The Interior Castle

Introduction

“
I
AM SO SICK
of … feeling that nothing I can possibly say ever can convey what it’s like to be inside this particular skull,” Jean Stafford once wrote to a close friend. She was sighing over the futility of psychiatry, to which she had had plenty of exposure, but her skepticism about the power of confession is also a warning about the difficulty of biography. Stafford’s “interior castle,” the image she borrowed from St. Teresa of Avila to symbolize the secret recesses within the skull, was a well-barricaded place.

What to make of her sense of isolation was perhaps the centrally painful, and inspiring, question that Stafford faced in her life, which began in 1915 and ended in 1979. Her characteristic stance was to be intensely protective of her privacy and solitude. That didn’t mean she was quiet and retiring. On the contrary, she was readily distracted by friends, of whom she had many, and by larger social gatherings, at which she was renowned for telling long stories in her low, gravelly voice. But she saw to it that sociability was not the same thing as easy intimacy. Stafford had a “
predilection for masks and disguises,” as her close friend Howard Moss was far from the only one to notice. He was speaking literally, remembering one occasion when she had come to the door in a mask with a big red nose, and another when she appeared wearing a cocktail waitress’s outfit, but he also meant it metaphorically. Stafford devoted a great deal of energy, some of it anxious but much of it comical and high-spirited, to playing out different personas.

Her “
Lowell-to-Liebling-to-dowager mask,” as another friend, Wilfrid Sheed, summed up her long-running public performance, mostly took the form of variations on the innocent child and the ironic spinster.
When Stafford looked back on her first marriage in 1940 to the poet and New England scion Robert Lowell, she generally cast herself as the provincial girl from Colorado. But after her divorce from Lowell in 1948 she also mastered the arch Bostonian lady, the well-pedigreed, imperious Puritan grande dame she never really had a chance to be. During her marriage to A. J. Liebling, the
New Yorker
writer, she was the innocent-savvy “
reporter’s moll, a kid you could take anywhere,” as Sheed put it. And then when her husband died in 1963, she jokingly called herself “the Widow Liebling” and set about cultivating the pose of the eccentric rural recluse in East Hampton, where she lived out her life in a house that he had left to her.

Well practiced at maintaining a certain detachment in her personal life, at making intimacy an intricate and entertaining game, Stafford was even more vigilant about independence and self-protection in her literary life. It was again a somewhat paradoxical mission, since she certainly made no effort to avoid literary company. But whenever she faced an occasion to present some public statement about writing (which, though she disliked it, she intermittently did), she ended up delivering a lecture on the dangers of exhibitionism, the virtues of reticence, the snares of the literary world. She announced that she was against the fashion of being “forthrightly autobiographical,” and that the most important lesson she had ever learned, from Ford Madox Ford, was that portraiture drawn too directly from life was “impolite and it’s not fiction.” In yet another talk, she attacked “the private-made-public life” of authors on the promotion circuit. And indirectly invoking St. Teresa’s metaphor of the many-chambered inner castle, she offered her own vision of the quintessentially solitary act of creativity: “Writing is a private, an almost secret enterprise carried on within the heart and mind in a room whose doors are closed.”

In a commemorative tribute given at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters after Stafford’s death, her longtime friend Peter Taylor perhaps best summed up her often perplexing determination to remain aloof. “
Although it often may have seemed otherwise to those who didn’t know her well,” he said, “Jean set little store by the literary world.… It was only her work, not herself, that she wanted to deliver into the narrow ways of the literary world.… 
She
remained a ‘private person’ (her phrase).” And as if that were not caution enough to
a literary biographer, he went on to confess his suspicion that finally Stafford’s private person remained a mystery. “
Actually, what she was like when she sat down to write her wondrous novels and stories may be something beyond the comprehension of any of us,” Taylor suggested as he looked back over her career. “In a sense, her literary personality remains her best kept secret. Perhaps it was in that role that she was the most private of private persons, and perhaps, in order to preserve that role, it was necessary for her to have the privacy she was always seeking.”

My aim is to pursue the mystery of Stafford’s literary personality, which means confronting just how complicated her creative identity was. Without claiming to penetrate that best kept secret, I hope the search casts some clarifying light into the rooms of her imagination. The route I have taken is through her writing, which suggests again and again that isolation is a state as much to be feared as sought after, and through her writing life, in which, despite her professed desire for distance from the literary world, she in fact energetically courted close literary connections. Stafford struggled outwardly to defend the quiet chambers of her castle, but she also struggled inwardly against a terror of loneliness and a destructive urge to succumb to the peace of isolation.

Charged by this tension, her life, though not publicly dramatic, and her work, though not prolific, continually strain against their ostensibly circumscribed boundaries. Beneath the carefully crafted surfaces, there are chasms; and the neat dichotomies—inner and outer, self and other—keep threatening to dissolve. Stafford resolutely refused to follow literary vogues, with the result that she wrote fiction that is anachronistic in the best sense. At the same time, both the independent course of her literary career and the idiosyncratic life of which it was a part offer a revealing perspective on an American literary generation in the middle of the century. In probing the problems of subjectivity, she avoided the confessional route favored by many of her much-read poetic contemporaries, which may have made her work seem dated then but has subsequently had the opposite effect. She couldn’t help being wary of the notion of the declaratory self; she wasn’t ready, however, simply to embrace the now-fashionable notion of the fragmented self. In her explorations of the mysteries of identity, Stafford managed to maintain a sense of their complexity, to resist facile confidence or skepticism about the power of the imagination. She was obsessed by the idea of an autonomous self at war
with the outer world, but she also dared to admit the potentially illusory nature of that idea.

To understand the sense of marginality, personal and creative, that was at once a source of strength and a cause of deep insecurity for Stafford in her life as well as her art, it helps to situate her career in a wider literary milieu. The assertively maverick Stafford, whose provincial origins in the American West played such a large part in her self-definition, also saw to it that she found a place among writers who were shaping literary and critical debate and expectations in America. At twenty-four she married the promising poet Robert Lowell, and like him came of literary age with the New Critics as mentors and with a circle of intense young writers as friends. While their older guides—Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom—were transforming the study of literature in American universities, Lowell and his contemporaries—Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell—were embarked on feverishly creative but ill-fated courses, paths that hauntingly converged, earning the group the status of a tragic generation. Later Lowell wrote of himself and his fellow poets, “
Yet really we had the same life, / the generic one / our generation offered.”

Stafford’s place in the circle, biographically and creatively, was an uneasy one. In a sense her life was not so different from that generic one of exhilarating heights and troubled depths. Like the poets, she stumbled early into fame. At twenty-nine she published
Boston Adventure
(1944) to great success, just before the start of Lowell’s spectacular rise. By the time she left Lowell, her life looked as tragic as the rest of the poets’ would soon look. Having smashed her skull in a car accident with Lowell a year before they married, she was in Payne Whitney with a mental breakdown two months after they separated. The insomnia, suicidal urges, emotional and physical illness, marital trouble, and alcoholism that in different ways plagued Lowell, Berryman, Schwartz, and even Jarrell never ceased to afflict her. Like them, she didn’t hide her suffering; she could and did disrupt lives around her with her difficulties.

Yet her art, and her subsequent creative life, took a different direction. For Lowell and Berryman, suffering and writing became inextricably connected, the one unimaginable without the other, the turmoil fueling and fueled by the writing in an exhausting cycle. Stafford instinctively resisted any conflation of her life and her art or, just as important, of her identities as a woman and as a writer, as she made clear in a despairing
letter to Lowell in 1947. “
What do I care if Randall [Jarrell] likes my book?” she wrote to him:

After a brief unsuccessful marriage to Oliver Jensen, an editor at
Life
and then
American Heritage
, Stafford found a third husband in a literary enclave worlds away from the one in which she had begun. When she married A. J. Liebling in 1959, she was a happy woman for the first time, she said—and she all but ceased being a writer.