Read The Interior Castle Online
Authors: Ann Hulbert
A curious loyalty to the memory of her reclusive, embittered father is reflected in her retreat to her Springs house and in much of the indignant writing that emerged from her downstairs study, where, she said, “
I wear pants and boots and a green visor and I turn into a journalist.” That was an echo of her descriptions of her father the cowboy free-lancer, pounding away at his old typewriter. Describing her attachment to her haven in the article “East Hampton from the Catbird Seat,” she acknowledged that she, “
a Westerner,” was hardly a native, but then spent most of the piece demonstrating that her heart was with the locals and with the other curious characters who had come not to find the chic parties but to flee the ordeals of contemporary urban life. It was an evocation of an eccentric agrarian life not unlike the existence she sometimes described her father aspiring to. Among its great virtues was, she claimed, freedom from conventional sociability. “
I can be a grasshopper for two weeks running and then I can be a mole for the next three months. I am not obliged to see anybody who bores me or anybody who disapproves of me and nobody whom I bore and nobody of whom I disapprove is required to keep my company.”
Similarly, when Stafford took off her visor and became a bustling lady of the house, her allegiance to her mother’s domesticity showed through. She was happily preoccupied with homey pastimes like making potpourri and doing needlepoint. She admitted that “
I’m a compulsive housekeeper. I even go into corners with Q-tips”—an echo of Shura Marburg’s obsessive poking with hairpins at the dust on the Hotel Barstow furniture. Though Stafford acknowledged that these “explosions of
orderliness” were signs of the doldrums, she played down the dark side: “They’re better than staring-into-space depressions.” She was unabashedly house-proud once again, as she had been in Maine: “
I give presents to my house—gave it a cedar-closet last year, gave it a new study this year—and when the workmen have finished for the day, we cut up a few touches over a Bud.” Much of Stafford’s renovation entailed gradually turning extra bedrooms in her house into studies to avoid having guests, whereas her mother had been forever looking for more room to sleep another boarder. The effect, ironically, was not so different: whirlwinds of domestic energy, yet no real family hearth. And there were plenty of studies, yet next to no work was getting done in them.
To keep her company in her house, she resurrected an imaginary alter ego, named Henrietta Stackpole after Henry James’s feisty journalist in
The Portrait of a Lady
, whom she had originally invented when she lived in Westport. Her role then, as Stafford explained Miss Stackpole’s inception, was to be an intermediary with a vulgar world that too often and rudely intruded on her treasured, civilized retreat. This fictional character played the role of secretary, sending out letters under her own name for her refined companion. Stafford pretended that the name had fortuitously sprung to mind, but in fact her amanuensis was more carefully chosen and helps shed light on the persona and perspective that Stafford cultivated during the last decade and a half of her life.
The juxtaposition of Jean Stafford and Henrietta Stackpole showed Stafford at work borrowing from her literary mentors in fashioning a style, this time for her life rather than for her fiction. In appropriating Miss Stackpole as her secretary/alter ego, Stafford was invoking James, but she had picked his most Twain-like character. James himself, in his preface, apologetically explained the uncharacteristic Henrietta as his effort at “
the cultivation of the lively,” to counteract the danger of “thinness” in the rest of the refined novel. James’s heroine Isabel Archer gave a fuller account of her blunt friend, whom she appreciated as an exemplar of American virtues for which she felt a real nostalgia. It’s not hard to see why Stafford kindled to Isabel’s portrait of the less-than-ladylike Henrietta Stackpole. “
I know enough to feel that she’s a kind of emanation of the great democracy—of the continent, the country, the nation,” Isabel said, defending Henrietta to her cousin Ralph Touchett, who had fled his native ground for England:
I don’t say that she sums it all up, that would be too much to ask of her. But she suggests it; she vividly figures it.… I like the great country stretching away beyond the rivers and across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading till it stops at the green Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta—pardon my similes—has something of that odour in her garments.
Settled in comparative solitude on the eastern tip of Long Island, Stafford was eager to welcome the West back under her roof. As a pair, Stafford and her invented companion encompassed the tensions that had long animated her distinctive style. In the drama that Stafford scripted between the two of them, she juxtaposed the established lady and the combative journalist and played on the contrasts entailed by that paleface-redskin dualism—between refined and colloquial, elitist and populist, retiring and “lively.” The letters that the loyal Miss Stackpole penned for her employer carried Stafford’s own idiosyncratic, indignant voice to extremes, ridiculing the stupidity of her correspondents in a vein that John Stafford would have appreciated.
Yet “Miss Stafford,” who stood behind this blunt amanuensis, was no less outraged by the world, only more detached and polished. The tone of their collaboration—and their common sensibility—is captured in a withering letter Henrietta wrote to a poor young man who had happened to write Stafford for advice about his love life. After a dose of contempt, Miss Stackpole informed him that her employer might find his letter “
sufficiently outré to include in her Dunciad which she has been compiling over the past 25 years.” Sent a sexually frank novel by some hapless and apparently none-too-talented writer, with a request to write a blurb for it, Miss Stafford had her secretary respond fiercely; her employer, Miss Stackpole explained, “
would undergo a most grievous curdling of the blood” at the prospect. Apparently Stafford was amused enough by the correspondence to send it to several friends, including Ann Honeycutt, who wrote a note back to Stackpole, making fun of her purer-than-thou employer:
Thank God you are there to protect Miss Stafford. Had that book and title and portrait of the author fallen into those fine, unsullied, but too delicate hands of hers, she might well have swooned away
for her last time on this earth and be by now in heaven. I often think—and frequently say—that Miss Stafford is on loan to us poor mortals here below from the saints on high.
The merciless disdain of Misses Stackpole and Stafford is reminiscent of the young Stafford, scathing about Babbitt-infested America in her letters to Hightower soon after she had returned from Germany. But a significant transformation had occurred. Then she had been full of impatience toward her philistine country and family and had dreamed of modernist adventure. Now Stafford was still inveterately opposed to philistinism, but she was more inclined to associate it with the disorder of “
this so-called 20th Century” (one of her favorite Waugh phrases) and especially, as she confronted the 1960s, with contemporary turmoil.
A
S
1967
OPENED
, Stafford sent her agent a dramatically bleak letter: “
Things grow grimmer and grimmer. Anger alone keeps me alive.” Settling down in her Springs house the year before had not been a cozy retreat. She had had plenty of physical ailments (including pinched nerves, which meant an immovable arm), and she had done little writing. She was very upset at her doctor’s instructions to quit smoking, and then at her utter failure to buck the habit, which was clearly dangerous in more ways than one: dropped cigarettes had already set two fires in her bedroom. Judging her acutely depressed, Dr. Roberts advised her to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Jacques M. Quen, and though the sessions didn’t last very long, his impressions of her state of mind are revealing. His general diagnosis echoed those of countless doctors before him, and of Stafford herself: “
There is a markedly passive, perhaps even a masochistic element prominent in her personality structure.” But in a report back to Dr. Roberts, he went on to remark on the unexpected high-spiritedness she also conveyed: “I am intrigued by a sense of vitality and energy which she transmits, despite the severity of her depression.”
It was thanks to that energy that she ventured out into the world in 1967. She managed to be quite funny about one brief emergence into the limelight that summer, a passing appearance in a
Time
cover story about Lowell, in which—to her surprise—she found little to get angry about. (She had been “
intense, beautiful, a gifted writer of fiction” when he met her.) Far from betraying any pangs at the gulf that loomed between
them, she wittily played the part of the scrounging ex-wife of the famous poet in a letter to Peter Taylor about the article:
I was, to tell the truth, quite sorry that I came off so well; I had partly hoped that they’d be so scurrilous about me that I could sue them for huge sums. (There seemed to me a note of reproof in the statement that we wrote in separate rooms. How else is it done?) I counted nine factual errors just in the part I figured in.
Stafford’s real entry back into the literary bustle and city life came in the fall, and it was not so diverting. No huge sums forthcoming from anywhere, she had agreed to teach creative writing in the master of fine arts program that had just been founded at Columbia, and she had rented an apartment on East Eighty-seventh Street for the year. She was evidently more than a little ambivalent about what lay ahead, as she wrote to her agent at the start of September:
It has been a most monstrous summer (including for me a savage attack of peripheral neuritis thought to have been brought on by arsenic poisoning from sprayed fruits or vegetables—I ended up in the local hospital sobbing)…. I dread Columbia and in certain ways I dread New York. In others I greatly look forward to being back. Lately I have been trying out my city shoes, changing them every hour; my wig is extremely successful, but I’ve nothing at all to put on myself between my feet and my head.
She was the rural lady in a dither about going to town. (“
I am so rustic,” she wrote to Nancy Flagg Gibney, “that when I go into town once in a blue moon my feet hurt and I am afraid of the traffic and my clothes look as if I’d snatched them off my cleaning woman.”) It was a manner that could hardly have been less in step with the times. Prim in her city shoes and gloves, she was an almost comic contrast to her Columbia colleague
Edward Dahlberg, who, though not young, had a much more fashionable reputation: an eccentric writer admired by the Beats, he had been described by
Esquire
in the early 1960s as one of the heroes of the American literary underground. It was quickly clear that Stafford and her students were confronting each other across an enormous divide, and though she listened with her typical curiosity to the cadences of their
complaints, she couldn’t begin to imagine responding to them. She wryly recalled her experience several years later:
“
I have nothing to say about ‘A Rose for Emily,’ ” said Y one day. “I read two paragraphs, and it didn’t turn me on. I don’t dig Faulkner.” And a few weeks later, X said, “Of course I didn’t read
Heart of Darkness
. Do you seriously think I’d read anything by a pig who wrote a book titled
The Nigger of the Narcissus?
”
I was stopped in my tracks: I could be neither collaborator nor disputant, and my role of teacher was canceled out, as were Y’s and X’s roles of students. I was a servant who had not divined what services I was to render.
In the calmest of times, Stafford had not found teaching easy, and now her ordeals in the classroom were a sign of more than professional unease. They captured her broader sense of alienation from the surrounding culture. When students staged a sit-in during the spring of 1968, the turmoil roused Stafford to some general reflections on the state of society that revealed her growing cultural conservatism. It was part of her curmudgeonly style to strike reactionary poses, but her declarations were usually more rhetorical than substantive. Now, in a letter to Peter Taylor, she made a more serious effort to gather her thoughts, and the result was a surprising, sweeping defense of the institution of the family. “
I am out of my element in a debate like this one, primarily because I believe our society is an utterly decadent one,” she began, meaning the society in convulsions around her:
And I believe so because I believe any society is decadent in which the family is not the basic unit—the basic moral, social, economic unit.… In opposition to this idea is that of individual freedom. The rights of the individual must be put before everything else! But the family is just as organic as the individual, say I,—more so—and its rights should be put first. How can one speak of the brotherhood of man if one does not really know what a brother is? Of course families cause us great pain, but unless we are decadent we must be willing to suffer for principles. Today more than ever before, we can know what a permanent relationship is only through our families.… We have abandoned the ideal of the family, which
is
humanity, for the ideal of the individual, which is not quite human.… It is not enough to think of a man or a woman
simply as a lover. A man must also be a son, a brother, a father. A woman must be also a daughter, a sister, a mother. Otherwise, we are all either enemies or lovers, and I don’t believe that. I won’t have life so simple minded.
It was an analysis that she elaborated a couple of years later in an article for
McCall’s
about Charles Manson and his followers, whom she took as an extreme specimen of the anomie to which society had succumbed. “
It is not entirely surprising that the girls in California drifted into Manson’s community, out of the instinctive (though often inadmissible) need to belong to someone and to own someone, to have brothers and sisters and, above all, a father—to have, in short, kinsmen under the skin if not by blood,” she wrote in “Love Among the Rattlesnakes.” “The horrendous perversion of the moral code and of the traditions of protectiveness, guidance, and support that accrued to Manson as pater-familias was not just a cry for love but a desperate shriek in the wilderness.” Here she made clearer that in appealing to the traditional family, she did not intend to romanticize it, but simply to claim it as the best available civilizing force: “The structure of the family, of whom the woman is the architect, has been weakened to the point of debility, and in our waifdom, our orphanhood, we sue total strangers—we sue, indeed, our enemies—to be our teachers and our protectors. Nothing obliges us to love our parents or our cousins; and, so far as I know, no authority has ever proposed we
like
them; but, plainly, the individual must be nurtured within an edifice, within a form.”