The Interior Castle (7 page)

This sterile vision of detachment was precisely what Stafford was looking to escape at college. When she put her clothes back on and joined her fellow barbarians, the dilemmas were posed in less abstract form. In pursuit of her artistic aristocracy, she tried out different versions of belonging as she mingled with the bohemian intellectual and literary set that was avidly discovering modernism, pretending that Boulder was Paris and the early 1930s were the early 1920s. It was an exhilarating introduction to the possibilities of creative art.

In her later writing about her college years, Stafford was eager to evoke the high excitement of the intellectual scene. She conjured up memories of her bohemian circle at some length in a lecture she delivered at the 1952 Writers’ Conference in the Rocky Mountains, held at her alma mater:

Two friends from the circle remembered her role as more peripheral than she suggested in her lecture, and Stafford’s own portrait of the intelligentsia’s gatherings in
In the Snowfall
placed Joyce Bartholomew insecurely on the outskirts. “
She did not really listen to these poor, proud, scholarly boys and girls when they talked of lofty matters or read aloud … from T. S. Eliot or from their own works-in-progress … novels that sounded like Proust, poems that sounded like Pound, but she was happier with them than she was at home with her father.” John Stafford apparently hovered not far in the background for Stafford even as she abandoned him for fervent conversations over beer with her new friends. In fact, the values and stance of the intelligentsia, a gathering of the poor social outsiders on campus, were in a broad way not so different from his. (In a revised version of that passage about “poor, proud, scholarly”
students, featuring Cora Savage and her father, Dan, Stafford wrote: “
All of [the intelligentsia] were writers, and they read aloud from … novels that sounded, usually, like Wolfe, poems that sounded, usually, like T. S. Eliot with undertones of Donne, and political tracts that sounded, to Cora, like Dan.”) She had found an escape from her father that wasn’t entirely a repudiation of him.

With greater surreptitiousness, Stafford was also exploring a more dramatic, dissolute escape. In her junior year she became a close friend of Lucy McKee, who was one of the few women studying law and a very visible presence on the campus. Nicknamed “
the red-haired queen” by one of Stafford’s friends, Lucy was rich and talented and presided over a distinctly different scene of daring experimentation. She was elected judge of the student disciplinary court in 1935, but it was her unofficial role as arbiter of a glamorously decadent code of behavior that apparently fascinated Stafford. Lucy’s circle carried to much more sophisticated extremes the punishing libertinism that prevailed among the barbarians, whose habits Stafford described this way in
In the Snowfall:
“
It was the fashion amongst [the barbarians] to scorn athletics and all other forms of physical experience since, except for sex … they had no uses for the flesh.… [B]y the time they had got their degrees … their stomachs were ready for ulcers and their hearts were cynical.” Later in life, Stafford was usually more oblique about this darker side of her bohemian life. In fact, in her 1952 talk she explicitly denied any but the most innocent of literary intentions: “
We would have been shocked and disbelieving if anyone had even jokingly suggested that we were disinterring and exposing derangements and unwholesome desires.”

The truth was that at some point during her junior year, Jean joined Lucy and what Stafford later called her “
limp, disreputable entourage” in exploring just such derangements and unwholesome desires in a “terrifying modus vivendi.” It was evidently Stafford’s literary talent that attracted
Lucy, who also had aspirations to write, but their companionship was rarely quiet or creative. Stafford was soon a regular guest at the wild parties held at the house where Lucy lived with her husband and fellow law student, Andrew Cooke—whom she had married in 1933, reputedly after a friend took out a marriage license for them as a joke. Certainly marital vows weren’t taken very seriously among the circle: Lucy presided over and participated in a kind of frantic dissolution, sexual and alcoholic. (She had come to the University of Colorado after
being expelled from Northwestern University, where she had been notoriously promiscuous and had contracted a venereal disease.)

Stafford was mesmerized by Lucy and the antibourgeois style of the household, which grew more extreme during the two years of the friendship. Before long she was a favored initiate. Stafford moved in with the Cookes,
leaving the local boardinghouse where she had been living (her parents had evidently given up trying to keep her at home).
Her enthrallment entailed plenty of self-abasement. As Andrew Cooke remembered it, Stafford and another friend who lived in the house often played the roles of maid and butler—and the joke was telling. For all her elect status as Lucy’s close friend, she was rarely allowed to forget her lowly origins with this high-living pair. Her central place in some of the party “games” (which included wine enemas for the guests) was often quite literally painful. She was Lucy’s most accommodating subject in the hypnosis sessions that she liked to stage; Stafford’s role was to remain impassive as her friend skewered her hand with a needle to prove the depth of her trance.

Lucy was a mentor in dissipation for everyone in her entourage, but she took a special interest in corrupting Stafford. Jean drank a great deal and,
according to another friend, tried ether. At the urging of her hosts, she occasionally slept with the fourth occupant of the house, a friend of Cooke’s, and she became ever more dizzyingly entangled with Lucy, who knew she had an impressionable recruit.
Just how entangled was the subject of various rumors, which implied that she was sexually involved with either or both of the Cookes. Stafford herself, in the draft of her novel, set a scene of deep sexual confusion and unhappiness. She portrayed Joyce as ready to agree to a joint
suicide pact with the husband of Maisie Perrine (the Jamesian name she gave to her Lucy character), and described Maisie, desperate to escape that husband, as ready to announce a sudden voyage with Joyce as her lesbian lover.

The truth seems to have been that there were no shocking sexual liaisons among the three of them. In fact, Stafford took up with Lawrence Fairchild, a premed student who was worlds away from their circle, in the summer of 1935. Still, her relations with the Cookes apparently acquired an imaginative vividness for her that transcended physical fact. For Stafford, life with them was a frightening yet intoxicating experience, as her identity—none too firmly defined to start with—was threatened even more radically. If she retained her sexual independence, she
nonetheless felt herself succumb to Lucy’s manipulation and glimpsed the potential for thorough disorientation. Self-destructive hedonism was the theme of Lucy’s household, and it entailed perpetual disequilibrium. Just how self-destructive became clear on November 9, 1935, when Lucy, who had been increasingly unwell (she had recently had surgery for ovarian cysts), shot herself in the head with a revolver in the kitchen of her house. Andrew was in the bathroom. Jean, worried about what her friend might do, had gone to the phone to call a doctor.

T
HIS TRAUMA
gave Stafford a tenacious fictional subject. At the same time, the experience left her without the detachment and style to execute it successfully. In her discussion of the unfinished
In the Snowfall
in “Truth and the Novelist,” an article she wrote for
Harper’s Bazaar
in 1951, Stafford indicated that she had hoped to elevate her story from the personal to the generational: it was to be an “
explanation of myself as a specimen of my generation in the formative years.” What is striking is how much that impulse to generalize seemed to be inspired by the writers of the preceding decade, the Lost Generation, and how much her portrait of the thirties in her novel overlapped with theirs of the twenties. As she had envisaged the novel while she worked on it in the late 1940s, it was to be her definitive work—much as, she said,
The Sun Also Rises
(1926) was probably Ernest Hemingway’s and
The Great Gatsby
(1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s.

The comparisons were not pulled out of a hat. Those were disillusioned novels by the younger postwar writers of the 1920s, who didn’t share the political hopes or the Victorian burdens of the older, engaged writers of the decade—Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill. The younger writers’ comparative political apathy and wild dedication to the life of art earned them some condescension from their elders, who were skeptical of the idea of the uncommitted artist. In his famous Nobel Prize speech of 1930, Sinclair Lewis (the first American winner) voiced some doubt about the art-for-art’s-sake zeal of the postwar literary generation, even as he pronounced the end of American literary gentility and provincialism. “
Most of them,” he observed of those writers, “were a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce.”

But it was just that insanity—increasingly febrile and dissolute for both Fitzgerald and Hemingway —that seemed relevant to literary college students like Stafford, for whom politics was at most a peripheral
hum, and it was the younger writers of the 1920s who seemed most accessible. Hemingway had quickly become a spokesman for the war generation among those who had missed the war. Fitzgerald, though less popular in the 1930s, was the chronicler of the Jazz Age. They were both emblems, not just individual writers, and the Lost Generation they belonged to was a mythic creative community. Its influence was enormous, not least over young aesthetes at college during the 1930s, who were coming of literary age as the first portraits of that previous generation were beginning to appear. (Malcolm Cowley’s
Exile’s Return
, a memoir of the expatriate literary scene in Paris during the 1920s, came out in 1934.) Stafford’s era of literary students felt they lacked the sense of solidarity that had inspired and united their predecessors. Among their responses was to replay the artistic ferment of the previous decade. “
The aroma of Bohemianism” was thick during the 1930s, as one of Delmore Schwartz’s classmates recalled of that time on another college campus, the University of Wisconsin. “Except for the gray mass of average students, 1931 was a year of vast experimentation, in which the experiences of the hip-flask decade were condensed into nine months.”

Stafford intermittently invoked the larger generational context as she struggled with her traumatic material in the various drafts of
In the Snowfall
. It was an effort to tame, to distance the story of Joyce Bartholomew and her seduction into the depraved world of Maisie Perrine. Joyce entered the gates of the university in search of a life that fulfilled an inchoate desire for artistic distinction: “
Maisie herself was a symbol, but rather an atavistic one as if she had been held over from the jazz age. She and her household were composed in the earlier decade by Fitzgerald, Huxley, and Coward. And Joyce, feeling herself to be identified with no time, wanted to examine these figures of history at first hand.” But entering the precincts of the household, where “Bohemianism … must dictate every event, even the most commonplace,” was not so easy for penurious, studious Joyce. “From the beginning she was called scholarly, and it amused Maisie to point out what a rare combination she was of the blue-stocking and the Bohemian.” The true incongruity was internal. Joyce guiltily betrayed her father and her intelligentsia friends, who were “consumed with indignation at the unfair order of things,” by being herself consumed with envy of the rich and desiring “nothing so much as to imitate their ways.”

But Stafford quickly abandoned any serious effort at generational portraiture
in the ill-disguised fictional drama of her own ordeals. She couldn’t sustain the social focus on an experience that had shaken her so personally, thoroughly undermining her sense of integrity and independence in the world. The various drafts of
In the Snowfall
are remarkable not for their social sweep or emblematic action, but for the vivid immediacy with which they reflect Stafford’s imaginative enthrallment to Lucy, as if that trauma had only recently happened. Despite the intervening years, Stafford still wrote with the adolescent passion and lack of balance that belonged to her younger self. While she worked on the manuscript, which reads like a disjointed, self-dramatizing journal, she graphically relived the memory of Lucy’s perverse power and of her own degrading submission to it.