The Interior Castle (4 page)

That perhaps the youngest Stafford was more aloof, somehow more troubled early on by the family’s trials, emerges even from Marjorie’s genial account. “
Jean was a quiet child who did not whine, yell, or have tantrums like the rest of us. She usually waited to voice protests until she had thought of something incisive and withering to say.” As Stafford herself told it, words were her recourse very early on. They were evidently at once a refuge in her loneliness and a way of encountering her father on his own ground. Stafford later said that she “
pledged allegiance to the English language,” which was the guiding light of John Stafford’s life, and her verbal precociousness was a source of pride within the family. It seems to have counted for less in her relations with her brother, Dick, though she rarely offered more than abstract testimonials of her youthful devotion to him. Perhaps the most vivid image of their friendship, captured in a photograph that became very important to her, was of happily united action, rather than combative speech: Jean, small and smiling blissfully, riding on the back of her brother’s bicycle, confidently holding on to him. “
Sometimes when my eye falls on it,” she wrote later, “I go rather funny in the head at the spectacle of such joy.”

But her most reliable source of pleasure, and of self-confidence, was language. In retrospect Stafford emphasized how physical her early engagement with words had been. She liked to claim that she had learned Braille in kindergarten (though her family told her she must have been
remembering an abacus), and her first novel, a thriller written in seventh grade and set in the British Museum, was memorable for its form not its substance: “
I typed it all out in upper case letters on the biggest and oldest and loudest typewriter ever seen.… I filled in the punctuation by hand with colored pencils.” Under her father’s influence, she developed the taste for the incongruous textures of language that became a hallmark of her virtuosic style. She learned some Latin, read his favorite highbrow and lowbrow authors, and pored over the dictionary, cultivating a vocabulary as exotic and as colloquial as his.

By high school she had also cultivated a tone of arch irony and a prose of strident individualism rather like her father’s. (Even in elementary school, she apparently took pains to stand out, and John Stafford was the inspiration:
a friend, Howard Higman, remembered her walking from school, slowly and awkwardly, dragging her father’s saber with her.) At Boulder State Preparatory School, which she attended from 1929 to 1932, Stafford was a good student (except in math) and above all a conspicuous nonconformist—though you wouldn’t guess it from a demure photograph, probably a school portrait, of sixteen-year-old Jean, her face looking innocently pretty above the ruffled collar of her dress. She was a member of a small group of self-styled literati who favored exotic reading (O’Neill, Boccaccio’s
Decameron
, Voltaire’s
Candide
, as Higman recalled) and conducted “Voltaire dinners,” which they did their best to make decadent affairs (held at midnight, mothers’ permission required). As part of her antiphilistine style, she disdained physical fitness and made resistance to gym a vigorous cause. Her chief extracurricular activity, predictably, turned out to be the school newspaper, the
Prep Owl
, which she joined at the urging of the editor, who was impressed by several pieces she submitted.

Those signs of confident independence, though, were far from the whole story. The sense of unbridgeable loneliness and insecurity that she later traced all the way back to her babyhood was clearly a burden particularly during adolescence. At home, Stafford could now claim more of the solitude she wanted, since her siblings were leaving one by one (Mary Lee to teach school in Hayden, where she promptly got married; Marjorie to teach on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma; Dick to college), but she was evidently more, rather than less, unhappy. With her friends from school—she had some, not many—she tended to be reserved, skirting real intimacy. She apparently felt more comfortable when conversation
was impersonal, and although she had a ring that she reportedly bestowed on whatever male classmate was currently in favor (Higman had it for a while; so did the editor of the school paper), she was interested in intellectual companionship, not romantic involvement. Her suitors didn’t challenge her desires. Behind Stafford’s detachment seems to have lurked a defensive secretiveness about her life at home, above all about the man in the basement. Almost none of her friends ever saw the inside of her house.
Anyone who walked with her from school was firmly discouraged from accompanying her all the way home.

But if scrawny, tobacco-chewing John Stafford in the flesh was a secret she did her best to keep hidden away, in spirit her father was still a dominant force for her, especially in her writing. In an editorial in the
Prep Owl
in 1931, her junior year, Stafford displayed a maverick style that was clearly modeled on his and aired the kind of aggressively unconventional views of which he would have approved. Her denunciation of the philistine aspirations of the social elite of the school, which she presented under the pseudonym Vox Populi, created a stir, and everyone at Boulder Prep guessed who had written it. Stafford was brutal about the rest of her schoolmates, especially the girls, whom she called

Stafford was taking on not only her classmates (given that she still had a year to go, it was proof of her willingness to be unpopular), but also her conformist mother and sisters, who saw nothing wrong with sororities. In fact, her struggle with her family had been the implicit, and sometimes very explicit, theme of much of her writing ever since she had begun producing stories (probably in junior high school, though few are dated). She specialized in melodramatic declarations of pained isolation from a conventional world, which usually meant the female side of her family. Yet very early on, she also seemed to appreciate the disproportion of her estrangement and to see the juxtaposition of her histrionic alienation and her perfectly friendly family as an occasion for irony at her own
expense. Even as the self-important Vox Populi, she used exaggerated rhetoric to make herself sound slightly ridiculous—just the kind of nut she knew her classmates would dismiss. In her youthful stories about a family named Smith, which closely resembled her own, she routinely deflated her characters’ flamboyant declarations of martyrdom. “
It wasn’t everyone who had suffered so. And she so young!” exulted a character called Sarah, who had just announced that “her family was her barrier to happiness.” Polly, Sarah’s younger sister, promptly undermined that self-dramatizing despair, commenting on all her relatives, including her sister: “They were asses. They were so stupidly serious.” In other stories about the Smiths, Stafford portrayed Ursula, the baby (her counterpart), as a forlorn creature—but also made fun of her often theatrical unhappiness.

Above all, Stafford’s exaggerated irony was a way to emulate her father’s peculiar literary enterprise, even as she mocked it. When she was about fifteen she poked fun at their common, undisciplined approach to their literary occupation in a humorous portrait called “Fame Is Sweet to the Foolish Man,” about a summer trip she and her father had taken to a cabin in the mountains. They intended to spend the vacation writing, promising their family that “
before August was over we would have gained national recognition for our outstanding work in the literary field.…” Instead they were seduced from thoughts about “the philosophy of the short story and the movement of the drama to the extraordinarily inviting snow-capped peaks and cool shaded lakes.” In another story, she described Mr. Smith huddled in the basement “
pounding out ‘shorts’ and ‘squibs’ on an ancient Remington.… Mr. Smith was always surprised and flattered when he received a check. He would chew a match thoughtfully and say, ‘May Plutus be praised.’ He was never quite sure about his classical references but since the rest didn’t know the difference he could consult Bullfinch [
sic
] before he said anything else.…”

Stafford sometimes focused her wit not on her father himself, but on his incongruous fixations—Latin and bizarre tall tales. In “Our Latin Teacher,” she facetiously celebrated an implausible romance between two Latin teachers, who fall in love “
with only the true passion that a hysteron proteron can inspire, happy mortals that they were in comparison to us who had never felt our heartstrings pulled by the sight or the sound of Latin rhetoric.” At thirteen, in “Miss Lucy,” she produced a curious
narrative in colloquial dialect, which was a specialty of her father’s and which continued to fascinate her throughout her writing career. Told from the perspective of an innocent boy, it featured his extremely odd relative Lucy, who was “
the most imaginative of all our family. She always is or has a new character and she keeps us in gales of laughter from dawn to night. She is far from insane but to one who does not know her peculiar manners, she gives that impression.” Outlandish Lucy sounds like a not-so-distant relative of Stafford’s father, or an imagined version of Stafford herself grown up.

Flattering her father by imitation, Stafford’s humor at his expense seems to have amused him—which was at least in part what she intended. The spirit of their curious literary alliance (and an augury of its evolution) was captured by a photograph that John Stafford made a point of showing, roughly thirty years after it was taken, to Stafford’s second husband, Oliver Jensen, with whom he carried on a brief correspondence:

It was an odd scene, re-created in John Stafford’s self-consciously colloquial style. In part it was evidently wish-fulfilling fantasy, as Stafford played up to her father’s literary hopes and he eagerly succumbed. The picture, to judge by his fondness of it, evoked the closeness of their relationship, perhaps shortly before it began to erode; though his daughter was on the brink of adolescence, her childhood devotion was still in evidence. Yet the photograph also conveyed a joke. Certainly in retrospect John Stafford was making fun of himself; with his “yarn factory” and his
“trance” he was acknowledging his delusions of literary grandeur. Stafford, too, surely had had mockery in mind, of herself as well as of her father, when she came down to the basement all dressed up for a charade based on the ludicrous expectations they both cultivated.

Just how far she could go mocking him by his own lights she showed in her first published writing a few years later, in 1930, when she was fifteen. “Disenchantment” is an ironic tale of her family’s disillusioning trip from California to Colorado. The essay, which won the annual state high school contest, was published in the Boulder
Daily Camera
and prefaced by the announcement that “her father is a noted author.” Whether or not Stafford appreciated the implication of direct paternal influence, her father was the unspoken subject of the essay and one of his favorite authors, Mark Twain, was the implicit model.
Roughing It
(one of the books at Stafford’s bedside when she died) lurked as the evident inspiration for the anticlimactic adventure story.

In her prize-winning essay, Stafford had not picked an easy subject. The trip, which was the turning point of her childhood, marked her father’s fall. She was oblique about it: John Stafford didn’t figure in the essay, and there was no clue as to why the family in her story was on the move. But her theme—ridicule of a romanticized vision of the West—was an implicit comment on his failed dreams of writing frontier fiction in golden California. Her young narrator, like Twain’s, was bursting with expectations of adventure in the Wild West, which she knew only (and erroneously) from books. Twain’s naïvely eager narrator started out envying his brother’s expedition to establish himself as secretary of the Nevada Territory: “
Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped and have ever such a fine time.” Stafford opened on a similar note:

Like Twain’s, her style relied on exuberant overstatement and an incongruous vocabulary, and her device was episodic deflation of fantasy—and then deflation of disillusionment: “
How we suffered, suffered, suffered!” Twain’s narrator exclaimed, and Stafford’s echoed the theatrical disappointment when the West proved drab. She and her siblings were devastated in a very grand manner: “
Our beautiful dreams were shattered.… A tragedy was this scarcely less than Shakespearean. Ah, yes, what pain we have suffered.”