The Interior Castle (6 page)

First, however, she had to get away, and unlike Huck she was ready to be seduced by the temptations of civilization and society and wealth: the world to the east—New England and Europe, Henry James country—beckoned. It was a seduction that John Stafford had evidently succeeded in forgetting. Certainly he had determined to repudiate it, as Stafford explained in a passage in
In the Snowfall
, describing the dilemma of her autobiographical persona, Joyce Bartholomew:

Though Stafford continued to live at home, college was the first step of her escape.

A
S SOON AS
Jean Stafford began to write in earnest, her four years at the University of Colorado, 1932 to 1936, were her subject. She kept returning to them, aware that they were a decisive time in her life, certainly in her imaginative life. But almost none of what she wrote about those years was ever finished. Her manuscript from the 1940s,
In the Snowfall
, thwarted her, and she wrote several articles in which she discussed her difficulties transforming that chapter of her life into successful fiction. Corrosive memory overwhelmed creative energy every time. Though she tried to stray from the real people and experiences, she explained, she never managed to leave them far enough behind. That wasn’t because her recollections were fond, but because they were frightening. It is clear that she was often appalled by her past self, by how dangerously susceptible to external influence and to self-doubt Stafford the college student had been. Yet she also suspected that the same vulnerable imagination that disoriented her in life could perhaps inspire her writing. The fragmented manuscript, though not a trustworthy memoir, is nonetheless a useful guide to Stafford’s deep confusions about personal identity, which were at the heart of her preliminary explorations of a possible literary identity.

At the university Stafford faced the typical collegiate dilemma of how to fit in and stand out at the same time. Increasingly resentful of her father, dismissive of her mother, and ashamed of their circumstances, she was well practiced at being a loner. But she was also determined to discover some sense of community and of respectability. As an aspiring writer, she experimented with what it might mean to lead the “life of art” without following her father’s hopeless literary path. Her own experience was far from calm. Stafford’s college career closed with an act of violence—the suicide of her closest friend, Lucy McKee—that
haunted her art and her life for years, perhaps until the end. It seemed, as she wrote later, to dramatize for her the fragile boundaries of the self.

When Stafford entered the University of Colorado in 1932, the beneficiary of a waiver-of-fees scholarship, she had a set of prohibitions to obey, sternly enunciated by her younger self in the guise of Vox Populi. The frivolous route of the “social-climbing sniggering hypocrites” among her classmates, who didn’t deserve a university education in the first place, was forbidden: she was not to join a sorority, flunk out, or emerge a polished young American with a dilettantish collegiate air. On one level, the strictures were easy enough to satisfy, and Stafford confidently did. She was one of the “barbarians” on campus who rarely set foot in the Greek-letter mansions all over the Boulder hillside. She doubled up on courses in order to earn both a B.A. and an M.A. in four years. And she graduated a restless American, looking forward to a year in Heidelberg and a serious scholarly career in philology.

Stafford’s academic career looked less smoothly purposeful from the inside. Her intellectual intensity, as she freely admitted in retrospect, was matched by real insecurity, intellectual and social. She was “
restless, plunging into work, into getting honors because … I could not express myself in the way I really wanted to, with friends.” She started out intending to study philosophy and was in devoted awe of an outspoken professor named
Joseph Cohen. She was impressed less by his politics (he was a vocal Marxist, who championed, among other controversial events, a campus appearance by longshoreman leader and prominent radical Harry Bridges) than by his erudition. Cohen was the advanced intellectual on campus, the person who had always read the latest important book and who routinely intimidated the new professors. He intimidated Stafford too, but also admired her, and as philosophy often does for freshmen, his subject seemed to promise the answer to her confusions.

In one first-person draft of
In the Snowfall
, Stafford placed her autobiographical protagonist Joyce Bartholomew in a similar predicament in Dr. Rosen’s class: “
In my chronic inability to relate the profane to the divine, to allow the marriage of a mind which ate up Plato … to a body which with equal ardor ate up the sensuality of evenings in mountains, I had continued to look upon this class, philosophy, as having the atmosphere in which I was the most at ease, the happiest, the closest to fulfillment.”
Stafford encountered psychology in Cohen’s class as well, which must have seemed to shed further light on some of the disjunctions in
her life, and on the more dramatic turmoil she encountered in her college friendships. But to judge by Joyce’s fictional experience, Stafford couldn’t help associating Cohen with her father, even though her teacher was a far more satisfying intellectual guide than John Stafford, with his “wild pastiche of learning,” could possibly be. The mental preoccupation was familiar and daunting: though “
the splendor of [Dr. Rosen’s] intellect did not make [Joyce] restive as her father’s did,” she “most secretly, despite her present situation as a candidate for an academic degree … wondered if society would not be simpler and happier if learning were left altogether to the men.” It was a thoroughly uncharacteristic hint—but only a hint—of allegiance with her mother.

Stafford was not about to act on whatever secret reservations she may have had about her scholarly aptitude, but she did ultimately turn from philosophy to study with a woman, Professor Irene P. McKeehan of the English department. In her classes Stafford seemed to find less aggressive but no less rigorous guidance. Professor McKeehan was an intimidating character of a completely different kind, a radical contrast not just to men like Cohen and her father but, perhaps even more important, a contrast to Jean’s round, beleaguered mother—though her teacher was equally fastidious. In a lecture Stafford delivered at the University of Colorado in 1972, she described her starchy mentor: “
Miss Irene Pettit McKeehan was the size of her middle name if her middle name had been spelled ‘petite.’ Her tailleurs and her hats and her shoes were accurately cut, sewn without error, and impregnable to blemish or to disarray. Her learning was so prodigious and so terrifying that during the first week of my first class with her—The Victorian Age—I could not look at her but addressed my eyes to my notebook in which I wrote down, lickety-cut, every word she said.” In Stafford’s third year, this Victorian guide to Victorianism led her student even further from daily confusions, introducing her to the Middle Ages and medieval languages, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English—“
equipment as useless as any I can think of for our own Dark Age of the depression,” Stafford commented later. She wrote her master’s thesis on “Profane and Divine Love in English Literature of the Thirteenth Century” and showed that, at least within the confines of a scholarly paper, she was perfectly capable of relating “the divine to the profane.” In the process she acquired a smattering of Vulgar Latin, Old French, and Gothic—and a desire, she said, to become a philologist.

But Stafford’s more consuming desire, as she said later, was to “
express [her]self in the way [she] really wanted to, with friends”—and in her writing—which proved to be more difficult than excelling at scholarly tasks. This self-proclaimed “
democrat of the most radical species” who inveighed against “gangs” also came to college eager to discover some kind of distinctive, artistic community in which to lose or find herself—or, ideally, both. (Her literary entourage at Boulder Prep, with its Voltaire dinners and advanced reading lists, had appealed to a similar urge.) She wasn’t sure just what kind of community, and her confusion was both personal and, as she emphasized in retrospect, generational.

Her maverick father was still the main source of her private confusions. His embarrassing poverty was a practical obstacle to elite fraternizing, and his inclination to asceticism was a spiritual admonishment against such a conventional, comfortable goal. At the same time, John Stafford was himself the model for her sense that there was an aristocracy of art, even if his rendition of it seemed ever less admirable. Years later, in the fragment of memoir in which she described the family’s collusion in his deluded visions—“
my mother spared his feelings and we believed he was an artist”—she bitterly recalled the rationale for their indulgence of him: “We understood why it was our father would not work in a mine or an office. He was sensitive and he was aristocratic.” What had once been respect for her father’s version of the elect life turned to resentment. His isolated intellectual and literary obsessions meant constant financial worries and a sense of social ostracism—at least they had for most of her self-conscious life with him, however idyllic the past before that might have been.

Stafford’s response in college was to long for wealth, or some connection with wealth, which she associated with a refined conception of culture at odds with her father’s increasingly crabbed complaints about the profligate world. In a passage of
In the Snowfall
she described her protagonist Joyce’s vision of elegant civilization: “ ‘Culture’
was a word that inhabited her like a truth or a taste; it was the agent she believed … could quarantine such people as her parents (her father was crazy, her mother was silly)…. It would permit upon the premises of its marble-halled and rose-decked estates no untoward noises, no ugly appointments, no barbaric speech, no rough manners.” At the same time, she evoked Joyce’s ambivalence about the allure of money:

Understandably, Stafford’s plans for seeking out friends when she arrived at college were far from orderly. The preoccupying question was where she belonged, or wanted to belong. Her first impulse was to gravitate toward the bohemian set among the barbarians. She had a reputation, according to a fellow student and temporarily infatuated admirer, as one of the literary libertines.
She wore jeans at a time when they were hardly the vogue. More shocking, she modeled nude for art classes at the university. The contrast could hardly have been starker: the rumpled student was unveiled as a strikingly attractive young woman. In a studio portrait taken during college, her neck is gracefully arched, her features delicate; a much more amateurish nude sketch by a classmate shows an equally well-proportioned body, slender yet nicely rounded. Stafford was studiously nonchalant about her rather sensational employment; thanks to her impecunious father, she had to work, and this was merely a high-paying job.

Yet modeling also seemed to be a dramatic expression of deep uncertainty about her identity, as her subsequent fictional treatment of it in her story “The Philosophy Lesson” suggested. There was a real gulf between the student who sat raptly in awe of her buttoned-up Victorian professor and the avant-garde girl who posed nude for her artistically inclined (and philistinely curious) classmates. In fact, her story, extracted from
In the Snowfall
and published in 1968, implied even more profound tensions than that. Teetering naked on the podium was a perfect emblem of her efforts to find some balance between her sense of isolation and her desire for connection with a wider world; it captured her fears that an escape from loneliness might entail an equally alienating exhibitionism.

For her autobiographical protagonist (renamed Cora Savage in “The
Philosophy Lesson”) to stand up on the platform undraped was at once a declaration and a denial of her independent existence in the world of other consciousnesses: she presented herself as an object of others’ scrutiny, only to see herself disappear in their subjective renderings of her. Cora was disturbed by that invisibility: “
Then she wandered about through the thicket of easels and saw the travesties of herself, grown fat, grown shriveled, grown horsefaced, turned into Clara Bow. The representations of her face were, nearly invariably, the faces of the authors of the work. Her complete anonymity to them at once enraged and fascinated her.” Profoundly unsettled, Cora resorted to bleak Berkeleian meditations: “
She concluded that she would be at peace forever if she could believe that she existed only for herself and possibly for a superior intelligence and that no one existed for her save when he was tangibly present.”