The Interior Castle (35 page)

Stafford’s return to the Covina and Colorado of her childhood was another exploration, as
Boston Adventure
and before that
Autumn Festival
had been, of her sense of homelessness—written, very quickly, in the midst of arduous homesteading. Later in life, far smaller bouts of energetic housekeeping served as lengthy distractions from her work, but the whirlwind of restructuring and redecorating at Damariscotta Mills seemed to carry over into her creative life, not to detract from it. That’s not to say that the writing was easy—or, for that mater, that the renovations went smoothly.
The Mountain Lion
was the product of considerable tumult, but it seems that the exploration of her past and the construction of her present and future in Maine were linked in an important way for her.

In a letter to Lowell from the hospital a year later, the same letter in which she poured out her feelings about Molly, Stafford ruminated far more explicitly, and darkly, on the connection between her writing and her house—and her marriage and her father:

Dick Stafford and his sister Jean riding a bicycle
. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.

John Stafford
.
Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.

Sketch of John Stafford, presumably a self-portrait, on the fly-leaf of his thesaurus
.
Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.

Ethel Stafford with her son, Dick, in Covina, California
. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.

Andrew Cooke and Lucy McKee in the Colorado Rockies, 1931
. Courtesy Andrew Cooke.

Jean Stafford at sixteen
. Courtesy Robert Giroux.

Jean Stafford at the University of Colorado
. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.

Jean Stafford’s first passport photograph, 1936
. Courtesy Robert Giroux.

Jean Stafford and James Robert Hightower in Europe, 1936 or 1937
. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.

Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Robert Giroux in front of the Lowell’s house in Damariscotta Mills, Maine, 1946
.
Photograph by Charles Phillips Reilly. Courtesy Robert Giroux.

Jean Stafford and Peter Taylor in Sewanee, Tennessee, 1942
. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.