The Interior Castle (30 page)

T
HE THREE STORIES
that Stafford published that year—“The Darkening Moon” in January in
Harper’s Bazaar
, “The Lippia Lawn” in the spring issue of the
Kenyon Review
, and “A Reunion” in
Partisan Review
in the fall—all treated the central theme of exile. In fact, the image that lurked behind all of them was banishment from the garden, a religiously evocative drama that Stafford gave three very different secular treatments. Although the stories were doubtless all begun before
Boston Adventure
was finished (it is hard to fix just when and in what order they were written), none gave any sign that Stafford had that ambitious novel in her. Each tends to rely on rather heavy-handed manipulation of symbolism, but together they offer an overview of this stage of Stafford’s stylistic development and an introduction to the origins of the preoccupying theme of homelessness.

It is striking that all three stories focused, directly or indirectly, on the figure of the father, who was virtually to disappear from Stafford’s fiction after Hermann Marburg’s comparatively brief appearance in
Boston Adventure
. “A Reunion,” though published last, was the least mature of the stories, harking back to her early static, histrionic efforts; it was a kind of companion to “And Lots of Solid Color.” This time it was the father figure whom Stafford exposed in his heartless myopia. The plot was not taken from life, though the portrait of the protagonist’s self-pitying father in part was. The first-person narrator of this story, whose mother had died at her birth, returned to visit her father after a seven-year absence, wondering if their lifelong estrangement would have altered at all. But in his eyes, and in her own, she remained the guilty daughter, an unwitting murderer. Though he welcomed her into his garden, it was a shrine to the dead mother, and she was an intruder—likened, in a less-than-subtle closing image, to a beetle her father injured and then left to die.

The lush garden of “A Reunion” recalled the Covina, California, paradise, which was explicitly invoked in “The Lippia Lawn” (included, as was “The Darkening Moon,” in Stafford’s
Collected Stories
). In the 1970s, in a brief sketch of her California origins, Stafford claimed that she had only recently come upon the name for the kind of lawn that had surrounded her Covina house, though she had spent years perusing horti-culture books. As she must have known, her own fiction gave the lie to
that claim. “The Lippia Lawn” took as its starting point and symbol the search for—and discovery of—the elusive name of the plant, lippia, of her childhood. In fact, Stafford’s subsequent claim of forgetfulness is an illustration of the theme of the story: nostalgia for a purportedly Edenic past is dangerous. It is better not to remember the lost paradise.

In place of the overwrought meditation of “A Reunion,” Stafford was now in control of the intricate yet concrete introspective style she elaborated in
Boston Adventure
. The first-person narrator of “The Lippia Lawn” summoned up memories of her past, jogged into the rumination by an arbutus plant she came upon during a walk with an old man on the Cumberland Plateau (a setting inspired by Stafford’s Monteagle stay). She realized that the trailing arbutus reminded her of the lippia lawn of her youth, a past that she had evidently done her best to bury. In a scene that suddenly acquired symbolic intensity, she found herself wrestling with the tenacious plant, aiming to retrieve a cutting for the old man (another unsympathetic father figure, as the story proceeded to reveal). “
It was as though the root was instinct with will. There was something so monstrous in its determination to remain where it grew that sweat, not from exertion but from alarm, streamed from my face.… Something prevented me from cutting it,… a sort of inexplicable revulsion at the thought that the knife might not cleave through.” The plant had become a sinister symbol of a past that couldn’t be domesticated. While her companion ranted nostalgically about the once lush landscape—“
It’s a crime, I tell you! When I was a boy this place was Eden!”—she was thoroughly unsettled by memories of the past. His constant refrain of rootedness was like “a phrase of music once admired and now detested.” To recall her own Eden vividly would be to confront her exile; her fall from innocence was best left unexamined.

In “The Darkening Moon,” Stafford turned to a dramatically different terrain and style, harbingers of the texture of
The Mountain Lion
and of Stafford’s subsequent Colorado stories. This was the first of her western stories, featuring a twelve-year-old character named Ella and told by an omniscient narrator who favored exact, objective description over subjective meditation, a colloquial over a refined manner. The story was about the dawning of a divided consciousness, the moment of maturity when Ella suddenly recognized the end of an unreflective unity between herself and the external world, her mind and her body. Nature abruptly turned ominous and unwelcoming: she was cast out.

This time the garden was not a tended enclave but the looming, rugged country of Colorado. Ella began the story courageous and comfortable in that world, thanks to her deceased father’s lesson years before on a night fishing trip, when he left her alone by the riverbank with these reassuring words: “
There ain’t nothing to harm you, sister. The animals is all there is and they won’t be looking you up.” But this night, baby-sitting for a neighbor, Ella let her imagination take over from her senses, and she was profoundly disoriented. Unnerved by the mystifying eclipse of the moon, Ella was revisited by a darker version of her childhood fishing trip. She had fallen into the river up to her waist, and the fish had “
swarmed slimily” all over her. At her father’s instruction, she had picked up the “fat slithering blobs in her bare hands,” and to her terror, the fish blood had been smeared on her. “The horror of the reptilian odor” came back to her now, and Ella cried out for her father, but there was no comfort. The imagery of the story was unmistakably sexual: Ella’s own body was about to become unfamiliar; the moon’s rhythms and new fears and desires were about to hold sway. The old Edenic confidence had become part of the irretrievable past.

Despite the common theme, the stories were strikingly different in formal execution. It was as though Stafford had decided to practice a variety of techniques and tones as she continued to revise
Boston Adventure
, where her very different task was to unify the parts of that ambitious whole. And she was sampling different literary outlets. She had been welcomed in the quarterlies of both the New Critical and the New York camps, and somewhat to her chagrin, she wrote Hightower, she had dipped down to
Harper’s Bazaar
, which clearly didn’t rate with her literary circle (though it paid well). She was drawing on material from the relatively distant past—her family, not her current life. It was only when her novel was finally in her editors’ hands that she turned to the present, or near present, for inspiration for the rest of the short fiction she wrote during their year and a half in Connecticut. But before she was ready to turn to those quite different stories, she faced a tumultuous autumn, beginning with the appearance of
Boston Adventure
in September of 1944.

“A R
EUNION
” appeared in the same fall 1944 issue of
Partisan Review
as a review of
Boston Adventure
by Andrews Wanning, dramatizing the distance Stafford had come: the author of comparatively slight exercises in
sensibility had produced a Proustian epic. Most of the reviewers, like Wanning, had high praise for the unconventional ambition of the novel, though several confessed to being mystified by the peculiarly passive heroine. Just what Sonie’s fate might be, once she had dreamed her way out of her un-Edenic childhood to the pinnacle of New England civilization, only to be drastically disenchanted, was far from clear.

Stafford’s own fate looked very promising, though she was genuinely modest about her artistic accomplishment.
Her novel did very well very quickly: forty thousand copies were sold within a few months of publication, and as a Book League selection,
Boston Adventure
went on to sell almost two hundred thousand more copies. A condensed armed services edition of more than 125,000 also appeared. But Stafford played down the success. As she—like her mentors and friends—hastily emphasized, commercial success was hardly a measure of merit. Stafford had evidently been worried all along that Harcourt, Brace might be taking a lowbrow approach, and had consulted Philip Rahv about the popular title her publishers had proposed. He suggested some tonier possibilities, acknowledging the delicate line she was treading: “
Your book struck me as the best first novel by an American writer that I have read in quite a few years. I am sure it will be a great success. Congratulations!” he wrote to her, endorsing bestsellerdom. But he also advised a more refined presentation: “I’ve thought about that title rather intensively, and all I can manage are the following: 1) A Boston Venture (takes the sting out of “adventure,” I mean the sting of romantic and popular appeal). 2) The Siege of Boston 3) Late Pilgrimage—or Belated Pilgrimage. I like the first title best.”

Stafford was also eager to subordinate her noisy debut to Lowell’s virtually simultaneous, more elite publication with the Cummington Press. “
Cal’s book [
Land of Unlikeness
] … came out just three days before mine and I cannot tell you how relieved I was to have him beat me into print. His is a ‘fine’ edition, very beautiful and so expensive that he’s sure no one will ever buy it,” she wrote to the Thompsons. There were clearly some competitive tensions as their two careers were launched, but Stafford seemed more than happy to defuse them with modesty. To Hightower, she was excited but self-effacing: “
The success of this book is both ludicrous and disgusting. It would never, never have happened at any other time in the history of publishing, but books, all books, are selling like mad.” (Perhaps a little envious, Caroline Gordon somewhat tactlessly
emphasized the hype involved: “
It looks as if it would certainly sell. I believe they are spending enough money on it to make it sell,” she wrote in the early fall.)

Just in case anyone thought she might be corrupted by popular success, Stafford outlined her plans for a highbrow sequel. As she described it to Hightower, it was going to be a literary leap beyond
Boston Adventure
, and the subject was not exactly best-seller material:

Sonie’s fate wasn’t going to have the sting of popular or romantic appeal. Her future was apparently to be a religious one; Stafford planned for her to discover the spiritual significance of her “red room.”

If commercial success was somewhat suspect among their circle (Lowell hastened to write Tate that “
we are neither respectable nor rich”), it was an even more delicate issue for Stafford among her family, in particular her father. She might have been able to skirt the subject; she had put many miles between herself and him, and seen to it that they were not in close touch. But that fall there was a family crisis. In early October, as she was in the midst of organizing yet another move (to Westport, to another rented house, which they called The Barn—this one closer to her dreams), Stafford received the stunning news that her brother, Dick, had been killed in France in an ambulance accident. Though she and Dick had not been close for years, their two brief and happy reunions, one so recent, had obviously stirred up the past. For her it was a relationship dominated by imaginative nostalgia—he was the idol and elusive ally of her youth—which perhaps helps explain the momentous blow his death was for her: dead, he became an immutable, even more imposing presence.

Stafford promptly made plans to go out to Oregon to be with her parents and sisters. “
I am so glad, in this terrible thing, to be a Catholic,” she wrote to Mary Lee. “And you must believe, as we all have got to
believe, that he is just somewhere else.… I long to be with you. Cal is wonderful, but he didn’t know Dick.” On her return to Connecticut in mid-November, she wrote a mournful letter to Peter Taylor, obviously struck by how little she herself knew Dick, or her parents, and yet how bereft she felt:

The “
image of a modest schoolteacher” while she was in Oregon, according to her sister Marjorie, Stafford certainly did not play the role of triumphant novelist on her trip home.

But there was one person who paid special attention to Stafford’s commercial success, and that was Mrs. Lowell, who couldn’t avoid at least a grudging acknowledgment of her daughter-in-law’s worldly accomplishment. The reception of Stafford’s novel in Boston was a very mixed one, not surprisingly, but the clan had to take note. Stafford could no longer simply be the wife beneath notice. In a letter to Cecile Starr, Stafford caustically reported the reactions they had encountered during a visit to Marlborough Street: