The Interior Castle (15 page)

That was a hopeful construction of Stafford’s predicament, about which she herself was evidently feeling considerably more pessimistic.

L
OOKING BACK
over his own literary apprenticeship, Robert Lowell dated a turning point from the day in the spring of 1937 when he drove into the “
frail agrarian mailbox post” of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon’s house in Tennessee. “I had crashed the civilization of the South,” was the droll, supercilious way he put it two decades later. He got out of his car to disguise the damage to the rickety post and was promptly welcomed by the southern literary elite as a valuable rebel from New England: a renegade from the Lowell clan was a real coup for the Fugitives. The mythic status they conferred upon him—“I too was part of a legend. I was Northern, disembodied, a Platonist, a Puritan, an abolitionist”—gave him one of the literary themes that dominated his early writing and underlay all his work.

Jean Stafford’s own story of arrival was a nightmarishly distorted echo. A year and a half later, home from Kenyon on Christmas vacation in 1938, Lowell smashed his parents’ car, with Stafford in the passenger seat, into a wall in a dead-end Cambridge street. She was rushed to the hospital with “
massive head injuries,” as a friend described it, “everything fractured, skull, nose, jaw, everything.” The damage would never be entirely disguised, and Stafford was soon made to feel she had “crashed” the civilization of Boston—rudely, not heroically. Lowell’s parents adopted an attitude of chilling detachment from the unpedigreed interloper. Yet for Stafford the collision took on symbolic dimensions that helped give her the themes around which her emerging style matured. Inspiration did not come immediately; her head needed mending, and the symbols required time to take shape. In fact, Stafford had another unsuccessful novel to go before she found the frame and images, and the distance, to sustain a narrative.

The disastrous car ride with Lowell, a notoriously bad driver who had
probably been drinking that evening, was the climax of the high drama that had begun two months earlier when Stafford escaped from Iowa in the middle of the night. Soon after she finally surfaced in Cambridge in November, she had confessed to Hightower the cause of her delay in arriving—the rendevous with Lowell in Cleveland. Having rearranged his life and rented more spacious rooms to welcome Stafford, Hightower understandably felt betrayed. But he trusted her claim that she was afraid of Cal, and made clear that he was still ready to try living with her.

Lowell certainly was far from the low-key suitor she was used to from her years with Hightower. Cal’s romantic history before Stafford had consisted of a swift, fierce, finally aborted campaign two years earlier to marry a twenty-four-year-old Boston debutante, Anne Dick, an unlikely match opposed by his parents—which had only spurred Lowell on. His father had been the victim of his violent zeal on that occasion: protesting his parents’ meddling disapproval, Cal appeared on their doorstep and knocked his father down in the front hallway while his mother watched.

Stafford had a taste of Lowell’s wild determination during a visit from him in Cambridge over Thanksgiving when, she wrote to her friend Mock, “
he got savage and I got scared.” The issue was marriage, she said, which he insisted on and she resisted. “A friend of his, a young man from Harvard College,” she went on, “told me in a private interview that Mr. L. wanted me more than anything else in his life and that I wd. never be free of him, that he will continue to track me down as long as I live, a very pleasant thought. It makes me perfectly sick because he is an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet.”

How much of the account reflected her typical dramatizing is hard to say, but she was evidently unnerved. Hightower’s apartment was not a workable haven, and she soon told him that she had better move out to Concord to be safe. Stafford clearly wanted distance from Hightower too, or at least couldn’t manage in the flesh the intimacy she had described in her letters from Iowa. “The full articulation of passionate love” didn’t happen with the fevered eagerness she had conjured in words; living together faltered from the start, when Stafford told Hightower she was frigid. Whatever she meant by it, and whether or not it was true, he understood the message. It was one more stunning reversal, but the friendship didn’t collapse.

They continued to see each other after she moved to Concord, and
Hightower planned a modest Christmas celebration. But on December 21 he received an urgent message to call Mount Auburn Hospital. He found Stafford swaddled in bandages and, learning of the accident, discovered that she hadn’t kept Lowell at a safe distance after all. A loyal bedside visitor for several weeks, Hightower finally sent a letter announcing the end of their relationship, to which Stafford replied with an atypically unadorned indictment of herself: “
I will say nothing, only this: I love you, but my selfishness is so all consuming that I can’t help hurting you.” Two weeks later, she adorned it somewhat: “
I want children, I want a house. I want to be a faithful woman. I want those things more than I want my present life of a writer, but I shall have none because my fear will make me unfaithful and desire cannot now be hoped for, it is too late and I have been too much revolted.” It was an echo of her declarations of frigidity and of the journal entry about her profound loneliness that she had sent him over the summer: here too she viewed herself tragically, as both victim and victimizer, maintaining that her “life of a writer” was no compensation for the emotional commitment and sexual fulfillment that eluded her.

Once Hightower had retreated, Stafford had few other places to turn during a very painful convalescence. Neither Lowell nor the Atlantic Monthly Press—the other Boston attractions that had drawn her—proved a source of much support. Lowell was not even at hand. He returned to Kenyon for the spring term of his junior year, leaving Blair Clark, a friend from his prep school days at St. Mark’s, to help Stafford deal with the lawsuit it had been agreed she would file against Lowell to pay for her hospitalization. Clark was also supposed to protect her from Lowell’s parents, which was a full-time job, if the rumors that reached Cal in Ohio about the Lowells’ bullying conduct toward her were to be believed. “
About Boston,” Lowell chided his parents in the summer, “I gather many people think you have behaved shabbily about Jean’s accident. Such opinion is not my concern yet I cannot feel the action of my family has in all cases been ethicilly [
sic
] ideal.”

Stafford hadn’t managed to establish a literary life in Boston that offered much relief or gratification either, though she had been busy making herself known at the Atlantic Monthly Press from the moment she arrived. Her Neville manuscript, based on her Stephens experience, earned her praise from the editors there, whose report judged that “
she can handle the English language as a skilled carpenter handles a chisel—with
ease, deftness, accuracy, and rhythm,” but they indicated that she would have to rework it completely before they would consider a contract. In fact, Edward Weeks, the editor in chief, went so far as to suggest a rough outline for a fundamental overhaul of her “
ironic, heartless story of a small college community” in a memo to another editor:

Stafford was prepared to be a docile, and speedy, student. Eight days later, on December 9, Archie Ogden sent her a check for two hundred and fifty dollars as an option on the book and said they looked forward to a “
sizable portion” of the manuscript six months later, on June 1, 1939.

The guidance Stafford received didn’t sound very promising. What Weeks had extracted from Stafford’s ungainly Neville undertaking—a jumbled gallery of satiric portraits hung on a plot line too arbitrary and ludicrous to be compelling—was a broad (and banal) outline of her autobiography. That was exactly what she had been trying to bury beneath the more objective enterprise of a larger social satire, at the advice of the readers of her first solipsistic venture,
Which No Vicissitude
. Not that Weeks had any reason to know the creative history of this fledgling writer, but even by his own standards, which were apparently mainly commercial, his advice was dubious. After all, he and his staff had just told her that the college theme was rather narrow and overdone, and a year earlier she had sent sections of her Germany diary to the
Atlantic Monthly
at the suggestion of Howard Mumford Jones, only to meet the objection that “
there is too much about Germany on the market at present.”

The prospects for the book looked even less promising two weeks later, when Stafford found herself in the hospital, with a crushed nose, a broken cheekbone, and a skull fractured in several places. Ogden urged
her to give “
no further thought to that novel of yours until relaxation has taken every last kink out of your cranium,” but relaxation didn’t seem to be what Stafford wanted—and it certainly wasn’t what she got. After spending roughly a month in the hospital, she had to return twice in the spring for harrowing surgery on her nose. Her convaiesence was extremely uncomfortable (along with nose troubles and difficulty breathing, she was plagued by headaches). And it was lonely, though she didn’t go straight back to her Concord room. She was welcomed first by the Ogdens, with whom she had become friendly; then an acquaintance put her in touch with a wealthy Milton, Massachusetts, family, who took her in. Still, she felt bereft of close companions and was apparently finding solace in
solitary drinking. By the summer, she admitted, however jokingly, to some concern: “
I have taken the veil and at the moment do not think I will become alchoholic [
sic
],” she wrote to Hightower.

Meanwhile, the negotiations with Lowell, not to speak of those with his parents, were far from smooth. Once again, Stafford’s relationship with a man was radically unstable. His pursuit apparently continued to be unnervingly intense;
he tracked her down at a friend’s apartment near dawn during a visit she made to New York that spring. She in turn continued to be thoroughly unpredictable, now eager to see him, now ready to denounce him. After welcoming Lowell’s company in New York, she anticipated his return to Boston for Easter vacation with trepidation. It seems that another trip to New York, during which she had seen Ford Madox Ford and his wife, had revived her fears. In a note to the Ogdens, she reported only half facetiously that the Fords, “
convinced that Cal Lowell is really pathological and capable of murder, told me such horrible things about him that I am thinking of pressing Stitch [Evarts, her lawyer] into service to get out an injunction against him. He is due to arrive next week. I may have to find a hiding place.” But she didn’t, and when he arrived Lowell seemed “
completely metamorphosed,” she said later. They enjoyed a genteel time visiting his elegant relatives, and by the time Lowell returned to Kenyon to finish the spring term, they were engaged, though Stafford kept the betrothal a secret.

It was only a couple of months later, in the early summer, that they had another dramatic falling out. Under the influence of Frederick Santee, his eccentric classics professor at Kenyon who knew doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Lowell abruptly ordered Stafford from Boston to Baltimore
for yet another operation on her nose: Lowell was peremptory even, or perhaps especially, when he was acting out of guilt. Having arrived in Baltimore, Stafford panicked at the prospect of further surgery—to be undertaken without consulting her Boston doctors. With Blair Clark’s help, she escaped on the train after a scene with Lowell on the station platform.
Incensed by her and Clark’s medical apostasy, Lowell leapt to the conclusion that the two of them had betrayed him romantically as well. He was quickly talked out of his delusion, and he and Stafford were reconciled. During the summer, after Lowell returned from Kenyon, they visited often, their meetings apparently made more pleasurable by being forbidden according to the terms of their lawsuit, due to come to trial in November.

In short, it was hardly the convalescence the doctor would have ordered, or the circumstances most conducive to producing a novel. Yet despite abundant medical excuses for postponing and interrupting work, Stafford was understatedly stoic—a contrast to her style in later life, when her health problems consumed her. In a note to Ogden at the beginning of May, she apologized for her slowness and treated her troubles as a passing irritation only superficially related to her work: “
Part II is going at a snail’s pace at the moment but I think when the effects of Dr. Butler’s insufficient anaesthetic wear off, I will be able to work with vigor having no further hospitalization to look forward to.” Lowell, however, seized the chance to develop a deeper connection between Stafford’s external ordeals and her imaginative undertaking. An early, unpublished draft of a sonnet entitled “On a Young Lady Convalescing from a Brain-Injury but Unable to write a novel in Concord, Mass.” (parts of which were subsequently reworked into “Salem” and “Concord” in his first book,
Land of Unlikeness
) is not a polished literary effort (or, obviously, a reliable factual source). But it is a suggestive projection into that mysterious realm where experience is transmuted into symbols. Lowell didn’t pretend to be an omniscient mind reader. In fact, his theme was the confusion in the young lady’s brain and the effort to find a form for the destructive disorder within: