The Interior Castle

by Ann Hulbert

  The last time I saw her … I said, “Come clean, sister. I’m on to your game. It’s Beatrice Trueblood’s story again. Okay, so you didn’t believe it—you wrote it, and now you’ve done it. You can’t speak because you find everything unspeakable. You can’t talk because you see no one fit to talk to.”

  She nodded her wonderful ravaged head and laughed. Her laughter was eloquent and unimpaired.

  As Stafford acknowledged, at least in her imaginative writing, the mind and the body worked on each other in ways sometimes too uncanny to be believed. Certainly she had been a prime candidate for a stroke on physical grounds, but the mental terrain had been prepared as well. She had come close to prophesying her affliction in her story, a fable about the ironically fitting fates that the head can visit upon the flesh. And she had clearly been poised to retreat before it ever happened. A month before her stroke, in her last review for Esquire, a pan of Mary Hemingway’s autobiography, How It Was, she announced an impending silence: “This is the last review I shall write for Esquire—through circumstance and not through disagreement; and we part in peace. It may be the last review I will write ever.”

  There was cruel irony in the fate of this woman who had counted on language as her salvation, and her aphasia was clearly a source of great pain and further rage. Her stuttering efforts to bring forth words were agonizing for her and for her friends. (One of her speech therapists—toward whom she exhibited “passive hostility,” according to a speech pathology report—remarked that Stafford made little attempt to ease her ordeal: “Marked speech frustration experienced by patient along with marked inclination to search … for polysyllabic word rather than common colloquial word which is easily within patient’s linguistic grasp.”) But in another sense, as Gibney suggested, it was an all too fittingly scripted fate for a woman who had come to feel that there was nothing very good to say about the world. Or, perhaps even more to the point, for a woman who was full of frustrated anger at her inability to find imaginative verbal form for her vision, full of disappointment at her lapse into disgruntled commentary—and, who knows, full of terror at hearing the echoes of her poor father in that decline. Perhaps it was not so much that Stafford saw no one fit to talk to as that she felt herself unfit to talk; silence was better than the speech she had been reduced to. She had long known the allure of isolation.

  Yet, as Stafford knew, retreat was not easily accomplished. A succession of women hired to help her were dismissed, usually in dramatic fashion; therapists were hardly more welcome. Her East Hampton friends drew back, daunted by the difficulty of any dealings with her (though they and others rallied with financial help, and Stafford sold roughly thirty acres of land to ease her dire straits). At the same time, her past, though she had tacitly abandoned hope of mastering it in fiction, was not to be banished. This time it was Lowell, rather than her family, who loomed large. Only a couple of months before her stroke (and a year before his death), he wrote her a letter from England, in which he waxed fondly nostalgic about their life together long ago:

  1940. Remember Chimes Street and Baton Rouge …? I got a letter last month from Vanderbuilt [sic] to write for Red’s [Robert Penn Warren’s] 70th festschrift. After struggling with a laborious prose compliment, I dropped it for a poem, more of the tone, the humidity, less critique. A hundred unusable things came back to me—the arrival of Gaga’s chairs, Peter’s earplug falling out at bridge …, Peter and I in pajamas sick over taking out Cinina’s [Warren’s wife’s] cat-shit, waiting still in pajamas outrageously for you to return from the office to get our lunch, Christmas with Red staring long at a sheep that looked like Cinina and saying it reminded [him] of someone he couldn’t place. You could toss up fifty times as much in the same number of words. How can I thank you?

  Time, but we must call it age, they are so inextricably married, is really full of novelty, and even wisdom, never quite enough to say we have repaired our losses or smoothed our distortions. Do you see I am trying to thank you for the past?… Once we thought we could potentially imagine everything, or anything. But I couldn’t have imagined these “mellow” days, and gentle as they are—what a mercy.

  Intimations of mortality were clearly very much with Lowell, as they were with Stafford, but his elegiac perspective was distinguished by an almost exultant tone. The same day he sent that note to her, he proclaimed in a letter to his friend and fellow poet Frank Bidart: “I think the ambition of art, the feeding on one’s soul, memory, mind, etc. gives a mixture of glory and exhaustion.” There is no record of how Stafford reacted to his gesture of gratitude, but she was clearly feeling that exhaustion, not glory, was the legacy of her ambitions.

  A month after her stroke, Lowell gave a reading at the 92nd Street Y, in which he again paid tribute to her, and this time her response survived. He read “The Old Flame” from For the Union Dead (1964), a poem about revisiting their Damariscotta Mills house, which expressed a mixture of relief and of loss at the passing of that chapter of life:

  Everything’s changed for the best—

  how quivering and fierce we were,

  there snowbound together,

  simmering like wasps

  in our tent of books!

  Poor ghost, old love, speak

  with your old voice

  of flaming insight

  that kept us awake all night.

  Lowell also read a poem shortly to appear in Day by Day, “Jean Stafford, a Letter,” which he prefaced with a rather double-edged comment to the audience: “Men may be superior to women, but women always do better in college, I think, and are much more precocious.… She could punctuate, and do all sorts of things.… She is one of our best writers, and her talent developed early.”

  That curious tone of condescension culminating in praise was reflected in the poem as well. It began by twitting Stafford about her affected German pronunciation (a cruel joke, given Stafford’s mortification about her bad German) and proceeded backhandedly to credit her linguistic skills (she wrote “outlines for novels more salable than my poems,” and “Roget’s synonyms studded your spoken and written word”—not exactly praise for her high artistry). And then it closed with two stanzas in which Lowell suggested a convergence at the end of life between the precocious novelist and himself, the more ponderous poet, and at last declared her words worth listening to:

  Tortoise and hare

  cross the same finishing line—

  we learn the spirit is very willing to give up,

  but the body is not weak and will not die.

  You have spoken so many words and well,

  being a woman and you … someone must still hear

  whatever I have forgotten

  or never heard, being a man.

  Stafford’s reaction, when Giroux described the reading during a visit to her in the hospital, was fury, though her friend the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, who had come to see her too, thought he perhaps detected a glimmer of inadmissible pride. Not long after she cursed Lowell in her halting speech, exclaiming, “Why doesn’t he leave me alone?” she wanted to talk about the poem. Years earlier, after one of the phone calls from Lowell that she both dreaded and awaited, she had jotted down a fuller version of the same exclamation on a scrap of paper, as if recording a vow she knew she would break: “I who have less reason to tolerate that man than anybody else—legally, legally, divorced him—have been obligated by his unquenchable vanity to remain a part of him. Now I’m finished and done with him.” As she doubtless knew then, and still knew, she wasn’t really done with Lowell. That refrain, which had punctuated their long and complicated relationship ever since their separation, conveyed both her deep desire for escape and her own unshakable preoccupation with him.

  Lowell was in fact the subject of the last piece of writing that appeared before her death, her story “An Influx of Poets,” which Robert Giroux carefully excised from the unfinished manuscript of The Parliament of Women, laboriously working over it with Stafford, conversing with
her in the form of questions to which she could manage simple answers. She did what Lowell had urged in his poem: in her story, which appeared a year after he died, others heard what he had “forgotten or never heard, being a man”—and being Lowell. It was her belated answer to Peter Taylor’s challenge years before, to tell her side of the story. She crafted her version of her marriage to Lowell and its collapse and produced the first story in which she had come quite so close to her own personal history. In the ordeal of transforming autobiography into fiction, she managed to confront one of the most devastating episodes in her life and turn it into a distinctive mix of social satire and psychological revelation. The story was not a therapeutic self-exculpation, not a thinly veiled brief against the famous poet. Its unexpected, perfectly tuned comic edge—the detachment from her younger self, the ruthless eye for ironic details—rescued the story from the bitterness that constantly threatened to overwhelm Stafford’s imagination. In fact, it was precisely the hard-won, tenuous balance between clear-eyed irony and corrosive grievance that gave the story its power.

  Sustaining that feat of imaginative poise was now beyond Stafford. Not only did the rest of her autobiographical novel keep escaping her control, but the publication of “An Influx of Poets” in The New Yorker in November of 1978 seemed to throw her completely off balance. To acknowledge that this was almost certainly her last published piece of writing, that her long-awaited novel had come to this story and no more, was too much to bear. She in a sense turned deaf as well as speechless, claiming that she had heard no response to her story, though in fact her friends had been quick with their congratulations. She became disoriented in her bitterness: Giroux and her friends were cast as her betrayers, and she wrote them off one by one as ingrates and enemies—much as Molly in The Mountain Lion, in her frantic unhappiness, had compiled her list of unforgivable fat people.

  Stafford was to live another four months, mostly reclusive but every so often rallying in her typical style. In a reminiscence, her friend Dorothea Straus, a writer and the wife of Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, described visiting her in the New York City club where she was staying toward the end. The Strauses watched her emerge from the library in scarlet pumps, with a bag to match, and listened to her say, with great effort, that she had decided to sell the Springs house, move to New York, and see all her old friends. Discovering that the bar was no longer open to entertain these particular old friends, she promptly made the long trip back to her room for a bottle of whiskey, a gesture not just of need but of desire for the old conviviality. Yet the defiantly sociable style was usually fleeting. During those same last weeks, she told her friend Joseph Mitchell at dinner one night that she was half in love with easeful death, and it was clear to him that she had made her choice.

  Not long after that evening she was taken to New York Hospital, clearly failing, and was soon transferred to the Burke Rehabilitation Center, where she lasted a week. At her bedside when she died were two volumes of Twain and Lowell’s Mills of the Kavanaughs, which she had annotated. Reading the title poem, she had paused over various details to give her version of the autobiographical facts behind them. Her jottings look like yet one more effort to settle scores, this time in an almost childlike way. She noted down Lowell’s debts—she had typed for him, taught him solitaire, showed him flowers: “He saw nothing of the natural world—nothing!!” She defended his father, and herself, at the poem’s first mention of the figure clearly modeled on the senior Robert Lowell: “Poor old Mr. Bob Lowell, bossed by Charlotte, & despised, despised & patronized by his son. He did, I know he did, love me—he thought I was a regular fella & he also thought I was a pretty girl.” But then, in a surge of literary appreciation, she left off her crabbed scribbling and exclaimed beside one passage, “How marvelous this is. It’s the kind of writing that reminds me why I married him.” Lowell’s lines clearly spoke to her own vision of precarious innocence, so central to her imagination. And behind them, she perhaps heard a commemoration of a youthful marriage that had overwhelmed them both, but also inspired them:

  … Here bubbles filled

  Their basin, and the children splashed. They died

  In Adam, while the grass snake slid appalled

  To summer, while Jehovah’s grass-green lyre

  Was rustling all about them in the leaves

  That gurgled by them turning upside down;

  The time of marriage!—worming on all fours

  Up slag and deadfall, while the torrent pours

  Down, down, down, down …

  THE SHADOW of Stafford’s fiction, which dappled her life all along, seemed to loom over it at the end. Like Katharine Congreve in The Catherine Wheel, she had her tombstone ready well before her death, ordered from a stone carver in Newport (along with one for Liebling) and engraved with a snowflake, the emblem of her early unfinished novel, In the Snowfall. Shortly after “An Influx of Poets” appeared, she rewrote her frequently revised will for the last time, and as many of her friends remarked—some with appreciation and some with exasperation—her change of heart was the kind of end one might expect from her fiction.

  The spirit of Sonie Marburg lurks in the peculiar abandonment of the literary world that Stafford’s final will represents. Before her stroke she had asked Everett Rattray to be Liebling’s literary executor and Robert Giroux to be her own. A New York lawyer had drawn up her will accordingly—only to be fired by his client after a dispute about his bill. Without a word to her friends, in November 1978 Stafford hired an East Hampton lawyer for the last revision of the will. In it, no literary executors were appointed. Instead she named as heir to her estate Josephine Monsell, her housekeeper, a middle-aged local East Hampton woman who had always been there when Stafford needed her but had never been intrusive—who never seemed to cast judgment, perhaps because (as Monsell was the first to admit) she didn’t begin to comprehend her often mercurial employer. It was as though Stafford were settling the long tension between her identity as a woman and as a writer by declaring her allegiance to domesticity. The most important material legacy to Monsell was the house that Stafford had once thought of turning into a library. Presiding over the earlier plan had been the spirit of Emily Vanderpool, the indomitable rebel who was always looking for a quiet place to read—and happily finding it in the least likely of places. But it was Sonie, the troubled daughter who never found a home for herself, who spoke up in the end. Behind Josephine Monsell stood Shura Marburg, a cleaning woman herself, behind whom stood Stafford’s own mother, the keeper of boardinghouses. Stafford never managed to write the sequel to Boston Adventure, but at the end of that novel she had pointed toward a future claim on Sonie’s conscience. Sonie had banished Shura, much as Stafford had banished her own mother, but she knew that the exile was not forever for either of them. “For the time being, I had walled up my mother into the farthest recess of my mind, knowing that the time would come when I must let her out again.”

  Acknowledgments

  I owe many thanks to many people and institutions for their help and encouragement in the course of my work on this book. None of it would have been possible without those who made Jean Stafford’s unpublished words available for quotation. I have reprinted excerpts from her letters, manuscripts, notebooks, journals, and other writings by permission of Russell & Volkening, Inc., as agents for the Estate of Jean Stafford. Most of that material is located in the Jean Stafford Collection of the Norlin Library, at the University of Colorado in Boulder. My visits there and my subsequent long-distance research were immensely aided by the efforts of Nora Quinlan and Kris McCusker. For permission to use material housed elsewhere, I would like to thank Blair Clark; Andrew Cooke; Eleanor Gibney; James Robert Hightower; Oliver Jensen; William B. T. Mock; Cecile Starr; Peter Taylor; Paul and Dorothy Thompson; Stuart Wright; the Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin; Department of Rare Books, Olin Library, Cornell University; t
he John Berry man Papers, Manuscript Division, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis; the James Oliver Brown Papers and the Random House Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; the Peter Taylor Papers, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Special Collections, Vanderbilt University; the Story Magazine Archives (Box 50), the Caroline Gordon Papers (Box 37), and the Allen Tate Papers (Box 8), Princeton University Library; Dartmouth College Library; Greenslade Special Collections of Olin and Chalmers Libraries at Kenyon College.

  I owe a large debt to the following relatives, friends, and acquaintances of Stafford, who agreed to interviews and patiently unearthed their memories of her: Louis Auchincloss, Pearl Bell, Elaine Benson, James Oliver Brown, Vivian Cadden, Hortense Carpentier, Ralph Carpentier, Edward Joseph Chay, Craig Claiborne, Blair Clark, William Cole, Andrew Cooke, Peter Davison, Anatole Ehrenburg, Sanford Friedman, Brendan Gill, Robert Giroux, Steven Hahn, Elizabeth Hardwick, Ihab Hassan, James Robert Hightower, Howard Higman, Eleanor Hempstead, Ann Honeycutt, Maureen Howard, Richard Howard, Oliver Jensen, Joe Kaufman, Alfred Kazin, Barbara Lawrence, Frances Lindley, Robie Macauley, Janet Malcolm, William McPherson, Frank McShane, Joseph Mitchell, William B. T. Mock, Josephine Monsell, Howard Moss, Frank Parker, Marjorie Stafford Pinkham, Helen Rattray, Kenneth Robbins, Berton and Kay Roueche, Wilfrid Sheed, Eileen Simpson, Raymond Sokolov, Cecile Starr, John Stonehill, Dorothea Straus, Peter and Eleanor Taylor, Paul and Dorothy Thompson, Diana Trilling, Miriam Ungerer, Marie and Alex Warner, Dan Wickenden.