Read The Interior Castle Online
Authors: Ann Hulbert
But precisely what seems to have liberated Stafford years after the Maine summer to rework this section of her stalled novel for publication was the sense that she no longer needed to see it as a war. Time had allowed a cooled perspective. She was free to let irony replace the agony of betrayal. In this case, the domestication was devastating, as she cast the episode comically as a story about children and a bygone time, not about important poets whose lives had acquired the status of cultural symbols.
The truth, of course, was not so comical. And the power of “An Influx
of Poets” is that, for all its witty shapeliness, it does capture some of the shapeless confusion, the real desperation of that summer. The trouble was clear to the earliest visitors, John Berryman and his wife, Eileen Simpson, who glimpsed the marital tensions and Stafford’s distress beneath the mostly convivial, intensely literary stay. Jean’s “
somber mood was growing more obvious every day,” Simpson remembered in her portrait in
Poets in Their Youth
, which captured Stafford slipping from ordinary depression into more serious disequilibrium. Caustic as always, and a solicitous host, she was nonetheless drinking more and more and sleeping less and less. Lowell certainly seemed dead to her unhappy world, endlessly verse swapping and talking with Berryman, and Stafford became ever more distant. She drank against his wishes, from bottles hidden around the house, and she was awake at night, her insomnia a solitary vigil (though one night she told her Lucy story to a sleepless Berryman, the third poet to urge her to put it into prose). A letter in June from Stafford to her sister Mary Lee, to whom she often confided her unhappiness at this stage of her life, conveyed her mixed mood, which easily shifted to real bleakness:
Everything is going much better in one way—so that day to day existence is easier—much worse in another; it will be harder to make the break. In my absence [in Pennsylvania and New York] Cal realized the horror of solitude. Now I do not know what to do. In some ways the problem is not terribly complex. I am suffering from years and years of accumulated fatigue not only from working too hard but from knowing too many people. Being a writer and being married to a writer is a back breaking job and my back is now broken.
Stafford cast her predicament in literary terms. The allure, and burden, of being married to a promising, difficult writer—and being one herself—had been clear to Stafford from the start. And the tension between dreaming of the communal literary life and dreading the arrival of litterateurs was a familiar one, dating back to her feverish days in Louisiana. Now the allures and dreams seemed to have faded almost completely. It was clear that Stafford was looking for a way out. She announced her verdict in a flip tone, but behind it lurked serious intentions: “I’ve now decided,” she told Mary Lee, “that writers shouldn’t be married and certainly women writers shouldn’t be unless they are married to rich responsible
husbands who fill their houses with servants.” She sounded almost like the older, wiser Cora Savage speaking, who had put those poets behind her.
By August neither Lowell nor Stafford was sounding remotely flip, and an end was in sight. Gertrude Buckman had arrived in a plane and captivated Lowell while Stafford watched, her passivity a spur to their affair. Lowell wrote to Taylor, leaving out the specifics but emphatic about the impossibility of life with Stafford:
I don’t care for confessions, but I suppose I must tell you that everything is chaos between us. Jean is driving like a cyclone and we both have had about all we can stand and more. Right now I think I’ll go to New York sometime in September.… Jean has a lot of plans, none of them too good, including going to Hollywood. Anyway, we have got to
leave each other alone
and the future to time.
Stafford, writing to Cecile Starr, sounded much less composed and wasn’t yet ready to announce the end. In fact, she claimed she felt some calm might be at hand:
There has been such a stream of visitors ever since Memorial Day that I was half out of my mind and so was Cal. I was half out of my mind with all sorts of anxieties and was drinking too much—as I do, you know—and had got no work done at all since April and in general I thought I was at the end of everything in my life. Now that everyone has gone and no one else is coming and the leaves are beginning to turn … I feel as if I were recovering from a long and feverish sickness, one that has covered a great many years, and I have some kind of hope that I will at last be able to pull myself together.… Our plans are as vague as they have always been.
When she wrote a little later to Peter Taylor, the hope had faded, the recovery seemed out of sight again. Stafford too was silent about specifics—there was no mention of Buckman—and, far from blaming Lowell, she shouldered responsibility for the disaster, though it was clearly more complicated than that. Neither of them stable at the best of times, both had drastically lost their balance. That Stafford still had the poise to bear the guilt for the failure was a sign of hard-won maturity, but at the same time a last act of self-punishment:
I have wanted to write to you ever since Cal told me he had written but there have been so many people here and besides I have been rather too miserable to be coherent. It is just barely possible that if I can ever pull myself together something will work out for us but I love Cal too much now to allow him any longer to be subjected to what seems to amount almost to insanity. I am very much afraid of the future, but I will pull through somehow. What I most need now is to go far away somewhere to a place where I know no one and cannot therefore be influenced by the wrong people.
I am almost altogether to blame for my life being the ruin it is.
She was right, her sickness wasn’t over, and its course continued “like a cyclone,” sweeping away a house and a husband. Stafford was left to rebuild a life, which inevitably was a literary life, despite her vows to avoid the creative company. But it was a strikingly different literary life, a world away from the poets and critics among whom she had come of age.
I
N
S
EPTEMBER
1946, Stafford and Lowell left Maine by train, and as she told it in “An Influx of Poets,” the trip from Damariscotta Mills was the culmination of their estrangement. It was a bleakly symmetrical ending to a marriage that had begun less than smoothly with a train ride: they had spent their brief honeymoon en route to Cleveland in 1940, and when they had separated in the station (Lowell on his way to Kenyon, Stafford to her sister’s ranch), Stafford had been full of doubts about the vows she had just taken. Now the lonely fall of 1946 continued to echo past scenes. In New York, Stafford soon went to the New Weston Hotel, and the next several months were full of “scary days.” That’s what Stafford had called her nightmarish stay in New York after fleeing from Iowa in 1938; this time she was even more disoriented. Then she had been wondering when and how her literary career would begin, and she had been entangled with two men, Hightower and Lowell. Now she was wondering if that career had peaked, and she was distraught over her husband’s betrayal. And this time the frightening days lasted much longer than they had eight years earlier. As she described it later, the fall in New York was an abyss of rage and humiliation, and above all of loneliness. She drank wildly—suicidally, she said in retrospect—and ate and slept very little. Finally she turned to doctors for help, recalling yet another New York scene from her past. In 1937 she had gotten off the boat from Heidelberg alone and feverish and had spent most of her time in the city as a patient in Brooklyn Hospital, writing despairing letters to Hightower. This time, in late November, in more psychological than physical trouble, she signed herself into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic at New York Hospital.
Amid what looked like a notably unsteady life, there were uncanny patterns and correspondences. In a letter to Peter Taylor the month she
entered the hospital, Stafford expressed her fear of the inauspicious shapes her life seemed to take. “
There was something wrong in me to marry [Cal],” she wrote, “for he was so much like my father whom first I worshipped and by whom I later felt betrayed.” Recognizing this central echo in her life, she shuddered at all the other reverberations:
This is not psychiatric cant even though the psychiatrists have told me that this is just what I did, married my father, just as the same perverseness made Cal marry his mother.… I disobeyed him as I disobeyed my father; he was cold as my father had always been and he was economically and domestically irresponsible as my father had always been. And he read his poems aloud to me as my father had read his stories for the pulp magazines. And his manners were courtly or they were uncouth and he was slovenly, as my father was. My father didn’t have his wit nor his brilliance. They were both violent men in every way. This pattern terrifies me. All the patterns of my life terrify me and this is why, in the constant torment of my fear, I have had to seek someone who really
can
be my father and can protect me.
For the next year and more, psychiatrists were Stafford’s source of support (as doctors of one sort or another were to be for the rest of her life). She was not, however, a simple and tractable patient. Her attitude toward psychiatry, as her phrase “psychiatric cant” suggested, was at base skeptical, a view she shared with many of her friends, certainly with Lowell, who at this stage was less than sympathetic, as Stafford indicated in “An Influx of Poets”: “
He was, despite his eccentricities and his rebellion, an intransigently conventional man,” she wrote of her character Theron; “thus his diehard repudiation of psychiatry as poppycock, a Viennese chicanery devised to bilk idle women and hypochondriacal men.”
It was Robert Giroux and Cecile Starr, two of Stafford’s most loyal friends during the frightening autumn, who urged her to try psychotherapy, less out of faith in that course than out of desperation. Starr had welcomed Stafford to her apartment when she arrived in New York, and had tried in vain to help her stop drinking and begin sleeping again: “
If it had not been for Cecile,” Stafford wrote to Lowell later, “I would have killed myself.” (At one point they retreated to Connecticut for some peace and distance from the hard-drinking literary crowd, whose company only added to Stafford’s anxieties, Starr could see.) More drastic
measures were clearly called for, and before long Stafford’s unhappiness overcame her resistance. She was ready to find help wherever she could, even though enlisting doctors seemed to her an admission of defeat, as she wrote in the early fall to her sister Mary Lee. It was a letter of confession, but also of warning; she wanted no comfort or visits from close relatives:
I have finally had to face the fact that I am very ill and I now must face a long and arduous and tormenting cure, but it is the only way out of my despair. I am full of self-hatred and disgust for I have always scorned people who could not help themselves to become adjusted, but my heart breaks for all of them now: I understand fully what “nervous breakdown” means. I do not know what will happen.… I shall be alone and shall be lonely, but it is all better than what might otherwise happen to me. There is now nothing that anyone can do for me but myself and an expert.… I cannot, in my present state, burden anyone with my half-mad society.
When Stafford came under the care of Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey, a young doctor on the staff of Payne Whitney, she felt she had found the person she needed. Stafford had already had a dizzying tour of assorted other doctors, all well known and very interested in the gifted young writer. Robert Giroux had put her in touch first with Dr. Carl Binger, whose books on psychiatry were published by Harcourt, Brace, and whose recommended treatment was more drastic than she was yet prepared to consider: no more alcohol, he insisted, and he urged a brief stay in Payne Whitney Psychiatric Hospital. Then she turned to Dr. Gregory Zilboorg, who earned her enmity by sending her in October to a Detroit sanitarium, from which she promptly fled to Denver, where she was met by Mary Lee. Proximity to her family was, as she had predicted, the worst cure. Her sister was distraught, especially about Stafford’s drinking, and there were battles, as well as one unhelpful visit to the local doctor, the son of Stafford’s childhood doctor. She hurried back to New York, moved into progressively cheaper hotels, and tried yet more doctors (and yet more drink: sleepless, she would close the hotel bar, then pour herself applejack in her room). Again at the suggestion of Giroux, she talked with Dr. Henry Murray of Harvard (“
my marvelous man—I wish he were our father,” she wrote to Mary Lee), who unfortunately had to return to Cambridge. Finally at the end of November, she was ready to
admit herself to Payne Whitney (Giroux was to release her if she decided she wanted to leave), where she was initially treated by Dr. Oskar Diethelm, psychiatrist in chief, who then entrusted her to his student Dr. Sherfey.
As Stafford herself seemed to recognize, psychiatry occupied much the same place for her that Catholicism once had. In fact, while she was frantically touring doctors, she also consulted Father Dougherty, the priest whom she and Lowell had relied on in New York, and whom she had especially counted on during her lonely days while Cal was in prison. Father Dougherty urged her to try a convent in New Jersey run by German nuns, an implausible plan that the nuns vetoed before Stafford had to make the decision. She clearly needed an authoritative structure to guide her, but a more therapeutic discipline than religion could provide. Psychiatry presented a prescriptive regimen against which she could continually rebel but on which she could also rely. It offered a system of explanation, a possible way to overcome the confusion and lack of control that she knew all too well, in fact sought out. Stafford’s impulsive testing of experience was an exhilarating part of the creative life, and yet it also “terrified” her, she had written to Hightower earlier: “I am saturated with meaningless experience.” Her sense of a centered self was precarious, she confessed in journals and sometimes in letters, and her ever active imagination made the world around her an infinitely distracting, often threatening, place;
Cecile Starr thought of her as internally combustible, because she was so susceptible to so much outside. Alcohol, as Stafford alternately admitted and denied, was an additional deadly ingredient. Drinking beckoned as an anesthetic, only to betray her; its pleasures were short-lived, and instead of dulling internal and external anxieties, it multiplied them.