The Interior Castle (58 page)

But the fiction wasn’t in fact under way just then, and though she made an energetic foray into journalism and so could claim some productivity for the first time in several years, it seems quite clear that Stafford’s literary trouble was essentially the same: the unwieldy truth, in particular autobiographical truth, continued to draw and to deter her. If she had ever entertained much expectation that the role of critic might open new nonfictional terrain to her, she made no real effort to develop a serious voice in the regular column she started writing for
Vogue
that year. Her monthly book reviews were brief (seven hundred words or so), largely devoted to summary, with some display of her distinctive prose, but not much sign of a unifying perspective or analytic intent. Many of the reviews were positive, and the praise was largely predictable (she liked Walker Percy, Saul Bellow, William Trevor, V. S. Pritchett). Although her subject was usually fiction, she showed little interest in working out any of her confusions about the direction of her own work in her discussions of other people’s writing.

In an article called “Truth in Fiction,” published in 1966 in
Library Journal
, Stafford did face her difficulties, but she had plainly come to no new conclusions. It was a rehash of “Truth and the Novelist,” written fifteen years before when she was having trouble with
In the Snowfall
,
the novel about Lucy McKee and her college days, and the gist was exactly the same: “
While autobiography is inevitable, we must winnow carefully and add a good portion of lies, the bigger the better.” Ostensibly, the occasion for the reflections was also the same. Almost verbatim, Stafford detailed her ordeal with the Lucy novel, now cast as an episode long behind her.

But she then very abruptly shifted to talk about her more recent writing life in the only fresh section of the essay, a discussion of her experience with Marguerite Oswald: “
Let me change my tack now and tell you about a time more recently when telling the truth and nothing but the truth was the job I had to do.” That creaky transition perhaps suggests the real impetus for resurrecting her essay. In writing about her previous block with her autobiographical novel, she was indirectly writing about her current block, from which the Oswald interview was a kind of an escape.

The journalistic project was quite a different tactic for overcoming obstacles than the one she had resorted to earlier. Then she had turned to more purely imagined material, and in
The Catherine Wheel
ended up writing a novel comparatively free of autobiographical fact and memory. This time she turned to more purely factual material. If subjectivity was the problem, she was ready to try objectivity and see where that led her. As “Truth in Fiction” went on to reveal, Liebling’s spirit presided over her Oswald project. The subject was close to his heart. Before his death, he had been collecting clippings for a “Wayward Press” column—never written—about Kennedy’s assassination. More important, the reportorial technique Stafford aspired to was modeled on her late husband’s methods, which she had seen in action when she accompanied him to New Orleans to talk to Earl Long. “
What I wanted to do was report exactly what I heard and saw, not what I felt,” Stafford explained. “And the hardest job I had, when I started the writing, was to edit without editorializing.” She admiringly described Liebling’s oblique way of winning the crazy governor’s trust and then admitted that she had never managed to establish any rapport with the assassin’s peculiar mother, who was all but oblivious to Stafford throughout her long, addled monologue in defense of her son.

Still, Stafford thought she had succeeded in her journalistic pilgrimage, even if readers were less sure about what to make of her profoundly unsympathetic portrait of Mrs. Oswald. “
It seemed to me and it seemed
to the editors I worked with, and it seemed to my friends,” she wrote in “Truth in Fiction,” “that I had presented the case of Mrs. Oswald without slant or analysis, and that the irony derived from the facts rather than from any commentary.” But there was a note of defensiveness in her claim. In fact, the book showed her succumbing to a version of the same trouble that dogged her in her novel: she couldn’t seem to get her sensibility out of the picture. If the problem in her fiction was that self-loathing deadened her imagination as she tried to conjure with characters too close to herself, here the problem was her obvious loathing of a woman with whom she had nothing in common. Hardly impartial or invisible, Stafford could not resist the opportunity to comment witheringly on her hapless subject and to bemoan her own deep fatigue (“
I was tired and headachy”) during her nine-hour ordeal.

It was an unfortunate pose. Rather than letting Mrs. Oswald’s tape-recorded outpouring speak for itself, Stafford constantly interrupted the bizarre monologue to add snobbish visual detail and heavy-handed ridicule of the malapropisms, grammatical lapses, and other embarrassments and inanities of Mrs. Oswald’s homely efforts at high rhetoric on behalf of her son. The woman’s often incoherent harangue was plainly outlandish: “they” in Washington had decided that her son was the sole, evil assassin, Marguerite Oswald claimed, but if only they would listen to her, she would reveal the “truths” to set the story straight: “
I’ll write a book and the title of it will be
One and One Make Two
or
This and That
. Oh, I could write three books or five books! I could write books and
books
on what I know and what I have researched.” Out of the haze of misinformation and non sequiturs, Mrs. Oswald’s case came down to a pathetically bizarre defense, which made for unsettling comic reading:

Stafford’s piece was finally a cruel portrait, executed pitilessly. As if Mrs. Oswald’s own deranged self-exposure were not damning enough, Stafford insisted on intruding in the role of merciless judge. As Martha
Gelhorn suggested in her review of
A Mother in History
, Stafford seemed under pressure to proclaim her own eminently sensible perspective in the face of Mrs. Oswald’s megalomaniacal persecution complex: “
Perhaps Miss Stafford puts herself in the picture too often, as if to remind herself that she is still there, still sane; and this is a journalistic error.”

The heartless mockery of a misguided mother is a curious permutation of Stafford’s youthful plan, sketched out in letters to Hightower decades before, to transcribe the damning evidence of her parents’ benighted vision of life. She had been avid to ridicule her own mother’s clichéd expressions and hopelessly banal, optimistic outlook, much as she made fun of Mrs. Oswald’s refusal to face the facts; and she had listened intently to plenty of her father’s long accounts of conspiratorial persecution by “them.” As she had half admitted to Hightower back then, fear lurked behind her ruthless project—fear that there were deep bonds and similarities linking her to the pathetic parents she desperately hoped to escape. In her Oswald piece, she expressed the same apprehensive curiosity about the ineradicable traces of kinship. The quest for the roots of character, she explained, was the motive for the profile:

A version of the same quest motivated the novel she was having such trouble writing. Where did she come from, what had been the influences and accidents and loves and antipathies and idiosyncrasies that had helped to shape her? What secrets might those ignorant relatives, especially her father, hold? To ask the questions in a radically different context, for the Oswald article, was perhaps a relief of sorts. The writing of
the piece apparently proceeded smoothly and promptly, and Stafford also expeditiously enlarged it into a short book
A Mother in History
, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux was happy to publish in 1966, even if it wasn’t the work they were waiting for.

S
TAFFORD HAD BEEN BACK
in East Hampton for half a year, settling into a new, rustic life (her Rockefeller grant in hand), when her father died in January of 1966. It was the liberation she had been impatiently awaiting for years, as she had bluntly told even her loyal sisters, who had been shouldering most of the burden of caring for him. But not surprisingly, her reaction to his death was not the simple sense of release she had hoped for. Distance had never been as easy to establish as she liked to pretend. She had resisted her sisters’ pressure to visit him and found every excuse not to write to him, but he was clearly very much on her mind, not least perhaps because she had set herself the task of writing
about
him. She had begun to help contribute to his support when he was moved, unwillingly, into a nursing home near Marjorie in Oregon, where his health deteriorated quite rapidly. (He apparently suffered several strokes and started rambling incoherently toward the end, and bronchitis made breathing difficult.)

Stafford didn’t go to his funeral, and she proceeded to be the thoroughly recalcitrant daughter and sister. Confronted with the overwhelming fact of her father’s death, she seemed to feel compelled, out of guilt and a fear of facing the loss straight on, to stir up a petty family squabble as a pretext for severing ties. A letter to Peter Taylor, written “
in a winter mope” shortly after John Stafford’s death, offers a glimpse of the extent of her guilty conscience and of her ambivalence about the bonds of kinship:

The question of the heritability of inhumanity had been the theme guiding her investigations of Mrs. Oswald: Was her discovery of the mother’s chilling absence of empathy a clue to the son’s act? Here Stafford almost ludicrously trivialized the fear of being “wanting in some terribly important human quality” by linking it to her sisters’ reversal of telephone charges, but in fact it was a fear that had haunted her relations with her father for a long time. That was evident in her ruminations in
In the Snowfall
on Joyce Bartholomew’s father, his misanthropic bitterness as a man and his coldness as a father, and on Joyce’s fears of her own profound detachment. In her letter to Taylor, apparently without any sense of irony, she offered an almost pathetic instance of her susceptibility to precisely the traits she least admired. She abstractly admitted the possibility that she was as coldhearted and petty minded as her sisters, but she seemed unaware of her own actual display of just those qualities. If it was astounding that they, “at such a time,” should have called collect, it was hardly less notable that she should have magnified that lapse into cause for a complete rupture. And no sooner had she celebrated the break than she acknowledged the barren isolation she had created for herself.

Stafford was alone in a more profound way than she had been for a long time. She was right that living so completely on her own, as she continued to do in East Hampton, didn’t turn out to be productive, and she was right to characterize her existence as “queer.” But the oddity of it was not entirely new. More than a decade earlier, after her divorce from Oliver Jensen, she had set up house alone in Westport and cultivated the role of the spinsterish literary lady. It had been an old-fashioned pose that covered up a reality that was not in fact so cozy: then Stafford had been quite sick and often drunk. Her style this time was similarly fusty, though a new fierceness began to surface. Her stylized eccentricity looked less like an entertaining act and more like an effort at symbolic caricature of the kind she had once undertaken in her fiction.

The fact that she was no longer successfully writing fiction seems to have meant that Stafford became more absorbed than ever before in
crafting a protective persona. The reclusive spinster role in the 1950s had served as a playful deflection from her personal troubles, while she was hard at work writing her way out of her literary troubles. She had been more than ready to drop the pose, as her susceptibility to Liebling showed. Now the role was more central to her life, more firmly established every year. And for all of her steadfast rejection of the claims of kinship, avoiding her father’s funeral and feuding with her sisters, the alternately crotchety and demure provincial style that Stafford perfected after Liebling’s death looked like a belated embrace of her “hick” origins. It was as though she was trying to work out some of the themes that thwarted her in her fiction, to find some accommodation with her Colorado past.