The Interior Castle (5 page)

Stafford allowed the satire of her father to get quite sharp. Unlike Twain’s narrator, who was leaving behind “
years of tiresome city life” in Missouri and who ultimately reached a shining San Francisco, Stafford’s had come to Colorado from that coast and wasn’t going back. “
We were dismayed to think that we had left the place where we might rise before our neighbor and steal oranges from his grove with wicked satisfaction, where one might stare enchanted and terrorized at jelly-fish.… That we had left all these joys for something far more stupid and dusty was a thing incredible.” The blame was laid very close to home: “It was monstrous that we had been tricked by Tom Mix and Zane Grey and all the others whose bloated fancies have produced such glamorous exaggerations.” Jack Wonder and Ben Delight were implicitly indicted along with Grey, the classic Western yarn spinner.

Yet with Twain as an intermediary and model, Stafford could suggest a kind of camaraderie of irony: she was drawing on an approved tradition of mockery, to which her father himself subscribed. And she closed the essay with a lesson that suggested solidarity with her nonconformist father. She refused to let the disillusioning world convert her to censorious realism or genteel hypocrisy. She too could cultivate rebellious distance. Here she was, after all, winning the state essay contest with a piece that slandered the state. “Sighing, we accepted the conventionalities of the lied-about state, sealed the wounds of our disenchantment.…” The self-proclaimed tragic members of this family had learned to minimize their material disappointment and to be “celestial spirited”—a lesson her unconventional, head-in-the-clouds father himself might have taught.

T
HROUGHOUT HER LIFE
, Stafford’s invocations of Twain, explicit and implicit, were an important part of her attempt to make some sense of the legacy of literary eccentricity and provincial poverty bequeathed by her father. Twain’s spirit and his satiric, colloquial American voice preside over her juvenilia, the short stories about Adams, Colorado, of her middle career, and some of the journalism of her last years.

She went so far as to suggest, directly and indirectly, affinities between her cowpuncher-newspaperman-writer father born in Missouri, and the steamboat pilot–newspaperman–writer from the same state who had become famous while John Stafford was a boy. In an outline of the “people of the narrative” for
In the Snowfall
, she described the character modeled on her father this way:

The kinship with Twain, sketchy as it was, could help clarify and dignify her father’s dilemma and thus her own heritage. Stafford continually emphasized the incongruous mix of redskin and paleface in her inheritance—vigorous Stafford and tame McKillop—and Twain showed the way to one appealing resolution: a kind of literary hickness. His career demonstrated that the tradition of frontier humor to which John Stafford turned could be fertile ground for something other than mere hack fiction. Twain, the champion of the vernacular, had faced the disapproval of his wife (to say nothing of such genteel mentors as his friend Mary Fairbanks, who at one point got Twain to swear, “
I will rigidly eschew slang and vulgarity in the future”). John Stafford could similarly be cast as the victim of the prim McKillops. It was a tension Stafford suggested in the author’s note to her
Collected Stories
, juxtaposing
When Cattle Kingdom Fell
with another element of her family literary legacy, memory books from her mother’s more decorous side of the family. She elaborated on the McKillop literary style in an article for
Vogue
, in which she excerpted a little meditation on slang from her mother’s
memory book. It sounded like Mary Fairbanks’s censoriousness—and like the sappy girls in Tom Sawyer’s class:

This, as Stafford tended to see it in her moods of solidarity with her father, was the sensibility that the two of them were up against. They were in Twain’s camp.

Suggesting a parallel between her father and Twain helped justify the man who sat in the basement talking to himself as he typed. Her father could be hailed as an admirable original who scorned material comforts and laughed at prevailing pieties, who had decided simply to write straight from his own quirky soul. But the parallel also inspired a less generous judgment. Was her father simply a thwarted man who had betrayed his vigorous inheritance and then been beaten down by a genteel world, reduced to a bitter, clowning caricature of an artist? Throughout her life, Stafford took sides, switched sides, was filled with gall, then with guilt.

In fact, Twain’s own reputation, whether Stafford knew it or not, was also the subject of a debate that heated up in the 1930s during her adolescence, when she felt most intensely ambivalent about her father. In 1932 Bernard De Voto published
Mark Twain’s America
, largely a response to a book that had roused controversy a decade earlier, Van Wyck Brooks’s
The Ordeal of Mark Twain
(which had appeared in 1920 and was then reissued, slightly revised, in 1933). A salvo in the attack on the genteel tradition, Brooks’s analysis debunked the prevailing hagiographic view of Twain. Far from America’s heroic writer, Twain was a “
frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested development,” a mere humorist who had been diverted from fulfilling his true satiric promise by stifling social and psychological pressures. Thanks to his Calvinist mother, his crude western surroundings, and his genteel wife, among other influences, “the poet, the artist in him … had withered into the cynic and the whole man had
become a spiritual valetudinarian.” De Voto countered with an attack on Brooks’s crude psychologizing and a defense of Twain as a brilliant humorist whose devastating send-up of the Gilded Age was built on a tradition of frontier comic writing that blended ballads, tall tales, and folktales.

I
N
S
TAFFORD’S
last published work, “Woden’s Day,” which appeared in 1979, after her death, she again tackled the subject of her father in fiction, but she had switched sides. Mocking tolerance, even admiration, had given way to much sterner treatment. The story was excised from the manuscript of the unfinished autobiographical novel she worked on at the end of her life,
The Parliament of Women
, but it drew on earlier fictional efforts as well: Stafford’s long silence about her father over the years was not for lack of trying to turn him into a workable character. Like “Disenchantment,” “Woden’s Day” addressed his downfall in Twainian style, but her youthful exuberance had turned into more high-strung, almost surreal satire. Certainly the old innocent irony had long since faded from her father’s style. John Stafford had hung on, not dying until 1966, and his always dubious literary career had been derailed for decades. “
Of course there’s no market for the Thud and Blunder which in palmier days once brought me enough checks to pay about half the rent while that faithful saint, your mother, made our living,” he wrote to Jean in 1963. Instead, he had devoted himself to pamphleteering against the stupidity of humanity. He had plans for peace, for deficit reduction—and even for a deadly weapon he called a Hell Ray that would make all such meliorative schemes unnecessary.

But there was also an ever-present note of bitter self-irony in his presentation of his obsessions. In his letters—which his daughter dreaded getting—he frequently acknowledged his own errors along with the rest of mankind’s: “
Only a few people have brains enough to get down to brass tacks on fully desirable and practicable enterprises. The overwhelming majority please themselves with daydreams of a helluva big something for nothing and generally return from their expeditions sadder, but instead of wiser more determined than ever to continue in the practice of their congenital imbecility.”

In “Woden’s Day” Stafford delineated a lurid “ordeal” of Dan Savage, her name for the character inspired by her father, and his “arrested development.” Whether or not she had Brooks’s portrait of Twain in mind
when she started, it’s clear that when she ended Twain wasn’t far from her thoughts, for the figure based on her father evokes Huck Finn’s pap, as she herself observed in
In the Snowfall
. Again, her fiction was far from factually accurate: Stafford omitted the California chapter of their lives, staging the whole story in Missouri. There she conjured up an unhappy valley, called Graymoor, where Dan Savage began to go wrong.

The account was full of colloquialisms and caricature and bustle, as crowds of Savage (Stafford) and McKinnon (McKillop) relatives of her grandparents’ generation made unexpected entrances and dramatic departures, all in period dress and mode of transport. But Stafford paused over two portraits of Dan, which together anchor the busy story. The first was a picture of Dan the cosseted writer son, who was funded by his dead father and fussed over by his mother. She had summoned a photographer to commemorate the sale of his first story:

This was the Victorian gentleman writer, overeager to pose for conventional praise, vulnerable in his false vanity. The “good” son, Dan had been granted his inheritance in capital, not in trust, and he had in mind a suitably dignified agrarian existence, disdaining exertion in more
worldly enterprises. But Dan couldn’t resist the shine of the Gilded Age altogether, especially if the glow came from gold without sweat: he proceeded to lose all his money in the stock market.

The second portrait was of Dan after his downfall, and it calls to mind one of E. W. Kemble’s illustrations of Huckleberry Finn’s pap, the frighteningly disheveled disgrace of the town of Hannibal, Missouri, for the first edition of
Huckleberry Finn:

This man, whose “
laughter strangled him; his eyes screwed up like a bawling baby’s and the veins on his forehead swelled and pulsed, a dreadful blue,” had betrayed his father, been abandoned by his mother, and was then trapped by his wife’s father, a blistering Scottish Presbyterian who tyrannized his kinsmen. It was only at the close of the story, when Grandfather McKinnon died after a stroke brought on by an apoplectic rage, that Dan could escape to Adams, Colorado, with his family. It was hardly a triumphant journey westward.

B
ETWEEN
“D
ISENCHANTMENT
” and “Woden’s Day,” Stafford struggled to find a satisfactory portrait for a character based on her father, trying to reconcile the man she described in
In the Snowfall
as this
“
figure, this replica (save that he was not a drunk) of Huck Finn’s pap, with the figure I had never seen but heard about”—the man whom “someone once in my hearing had called … a genius,” who had cut a civilized profile in Missouri. These two pieces of writing were as close as she could come to publishable portraits. Although her father was the original inspiration for her style, he was only rarely its successful subject.

Distance was apparently not the solution to her troubles. Soon after she wrote “Disenchantment,” Stafford began envisaging an escape from home, and eventually she managed to leave her family behind. But even safely far away, she was stymied in her efforts to portray this haunting character, who was addled by words rather than by drink: “
He got up at dawn and he began before the light was full, softly orating a wild pastiche of learning and approximation with all the nouns leaping forth like pointing fingers and all the bilious adjectives insisting on their naked menace as he cherished them in a long pause.” Until her last story, her explicitly autobiographical attempts went unpolished and unpublished. But the Twainian style, Stafford discovered later, offered a way to tap her roots in the “semi-fictitious town of Adams, Colorado,” without facing her father directly. She ran away, and when she came back in her fiction, in her western stories and in her second novel,
The Mountain Lion
, fathers were notably absent from that childhood world, with comic and tragic results.