The Interior Castle (60 page)

Stafford defending the family as a source of stability and strength is a long way from the young Stafford battling against her clan, and a long way from the novelist struggling to explore the darker side of kinship. There is a strange undercurrent of self-denunciation in Stafford’s indictment of rebellious youth for overthrowing the family. After all, she had abandoned her own family and championed a ruthless individuality in the face of their persistent efforts to claim some kind of permanent relationship with her. She had spent much of her life chafing at the roles of daughter and sister, and motherhood had never been a very serious prospect for her; her bond with her brother had not been as continuously close as she suggested in retrospect. In her concluding assessment of the dire implications of the sixties ethos in her letter to Taylor, she was perhaps alluding to her own decisive youthful break with her family: “
The
direct appeal to youth for youth’s sake will always be the making of just so many little Hitlers” she wrote. “They love nobody but themselves and their cry is
I
want
mine!
” Years before, Stafford had escaped from home to Hitlerian Germany, where—to judge by the ordeals she arranged for her autobiographical character Gretchen Marburg in
Autumn Festival
—she had been trapped by egocentric desires and, though appalled by Nazi youth in Heidelberg, had been profoundly adrift herself.

Now Stafford was adamant about sticking to her own, anachronistic cause. The student rebellion at Columbia in the spring of 1968, however disorienting, did little to intimidate her into playing along. On the contrary, as she contemplated returning to teach in the fall, she was emphatically uncompromising, as she explained in a letter to Frank McShane, the director of the creative writing program:

That letter made clear the underlying consistency of Stafford’s emergence as a cultural conservative in the scattered journalism that by now eclipsed her fiction. Though her traditionalist discontentment with contemporary culture consorted somewhat uneasily with her own rebellious, bohemian youth, and though her defense of conventional decorum looked a little odd in light of her own psychological turmoil, there had been a steady allegiance at work. From the outset Stafford had felt the need to embrace order in the struggle with unruly experience, and to buck the tide of majority opinion—however much tension was entailed.

As usual, there was plenty of tension. When her first year at Columbia was over in the spring, she didn’t feel much relief. She returned to East Hampton only to face more physical ordeals (further trouble with pinched nerves) and to continue to vent her spleen at the state of the
world. A letter she wrote that summer to the local newspaper, the
East Hampton Star
, is a typical example of the humorously peevish journalistic manner she increasingly adopted and the arch populism it expressed. (It was the sort of letter she often had Miss Stackpole pen for Miss Stafford.) In it, a sampling of her characteristic crotchets was on display:

While she was cultivating her out-of-date image—often wittily, sometimes more indignantly—she was also keeping track of Lowell, who was energetically abreast of the times. It was easy enough to follow him during the late 1960s when, as his biographer has put it, his “
public persona achieved its remarkable apotheosis.” He had been protesting prominently—refusing to accept an invitation to the White House from President Johnson, marching on the Pentagon—and now he plunged into electoral politics, campaigning with Eugene McCarthy. Though he must have seemed to be on the other side of the barricades most of the time, Stafford was for the most part fondly humorous, and sarcastic, about Lowell’s high profile. “
It is a little hard to keep up with R. T. S. L., Jr. these days,” she wrote to Taylor in the spring of 1968, “but I’ll try to run this clipping service as efficiently as possible. I like the image of a president-maker lolling about with his loafers off (you can imagine what condition they’re in) and fetching up with that definition of acedia.” It all seemed outlandish, but in a half-familiar way. “The whole business sounds like the mythology of the Wuberts,” she commented, remembering Lowell’s role as Arms of the Law, the sheriff-like bear who scripted elaborate parts for all of his friends in the game of “berts” that Lowell and Stafford had played during their marriage.

Amid all the turmoil, there was one interlude of peace, when her friend Jean Riboud spirited her away for a visit to his château in France. There she escaped the rude modern world for a brief taste of old-fashioned gentility. As she wrote in an article several years later, “Why I
Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” an amusing catalog of her horrifying travails every time she set forth from her beloved house, her visit to France was her last trip abroad. It had been so uncharacteristically painless that she took it as an omen not to press her luck: “
I doubt that I will ever go abroad again, unwilling to challenge that record and come a mighty cropper.”

As she went on to say in the article, she was occasionally tempted against her better judgment to venture out in her own country. Invited to participate on some panel or other, “
compulsively I accept because, I tell myself, I will see a part of the country hitherto unknown to me; the fee is attractive; the date is so far in the future that it will never come.” Instead, she found the experiences yet more rude confrontations with an uncongenial world. “Far from broadening, travel in this unenlightened age has narrowed my mind to a hairsbreadth. Chatty seatmates on planes, trains and buses have made me misanthropic; motels and hotels with no or with lackadaisical service have made me undemocratic.” Her experiences at Columbia were her most extended exposure to the unenlightened age, and on her return to teaching in the fall of 1968, she found herself even more out of her element than she had felt the year before. Eager to be back in East Hampton, she arranged to have another writer take her place for the spring term.

Stafford’s retreat roughly coincided with the sudden emergence of her fiction in print. Her story “The Philosophy Lesson” appeared in
The New Yorker
in November of 1968. It was apparently drawn from work she had done long before on
In the Snowfall
, which had since then migrated into the autobiographical novel that was still giving her so much trouble. The story was set at a university clearly modeled on her alma mater, and its plot also linked it to
In the Snowfall
, though Joyce had been renamed
Cora Savage. Like the protagonist of
The Parliament of Women
, she confronted a familiar, Lucy McKee–inspired trauma: while posing for an art class, Cora heard the news of a fellow student’s suicide. In exploring Cora’s consciousness as she meditated on the death and watched the snow start to fall, Stafford included a moment reminiscent of the bilocation that she was experimenting with in her new novel—the disorienting shift between vivid present and dreamlike past. But in this version, rather than aiming for unsettling disjunction, she smoothed it into a relatively tame moment of memory. Looking out at the snow, Cora was suddenly transported back to her childhood in Adams by thoughts
of the danger she had associated with winter when the sleds came out: “
Once Cora lost control and went hurtling into a barbed-wire fence. It seemed to her, on reflection, that she had slowly revolved on her head, like a top, for a long time before the impact. Then, too frightened to move lest she find she could not, she had lain there waiting for her brother.… Afterward she had been afraid of the ski jumps.…” The vision of cold loneliness haunted her again as she found herself all too able to imagine what had driven her fellow student to death. “
A darkness beat her like the wings of an enormous bird and frantic terror of the ultimate hopelessness shook her until the staff she held slipped and her heart seemed for a moment to fail.” This story about the terrors of an isolated consciousness within an alienating body was a carefully shaped work, whose very artfulness served to underscore the dangers of disintegration.

Stafford’s appearance in
The New Yorker
after so long was soon followed by an announcement in
Time
of a forthcoming novel (“
her first … in seventeen years”), a misleading report, though her public revival did continue.
The Parliament of Women
was nowhere in sight, but in February of 1969 her
Collected Stories
was published. Here, too, Stafford was obviously riding on old work: almost all of the stories had been published at least a decade earlier. It was a consolidation of her career that clearly meant a lot to her, though it was also a potentially difficult reemergence. She hadn’t managed to produce much since those stories, and meanwhile literary tastes had moved significantly beyond the sensibilities and standards that informed much of her work. But Stafford betrayed no apprehension, in fact took the occasion to emphasize her nonconformist, out-of-date literary allegiances. Studiously resisting any “relevant” packaging of her reentry into a literary scene that she disparaged as undecorous, she paid homage to Twain and James in the author’s note, borrowed from those unfashionable mentors for the section titles of the collection, featured the elegant
New Yorker
in a cover collage of the magazine’s pages, and dedicated the book to Katharine White.

Her confidence was well rewarded. However unenlightened she judged the times, she herself was judged very favorably. Enthusiastic reviews appeared promptly and prominently. The daily
New York Times
declared, “
Everything that we desire from a collection of short stories, from the art of fiction, in fact, can be found in this gathering of Jean Stafford’s work”; Guy Davenport in the Sunday
Book Review
heralded it
as “
an event in our literature,” and others followed suit. Early in 1970 Stafford was at last elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, after years of not quite making it. When the most unexpected recognition of all, a Pulitzer Prize, was announced that spring, Stafford was taken by surprise, and so, apparently, was the
New York Times
. The newspaper’s editorial about the awards—after saluting Seymour Hersh’s prize for reporting on the My Lai massacre and noting that “in the arts and letters section, the judges appeared to be aware of what’s new”—was caught up short by the anachronistic air of the fiction prize winner. “
And if Jean Stafford’s stories are more traditional than adventuresome,” the editorialist rather lamely observed, “they are surely among the best of their kind being written today.” Stafford herself commented in an interview on the incongruous timing of her elevation. “
I find it awfully heartening that a writer as traditional as I can be recognized,” she said—and then took the opportunity to vent her typical impatience with the prevailing aesthetic: “Do we really need a poem about a banana that is set in type to form the shape of a banana?”

Stafford’s sudden prominence pleased her, though true to her retiring rural-lady style, she liked to play down her success, treating the fanfare as a rude intrusion into her life. “
For a few days my privacy was outrageously invaded by telephone calls,” she wrote to Mary Lee, “but now everything has quieted down.” In fact, the flurry over the award did subside relatively quickly, and if she was disappointed, Stafford could also claim she was not at all surprised. Before the Pulitzer she had written caustically to Allen Tate about the complaints of her less sympathetic readers: “
I’m now getting very snippy reviews—I’m not ‘relevant,’ I’m not involved with issues, I’m not a Jew and I’m not a Negro, I deal only with the human heart and that has been transplanted.” After the prize, she was invited to be a writer-in-residence briefly at the University of Pennsylvania and was similarly under no illusion about her relevance: “
None of them [her students] had ever heard of me and certainly had not read me, but this was understandable enough since neither had their teachers.”

As those declarations suggest, Stafford’s sense of marginality inspired indignation and resignation, depending on her mood and depending on her audience. In the 1970s, in the journalism that now constituted her literary output, she mostly kept her disgruntlement within decorous bounds. “
I could wish that the 1970s came to be known as the Age of
Order” she wrote in
McCall’s
as the decade began, and the demure tone and glossy venue were typical. “I would like to see government once again informed by statecraft and education dignified by humanism; I would like to see a straightening up of the language and the removal of rubbishy jargon and solecisms.” Rather than veering into extreme bitterness, she seemed almost consciously to be holding herself in check, carefully taming her personal turmoils, present and past, and curbing her critique of public disarray. Of course, the style was partly the product of the places she was writing for—women’s magazines, for the most part, where she had a hope of making some money. But the gentility of her rage perhaps reflected deeper constraints as well. Stafford knew all too well the direction in which old rural recluses could incline: she had written about addled isolates, and she had known her father.