Oswald. Launching the piece was no small achievement, since it meant travel, which Stafford dreaded; she left Wesleyan for a trip to Dallas in May and spent several days interviewing Mrs. Oswald. But she tended to disparage the project and sounded a little apprehensive about actually completing the writing. In a letter to Allen Tate that spring, she cast her assignment in thoroughly pragmatic terms, describing it as a hedge against the future: she was writing, she confided, “for a magazine whose name I am ashamed to write down, but for one so rich that if I can get the story done I won’t be too badly let down if the Rockefeller grant doesn’t come through.”

  Rather than settling down to work, Stafford found plenty of diversions at Wesleyan. She ran a social hour every afternoon, drinking and talking with the less academic fellows, often mocking the donnish life. It was her familiar anti-intellectual pose, except this time she seemed to feel less of the defensiveness that had roused her to productivity in the past. She had an ideal companion in Edmund Wilson, who was notoriously scathing about the academy and who was happy to spend long cocktail hours with her. And as always, an appreciative audience soon gathered to hear her witty, acerbic talk.

  Given all the distractions and all the previous difficulties she had had with writing, it is perhaps hardly a surprise that Stafford made no progress on fiction that year. The fallow period was easily overlooked, thanks to the publication and warm reception of Bad Characters, a collection of nine of her stories and the longer “A Winter’s Tale,” in the fall of 1964 while she was at Wesleyan. Most of the notices, like the one in the New York Times Book Review, were an encouraging combination of praise and implicit expectation of more fine fiction to come: “Jean Stafford is surely one of our best writers. She makes the English language a weapon or a wand.”

  But the fiction wasn’t in fact under way just then, and though she made an energetic foray into journalism and so could claim some productivity for the first time in several years, it seems quite clear that Stafford’s literary trouble was essentially the same: the unwieldy truth, in particular autobiographical truth, continued to draw and to deter her. If she had ever entertained much expectation that the role of critic might open new nonfictional terrain to her, she made no real effort to develop a serious voice in the regular column she started writing for Vogue that year. Her monthly book reviews were brief (seven hundred words or so), largely devoted to summary, with some display of her distinctive prose, but not much sign of a unifying perspective or analytic intent. Many of the reviews were positive, and the praise was largely predictable (she liked Walker Percy, Saul Bellow, William Trevor, V. S. Pritchett). Although her subject was usually fiction, she showed little interest in working out any of her confusions about the direction of her own work in her discussions of other people’s writing.

  In an article called “Truth in Fiction,” published in 1966 in Library Journal, Stafford did face her difficulties, but she had plainly come to no new conclusions. It was a rehash of “Truth and the Noveli
st,” written fifteen years before when she was having trouble with In the Snowfall, the novel about Lucy McKee and her college days, and the gist was exactly the same: “While autobiography is inevitable, we must winnow carefully and add a good portion of lies, the bigger the better.” Ostensibly, the occasion for the reflections was also the same. Almost verbatim, Stafford detailed her ordeal with the Lucy novel, now cast as an episode long behind her.

  But she then very abruptly shifted to talk about her more recent writing life in the only fresh section of the essay, a discussion of her experience with Marguerite Oswald: “Let me change my tack now and tell you about a time more recently when telling the truth and nothing but the truth was the job I had to do.” That creaky transition perhaps suggests the real impetus for resurrecting her essay. In writing about her previous block with her autobiographical novel, she was indirectly writing about her current block, from which the Oswald interview was a kind of an escape.

  The journalistic project was quite a different tactic for overcoming obstacles than the one she had resorted to earlier. Then she had turned to more purely imagined material, and in The Catherine Wheel ended up writing a novel comparatively free of autobiographical fact and memory. This time she turned to more purely factual material. If subjectivity was the problem, she was ready to try objectivity and see where that led her. As “Truth in Fiction” went on to reveal, Liebling’s spirit presided over her Oswald project. The subject was close to his heart. Before his death, he had been collecting clippings for a “Wayward Press” column—never written—about Kennedy’s assassination. More important, the reportorial technique Stafford aspired to was modeled on her late husband’s methods, which she had seen in action when she accompanied him to New Orleans to talk to Earl Long. “What I wanted to do was report exactly what I heard and saw, not what I felt,” Stafford explained. “And the hardest job I had, when I started the writing, was to edit without editorializing.” She admiringly described Liebling’s oblique way of winning the crazy governor’s trust and then admitted that she had never managed to establish any rapport with the assassin’s peculiar mother, who was all but oblivious to Stafford throughout her long, addled monologue in defense of her son.