The Interior Castle (40 page)

Taylor invoked an ancient but appropriate moment: Stafford at fifteen, when her essay “Disenchantment” had been awarded first prize in a statewide competition among high school students. That disenchantment was with her father, who had uprooted his family and consigned them to a life of boardinghouse instability. She had been able to turn a sense of loss into polished satire and had apparently taken her prize in the same spirit of calm detachment and control. What her father, the villain of the piece, might have thought of it all did not ruffle her. Neither did the fact of the prize.

It was not a poise that came so easily to her in Payne Whitney after the great disenchantment with Lowell. She had lost yet another home, which, as Stafford wrote to Taylor, was much more than a beloved house: “
a symbol to me of all I ever wanted, it is the symbol of my marriage to him which I wanted, I desperately wanted to be complete.” She was frantic in the face of her abandonment by Lowell, who apparently came to the hospital only rarely. Other friends did make regular visits, which she awaited eagerly, but she needed some reaction from him, some contact, to stave off thorough disorientation: “
I must be believed in,” she wrote to
Cal, “you must believe in my objective existence.” She sent the same message to Taylor. “
Once again I have been visited by the fear … that I have no objective existence.… I continue to pray … for the realization at last [from Cal] that I am in a
hospital
, that I am
sick
, that I am a woman, that I am a reality and not an abstraction.…” (She took one occasion, the publication in
The Nation
of his poem “Her Dead Brother,” with its suggestion of sibling incest, as a rare communication from him—precisely the kind that proved his utter insensitivity, for she felt he had plundered and slandered her life. The poem “
appearing in the Nation a week before the publication of my book with its dedication [to Lowell and her brother, Dick], with its theme of latent incest, at a time when you have left me and I am in the hospital,” she raged, “seems to me an act of so deep dishonor that it passes beyond dishonor and approaches madness. And I am trembling in this presence of your hate.”)

Gone was the child’s self-sufficient objectivity. In the many agonized letters Stafford sent to Lowell, she constantly looked to him for an acknowledgment of her unliterary, feminine identity—an identity she felt he had always rejected. She tried again and again to explain to him the sense of extraliterary integrity that was so important to her, and her insistence suggests that it wasn’t just Lowell she had to convince, but herself as well. “
Cal, let me point out one thing finally,” she wrote to him at one point:

Stafford was struggling to define herself on more stable and ordinary ground as the celebrated Stafford-Lowell literary and marital alliance dissolved. (Their reputation was far-flung: Cyril Connolly, surveying the American scene in 1947, reported that “
last year’s authors … are pushed aside and this year’s—the novelist Jean Stafford, her poet husband Robert Lowell or the dark horse, Truman Capote—are invariably mentioned”) She was insecure about sustaining on her own the intense
creative ambition that Lowell had brought to their life together. “
I am only a part of Cal’s very fabulous life and a time will come when I shall be glad that my role was taken away,” she wrote in an elegiac vein to Cecile Starr from the hospital. But her assertion of simple humanity was far from merely defensive. She was also trying to clarify what she saw as a dangerous confusion between art and life that she identified in Lowell—and that had lurked behind some of the tensions of their marriage. “
I have never, as you well enough know, regarded my writing as being as important as yours,” she wrote to him. “But now, while this is still true, I regard myself as being as important as a
writer
as you. I am, I mean, as valuable a human being whose vocation happens to be writing.” She was trying to assert the existence of values that arguably transcended even the most obsessive dedication to art; not all of life could be subordinated to art, made mere grist for the creative spirit. It was not the last time Lowell heard that plea from a wife.

As perhaps the most painful letter of the painful correspondence suggests, the truth was that Stafford desperately needed some confirmation that she was in fact a valuable human being. “
What do I care if Randall likes my book? Or anyone? Why should it console me to be praised as a good writer?” she challenged Lowell, rejecting what must have been his offers of literary praise. Those were no substitute for love withdrawn—were in fact only reminders of what she was missing. “These stripped bones are not enough to feed a starving woman. I know this, Cal, and the knowledge eats me like an inward animal: there is no thing worse for a woman than to be deprived of her womanliness. For me, there is nothing worse than the knowledge that life holds nothing for me but being a writer.” It was a version of the declarations she had made to Hightower years before in the stream of letters she had sent him from Iowa—that within her hid a needy feminine nature, waiting to blossom.

Now, as then, it was as if she hoped that by proclaiming her womanliness, her ripeness for love, she could call those qualities into being. What seemed to lurk behind her pronouncements was a fear that Lowell had put into words. He had left her, Stafford confided to Peter Taylor, saying that she was “
incapable of being loved by anyone.” It was a devastating verdict that summed up all of her doubts about any extraliterary life as a wife and, perhaps, mother. Citing those fears, which Taylor the faithful intermediary clearly understood, he urged Lowell to wait on a divorce: “
Jean has suffered a lot in her lifetime from the feeling that she
is unwanted. It is a theme she returns to in her conversation and in her writing. The effect of a divorce on her might be disastrous.”

The problem, as Stafford recognized, was not one-sided or new. It was another pattern, one she knew all too well. She acknowledged just how difficult she found any real intimacy, and despite her professed interest in children, she must have sensed—as she later said—how ill suited she was for motherhood. (“
I love children,” she wrote toward the end of her life, “but I chose to have none because I knew I would be an abominable mother, by turns indulgent and cold”) Not long after her separation from Lowell, she confessed in her journal a sense of fraudulence in her expressions of love. “
I have never been able to demonstrate love except when I have been drunk and the love I have shown then has been trumped up out of the bottle.” It wasn’t just drink but also, as her letters to Lowell and to Hightower revealed, emotional crises that brought out the protestations of love so extreme and elaborate that they couldn’t help seeming false.

Stafford had plenty of occasion in the hospital to meditate on the sources of feeling unwanted, and she traced the sense of loveless isolation to her past. That seemed to be Stafford’s dominant memory of her family life—though she was the first to admit, as she did in a letter to Mary Lou Aswell, her friend and an editor at
Harper’s Bazaar
, that her memories, however intense, were not the most reliable: “
Partly because I was born with a monstrous talent for exaggeration and partly because I write fiction, I am never the least bit sure whether I am telling the truth in all these explorations of the past.” And she was prepared to acknowledge that rejection on her part, not just on theirs, had played a significant role in the estrangement she felt.

S
TAFFORD’S EXPLORATIONS
of the past led her outside the walls of Payne Whitney twice in 1947. Both journeys revealed just how ensnared she still was in the unhappy patterns she had hoped to escape, and she hurried back to the protection of her doctors, overwhelmed by the need to drink. In February Stafford received the news that her mother was dying and, full of apprehensions about whether she was up to the trip, she got permission from the hospital to fly out to Oregon. By the time Stafford arrived, her mother had died of malignant melanoma, and she remained to mourn with the assembled family. It was a trauma that brought back her family past even more vividly, and Stafford’s response—like
her reaction to so much else during that difficult time—could hardly have been more ambivalent. She said she experienced a transcendent reconciliation with her mother, speaking of it in both mystical and psychological terms. On a page of her diary headed “
My mother’s death” she experimented with some lyrical imagery: “A mind, no more inseparable from its body than a pilot from his plane, sang in its bone-cell:
DEUS TE AMO
. Purblind it nosed like a mole through splendid mansions, hearing a chorus in ecstasy, within an inch of god.” She clarified her experience in a letter to Lowell: “
I received (and I do not use the word inaccurately) a kind of spiritual and consuming rapture that I had never known before in all my life; freed of guilt toward my mother, I was free to love her and to take a most wonderful joy in her peaceful death and I myself felt no fear, no hatred, nothing but this tranquil exaltation and the certain knowledge that I was prepared to die.” To Taylor, she spoke in more standard therapeutic terms: “
I grieve that I did not get there to efface my past unkindness, but my guilt is leaving me slowly and this time I am not hurting myself. I know this sounds unfeeling, as if I counted myself the most important person—yet, curiously, in forgiving myself at last, at last I love my mother.”

Yet Stafford’s claim to have been liberated from guilt about her mother had a hollow ring—further protestations of newfound intimacy grounded more in rhetoric than reality. It was clear that she also continued to feel trapped in the old, antagonistic way. A journal entry apparently written shortly after her mother’s funeral, as Stafford looked forward to leaving Oregon, showed how susceptible she was to a return of the intolerance and insecurity that had made her adolescence at home such an ordeal. Despite the years she had spent far from home, her family could still promptly reduce Stafford to the resentful youngest child; the past, however completely she had aimed to put it behind her, was always there just below the surface, poised to engulf her again. She began her journal striving for mature distance—and then failed to find a merciful vantage point:

Her memory was “pitiless,” she had written to Lowell, and as the rest of the passage revealed, Stafford couldn’t help reverting completely to her childhood role:

It is not hard to read the journal entry for telltale references to some of Stafford’s lifelong preoccupations and problems—her dependence on doctors, her ambivalence about food, and her search for surrogate-daughter relationships. Her responses to the ancient feeling of being unwanted were open, as Stafford would probably have appreciated, to less-than-subtle analysis. (“
Deep-rooted as it all is,” she wrote to Taylor of her propensity to feel rejected, “it appears to me at least to be so clear-cut a kind of perversity, so really up the alley of psychiatry that it shouldn’t be too hard for them to help me.”) Her cold father disapproved and deprived his family of doctors; his daughter sought paternal reassurance in doctors. Her sisters teased her about fatness (while her round mother urged food on her family); she became a “problem feeder.” They suggested that she didn’t belong; she set about proving that she was an outsider.

And yet, as the next few sentences in her journal showed, this defiant self-definition left Stafford feeling as stranded as ever: “
There are no
pictures at all of me in the album,” she wrote—she had evidently spent time perusing the family record—“except for one in which I am dressed in some man’s clothes … and my father’s hat and am carrying his blackthorn stick. This is my father’s favorite picture in the album.” The picture was the one of Stafford dressed up as a literary agent come to deliver her father to fame and fortune, a picture that he loved more and more as time passed and that Stafford liked less and less.

It was a photograph that exposed his delusions, delusions that she felt had destroyed the family’s life; and it implicated her in his fantasy. Writing to Mary Lee from the hospital shortly after the Oregon visit, Stafford expressed the worst version of her fears: that, like the literary agent in the picture, she should devote her life to her now-solitary father—the nightmare she had tried to escape by leaving home as soon as she could. “
I felt awful about Dad and I still do. Wrong as it is and always has been, it still isn’t possible not to feel torn to pieces by the spectacle of his loneliness and I only hope, for everyone’s sake, that it will not last long,” she wrote, sounding more sympathetic than she had in her journal. But even if her embittered seventy-two-year-old father lingered on only a short time, she couldn’t face it, a confession she relegated to a footnote, though the message was clearly more than an afterthought: “PS: I know I should go out there and keep house and I suppose that by not going I will be tormented with the guilt I
should
feel and won’t as much as I would be if I went. But I know that I couldn’t live with him without drinking.”