The Interior Castle (56 page)

Two pieces of Stafford’s own fiction were on their way into print in the early 1960s, but neither was a sign of newfound inspiration. Both were stories that she had done earlier, a weak one called “The Ordeal of Conrad
Pardee,” which appeared in
Ladies’ Home Journal
, and “The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies,” a sketch that kept finding a place in various unfinished manuscripts, from
In the Snowfall
to
Parliament of Women
. Stafford quietly unearthed it to contribute to a commemorative issue of the
Kenyon Review
, in honor of John Crowe Ransom, and it was a telling revisiting of her past. The story drew quite directly from her life. It was a rare portrait based on Stafford’s mother, the self-deluding optimist, whose refusal to face the dismal facts of her family’s pinched, provincial life inspired the protagonist, her daughter, to dreams of escape from Colorado, “
from the spectacle of her eaten father and from her mother’s bright-eyed lies, from all the maniacal respectability with which the landladies strait-jacketed the life of the town.” A tour de force of descriptive detail and colloquial dialogue, the story showed Stafford at a distance from her autobiographical character, leavening her brutal bitterness with comedy. Stafford downplayed the resuscitation of her story, neglecting even to mention it to her agent, perhaps because it was an all-too-vivid reminder of her failures with her larger project—and because its publication was presided over by the spirit of Ransom, who had predicted great things for her.

By the spring of 1963 Liebling too, increasingly ill, had sunk into a depression and was having trouble with his writing. They had moved to a much smaller apartment on West Tenth Street (rent on their grand Fifth Avenue apartment had gotten too steep), and life was not the whirl it had been. “
For the first time in his life,” Stafford told his biographer, Sokolov, Liebling “developed a real block. Depression was new to him. Looking back on it, I wasn’t sufficiently sympathetic because I had always had depression with me.” Liebling did his best to rally, visiting fight-training camps, despite painful, advanced gout, and then flying to Algeria, planning a “North Africa revisited” piece and pondering an essay on Camus. While there, he wrote to Stafford in the old gallant vein, proposing another European trip together, but acknowledging in his comically direct way that they would hardly be traveling in vigorous style: “
I can show you how beautiful and amusing France is,” he promised her, and then continued: “Your letter indicated that I’d find you more of a wreck than I am. Well, we’ll collapse in each other’s arms.”

The summer trip to Europe was a memorializing tour. Liebling retraced his steps through France, and Stafford searched for her brother’s grave, and they spent some time with Jean Riboud at his spectacular
château near Lyons. They returned home in the fall, and Liebling’s depression didn’t lift, though he went into the
New Yorker
and tried to work.
He had in mind a “Wayward Press” column about Kennedy’s assassination, which had shaken them both profoundly. (The Thompsons in Boulder received a long, late-night call of mourning from Stafford.) Intimations of death were clearly very much with Liebling, though he was only fifty-nine, and with Stafford as she watched his decline. On December 21, 1963, he went into the hospital, suffering from pneumonia.

Stafford apparently informed her family, and her father responded with a peculiar letter of sympathy, commenting on his own longevity, not Liebling’s frailty. He said what his daughter had said for years—that his lease on life was perversely long:

The letter must have been extremely unsettling. It echoed not only Jean’s death wish for him, but also her own fear about herself, which she had confessed to her doctors: that she too was perversely indestructible. The reminder of her inescapably bleak heritage could hardly have come at a worse time: the letter arrived shortly after her husband died on December 28, and she was left alone in life yet again.

Her father seemed to sense what a disturbing message he had sent, for he wrote again right after Liebling’s death. It was another confession of his failings, but in this letter real distress replaced the stylized self-indictment:

In a postscript, he added, “My dear Jean: know that we would all like to help you if only we knew how. Forgive us our ignorance.” A certain reproach perhaps lurked there, a puzzled unhappiness about his unresponsive daughter, who impatiently resisted all such gestures from her kin. But there was also a palpable desire to play the comforting father for once. And he knew what obstacles he had to overcome; that was clear from his awkward efforts to lift at least one burden from his daughter, the burden of her guilt and resentment toward him. In his pre-deathbed confession, he took responsibility for the course of his life, and yet also stood by it, a spirited Stafford to the end. It was probably the most compelling image of himself that he could hope to bequeath: the ancient man acknowledging his folly, but valiantly denying the role of victim and implicitly urging his daughter to do the same.

S
TAFFORD
was beyond fond comforting and cheering in the months after Liebling’s death. As she had once written wittily and prophetically to her friend Ann Honeycutt, “
You and I might as well make up our minds that we are going through the rest of our lives—or part of it—buttressed up by doctors, and I know of no better buttressers. We certainly want no family buttressing in on
their
terms—and that is the only way they would do it—and the friends we admire are largely of such collapsible material themselves they can’t be counted on for any sustained work. Further, they are all amateurs, and when we blow, we need the pros in.…” True to her own prescriptions, Stafford summoned her doctor, Dr. Thomas
Roberts, who admitted her to New York Hospital in early January 1964, just after Liebling’s death. She hadn’t blown dramatically, but he described her as “drinking, run-down, and depressed” and
listed plenty of problems: a benign gastric ulcer, chronic malnutrition, bronchitis, “reactive depression with excessive alcohol intake,” and fibrocystic disease in one breast. James Oliver Brown wrote to her full of relief that she was in medical hands: “
I’m so very glad you are going into hospital. You are worn out. You must get a rest and get out from under this strain or you are going to crack.” Her treatment was hardly high-tech medicine; for sixteen days she dried out and was served real meals in the protective confines of the hospital, which must have seemed even more protective than usual, given the emptiness that awaited her in the world outside.

