The Interior Castle (39 page)

Stafford knew she needed a domain of order as a refuge from disorientation. Her domesticity was one practical source of stability; her identity as a woman with a house and the responsibilities that went with that role were clear. Yet that realm, so painstakingly constructed, had quickly crumbled in the fall of 1946. Now the hospital offered a haven. The position of patient, disciplined and tended to, was a relief, and psychoanalysis held out the prospect of easing some of the burden of dizzying experience; it could point out patterns in her life, not to entrap her, but instead perhaps to liberate her.

Although liberation was the goal, Stafford also worried that freedom from her demons, if it was possible, might destroy or dilute her creative gift. As a writer she depended on hypersensitivity to her surroundings and on contact with her subconscious. Despite her need for her “red room,” as she sometimes referred to her hospital retreat, she was ambivalent about admitting psychiatrists into the inner sanctum. Her doctors, most of whom had read her novels with great interest and admiration, were all too eager to parse them for symptoms. Dr. Zilboorg, Stafford reported to Lowell, had told her that “
Boston Adventure was ‘the product of one of the most tormented minds in a woman of my age’ that he had ever seen.” Stafford’s initial response was icily to remind him that she was not an agonized neurotic, but a writer with particular aims. When Dr. Sherfey told her that
The Mountain Lion
was “excellent from a psychiatric point of view; so is the mother in Boston Adventure,” Stafford’s reaction was decidedly mixed. She had had no conscious intent to produce perfect neurotic specimens, and the diagnosis seemed to turn imaginative characterizations into mere case studies. At the same time, she had to admit that
Boston Adventure
was intimately connected to her own deep-seated preoccupations and insecurities, whether or not she had consciously seen the connections in the process of writing. And the autobiographical anxieties were closer to the surface in
The Mountain Lion
, she acknowledged; she told Dr. Diethelm that she “felt [the novel] had very much to do with my collapse.… I do not know why the collapse did not come last spring when I finished the book.”

In an unfinished manuscript of a short fictional sketch entitled “A Personal Story,” which seems to have been written sometime in the fall of 1946, perhaps after Stafford had entered Payne Whitney, she pursued the theme of patterns and proposed an unconventional relation between her writing and her life—one that sheds an unusual light on her career. A thinly fictionalized reminiscence of her and Lowell’s year in Maine, the story began as a meditation on the thrall of memory. The protagonist was a traumatized, solitary woman; “
almost more than anything else, it was the thought of the summer and of the house when it was ‘finished’ that had taken her up in a possessive embrace.” Yet after a few pages of the woman’s despairing nostalgia, which she admitted was not new to her life, the sketch ended with an echo of Stafford’s letter to Taylor about haunting patterns, and a shift from memory to prophecy:

Stafford reversed the usual relation between art and life. Her books, she suggested, shaped her life as much as, if not more than, her life shaped her books. It is a point too rarely acknowledged about writers’ relations to their creations: plumbing a life for psychological clues to the writing that emerges from it, critics and biographers sometimes neglect to observe that a life is in turn altered by writing. That is clearest on a public level: a book that is a great success, or for that matter a marked failure, obviously looms over a writer’s subsequent career. Sudden fame, as Stafford discovered with
Boston Adventure
, can inspire confidence but also insecurity. That novel behind her, she was watched as a promising young writer by a much larger circle; she now had a reputation, and a distinctive one, to live up to. Yet there is also a more private, psychological level on which writing can influence a life. It was that more mysterious intermingling that Stafford invoked in “A Personal Story.” For a writer as imaginatively impressionable as Stafford was, creative fantasy, dream, and reality readily blur. The fantasizing mind can exert surprising power over, as Stafford put it, much that happens later. The confusions and fates she worked out for her characters on paper, whatever they owed to her past, also seemed to influence her future in indirect ways.

In a digression in “An Influx of Poets,” Stafford called attention to the power of words to influence experience—in particular the power of lies to entail suffering: “
So ignorant and sheeplike is my flesh,” Cora Savage announced, “that if, at the eleventh hour, I telephone my hostess to say that I cannot come to her party because I have a headache, at the twelfth hour a fang of pain strikes deep within my skull, and by the time the party is over and the guests are at home in bed asleep, I am haggard with suffering.” Stafford’s susceptibility to psychosomatic illness, the most obvious instance of mind over matter for her, suggests the overweening role her imagination could play. Not unlike her little medical lies, her large-scale literary fictions seemed to her to have a kind of independent life within her life, altering as well as reflecting its course. Suffering was usually the result, which was doubtless what terrorized her.

During her year in the hospital, her two novels haunted her in different ways. In
The Mountain Lion
the familiar relation between life and art prevailed. It was a novel steeped in memory, for Stafford had drawn deeply on her childhood, but it also cast a shadow over adult life, especially over that year. She associated the ordeal of writing about Molly with her collapse in Damariscotta Mills, and the painful childhood memories were doubtless kept vivid as she probed her psyche with a succession of doctors at Payne Whitney.
Boston Adventure
was a stranger case. Unusual for a first novel, it had tenuous grounding in autobiography. It was the book that Stafford wrote before one would have expected her to be able or inclined to. After all, she had barely penetrated the Boston enclaves that she set out to dissect. It was a novel written more thoroughly out of the imagination, a book that then exerted a kind of prophetic power over Stafford’s life. The sequel that the novel’s ominously inconclusive ending seemed to call for—and that she kept trying over the years to write—always took on quite transparently autobiographical shape. Sonie and Philip’s subsequent life, as Stafford tracked it in various abortive drafts and outlines, was essentially her life with Lowell. She couldn’t make it work in fiction. The real sequel was perhaps Stafford’s own life, as she lived out some of the implications of what she had written in her first novel.

Certainly during that fall in New York, when she had lost Lowell, her Philip, to another woman and when a retreat to her “red room” beckoned urgently, Stafford felt the book haunting her. “
All I can feel now,” she wrote to Taylor in her unhappiness, “is Pray God the day I can forget my Boston Adventure will not be long in coming.” And in the course of her trip back from Denver after her stay with Mary Lee, the novel instigated a traumatic reckoning with the life she had imagined in it and had lived while writing it. Or at least that was the dramatic story she told. In the train station in Chicago on her way to New York, she wrote to Lowell, she was overwhelmed by the sense that she could

Her convulsion seems almost too neatly scripted to be true. Whether she had imagined or actually lived that “little suicide,” it was a scene more in keeping with Hopestill’s dramatic life than with Sonie’s, as Stafford’s entire time in New York was. She had described Hope’s disoriented, self-destructive life in the city with some wryness in the novel. In search of peace with herself, Hope had become immersed in a psychiatric milieu worlds away from her Calvinist relatives in Boston. Stafford’s own life was not so different. In fact, the memory of Lucy McKee, the model for Hopestill, loomed over her during her ordeal—and so did thoughts of her father (just as Sonie’s father continued to haunt her). “
If only I could sleep,” Stafford wrote Taylor in November, still suffering from the insomnia that had plagued her before entering the hospital. “But I shall learn [to] again,” she assured him, and herself, as she summoned up optimism about her future, “just as I shall learn to eat again and to face reality on my own two feet without the crutches of alcohol and sleeping tablets because if I do not learn again, I shall destroy myself in one way or another. It will not be so hard now that my father has departed from my life and as soon as I can really lay Lucy’s ghost [to rest] I will not have to flee my guilt.”

But her father hadn’t departed from her life, even if at moments she might feel she had successfully banished him, and Lucy’s ghost was not so easily dispelled. It was Sonie’s analogous predicament that gave the end of
Boston Adventure
its inconclusive feel: Hope’s death had hardly liberated Sonie, and Miss Pride was clearly no father substitute. In the hospital Stafford was relieved to be in a sense suspended in time, “
safe between innumerable locked doors,” focusing only on establishing a mundane, healthy routine: eating well, not drinking, dressing neatly, and being amused by the ridiculous routines of “
Luna Park,” as she called it. But she was also probing her past, and she couldn’t help wondering what the sequel to her life so far would look like. Above all, she hadn’t abandoned thoughts of the writing that might lie ahead. Work on the
Boston Adventure
sequel continued to vex her, but she embarked—or at least announced that she was embarking—on a different book, which was another approach to laying the persistent ghosts to rest. It was the book
that she had outlined to Lowell and Schwartz in Cambridge and then stayed up late recounting to Berry man in Maine:
In the Snowfall
, the story of Lucy’s suicide, which was also the story of her own escape from her family, in particular from her father, during her college years.

It’s not clear when (or whether) during her year in Payne Whitney she actually began work on it, but by the summer she was referring to a novel, one that she was having real trouble with. The trouble was familiar from her earliest fictional efforts, as she acknowledged in a journal entry: self-hating solipsism. “
I think the stumbling block in both the novels I am writing—writing the one to escape the other—is my dislike of both my heroines who are, as they have always been, myself. I can only write of loneliness—when I don’t I offensively attack—only of a half-mad separateness.”
In the Snowfall
was a novel written about a past that cast its shadow far into the future for Stafford: Lucy and her father were, as her efforts on the novel suggest, two images of her own fate—the loveless woman and the frustrated, bitter writer. Those were the patterns that perhaps terrified her most.

The novel shaped around those images languished, but they were among the dominant themes of the torrent of letters she sent to Lowell while she was in Payne Whitney. The correspondence (none of Lowell’s letters survive) proved to be Stafford’s main literary work during her stay. The letters, essentially a long plea that they give their marriage another chance, were remarkable for their fluency and their fierceness. If they were the product of one draft, she was in amazing control of language in the midst of her misery. The well-crafted sentences rolled out smoothly, and there was barely a correction in letters that sometimes ran as many as nine single-spaced typed pages. Still, the correspondence was far from measured. Stafford’s tone shifted radically, sometimes almost hysterically, within and between letters. Her irony for the most part had fled, and she became histrionic, as she was sometimes able to recognize.

It was in her letters to Peter Taylor—who kept in close contact with both her and Lowell throughout, devastated by their separation and even offering at one point to serve as intermediary in an effort to clarify the situation between them—that Stafford managed some distance from her distress. “
I warn you that I am fanciful these days and that I am so starved for consideration which I am not getting, for affection of which I have been entirely deprived for months,” she complained dramatically, but caught herself up, “that I am, in short, so beside myself that I cannot
help but exaggerate.” In a short note, she put it simply and poignantly: “
I have had many very hideous things happen to me which I hope I can be funny about some time.”

And it was Taylor who early on that fall gave Stafford advice that spoke to her fears about her identity as a writer and as a woman. He understood her ambivalence about a single-mindedly literary life and urged her to avoid the total immersion she had experienced so far. She ought, he advised,