The Interior Castle (13 page)

Stafford’s subject and her self-consciously disciplined literary approach to it were in stark contrast to her own predicament. She was hard at work lambasting an educational system that coddled young women who upon graduation would be supported by their fathers until they lured husbands with their cosmetic and homemaking skills. Meanwhile, she—with her advanced degree—was without a job and flailing, and her father was certainly not a protector. John Stafford was unable to support himself and his wife, much less Jean, but the trouble went further than that. He loomed as an image of the hapless, hopeless life dedicated to words. As for marriage, Stafford had begun to think about that prospect but was confronted with too many suitors to pick from. Again, though, the difficulty was more profound. Balancing art and love, she discovered, did not come easily or naturally to her.

In the one piece of published writing that emerged from that visit
home—a thinly fictionalized portrait of those slow summer months in 1938 when she was in Oregon with her parents and Aunt Ella—Stafford addressed the ever-troubling subject of her father and her family. “And Lots of Solid Color,” which appeared in
American Prefaces
more than a year later, in November 1939, was her fictional debut. The story shows her struggling for perspective on the subject that deprived her of any distance and inspired romantic despair. In fact, a recurring theme of Stafford’s letters to Hightower toward the start of the summer was the impossibility, or inadvisability, of writing anything down about her father and his life among his womenfolk. Yet she was preoccupied with him and with the way his fate seemed bound up with hers. Her repeated resolutions to stay silent were admissions of her need to find words for her struggle with her family.

Sometimes she simply went ahead and wrote, reporting to Hightower that she was starting work on her autobiography (Evelyn Scott’s
Escapade
, published when she was twenty-seven, helped inspire the precocious undertaking). Stafford was also busy jotting down notes for a novel about her “
poor benighted father,” a long-term project “that can wait, I think, because I can never forget the details of his misery and I can write them down bit by bit for a long time. The McKillop girls are in league against him.” She was appalled by his predicament: “
He sits in a corner of the couch with his legs drawn up and looks like a dwarf. He is a combination of the oldest man in the world and the youngest child. I am sick to death to look at him and to know what hell he has lived with this dreadful woman.… My only hope is that he will die pretty soon.” More often she endeavored to banish the obsession—only to be caught in the trap of writing about precisely what she vowed to avoid. “
I wish to keep to my resolve that I may have already mentioned that henceforth I am not going to write about the trivia that vex me,” she wrote to Hightower in August in a particularly anguished letter about her parents, which then went on in a tumultuous stream of consciousness:

Implicitly Stafford acknowledged that she could not help putting them down, and her letters were full of ambivalent outbursts. Sometimes she was bitter about her “psychopathic” father and his delusions about his writing and pitied her mother for having to tolerate his brutally condescending treatment of her even as she worked to support his preposterous existence. Sometimes she defended him, praising his prose (which she sent to Hightower for a look) and lamenting his predicament, suffocated by his wife and sister-in-law; Stafford herself could be cruelly condescending toward them (she was recording her mother’s and aunt’s clichés for a projected anthology of banality). And sometimes she was resigned, even tenuously fond. She was trying out alternate tones and styles, looking for some perspective that could mediate between detachment and identification.

In another letter, written in a much more composed frame of mind, Stafford confronted with ruthless lucidity the bind she was in with her father. “
I don’t laugh any more. Not at all. Not about Dad I don’t laugh,” she wrote to Hightower:

Yet the “consolation” of being unpublished was also a tribulation and a challenge. For Stafford to publish words would be to best—and to shame—her father, which she claimed she was loath to do. At the same
time, it could be a kind of vindication of the life he had led badly, an answer to what she perceived as the philistine McKillop disdain for a literary vocation: “
Today Mother said she did not understand how I could write, having witnessed Dad’s thirty-year miscarriage.” And of course it would be a vindication of herself.

As the story Stafford wrote that summer suggests, the resolution of her bind was far from simple. She took as the situation of “And Lots of Solid Color” the most immediate, sensitive stage of her life: she juxtaposed her own insecurity about her literary future with her family’s perpetual insecurity, thanks to her father’s literary past and present. That summer, on the brink of leaving home for good, Stafford was preoccupied with the question of reconciling domestic, practical values and intellectual, artistic aspirations. Her Stephens novel and article expressed one clear vision of their incompatibility: those frivolous girls would tend a house but nothing higher than that. “And Lots of Solid Color” conveyed another daunting prospect, that the price of pursuing the life of the mind was the loss of a home.

That was the theme of the simple plot, which was transparently autobiographical as few of Stafford’s subsequent stories are. (Many of her observations of and indirect quotations from her family were lifted nearly verbatim from letters to Hightower during those months.) What saved it from being a self-dramatizing diary, “words, merely” atop a surge of agonized sensibility, was the prose, which was unexpectedly simple. Her protagonist, Marie Charles, awaited the arrival of the mail on a Saturday and then a Monday late in August, desperate for a letter offering her a teaching job for the fall, dreaming of the adobe house in New Mexico she would buy, with “
bright solid color bathtowels … orange teacups in blue saucers and red candlewick spreads for the beds.” The other members of the family—father, mother, and aunt—hovered obtrusively in the background, each of them presenting an implicit, or explicit, commentary on Marie’s predicament.

Both of her parents kindly but pathetically played along with her delusions. Her emaciated father wished Marie’s predicament away: “
Well, we’ll be riding in a Packard pretty soon if I sell this article. I’ll buy a farm and then we won’t have to worry about teaching jobs. You can just read and write all the time.” Her “fat, rosy” mother listened to her pipe dreams with friendly, foolish optimism. It was only Aunt Eva who spitefully punctured Marie’s fantasies, sure she wouldn’t be invited to live in
the house should it miraculously appear—which of course it didn’t. The old woman’s disenchantment was doubly intolerable to Marie because it was a wizened version of the hopelessness and selfishness she herself harbored as she waited in vain for an offer. “Nothing for a college graduate,” Marie lamented bitterly as she scanned the want ads and mail, “no food for them, hell, no, they could eat their educations, live on words as her father had done all his life.”

T
WENTY-THREE THAT SUMMER
, Stafford worried about finding a fruitful balance between her personal and artistic desires not simply as a daughter but also as a potential wife. The story she wrote confirmed the fatalistic thrust of her letters—that she, the prodigal daughter, finally wouldn’t be able to vindicate her prodigal father, let alone herself. Instead, she was tempted to take revenge, out of guilt and resentment, on the whole family. Such a possibility lurked beneath the surface of the story: that Marie, if she had her adobe house, would fill it with her “
beautiful friends, happy and rich, not worried,” rather than with her poor, unhappy relatives. She would selfishly retreat.

Stafford had an even greater fear as a lover: that she was a frigid woman doomed to love from a distance and to betray. That same summer, outside of her family, Stafford was navigating another confusing course between the competing claims of love and art, one that she didn’t try turning into fiction. Not that love won out over art. The contest was far from clear. The drama was played out in letters, in which she abruptly vacillated between emotional commitment and artistic detachment. Responding with her “whole being” seemed to be impossible.

Job offers were scarce during the summer, but suitors weren’t. Stafford had three. William Mock, her colleague from Stephens, was eager to marry her, but friendly though they had been that year and fond though their subsequent correspondence was, she didn’t take the courtship very seriously. Robert Lowell had written to her that summer and during the rest of 1938 “
wooed her something fierce,” according to a friend, although none of the correspondence remains. (One possible oblique comment on the courtship, in a letter from Lowell to his friend Frank Parker that year, suggested that Lowell had decided that his work took precedence over love. “
Whenever you uncover the growing flowers [of art],” he instructed his friend, “you must chew and suck them, rembering [
sic
]
that
they
are your staple. Women until you surpass puberty are sweets, not to be ignored, not to be lived on.”) The most serious, long-standing suitor was Robert Hightower, and the frequent letters between him and Stafford are a revealing record of her confusion about her identity as a woman and as a writer.

They are also a disconcerting record, for Stafford expressed her ambivalence as a violent swerving between extremes. Those fluctuations could be bewilderingly abrupt, as she suddenly switched from aloof writer defending her solitude to romantic lover pleading for emotional and physical intimacy. In part, her unsettling inconsistency toward Hightower can presumably be ascribed to deceit: she was concealing something from him—her interest in Lowell. But it also seemed to be the honest expression of a woman who truly didn’t know her mind, heart, or body—whose ambivalence was so deep that the surface signs were radically unsteady. Clinging to a precarious sense of herself as a writer, Stafford was confused about the implications of aspiring to “womanliness,” as she intermittently—and a little too vehemently—declared she did. Was fulfillment as a woman (whatever that might mean) a necessity or an impossibility, a prerequisite to writing or an alternative to it? Or to put the question differently, as Stafford’s evident anxiety about her femininity suggested might be appropriate, was writing perhaps an alternative to committing herself to full engagement as a woman, a justification of aloofness?

To Hightower’s disappointment, Stafford had started out the summer, during their trip out West, insisting on distance. Her rebuff in Geneseo was not personal but profound, she took pains to convince Hightower somewhat later, sending him a spring entry from her journal, in which she had agonized over her sense of alienation. Tacitly acknowledging his confusion, and suspicion, about her fickleness, she obviously meant the soul-baring as special proof of her openness and sincerity. In it she both condemned and excused herself in self-dramatizing style:

In the course of July, as she settled into her writing regimen and struggled for tolerance toward her family (“
Really, I don’t mind it. I feel sort of good about being kind and unprofane. I feel sort of clean”)—and perhaps received yet more letters from Lowell—her resistance to Hightower became more self-assured. He was eager to arrange a meeting in the course of the summer and to plan the future after that; the life of a scholar of Chinese was not the creative adventure he had had in mind, and he was ready to abandon Harvard and set out with Stafford. Her explanations and justifications for holding back suddenly were not those of a wistfully doomed woman who had “destroyed everything in [her] soul,” but of a purposeful writer. “
It is not that I do not love you,” she wrote to him in early July. “It is that I love both you and my novel and for the time being any marriage of the two is out of the q[uestion].” She rather coldly cited the unfavorable working conditions in Salida as her main reason for postponing a visit.

In a letter two days later she lectured Hightower about the longer-term difficulties of the marriage of the two—of him and her novel—in unexpected and convoluted terms. Domineering demands that she renounce her writing and make Hightower a home were certainly not what stood in the way of a union: there were no such demands. On the contrary, it was precisely his willingness to sacrifice his scholarly career and make her a home, without seriously weighing the implications for his own possible artistic career, that seemed threatening. Rather than a declaration of her independence, her letter was designed to goad him into asserting his own ambitions. Above all, she didn’t want a house and marriage on the compromised terms that had trapped her parents into unions that she and Hightower agreed were stifling. “
I will put it coldly like this,” she summed up: