The Interior Castle (48 page)

When Stafford went out West again in the summer of 1952, invited by the Writers’ Conference in Boulder to deliver the keynote lecture (the speech she had heard Ford Madox Ford give fifteen years earlier), she took advantage of the geographic distance to initiate a separation from
Jensen. Thus her second marriage unraveled where the first had in a sense begun, in her encounter with Lowell at the Writers’ Conference in 1937—and her literary career arrived at a plateau at the site where she had started the climb upward. Her letters to Jensen from Boulder were letters of retreat. She had no more energy for involvement, she wrote to him, echoing her passionless protagonists: “
I feel a desperate fatigue and I should think you would too—a fatigue that comes from an expenditure of emotion. We cannot do that anymore.” In a letter a week later, she tried to explain her resigned embrace of loneliness, which she both dreaded and yet needed:

At the same time, Stafford delivered a lecture of retreat in Boulder. The conference, at which she was expected to talk to prospective writers and read their work, as well as give the main speech, was precisely the kind of spotlight she was eager to avoid.
Her reluctance apparently showed in her bearing, as she mumbled and stood or sat hunched in front of her classes (the students had been primed by Stafford’s friends to ask questions, to spare her mortifying silences). And her address was devoted, paradoxically, to the theme that writers should be read and not seen or heard. Once again, to an even greater extent than in “The Psychological Novel” and “Truth and the Novelist,” she adopted the anecdotal style of the amateur—and, as if to emphasize her fusty approach, called her talk “An Etiquette for Writers.” Boulder disarmed her with nostalgia, she explained, and she “
concluded at last it would be impossible for me to speak here with academic detachment of the art of the novel, or the state of the novel, or the future of the novel, or the novelist and society, or the novelist and psychoanalysis. I knew that I should be able to do little more than peregrinate amongst personal meanders.”

Her theme was familiar: that a decorous distance ought to be maintained between art and life. Where she had previously argued against exhibitionism, she now took commercialism to task. Her target was the
transformation of the writer into a huckster for the big business of publishing. She disapproved of “
the private-made-public life” of authors, this time not within their own pages but on the promotion circuit that had become a routine part of publication. She spoke as a disillusioned innocent, who had started out with visions of writing not as a profession but as a pure end in itself, and had been rudely awakened to the book business by her first publishing experience.

It was hardly an original indictment, though Stafford’s version was charming enough and gave her an opportunity to do some reminiscing about her college days. But it is possible to read the talk in a more personal light, as a comment on the state of her own career as much as on the state of the publishing business. Especially in hindsight, her reflections seem to betray a sense that she, the once much-hyped writer, was entering a phase in which she hoped (and feared) that the pressure would be off. She sounded as though she was somehow trying to prepare the way for a second act considerably less celebrated than her first had been. She was being lionized by her hometown, and her latest book,
The Catherine Wheel
, was selling quite well, but she was determined to downplay her stature and her future. The burden of reputation was heavy, she told her audience, and though she wasn’t speaking directly of her own experience, her anecdote spoke prophetically, and poignantly, to what lay ahead for her:

Of course Stafford’s reputation had been founded on a truly unusual book. But she had felt the burden of reputation nonetheless, and from two sides: she had known not only the pressures of publishers, but also the disdain of her poetic friends and colleagues for the mass success and
celebrity she had enjoyed. At the same time, even among that company, cultivating a literary persona was part of the game—an especially intimidating part. As she well knew, her charm and wit, her conversational virtuosity, her “presentableness at dinner parties,” had played a role in establishing key connections for her fifteen years earlier when she had so impressed the visiting faculty at the Writers’ Conference, and those social gifts had been part of her public literary profile ever since. She felt increasingly ambivalent about that—an ambivalence perfectly embodied in her speech. Certainly the role of author on the dais ill suited her; she wasn’t just being modest when she complained in her speech that she was not very good at it. And yet here she was, relying on precisely the superficial qualities she had impugned—giving a charming, witty, after-dinner sort of speech. Stafford may have disdained the public performance that she was called upon to give (in particular now that she had dedicated herself to her “low pitch,” post-Lowell life), but even more she dreaded anything that approached real personal disclosure. The anecdotal charm was her defense against confessional revelation—especially now that her writing was not going as smoothly as it once had.

She alluded to her troubles in one sentence that stands out in her speech as a revelation, however oblique. It was Stafford’s declaration of privacy:

Stafford was drawing both on a universal metaphor—linking literary creativity and birth—and on her own, idiosyncratic chamber imagery. The result was a rather unsettling portrait of the writing process, a striking contrast to the pure youthful zeal for expression that she had recalled earlier in the talk. The progression she described here could hardly be further from the conventional birth sequence: mysterious gestation followed by miraculous arrival in the world and a proud presentation by parents. Stafford evoked an unnatural, almost sinister gestation, followed by an exposure that seemed above all to entail shame. She emphasized doubt and fear, rather than relief and joy. Stafford’s imagery conveyed a
sense of failure, or at least trepidation, not just about her future as a writer but also about her fate as a woman. There was no vision of fruitful procreation, literary or biological. Instead she came close to accusing herself of a kind of perversity.

Back from the conference, Stafford stayed in Westport for a couple of months, working up her resolve to leave, which she did in the fall of 1952, having prepared Jensen for it in a series of self-accusatory letters from Boulder. “
I am all you say, a liar, a breaker of promises, an alcoholic, an incompetent … a hypochondriac. Do you imagine that knowing this and knowing it full well—I can also love myself and wish to go on living, making your life an incessant disappointment?” One day in early November she called a friend to drive her to the train, and she went to New York, where she disappeared in another nightmarish week of solitary hotel living and drinking. In a letter to her sister Mary Lee after her flight, Jensen confirmed Stafford’s own bleak reading of her fate as a woman. Whatever possibilities literature still held for her, her life looked unhealthy and barren, and he acknowledged that he was not a husband who could help:

Jensen had by then discovered that Stafford had ruled out one avenue of creativity. Not long after she arrived in New York, she retreated to her familiar asylum, the hospital, to tend to the uterine fibroid tumors she had been diagnosed as having. While she was there, she told her doctor to go ahead and perform an unnecessarily drastic treatment—a hysterectomy.

It was as though Stafford needed to make a dramatic statement of disillusionment with the ordinary, domestic plans with which she had begun her post-Lowell life. On emerging from Payne Whitney in 1947,
she had written to Cal of her hopes that “
I will soon be loved and married so that I can have a child before it is too late.” Now she was ready to be divorced again (before she left Westport she had already written to the Gibneys about a return trip to the Virgin Islands), and she was explicitly acknowledging what she had implicitly realized long before: that she could not imagine a life stable enough to have children.

Her assessment of her literary life during the early 1950s tended to be bleak as well. At least that was her judgment of the two longer pieces of writing she did then, after she had abandoned
In the Snowfall
, the biggest disappointment of all. (Her short stories, by contrast, kept coming and mostly escaped her ruthless self-condemnation.) Of
The Catherine Wheel
, which appeared in early 1952, she wrote disparagingly to Mary Lee: “
All I ask you, when you read it, is to remember that this is only the
present
book, and I will write a better one.” She urged Caroline Gordon, with whom she was briefly back in touch, not to read it at all: “
Please do not read my new one coming out in January. It is no good.”

And she was dismissive of her novella,
A Winter’s Tale
—which she had reworked from a story that in turn harked all the way back to
Autumn Festival
and to the sequel, featuring a monk named Dom Paternus, that she had once envisaged for
Boston Adventure
. “
I only refurbished the dull thing to help Mary Lou [Aswell, at
Harper’s Bazaar
] get a collection together [it appeared in
New Short Novels
in 1954], since it’s far from my favorite story,” she wrote to Jensen, who had praised it. And to Lowell, who had evidently mentioned hearing about something she had written, she was even more self-effacing (after saying how proud she was of Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell for their recent successes): “
I don’t know what new novel you mean unless it’s a nasty little rent-payer in a paper back. I’m not going to send you a copy because I don’t want you or anybody else to read it.” By the time she wrote that, toward the middle of the decade, she had reason to wonder whether her promise to Mary Lee that she would write a better novel had been in vain.

W
HEN
S
TAFFORD HAD BEGUN
The Catherine Wheel
—at least as she told it in “Truth and the Novelist”—she had had high hopes. Her renunciation of autobiography was a liberation, she claimed. As she described it, her project sounded like a confident effort to follow Dr. Sherfey’s prescription, to exercise a new “capacity to remember and experience lightness” and to avoid the ordeals she had encountered with
In
the Snowfall
. She wrote of her new novel that “
It deals with people I have never met and with a permutation of circumstances that has no counterpart in my own life, and it is set in a part of the world that bewitches me. (I had always quarreled with the landscape of the other.)” And she emphasized what relief that distance had brought: “I am not required to resuscitate any black humors and therefore to suffer again; and because my protagonist is not myself, I am kindly and uninhibited.”

The first half of her statement was true enough. The setting of
The Catherine Wheel
was New England, a town called Hawthorne that Stafford modeled more or less on Damariscotta Mills and that, as an exotic commingling of locals and summer intruders from Boston, was also a kind of inland, upscale Chichester, Sonie’s birthplace. The characters were not based on friends or relatives. As in many of the stories she had been writing, Stafford drew only thematically, not explicitly, from her own life. In fact,
The Catherine Wheel
blended essentially the themes of those stories in its two interwoven plots.

In the portrait of the summer agony of shy, twelve-year-old Andrew Shipley, who was tormented by the sudden indifference of his erstwhile best and only friend, Victor Smithwick, Stafford found a new incarnation of the alienated youth who yearned to participate in the world but was instead overwhelmed by it. The counterbalancing portrait of Andrew’s spinster cousin, Katharine Congreve, a generation older than he, was perhaps Stafford’s most polished tale of an ossified heart. Katharine’s usual passionless calm had been disturbed when Andrew’s father, who two decades earlier had betrayed her to marry her orphan cousin Maeve instead, suddenly declared his love anew. Depositing his three children with her and setting off on a summer cruise with Maeve, he pleaded with her to marry him on his return.