The Interior Castle (45 page)

The divorce was mostly her burden to bear, and she did so gamely. Having decided with Lowell that six weeks for her in the Virgin Islands was the least disagreeable course, she did her best to write him jaunty letters and to entertain her other friends with corrosively humorous descriptions of the exotic scenery and the thoroughly unappealing company—the divorcées-to-be, the Rotarians, the unwholesome sybarites. And then through connections of Robert Giroux’s, she met some completely congenial company, Nancy Flagg Gibney, who wrote for
Vogue
, and her husband, Robert. “
For the three of us it was love and jokes at first sight,” was the way Nancy Gibney remembered it. Stafford spent a happy weekend with them on St. John, the start of a lifelong friendship with Nancy. But beneath the surface cheer and wit, as she confessed to Dr. Sherfey, with whom she was in constant correspondence, Stafford was miserable. She had a fever, and she was drinking too much, which prompted some stern instructions from her doctor: “
Pull yourself together and take it easy and say no to everybody. Live your life not theirs. Nothing is more important. I expect you to do it. Keep writing.”

On her return, though she felt at “loose ends,” she kept up the bustle
of activity and the tone of jauntiness. She ran into Lowell and declared in a letter to Peter Taylor that the encounter had been therapeutic: “
He is an altogether magnificent creature and I am so glad that I never have to see him again that I could dance.” She was dating a man named Chris Merillat, an editor at
Time
whom she had met in the spring and whose picture she had taken with her to the Virgin Islands, though she seemed to know this wasn’t really the match she had in mind. Her social life was active as she mixed with a new crowd at
Time
and saw her old friends, less insistent now on steering clear of her former company.

And her name was frequently in print. Her profile of Newport, originally written on assignment for
Life
, was accepted by
The New Yorker
and appeared in August. Two stories were published in the fall, “The Bleeding Heart” in
Partisan Review
and “A Summer Day” in
The New Yorker
. Both were tales of dislocation in which Stafford chose protagonists far removed from herself—a Mexican girl from the West transplanted to Concord, Massachusetts, and an eight-year-old Cherokee Indian sent from Missouri to Oklahoma—whose travails nonetheless struck close to home. They were stories of orphanhood, which was clearly on Stafford’s mind, and the conclusions were bleak. Rose Fabrizio, who dreamed of being adopted by an elderly New England man, was profoundly disillusioned when she glimpsed his sordid life. Poor Jim Littlefield’s arrival at a grim orphanage, full of sick children, was even more terrifying: dreaming of escape, he succumbed to a deathlike sleep in the heat.

Stafford herself was discouraged and disoriented, despite her efforts to forge ahead in her new life on her own. She wrote to her friend Bill Mock about a sense of frightening stasis. She was “
stifled by the terrible rush of time,” and by the feeling that she was getting older “without ever maturing.” The past was very much on her mind, not least because she was wrestling with
In the Snowfall
. As she wrote to Joe Chay, who chided her about her reluctance to return to the West and her past, “
Alas, alas, I live within it and if I
could
run away it could be ever so much better for me.” She moved to a new apartment, at 32 East Sixty-eighth Street, hoping that quieter surroundings might help spur her stalled work along, but soon she decided that she really needed more distance from New York, a city of rootless souls among whom she saw herself fitting all too well. She began planning a trip to Europe, and
The New Yorker
was happy to commission some articles to make it possible.

But such a large step away from familiar surroundings suddenly seemed more than she could handle when her former life came back to haunt her. By the spring of 1949, the dark side of Lowell’s “fabulous life” became starkly, clinically clear in a way that it had not been before,
at least not to his friends, some of whom have wondered in retrospect at how long it took them to see Lowell’s enthusiasms as a sign of real imbalance rather than mere zeal. After several months of increasingly strange behavior, Lowell suffered the first of his recurrent violent, manic attacks and was committed to the hospital. He was taken first to Baldpate in Massachusetts, then to Payne Whitney when he moved to New York with his new wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he had gotten to know shortly before at Yaddo and had married on emerging from Baldpate.

Stafford was greatly shaken by the news of his troubles, though she was the rare intimate of Lowell’s who had long suspected that “Cal is crazy,” as she had told Eileen Simpson, remembering the fall in New York when he was in prison. But it was a suspicion that she had barely allowed to become conscious. That diagnosis had probably been meant to sound like her typical hyperbole. The truth was that she rarely knew for sure where the imbalances in their marriage began and ended, and she tended to play down the violence she knew firsthand. (Lowell’s friend Frank Parker remembered her as remarkably cool as she recounted the “incident” in Maine.) With her own fears of going mad, and her final collapse, it was she who had assumed the role of radically unstable partner. Now suddenly there was external evidence that she was not alone, which doubtless prompted memories of precisely the high-pitched life she had vowed to escape. The saga of Lowell’s breakdown, which Stafford apparently retold avidly, echoed some of the more manic moments in their life together. In the wound-up weeks that preceded Lowell’s entry into the hospital, he abruptly became a zealous Catholic again, insisting that his marriage to Stafford was still valid.
At a later stage, he confronted his father figure, Allen Tate, in a scene reminiscent of Stafford’s battle with Caroline Gordon in Maine: he announced Tate’s infidelities and bullied him, and Tate ended up calling the police.

At the same time, Stafford was deeply relieved by Lowell’s collapse, strange though she knew that might sound, and she was even more intent on preserving her own precarious calm. She tried to explain the weight that was lifted from her with the revelation that the trials in their
marriage had not been the work merely of her perverse will and mind. “
Cal is in a sanitarium now, very ill, and while I grieve for him, I feel a kind of liberation at last in knowing we were both such emotional wrecks when we married we didn’t have a prayer,” she wrote to Paul and Dorothy Thompson in April. “
It is an awful irony that perhaps out of this tragedy will come my happiness,” she observed in a letter to her sister Mary Lee, and revealed how much she counted on her doctor for support: “I am going to stay here where Dr. Sherfey is and finally somehow liberate myself from my guilt over that poor boy.”

The graphic evidence that she was not alone in her “sickness of the spirit” helped ease her fears that the “ineradicable, black mark” of the asylum inmate meant ostracism. The mark even sometimes beckoned as a sign of election. The mad artist theme was a familiar one, championed by Schwartz, taken up by Berryman and later by Lowell, who became the main mythologizer of the collective angst that distinguished their tragic generation,
Les Maudits
, as Lowell later labeled his poetic colleagues in “For John Berryman.” Stafford was briefly tempted by the self-dramatizing identity herself, spurred by Berryman’s anointment of her as a tormented soul in his poem “A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away,” a meditation on the artist’s ravaged lot prompted by her Payne Whitney stay. When Berryman sent her his new book,
The Dispossessed
, in 1948 she had singled out that poem for praise: “
Is it wrong (Randall, at any rate, would say it was uncritical) of me especially to like, among my especial favorites, my own which makes my heart bleed for us all?” She was echoing Berryman’s prediction about his creative friends elsewhere in
The Dispossessed:
“
analysands all, and the rest ought to be.” It was a prediction that Lowell confirmed many years later, in a letter to Theodore Roethke in 1963: “
There’s a strange fact about the poets of roughly our age.… It’s this, that to write we seem to have to go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning.” If the romanticizing tone was in any doubt, Lowell settled it by musing: “There must be a kind of glory to it that people coming later will wonder at. I can see us all being written up in some huge book of the age.”

But for the most part Stafford’s tone was quite different. She was determined to resist that romanticism as she set out on her life apart from the poets. Although she admitted a bleak comfort, and even a certain mystique, in knowing that she was not alone in her psychic fragility—especially in knowing that Lowell’s intensity and violence transcended
his involvement with her—she was disinclined to ennoble neurosis. As her Bard lecture had suggested, she shied away from elevating her ordeals as a sign of the artistic spirit, as the key to her gift. Noting the surge of unhappiness on all sides, she was caustic in a letter to the down-to-earth Thompsons. “
It is not news to me that everyone is cracking up. I’m glad, since it was on the books for me to do so, that I cracked up this year instead of ten years from now,” she had written to them from the hospital. “All my friends in the outside world are, most of them, entirely miserable and are all drinking themselves out of their minds and everyone is getting divorced and no one is getting any work done and they are all consumed with this universal rage that has swept the country.”

D
ESPITE THE TURMOIL
, by the summer Stafford was ready to leave the country, thanks to help from Dr. Sherfey and encouragement from
The New Yorker
. She set off for England, France, Germany, and Scotland, buoyed by the magazine’s confidence in her as a nonfiction correspondent, not simply a fiction writer. Filing stories from abroad, she proved herself an able reporter and a prompt writer—and she had a very good time. She cabled a last-minute “Letter from Edinburgh” about the International Festival of Music and Drama, which was hurried into print. She also produced a more substantial “Letter from Germany” for a December issue that year, in which she sketched an acutely ironic portrait of the Allied occupation, drawing on her prewar memories for contrast. Her approach was clear-eyed observation and calm assessment: the ravaged country inspired pity, not rage. But her imagination was clearly roused at being back on formative ground, and the writing was metaphorically charged, beginning with the sinister image of a rat and closing with a monkey disappearing into the huge mouth of a rhinoceros.

The trip was a success, but it was also in a sense an evasion. Stafford had managed to find a style and to regain momentum working on non-fiction, which was a welcome change of pace. But as she admitted, she was turning away from the real challenge, which was to reestablish her creative writing life. Above all that meant tackling her novel. What kind of fiction writer Stafford would be seemed a newly open question during these “low pitch” years after she emerged from the hospital. In “The Psychological Novel” she had declared a decorous aesthetic, suggesting that her response to the chaos of her life would be increasing order in her work, an avoidance of exhibitionism. But in fact she was probing
a new, more autobiographical direction in
In the Snowfall
, her large and finally unsuccessful project during the late 1940s. This was not the domesticated memoir genre Schwartz accused
The New Yorker
of encouraging, but a much more ambitious effort to write about a generation—students in the 1930s—and, more importantly, to confront the major demons of her past: Lucy McKee and John Stafford.

She described the toll that enterprise took on her in an essay, “Truth and the Novelist,” which appeared in
Harper’s Bazaar
in 1951. The account is not the definitive analysis of Stafford’s difficulties during this time—she was not thoroughly baring her soul in the glossy magazine. But the article is a useful guide to her thoughts about writing during years that for her, as for Lowell, proved to be an important transition. In the late 1940s and early 1950s—after their marriage, their mental stability, and their faith had all come into question—both of them, in very different ways, faced a tension between the formalist lessons they had learned at the start of their careers and the experiences of their disorderly lives.

The essay reveals a struggle between Stafford’s principles and her instincts. She had been taught, and she herself had preached, that writing should not be personal. Moreover, she had early on had arduous firsthand experience of the perils of intensely autobiographical writing. Her first published fiction reflected the lessons she had learned. In
Boston Adventure
her imagination had carried her far beyond her own experience, and in
The Mountain Lion
irony and a symbolizing impulse had transmuted powerful memories. But ever since her stay in Cambridge in the winter of 1945 to 1946, she had been brooding on two subjects that were much closer to her—and much closer to her earlier fictional efforts: her own adolescent turmoil, precisely what Sonie sublimated in her pilgrimage to Miss Pride and what Molly avoided by her death; and her father, the figure who quickly disappeared from
Boston Adventure
and who was dead from the start in
The Mountain Lion
. Writing in retrospect in “Truth and the Novelist,” Stafford acknowledged that she had strayed from the advice given her by, among others, Ford Madox Ford, who had told her long ago that portraiture straight from life “
is impolite and it’s not fiction.” Once again she adopted the tone of the critical amateur: