The Interior Castle (46 page)

As Stafford told the story, it was the urging of “two poets” in 1946—Schwartz and Lowell (later joined by Berryman)—that convinced her to undertake her saga of “college life in the thirties and the shocking event that had altered the whole course of my existence and had loitered horridly as a nightmare for eleven years.” She didn’t exactly blame them for the advice that led to her writing troubles (she respected the “taste and wisdom of the poets,” she said), but she made clear that their aesthetic concerns and hers diverged. The implication was that they failed to understand a fundamental requirement of fiction: the necessity of emotional distance. She did understand it, but misjudged her own objectivity, wrongly assuming that “the experience had sunk deeply enough to rise again as literary experience, and now that the immediacy was removed, I could examine its components judiciously and disclose its meanings.” Instead she discovered that she was consumed all over again by the miseries of those years. She felt driven not to fictional creation, but to confession about past turmoil, and was sickened by her “ubiquitous self.”

She turned to work for
The New Yorker
as a release from the large-scale ordeal of
In the Snowfall:
“Probably the most ingenious of my escapes was this: I declined an advance from my publisher and therefore, in order to live, I was obliged to write short stories and articles which naturally consumed my time and claimed my attention.” In fact, she had received an advance from Harcourt, Brace, but there were still financial pressures to serve as a rationale for distraction from more ambitious, problematic fictional endeavors—as they did again and again in later years. Finally, in December 1950, her response was, she claimed, to burn the pounds of manuscript that she had accumulated during more than three and a half years of work—a reaffirmation of the aesthetic from which she had temporarily and disastrously strayed by being “more personally omnipresent than coolly omniscient.” She concluded “Truth and the Novelist” in her old-fashioned, prim tone, reiterating the decorous standards she had announced in “The Psychological Novel”: “There are times when I wish we might return to the reticence of my parents’ era
when people kept their secrets.… I dare say it was sometimes unkind to hide away relatives of unsound mind in upper bedrooms, but still that seems to me more becoming than to brag in public about the lunatic heritage that can explain our own misdeeds.” And she announced a happy ending: she was now at work on a new novel, she said, which “deals with people I have never met and with a permutation of circumstances that has no counterpart in my own life.”

Stafford’s account in the essay was deceptively well rounded. The interlude of
In the Snowfall
was a major creative crisis and not so cleanly overcome as she suggested in her article. Her hopes for the novel were extremely high: it promised to be
her
book, her testament, the one in which she would “reveal the quintessence of [her] talent,” achieve “the crystallization of what I, as a writer, want to say.” And her fears, when she had trouble, were great. Almost in passing, she admitted that she worried that “whatever gift I once had had was gone forever.” When she spoke up in favor of reticence, she was not simply being anachronistic but was addressing a real anxiety nowhere explicitly confronted in the article: that her experience of psychiatry was perhaps to blame for destroying her gift. She had spent months talking with her doctors, trying to exorcise the demons who were also her fictional subjects—Lucy and, even more important, that relative of “unsound mind,” the source of her possible “lunatic heritage,” her father (though she never named him in her article). Perhaps the constant exhuming of memories had undermined the role her imagination needed to play. Certainly plumbing the pain on the written page had no therapeutic benefits: “Take with a grain of salt the cliché that it is possible to rid oneself of a grief or a guilt or an ugly memory by writing of it,” she counseled in her article. More important, the scrutiny bore no literary fruit.

Stafford was also skirting the truth when she said that she destroyed the manuscript, or when she said that the novel she then turned to (
The Catherine Wheel
) was progressing like a breeze. She saved drafts of
In the Snowfall
, which she kept returning to over the years, unable to admit complete defeat with the novel for which she had had such hopes. And
The Catherine Wheel
, though the writing of it progressed quickly enough during the spring and summer of 1951, proved to be a labor of another kind: Stafford had to work hard for a sense of passionate engagement with her material, precisely what had come all too readily with
In the Snowfall
.

Several letters shed more intimate light on the struggles Stafford publicly presented in “Truth and the Novelist.” She had her moments of high expectation. In the spring of 1949 she wrote optimistically to Taylor about
In the Snowfall
, saying that she was “
very hard at work. I have achieved the final tension because now at last I know what this book is about and I know how to write it. The plot has revealed itself and I can finish it in this last sitting. And I have
got
to finish it now because I am so sick of it, having lived with it for so very many years.” But only a couple of months later, as she was about to leave on her European trip, she gave an entirely different report to Mary Lee, sounding distraught: “
I feel that I have lost all energy, all courage, and, worst of all, all talent.… My book goes so badly that I am in despair half the time and my insomnia has returned in full force. There are times when I feel that it is psychiatry that has destroyed my gift, but perhaps the gift isn’t gone yet, I don’t know. If it has, God knows what will become of me because that is the only thing in the world I have.”

It is clear that Stafford talked to Dr. Sherfey about her fear that, despite what she had said in “The Psychological Novel,” her neurosis might well be the key to her gift, and that bringing her secrets to light in session after session might be the destruction of it. That same summer Dr. Sherfey wrote to her in Europe, reassuring her of the psychological and literary liberation that therapy should bring by enabling her imagination to take in not just the “
hidden pathological tortures of mans soul,” but also “those aspects of life which make it good.” Sherfey emphasized that she wasn’t invoking insipid wholesomeness: “You will never lose that capacity for remembering and experiencing the darknesses; it is a vital, moving part of you. You will but add to it the capacity to remember and experience the lightness.” She acknowledged that the new capacity wouldn’t come easily. But she was confident that she and Stafford together would succeed at “the job [which] is to make that capacity not a superficial part of you—so that writing about it
would
be frivolous—but a part as integral as the other. When that happens you will be quite ‘Well.’ And I have no qualms nor concern about the kind of writer you’ll be.”

S
TAFFORD CLEARLY
did have qualms, and on her return from Europe her response was to find distraction from her creative anxieties in energetic socializing. She was apparently no longer dating Chris Merillat, but at a party during the fall of 1949 she found a new beau, Oliver Jensen, a
thirty-five-year-old editor at
Life
. He was a ruggedly attractive man, Yale educated, well paid, and gallantly solicitous of Stafford, then thirty-four, whose wit appealed to him and whose literary fame impressed him. Stafford in turn was thrilled to be wined and dined by a conventional man whose gracious wooing was such a welcome change (
Alfred Kazin remembered her amazement, and gratitude, at being sent roses). Jensen arrived as the embodiment of the reliable protector she needed, the man with whom she might be able to live calmly. For it was a desire for security, rather than romantic longing, that inspired her eagerness for remarriage, which evidently peaked that winter. “
I so terribly want to marry,” she wrote to Peter Taylor in December. “I so desperately long for the orderliness and the security of marriage and the end of my intolerable loneliness.”

Jensen belonged to a familiar journalistic set, and yet he was not one of the intense literary souls among whom Stafford had come of age and whom she had vowed to avoid. For both, that difference between them was part of the initial appeal. While in Europe traveling by himself late in the fall of 1949, Jensen evidently heard plenty about Stafford’s creative gifts, which only increased her allure on his return. And while Jensen was away, Stafford went to Yaddo once again and was reminded of how anxious the place and the writers there made her. One of her fellow guests, psychopathic according to Stafford, completely lost control. Frightened, Stafford promptly got sick (insomnia, asthma), and in a letter to Jensen she reiterated her vow to avoid the miserable milieu. “
When the whole thing dawned on me three years ago, I repudiated the company I had kept so long. I abandoned the enemies of serenity and the advocates of self-hatred … and I am cross as a patch that on my return to Life Among the Writers, there is immediately an incident.”

She invited Jensen to come visit, welcoming him as an emissary from a much brighter, calmer world. His presence was just the proof she needed that “
all of life is not hideous and that Yaddo doesn’t constitute the world.” Together they sneaked away from Yaddo, went back to New York, and hurriedly got married on January 28, 1950, in Christ Church. Dr. Sherfey counseled against it, and Blair Clark, who hosted the reception after the wedding, did so with a sinking heart. Harold Ross told the Whites that he knew the marriage wouldn’t last. But for the start at least it was what Stafford had dreamed of. She had her first real honeymoon: they went to Haiti and Jamaica. And when they returned and settled in
Jensen’s apartment, she played the part of the proper East Side wife. Along with wedding announcements, she sent out engraved cards informing acquaintances that “
Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Jensen” were “At Home after the fifteenth of February [at] 222 East Seventy-first Street.” By the summer, they were getting ready to move into another house, closer to Stafford’s familiar vision. They rented a place in Wilton, Connecticut, while the old colonial house they had bought in Westport was being fixed up.

S
TAFFORD KNEW
there was a price to be paid for her new sense of domestic comfort and stability, which she acknowledged was not as solid as it might have looked from the outside. And as she had admitted to Dr. Sherfey, she was worried about what might happen should “lightness” come to prevail in her writing, even as she was struggling with her dark novel,
In the Snowfall
. In “Truth and the Novelist” the tension between poised, formal detachment and autobiographical immersion seemed to be settled in favor of the former. But that was clearly an oversimplified account. Stafford never resolved the tension; her best fiction demonstrated the possibility of probing psychic confusions in unnervingly controlled prose, of commenting on the disorderliness of experience without succumbing to it. In fact, the tension between immersion and reflection was itself an underlying theme linking the stories she wrote during the late 1940s and early 1950s—years when she was also struggling with one novel,
In the Snowfall
, in which emotional proximity was the difficulty, and then with another,
The Catherine Wheel
, in which detachment was the problem. The result was a distinctive group of stories that, among their other accomplishments, indirectly raised questions about both the cool, Olympian style and the confessional, high-pitched approach.

Between her release from the hospital and her abandonment of
In the Snowfall
at the end of 1950, Stafford was writing quite steadily for
The New Yorker
. It seems that the stories came easily at first. During the winter, spring, and summer of 1949, three of Stafford’s stories appeared in the magazine, variations on a common theme: a reclusive protagonist, trapped in unwelcome social relations, found himself both an ambivalent participant in and a merciless observer of social hypocrisies. Stafford set one of the stories, “The Cavalier,” in Germany and introduced a character who was to reappear, an intensely shy American student who was confronted with more experience than he had bargained for. She called
on more recent memories in the two other, more interesting stories. “A Modest Proposal” was set in the Virgin Islands and was a showpiece of Stafford’s descriptive skills, much as her letters from there had been. Her protagonist, a divorcée-to-be serving out her appointed Caribbean exile, was profoundly aloof from the scene of which she was a part—a gathering of rejected wives on the veranda of a predatory, transplanted Dane. Despite the torpor that overcame her (“
it was fitting, she concluded, that one come to such a place as this to repudiate struggle and to resume the earlier, easier indolence of lovelessness”), she succeeded in maintaining a withering distance from the decadence of the assembled company. But Stafford complicated the story by suggesting that the purer, isolated life guarded by her protagonist, freshly bereft of her husband, was a barren one.

In “Polite Conversation,” Stafford took an earlier chapter of her marriage as the occasion for lighter social comedy and for experimentation with dialogue. Her protagonists were the Heaths, a young literary couple newly settled in Maine who struggled only half successfully to avoid the insistent social overtures of the local folk. As a letter several years earlier to Cecile Starr from Damariscotta Mills shows, Stafford was writing this one directly from life:

The real interest of the story was Margaret Heath’s ambivalence as she endured tea with the local ladies. She staunchly defended the reclusiveness of her husband, Tommy, yet there was also a part of her, as there was of Stafford, that agreed with her neighbor’s exclamation: “
I think Tommy is gravely mistaken if he thinks one can live by art alone. But I daresay he would call
me
bourgeois for posing that question!”