The Interior Castle (16 page)

After the fierce octave based on dynamic nature analogies, Lowell’s cadence suddenly slowed in the sestet, and he suggested a more static, historical set of symbols to give shape to the chaos: the New England images that eventually dominated the final poems inspired by this draft. But here the image of Concord was only introduced, its ironic implications—named for tranquillity, it was famous for rebellion—merely suggested before violent confusion returned.

Certainly Stafford hadn’t yet worked out her symbolic geography, in which cold New England (a setting of both tranquillity and rebellion for her, too) would occupy such a prominent place, when she began to write again in the turmoil of early 1939. She was nonetheless able to write—in fact to prove herself a “
fast worker,” as Ogden had described her to the Atlantic Monthly Press’s business office. But Lowell’s poem emphasized what Stafford herself didn’t tell her editors: the writing was far from painless. The bland landscape that Weeks had sketched in his outline didn’t offer the creative release she needed, to judge by the manuscript that was emerging; the characters were indeed storming in her brow, but scrawling them out on paper was no liberation. The section she delivered to Ogden in April bore little resemblance to the upbeat bildungsroman the Atlantic Monthly Press staff had suggested. Confiding to Stafford (even though it was against the rules) that the initial editorial report was less than favorable, Ogden tried to suggest the problem, which was one she had been told about before: the story, he said, was heartless. Whit Burnett had bluntly made the same criticism more than a year earlier about
Which No Vicissitude:
“
Verbally I think you are one of the most
brilliant persons I have ever read, but I think all of these people are not merely lost, they are damned and I must say pretty repulsively damned at that.”

Ogden put it somewhat more gently. The reader, he said,

Rather than the conventionally encouraging story of revolt and reconciliation that Weeks had outlined,
Autumn Festival
, as the novel was titled, was the record of a tortured consciousness. And the revised manuscript that she submitted in September, after which she left for two months at Mary Lee’s ranch in Colorado, was not much different. It was more of the “exhibitionistic self-abuse” she had vowed to avoid after
Which No Vicissitude
, and yet it was also a kind of perverse precursor to
Boston Adventure
, the novel she ended up publishing five years later. There, playing off an almost mythic image of Boston, she found a successful way to tell her unconventional story of social ostracism and then infiltration, which eluded her so long as she struggled with a German setting.

In
Autumn Festival
, a draft of which survives, Stafford took Weeks’s outline and gave a morbid twist to each of its proposed optimistic episodes to produce a portrait of radical alienation. Her protagonist, Gretchen Marburg, endured an unhappy childhood in America, full of ambivalence about her German father, Hermann Marburg. Mocked as a “Hun,” she felt excluded and marked forever: “
There was never a time she did not know that she was largely German.… Next to Bolshevik, that had been the worst thing in the world to be.” Her adolescence was similarly loveless and insecure. Her brother’s friends laughed at her, and her one frail effort at romance turned to hate when she was rejected.

The focus of the story was Gretchen’s year at the University of Heidelberg, her father’s alma mater, where she went after college in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, with her brother, Karl. She wasn’t appalled by far
worse things than she ran away from at home, as Weeks had prescribed. On the contrary, she discovered a strange salve for her self-loathing loneliness in Nazism, to which she subscribed with desperate fervor. “In America, Gretchen had been kithless; in the country of her own blood, she felt assimilated with a natión.” As for the love affair the Atlantic Monthly Press proposed for “rising interest,” Gretchen’s attachment to the young Nazi aviator Rheinhard Rössler was a chilling union, contrived mainly to ensure her acceptance as a loyal Nazi. For this was a young woman in search of a violent, punishing embrace: “There might be, as the aviator said, here something to take in your two hands; maybe you could wrench a tree by the roots. You could believe in something hard and brutal like the Hebrew God that could scare the daylights out of a sinner and scorch the sinews of an idolator.”

But Gretchen also aspired to revenge against the world, convinced in her loneliness that she was sinned against as well as sinning. She found a pretext for it in her frantic determination to prove her faithfulness to the Nazi cause. “Like the Catholic in whom the ritual grows and grows until it becomes all, so she rejected nothing of National Socialism.” In fact, she went so far as to inform on her own brother, an anti-Nazi, as well as on several of his friends and an old humanist at the university, Professor von Reisenhoff, her father’s mentor during his student days. While Rössler was being killed in Spain, soldiers were pillaging on the home front as well: they stormed Professor von Reisenhoff’s apartment, thanks to Gretchen’s tip. Appalled by what she had done, in self-defense she murdered a drunken Nazi in the mêlée that ensued. But the writing leaves it far from clear that her eyes were opened in the process. After a brief and fearful refuge in drunken oblivion herself—the novel is full of “drinking and howling and flirting with strangers” as an escape from self-hatred—Gretchen was rescued by the chance to leave Germany, arranged by one of Rössler’s friends.

The novel was an exercise in venting self-disgust and revulsion with the world. It was an outpouring that Stafford seemed to be powerless to redirect in more positive directions, even though that was her own creative aim, not just the commercial desire of her editors. During the previous summer she had exhorted herself, in correspondence with Hightower, to purge her writing of its defeatist strain. That she found it very hard to avoid was suggested by the insistence of her rhetoric: “
I will not write any more books that are discouraging; I will not be a writer of
defeat.… I will not teach anyone a doctrine of futility, and I will not delight anyone with violent burlesque.… It is wrong to put futility and disease down on paper.” The remedy she had usefully identified was comic irony, which she tried with very uneven success in her Neville novel. The trouble with
Autumn Festival
was that she doomed any effort at tragic ironic tension by rendering her protagonist in such profoundly unsympathetic terms. For a brief moment, during the fall of 1938 when she had written to Hightower about embarking on her portrait of the artist (which she apparently quickly abandoned), Stafford had managed to feel fondness for a heroine with the same name—and had remarked upon it: “
I like Gretchen Marburg now as I did not before.” But sympathy eluded her when she set to work on
Autumn Festival
in 1939. Instead of the protagonist pulled between love and literature whom she had described to Hightower, what emerged was a character incapable of love who in her guilty, agonized isolation concluded that “
You could anaesthetize yourself in one of the two German ways: the Reich way or the way of books”—and chose the Reich way.

Stafford may have assumed that making Gretchen a Nazi automatically ensured a certain ironic distance, much as Gretchen seemed to feel that becoming a Nazi could rescue her from the burden of being herself. But it is precisely that parallel that undermines any consistent possibility of irony: Stafford’s merciless narration, like Gretchen’s merciless indoctrination, reads like an act of self-punishing will rather than an act of self-transcending imagination. Instead of irony, there is an air of futility, as one of the Atlantic Monthly Press readers vividly complained, remarking that Gretchen

She had been reading Joyce almost obsessively, and this influence lay behind some of the “genuine merits” of the manuscript as well as its excesses. Stafford was still readily carried away by abstract “words,
merely,” seduced by their sound as much as by their meaning, but she was also striving for greater concreteness and often attaining it. Working her way out of the old loose introspection, she displayed a new, if sometimes less-than-nuanced, concern for form. She had taken pains to impose structure on her enterprise.

In fact, the central theme of her novel was the necessity of form, however brutalizing, to give meaning to otherwise undirected experience. Like Stephen Dedalus, who was “
proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and the riot of his mind,” Gretchen turned on the world and herself in rage and guilt. But instead of the portrait of the artist that Stafford had in mind when she wrote to Hightower, she turned Weeks’s instructions into a pretext for writing what amounted to an anti-
Kunstlerroman
. Where Stephen’s battle had a triumphant artistic outcome in
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, Stafford denied Gretchen such release. Stephen turned his back on the Catholic priesthood after suffering turmoils of the flesh and spirit, to become instead in his own mind “
a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.” Gretchen discovered no transcendence but remained trapped in an unwieldy body and a mind racked by guilt. She occasionally considered the possibility of elevation through art but was inhibited by what felt like an incompatibility between the roles of writer and woman: “
It was the same old horse and cow debate, which was better, a creative woman or a homebody.” She couldn’t reconcile the creative woman with a body: “She thought of the ink stains on the sleeves of her blouse … of her room which had no gender and belonged, as did the ink stains, to a desiccated Marburg, and she wondered if she looked like a woman … if she was as unsexed as her mother, who was as uninteresting as a plain white linen pincushion.”

Instead, the only vocation Gretchen could claim was not a creative analogy to the Church, but a destructive parody of it. Throughout the novel, Stafford adumbrated a parallel between the zealous Catholic and the fanatic Nazi. At the close, the religious framework became explicit in the symbolic super imposition of Golgotha on Heidelberg and the arrival of Lent: “The great grave of Golgotha, the ostentatious mausoleum and the carnage primly covered and marked with a Christian cross to which four extra arms had been affixed, was a charming town cut by a beautifully twisting river.” Here, as throughout, Stafford’s irony is almost
impossible to gauge, but this awkward image effectively undercut any suggestion of imminent redemption for Germany or for Gretchen. This Lent wasn’t likely to end in any resurrection into “everliving life.”

A
S IT TURNED OUT
, Stafford herself was denied any reward after writing two drafts of the novel, a labor that must have been a masochistic ordeal. It is not hard to read into the manuscript Stafford’s own anxieties about ostracism and her ambivalence about literature as a salvation from corrosive self-doubt and hatred, magnified to nightmarish proportions. Despite Ogden’s championing of what he admitted was a “
curiously tortured story,” the Atlantic Monthly Press rejected
Autumn Festival
in December 1939. In a sense it was a fitting fate for an anti-
Kunstlerroman
, just as the publication of a portrait of the artist can be its own self-fulfilling conclusion. It was also a familiar fate for Stafford; she had been turned down before. Once again, she reacted with impressive resilience. Earlier she had shown herself eager to be taken in hand, even harshly, and now, though she had made obvious strides since
Which No Vicissitude
, she seemed to know she needed to be goaded to avoid that “
doctrine of futility,” as she described her tendency to Hightower.

Years later, in 1952, Stafford offered this rather strange retrospective assessment: “
The war came along and [the novel’s] slant wasn’t topical enough. Thank Heaven, oh, thank Heaven, its author apostrophizes. It was not, in retrospect, a book she would like to have written.” Her declaration is striking not only for its subtle distortion of the circumstances of rejection—actually, the book was all too topical, though its slant would definitely have been unpopular—but also for her emphatic relief that the book was buried.
Autumn Festival
evidently was a disturbing skeleton in her literary closet, which she only later found ways to flesh out more successfully and acceptably.