The Interior Castle (43 page)

Though she hastened to say that she didn’t mean that fiction should be circumscribed and tame, Stafford emerged as a champion of civility—and of charm. “
Naturally I go on the assumption that I am in the society of people who want to be charming and who want to be good,” she said, sounding her gentlewoman’s note. Just as she had counseled against personal exhibitionism, so toward the end of her lecture she warned against zealous social engagement. The disorder both of psyches and of the times called for formalist discipline, not full expression:

As Stafford recognized, her message to writers implied a message to readers as well: that a writer’s work not be taken as autobiography. Defending one of her models, Henry James, against the critic Clifton Fadiman’s reductive reading of “The Jolly Corner,” she lamented that his interpretation “
lowers the story from its great stature as an imagined and constructed work of literature to … a public exhibition of James’s private life. I do not say that Fadiman is altogether wrong but that he is not precise.”

It was a far from systematic aesthetic, but Stafford’s lecture foreshadowed a shift in her literary associations, an artistic parting of the ways with Lowell. She was distancing herself from the milieu and some of the artistic ambitions they had shared during their marriage, and so was he, though moving in a very different direction. The outlines of the shift look stark. Toward the end of 1947, Stafford began her decade-long close association with
The New Yorker
, a world away in sensibility from the
Partisan Review
and the quarterlies. During the 1950s she wrote one more novel,
The Catherine Wheel
, a circumscribed exploration of mental and emotional isolation, but her specialty became meticulously crafted short stories, renowned for their stylistic and structural polish, for their mercilessly ironic, detached treatment of states of alienation. She was moving further and further from
Boston Adventure
, her sprawling debut. By the last third of the 1950s, she had encountered a block and all but stopped publishing fiction.

Meanwhile, Lowell was turning away from the formalist vision of Tate and toward the more flexible notions of style and content he found in a new mentor, William Carlos Williams. Lowell struggled with a block through the 1950s after the publication in 1951 of
The Mills of the Kavanaughs
, in which it was clear that his early, fiercely formal style and religious themes were no longer the source of inspiration they had once been. By 1957, when he suddenly began feverish work on
Life Studies
, he had discovered a radically different style and subject matter, breaking away from the prosodic restraints that had guided his early poetry and turning to undisguised autobiographical themes. “
At forty I’ve written my first unmeasured verse,” he wrote to Williams of the breakthrough. “I’ve only tried it in a few of these poems, those that are the most personal. It’s great to have no hurdle of rhyme and scansion between yourself and what you want to say most forcibly.”

It is easy to make the divergence sound too schematically symmetrical, as if to suggest that before their separation, Stafford and Lowell were in some sort of literary tandem, and that they faced comparable creative challenges in their development as writers after that. That couldn’t of course be said of any two writers, let alone a poet and a writer of fiction. And it would mistakenly imply a marked swerve in Stafford’s literary allegiances and intentions that year after she emerged from the hospital. She clearly was aiming to reorient her writing life, but her sense that she hadn’t been in her element, that she needed a change of scene, was hardly
new. Beneath the witty, poised writer who had so impressed young Lowell, there had always been the girl from Colorado who felt she wasn’t suited to compete in the ruthless literary circles of the New Critics and the New York intellectuals. What was new was Stafford’s attitude toward her own discomfiture. The old insecure defensiveness had subsided somewhat. She was readier to take the ironic offensive and expose what seemed to her the heartless egotism and maliciousness too often associated with the intellectual intensity of her friends. The claims of genius, Stafford suggested, should leave room for gentility, or at least civility. She was prepared to assert the simpler values and more modest tone of the clear-eyed rube.

It was at
The New Yorker
that Stafford found a new circle where the ambience and expectations were more congenial.
In December she sold a story to the magazine and signed a first reader agreement, giving the editors right of first refusal of pieces for a year and Stafford 25 percent above their usual rates. When she began writing for it, the magazine had emerged from World War II a considerably more serious publication than it had been when Harold Ross founded it in 1925, though there were plenty—including a fair sampling of Stafford’s friends—who criticized its abiding frivolity. In
The Years with Ross
, James Thurber described the sensibility Ross brought to the place, a spirit that lingered on long after him. Although Ross “
secretly enjoyed being thought of as raconteur and man about town, [he] was scared to death of being mistaken for a connoisseur, or an aesthete, or a scholar, and his heavy ingenuous Colorado hand was often laid violently upon anything that struck him as ‘intellectual.’ ” His favorite genre was the “casual,” and as Thurber explained, “
the word ‘casual’ indicated Ross’s determination to give the magazine an offhand, chatty, informal quality. Nothing was to be labored or studied, arty, literary, or intellectual.”

Yet Ross also understood that for the magazine to be suitably urbane (it was, its prospectus had declared, “
not edited for the old lady in Dubuque”), it required a defter touch than his own. He found the more cultivated collaborators he needed in Katharine White and later William Shawn, who nudged the magazine beyond humor to more serious, and lengthy, reporting and fiction. (Under Ross, Shawn recalled, “
for many years the word ‘literary,’ applied to some piece of writing—including fiction—was a house pejorative.”) Still, Ross and his original conception of the magazine were far from overshadowed. The tone of ingenuous
urbanity, of the quaintly innocent provincial in the big city, continued to exert real influence. Shawn acknowledged the anti-intellectual ambience in his obituary for Ross, characterizing the founder’s shaping hand and describing a substance and style still recognizable in the magazine today: “Because Ross was suspicious of ‘thinking,’ the magazine that he founded and edited did not publish either essays or what are called articles of opinion. It was, fundamentally, a magazine of reporting, humor, fiction, and criticism.… Ross was an editor who doted on immaculate writing and on stylish writing, which is to say writing that had style.”

Shawn and Thurber obviously admired and helped perpetuate the urbane qualities they described as Ross’s legacy, and it is not hard to imagine the rapport that seems to have sprung up between Stafford and Ross, who still had five years of editorship ahead of him when she began writing for the magazine. Displaced Coloradans, they both relished the incongruous identity of colloquial hick and obsessive stylist, rube and sophisticated raconteur, and Ross appreciated her wit. But Stafford’s most important relationship at the magazine was with Katharine White, whose Bostonian gentility exerted a very different appeal. In her, Stafford found a devoted editor and a mother of sorts; and in Stafford, White found “
one of her best friends among the contributors”—and “
a remarkable reviser. Stories would come in with very hopeful material that hadn’t quite jelled; and … over and over again I [would] ask her to rewrite a story, and over again she [did] so successfully.”

The association was more than merely professional, as it was for most
New Yorker
writers. It was familial in a peculiar way that suited Stafford well.
New Yorker
writers were treated as though they were shy recluses in need of cosseting—that is, as though they were close relatives of the quintessential
New Yorker
character (“
a vague, little man helplessly confused by a menacing and complicated civilization,” was the way Wolcott Gibbs, an editor, described the typical, Thurber-inspired protagonist in the magazine’s stories). It was very different from the cutthroat literary company Stafford was used to. Ross considered writers an exotic breed, usually crazy and certainly oversensitive, who had to be indulged. Katharine White, herself one of the breed, specialized in commiserating. She and her husband were well acquainted with suffering, real and imagined: their psychosomatic travails were legendary, but they also always had time to hear about others’ troubles. She and Stafford sometimes conferred as intently about ailments as they did about fiction. It was a
friendship that seems to have offered Stafford just what she needed after her experience with Lowell and the tragic rebel school: the solicitude and approval of a well-bred Bostonian with taste.

