Read The Interior Castle Online
Authors: Ann Hulbert
For being back in the New York literary whirl was not the exhilarating experience it had been the first time around, in 1941–42, during the Lowells’ Sheed and Ward year. This time Stafford ventured out alone, without Cal, to face the intimidating
Partisan Review
crowd—and then found she had to defend him in absentia. It was the kind of fight she felt completely inadequate to wage. In a long letter to the Taylors in November, she graphically dramatized her predicament. She had just been to Danbury to visit Lowell and waxed uncharacteristically romantic: “
He is the most attractive and lovable man I know.… And I cannot tell you how glad I am that I am married to him and how sick down to my bones it makes me that he isn’t in this room and won’t be for ages.” As in her earlier letters to Hightower, she seemed better able to love at a distance, and on paper. But the mood was quickly shattered:
I have had
such
a revolting experience. After I got back from Danbury, I went to a cocktail party at the Rahvs. I got there very late—never should have gone, of course; I was wretched and should have gone home with my wretchedness and spent the evening looking at the snapshots of Cal—and not only was everyone quite drunk, but Philip Rahv had told everyone about me and Cal. (I should say here, by the way, that the greatest snobs in the world are bright New York literary Jews and the name Lowell works like love-philtre.) So that total strangers came up and asked me how Cal was. A certain Mr. Sidney Hook said to me, “Your husband is a heretic. He cannot be a conscientious objector and a Catholic for he is going against the dictates of the Pope.” This happens to be untrue and it is an un-nice thing to be told by a logical positivist that your husband is a heretic. We had a little set- to over Saint Augustine (I was on steady enough ground here because I have recently been reading the confessions and reading them hard.) and had a generally distressing conversation. Of course he had everything at his fingertips and I daresay he is a distinguished man—if you go in for that kind of distinction. At any rate, when the crowd thinned out, a few of us went to dinner and then to a PR editor’s house to go on drinking.
Mrs. Sidney Hook … commenced to bait me and when I said “I can’t discuss the Spanish war with you because I don’t know enough about it. I know only the Encyclicals. But I am very sure there is something to be said for Franco,” she screamed across the room, “Sidney, there is no point in talking to this girl. She thinks there is something to be said for Franco.” And suddenly, as if there were large onions before my face, tears began to stream down my cheeks. They were automatic tears and very large ones and I couldn’t stop them. Finally the woman gave me her handkerchief and presently they left.
In the middle of the distressing scene—a snapshot of the legendary, unending
PR
-style party—Stafford was still able to watch it and then recreate it, deftly inserting irony alongside the agony. Her comment about Franco seems to have emerged unbidden; she was perhaps parroting a throwaway line of Lowell’s. Once again the literary world had undone her, but this time she saw more clearly than she had at Yaddo the degree of her ambivalence. She went on to give the Taylors her postmortem of the event, sizing up her situation with acuity:
This morning when I woke up I felt like something out of its shell.
Crying
in front of people! And I analyzed it out and realized that what had happened was that I was lonely and isolated and that there had never been such a stupid move on my part as to go amongst such cruel people immediately after seeing Cal. For I had been told by ¾ of the men there that Cal was a fool or was hysterical, etc. etc. And suddenly everything broke like a glass and there I was, in tears.… I wish I could talk to you long and completely about literary people in New York. They are such cut-throats, such ambitious and bourgeois frights and yet I, in my stupid lack of integrity, continue to see them.
And it wasn’t just
Partisan Review
people whom Stafford had to battle on Lowell’s behalf. Perhaps even worse, she had to face her mother-in-law. In a couple of remarkable letters, Charlotte Lowell—“
Charlotte Hideous” to Stafford—coldly lectured her daughter-in-law about the inadvisability of drawing on Lowell’s trust fund while he was in prison (as Cal had wanted) and insinuating none too subtly that Stafford was to blame for letting “
Bobby” get into this fix. “He will be completely penniless when he is released if you care to impose upon his generosity,” she
warned. “I hope, Jean, for your own sake as well as for Bobby’s, that you will see in the present situation an opportunity for courage, selfdevelopment, and integrity of purpose.”
In finishing
Boston Adventure
, which she was on her way to doing by the turn of the year, Stafford had shown all three—though Mrs. Lowell would hardly have seen it that way, not least because the product of Stafford’s perseverance was a spirited satire of Mrs. Lowell’s own precincts. But in February of 1944 as Lowell’s sentence neared its end (he was granted parole in March), Stafford’s courage faltered and her sense of Lowell’s own self-development and integrity was shaken. According to a retrospective account of the year, she had “
great trouble with the church … could not believe and suffered great tortures.” Whatever new wave of doubts she may have had, they were augmented by the increasing religious zeal Lowell displayed in prison. She talked with a priest in New York who also knew Lowell, who confirmed her impression that Cal had become “
more Catholic than the church,” but as she confided to Peter Taylor, that was small comfort. Ahead of her loomed life with a man whose fervor dwarfed even his previous religious dedication. Her letter to Taylor spelled out the specifics, and it tends to confirm her later declaration that the term in jail was not so hard for Cal, for he was “
crazy” (she was not being merely figurative). Certainly his plans were outlandish:
It is not right for me to burden you with this just before you go overseas, but you are probably Cal’s closest friend. I see I’ve given you no facts. Roughly this is it: after the war, what Cal wants to do (he cries, “This is to be my life and I will not be hindered”) is to be a sort of soap-box preacher with an organization called the Catholic Evidence Guilds which operate in city parks, etc, preach and answer the posers of hecklers. I cannot write this down without seeing you smile.… And when I inquire of him how we will live, he points to the Gospels and says that we must not worry about that, that God will take care of us, that one cannot be a wage-slave but must have leisure in which to serve the church.…
I am frightened, feel that it will be three years before Cal has recovered from the pleasurable monasticism of the penitentiary.
Once again, it was an eerily prophetic pronouncement. Not that Lowell took to the soapbox, trusting to God’s support. On the contrary, Lowell
and Stafford turned again to writing, and Stafford spent a great deal of time and energy worrying about how and where they would live. But it was less than three years before it was clear that neither of them could recover from the unhappy monasticism of their marriage. If one can credit unprovable claims and rumors, the sexual side of their relationship had long since deteriorated (the Tates gossiped about it at Monteagle, and Stafford herself later declared that sexual relations between them had ended when Cal became a Catholic). They had cultivated their separate retreats, which also served as punishments, of themselves and of each other. Lowell had not only the “monasticism of the penitentiary” but his Catholic observances; Stafford her retreat at Yaddo, her domestic preoccupations, and her drinking. Yet over the next three years, despite distractions and unhappiness, they also adhered to their other devotion, writing, and they produced work that arguably ranked among the most important of their careers. Being cloistered together was far from simply destructive.
W
HEN
L
OWELL
was released from prison in March of 1944, Stafford undertook what was to become an increasingly preoccupying project over the next couple of years: house hunting. She searched Connecticut for a place to rent, well aware that she and Lowell were about to settle in greater solitude than they had yet known in their married life. This time there were no patrons, either critical or Catholic. They would be living by themselves, and they would be a train ride away from the literary bustle of New York. She found a house with a picturesque address—Harbor View, Ocean Avenue, Black Rock—and the right pedigree. It was owned by a Roman Catholic priest. The reality, however, was far from bucolic. Relishing the unsavory details, Stafford sketched a comic portrait for Cecile Starr:
I myself have nothing to report although I could on request write volumes on the odor of low tide in this unpleasant fen known grandiosely as a “harbor.” At present the tide goes out some time after midnight and when the process is complete, our rooms are instantaneously invaded by a stench that wakens us like gunshot. It lingers in our hair and clothing and coats the caramels and gets into the apples. It does not more closely resemble a stockyard than a small boy who traps skunks, nor is it more like a condemned privy than an ice-chest in need of attention. It is an essentially
organic
odor, and probably the most powerful I have ever experienced.
What she really longed for was a beautiful house to buy, and her daydreams were fed by Harcourt, Brace’s efforts on behalf of her book. Her publishers had decided to promote
Boston Adventure
vigorously, evidently gauging that it had a potentially wide readership. Stafford had
every reason to think that she might actually make some money on her first novel. It was not a prospect familiar to her circle of poets and critics (or, for that matter, novelists: neither of the Tates had earned much from their fictional labors). Stafford was more than a little distracted by high hopes during the spring and summer, and somewhat sheepish about her fantasies. Certainly her optimism and domesticity were out of tune with the times, as a visit from her brother, who was about to be shipped off to France to serve in the airborne field artillery, must have reminded her. But rather than dwell on worries about his future, she marveled above all at the ease and pleasure of their time together after such a long separation: they hadn’t been in touch since their short reunion in Oregon six years earlier, after her return from Europe. She was aware of the fragility of her contented visions, but couldn’t banish them: “
Our dreams are probably the most dangerous and very likely will all collapse, for we have based them on my book,” she wrote to Eleanor Taylor in June, describing the advance publicity and the Hollywood interest that
Boston Adventure
was attracting. “You will understand the violent spasm this has flung us into. We so passionately want a house that we have become very unattractively materialistic.”
The “we” seems not to have been Stafford’s imperial projection of her own desires onto Lowell. Her worst fears about his unworldly aspirations, which she had confessed in her letter to Peter Taylor in February, had not been fulfilled. Despite his prison rhetoric, Lowell gave little indication of yearning for the soapbox and the ascetic religious life (though both he and Stafford went on a satisfyingly rugged Trappist retreat in June). On the contrary, once he had completed his parole stint cleaning the nurses’ quarters of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport, Connecticut, he turned to poetry with zeal after months of not writing. And, completely contrary to Stafford’s expectations, he seemed ready for a stretch of pleasurable domesticity. He too was eager to dream of countrified comfort—and was greatly disappointed when he saw the view that went with the scenic Black Rock address.
He had looked forward to a wide vista of ocean.
But Lowell’s house reveries took second place to his writing. Stafford, by contrast, admitted that her work was completely derailed. It was a well-earned lapse in concentration. She had a winter of intensive revision to recover from and laurels to rest on: in addition to her forthcoming
novel, two stories had been published by the spring (“The Darkening Moon” and “The Lippia Lawn”) and another was scheduled to appear in the fall (“A Reunion”). Still, the fallow stretch was hard. “
Cal … is working with the same intensity that he did in that great period of fertility in Monteagle,” Stafford proudly announced to Peter Taylor in July. To Eleanor Taylor, she went on to confess that his productivity had its corrosive effect on her: “
Cal has started writing poetry again and his intensity and industry make me feel completely worthless. I have done nothing at all this summer. However, I rarely do work in the summer but that’s no excuse.” Her imagination, she emphasized again, was devoted to house fantasies so vivid that she couldn’t resist describing her dream to Eleanor: “I imagine it as being on one of the tongues of land that project into Long Island Sound and fancy a lawn going directly down to the water. I wish it would be a hundred years old with its original floors and many fireplaces and with the tallest possible trees. This is the shocking way I spend my time!”
The domestic vision generally seemed to take the Tates as a model. That is, Stafford had in mind artistic fraternizing within her dream house, though for the time being she and Lowell were enjoying the experience of married life, just the two of them, far more than she could have anticipated: “
Despite the ugliness and the heat we continue to enjoy this solitude. It may be a sign of age in us but whatever it is I’m glad we have become so happily independent. And now, after this summer of finding so much pleasure in one another’s society, New York is unthinkable. A house is mandatory.” But she didn’t intend the house to be a haven of solitude. A letter to Eleanor Taylor sheds some light on a deep-seated paradox in Stafford’s sense of her relation to a larger literary world. Surrounded by writers, she felt her fever rise, but without them she felt abandoned, uncreative. “
Actually I think few things are more stifling to creative energy than loneliness,” she wrote to Taylor. “I wish we were established somewhere in a roomy house and you could come live with us and do nothing but write.” The sense of isolation that was a main wellspring of her imagination was at the same time, she knew, a source of paralysis. A house of her own seemed to beckon as one place where the tension might be eased—somewhere she could retreat and yet also feel rooted, enjoy both independence and camaraderie; somewhere she could perhaps find fulfillment as both a writer and a woman.