The Interior Castle (31 page)

B
ACK FROM
O
REGON
, Stafford settled into a comparatively uneventful winter and spring in Westport with Lowell in the spacious house they had moved to after Black Rock. Once again, they were not alone, perhaps
a sign that they were ready for some distraction from each other. Not that the guests were easy to manage: Albert Erskine (who had been business manager of the
Southern Review
when Stafford worked there and was now an editor at Reynal & Hitchcock) and his wife moved in with them, and there was a steady stream of visitors. Stafford admitted that the company was often a trial: “
I have bad nerves and entertaining large numbers of people does me in,” she wrote an old friend. “Inevitably I drink too much.” In the spring Stafford took a job teaching creative writing at Queens College, another academic stint that proved to be a big mistake. She was no more comfortable in front of a class than she had ever been, and the commute between Westport and Flushing, which must have taken at least two hours, was a nightmare.

Meanwhile, Lowell’s creative stretch continued, and his next book,
Lord Weary’s Castle
, steadily took shape as he revised old poems and wrote new ones. Stafford’s writing was not proceeding so smoothly. In December 1944, she told Peter Taylor that she hoped her old energy was back; she was feeling inspired by, among other things, F. O. Matthiessen’s new book
Henry James: The Major Phase
. “
The book on James together with native conscience have roused me from my stupor and I am eager to get to work again. I did finish a story which was not altogether satisfactory but was something so entirely different from anything I’ve ever done before that I did feel a certain sense of achievement.” It was not an assessment brimming with confidence, and she went on to confess a more pervasive sense of inadequacy, surprising in the wake of
Boston Adventure
. “I am still so inchoate in my perceptions, something that you, I believe, have never been,” she wrote to Taylor, perhaps thinking of the endless revisions of her novel and the unfocused manuscripts before that. “I think you, like James, see your story entire in the initial symbol. I see nothing but the symbol.” To Hightower in March, she also mentioned a story that was “
something completely new for me” and reported that her new novel was going badly. “
My new novel is progressing at a snail’s pace,” she wrote to another old friend, “and I’m not yet certain I want to write it at all; I’m sick of the way I write.” She planned to put it aside and turn to three short stories.

Stafford’s stories after she finished
Boston Adventure
were more ambitious than her earlier short fiction. She was not as barren as she feared. In the two stories that appeared in 1945, “The Home Front” in
Partisan Review
in the spring and “Between the Porch and the Altar” in
Harper’s
Bazaar
in June, Stafford tackled more serious subjects: the war and religion. She was evidently pursuing themes suggested by the new, recalcitrant novel about Sonie that she had started, and she was turning away from her past to address preoccupations in her life with Lowell. In fact, the two of them seemed to be drawing on at least superficially similar sources of inspiration. In two poems Lowell was working on at roughly the same time, he chose (for one) the same setting and (for the other) the same title. His “Colloquy in Black Rock” is set, like “The Home Front,” in Black Rock by the stinking harbor and similarly involves immigrant Hungarian Catholics who work in the local defense plant during the war. And Lowell’s dramatic monologue, “
Between the Porch and the Altar,” takes its title, as Stafford’s story does, from a phrase in the Book of Joel, the Ash Wednesday chapter.

Without suggesting anything like an intimate parallel, it’s possible to point to general links between Stafford’s story of a young girl on her way to the first Ash Wednesday Mass at five o’clock on a cold February morning in New York and Lowell’s four-part poem that dwells on mother domination and adultery. Both convey the confessions and confusions of youthful believers, struggling to reconcile the flesh and the spirit, the disorder of life and the order of religion. Stafford had shown Tate a draft of the story in the summer of 1944. It wasn’t a formal submission to the
Sewanee Review
, where he was then editor, but perhaps she hoped that he would accept it. If so, she was disappointed. Tate’s response was typically to the point; “
BETWEEN THE PORCH AND THE ALTAR
is beautifully written, but I don’t think it is successful.” His complaint was that it was too elliptical, that the reader never learned enough about the girl to “place” the sudden conversion of feeling she experienced at the end. Her abrupt clarity of soul might work in a lyric poem, he told Stafford, but not in a story. “I wish you would write a full-length story and let me have it,” he wrote somewhat impatiently. “I am determined to publish you only at your best.” Stafford evidently worked further on the story; at least she smoothed the transition to the concluding revelation.

The story was strikingly well written, a happy balance of exact description of the external world and an unexpectedly concrete evocation of her protagonist’s thoughts and feelings. Throughout the story Stafford effectively counterposed ritual and real life, both of which pulled at her protagonist, whose loneliness was made palpable. Heading for church
with careful plans for distributing her alms (some for the poor box, some for candles in memory of her dead mother and two friends interned in China by the Japanese), the girl was distracted by other, grubbier demands on her money (a poor beggar, an old crone). She was disoriented: “
She was not assured in her heart and she prayed with a dry compulsion.” The story teetered toward skepticism, for structured piety seemed wan and irrelevant compared with clamoring life. Yet at the same time Stafford’s “natural aestheticism,” as Taylor had called it, prevented anything so simple as an endorsement of “the coarseness … the grossness” of daily existence. The girl gave her dime to the crone, rather than spending it for a candle as she had planned, but she was repelled. When her trials of charity were over, she wiped away the official ashes, “
leaving herself alone possessed of the knowledge of her penance”—a penance that brought ambivalence, not complacency. Catholicism was not a matter of easy motions for either Stafford or Lowell.

Patriotism was an equally fraught subject during those years. It lurked behind Lowell’s “Colloquy at Black Rock” and was at the center of Stafford’s “The Home Front.” The surfaces could hardly have seemed less alike. Still, some underlying affinities were clear. Lowell’s poem, originally titled “Pentecost,” was an impassioned religious meditation on the incarnation that, as
one critic observed, looked forward to apocalypse not redemption. In his version of the Pentecostal ritual of the bird falling from the church roof, Christ descended to destroy the body, not redeem it (“
my heart, / The blue kingfisher dives on you in fire”). At the same time, the poem, with its evocation of the poet’s great agitation as he watched the war efforts of the Hungarian immigrants (“My heart, you race and stagger.… / Till I … / Am rattled screw and footloose”), was an anxious meditation on human guilt and destruction and on martyrs; there was perhaps a trace of Lowell’s uneasy reflections on his decision to stand by while others fought.

Stafford’s “The Home Front”—the story she had described as “something completely new” for her—featured an unfamiliar protagonist: a late-middle-aged German-Jewish doctor exiled in Connecticut during the war, who Ian Hamilton, Lowell’s biographer, has suggested was “
quite clearly Lowell.” That is too reductive an autobiographical reading, but the story’s theme was close to home. “The Home Front” was about unpopular permutations of patriotism, about the unredeemable destructiveness
of human nature. The whole point of the story was to complicate “sides.” The Hungarians who ran the doctor’s boardinghouse were loyal contributors to the war effort, yet they were anti-Semites. The doctor was a Jew watching the war from the sidelines, but he was also a German full of nostalgia for the old, civilized Germany and full of crude loathing for the dirty Hungarians. The war between the doctor and his landlady was played out through their pets, a cat and birds respectively, none of whom made out well.

The story was unnerving, for it was unclear where—if anywhere—Stafford’s own loyalties lay. Though her imagination obviously kindled to memories of Germany, the result was that cold lack of compassion in her writing that she had worried about to Peter Taylor the year before—and that editors had complained about long ago with
Autumn Festival
. But
Partisan Review
was impressed by it, naming the story the “
second prize-winning novelette in the
Partisan Review
–Dial Press Contest.” Randall Jarrell’s reaction, in a letter in August of 1945, spoke to the sinister ambiguity of the story. A great cat lover—and a war poet—he was immediately drawn in:

That same summer Allen Tate registered a characteristically uncompromising assessment, though he leavened his reaction with praise for the other story Stafford wrote during 1945, “The Present” (which appeared in her
Collected Stories
under the title “The Captain’s Gift”). “
Since I like this story [“The Present”] so much,” he wrote to her, accepting it for publication (it didn’t appear in the
Sewanee Review
until the spring of 1946), “perhaps you won’t mind my saying that your story in the next to last
Partisan
is very bad indeed, and I can’t understand why either you or Philip would want to see it in print.”

“The Present” was also about the barbarity of war, but here Stafford had mastered an extraordinarily polished irony. Recounted in the present tense (one of only two such stories in her
Collected Stories
volume), the
story was a mixture of familiar themes presented in the compacted Jamesian style that came to characterize much of her fiction. The protagonist, Mrs. Chester Ramsey, was another in an expanding gallery of elderly characters whose salient quality was their resistance to change. Miss Pride-like, she immured herself in her brownstone in New York, unaware of the world and above all of the war: “
The ivory tower in which she lives is impregnable to the ill-smelling, rude-sounding, squalid-looking world which through the years has moved in closer and closer and now surrounds her on all sides.” Stafford’s irony was effective because Mrs. Ramsey’s delusion was not simply folly by any means. It was presented as a dignified aesthetic reaction to a sordid reality. Just as the appeal of Boston snobbery was clear in
Boston Adventure
, the allure of the widow’s self-protective cocoon was obvious.

Yet its inadequacy was also obvious, and the suspense of Mrs. Ramsey’s inevitable disillusionment propelled the plot. Her ultimate shock was, as Caroline Gordon judged in a letter to Stafford about the story, vivid in precisely the right way: Mrs. Ramsey’s favorite grandson, a young captain off fighting in Europe who thus far had faithfully and cheerfully kept in touch with her, sparing her the facts of combat, one day sent her a fateful package. When the old woman eagerly opened it, out fell a thick, blond braid. “
You have concentrated on that golden braid,” Gordon commended Stafford. “It’s very real and its reality invokes overtones, makes the story go on sounding in the head, conveys, I feel, all the implications you want conveyed.” It was a symbol, yet it was also a particular object, “
cut off cleanly at the nape of the neck,” as Stafford described it. “It is the sensuous aspect of the braid that does it,” Gordon told her, and went on to set that praise in the context of a more sweeping criticism:

It was a telling criticism in general, comparable to Tate’s emphatic teaching to Lowell that poetry was “
ideas
tested by experience, by
direct apprehension
.”
Lowell too was seduced by rhetoric, but at the same time he inclined—perhaps more than his mentor—to the fiercely concrete over the abstract. And in the poems he was working on in 1945, the emphasis was increasingly on experience, as he winnowed out the more intellectual poems in
Land of Unlikeness
, revised the ones that Tate had judged “
richer in immediate experience,” and wrote new poetry more firmly grounded in fact. Stafford’s progress too had been steadily away from the “words, merely” difficulty of her early unpublished efforts. In her stories of 1944 and 1945, which introduced her major protagonists—disoriented old women, lonely young women, sensitive but stalwart children, uneasy expatriates—she was taming some of the Proustian ornamentation that had cluttered parts of
Boston Adventure
. She was perfecting her gift for the well-selected detail with symbolic resonance, and she was working at mixing more colloquial cadences into her Jamesian style.