The Interior Castle (21 page)

Almost two years after the accident, in the fall of 1940, Stafford’s memory of the pain, and doubtless also of anesthetic release, was refreshed.
On a trip to New Orleans with Lowell’s school friends Blair Clark and Frank Parker, who were down in Louisiana for a visit, Lowell hit her, breaking her nose again. A surreal, horrible night, it seems to have stunned them all, including Stafford, into an oddly understated appraisal of the event: arguing with his wife about something (no one remembered what), excitable Cal had simply forgotten his own strength. In the rush to get Stafford to a hospital—Clark, as usual, came to the rescue—none of them paused to consider at all seriously what it might suggest about Lowell and about their marriage. If worries surfaced afterward, they were kept quiet. Stafford made no mention of the incident, or of the ordeal of further surgery on her face, in her letters to Hightower. But it seems she was working on her experience of suffering, recently renewed, turning it in an unexpected direction. Her story about her “queer room daydream,” which built on the accident, was a story about a votary, not a victim. Putting St. Teresa’s metaphor to use, Stafford found metaphysical meaning for her travails. She charted the soul’s path from bodily woe to a moment of spiritual release.

The story was divided into two parts, two stages in the lessons of suffering. The progression loosely followed Teresa’s
Interior Castle
and is worth tracing in some detail, for the story’s structure, themes, and style laid the groundwork for much of Stafford’s fiction to come. In the first section, the nameless patient lay silently in her hospital bed, cultivating aloofness from the outside world and alertness to the motions of her mind. It was an all-consuming occupation, which required a willed self-absorption but promised some ultimate repose. “
She fancied the consummation would resemble her present obliviousness to all but the abstract exercises of her mind, but that the external world would be altered; it
would no longer be necessary to discipline her privacy, for the trespassers would be exterminated. But she forever pondered what the steps to this treacherous Nirvana would be.” Memory, as Teresa instructed, played a crucial role in the progress of the soul away from the distractions of the world. It summoned up reminders of the contingency of material things, strengthening the soul in its determination to turn away from them. In the opening half of Stafford’s story, her patient dipped down into ether dream states where she drifted among memories, some recognizable, others mysterious. One image in particular stood out, and here St. Teresa’s metaphor of chambers entered explicitly. In her mental meandering, the patient stumbled upon a room, soothingly shabby and bathed in a restful autumnal light—a vision of material decay that seemed to offer sanctuary:

For Stafford’s patient, this reddish room, though alluring, remained somewhat elusive: permitted no further than the threshold, she continued to inspect the apparition like a psychologist, resisting any religious interpretation. The process turned up a disturbing memory that was perhaps its source—of a real room in New York where a moment of “
tranquil mortal melancholy” was suddenly transformed into an experience of loneliness, of cosmic homelessness. Though all the furnishings seemed to connote death and decay, and an eerie isolation, the patient was calmed by the chamber:

But like St. Teresa’s pilgrims in the preliminary stages, Stafford’s protagonist was in a precarious position, her progress away from the world still only tentative. She had managed to will her detachment only because the external world—a quiet hospital room, with a chilly landscape beyond its windows—“
made on her so few demands, distracting her so little from herself.” Similarly, she had found that her will could take her only so far in her journey toward the interior world: “
Though the room was ready and was appropriate, as far as she could judge, in every respect, she could not gain entrance to it again. Her dilemma was exasperating: she could not destroy the room and neither could she evoke it.”

In the transition to the second section of Stafford’s story, the will’s true trials began, as St. Teresa instructed they must on the route to salvation: “
Doing our own will is usually what harms us.” The will was chastened by greater physical suffering: an assault from without enabled the necessary surrender within. For the path to God, the mystics taught, was passivity. The soul did not
gain
entrance to God; it was admitted if he so willed. For Stafford’s patient, the liberating ordeal came at the hands of her nose doctor, who barged in one morning, disturbing her meditations, and announced that it was time to operate. Forced to endure anesthetic cocaine packs stuffed into her injured nostrils—a procedure that Stafford described in excruciating detail—the patient lost all capacity to concentrate on her beloved room. Her crisis began to convert her from a psychological to a spiritual perspective on her plight:

The second section of the story was a meticulous description of the surgery on her skull and a metaphorical evocation of the seizure of her soul. As the doctor cut close to her brain, piercing tissue unprotected by the anesthetic, the patient in her agony was suddenly delivered into her room. Stafford’s effort to put that moment, that decisive turn, into words recalls William James’s “gifted woman” who strained to find adequate expression for her experience. Like her, Stafford groped after geometrical
imagery: “
Her solitude was pyramidal: its peak was the snarl of unsheathed nerves. It was a naked pain, a clean and vivid pain, causing her to be reduced to a focal point. She had no existence beyond it.” And then she tried again: “
Her solitude was a sustained shriek, an infinite line, a light of incommensurate intensity. It was a minute sharp edge, a metallic malice, a flame from the hottest fuel.”

In the room itself, the calm seemed almost anticlimactic: “
She was so loving she felt she could not ever leave.” Stafford’s vision of faded grandeur was quite different from Teresa’s brilliantly sparkling inner chamber, but she closed her story with the image of a jewel familiar from the saint. In her commentary on imaginative visions, Teresa likened the culminating revelation to sudden admission to a secret reliquary that housed a precious stone. Stafford’s patient came into possession of a pearl: “
Now she lay upon her gentle bed with her aches stroked out and her fever cooled by the pacific maturity of her room. Her bleeding brain was sealed and rounded, was like a loaded, seamless ball, the agony’s wonderfully perfect pearl.”

Stafford’s story was the map of her formative efforts to find some accommodation between writing and religion—an accommodation implied but not spelled out by the New Critical teachers with whom she was now so closely associated. Lowell had already blurred the line when he began not only sprinkling his poetic terminology with words like “heresy” and “Gnosticism” but exploring some connection with the Church. He had barely begun to prove that he could be Eliot’s “classicist in literature” when he turned to the other element of Eliot’s equation, becoming “Anglo-Catholic in religion”—and not just in theory but in single-minded practice. For Lowell in 1940 the terms of the accommodation were temporarily clear: he wasn’t writing poetry at all. His religious convictions explicitly took precedence over his literary craft and would dictate its direction when (and if) he resumed. His piety was a matter of fierce will, and so would his poetry be, its formal structure and its metaphors the occasion for yoking together the abstract and the concrete, the spiritual and the material.

For Stafford the terms were not so straightforward. Faith eluded her, and her will tended to be fickle. She explored her predicament, stylistically as well as thematically, in her story. She introduced the central subject of her fiction: the isolation of the self. Her outwardly passive patient was in a sense the extreme archetype of many of her future protagonists,
under assault from without yet also secretly plotting an escape within. And Stafford focused on the double-edged faculty that dominated her characters: the imagination. In a world of opaque selves, it was the only power that permitted any semblance of interpenetration, any possibility of transparency. Thus it could claim near omnipotence. And yet, inescapably subjective, the imagination wasn’t simply to be trusted. Following St. Teresa, Stafford suggested deep ambivalence about its status. The most seductive of faculties, the imagination granted vision, but it also increased vulnerability. To see into the alien world was not necessarily to master it; to be at its mercy was perhaps more likely. The imagination threatened entrapment at the same time that it promised transcendence.

The other faculty that complicated matters was the will, if anything even more unsteady than the imagination. On the one hand, it helped define the rootless self, establishing its identity in embattled relation to the rest of the world. Stafford’s patient, all alone in the hospital, deliberately ostracized herself from her surroundings and consciously worked at cultivating a private, self-protective realm. On the other hand, the chief allure of that realm seemed to be that it offered a respite for the will—a place of repose. Moreover, ultimate access to that realm required a surrender of the will. In her story, Stafford introduced the uncanny dynamic at work in so many of her characters. They start out on the arduous route to self-creation, which turns out to be the path of passive self-abnegation.

In the curious play of will and imagination that Stafford set up in her characters, escape could seem a kind of imprisonment and imprisonment a kind of escape. For her patient, the red-tinted room was not a simple refuge, and the return to the real world was a very ambivalent resolution. Playing the therapeutic and theological perspectives off against each other, Stafford discovered a rich source of irony and tension, qualities that she counted on in her writing—which were also the key literary ingredients in the New Critical recipe. The double identity of the victim/votary provided her with a suggestive set of oppositions—body versus mind, outer versus inner, active versus passive. The most important opposition of all for Stafford was innocence versus experience, as her patient yearned for enchantment and faced disenchantment. It so happened, though doubtless not by explicit design, that the contrasts answered to the prescriptions Brooks and Warren were shortly to announce in
Understanding Fiction
(1943), the companion to their influential volume
on poetry. The oppositions were encompassing and morally ambiguous, and thus productive of the complex conflict that was an “
essential aspect of fiction.” They were central to all-important irony, which “in its most sophisticated form,” Brooks and Warren explained, “concerns the alignments of judgments and sympathies on the part of the author—the problem of his own self-division.”

That division was reflected in Stafford’s style as well as her themes. In the course of the story, her prose underwent a striking transformation. She opened in an abstract, discursive, rather mandarin style, but by the second section, she had shifted to concrete, imagistic language and was inclining toward a colloquial tone. It was an evolution entailed by the shifting focus of her subject matter. The first section, as the patient lay undisturbed in her bed, was introspective and meditative. The second, when she was ambushed by the doctor and his knives, was interactive and dramatic. But the shift was itself also part of the subject matter, for in probing the place of the self in the world, the story also probed the role of language in linking the mind to physical and metaphysical reality.

The Latinate discursiveness of the first half conveyed a mistrust of metaphor, an insecurity about how to relate the subjective and the objective, the abstract and the concrete. The ungainly grasping after, yet holding back from, analogy or allegory often resulted in heavy obscurity—the “words, merely” problem that was all too familiar to Stafford: “
The steadfast plant was like an allegory of her body in which comfort followed pain in progression syncopated with retrogression. The sameness of her occupation was, indeed, as unrelieved as the winter sky; yet she was not so mournful as the scene, nor was the protracted interruption of her activity suitable to arbitrary categorizing.” Stafford’s discovery in the second half of the story was an increasing confidence in concrete detail as a vehicle for metaphysical meaning. She had set herself perhaps the most difficult challenge of all in the use of metaphor: to give expression to pain—that is, to find for the most subjective of experiences some objective form. It meant venturing out onto the poetic verges of metaphor, as she did in her geometric allusions. As important, it meant creating a more solid, prosaic context to set off those poetic excursions. Stafford was inspired to a mixture of the mandarin and the mundane, of elevated and lowly diction and imagery, which came to be a staple of her style: