The Interior Castle (62 page)

The truth was, her solitary streak was not quite the quaint eccentricity she liked to suggest in her slight pieces. While she was telling others how to endure their guests, she was arranging her house so that no one would come stay with her. It was the old, deep lure of isolation and, it seems clear, a desire to hide the life she lived—to escape the drinking she did in company, to obscure the drinking she did alone, to elude advice about her unhealthy habits in general. In “Don’t Send Me Gladiolus,” she gave tips on social protocol with hospital patients, a trivializing treatment of a troubling, chronic subject in her life—sickness, and the vulnerability it entailed. “
Cherish but do not pamper me. Treat me as if I were a grown-up temporarily under the weather,” she wrote, and her complicated dependence on doctors and on bouts of invalidism was reduced to a glib maxim well suited to the pages of
Vogue
.

The profiles Stafford wrote, which fall into roughly two categories—grandes dames and alarming eccentrics—can also be read in an autobiographical light. They reflected, as the editors who assigned them must have felt, two contrasting impulses obviously central to her self-conception. Miss Prides, in more or less intimidating versions, had long figured in Stafford’s life, in her aspirations to a sense of social connection At the same time, her fascination with propriety never obscured her iconoclastic inclinations. Both are easy to trace to her past, to the ambivalence she felt about her provincial roots and her colorful father. But her magazine articles are notable for glossing over any confused allegiances.
Stafford gushed shamelessly over the aristocratic ladies (Katharine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post;
Lally Weymouth, her daughter; Millicent Fenwick; Mrs. Warren G. Topping, founder of the Hampton Day School), adopting the tone of a refined woman appreciating another rare specimen in a crass, democratic world. In a letter to Nancy Flagg Gibney, Stafford complained that “
the Fenwick caper did me in as the Katherine Graham one did last year” and swore that she would never write for
Vogue
again. Still, she proved herself remarkably adept at producing the fawning pieces, and the result was reminiscent of Sonie Marburg’s blind infatuation with her starchy mentor. The end of the piece on Mrs. Graham, a long digression on the theme of family loyalty inspired by a reunion of the wellborn clan at Christmas, suggested Stafford’s lurking preoccupation with her own family origins, so different from the patrician Grahams’. As in her previous defenses of the family, she seemed notably unhindered by the irony of her own situation—she was a woman who hated Christmas, and who kept her relatives at a distance:

Stafford was closer to her familiar, acerbically witty self in her treatments of eccentrics (Mrs. Oswald, the filming of
The Misfits
, Martha Mitchell, the pathological Charles Manson), though as her portrait of Mrs. Oswald showed, her articles often lapsed too quickly into condescension toward her curious subjects. It was her own idiosyncrasies that she seemed to take more seriously, devoting increasing energy to a form
of self-portraiture that had a lineage in her family: the outraged, beleaguered, peeved, appalled letter or short piece, which her father had specialized in toward the end of his life as well. As she admitted in an article in
Esquire
, “Somebody Out There Hates Me,” “
the venting of spleen and bile is relieving and, if it offends and is sourly returned, perversely delicious.” In the diatribes she clearly relished, she mostly defended the unfashionable views that often riled her readers, and elaborated her fusty persona, complaining about miniskirts, illiteracy, malapropisms, and other offenses of the undecorous times—often in a less-than-decorous way. Or, as in a long battle with Con Ed over an erroneous bill, she adopted the pose of the aggrieved little person—often in an arch, less-than-populist way. The first and longest of the letters she exchanged with the electric company, and later wrote about, was a seven-page document of manic name-dropping, itemizing the famous people with whom she had socialized over the course of a month (proof that she had not been at home using electricity). There were moments of real amusement in the epic self-mockery, but the energy she devoted to it seemed bizarre:

More poignant were the letters to her editors in which she complained about the treatment that her pieces had received at their hands. Once more she was the defender of the language and of her own history of stylistic polish, and it was clear how much was at stake for her even in her less substantial journalism: she cursed it as hackwork and then, as if in compensation, became the imperious author. “
Digression is integral to my style. Parenthesis is my middle name,” she lectured Shana Alexander at
McCall’s
. “I have been assiduously at work on my style for a great many years. Style is the morality of language, and I look upon myself as
a moral writer.” Describing another editing ordeal, this time at
Cosmopolitan
, she invoked the by now familiar metaphor of the body to describe her sense of linguistic violation: “
I knew they would [greatly cut] but I was nevertheless sickened to see all the flesh stripped from the bones and the bones, in general, dislocated.”

There was an exception to the journalistic constriction that Stafford courted and yet chafed under. For six years, from 1970 through 1975, she wrote the Christmas roundup of children’s books for her old patron,
The New Yorker
. Not that it was a thoroughly liberating, fulfilling project by any means. She dreaded the arrival of the holiday season, when the books that had been steadily accumulating finally had to be tended to, and she was far from impressed by the caliber of the writing she was commenting on. But appearing in
The New Yorker
was a welcome return to the ground of her earlier success, and writing about children’s books offered a way to tap into an otherwise daunting past. Much as her Adams stories had opened a door onto her childhood, in these reviews she could and did write as an adult enlightened rather than entrapped by her vivid memories of the state of innocence, its fears and its exhilarations. She began her first review with a declaration of her critical perspective and standards, which was also one of her best statements of her own imaginative debt to her childhood:

Stafford’s past was very much on her mind as the 1970s progressed and her health declined, but she was rarely able to maintain that kind of poise about it. Although a visit to her alma mater in the spring of 1972 to receive an honorary degree went very well, and although her survey of her career in her lecture “Miss McKeehan’s Pocketbook” sounded satisfied (she even talked of collecting her miscellaneous nonfiction writing), it was clear that the sense of accomplishment and equilibrium she conveyed was more than a little fragile. Just how fraught the prospect of a return to Colorado was for Stafford is suggested by a letter she wrote to Mary Lee, who had evidently expressed interest in seeing her when she came West. In it the youngest, bitter sister spoke as though still a defensive adolescent, as though her lifetime away had brought no distance:

Unfortunately, Stafford’s failures to eat, to sleep, and to work were far from a merely passing fit occasioned by her sister. Several years later, Stafford was ready to acknowledge that she had arrived at a disheartening turning point. Despite regular free-lance work (she took over Malcolm
Muggeridge’s slot reviewing for
Esquire
in 1975) and intermittently hopeful mentions of her novel, the truth was that her writing was not going well. In 1975 she wrote a dismal, prophetic letter to her agent James Oliver Brown, suggesting that she leave him: “
I am so unproductive (I’ve had a miserable and long siege of bronchitis with the asthma that goes with it and just before Christmas I was in the Hospital for Special Surgery for treatment of the arthritis with which I will be stuck for the rest of my life) that I can’t think I will ever bring you anything but small, unprofitable nuisances. The novel is still miles and miles in the future.” It was the first time she had been so explicitly hopeless about the book.

She turned to Lowell for help, and though the tone of her letters was jaunty, her mission must have been uncomfortable: she was asking him to autograph some of his books for her to sell. If part of her enjoyed playing the importunate ex-wife, part of her clearly didn’t. “
Do you loathe me for this? Do I wound you?” she asked him, questions probably half directed at herself. “If you do, tell me and I’ll stop,” she said, though she admitted her desperation for some money with which to buy time. “I do
so
want to finish my novel. I do
so
hate to have to interrupt it to write reviews and articles. I wasn’t put on the earth to be a journalist. I’m
sure
I wasn’t.”

As she went on to confess to Lowell, she was leading an even more reclusive life, and if she lied to him about drinking alone only “occasionally,” her general description of her ambivalently antisocial life was painfully true:

In a mock memo several years before, sent from Henrietta Stackpole to Dr. Roberts, Stafford had been even more forthright about the central place that alcohol played in her increasing unhappiness. The colloquial, lighthearted style of her confession only added to its poignancy: