The Interior Castle (64 page)

Sustaining that feat of imaginative poise was now beyond Stafford. Not only did the rest of her autobiographical novel keep escaping her control, but the publication of “An Influx of Poets” in
The New Yorker
in November of 1978 seemed to throw her completely off balance. To acknowledge that this was almost certainly her last published piece of writing, that her long-awaited novel had come to this story and no more, was too much to bear. She in a sense turned deaf as well as speechless, claiming that she had heard no response to her story, though in fact her friends had been quick with their congratulations. She became disoriented in
her bitterness: Giroux and her friends were cast as her betrayers, and she wrote them off one by one as ingrates and enemies—much as Molly in
The Mountain Lion
, in her frantic unhappiness, had compiled her list of unforgivable fat people.

Stafford was to live another four months, mostly reclusive but every so often rallying in her typical style.
In a reminiscence, her friend Dorothea Straus, a writer and the wife of Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, described visiting her in the New York City club where she was staying toward the end. The Strauses watched her emerge from the library in scarlet pumps, with a bag to match, and listened to her say, with great effort, that she had decided to sell the Springs house, move to New York, and see all her old friends. Discovering that the bar was no longer open to entertain these particular old friends, she promptly made the long trip back to her room for a bottle of whiskey, a gesture not just of need but of desire for the old conviviality. Yet the defiantly sociable style was usually fleeting.
During those same last weeks, she told her friend Joseph Mitchell at dinner one night that she was half in love with easeful death, and it was clear to him that she had made her choice.

Not long after that evening she was taken to New York Hospital, clearly failing, and was soon transferred to the Burke Rehabilitation Center, where she lasted a week. At her bedside when she died were two volumes of Twain and Lowell’s
Mills of the Kavanaughs
, which she had annotated. Reading the title poem, she had paused over various details to give her version of the autobiographical facts behind them. Her jottings look like yet one more effort to settle scores, this time in an almost childlike way. She noted down Lowell’s debts—she had typed for him, taught him solitaire, showed him flowers: “
He saw nothing of the natural world—
nothing!!
” She defended his father, and herself, at the poem’s first mention of the figure clearly modeled on the senior Robert Lowell: “Poor old Mr. Bob Lowell, bossed by Charlotte, & despised, despised & patronized by his son. He did, I know he did, love me—he thought I was a regular fella & he also thought I was a pretty girl.” But then, in a surge of literary appreciation, she left off her crabbed scribbling and exclaimed beside one passage, “How marvelous this is. It’s the kind of writing that reminds me why I married him.” Lowell’s lines clearly spoke to her own vision of precarious innocence, so central to her imagination. And behind them, she perhaps heard a commemoration of a youthful marriage that had overwhelmed them both, but also inspired them:

T
HE SHADOW
of Stafford’s fiction, which dappled her life all along, seemed to loom over it at the end. Like Katharine Congreve in
The Catherine Wheel
, she had her tombstone ready well before her death, ordered from a stone carver in Newport (along with one for Liebling) and engraved with a snowflake, the emblem of her early unfinished novel,
In the Snowfall
. Shortly after “An Influx of Poets” appeared, she rewrote her frequently revised will for the last time, and as many of her friends remarked—some with appreciation and some with exasperation—her change of heart was the kind of end one might expect from her fiction.

The spirit of Sonie Marburg lurks in the peculiar abandonment of the literary world that Stafford’s final will represents. Before her stroke she had asked Everett Rattray to be Liebling’s literary executor and Robert Giroux to be her own. A New York lawyer had drawn up her will accordingly—only to be fired by his client after a dispute about his bill. Without a word to her friends, in November 1978 Stafford hired an East Hampton lawyer for the last revision of the will. In it, no literary executors were appointed. Instead she named as heir to her estate Josephine Monsell, her housekeeper, a middle-aged local East Hampton woman who had always been there when Stafford needed her but had never been intrusive—who never seemed to cast judgment, perhaps because (as Monsell was the first to admit) she didn’t begin to comprehend her often mercurial employer. It was as though Stafford were settling the long tension between her identity as a woman and as a writer by declaring her allegiance to domesticity. The most important material legacy to Monsell was the house that Stafford had once thought of turning into a library. Presiding over the earlier plan had been the spirit of Emily Vanderpool, the indomitable rebel who was always looking for a quiet place to read—and happily finding it in the least likely of places. But it was Sonie, the
troubled daughter who never found a home for herself, who spoke up in the end. Behind Josephine Monsell stood Shura Marburg, a cleaning woman herself, behind whom stood Stafford’s own mother, the keeper of boardinghouses. Stafford never managed to write the sequel to
Boston Adventure
, but at the end of that novel she had pointed toward a future claim on Sonie’s conscience. Sonie had banished Shura, much as Stafford had banished her own mother, but she knew that the exile was not forever for either of them. “
For the time being, I had walled up my mother into the farthest recess of my mind, knowing that the time would come when I must let her out again.”

I owe many thanks to many people and institutions for their help and encouragement in the course of my work on this book. None of it would have been possible without those who made Jean Stafford’s unpublished words available for quotation. I have reprinted excerpts from her letters, manuscripts, notebooks, journals, and other writings by permission of Russell & Volkening, Inc., as agents for the Estate of Jean Stafford. Most of that material is located in the Jean Stafford Collection of the Norlin Library, at the University of Colorado in Boulder. My visits there and my subsequent long-distance research were immensely aided by the efforts of Nora Quinlan and Kris McCusker. For permission to use material housed elsewhere, I would like to thank Blair Clark; Andrew Cooke; Eleanor Gibney; James Robert Hightower; Oliver Jensen; William B. T. Mock; Cecile Starr; Peter Taylor; Paul and Dorothy Thompson; Stuart Wright; the Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin; Department of Rare Books, Olin Library, Cornell University; the John Berry man Papers, Manuscript Division, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis; the James Oliver Brown Papers and the Random House Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; the Peter Taylor Papers, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Special Collections, Vanderbilt University; the
Story
Magazine Archives (Box 50), the Caroline Gordon Papers (Box 37), and the Allen Tate Papers (Box 8), Princeton University Library; Dartmouth College Library; Greenslade Special Collections of Olin and Chalmers Libraries at Kenyon College.

I owe a large debt to the following relatives, friends, and acquaintances of Stafford, who agreed to interviews and patiently unearthed their memories of her: Louis Auchincloss, Pearl Bell, Elaine Benson,
James Oliver Brown, Vivian Cadden, Hortense Carpentier, Ralph Carpentier, Edward Joseph Chay, Craig Claiborne, Blair Clark, William Cole, Andrew Cooke, Peter Davison, Anatole Ehrenburg, Sanford Friedman, Brendan Gill, Robert Giroux, Steven Hahn, Elizabeth Hardwick, Ihab Hassan, James Robert Hightower, Howard Higman, Eleanor Hempstead, Ann Honeycutt, Maureen Howard, Richard Howard, Oliver Jensen, Joe Kaufman, Alfred Kazin, Barbara Lawrence, Frances Lindley, Robie Macauley, Janet Malcolm, William McPherson, Frank McShane, Joseph Mitchell, William B. T. Mock, Josephine Monsell, Howard Moss, Frank Parker, Marjorie Stafford Pinkham, Helen Rattray, Kenneth Robbins, Berton and Kay Roueche, Wilfrid Sheed, Eileen Simpson, Raymond Sokolov, Cecile Starr, John Stonehill, Dorothea Straus, Peter and Eleanor Taylor, Paul and Dorothy Thompson, Diana Trilling, Miriam Ungerer, Marie and Alex Warner, Dan Wickenden.

I am grateful for permission to quote from the correspondence of Stafford’s friends and family, as follows: James Oliver Brown; Whit Burnett (by permission of Whitney Burnett Vass); Lambert Davis; Nancy Flagg Gibney (by permission of Eleanor Gibney); Robert Giroux, Copyright © 1992 by Robert Giroux (courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University); Caroline Gordon (by permission of Nancy Tate Wood, courtesy of The University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections); James Robert Hightower; Ann Honeycutt (by permission of Robert MacMillan and Joseph Mitchell); Oliver Jensen; Karl Lehmann (by permission of Phyllis Williams Lehmann); A. J. Liebling (by permission of Russell & Volkening, Inc., as agents for the author, copyright © 1991 by Norma Liebling Stonehill; courtesy of the Department of Rare Books, Olin Library, Cornell University); Robert Lowell and Charlotte Lowell (by permission of Frank Bidart, courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University); A. G. Ogden (by permission of the Atlantic Monthly Company); Dr. Jacques Quen (by permission of Dr. Thomas N. Roberts); Philip Rahv (by permission of Betty T. Rahv); Dr. Thomas N. Roberts; Delmore Schwartz (by permission of Robert Phillips); Evelyn Scott (by permission of Paula Scott); Mary Jane Sherfey (by permission of William E. Sherfey); John Stafford (by permission of Marjorie Stafford Pinkham); Allen Tate (by permission of Helen H. Tate, courtesy of Princeton Library and McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa); Peter Taylor (courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University);
Paul and Dorothy Thompson; Edward Weeks (by permission of Phoebe-Lou Weeks); Katharine S. White (by permission of Roger Angell).

Soon after I began my research, I discovered that two other biographers were also at work. My aims have been different from theirs, but I have benefited from the ground covered and the information uncovered by David Roberts in
Jean Stafford: A Life
(Little, Brown) and Charlotte Margolis Goodman in
Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart
(University of Texas Press). Ian Hamilton’s
Robert Lowell: A Biography
(Random House) and Raymond Sokolov’s
Wayward Reporter: The Life of A. J. Liebling
(Harper & Row), the fullest biographical accounts of two of Stafford’s husbands, were also valuable resources.

Finally, I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a fellowship in support of my work. But above all, I am grateful to my friends and family, without whom this book would have been unimaginable. Martin Peretz, the editor-in-chief of
The New Republic
, didn’t hesitate for a moment when I asked for a year’s leave to get started. Leon Wieseltier, my colleague in the magazine’s “back of the book,” urged me on, shouldering various burdens during my absence and sharing his thoughts about literature and criticism all along; those conversations have left their mark on the book. Scooter Libby gave me helpful legal advice. Mary Jo Salter was the first to see the manuscript, and as always, she was my ideal reader; the book’s final shape owes a great deal to her comments, large and small. Luke Menand, who stood in for me at
The New Republic
during my sabbatical year, helped me early on to refine my thoughts about what literary biography could and should be; four years later I relied once more on his advice. Dorothy Wickenden was yet again an acute and rigorous editor. Brad Leithauser, Jay Tolson, and Janet Hook gave me very useful suggestions in the last stages of my work. Many thanks also to my agent, Rafe Sagalyn, and to my endlessly patient and perceptive editor, Ann Close.

This book owes more than I can say to my husband, Steve Sestanovich. Over the past five years, he has seen me through not only its writing but the arrival of our children, Ben and Clare. I could not have wished for wiser help or more love.

1
“I am so sick”: JS to Ann Honeycutt, June 25, 1956, Jean Stafford Collection, Special Collections Dept., University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries.

2
“predilection for masks”: Howard Moss, “Jean: Some Fragments,”
Shenandoah
30, no. 3 (1979), p. 78.

3
“Lowell-to-Liebling”: Wilfrid Sheed, “Miss Jean Stafford,” Ibid., p. 98.

4
“reporter’s moll” to “the Widow Liebling”: Ibid., p. 95.

5
“Although it often may”: Peter Taylor, “A Commemorative Tribute to Jean Stafford,” Ibid., p. 57.

6
“Actually, what she was like” to “she was always seeking”: Ibid., p. 59.

7
“Yet really we had the same life”: “For John Berryman,” Robert Lowell,
Day by Day
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 27.

8
“What do I care”: JS to Robert Lowell, n.d., Houghton Library, Harvard University.

9
“The esthetic distance”: Guy Davenport, review of
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, The New York Times Book Review
, Feb. 16, 1969, p. 40.

10
“the poets to a fare-thee-well”: Alden Whitman, “Jean Stafford and Her Secretary ‘Harvey’ Reigning in Hamptons,”
The New York Times
, Aug. 26, 1973, p. 78.

11
“You have spoken”: “Jean Stafford, a Letter,” Lowell,
Day by Day
, p. 29.