The Interior Castle (10 page)

Before going west for the conference, Stafford languished in a hospital
in Brooklyn during the late spring of 1937, mysteriously ill. “
It’s
female trouble
which heretofore has always been good for a laugh” she wrote to Hightower at the time. “My uterus is turned over, pressing against the intestine. I have an intestinal infection. I have ovarian cysts. It will be months before I have recovered and until then I’ve got to be a bloody invalid of the E. B. Browning variety.” Several years later, however, she told Hightower it had been gonorrhea, contracted in Heidelberg, a dramatic claim made even more dramatic in David Roberts’s biography of Stafford, where
he argued that in fact it was likely syphilis. The evidence for any diagnosis is thin at best, given that no medical records survive other than Stafford’s letters from that spring detailing her symptoms.

As usual with Stafford, sorting out fact and fiction is far from simple: throughout her life her illnesses often seemed to inspire imaginative elaboration and collaboration. It is possible to question the truth of her subsequent confession to Hightower, the sole grounds for a specific diagnosis; she was rebuffing an advance from him, and invoking the disease served as a justification for aloofness that salved his ego. Moreover, even as she was confessing, she told him two different versions of how she got gonorrhea—first she claimed that the culprit was an Italian she had met on her trip to Italy, then that he was an American baseball player she had slept with once in Heidelberg. In general, her love life during her year abroad was a mystery she enjoyed embroidering on;
she later told a friend of Robert Lowell’s that she had had an affair with a German aviator, almost certainly a lie, according to Hightower.

Still, Hightower did believe her when she announced that she had had gonorrhea, and it is worth remembering that he of all people knew to be wary of her revelations (as he has been of Roberts’s subsequent, much more speculative diagnosis of syphilis). Whatever the medical facts, Stafford undeniably had dark associations with her ordeal long before her retrospective claim. Being sick stirred up memories of Lucy, herself renowned for a history of sexual diseases and plagued by “female trouble” before her suicide. In physical pain and imaginatively haunted, Stafford was inclined to read her illness symbolically: she was a decadent sufferer stranded among innocent Americans.

But rather than succumb to self-pity, she portrayed herself as an ambitiously creative soul. In her letters to Hightower, who had remained in Paris with Berueffy, she was full of plans for her literary life. She enjoyed cultivating the image of the alienated American artist; at the same time,
she yearned for the disciplining company of fellow creative spirits in a civilized setting—that is, in Europe. “It
s hideous and I am the unhappiest mortal alive,” she informed Hightower and Berueffy during the spring in the ironically histrionic style that characterized their correspondence. “I can’t stay in America next year unless I completely repudiate the whole past and live in some foreign quarter.… I am going to try to get a job here & if I can’t I’ll go west & finish the novel at [her sister Mary Lee’s] ranch. If I sell it I will come to Europe at once.… I’m miserable at the thought of never being around you guys again & being stuck in this wretched filthy Babbitt-ridden country.” And she was miserable at being stuck in her “
revolting body which is an old wadded up bunch of rubbish and musk and bilgewater.” This romantic agony gave rise to classical inclinations, Stafford claimed: “
Having had to be conscious of my body for so long, during the rare intervals that I don’t hurt, I have become savagely spiritual and I swear, having realized that the only time your brain can work is when it is not bothered with a malfunctioning body, that I am going to get healthy and I want to get on the earth somewhere with some books, paper, piano, 2 typewriters and you boys”—her fellow artists, as she conceived their creative trio.

As Hightower could sense from her letters, Stafford’s sights were soon trained at least as intently on more established artists as they were on her two neophyte literary friends in France. During a brief recuperating visit with her sister Mary Lee, she toyed with the idea of retreating there to write, but the isolation inspired anxiety: “
I am afraid of following in my pa’s footsteps,” she wrote to Hightower. When she went on from the Hayden ranch to the Writers’ Conference in July, she found much more promising models, worlds away from her father’s anachronistic obscurity. In Boulder this time she discovered and was discovered by teachers who had come of age in the 1920s as the American literary landscape was being transformed by the revelations of modernism. In fact, the parade of authorities extended even further back, to the world of letters out of which modernism had sprung, in the person of Ford Madox Ford, the guest lecturer for the conference. “
When I knew Ford in America,” Robert Lowell later reminisced of his meeting with him then, “he was out of cash, out of fashion.… He seemed to travel with the leisure and full dress of the last hectic Edwardian giants—Hudson, James, and Hardy.…”

Ford had been staying at Benfolly, Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon’s
house in Tennessee, which had become a gathering place for the Agrarians, an ideal setting for that southern group’s prescribed regimen of intense literary work amid a rural landscape. Although Tate didn’t come to Boulder, the conference boasted his fellow poet and erstwhile teacher John Crowe Ransom. They had become close friends during the 1920s when both were Fugitives, members of the close-knit Vanderbilt University circle whose journal,
The Fugitive
, was devoted to publishing modernist poetry. By 1930 a larger cause inspired them—revitalizing southern literature and traditional southern ways—and they had produced a manifesto,
I’ll Take My Stand
. John Peale Bishop, another friend and champion of a vital literary South who also knew the European modernist scene firsthand, was in Boulder too. So was a then-obscure face from the North: bringing up the rear of the southern entourage was a new young follower and aspiring poet, twenty-year-old Robert Lowell, who had been camping on the Tates’ lawn since his migration south that spring, a detour between Harvard and Kenyon College, where he was to take up studies with Ransom. There were also a few who fell outside that fraternity: at opposite poles, Howard Mumford Jones, the old-style academic critic, and Evelyn Scott, a writer of the lush Mabel Dodge Luhan school of “carnal mysticism,” whose novel
The Wave
had been a best-seller in 1929. (Sherwood Anderson also attended, but Stafford ended up having little to do with him.)

