The Interior Castle (49 page)

During the summer spanned by the novel, which passed slowly on Katharine’s graceful Hawthorne estate, Andrew’s and Katharine’s preoccupations undermined what had for years been a special sympathy between them. In fact, suffering side by side, each was made only more miserable by intimations of the other’s unhappiness. While Andrew guiltily dreamed of killing Victor’s brother, Charles (to whom Victor now devoted all of his attention), Katharine guiltily nursed resentments of Maeve—and their guilt was compounded by the conviction that the other had somehow glimpsed their secret, shameful desires. Both were visited by the fear Stafford evoked so well. They were convinced that the
mind could all too easily tyrannize the world (their evil wishes had for them the status of murderous deeds), and yet they were also convinced that the mind could be all too easily tyrannized by other minds. Katharine “
was looking right through the back of his head,” Andrew was sure, “reading everything written there.”

As that summary suggests, Stafford had not been quite accurate when she implied that it was a novel of airiness and light. To be sure, she wasn’t plunging into the black humors of her own past, but she was again writing about the ravages of gentility and about the masochism of the mind, about social and psychological entrapment. At the same time, as in some of her stories about the perils of experience and the allure of detachment, the novel also encourages a self-reflexive reading. This all but plotless, painstakingly crafted book is an illustration of literary entrapment, of the encroachments of style on substance. But it is harder to tell how consciously Stafford had fashioned a mannered, static book to reflect the lives within it. To judge by her own comments on the novel, she hadn’t started out intending such a detached and coolly wrought book, even if she was aiming to avoid the immediacy of
In the Snowfall
.

Stafford may well have conceived of this novel as the fulfillment of the aim she announced in an interview not long after it was published. Her ultimate goal, she said, was to “
fuse the two manners” of her first two very different novels—that is, to blend the “leisurely … embroidered, contemplative, old-fashioned” style of
Boston Adventure
and the more symbolic approach of
The Mountain Lion
. On the surface she did just that. Stafford’s serpentinely introspective prose, which had become even more elaborate than in her first novel, wound its way to a symbolic ending, which was even more freighted than Molly’s end in
The Mountain Lion
. The refined diction of the elegant Katharine, more arch than the Bostonian argot, was juxtaposed with the almost caricatured rustic talk of the local folk. Andrew’s first scene, for example, included this “leisurely … embroidered” evocation of his mood: “
He waited, in the larger chambers of his being, for the world to right itself and to become as it had been in all the other summers here, at Congreve House in Hawthorne, far north, when he had gathered the full, free days like honey and had kept his hoard against the famine of the formal city winter when he was trammeled and smothered by school and a pedagogical governess and parents whom he barely knew and certainly did not understand.” By contrast Victor, the local boy, inspired a colloquial turn:
“
Once Andrew had seen a green worm in [Victor’s hair] and when he reached up to brush it off, Victor said, ‘Leave urn be. I put urn there. He’s measuring me a hat.’ ”

The characters, too, alluded back to her earlier novels. Andrew, cut off from his twittering twin sisters, was a cross between the young Ralph and Molly, less brilliantly strange than she was, more uncommon and unmasculine than he. (The boy’s sexual ambivalence, hinted at, was more explicitly suggested in some of Stafford’s earlier drafts.) Miss Pride lurked not too far behind Katharine, whose family physiognomy could almost be lifted from the earlier book. The Congreve portraiture hanging on the walls of the grand summer house in Hawthorne would look fine in Pinckney Street:

But rather than achieving a successful synthesis of the two manners, or a conjunction of the characters, Stafford ended up succumbing to style. The description of the Congreve gallery could almost apply to her own portraiture, for given the absence of real plot, portraiture was what the book essentially consisted of: alternating tableaux of her two protagonists. The poses that her lapidary prose allowed them to take were stiff, and their passions seemed artificial. Andrew in particular never emerged as remotely the riveting soul that poor Molly immediately was; he seemed to occupy a central place in the novel for reasons more of symmetry than sympathy. In earlier drafts, Stafford had made him an older boy and complicated his unhappiness, with mixed success, by suggesting at once an incestuous fascination with his cousin and effeminate leanings that enraged his father, and by implying a potentially artistic nature. In her final version, Stafford had retreated, deciding to hang the whole of his spiritual malaise on a summer breach with a friend. But Andrew’s circumstances and his crisis inevitably seemed disproportionate, and lengthy abstract introspection only accentuated the difficulty. Since Stafford told so much more than she showed about this boy—slumped in a
hammock for most of the summer, Andrew offered little opportunity for action—he threatened to become what so few of her children are: an adult’s idea of a child. The ritualistic, timeless world of childhood that Stafford had captured so well before often seemed simply static here.

Katharine, who “
in her rarefied world … countenanced no change”—she drove around in a brougham, among other quaint habits—was a more interesting figure, a social specimen Stafford had limned in
Boston Adventure
and a psychological type she had sketched in her stories. Katharine was the hypertrophied Puritan, the Bostonian as seen from, in a sense, the southern perspective: she was cut off from all vital sense of the past and from feeling, but was fanatically devoted instead to desiccated notions of history and humanity. And she was the frigid woman, who had sacrificed a life of substance for an existence of appearances. Unlike her Brahmin relatives in the earlier novel but like her aloof predecessor in “I Love Someone,” she saw her chilling predicament: “
It struck her … that … she would never participate, that she would read astutely and never write, observe wholeheartedly and never paint, not teach, not marry God. Untalented and uncompromising, she would not commit herself.” But her self-knowledge did not liberate her; in fact, it only added to her resigned complacency.

Stafford had set herself a real challenge in trying to create a changeless yet compelling protagonist. She had demonstrated that she could sustain such a figure, almost fablelike in frozen detachment, over the course of a story, but in her novel, her sense of distance collapsed. The fact that the whole tone and style of the book were so close to Katharine’s tone and style introduced a central problem. In place of the old controlled irony there was a recurring confusion: How much was in fact meant as irony, and how much was romanticization? To what extent was Katharine intended to be a charming anachronism and to what extent an exemplar of petrification? In earlier drafts, Stafford had included episodes to suggest a truly sinister sterility at work: Katharine had wreaked real havoc in the Shipleys’ lives, encouraging Andrew’s deep distraction and actually driving one of his sisters mad.

But by the final version, she was a considerably tamer figure. There was a deeply unhappy woman beneath the unruffled surface—Stafford referred throughout to the image of Katharine’s Catherine wheel of torture—but her tribulations didn’t live up to the metaphor. When Stafford played out the St. Catherine symbolism in Katharine’s end (she was
burned to death by a misfired Catherine wheel in a fireworks display at a grand party on her estate), the very melodrama of the conclusion called attention to the absence of real drama until that point. The only resolution for this disengaged life was a final, fantastic flight. Stafford’s epigraph from Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral
stood as a kind of endorsement of her protagonist’s rarefied detachment—and a justification of her own slow, oddly hollow novel:

Although the book sold quite well (
it even made it onto the bottom of the
New York Times
best-seller list), the critical reception was distinctly cool, and the emphasis was the same: the masterful formalist had abandoned life. In
The New Yorker
, the reviewer Anthony West was disappointed in the novel’s preciosity: “
At other times, the curse of the catalogue, which Flaubert laid upon the novel, descends, and the characters are held frozen while the oversensitive eye travels slowly over the materials of their clothing, the furniture, the bric-a-brac, the curtains, the wallpaper, and the creepers tapping at the windows.” To be sure, her technique was stunning, but the trouble was that it was too stunning. “
Miss Stafford’s prose is so fine and frequently so winning,” Irving Howe wrote in the
Kenyon Review
, “that it finally becomes a source of fascination in itself, undermining the matter it is supposed to reveal.”

Oddly enough, Stafford herself seemed to offer a similar indictment in her interview with Harvey Breit in the
New York Times
when the novel appeared. At least it is possible to read her criticisms of current trends as a comment on herself: “
You need to get back to even the confusions you had, which all help. I think the self-consciousness today, the over-editing, is a mistake,” she told Breit. “The writer today is competent. The English writer can’t write a bad sentence, but too often it doesn’t add up. Writers have been directing their talents to tiny things.
There’s a fear of making a mistake, of sticking your neck out, there is a finicking.”

Stafford’s great “
gifts for language and for details” were, as Peter Taylor rightly saw, “one and the same gift and … inseparable,” and there was real brilliance in the carefully crafted surface: “For me,” Taylor wrote, “the genius shines forth in the selection and use of all the paraphernalia.” But here she seemed to be relying more heavily than ever before on style, and she was using her virtuosic skills less to dramatize than to elaborate abstractly on her characters’ anxieties, which were in any case wan compared with the raw unhappiness in her earlier novels. It was as though, as her own earlier story had predicted, she had laid out an exquisite banquet at which there was nothing to eat.

She was at a crossroads after her troubles with
In the Snowfall
, and there was an uncanny correspondence between Stafford’s novel and the long title poem Lowell published the year before in
The Mills of the Kavanaughs
at a broadly comparable stage of uncertainty. His poem and
The Catherine Wheel
shared the Damariscotta Mills setting, and there was an underlying thematic similarity in the stories both of them told, about fraught love, betrayal, and the threat of madness in an aristocratic New England clan: at shaky midcareer, both recovering from breakdowns, they reached back to the theme of New England decay that had launched their careers, not sure where else to turn. The two works represented transitional efforts for both of them and suggested the very different courses they were embarked on.
Lowell was struggling to introduce autobiographical elements and a more direct, dramatic voice into his still formal poetic style. (
At the end of her life, Stafford indicated to Robert Giroux that she felt intimately, inwardly, familiar with Lowell’s poem, in which there were clearly echoes of their troubled marriage.) By contrast, Stafford was refining an increasingly oblique approach; she was in search of some way to escape the confessional pressures that had sabotaged
In the Snowfall
. The result for both of them was oddly analogous: lifeless subject matter and a mannered style. But the creative future that lay ahead for each could hardly have been less similar.

A
T THE CLOSE
of 1952, the year
The Catherine Wheel
appeared, Stafford was back in the Virgin Islands, this time ending her marriage to Oliver Jensen. She was in terrible physical shape. A doctor who saw her at the Gibneys’ thought she should be hurried back to New York for medical
care, which is exactly where she ended up when her requisite stay in the tropics was over. After subletting an apartment in New York, she decided to go back to Connecticut, despite her derision of the bourgeois bohemianism there. She rented rooms on the top floor at 24 Elm Avenue in Westport, and after a run of illness and discomfort, which she recounted in a letter to the Gibneys in her usual comic, hyperbolic style, she settled in and claimed she was feeling very content.

As Stafford described it, her new existence was the culmination of her retreat. It was a new role—reclusive spinsterhood—that she, echoing her character Katharine, took self-conscious satisfaction in cultivating. In a droll letter to Peter Taylor, she presented herself as a caricature, drawing attention to the continuity between her life and her fiction. Or perhaps more accurately, between her fiction and her life, for the relation once again seemed reversed: Stafford’s own existence imitated her art, rather than the other way around. “
I’m very happy. Have you ever heard me say that before? You couldn’t have because I’ve never said it. I am living the life I was destined for: I am a single woman with a cat and when I am not writing crabbed stories of frustration, I am hard at work on needlepoint.”