Read The Interior Castle Online
Authors: Ann Hulbert
As the unworldly creature lay strapped to the table and in her mind divorced from all accoutrements and all the claptrap of the surgeon and his entourage, a murmur, anguine and slowly perceived, reached her, and after the words had been spoken, she recalled them as though they were echoed: “Careful, careful, I’m near her brain.” Instantly she became an animal and though her attempt to escape was abortive, she jerked her head, and as she did so felt the pain flare.
“Relax!” cried the surgeon angrily.
Now she heard the busy scissors clipping the cartilage like tough old toenails. That place where her thoughts originated was buried shallowly and the points crept around the bones, through the tunnels to her brain.
As Stafford wrote to Hightower in the fall of 1940, she felt she had made a breakthrough, but also knew it was only a beginning. She got just the right kind of reading from Evelyn Scott, who proved for once that she could offer more than extravagant tributes to a potential talent. She stepped back to sum up what she took to be Stafford’s intentions, rather than simply focusing on the technique, the execution—though she was also ready with specific suggestions:
The surgical second section, the pain-delivery episode … is
grea
t writing. And I
mean
great. It is as harrowingly real as the best Dostoievski.… It is physical & emotional agony translated into immortal terms.…
The story begins with a rather wordy effect.… Your “room” is exquisitely purveyed. But its symbolic importance seems dependent on its character as “room” in a perfect category, and that is why the episodic references to the flat in New York … struck me as wrong.… [T]he minute you begin tying the room down to a specific instance of a room in which action takes place—specified—the eternal moment feeling the reader has threatens to be shattered.…
The defect [some] call “lack of focus,” I would call maladjustment in tempo. The infinite deliberation of first [
sic
] section refuses to relate itself
inevitably
, as it should, to the dramatic timing of section II.… You get the net impression of two distinct
blocks
of feeling—two
sorts of densities—adjusted in mosaic pattern, but not
fused
.
Scott suggested shortening the first half and making it “a precipitate of section two.”
I
T WAS GOOD ADVICE
, which Stafford eventually—six years later—took in rewriting the story. But as 1941 opened, “lack of focus” and “maladjustment in tempo” proved to be problems that went beyond her story. Like the patient in that story, Stafford was distracted in her efforts at disciplined meditation. Her writing was not the refuge she had hoped from religious confusions and pressures—or from social domestic demands. Soon illness (a persistent fever and a cough) got in the way, too. “
My life has become subordinate to all other lives to which I am related,” she had written to Hightower late in the fall of 1940; it “has become a monstrous pattern of struggle against rules and frustration so that my desire for anarchy has never been so passionate and the possibility of it has never been so remote.” In February she followed up her dramatic declarations, with which Hightower was by now familiar, with a more concrete account of her sense of claustrophobia and its cause: it was the first she had told him of Lowell’s conversion. Sitting alone in her
Southern Review
office one morning, manning the telephone, she summed up her situation in her deadpan style of desperation:
Cal is becoming a Catholic. He is being baptized in a couple of months. A real one with all the trimmings, all the fish on Friday and the observances of faith and confessions and grace before meals and prayers before bed, and while I can stand off and even admire what he is doing, I want to have none of it for myself. It sickens me down to my soul to hear him talking piously and to see in him none of the common Christian virtues [such] as pity and kindness but only the fire-breathing righteousness that belongs, not to an unbaptized lay brother, but to a priest. I am so tired of moods and disapproval and complaints that if I were any less tired I’d not put up with them. I’m boxed up and I’m hopeless and there is no one to talk to. “It is not important to me to be a writer,” he says. “If I cannot write devotional poetry, then I will not write poetry.” And it’s becoming not important to me to be a writer because it is absurd
to think of it, having no time to do it. Someday I’ll send you the stories, but God knows when. There’s no time for anything.
Yearning for anarchic release, Stafford instead succumbed to sickness. She herself noted the correlation between external pressures and internal problems: when literary guests and demands descended on her, her insecurities and her fever rose. And she appreciated the perverse resourcefulness of her imagination and will in cultivating this uncomfortable yet somehow alluring limbo. “
My particular brand of hypochondria is highly impractical,” she observed to Hightower in March after she had been on her back with a mysterious fever for three weeks. “Well, I imagine all kinds of diseases, sick, I refuse to pamper myself. I have been in bed only because Cal saw the doctor himself and enforced the order.” But in bed and feeling overburdened—too much mindless work, too many visitors, too much Catholicism—Stafford, like her patient, was about to turn a corner. Her formative story still unfinished, she found a focus and a tempo that inspired more writing. In a sense, she now did the opposite of what Scott had advised, saving her old teacher’s counsel for a later effort. Instead of shortening the first, introspective section of her story, Stafford set to work on a novel that relied on precisely such probing: she embarked on the chronicle of a curiously aloof yet alert consciousness.
Though Stafford later said that she began
Boston Adventure
when she first arrived in Baton Rouge, it seems clear that work began in earnest during the spring of 1941. Being ill seemed to bring Stafford a sense of liberation, or at least of detachment. Sickness apparently served as her response to and also her release from external pressures, for in bed she felt paradoxically less “boxed up.” Not that the devotional regimen relaxed. That April, Lowell was baptized and they were remarried in the Church. Routine observances remained a time-consuming affair. As for her writing, she found “great compensations,” both concrete and abstract, in the course of being sick and convalescent on and off throughout the rest of their year in Baton Rouge. (
With customary hyperbole, she claimed she had a fever for seven months straight and regularly referred to her disease as tuberculosis, as indeed it had been diagnosed by one doctor, though it turned out to be pneumonia.) She had time to write and read, since the
Southern Review
editors let her go home (grudgingly, she thought) and Cal commanded rest. Then in the spring her illness
served as a reason to escape the South and to spend a couple of weeks in the salutary air of Colorado at her sister’s ranch. In retreat, she seems to have been able to reflect on the spiritual claims of Catholicism rather than simply react to its daily demands.
The balance between reflection and rebellion, between passive and productive resistance, was precarious, as she conveyed in her correspondence with Hightower. By March the frustrations of February had modulated, and the tone was calmer: “
I have some new opinions of life,” she wrote,
the pattern, however, remains the same. I know the solution, but I cannot bring myself to affiliated [
sic
] myself with the agent. That is, order obviously cannot be set up in an individual life without some higher authority. I know that Cal is doing the sound thing by going into the Church and going the whole way, but it is the perverseness of my nature to fight against any therapy advocated for me without my first having discovered it. I may come around in time. Certainly I see no other institution as rewarding. Your anarchy, orderly as it is, is finally as worthless as my chaotic variety.
In April she sent two letters, the first proclaiming that “
turnabout as this may sound I believe Cal’s Catholicism has been the best thing that has happened.… I still object to some of it naturally, but have come to realize that anarchy, even our ordered anarchy, is no good. Also, even though my view of it is still far from objective, I am apprised of sin and no longer believe my history of it is too old for reparation. Don’t misinterpret me—I have not become pious and I deny having such notions every day of my life.” The second was written a week later. Stafford was drunk, and it was a frantic cry for escape: “
State some plan. You and me, I mean. No ties.… Get rid of your encumbrance, because oh dear God I cannot live this way without your help.”
Then in early May of 1941 she retracted her unhappiness almost cavalierly: “
I never, of course, meant any of it. I’m actually very happy.” But she followed up with a serious and sincere meditation on her shifting perspective:
I think I can still scoff at aspects of the Church, but I have come to believe in the Passion. And this, I hope, will not sound like pious cant.… Sin (and by sin I mean the behavior we have so often deplored in ourselves) is inescapable without dignity. I believe that you
have attained dignity; I imagine you to be much altered and I wish we had not, in foolish years, scorned the word “respectable” for its meaning is only fully clear to me now.… Speaking, you understand, of conduct. I am neither dignified nor respectable. I am formless. What else
but
orthodoxy? My life terrifies me. I am saturated with meaningless experience. I hope to have faith eventually.
Her last letter to Hightower from Baton Rouge—a very long one, in August, obviously written in several sittings—ranged over almost the whole spectrum of attitudes. Stafford acknowledged at the outset the inconsistency of any attempt at summary: “
Oh, Lord … I cannot give you an intelligible account of this period of my life at all.” Initially, her tone recalled the old fierce frustration, as she tried to convey the extent of Lowell’s zeal and of her own sense of precarious balance. She was full of dread at what lay ahead—moving to New York, where a job with the Catholic publishers Sheed and Ward awaited Cal. That represented “the first stage of our entrenchment, which I regret to say looks as though it will be permanent and deep,” a daunting sequel to their already intense introduction to the Church. “I couldn’t begin to tell you, convincingly, the extent to which [Cal] will go for a conviction. I have been
absolutely
without choice and I have whitewashed the thing to you because I must take all possible precautions against cracking up completely, which I have done several times anyway with nearly disastrous results.” She itemized the strictures of their lives, which she felt she had no alternative but to obey—aside from all the prescribed observances, “choice of movies according to the Censor, choice of books in the same way, and talk of
nothing
but the existence of God.” Once again she confided the urge to escape, to “do an Iowa City disappearing act” once they got to New York.
Yet by the end of the letter she was defending the virtues of discipline and devotion against Hightower’s skepticism, reiterating her own need for a source of order, her desire for submission rather than rebellion:
Nevertheless, when I cry out against all this, I am convinced … that there is at least the possibility of a heavenly book of records where my misdeameanours will be added up, in the end, to my ruin and damnation. Ideally, I suppose the religious attitude is composed of terror and love, humility and adoration and when, after my confession, saying in the Act of Contrition, “I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, but most
of all because I have offended Thee, my God” I do not then more than any other time believe but I see and am appalled at the
possibility
.… When I am alone at Mass or more particularly when I am doing penance after confession and no one else is in the church, I approach something. The obtrusion of opinion, argument, ramifications distresses me.
She could abstractly admire the large, austere structure of the thought, but she was put off by the “provincial, pious,
embarrassing
” style of the practice. “While I may agree with Eliot’s prescription—a Christian society—and may admire the intellectualism of the Thomists, I no better than the thousands of other liberals like me can speak of Christ as ‘Our Lord.’ ” She could not “swallow the vernacular of Sunday sermons,” she said, preferring a notion of the Church as “a composite of ritual and philosophy in which God, the saints and the angels remain timeless, absolutely timeless.” Yet, as she said, her mixture of philosophy and ritual was far from standard or steady. Stafford perhaps captured her perspective most accurately in an allusion to Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “I think I will always be in alien corn,” she told Hightower. She was summing up her relation to Catholicism, but her declaration of estrangement not only expressed her distance from religion but also suggested what drew her to it. She was a straying creature, in search of some sense of home.
While looking vainly for refuge in belief that spring, she found it instead in fiction. “
You would not recognize me,” she wrote to Hightower in March. “This present book is first person and is the first un-autobiographical piece I have done.” A month later she reported that she had finished a 175-page outline of the novel “
which is religious.” Though St. Teresa was an abiding presence, two other, secular influences seized her imagination: Henry James and Marcel Proust. Along with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, they were among the select authors who made it onto
Lowell’s short list of acceptably serious literature. Stafford certainly took them seriously. Reading them, as she described it, was not exactly a restful convalescent occupation.
“
Proust outstrips everyone,” she announced, and he was demanding: “He wears me out physically. His intensity demands complementary energy which in me is limited, but I know of no intellectual exercise so rewarding as reading him carefully.” She quickly amended that claim:
“That is, no exercise performed with another novelist unless it is James who in a way is better.” Then in rounding off her assessment, she called a halt to the competition between the two masters: “But the methods, inductive and deductive, are diametrically opposed and a comparison between them is precarious.” She had identified the contrasting approaches that she had begun to explore in her surgery story and that she was about to pursue in her novel. The loose, subjective Proustian progress from specific experience to generalizations lurked behind the opening section of her story, in which she strived to extract some kind of transcendent significance from sensual ordeals. But she was also attracted by James’s pursuit of appropriate particulars to illuminate his implicit theme, of drama to display the presiding intelligence in his stories. Her second section was a kind of exercise of that more directed and disciplined method.