The Interior Castle (50 page)

She was not always so cheerful, but at the outset, even in her darker moods, she continued to emphasize self-sufficiency. Her greater aloofness was not for lack of invitations. Blair and Holly Clark urged her to join them in Europe, assuring her it could be a quiet life of concentration, but she was not persuaded. She was far from totally isolated (she counted on Westport friends to keep her company, sometimes at ungodly hours), but she liked to be able to escape when she wanted. She aimed to avoid the literary-social distractions to which she knew she was so unhappily susceptible, and which inevitably made her feel compromised and insecure. “
I see almost no one, really—the P.R. boys are really beyond the pale with their machinations,” she wrote to the Clarks. “Everyone seems to be crumbling away into false positions and inertia—but maybe they’re all having the time of their lives and it’s only I who sit out here glooming away, reminded distressfully of my rooming house in Concord by this establishment.”

She exaggerated her isolation, especially as time went on, when she made periodic trips to New York to see her friends, often staying and entertaining at the Cosmopolitan Club, of which she was very pleased to be a member. Still, she obviously valued her “
spinsterish, rural life,” as
she called it, even if the old insecurity was still there. The Concord parallel was a revealing one. Then she had been convalescing after the car accident and feeling ambivalent about the attentions of Hightower and Lowell: the woman who had declared her desire to be loved was wondering if she was after all simply a cheat—of herself, and of others—unable to love. And she had been busily writing, turning out pages of
Autumn Festival
for Archie Ogden. In Westport, to judge by a diary entry from the spring of 1953, she was in a sense convalescing again, from a depression that seemed to stem from a version of the old fear of frigidity. She was ruefully aware, like her character Katharine, of the self-imprisonment that her remoteness brought:

This time, too, she was “
writing like crazy,” working on (among other things)
A Winter’s Tale
. As Mary Louise Aswell noted in her introduction to the collection of
New Short Novels
in which the novella first appeared, it was “
an example of emotion recollected in tranquillity, a supreme example.” That was the plot and structure of
A Winter’s Tale:
a middle-aged woman reflecting back on a youthful love affair in Heidelberg from the vantage point of a barren life in Boston. But the emergence of the novella was itself also an example of retrospective revision: Stafford was turning back to a piece of youthful fiction,
Autumn Festival
, in which she had been unable to establish the right distance, and she was trying to tame it in her reworking of the material. On both levels, the result was not a Wordsworthian synthesis of passion and reason, but rather an unsettling display of a deep tension between the two.

A Winter’s Tale
started out as another of Stafford’s portraits in petrifaction. Her infinitely resigned first-person narrator, Fanny, sounded like a close relative of the narrator of “I Love Someone” as she introduced herself in the framing episode that opened the story. Though this wan
woman was married and a mother, she was as isolated as a spinster: “
I am at peace with my beyondness and the melancholy that it implies … but there do come moments when I wonder if ever again I will prefer the sun of summer to this weary light.” It seemed at first as though recollecting her passionate past would help cure her detachment and reconcile her to her present. But the story did not turn out to be such a conventional tale of middle-aged accommodation. It was a bleak account of disenchantment at the core, as the narrator turned to face the sources of her cynical aloofness.

The love story Fanny conjured up was far from a happy, healthy affair. Though Stafford had seen to it that young Fanny was not the extreme self-hating specimen Gretchen Marburg was, once again Germany served as the setting for a punishing mixture of decadence and discipline. Instead of the religious conversion that she planned in the original Dom Paternus story, Stafford staged a revelation in human faithlessness. An unfocused college girl whose loneliness had lately been assuaged by lots of beaux and whiskey, Fanny had been sent by her widower father, “
an ascetic Boston Irishman,” to Germany for a term to be supervised by an ex-Bostonian and zealous Catholic convert named Persis Gait—a woman who, it turned out, was having an affair with a young Nazi, Max Rössler. They were a loveless pair, Max long since disillusioned but still entrapped, fearing exposure by Persis, who knew he was a Jew. Fascinated by Max, Fanny was drawn into a secret affair with him, not exactly the careless fling she had planned for her year. “
It was not love; it was another thing. I don’t know what,” Fanny reflected, as she and Max tormented themselves before he ultimately left on maneuvers in Spain, only to die on the way.

Compared with the subdued suffering in
The Catherine Wheel, A Winter’s Tale
is high historical drama. Yet the prose was in the cool style of Stafford’s maturity, far from the fervent overwriting of her first German effort. It showed how she had modulated the paired themes of the sadistic tyrant and the masochistic outsider, desperate to belong and seeking in vain for real love. Frau Galt was a portrait in twisted power lust, with “
a lack of talent which she had deceived herself into thinking was a talent for writing poetry or painting water colors or marrying a Bostonian but was really a lack of talent for being good. In the absence of goodness, she had to have power.” She was Miss Pride, with an admixture of Hopestill, yet the old imposing fire was gone.

Fanny and Max, the lost souls, were similarly dampened; there was a world-weariness to their alienated agony. “
I haven’t any politics and I haven’t any ideals,” Max told Fanny, and then outlined the barrenness of his life with unsettling resignation: “It would be wonderful to be a Christian or entirely to love one’s country. Entirely loving oneself would be the best of all.” The young Fanny made the motions of rebelling against his fatalism, but as recounted by her older self, her protestations of hope and love rang hollow. When he died, she studiously insulated herself against any real feeling: “
There had always been the danger that I would mourn Max, that I would miss him, would become inward about him. It had been necessary to get back to America to return to the exterior.”

It was a bloodless portrait in disengagement, and yet Stafford ostensibly granted the middle-aged Fanny a kind of liberation in the novella’s conclusion, which returned to the framing story. Her survey of memory accomplished, the past was erased—and Fanny announced: “
I am exalted; I believe that I am altogether purged.” Yet it was an eerie purgation, which left a woman who still seemed detached from her present detached now from her past as well. At least that Heidelberg memory had once kept alive a sense of conflict in her life. As Fanny and her husband looked forward to a trip to Bermuda, that “sun of summer” she was escaping to seemed as bleached as the “weary light” she claimed she had escaped from.

The novella suggested that for Stafford, too, the resurrection of that German memory and plot was not the creative inspiration she might have hoped. Doubtless she was pleased to be encouraged by Mary Louise Aswell, but a sense of her own disengagement pervades the story. Though rewritten into the first person, it was studiously constructed so that the narrator was as aloof as possible. And though Stafford had clearly worked at including more dramatized action, the scenes in
A Winter’s Tale
s were stagy rather than immediately moving. Finally, she had expanded the original story, but it was evident from the result how far Stafford was from a theme and characters adequate to a novel, which was once again the challenge facing her.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1953 Stafford’s first collection of short stories,
Children Are Bored on Sunday
, was published to general acclaim, and after a
dispute with Harcourt, Brace (over foreign rights), she signed a contract with Random House in the fall of 1953 for another book of stories. The contract also called for a novel, due by the beginning of May 1955, only slightly more than a year and a half away. But Stafford had trouble getting down to work on the book. Practical considerations, she emphasized, had something to do with her evasion of the novel. She was more worried than ever about money, which had been a preoccupation since she had emerged from Payne Whitney. Her recourse, now as then, was to turn out stories for
The New Yorker
, along with occasional articles for women’s magazines. Sickness, too, made sustained work on a large undertaking more difficult. Among many other complaints, Stafford contracted hepatitis in the fall of 1955. (It was in Westport that she acquired one of her treasured possessions, a hospital bed.) Those were the explanations she gave her editor, Albert Erskine, when she failed to meet her deadline, but she knew the trouble went deeper: “
It’s mainly indolence, stupidity and a fundamental lack of talent,” she wrote to him, full of self-recrimination.

It was a typically hyperbolic catalog of indictments, but it suggested a crisis of confidence not unlike her experience with
In the Snowfall
, when she also had trouble facing her daunting project and worried that her talent had deserted her. As for her “stupidity,” she might have been alluding to the fact that she found herself doing again what she had vowed, in “Truth and the Novelist,” not to do. It is clear from the manuscript fragments that remain that she was trying to write a novel based quite closely on her own life, focusing on her fate in the East but also ranging back to her Colorado childhood. “
I’ll tell you this much,” she revealed to an interviewer two decades later when the book was still unfinished, “it is my first autobiographical novel. It’s about Mommy and Daddy and Missouri and Colorado and Massachusetts and New York, all places where I’ve lived. A well-known American poet, with whom I was once closely associated, is petrified. And well he should be! I’m cutting up the poets to a fare-thee-well.”

Her jaunty confidence in that interview was not at all characteristic. It was a pose put on for precisely the public relations machinery that she detested and that she had eerily predicted in “An Etiquette for Writers” would come to hound her during fallow times. Already in the 1950s, when the novel was not yet the albatross it later became, she was worried
about its future, as she confessed to her intimates. Katharine White was especially sympathetic and encouraging, sending Stafford reassurances in the summer of 1955 (shortly after the Random House deadline had come and gone): “
I do hope the novel gets going. Don’t worry about it, though, for if you would just write some short stories that would start you off.”

It was a natural suggestion, for until then, Stafford had been fruitfully turning out short stories. Before Christmas of 1954 (which she spent in the hospital with pneumonia), she had been “
absolutely on top of the world, so healthy, so happy, so productive,” she wrote to the Thompsons. Her short stories, unlike her novella or her novels, were a real source of satisfaction. But they did not serve to start her off on the novel. Rather than catalysts, the stories represented another recourse altogether, an alternate way of dealing with the substantive and stylistic challenges she faced in the novel. In the group of western stories she had been producing, she found a very different route around the troublesome autobiographical terrain. Shifting to a comic tone and making childhood her subject, she discovered that she could return to her home ground without succumbing to memories that overwhelmed her imagination. And a newly confident ironic distance enabled her to revisit other parts of her past as well in the nonwestern stories she continued to write.

Her strategy in the Colorado stories is a stark contrast to
The Catherine Wheel
. Where her baroque manner predominated in that book in almost exaggerated form, she drew on her
Mountain Lion
style for the central group of stories she wrote during the 1950s. In fact, in these stories, set in a town called Adams, a fictionalized Boulder, she looked even more explicitly to Twain as a model than she had in her earlier novel. Here she overcame the “quarrel with the landscape” of the West that had partly stymied
In the Snowfall
, and she also dealt successfully with people she had met, in fact with her own kin (who had also stymied that novel). It was a strictly literary breakthrough, for her actual relations with her Colorado past had become, if anything, more strained. She had ended up in the hospital after her reunion with her father at her sister’s ranch in the summer of 1951. And as she wrote to the Thompsons in 1954 when they urged her to come for a visit, her father and his increasingly hopeless predicament remained an insurmountable reason for avoiding the West: “
I’m still no better able to face it than before,” she confessed. To Blair Clark and his wife she was more vehement, after a visit in the fall of 1954 from her sister Mary Lee, who came bearing more tales of her
father’s misery: “
I have never had an encounter with my family that did not fetch me up in the hospital with one thing or another. I
hate
them.”

Of course it was not that simple. She stayed as far away as she could, but not without guilt for her negligence. “
I dreamed that I never visited my parents although they lived in Westport and I went often to other friends,” Stafford had written in her journal in 1947. “I woke to lie an hour in a torment of guilt and then, as if my dream had been prophetic, there was a letter from my father in the mail, heartbreaking, relentlessly pitiful. He is inconsolably lonely, but he will live on and on, the sad, senile child.” During the 1950s, her father wrote more frequently, two-to-three-page letters in which the full extent of his eccentricity was on display in a style strangely reminiscent of Stafford’s own epistolary manner. In long, ornate sentences sprinkled with colloquialisms and exaggerations, he described one harebrained scheme after another (including plans for an outlandish novel about a prehistoric modern civilization) and vented his spleen on some of his favorite topics, such as the degradation of the American public, the national debt, and the virtues of the country over the city.