But as Stafford was well aware, her new affiliation was greeted with skepticism among some of her friends. It wasn’t a great surprise when the old intimations of philistinism and middlebrowism that had been in the air after the success of
Boston Adventure
surfaced again.
The New Yorker
came in for a good dose of condescension and criticism from the
Partisan Review
and the literary quarterly writers. To be sure, as an influential and comparatively lucrative outlet for writing, it was not entirely dismissed: plenty of writers crossed the line by the 1940s. But even they were often ready with scorn. Edmund Wilson, who was reviewing books regularly for the magazine, delivered an unvarnished assessment of its shortcomings at just about the time Stafford was signing on. In a letter to Katharine White in November of 1947, he was merciless in his judgment of her fiction department, dismissing “
the pointless and inane little anecdotes that are turned out by
The New Yorker
’s processing mill and that the reader forgets two minutes after he has read them.”

Delmore Schwartz gave a similar critique in an essay called “Smile and Grin, Relax and Collapse,” which came out three years later in
Partisan Review
. “
It’s easy to make fun of
The New Yorker
,” he began, “especially since
The New Yorker
has taught us how to make fun of anything and everything.” But he intended more serious scrutiny: the magazine’s effect on literature, he announced, was “
powerful and pernicious.” He echoed Wilson on style, lamenting that “
in
The New Yorker
you are supposed to be chatty, relaxed, not very serious, and certainly never (God forbid!) intellectual”; the point is to “seem elegant, charming, sophisticated, full of good manners and good taste.” His indictment of the content of the magazine’s fiction specified what he saw as the source of the “anecdotal” wanness of the genre: “
The chief recent tendency … has been to break down the short story as such into some form of memoir, reminiscence, or anecdote, especially about childhood or about ones dear, foolish, pathetic, and comical elders,” he observed, arguing that the impulse affected even the best writers: “When good writers write for
The New Yorker
, they adopt attitudes and mannerisms which are absent from their serious writing elsewhere.… Most of these writers are striving in one guise or another—or none at all—to write their memoirs, although
they are writers who in their writings elsewhere manage to distinguish very well between fiction and personal history.” He was ready to acknowledge that autobiography couldn’t be banished altogether: “
It is probably needless to say that personal experience, memory, and conversation, are often the beginning of fiction. But in
The New Yorker
it is swiftly becoming the end of fiction, in more ways than one.”

Schwartz cited Stafford as one of the writers so afflicted (he also cited Peter Taylor, Vladimir Nabokov, and Carson McCullers, among others), and he may well have had in mind her debut in the magazine, “Children Are Bored on Sunday” (actually the second story she submitted), which appeared in February 1948. The story seems to have had as its inspiration an episode in Stafford’s personal history that involved him, and rough autobiographical contours are easy enough to discern. But Stafford’s accomplishment was precisely to avoid confining her account to chatty memoir. It is true that its ingredients are among the most transparently autobiographical Stafford ever used. She wrote about literary people, which she did nowhere else in any detail except in “An Influx of Poets,” and she alluded to her breakdown. Her theme was close to home. In her protagonist Emma, she described a young woman’s wary reemergence into New York life after an unspecified trauma, convinced that a “rube” like her was always going to feel “in alien corn” among her former intellectual set.

Yet it was far from a therapeutic confession of insecurity, sensitive though the subject must have been for Stafford that fall. Instead she managed to make it the occasion for, among other things, a detached portrait of her place in a larger literary and social setting. Stafford welded anecdotal fragments into an ironically accurate sociology of the New York literary milieu that both Schwartz and she knew well. What Stafford demonstrated in her story was the peculiar power of her outsider status to liberate her even as it isolated her. Neither an authentic intellectual nor really a rube, she could pass for either but wasn’t herself fooled by her poses (in her fiction, at least, she wasn’t fooled) and so could capture the view from both sides. The tension between the rustic and the sophisticate, the colloquial and the refined, had been a theme of her fiction since
Boston Adventure
and continued to be. In “Children Are Bored on Sunday” she addressed it in more explicitly literary terms than she had before, at a time when her own literary direction and style were
newly in question. Distinctly not a
New Yorker
staple, Stafford’s story examined the intellectual insecurities that urbanity was designed to deny.