To judge by her reports to Hightower, Stafford was a model of poised confidence and ingratiating charm as she eagerly took advice and cultivated connections. She arrived with plenty of manuscripts to show around: a short story, eight poems, two hundred pages of excerpts from the journal she had kept in Germany, and one hundred and five pages of the novel she had mentioned to Martha Foley, evidently about Lucy and Andrew. She promptly, and for the most part approvingly, sized up the faculty:

(Revealingly, she closed with a vote for a master closer to home: “I read
Huckleberry Finn
again when I was at the ranch. It is the best book that ever came out of America”)

The faculty in turn apparently thought very highly of her and of her novel, which despite her promises to Foley six months earlier evidently remained very Joycean indeed—an intertwining of three streams of consciousness. Stafford was giddily self-aggrandizing in her letters to her friends, who were getting ready to return to America. Bishop, she immodestly (and perhaps inaccurately) reported to Hightower, “said I had an eminent nerve writing s. of c. [stream of consciousness] and thereby putting myself up to compete with the biggest boys meaning Joyce. Said I cd. however make the grade.” She considered Scott’s flattery worth quoting too: “Said if I can get away from the academic will become great writer.”

Moreover, it looked as though the talk might be followed by action. Burnett was considering running the story and some of her poetry. Jones left with some journal excerpts to show to the
Atlantic Monthly
. Scott, whom Stafford did not in fact snub as she had planned, “
says she’ll browbeat Scribner’s into printing my book. Whit Burnett, however, wants it himself. It’s wonderful having Harper’s and Scribner’s fighting over me with the Atlantic in the background.” Stafford indulged in a final spin, which her correspondents may well have found a little much: “
Have not embellished. Am not embarrassed. Know now for sure I’m good—like hell. Will doubtless spend my life writing novels.”

Not far beneath Stafford’s flip confidence lurked insecurity about her literary career. Certainly her new teachers, whatever specific praise they meted out to her, preached a generally intimidating, elite view of the literary vocation. Stafford was presumably one of the few who sat through Ford’s lecture, “The Literary Life,” an occasion that Cal Lowell at least saw as a dramatic confirmation of the old man’s main theme—the sacred nature of the literary calling and the total dedication that it demands. “
I watched an audience of hundreds walk out on him,” Lowell wrote years later, “as he exquisitely, ludicrously, and inaudibly imitated
the elaborate periphrastic style of Henry James. They could neither hear nor sympathize.” Lowell, the teachers’ young attendant and acolyte, with whom Stafford struck up an acquaintanceship, doubtless also preached intense creative commitment. In his intense way, this New Englander had quickly become an ardent disciple of the Southerners, and proselytizing came naturally to him.

Lowell was probably Stafford’s guide to the American mandarins (though she evidently impressed him that summer with her cosmopolitanism, somewhat misleadingly parading her mastery of German: “
Towmahss Mahnn:
that’s how you said it … / ‘That’s how Mann must say it,’ I thought,” he wrote in a poem decades later). During his stay with the Tates he had been eagerly absorbing his hosts’ and Ford’s stringent teaching that the literary life was no “
butterfly existence,” that art “
had nothing to do with exalted feelings or being moved by the spirit. It was simply a piece of craftsmanship”—arduously undertaken, producing “something warped, fissured, strained and terrific.” Some years later in his essay “Techniques of Fiction” (1944), Tate wrote down what he evidently told young Lowell, and it is easy to imagine the wisdom being passed on to Stafford that summer:

Firsthand exposure was an opportunity to be taken seriously, for as Tate continued: “There is an almost masonic tradition in the rise of any major art.… The secrets of this aptitude … survive in the works themselves, and in the living confraternity of men of letters, who pass on by personal instruction to their successors the ‘tricks of the trade.’ ” The “tricks of the trade” were the opposite of facile; the craft, according to Tate and Ransom, was the arduous essence of art.

Eighteen days among the confraternity—the duration of the conference—hardly counted as a full exposure to the tradition that was so essential to the formation of the individual talent. For Lowell, the intensive initiation continued, first a stint as secretary to Ford (“
As he is a very
great master of English prose,” Lowell announced, “the training is very valuable and I would not want to miss the opportunity”), then three years as Ransom’s student at Kenyon, in Ohio. For Stafford, who reluctantly set off to teach freshman English at what she called a “
charm school,” Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, the ties were considerably more tenuous, as they had been from the start. Still, she had made inspiring contact with new teachers, and she had discovered a forceful young man whose ambitions and confidence easily kept pace with her own.

Maintaining those ties was very important to her in her new uncongenial setting: teaching was merely the means to her real end, writing—and Stephens, the only place she had been offered a job, was especially mortifying. Whatever anxiety she felt about her teaching skills paled beside her disgust with the ludicrous curriculum she was required to teach: “Freshman English was known as ‘Communication.’ Two days a week the students were taught composition, and on the third they were taught conversation, the recommended textbook for which was the Reader’s Digest.” And she was scathing about the frivolous students, who brought their knitting to class and wrote themes entitled “A Short History of Fingernail Polish.” Stafford wasn’t making it up, and she did her best during the year to cultivate detachment from the idiocy surrounding her. She made only one real friend among the faculty, a fellow English teacher named William Mock, who knew Paul and Dorothy Thompson, Stafford’s Boulder friends. Mock was equally disenchanted with the surroundings, and the two of them spent a lot of time escaping the school in Mock’s car, but it was soon clear that their feelings for each other did not quite measure up. Happily wined and dined by her plump, affluent colleague, Stafford did not fall in love and envisage marriage, as Mock did. She was busily confiding in Hightower, who was now back and studying Chinese at Harvard, and
apparently Lowell kept in at least intermittent touch as well.