When she was released, she was well equipped with medicine and well supervised by Dr. Roberts: she was on a regimen of Antabuse (an antialcohol drug) and had tranquilizers to help her sleep and antidepressants to raise her spirits. But she was ill equipped with plans and energy. She had to move from the Tenth Street apartment but didn’t know where she would go. February and March were grim months, and on April 5 while she was having lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club, she was seized “
like a bear” by a pain that ran through her upper body. Now she had truly blown: it was mild heart failure, and she was taken by ambulance back to New York Hospital, where she stayed for five weeks.

Feeling thoroughly bereft, Stafford seemed more than half ready to follow Liebling. Months after the worst of her ordeals was over, she wrote to Hightower and itemized her physical travails: along with the heart attack, she had suffered a gallbladder attack and been stricken with pancreatitis, which reanimated an old ulcer—and all this had happened only two days after she emerged from the Hospital for Special Surgery, where she had a tumor removed from her foot and a calcium deposit from her wrist. But the real trauma, she told him, had taken place in the soul. “
It was interesting,” she said in the calm of retrospect, “and I learned one thing: the spirit gives up easy as pie, it’s the flesh that fights. I have always suspected this and now I know for sure.” It was evidently a formulation she used with another old friend, for it surfaced more than a decade later in Lowell’s poem “Jean Stafford, a Letter,” in
Day by Day
(1977); “
we learn the spirit is very willing to give up,” he wrote, echoing his ex-wife’s revelation, “but the body is not weak and will not die.”

Stafford was well versed in the complexity of the drama between flesh and spirit. The disenchanted mind, this practiced hypochondriac knew, had the power to undermine the body; but in its turn the body, with its
demands and desires, could stubbornly distract the mind from its dreams of escape. That contest had been the theme of perhaps her best story, “The Interior Castle,” and it returned as the theme that preoccupied her during her illness and recovery. Among her many visits to hospitals, this one seems to have stood out as a formative and strangely inspiring interlude—not unlike her painful stay in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge after her car crash with Lowell, and her retreat to Payne Whitney after the collapse of their marriage.

She was indeed “lost for a while,” as her father had predicted, but she was clearly struggling to find some new ways of putting her disorientation into prose. Though it is hard to tell when the work was actually done, much of the labor on the different versions of her novel, alternately called
The Parliament of Women
and
The State of Grace
, seems to reflect what she took to be a brush with death during the spring after Liebling died. Her drafts show her trying to give some objective form to terrifying subjective experience, as her body and spirit resisted but also courted defeat.

In the remnants of
The Parliament of Women
, Stafford continually circled around a struggle either to accept or escape the world, a struggle in which the mind and body were now uneasy allies, now enemies. Picking up with Miss Pride’s death, she focused on Sonie’s dilemma as she faced a future without her oppressive patron, searching in the dark for some sense of home: “
In the spring I lived in a nebulous atmosphere of homesickness, the more distracted and the more saddened because I had never known, in all my life, what was the home I was sick with longing for, or whose were the faces and the voices that my nostalgia craved to redeem.” Here Stafford experimented with different versions of the “red room” image that had emerged in
Boston Adventure
, for that was the closest Sonie could come to comfort. Not so secretly, she desired oblivion, suffering from a disease that Stafford described as both physical and mental: “
My disappointment was second nature,” the passive girl confessed, “an incurable and bothersome disease that didn’t hurt but so sapped my strength that I had not the energy to change my life.” Her lethargic body accommodated her drifting mind, and she retreated into her comfortably insulated chamber. “What commended [the room] so dearly to me was the quiet and the red of the dusk that imbued it.… Here I was not required to emulate or compete or to contribute.”

Shifting to the saga of Sonie’s troubled courtship with and then marriage
to Philip, Stafford aimed for more social vividness and sketched in a claustrophobic community clearly modeled on Westport, which she called Lymington, Connecticut. She also introduced a more concrete, material source for Sonie’s spiritual disorientation: alcohol, Sonie’s vice as well as the plague of all her friends, a “distressful secret” that she at first tried to hide from Philip. Stafford interwove the strands of two stories, Philip’s increasing interest in a neighbor named Daisy, and Sonie’s increasing passivity—stories that eventually coalesced in “An Influx of Poets”—but she couldn’t shape a larger tapestry from them. Instead, some of the most interesting, though always fragmentary, writing returned again and again to the interior of Sonie’s head, which Stafford evoked as a scene of suffocating terror. In one of those passages, Stafford managed to sum up vividly not only Sonie’s hell but also her own literary entrapment. The speaker was Sonie, but her haunted monologue could be Stafford’s description of her own endless, futile attempts to find some way to illuminate her pain in prose: