The Interior Castle (61 page)

It was in five lectures that she was invited to give at Barnard in the early spring of 1971 that Stafford gathered up her ruminations on the state of the times. Her ambition was not to work up a systematic discussion. As always, the prospect of the podium inspired real nervousness, and she skirted all pretenses to being anything but an amateur proud of her colloquial touch. The material was derivative of earlier work; she plundered freely from previous journalism (and later she plundered freely from the lectures, reprinting versions of them as articles and spinning off new pieces on the same themes). She gave the series an imposing title, “Tradition and Dissent,” and located a unifying preoccupation in her opening comments: “
For the next two weeks I’m going to be talking on a number of subjects, although as I look back on what I’ve written, they all seem to be variations on the same subject: the upheaval of our traditions.” But the titles of her individual lectures are a better clue to the more informal, quaintly old-fashioned cast of her undertaking: “The Felicities of Formal Education,” “The Present Afflictions of the American Language,” “The Teaching of Writing,” “Sense and Sensibility,” and “The Snows of Yesteryear.”

As she had done in the past, beginning with her first public-speaking effort, “The Psychological Novel,” Stafford pursued her themes in an anecdotal, autobiographical manner—all the while shying away from confession. It was sometimes a curious tactic, as it had been in that youthful lecture: she would approach painful truths (back then, psychological breakdown), only to round them out in a resolutely conventional perspective (years earlier, her message was that fiction writers should avoid
baring their psyches). Here she explicitly invoked the memory of her father and his curmudgeonly complaints against the times, only to declare her independence from him. He was a “
man embattled from his bassinet,” convinced “the world was going to hell in a handbasket.” She professed much more optimism.

Although Stafford did not in fact have very much hopeful to say, she was evidently taken aback when a student who interviewed her for the
Barnard Bulletin
halfway through the series commented on how bleak the lectures sounded. Stafford hadn’t intended a screed, told the student she feared she had “muffed” the lectures, and spent the interview speaking as a very approachable if unfashionable lady of letters, the edge all but gone from her tone. “
The lectures almost seemed a harking back to the nineteenth century,” her interviewer observed, and Stafford replied serenely: “Well, what I’d like to call myself is not a conservative, but a conservationist. I want to preserve everything that is good, dignified, and that is an adornment to the country, including the language.” She emphasized that she was feeling far from fierce: “I don’t feel bitter, I feel satiric,” she explained. “I felt much bitterer when I was younger, but now I’m mellowing. No, that isn’t true. I’ve no way to test myself, because I’ve retired to a sort of hermit’s life, and I get awfully cross when I read the
New York Times
, but I live such a pastoral life.…” In “Sense and Sensibility” she made the same point, turning it into an implicit critique of the current reverence for youth, a familiar theme: “
I look back upon the years of my own young life with a certain admiration and with a certain embarrassment and with no desire whatever to live them over again. I am glad that I was once obliged to be intransigent, but I am even more glad that I am now mollified and slowed down by the obliquities of old age.”

Stafford also did her best to assure her interviewer that her views on the women’s movement were mellower than the student had surmised. She declared that she was “
all for equal opportunity. I think it’s shameful that women with the same credentials and the same ability get smaller wages,” said she could not “think that I’ve ever suffered from discrimination by being a woman,” and concluded by emphasizing that it was the style of the debate as much as anything that she objected to: “I, well, I hate noise, and I think this great brouhaha between, who is it, Mailer and Kate Millett … the awful mudslinging … it’s just an ill mannered, bad public performance.”

Of considerably more concern to Stafford was a clarification of her views on language. She hastened to explain to her interviewer that she was “
not opposed by any means to the vernacular, the living language, the colloquial language. It’s something that I love and honor, and I use it all the time. I would be lost in my own writing without the vernacular. What I object to is the jargon of such things as ‘meaningful dialogue.’ ” The full extent of Stafford’s love of and alarm about language was clear in an article derived from her lecture, in which she declared one of her main missions to be vigilance on its behalf. Her carefully chosen figures of speech suggest how important this cause was for her. It was a tribute to her past, a continuation of the work she had once done in her fiction: “
Who will carry on the rich oral traditions of New England and the South and the West?” she asked, and her answer invoked her own stories, the bad characters in Adams: “I reckon that convicts and children, who have the most time on their hands, will go on contriving slang and jokes, and, God willing, the wellspring will not be polluted and will not go dry, and hillbillies and pickpockets and able-bodied seamen and timbercruisers and Southern politicians will go on sweetening the pot.”

At the same time, her worries about the state of the language were an extension of her fears about her own future, about her frailty amid contemporary barbarities. Here she invoked the metaphor of an ailing body to describe the ordeals of language, much as she had once used that same figure in writing about her deep attachment to her house. In both cases, her psychological and physical health were intimately tied to those two important refuges, her houses and her words:

Her fears for the “ailing language” were an eerie prediction of her own fate, though for the moment Stafford claimed that she was feeling quite hale. In concluding her talks, Stafford announced that she had found this particular encounter with the wide, wild world much less bruising than she had expected. In “The Snows of Yesteryear,” she played the role of rural recluse to the hilt. She was the quiet lady ready to go home, but surprisingly pleased to have ventured forth:

B
ACK IN
E
AST
H
AMPTON
during the summer, Stafford was less cheerful. That certainly didn’t mean unremitting grimness, as Wilfrid Sheed emphasized. He and his wife were her “
share-croppers” in her little bungalow out back that year, and they knew what good company their sharp-tongued landlady could be. During long evenings spent drinking together, they indulged in “manic flights of humor, all gone, alas, by the next day”:

It wasn’t art, however, and Stafford wasn’t quite prepared to reconcile herself to that. She wrote to her sister Mary Lee, with whom she was
intermittently feuding and confiding, that she was ailing and her work was suffering. It was a familiar complaint, she acknowledged, and it became an ever more recurrent refrain:

The plans that Stafford outlined help to put her last years into perspective. Notably, she relegated her novel to last on her list of endeavors and admitted less certainty about it: she merely “hoped” rather than “meant” to have that behind her. She was proved right in her skepticism. Her other projects were considerably more modest and backward looking, and they weren’t fulfilled in the form she probably had in mind. She did eventually get a couple of the lectures in shape to publish, but in less than prestigious places (such as
Saturday Review World
and
Confrontation
). And instead of the tidy tribute to the past implied by her plans to write about manners and departed friends, the scattered journalism that she ended up producing over the next five years (under pressure, as Peter Taylor said, of some “
real or imagined need of money”) can be read as a curious revisionist accounting of her life.

Her themes were for the most part familiar. She did write about manners in assorted pieces on etiquette for women’s magazines. She continued to write about language and commented intermittently on the women’s movement. (Her most celebrated pieces were a little diatribe against the use of “Ms.” for the
New York Times
and an article for the same paper entitled “Women as Chattels, Men as Chumps,” in which she declared that “
the fustian and the hollering … the strident jokelessness attendant on the movement are woefully unpropitious because they obfuscate a good many justified grievances,” such as unequal pay.) She reviewed books, and she tried her hand at several profiles, mostly for
Vogue
. And she wrote letters, increasingly full of complaints and despair about the world. As Taylor commented in his tribute to Stafford after her death, a spirit of disappointment infused these miscellaneous writings: “
She wrote numbers of book reviews and articles, of course, but frequently with tongue in cheek and always seemingly in a terrible rage, a rage against a life that had contrived to place her in such a ridiculous situation.” This was not what her literary career was supposed to lead to, and the different pieces, though chatty on the surface, suggest that some darker sublimation was at work. There was a good deal of denial and domestication of the real trials of Stafford’s life in the journalistic exercises that consumed her.

Various assignments prompted her indirectly to rewrite her past, taming the creative tumult that she had known. Thus in a review for the
New York Review of Books
she was condescendingly dismissive of Thomas Wolfe, claiming that she had been disaffected long before she had in fact outgrown her early imitation of him. Her characterization of Wolfe echoed the merciless reactions that her own prose had elicited from her first readers: “
The man revealed [in the letters] is infuriating and pathetic, so deformed by self-absorption and self-indulgence, so macerated by his warm bath of self-pity, so worshipful of the physical appetites he deified that he was incapable of deep friendship or deep love.” In another piece for the magazine, commenting on Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle’s
Being Geniuses Together
, a memoir of expatriate life in the 1920s and early 1930s, she found an occasion to be less than kind about another of her mentors during her early, confusing years—Evelyn Scott, whom Stafford backhandedly rescued from McAlmon’s dismissal this way: “
He’s not above taking pot-shots at sitting birds or of being as cheaply cruel as a bad, bright child: of Evelyn Scott he says, ‘She’d be more restful if she would just admit her mediocrity.’ ” If Stafford thought McAlmon’s tone was wounding, she evidently was not inclined to challenge the substance of his assessment.

On other occasions, she wrote with a notable lack of sympathy about women whose troubles were not entirely foreign to her, sometimes adopting an oddly judgmental tone. In a piece about Isak Dinesen, for example, she described an eccentric woman who was often cruel about her husband, cold in her writing, uninterested in food, plagued by ill health, and given to donning unusual masks—a portrait quite close to home, which Stafford concluded with a warning that was perhaps meant
for herself: “
Such whims (the hat, the kohl), such personal theatricals are to be applauded unless they become too important, unless the personage takes over the personality.”

Stafford’s etiquette pieces, mostly cast in the form of advice columns, were similarly peremptory on subjects that were in fact sources of pain and confusion. She emerged as a crotchety expert on sociability (in such pieces as “Suffering Summering Houseguests” and “Some Advice to Hostesses from a Well-Tempered Guest,” both for
Vogue
), making a gimmick out of her reclusive tendencies. Her temperamental aversion to company allowed her to be the unillusioned guide to the burdens of conviviality. And her old-fashioned approval of formality made her a stern critic of the vogue of immediate intimacy. Sent by
Horizon
magazine to cover a course in encounter-group techniques, Stafford was so appalled by the rudeness that her article “My (Ugh!) Sensitivity Training” was all about why she simply had to quit going.