The Interior Castle (63 page)

The metaphor was all too accurate. That dominant attachment, along with her many troubles, took its toll on Stafford’s other relationships. A demanding friend at the best of times, she became increasingly unpredictable and difficult as her health worsened. She went into New York Hospital in 1975 shortly before her sixtieth birthday with heart trouble and chronic lung disease and left it with all the accoutrements of a perpetual invalid (but none of the improved habits: she continued to smoke and to drink). She had to clear out her lungs regularly with a machine, and she was dependent on supplementary oxygen, which tethered her to a tank of air several times a day.

Her predicament tested her ties with her friends, of whom she had a large circle in East Hampton—the artist Saul Steinberg; the
New Yorker
writer Berton Roueché and his wife; Wilfrid Sheed and Miriam Ungerer; the poet Richard Howard and Sanford Friedman; Eleanor Hempstead across the road and the Guedenets, friends of Liebling’s, not far down it; Craig Claiborne; the comedian Dick Cavett and his wife, Carrie Nye; Ralph Carpentier, a local sculptor, and his wife, Hortense; Jeannette Rattray, the publisher of the
East Hampton Star
, and her son Everett, the editor, and his wife, Helen; a retinue of locals, including her housekeeper, Josephine Monsell, and handymen, the taxi driver, and many others. She also had plenty of friends in other places, who had gotten used to her late-night calls, which were often long and not always totally lucid.

Now those calls became longer and more of an ordeal, and Stafford clearly felt ever more ambivalent about actual visits, as she acknowledged in a letter to Hightower, who was still teaching at Harvard and with whom she had been in intermittent touch. She rebuffed an invitation from him with a moving mixture of deluded optimism about her work and undeluded realism about her life. “
All of this valetudinarianism has its advantages: the [health] regimen (not as time-consuming as it may sound) has driven me into work as an escape from the nuisance of it and I am at work almost altogether on my novel,” she told him, and then elaborated her reasons for staying home: “Even if I could bring all my gear with me, even if I were not so well at work, you would find me no fun: I am too egocentric, too preoccupied with my disorders and my novel.” Wittily she explained that she couldn’t sit by an open fire, due to her oxygen tank, couldn’t laugh because of her heart—so how would they have fun? “Ten million thanks, ten million apologies for being as mindlessly quixotic as the day I was born.”

Often her quixotic dealings with friends and the world had a more desperate tone. Soon after her humble proposal to leave James Oliver Brown, she turned on her agent, accusing him of failing her time and again, complaining of his “
peevishness,… irascibility,… paranoia.” A late relationship she formed with a young East Hampton couple, Kenneth and Maria Robbins, was perhaps the most dramatically problematic, and it suggests how her mounting dependence and egocentricity skewed her social life. When Stafford first met Maria Robbins, a children’s book writer, in 1975 during a ride on the East Hampton jitney, she was thoroughly enamored of her and quickly took up the couple as her special intimates. Such infatuations were Stafford’s style: one of her friends described her as a queen at court, who collected suitors with zeal. But her favors were fickle, as she herself knew, and it was ambivalence about her reliance on her courtiers that seemed to underlie her disorientingly unstable affections.

When she gave the Robbinses an acre behind her house in 1976, she saw the deal quite clearly. They had become her tacit caretakers, tending to her and her house, to say nothing of offering companionship—all of which she knew she needed. Her aim was to make an offering in return, one that would ensure assistance without undue intrusion. But she also knew that however clear the terms of the relationship, she was bound to feel intruded upon at some point: when she urged the land upon them,
Kenneth Robbins remembered, she warned that they should hurry up and take it before she had a turn of heart. And indeed she did, when her dignity and privacy seemed to her violated. Perhaps the most degrading exposure came when Robbins found her, bloodied, at the bottom of the stairs in her house one night, and insisted on sending her to the hospital, against her protestations. Helpless to fend off unwanted help, she felt deeply betrayed. The Robbinses were abruptly and absolutely exiled from her graces, a fate visited upon one set of friends after another in her last years.

On November 8, 1976, Stafford’s health took a drastic turn for the worse, following the bleak course that her doctors had warned her of—and a revised version of the course that she had outlined for her character Beatrice Trueblood years before. Stafford had a stroke, which was the physical blow she feared most. Where Beatrice Trueblood, the expert listener, lost her hearing, Stafford, the virtuosic talker, lost her speech. Her note to her sister Mary Lee about the catastrophe must be the most linguistically acrobatic announcement of aphasia ever composed. “
Since my speech is gone altogether now I have to write you,” she explained to her in May of 1977. “My fine labials and lenes are lean, disabled.” It is tempting (not least in light of such feats as that) to extend Stafford’s own psychosomatic analysis of Beatrice Trueblood to herself. Her close friend Nancy Flagg Gibney gave it a try during her last visit to East Hampton in 1977 and described the occasion in a short reminiscence of Stafford:

As Stafford acknowledged, at least in her imaginative writing, the mind and the body worked on each other in ways sometimes too uncanny to be believed. Certainly she had been a prime candidate for a stroke on physical grounds, but the mental terrain had been prepared as well. She had come close to prophesying her affliction in her story, a fable about the ironically fitting fates that the head can visit upon the flesh. And she had clearly been poised to retreat before it ever happened. A
month before her stroke, in her last review for
Esquire
, a pan of Mary Hemingway’s autobiography,
How It Was
, she announced an impending silence: “
This is the last review I shall write for Esquire—through circumstance and not through disagreement; and we part in peace. It may be the last review I will write ever.”

There was cruel irony in the fate of this woman who had counted on language as her salvation, and her aphasia was clearly a source of great pain and further rage. Her stuttering efforts to bring forth words were agonizing for her and for her friends. (One of her speech therapists—toward whom she exhibited “
passive hostility,” according to a speech pathology report—remarked that Stafford made little attempt to ease her ordeal: “Marked speech frustration experienced by patient along with marked inclination to search … for polysyllabic word rather than common colloquial word which is easily within patient’s linguistic grasp.”) But in another sense, as Gibney suggested, it was an all too fittingly scripted fate for a woman who had come to feel that there was nothing very good to say about the world. Or, perhaps even more to the point, for a woman who was full of frustrated anger at her inability to find imaginative verbal form for her vision, full of disappointment at her lapse into disgruntled commentary—and, who knows, full of terror at hearing the echoes of her poor father in that decline. Perhaps it was not so much that Stafford saw no one fit to talk to as that she felt herself unfit to talk; silence was better than the speech she had been reduced to. She had long known the allure of isolation.

Yet, as Stafford knew, retreat was not easily accomplished. A succession of women hired to help her were dismissed, usually in dramatic fashion; therapists were hardly more welcome. Her East Hampton friends drew back, daunted by the difficulty of any dealings with her (though they and others rallied with financial help, and Stafford sold roughly thirty acres of land to ease her dire straits). At the same time, her past, though she had tacitly abandoned hope of mastering it in fiction, was not to be banished. This time it was Lowell, rather than her family, who loomed large. Only a couple of months before her stroke (and a year before his death), he wrote her a letter from England, in which he waxed fondly nostalgic about their life together long ago:

Intimations of mortality were clearly very much with Lowell, as they were with Stafford, but his elegiac perspective was distinguished by an almost exultant tone. The same day he sent that note to her, he proclaimed in a letter to his friend and fellow poet Frank Bidart: “
I think the ambition of art, the feeding on one’s soul, memory, mind, etc. gives a mixture of glory and exhaustion.” There is no record of how Stafford reacted to his gesture of gratitude, but she was clearly feeling that exhaustion, not glory, was the legacy of her ambitions.

A month after her stroke, Lowell gave a reading at the 92nd Street Y, in which he again paid tribute to her, and this time her response survived. He read “The Old Flame” from
For the Union Dead
(1964), a poem about revisiting their Damariscotta Mills house, which expressed a mixture of relief and of loss at the passing of that chapter of life:

Lowell also read a poem shortly to appear in
Day by Day
, “Jean Stafford, a Letter,” which he prefaced with a rather double-edged comment to the audience: “
Men may be superior to women, but women always do better in college, I think, and are much more precocious.… She could punctuate, and do all sorts of things.… She is one of our best writers, and her talent developed early.”

That curious tone of condescension culminating in praise was reflected in the poem as well. It began by twitting Stafford about her affected German pronunciation (a cruel joke, given Stafford’s mortification about her bad German) and proceeded backhandedly to credit her linguistic skills (she wrote “
outlines for novels more salable than my poems,” and “
Roget’s
synonyms studded your spoken and written word”—not exactly praise for her high artistry). And then it closed with two stanzas in which Lowell suggested a convergence at the end of life between the precocious novelist and himself, the more ponderous poet, and at last declared her words worth listening to:

Stafford’s reaction, when Giroux described the reading during a visit to her in the hospital, was fury, though her friend the
New Yorker
writer
Joseph Mitchell, who had come to see her too, thought he perhaps detected a glimmer of inadmissible pride. Not long after she cursed Lowell in her halting speech, exclaiming, “Why doesn’t he leave me alone?” she wanted to talk about the poem. Years earlier, after one of the phone calls from Lowell that she both dreaded and awaited, she had jotted down a fuller version of the same exclamation on a scrap of paper, as if recording a vow she knew she would break: “
I who have less reason to tolerate that
man than anybody else—legally, legally, divorced him—have been obligated by his unquenchable vanity to remain a part of him. Now I’m finished and done with him.” As she doubtless knew then, and still knew, she wasn’t really done with Lowell. That refrain, which had punctuated their long and complicated relationship ever since their separation, conveyed both her deep desire for escape and her own unshakable preoccupation with him.

Lowell was in fact the subject of the last piece of writing that appeared before her death, her story “An Influx of Poets,” which Robert Giroux carefully excised from the unfinished manuscript of
The Parliament of Women
, laboriously working over it with Stafford, conversing with her in the form of questions to which she could manage simple answers. She did what Lowell had urged in his poem: in her story, which appeared a year after he died, others heard what he had “forgotten or never heard, being a man”—and being Lowell. It was her belated answer to Peter Taylor’s challenge years before, to tell her side of the story. She crafted her version of her marriage to Lowell and its collapse and produced the first story in which she had come quite so close to her own personal history. In the ordeal of transforming autobiography into fiction, she managed to confront one of the most devastating episodes in her life and turn it into a distinctive mix of social satire and psychological revelation. The story was not a therapeutic self-exculpation, not a thinly veiled brief against the famous poet. Its unexpected, perfectly tuned comic edge—the detachment from her younger self, the ruthless eye for ironic details—rescued the story from the bitterness that constantly threatened to overwhelm Stafford’s imagination. In fact, it was precisely the hard-won, tenuous balance between clear-eyed irony and corrosive grievance that gave the story its power.