The Interior Castle (2 page)

Clearly the divisions in her life were not actually as stark as she made out. Though she resisted conceiving of herself as a “woman writer” and made little effort to cement ties with other women writers or with anything that might be described as a feminine literary tradition (and though she was acerbic about the feminist movement late in her life), Stafford was intimately conscious of the pressures that male influence and expectation exerted on her. Her response was far from straightforward, which is just one reason to avoid schematically reducing her plight to the paradigm of victim and victimizer. She knew full well the allure of victimhood, as both her life and her fiction show. Yet for her, oppression raised questions first of all about the often perverse ways of the individual will, and only then about the peculiar susceptibility of women to domination.

Stafford’s ambivalence about the power and the vulnerability of the isolated imagination is the presiding theme of her three novels,
Boston Adventure
(1944),
The Mountain Lion
(1947), and
The Catherine Wheel
(1952), which were highly acclaimed when they appeared. It was also an underlying preoccupation of the short stories that she published regularly during the 1940s and 1950s, mostly in
The New Yorker
and then in several collections,
The Interior Castle
(1953),
Children Are Bored on Sunday
(1953),
Bad Characters
(1964), and finally
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
(1969), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. Close to home though that theme was, Stafford consistently resisted the urge to frame it in confessional form. The work that she produced before she
faced troubles with her fiction in the 1960s was worlds away from the increasingly autobiographical, less formally structured writing to which Lowell turned.

Perhaps the most disturbing and memorable quality of Stafford’s art, which has won growing attention since her death, is the stylistic composure with which she unfolded a vision of profound psychic disequilibrium. “
The esthetic distance she keeps between us and the untouchable otherness of her characters,” Guy Davenport observed, is the source of great power in her evocations of disenchantment; “she does not allow us to violate their essential privacy with sentimentality or an easy understanding.”

Insisting on impeccable formal control of her material, she probed the depths of private consciousness with psychological acuity, spiritual rigor, metaphorical inventiveness, and well-aimed wit. She also ventured onto social terrain, where again no detail escaped her scrutiny. There great temptations and even greater entrapments awaited her characters, who could hardly have been further from the image of the
poète maudit
made famous by her poetic contemporaries. Her protagonists—many of them female, all of them precariously poised, hungry for hope and a sense of belonging, and almost always disappointed in both—stand out for their ironic innocence, or more accurately for their innocent irony. With a childlike calm and clarity, Stafford looked into the abyss—and then wrote terrifying, tragicomic stories with titles like “Life Is No Abyss” and “Children Are Bored on Sunday.”

And yet to emphasize only that concerted, accomplished effort at detachment is to simplify Stafford’s effort to find both privacy and inspiration in her interior castle. All the while that she proclaimed loyalty to an impersonal aesthetic, learned from the New Critics among whom she began her career, she also waged an unceasing struggle to find fictional shape for some of her most troubling personal experiences—a struggle that helps explain why she all but stopped publishing fiction during the last two decades of her life. Though she knew her own imagination was threatened by her efforts to draw immediately from life, and though she disapproved of others’ readiness to do just that, she couldn’t resist trying again and again to convey more directly what it was like to be inside her “particular skull.” For years she worked intermittently on a novel she called
The Parliament of Women
, which she described as her most autobiographical fictional endeavor, one that she promised would (among
other things) cut up “
the poets to a fare-thee-well.” Gleefully she reported that “A well-known American poet, with whom I was once closely associated, is petrified. And well he should be!”

As it happened, that comically scathing account of her marriage to Lowell and its collapse was the only part of the stalled manuscript that was published during Stafford’s life. Her longtime editor and friend Robert Giroux helped her excerpt it for publication as a story, “An Influx of Poets,” in
The New Yorker
in 1978. By then Lowell was dead, so he never had a chance to read her version, which bore little resemblance to the assorted memories of their life together that he himself had committed to poetry over the years. The merciful nostalgia that often moved Lowell in memorializing his past was not a mood that came easily to Stafford.

But neither was “An Influx of Poets” simply a vehicle of revenge, as she had humorously hinted it might be. The struggle to free her imagination from bitterness, to find a liberating aesthetic distance, was all-consuming, and the last story that appeared in her lifetime was proof of the dauntingly high standards she had always set for herself. She ventured closer than ever before to intimate, painful facts of her life; and amid ruthless satire, of her young self and of the young poets, she found a way to cast a light of comic forgiveness on the scene. She wasn’t after factual veracity, and she wasn’t after agonized self-dramatization, and yet because she wasn’t, she found both truth and tragedy.

Stafford’s words, in her fiction and in her eloquent streams of talk, were rarely transparent windows onto anything so simple as the facts, which is one of the triumphs of her art and one of the frustrations and fascinations of her life. Those words are well worth listening to carefully, as Lowell himself, not long before he died, urged in a late poem, “Jean Stafford, a Letter”:

T
OWARD THE END
of her life Jean Stafford claimed that she had a terrible dream eight nights in a row. In it she was coming downstairs to join her family for breakfast. The Colorado day was bright, and all the faces at the table were smiling at her. “
If I have that dream again” she told her friend Wilfrid Sheed, “I’ll go ab-so-lutely crazy.” It was an ironic nightmare, perfect grist for the wry anecdotes at which Stafford excelled. But it was also truly a nightmare. Her exclamation was a rare confessional moment on a subject—the family she had left behind out West—that she usually did her best to skirt, either quietly or comically. It was hardly the whole story, of course, but the simple breakfast tableau summoned up Stafford’s long, complicated past and her bitter ambivalence about her family. She couldn’t forgive them for a hapless optimism that she felt had ruined all of their lives: those smiles masked disappointments that she, at least, had never gotten over. And yet there was also a hint of wistfulness about her exclusion from the circle in the kitchen. She stood apart, impatient to disown her past but lonely in her rootless pessimism.

Stafford told a little more of the story, in a similarly oblique but more literary way, in the author’s note to her
Collected Stories
in 1969, which turned out to be a more definitive autobiographical statement than she perhaps expected. The collection was her last book and a Pulitzer Prize winner. There she implied that a deep homesickness propelled her writing, yet her nostalgia was anything but straightforward. Beneath her breezy salute to the West, where she had been born and raised, there was real disenchantment about her family, especially about her father, which she clearly felt had flavored both her life and her art.

She opened the author’s note with a double-edged tribute to him: “
By the time I knew him, my father was writing Western stories under the
nom de plume
Jack Wonder or, occasionally, Ben Delight,” she wrote. “But before that, before I was born, he wrote under his own name and he published a novel called
When Cattle Kingdom Fell
.” In case anyone might mistake this for a loyal bow to her literary heritage, Stafford emphasized that it was only her father’s title, not his text (which “to [her] regret” she never actually read), that inspired her, and then only in her youth, when she too wrote about Colt .45s and men with steely blue eyes.

Stafford’s page-long note slyly undercut the conventional author’s dedication. Perhaps she even had her father’s inscription to
When Cattle Kingdom Fell
(1910) in mind. (She had surely gotten that far in the novel.) John Stafford had dutifully dedicated his only book to his father, Richard Stafford, “
whose life-long interest and success in the cattle business, whose ideals and purposes in the world of men, furnished me with the materials from which this tale is drawn.” Her own father’s legacy was radically different: he had furnished droll, unworldly pen names and odd titles (
she was fond of citing a work of his called “The Transmogrified Calf”).

Stafford liked to suggest that her father’s fanciful creations entranced her as a child and amused her in 1969, but the rest of the author’s note revealed that the transition from discipleship to detachment was not so smooth. After a brisk sketch of her career—“
as soon as I could,” she wrote, “I hotfooted it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean”—Stafford’s preface wound down on a more uneasy note: she had hurried away from home after college hoping to discover her identity, only to lose it. She rejected the romanticized Old West her father wrote about and also the more recent “tamed-down” West of her youth. Yet she never completely escaped. “My roots,” she wrote, “remain in the semi-fictitious town of Adams, Colorado,” a less than idyllic place that played an important role in her fiction. And she wasn’t sure where her whole self belonged: “The rest of me may abide in the South or the Midwest or New England or New York.” The truth was, she didn’t “abide” anywhere. Invoking Mark Twain and Henry Adams as incongruous literary kin, she confessed to a sense of “dislocation” that had no cure. She was like her characters, who “are away from home, too, and while they are probably homesick, they won’t go back.” Stafford made sure that she returned home rarely: between her graduation from college and her parents’ deaths, she saw her father four times, briefly, over thirty years and her mother twice in ten years.

In private, Stafford exposed the real animus behind the backhanded acknowledgment of paternal influence in her preface. In a letter to her oldest sister written in the same year as the author’s note, 1969 (three years after John Stafford’s death at the age of ninety-one), she was outright belligerent on the subject of her father, as she often was with her two older sisters, Mary Lee and Marjorie, who had stayed out West and been steady daughters to the end. “
When Cattle Kingdom Fell
is back from the binder,” Stafford reported to Mary Lee, who lived with her husband, Harry Frichtel, on a cattle ranch in Hayden, Colorado. “I am still unable to read that book and I’m not going to try again. What a waste! Obviously he was gifted but he was completely undisciplined and completely lazy and completely self-indulgent and I can’t forgive him.” Stafford could hardly have been less eager to praise his “ideals and purposes in the world of men.”

John Stafford’s literary legacy was only half of the burdensome inheritance he bequeathed his daughter. His eccentric writing career had gone hand in hand with financial disaster, which had radically unsettled his family’s life. The other part of the story, which Stafford left out of her preface and to which she silently alluded in her letter to her sister, was that her father had squandered his inheritance from his father, a prosperous cattleman who died in 1899—and it had been considerable. (In
1920, her father’s stocks, bonds, and real estate, she later estimated, were worth almost three hundred thousand dollars.)

In 1910, when he wrote his grateful dedication to
Richard Stafford in
When Cattle Kingdom Fell
,
John Stafford was still in clover. He was, as he said, well furnished with the materials from which his tale was drawn. He had plenty of Wild West lore to propel his plots. And thanks also to the exploits of his father, an Irishman who had emigrated at eighteen and amassed cattle land in the Texas Panhandle, in Arizona, and in Missouri, John Stafford had money and land to support a leisurely writing career—as well as a family. Three years earlier he had married Ethel McKillop. He had met her in Tarkio, Missouri, while she was taking summer courses and he was living there in a rented house with his mother, Phoebe Ann Wilson Stafford, a severe woman committed to the temperance movement, women’s suffrage, and later Christian Science. Their marriage took place in nearby Rock Port, where Ethel had grown up and where her father, Malcolm McKillop, had been a prominent lawyer and served as mayor and a member of the Missouri legislature.

Born in Canada, the son of Scottish Presbyterians who had left the Isle of Arran around 1830,
Malcolm McKillop had abandoned the farming life of his father. With his wife, Carrie Lee Thurber McKillop, he had raised four daughters in a Victorian house called Maple Lawn, in surroundings as genteel as
John Stafford’s youth had been rugged. (John liked to claim that one day when he was a boy Jesse James had arrived in the Staffords’ dusty yard asking for a place to sleep.) The marriage of thirty-one-year-old Ethel and thirty-two-year-old John, as Jean Stafford later portrayed it, was a union of paleface and redskin clans—of prim pillars of the community and independent-minded adventurers. Like his daughter, John Stafford was inclined to be condescending about the tame McKillops. But as he settled down to family life and the pursuit of fiction in 1907, the provincial gentility of his new circumstances must have been appealing. He had every reason to think that a lifelong interest and success (to echo his tribute to his father) awaited him in his business, which would be writing rather than ranching.