The Interior Castle (25 page)

That is what made Sonie such a peculiar, and powerful, heroine. Stafford’s Proustian and Jamesian ingredients resulted in an idiosyncratic mix. Sonie was neither an artist nor really an heiress. What stood in the way of art was that she aspired to be an heiress—that she wanted to be, and then was, adopted by Miss Pride—more than she wanted to pursue a literary life. What undermined her role as heiress was that she had the ironic spirit of an artist, the imagination to see the distance between pretension, aspiration, and reality. She made not only the opposite of James’s journey, but also the opposite of Proust’s journey—that is, she chose society over art, even though society was an imprisonment. Yet Stafford shared with both writers a focus on disillusionment, on spiritual alienation and social subjugation. In fact, her vision was completely dark. She allowed no bridging of American and European values, no synthesis of art and life.

Neither heiress nor artist, Sonie was an odd combination of dreamer and critic. She was a rather mystifying narrative presence, as Lambert Davis, Giroux’s successor as Stafford’s editor at Harcourt, Brace, pointed out to her that spring in Monteagle. He sent Stafford a preliminary editorial report, which was full of praise but also posed questions about her elusive heroine. How does Sonie, he asked,

These were not questions that would have been asked of Stafford’s earlier, heated style. That Davis asked them now was a sign of how far Stafford had moved from the subjective agonies of her first efforts and from more conventional psychological portraiture in general. Her answers did not make for a standard saga of developing identity. Instead, Stafford unfolded a sort of mythic progress of the soul, or rather of the imagination.

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, “Hotel Barstow,” Stafford set in motion Sonie’s liberation from Chichester and traced her problematic imaginative heritage. She lived surrounded by—suffocated by—disappointed hopes. Her mother, brought up in horrifying misery in Russia, berated her father for sabotaging her dreams of a lavish life in America. Her father, once a proud craftsman and now a poor shoe repairman, was tortured by self-hatred and shame at his fall, not only from his vocation but from Catholicism. As Edmund Wilson wrote of Proust’s Combray residents, “
all are sick with some form of the ideal.” As a child, Sonie knew all too well the symptoms of this sickness. Violence and hatred rocked the Marburgs’ dilapidated cottage, especially at night, when from her pallet on the floor she heard her parents rail at each other in bed. As the narrator, she understood the different sources of the common affliction: “
My mother believed herself persecuted by everyone she had ever known.… But [my father] knew, and was powerless to rectify the fault, that all his torture came from his own flabby will which swung him like a pendulum between apathy and fretful indecision.”

The odds were heavily weighted against this half-Russian, half-German child, whose lineage was even more outlandish than Gretchen Marburg’s had been. To be half Hun was “
infamous beyond pardon,” but to be part Russian was “utterly improbable.” Sonie was in unwilling thrall to her big-eyed histrionic mother, whose story of betrayal was “
so fantastic that not even I, a little girl, could believe it.” Stafford’s great accomplishment was to convey Sonie’s enraptured resistance to Shura’s lunacy. The two inseparable figures, mother and madwoman, loomed over Sonie, unbelievable yet unquestionable.

Shura Marburg grew more and more fantastically disoriented as the novel progressed, Dickensian in its exaggeration. Impregnated and abandoned by Hermann, she gave birth to a son, Ivan, whom she detested
and destroyed, while Sonie struggled in vain to protect the epileptic child, a little monster grown hateful from hate. The scenes—Shura shivering with cold in front of a blazing fire, embroidering birds without tails on every cloth surface she could find, painstakingly picking lint from wicker chairs at the hotel with a hairpin, staring at her son until his eyes rolled back and he succumbed to a foaming fit—made no pretense at realism, but were compelling in their symbolic intensity:

Where her mother was an incarnation of the dark urges and fears that Sonie was strong enough to restrain, Hermann Marburg embodied the ambivalent desires and needs that threatened to undermine Sonie’s determination, as they did his own. “
My father was not a man whose misery could be mitigated by a change of environment or an increase of worldly goods or an establishment in a society,” Sonie judged, and ascribed his suffering to his sensibility, “refined by what influences I could only conjecture. And this sensibility had led him away from the traditions of his religion and his work and neither the one nor the other could stand alone.” The artisan was tormented by what Stafford suggested was a deep, and hopeless, desire for transcendence. His scenes, too, turned into tableaux of high drama, which Stafford often deftly undercut. This damned man spoke a variety of tongues, but only one tone—a desperate rhetoric that left his daughter reeling, sometimes from physical blows that accompanied his verbal violence:

He fantasized that the American frontier was his escape from hell. His favorite book was Zane Grey’s
Riders of the Purple Sage
, which he loved to read to Sonie (if he wasn’t urging Latin on her). When, sixty pages into
Boston Adventure
, he fled his wife and family, he was presumably headed out West.

Thus Stafford gave plenty of evidence of the “violent inwardness” that lurked under Sonie’s cool style, though it didn’t come packaged in familiar psychological form. This was not subtle introspection at work, but a kind of poetic projection, a drama that called attention to its mythic, religious dimensions. Her parents were not simply the source of certain symptoms in her, but symbols that dramatized her divided nature. In casting Sonie’s predicament this way, Stafford couldn’t avoid a static, almost surreal quality in the first section of her novel.

What suspense there was in the plot lay in the question: Was Sonie, unlike her father, someone whose misery could be mitigated by “a change of environment or an increase of worldly goods or an establishment in a society”? That was certainly her dream as a child, as she announced on the first page of the novel. Huddled in the same room with her haranguing parents, her secret wish, cultivated in great detail in her head, was “
that I might have a room of my own, and the one I imagined was Miss Pride’s at the Hotel Barstow.” With the echo of Virginia Woolf, Stafford was playing off the expectation that Sonie’s transcendence might lie in literature, and she continued to point tantalizingly to that path for Sonie.

But as the soulless nature of Miss Pride’s room suggests, Sonie’s primary aspirations were, in fact, the opposite of aesthetically liberating. Her fantasies were of a potentially suffocating order. The Boston grande dame displaced Shura in Sonie’s dreams, an antimother if there ever was one. Miss Pride was repression incarnate, which the child interpreted as desirable aristocratic rigidity. Surrounded by violent passions, Sonie yearned for a kind of serene passivity that seemed ominous. “
It was not until then, in the summer of my 10th year, that I learned, in what terms
of childhood I cannot remember, that peace was to be desired above all things,” she announced, and showed herself eager to submit to Miss Pride’s tyranny.

Against Miss Pride, the heroine of Sonie’s childhood, however, Stafford juxtaposed another force, or direction, in Sonie’s adolescence: her Jewish neighbor in Chichester, Nathan Kadish. He represented the path of rebellious creativity, which had almost as much allure for Sonie as the route to social success, so commandingly staked out by the well-connected Bostonian. Precocious Nathan’s combative dedication to learning, which was his way of high-mindedly rejecting Chichester, thrilled Sonie. He dogmatically lectured her about his life’s course, much of which he cribbed from George Moore’s
Confessions of a Young Man
, which he pressed on Sonie, too. She was captivated but confused: How could this iconoclastic vision of culture and self-definition fit with her ambitions toward Pinckney Street?

It was a tension that Stafford knew firsthand in life and that she came back to often in her fiction—fascination with wealth and status in conflict with dedication to independence of mind. Sonie understood that she was pulled between two contrasting poles: “
Between these two astronomies, the young man’s whose earth was plural, and Miss Pride’s whose solitary world was Boston, round which the trifling planets revolved at a respectful distance, I could not choose, for both were true.” Here Stafford drew more directly from her own life, as she introduced another character to serve as a possible bridge between the two: Dr. Philip McAllister, a young Bostonian who mixed Miss Pride’s breeding with Nathan’s rebelliousness. He seemed the fulfillment of Sonie’s ideal, the independent insider who aimed to disconcert but not to destroy the smug establishment, and who thus could offer a potential solution to her dilemma—much as Lowell did for Stafford. In one of Sonie’s Boston reveries, Stafford conjured up this ideal young man in terms quite clearly reminiscent of Lowell. Sonie’s dream man was a literary radical—a reader of Donne, a writer of unconventional poetry—who posed an overt challenge to the old lady with her impossibly provincial views.

But Stafford finally didn’t allow a constructive synthesis, though at first it seemed she might. A man with a taste for transcendence, Philip McAllister enabled Sonie’s liberation from Chichester by helping her to commit her mother to a mental hospital. In Boston, however, he failed her. There he was too late in warning her against Miss Pride’s tyranny, distracted from Sonie’s troubles by his fascination with, and then marriage to, Hopestill Mather.

True to the injunction that art ought to be impersonal, Stafford had cast Sonie’s predicament in ambitiously encompassing terms in Book One. Though the facts of her own life were discernible, she was notably successful this time in transforming them into inevitable forces in her characters’ lives. The parents represented the most extreme metamorphosis. Sonie’s crazed mother was a kind of demonic inversion of Stafford’s own long-suffering, matter-of-fact mother. The father figure, violently embittered in his disappointment, had to disappear early in the novel: he was so daunting, Stafford recognized later, that she couldn’t confront him straight on in her fiction. The domineering, aristocratic woman was the mother Stafford didn’t have but acquired through marriage, and to whom she then felt masochistically susceptible: Mrs. Lowell lurked not very far behind Miss Pride, an emblem of social power and
ruthlessness and an enemy of creative energy. (Miss Pride’s aesthetic views seemed to echo letters from Mrs. Lowell, who considered serious writing a thoroughly unsuitable pursuit for a well-bred Bostonian. “
I think he writes doggerel,” was Miss Pride’s assessment of Eliot. “I have never quite got his connections clear. All I know of him is that he was born in Saint Louis, even though he really was an Eliot”) The younger men, too, could be assigned their counterparts: McAllister as Lowell, Nathan as Hightower. Moreover, the deeply ambivalent view of Boston reflected not simply Stafford’s personal dilemma but a preoccupation of her husband’s as well. At any rate, that was how Lowell sometimes told it, as he worked alongside Stafford on poems in which he couldn’t quite decide whether the Puritans were forces of enlightened rebellion or of benighted authoritarianism and inhumanity.