The Interior Castle (3 page)

It seemed that he was at last on his way, after a somewhat meandering start. John Stafford had majored in classics at Amity College in College Springs, Iowa, and then spent some time as a cowpuncher in the Texas Panhandle. Following a stint as a reporter for the
Chicago Sun
and a New York City newspaper, he had returned to Missouri in 1899 when his father died, and had worked briefly for the telephone company in Tarkio. A fellow journalist and friend urged him to come back to the big city and “
get down to what he called business,” John Stafford remembered later, but he “couldn’t see it.” Instead, blessed with land and money from his father, he stayed on with his mother and tried his hand at writing in a more imaginative vein. He managed to sell some stories, which marked his debut in the genre of frontier adventure and humor. John Stafford clearly enjoyed his pen names; it’s not hard to detect an ironic streak in the cowboy fiction of this erstwhile classicist who took evident pride in avoiding ordinary “business” for a more eccentric career path. Eleven years later he had a novel, full of quick-on-the-draw drama and a dash of comedy, to show for his pleasant labors, and he had a very solicitous, proper wife and a family.

Ethel McKillop, who after two years of college had begun teaching school, first in Rock Port, Missouri, and then in Salida, Colorado, had been more than ready to embark on married life. The Staffords settled in Tarkio and began having children almost immediately, first Mary Lee
in 1908, then Marjorie in 1909. John Stafford continued his agrarian existence, scribbling away and supervising the family lands from a distance, while his wife tended an immaculate house, cooked energetically, and kept in close touch with her relatives. A son, Dick, was born in 1911, and soon after that John Stafford left Tarkio with his family and headed for California, part of the more general migration westward at that time. The Staffords evidently had in mind a fresh start that nonetheless didn’t mean abandoning kin altogether. John’s mother and sister had already moved to Los Angeles, and an uncle and two aunts of Ethel’s (Malcolm McKillop’s siblings) lived in San Diego. With some of his inheritance, John Stafford bought ten acres of land in Covina, not far from Los Angeles, on which he planned to start a walnut farm.

At the Covina ranch he set about custom designing an agrarian idyll. He ordered a large house built, installed solar collectors on it, put prismed glass in the big front door, and planted a line of midget palm trees along the front of the land. There was a Japanese servant to help with the walnuts, the wash, and the housework, about which Ethel Stafford was fanatical. Inside, rough-hewn native trophies—Indian baskets and an old Indian tomahawk, Mexican serapes, a pair of sabers, John Stafford’s cowboy spurs and wide cartridge belt—were displayed next to shelves of Dante, Dickens, Shakespeare, Balzac, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, lots of children’s books, and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. While his wife dedicated herself to the domestic order, John Stafford continued to write, not only stories but also short diatribes on assorted political, social, and economic issues, which editors routinely rejected. He read his work aloud as he went along (to himself or to any listener he could corral), undistracted by the hens that sometimes flew in the window of his room. In that house, on July 1, 1915, Jean Wilson Stafford was born and lived for the next five years.

“
Our days on the ranch were idyllic,” is the way her sister Marjorie Stafford Pinkham remembered Covina in an account of their youth, the fullest record of those early years. Her memoir conjured up a portrait of childhood bliss, siblings at play in a natural paradise presided over by a dreamy but not impractical father and a nurturing mother. The older sisters doted on their pretty baby sister, lavishing attention on her and only occasionally teasing her. Dick was quickly fond of her, though he was famous in the family for having greeted Jean’s arrival into the world with “
She’s all right, I guess, but I wish she’d been a dog.” (As family
lore had it, all the children, unaware that their plump mother was pregnant, were told that a surprise awaited them; a dog was Dick’s hope, and Mary Lee and Marjorie had a long list of treats in mind.) The two younger children shared a room in the big house and became devoted companions.

Jean’s version was different. Though late in life she too described a scene of “pastoral serenity” in a draft of a speech she never gave, a hint of family disharmony and personal estrangement cast its shadow. The Staffords were in California because her father had “uprooted himself and my mother and my sisters and my brother,” and she, though the coddled baby, was also disappointed:

The slightly mocking tone of the portrait indicated Stafford’s retrospective sense of the inadequacy of the idyll. The small girl she described made do with mere paper clips and had no hope of pearls. In much darker memories, Stafford’s most remote past was haunted by a lurking fear that perhaps everyone in the family had been wanting something very different from a new baby.

Her real fall from innocence, she suggested in a short story she wrote as an older child, came after Covina. “
There is a drama in the life of every child, and tragedy that grownups can never know,” she wrote grandly in one of her youthful, autobiographical efforts at fiction. “He who has not felt the sharp edge of drama cutting clean through his body between the ages of three and eight has never had the right to call himself experienced.” For Stafford the decisive drama of loss began when she was five.
In 1920 John Stafford sold the walnut ranch. Convinced he could make a killing in the stock market, he moved his family to a house
in San Diego so that he could be near the exchange there. Within a year, he had lost all of his money. In 1921 the Staffords packed up and headed for Colorado in a heavily laden car. The trip was billed as adventure and a quest for a healthier climate, but it looked more like flight from the scene of catastrophe. And as Stafford remembered it later in an essay, the new physical setting struck her as anything but bracing: “
The Rocky Mountains were too big to take in, too high to understand, too domineering to love; the very spaciousness of the range and of the limitless prairies to the east turned me claustrophobic.”

After a brief pause in Pueblo and four years in Colorado Springs, the family moved to Boulder in 1925 so that Mary Lee—and then Marjorie and, in 1932, Jean—could afford to go to the University of Colorado there. (Dick went to Colorado A & M in Fort Collins.) Granted scholarships, they lived at home—in a full house. To help make ends meet during hard times made harder by the Depression (and by Grandmother Stafford’s growing disinclination to help out her son), Ethel Stafford at first thought of running a tearoom, then began taking in students as boarders. What her mother undertook in a spirit of mostly cheerful resourcefulness, well practiced over the years since they had left California, Jean Stafford suffered with deep embarrassment. Much of her mortification was social: renting out rooms to condescending sorority girls was hard for an acutely status-conscious adolescent to bear.

But what Stafford saw as the undermining of her home also roused a deeper sense of humiliation. She blamed her parents, though she was hardly consistent in her condemnations. She was full of resentment toward her unintellectual, supremely domestic mother, who seemed too reconciled to a lot that her daughter deemed beneath them. At the same time, she herself knew the allure of fastidious domesticity; years later she wrote of a character, drawn from her own experience, that “
in truth [she] would have liked to pause here in this female precinct where the winter sunlight discovered her [mother’s] impeccable housekeeping.” However philistine, Ethel Stafford’s carefully tended domain of order stood in striking contrast to John Stafford’s increasingly disheveled life and futile literary labors. He sold less and less of his work, and in Boulder he became more bitter and reclusive. As Stafford later described it, he was always holed up in the basement venting his spleen or spinning out some fantasy while the rest of the family coped:

Stafford started out as an admirer of her father. That didn’t preclude ambivalence, as it rarely does for complicated children, and certainly John Stafford was a complicated father. He was the artist in the family, and he was its betrayer. He was the high-minded scholar-in-residence (“
his mind was an orderly and vast storehouse of information on almost any subject,” Marjorie wrote in her memoir), and he was the increasingly moody, irascible character in the basement. He had been a man with a mission—an agrarian ideal of life—who had been reduced to a man haunted by visions of persecution. And yet he himself seemed unmoved by the disparities: he just kept on typing, as though at some point deliverance would come and he would be discovered. “
She was nearly always furious with him or afraid of him and nearly always admired him, but she did not associate these feelings with hate or love,” Stafford wrote later of her autobiographical persona in a draft of
In the Snowfall
, the novel about her life that she began in the mid-1940s. She never finished it, largely because she failed to establish imaginative or emotional distance from her material—which makes it a particularly revealing biographical source. The raw novel, though hardly a repository of reliable facts about her youth, is one record of her struggle for perspective on her family, especially her father. “It was not a question of loving or not loving him (what that meant precisely she didn’t know); he was a fact, or rather a set of contradictory facts as permanent a feature in her life as the trees in the backyard.”

It was, however, a question of imitating him: “It never occurs to her that she will not be a writer and only occasionally does it occur to her, depressingly, that she is going to grow into a woman, not a man.” According to Stafford’s usual version of the family alignments, there was a battle of the sexes, and of sensibilities, and she sided with the men. For the most part, her mother—whom she cast as the genial, prosaic housewife
in the novel—was a model of what Stafford strove to avoid, down-playing any inclinations in that direction (though she clearly had them: she zealously tended her bedroom, which shifted depending on the number of boarders in residence, re-creating a corner of cozy domesticity every time). She was the family’s “
problem feeder,” the alienated last child who resisted maternal nurturing and sisterly bonding. Instead, she struggled for the affections of her brother and the approval of her literary father.

But the struggle was far from straightforward, her allegiance far from steady. Later, in her moments of most Olympian bitterness, she claimed that she didn’t side at all. She watched them all from a withering distance. “
The Stafford-McKillop predilection for complaint, for perpetually blaming others for their misfortunes and even for the
accidents
that befall them,” she raged in a letter to Marjorie in the 1960s, “is one of the many reasons that for all practical purposes I left home when I was 7.” At the same time, she herself was known for complaining about exactly the opposite: she blamed them for their infuriating habit of hoping for the best, her father forever pounding away at his typewriter, her mother forever cleaning and looking at the bright side of things.

Marjorie’s own cheerier view of the Boulder years provides a useful contrast to Stafford’s agonized reflections. In her distinctly more nostalgic version, the household was not divided but gathered in solidarity around an admittedly strange but also engaging character. Her chatty memoir and subsequent reminiscences leave the impression that John Stafford’s high intellectual expectations and verbal energy set the tone in the family, and that his subsequent troubles were a source of pity more than outrage. It seems that relations with his much more conventional wife were, not surprisingly, strained at times. His high-minded refusal to assume any practical responsibility for their situation imposed an enormous burden on her. But her resentment at the patronizing treatment and the hardship seems to have been leavened by more than mere tolerance of her maverick husband’s expectations. She too, a practiced storyteller from a well-read family, was eager in her own genteel way not simply to feed but to cultivate her children.
When Grandmother Stafford impatiently urged that her grandchildren be sent to work after high school, her son refused, and Ethel Stafford gamely managed: her boardinghouse made possible their college educations.

Marjorie’s account suggests that her youngest sister’s plight was perhaps
not as distinctive as Jean liked to imply, which makes the quality and intensity of her response to it all the more notable. As Marjorie portrayed the family, all three daughters, not just the last, were under their father’s sway—especially Mary Lee, who was his first disciple in the family, an avid reader and budding writer as a child and later an excellent college student. Marjorie’s foray into print stands as her own proof of the family’s literary self-conception (though she had started out wanting to be an artist); in her prose, with its slightly mannered blend of provincial conventionality and idiosyncratic quaintness, McKillop and Stafford styles seem to mix.
As for Dick, his response to the paternal presence emerges as a quietly graceful escape: he pursued the time-honored Stafford path, away from words and into the wilderness. But unlike his more aggressive forebears, he cultivated a naturalist’s detachment, leaving the family house on the Boulder hillside whenever he could to hike and explore in the surrounding mountains. To his father’s disappointment, Dick wouldn’t take a gun.