The Interior Castle (36 page)
Read The Interior Castle Online
Authors: Ann Hulbert
Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell in Damariscotta Mills, Maine, 1946
. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Jean Stafford and her sister Mary Lee Frichtel in Westport, Connecticut, 1950
. Photograph by Oliver Jensen. Courtesy Oliver Jensen.
Jean Stafford in front of the mountain lion cage at the zoo
. Courtesy Robert Giroux.
Jean Stafford at the beach in Jamaica during her honeymoon with Oliver Jensen, 1950
. Photograph by Oliver Jensen. Courtesy Oliver Jensen.
Oliver Jensen and Jean Stafford
. Photograph by Kay Bell. Courtesy University of Colorado, Boulder.
Jean Stafford in Westport, Connecticut, early 1950s
. Photograph by Oliver Jensen. Courtesy Oliver Jensen.
Jean Stafford with her cat Elephi, early 1960s
. Photograph by Janet Malcolm. Courtesy Janet Malcolm.
Jean Stafford doing needlepoint, 1956
. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. Courtesy
Life
magazine, © Time Warner Inc.
Jean Stafford and A. J. Liebling sitting out behind their house in East Hampton, 1961
. Photograph by Therese Mitchell. Courtesy Joseph Mitchell.
Jean Stafford, 1975
. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd. Courtesy
Newsweek
magazine.
For ages (and indeed until now) I have not known what you meant by saying that my success was bad for me. I am not sure that you know exactly how it was, but I see it in this way: that suddenly, having got money and comfort, I remembered with all the bitterness and hatred of my childhood my early poverty which had been needless; I remembered all the humiliation, the half-hunger, the shabby, embarrassing clothes, the continual oppression, my mother’s tears and my father’s dreadful laugh. And when you cautioned me to be prudent in my spending, I whipped around as if you had insulted me; I thought that you were trying to deprive me of all pleasure just as my father had done when I was a child and out of defiance of my father, I spent the money wildly and I began to drink more and more, still paying
him
back.
The absent father haunted, and inspired, both her book and her house frenzy. She was writing the story of children in search of a father figure, of a force to mediate between effete Bonney values—the McKillop side of Jean’s family—and harsh Kenyon standards, the Stafford side. Molly’s idiosyncratic choice of a misanthropic, literary course was in fact the childish version of the course embraced by John Stafford. The role model Molly didn’t have was the model that Jean herself did have, and far from clarifying her life, he profoundly confused it. Admiration for her father’s uncompromising, cantankerous path continued to be mixed for Stafford with ever greater doses of bitterness, and even hatred. He had perversely chosen to abandon the responsibilities of maturity, leaving his family to suffer the consequences. Molly’s fate was in a sense a comment on his failures: the young writer died on the brink of maturity, prevented from repeating them.
But Jean Stafford’s own fate was quite different. She had grown up and written a best-selling book, and she found herself, as her letter to Lowell acknowledged, reacting quite differently to her father’s failures. She threw herself into establishing a home, precisely what John Stafford had never been able to do once he had embarked on his writing career, consigning his family instead to a succession of boardinghouses. It was her McKillop moment, her gesture of solidarity with the feminine world
of stability and domesticity. And it was her replacement of the Covina idyll that her father had squandered. Jean’s Utopian dreams for Damariscotta Mills echoed her father’s response to his first windfall, inherited in his case rather than earned. Her drama of triumphant defiance was spurred by Lowell’s ascetic reaction, which was the perfect stand-in for the paternal stringency she was rebelling against. Yet guilt undercut the triumph. Her success couldn’t help being a devastating comment on her father’s failure, and lurking in her utopian dreams was an urge to have it all fall apart, as it had for him—at least this was how she saw it a year later, as she wrote to the Thompsons in the spring of 1947: “
I felt perpetually accused and guilt-ridden and it was partly the guilt itself that made me spend all the money and so madly, to get as quickly as possible back to the familiar state of poverty, of literally not knowing where the rent was coming from. I was accused both by Cal and by my family, particularly by my father who wrote me (and writes me now) that he was glad of my success because he himself had been such an awful failure.”
S
TAFFORD FINISHED
The Mountain Lion
in the spring of 1946, as the house too was being completed. She wrote to the Taylors early in April, full of the familiar plans for a communal literary idyll, this time on her own territory: “
Come as soon as you can and plan to live with us for at least five years,” she wrote, her confidence perhaps masking a sense of desperation. She then went on to address the practical details, obviously aware of the precariousness of the proposal:
