Read The Interior Castle Online
Authors: Ann Hulbert
Not uncharacteristically, Stafford was overstating a transition in her life. To be a writer and an outsider had not simply been the destructive identity she suggested. On the contrary, it had been a mark of distinction. She had struggled for years to put her imagination and sense of alienation to creative use, and in her heady literary life with Lowell she had found a path that led not to the frustrated marginality she saw in her father but to an influential elitism. She had deliberately sought connection with Lowell’s “very fabulous life,” as she had confessed to Hightower; she herself had battened on associations that carried with them some reputation, social or literary. Once arrived, she had mostly wittily, sometimes anxiously, cultivated the acerbic profile of outsider.
The question facing her was how to follow the counsel that Peter Taylor had given her a year before, which fit with her own diagnosis—how to find “a community … where people would care for [her] as a person not as a writer, [how] to develop an interest in a career other than writing … to begin to make a life of [her] own.” As she had acknowledged in her article for
Vogue
, her convalescent dependence on doctors
had to end, or at least significantly diminish. She left Payne Whitney in November 1947 and moved to an apartment at 27 West Seventy-fifth Street, reassured that her sessions with Dr. Sherfey would continue, but unclear about what shape the rest of her life might take, whether she could control her drinking, whether she would write again. Lacking a new circle to turn to, she was immediately preoccupied with gingerly adjusting her relations to her old friends, determined to avoid her former role.
Cecile Starr was once again the loyal, nonliterary friend whom she counted on for help through a difficult transition, and who readily obliged. She had already been preparing the way before Stafford’s release, holding a party for her in the spring. Stafford’s poise had been precarious then and continued to be tenuous. She crumbled when Caroline Gordon unexpectedly appeared (her promised absence, Stafford claimed, had been what convinced her to venture out). Just how unsettling the encounter was for her was suggested by a letter about the gathering that Stafford wrote to Lowell, with whom she was still in frequent, but now much calmer, contact. “
It was more than just seeing Caroline,” she explained:
it was realizing how you and I together, unable to grapple with the enormous complexity of our problems, took refuge from them in other people—and often it did not matter who the people were. We could not be blamed for that; the Tates, when we first knew them, were delightful company, they were wise critics, they were helpful, they seemed really fond of us, and I think that in a way, Caroline is still fond of us … and that her questioning me about where I lived was not altogether malicious. I remembered the anguish of the year in Tennessee and I was struck in a heap to think of how Caroline had always said she thought of us as her children, because we
were
children, we have been everyone’s children.
Running into the Rahvs evoked comparably bad memories. When Stafford saw Natalie on the street one day, she had “
a fit of trembling and terror,” she wrote to Lowell. Meeting Philip on another occasion, she promptly wrote to Peter Taylor that the encounter “
returned to me a whole world of tiresomeness, of a thousand and one nights of nothing wonderful but only the most sterile talk about writers and their private lives.” They invited her to a party to meet Arthur Koestler, and she realized
with great relief that there was no reason she had to go or feel guilty about not going; she could, and did, decline and counted it a major step in her development.
But the biggest step was cultivating another community. Out of the hospital, Stafford began going to Columbia to take science courses, which she explained in part as research for her Lucy novel,
In the Snowfall
—a refresher course on collegiate life to help her with her setting. But the new regimen seems mostly to have been a determined effort to sample the nonliterary life. “
I am studying Botany and genetics and I enjoy it very much indeed,” Stafford wrote to Lowell. “I find scientists much more interesting than writers and my favorite new word is ‘skeptical.’ ” As she no doubt hoped, her preference roused Lowell to a defense of literature, but she was undaunted, and quite entertaining, in her newfound love of the laboratory: “I have never felt so liberated in all my life and some time I should like you to be introduced to the glories of my new study: you would see what I meant if you were to watch a great blob of plasmodium feeding upon a fungus.” In fact, her studies didn’t last very long. Toward the spring of 1948 she confessed to Lowell that the experiment hadn’t really taken: “
You will be as pleased as I am to know that I have had to give up the science. I was not understanding White-head and was feeling sick with guilt for not doing so (as I was always guilty for not reading Catholic apologetics even after you’d given up trying to improve my mind) so that I was getting no writing done.”
More important was her friendship with Dr. Alfred Cohn, a cardiologist in his late sixties who was affiliated with the Rockefeller Institute. He knew several friends of hers—he had published a book with Robert Giroux and had been a teacher of Henry Murray, the doctor whom Stafford counted as “
the first of [her] saviours” during the fall of 1946 (and whom she also saw several times after leaving the hospital). “
Dr. Cohn,” Stafford reported to Lowell, “is directing my scientific re-education,” but the relationship was more lasting than her dabbling at Columbia. Cohn was smitten with Stafford, who in turn was flattered by the attentions of the older, elegant man, and the two of them took to having tea at the Plaza regularly. Owner of a great library (which he bequeathed to the Rockefeller Institute), Dr. Cohn was hardly an unliterary companion. But he was part of the medical world and he was a careful, unthreatening friend. He seems to have understood that Stafford didn’t need yet another judgmental mentor—understood it better, in fact, than Stafford
sometimes did, lapsing into her old insecure role. “
Before we meet on Friday I must prepare you for the fact that I am a strict contender for your friendship,” he wrote to her with the formality of a suitor, “but that I cannot accept the responsibility of being a superego—and so I am not for anything that betters you or interferes with the free play of your faculties.”
Stafford was far from sure that she had found a haven to replace the hospital, and her confidence ebbed and flowed. “
It has been rather rough and on the whole I hated the loss of all that calm and all that protection,” she wrote to Lowell after being out of Payne Whitney for about a month. “Terribly slowly and terribly wonderfully, I am growing up. I have days of terror and on those days I talk only bombast to Dr. Sherfey (at last she has really used that word and said—but most compassionately—that my rhetoric frequently slows up the interviews)…. But on the whole I am happy, or, at least, I know what happiness is.” She resisted grand claims of recovery, recognizing that the year was a transition, not an arrival. She acknowledged that she was balanced uneasily between new friends and old ones. “
I cannot truly feel that this life of being made over by men old enough to be my fathers and grandfathers is the right one, but it is a pleasant and a very
safe
stopgap,” she wrote to Lowell, while admitting to Taylor that she hadn’t left the old dangerous life behind: “
Alas, I am still weak and foolish, and I still have a mortal fear of such people from the past as Allen and Caroline and all the cut-throats from Partisan Review.”
S
TAFFORD’S REACTION
to her insecurity was not, however, to retreat; she did not play the fragile convalescent that year. In fact, in the writing she immediately began doing, she took on precisely the difficult subjects she might have been expected to evade: her hospital experience and her ambivalence about her old friends and mentors. And she did it in settings that seemed least likely to put her at her ease. Right after emerging from Payne Whitney, she shared the podium with Lionel Trilling at Bard College’s Conference on the Novel and delivered a lecture entitled “The Psychological Novel.” She never liked speaking before the public. The critic’s authority didn’t come naturally to her even under the best of circumstances. Yet she ventured in front of an audience featuring some of those
Partisan Review
cutthroats to offer her views on a general subject—creativity and psychological instability—that not only was a live debate
in that magazine’s pages but also touched very close to home for Stafford. Trilling’s “Art and Neurosis” had appeared in
PR
two years before, and William Barrett’s “Writers and Madness” in the January-February issue of 1947. They were intimidating predecessors who had scrutinized Freud with a rigor she hadn’t. Her claim to special expertise on the subject was a highly sensitive one: she was a writer who had just spent a year in Payne Whitney.
It was a traumatic reentry, Stafford wrote to Lowell: “
I went to Bard to lecture and nearly died of terror (for no humane reason Mary McCarthy and Bowdoin Broadwater [McCarthy’s husband] came on and sat in the front row grinning like cats)…. I hated it all and vowed never again to leave my red room for a public appearance.” As she described it, McCarthy fulfilled her fears about the ruthless condescension of the “Rahv set.” “Her one comment on my lecture, delivered with all her ignited ice, was ‘your speech had a great deal of charm.’ I wanted, almost, to reply that I was glad, that to be a charming woman was my principal ambition.” Stafford’s imagined reply was not simply sarcastic. In the wake of her collapse, she spoke up increasingly for civility and decorum, which seemed to her antithetical to the style of her old company. She wanted, as she wrote to Lowell at one point, to live henceforth at a “
low pitch.” Among her aims was to avoid the raw confrontation and scrutiny, and the intellectual intensity, that she had known all too well with the Tates and then the
PR
circle.
At the same time, she wasn’t ready to be dismissed by them as merely charming, and worried about the reception of her lecture. She protectively played it down as a trifle, though clearly seeking approval. “
[My lecture] is so foolish and unmeaning that I am ashamed to show it to anyone, but I am obliged to and I promised them that I would write and ask you if you would take a look at it,” she wrote with overeffusive modesty to John Crowe Ransom, inquiring about the possibility of publishing it in the
Kenyon Review
. He accepted the piece, and she wrote to Lowell, obviously proud but still playing the apprehensive critical amateur: “
Uncle Ransom is printing the lecture I gave at Bard and I am thoroughly unhappy about it because it is so awfully bad.… He wrote a very nice note on a penny postal saying it was ‘belletristic if not academic.’ I dread your reading it.”
The lecture certainly made no pretense to rigorous argumentation. In it there were signs of the persona that was to acquire more caricatured
proportions in Stafford’s nonfiction writing later in life: the arch, opinionated commentator who took pleasure in bucking the contemporary tide, airing her old-fashioned views with vigor and humor. Stafford presented herself not as a professional critic prepared to make an erudite, abstract case, but simply as a writer who had briefly emerged from solitude to share some personal thoughts. But she was by no means interested in claiming creative-soul status for herself; she was a craftsman with down-to-earth advice and thoughts about her métier. And she was also a civilized reader in search of good literature and impatient with indulgent displays. With her characteristic blend of ornate and colloquial language, she managed at once to sound like a fusty older lady and a clear-eyed, unpretentious scout for the literate public.
Above all, what she didn’t sound like was a neurotic writer—“
loutishly well-adjusted,” she referred to herself at one point—which was in itself a comment on her theme. The fact that novels deal in human psychology should not, she argued, mean that they become occasions for exposing personal perversities. “
It is fashionable to be forthrightly and ungraciously autobiographical as if Freud had come as the emancipator of the skeleton in the closet,” she chided. “It would be hard to count the novels of recent years which have been strip-tease acts in the psychiatric ward or on the psychoanalyst’s couch.” From that it followed (by way of a droll anecdote about a mailing she received requesting her to become a contributor to a new quarterly called
Neurotica
) that she had no truck with the assumption that writers are by definition animated by “the
drive toward being a misfit” (one subject on which
Neurotica
proposed that she write). Thus Stafford obliquely entered the Trilling-Barrett debate and aligned herself with Trilling, who argued that the artist is unique not by virtue of his neurosis but
in the respect of his relation to his neurosis. He is what he is by virtue of his successful objectification of his neurosis, by his shaping it and making it available to others in a way which has its effect upon their own egos in struggle. His genius, that is, may be defined in terms of his faculties of perception, representation, and realization, and in these terms alone.
Stafford’s formulation was not so impersonal; she was not simply defining but prescribing, as much to herself as to her audience. Distance from one’s psychological and spiritual unhappiness was essential, she proclaimed,
urging “
detachment from our characters’ eccentricities and mis-adventures that prevents us from making them into improbable prodigies but that, on the contrary, enables us to be psychologically sound.” Her own early fictional efforts (which Whit Burnett had denounced as a “pocket of exhibitionistic self-abuse,” calling her characters “repulsively damned”) no doubt lurked behind this advice, which she amplified: “
We must be experts in the study of reality and cool judges of our own natures.… If we … are wanting in irony and are servants of our own pride and prejudice rather than of our sense and sensibility, we may bog down in self-pity or we may distort our personal misfortune into polemic or our idiosyncrasy into gospel.”