The Interior Castle (41 page)

The other trauma of the spring was a trip up to Damariscotta Mills to prepare to sell the house, a trip that left her, she wrote to Taylor, “
mutilated with woe.” She couldn’t face that without drinking either, she confessed to Cecile Starr, describing her collapse: “
Faced with its loveliness (I never owned anything so beautiful, nothing was ever so completely
mine
as that house and those trees and those marvelous scenes from all the windows) and with all the misery that my pitiless memory disinterred for me, I could feel myself falling headlong and helplessly.…” The journey wasn’t made any easier by the knowledge that Lowell was celebrating great literary success with the publication of
Lord Weary’s Castle
(he was
awarded a Pulitzer that spring, along with a Guggenheim and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters) just as she was commemorating their marital failure with her trip back to the castle. “
The pictures of him that one sees in all the papers are not the pictures of my husband but of someone else, a professional poet,” she wrote to
Taylor, sounding slightly stunned. To Mary Lee, she allowed herself to sound more thoroughly devastated: “
I went alone … and all the anguish of last autumn—and the whole summer and last spring—came back … in all the cold and desertion at the very same time that Cal was coming joyfully into all his national glory.” She retreated to the hospital to mend.

And sometimes, as she wrote to Lowell, even the hospital didn’t seem a remote enough sanctuary. The seductive exile she had created for Sonie in her novel was one that she herself was tempted by. Sonie’s Boston adventure had driven her to seek refuge in her “red room,” a prophecy of Stafford’s own response. But unlike her fictional character, she struggled against succumbing to her desire for total isolation. “
It would be, right now, easy for me to enter the Red Room and to shut the door tightly and forever,” she wrote to Cal, knowing that he was familiar with the terrain of her spiritual landscape:

T
HE ALLURES AND DANGERS
of transcendent retreat were a theme not just of
Boston Adventure
. In
The Mountain Lion
, Stafford had created in Molly a far more unworldly ascetic than Sonie; she was a child who might have become a nun, who turned away from the corruptions of the world to the loneliness of her own mind. And the theme was at the heart of her story “The Interior Castle,” which came out in
Partisan Review
in the winter of 1946, as Stafford was entering the hospital. In fact, it had been in a draft of that story, six years earlier, that she had first begun exploring concrete, literary expression for the symbolic inner chamber that became a centerpiece of her work. Another pattern asserted itself: this story inspired by Stafford’s first hospital ordeal in late 1938 and 1939, after she and Lowell had run into a wall, appeared during her subsequent hospital stint, after she and Lowell had encountered a different kind of wall. It seems likely that she had been reworking the story during the year before, a time of confusion when it was becoming ever clearer that the chambers of Damariscotta Mills were unlikely to offer
the refuge she had dreamed of—and when, as “An Influx of Poets” attests in retrospect and various letters suggest, the allure of retreat to the chamber of her own head was irresistible. She had resorted to an anesthetic readily available outside the hospital, alcohol. But her drinking did not, evidently, impede the revisions that produced perhaps her best short story.

In “The Interior Castle” Stafford took the advice that Evelyn Scott had offered years earlier, dispensing with much of the Latinate abstraction and refining the concrete description of the protagonist’s ordeal. It was the author of
The Mountain Lion
at work, letting symbols emerge naturally from specifics, making an abstraction like pain speak through physical details; with unerring intensity, she worked metaphor and simile hard. Stafford stepped further back from her protagonist, now given the exotic name of Pansy Vanneman, and thus gained objectivity, though not at the expense of vividness: it is difficult to read Stafford’s account of knives ravaging Pansy’s nose and skull without cringing.

Her distance did, however, introduce a new note of skepticism into the story. There was irony in Stafford’s perspective on Pansy’s arrogant zeal for retreat, a suggestion that the glorious inner chamber she visualized was perhaps not the ideal escape from pain and the lesser distractions of the mundane world that Pansy assumed it would be. At the same time that Stafford lavished perfect prose on the chamber, she implied a solipsistic inadequacy in it:

There was something loveless in Pansy’s worship of her own head, and the conclusion of her quest took a turn rather different from Stafford’s original ending. Pansy’s revelation was the product of resignation, as St. Teresa instructed, but this time it was not eager acquiescence to God’s
will but reluctant acquiescence to the claims of the world. Pansy’s glimpse of her inner treasure came only after she had bowed to the doctor’s designs, recognizing that “
the time would come when she could no longer live in seclusion, she must go into the world again and must be equipped to live in it; she banally acknowledged that she must be able to breathe.” She had her moment of ecstatic repose, her visit to the “red room”: “This time alone she saw her brain lying in a shell-pink satin case. It was a pink pearl.… It grew larger and larger until it was an enormous bubble that contained the surgeon and the whole room within its rosy luster.” Unlike the story of six years before, which left the patient with her “agony’s wonderfully perfect pearl,” Pansy was only granted a moment to marvel that “
never had the quiet been so smooth.” The self-important world intruded, and in the closing sentence, Pansy was left disenchanted: “She closed her eyes, shutting herself up within her treasureless head.” Transcendence or retreat could only be transitory relief, Stafford suggested with great ambivalence; the story conveyed bitter impatience with life in the trivial world, yet also doubt about life in the solitary head.

A therapeutic realism had diluted her former spiritual rigor, as Stafford acknowledged in an article that stands as a companion piece to “The Interior Castle.” Aside from two other short stories (“The Hope Chest,” about a crabbed old woman’s loneliness, which appeared in
Harper’s
in January 1947, and a story set in the West called “A Slight Maneuver,” which
Mademoiselle
printed a month later, both interesting mostly as variations on themes Stafford dealt with more successfully elsewhere), the only writing of hers to appear that year was in a new vein: journalism. As she did later in life, she turned to outlets worlds away from the
Partisan Review
end of the magazine spectrum, obviously with money foremost in mind.

The piece she wrote for
Vogue
, which came out in the October 15, 1947, issue, shortly before she was released from Payne Whitney, was hardly a conventional women’s magazine article. An account of her battle with insomnia, “My Sleep Grew Shy of Me” was a short tour of St. Teresa’s
Interior Castle
, to which Stafford credited her cure—not exactly the sort of thing
Vogue
’s readers were used to. It was a harbinger of some of Stafford’s later journalism, in which she domesticated her own ordeals, transforming personal difficulties into occasions for idiosyncratic advice columns. In this case, her mental breakdown was reduced to a sleeping
problem, which certainly had been a part of her agonies, but hardly the whole.

Stafford wrote as though her troubles were long behind her. It was a confident tone adopted for her audience, and it glossed over the sense of precariousness she acknowledged to friends on leaving the hospital that fall. Her style was deliberately archaic and poetic, the appropriate accompaniment to her anachronistic cure: “
And now that my insomnia has passed, I have liked to borrow [St. Teresa’s] divine figure in my profane reflections and similarly to see myself moving at a snail’s pace from the exterior wasteland where I kept a violent vigil to the safe place where I now sleep.” Stafford traced her progression from mansion to mansion, describing the transformations in her attitude that permitted her gradual penetration to the inner sanctums.

It was as though she were laying bare the outline that guided the shaping of “The Interior Castle,” doing the close reading of St. Teresa that preceded her far freer use of the saint’s work in her fiction. She explicitly addressed the analogies she used to such powerful effect in the story: the relation between a literary and religious perspective on the one hand and a medical approach on the other, between illness as a figurative and as a physical state. Her article described the evolution of her views that seemed to be reflected in the second version of “The Interior Castle,” a journey toward greater acceptance of a therapeutic, psychological understanding of her plight. It culminated in an embrace of the merciful science she had discovered: “
I honored the good practice of psychiatry as I had heretofore only honored religion and the arts, and [began] to see that its intention is profoundly moral in the most splendid and intelligent sense because it aims to create happiness.”

Its aim, she understood, was to return her to the world, which meant that she could not linger in the Fifth Mansion, of “
convalescence, the charming antechamber to health.” Its allures were great, and Stafford recognized her special susceptibility to them. She needed urging to relinquish its lovely oblivion: “Perhaps this is the happiest house of all to live in because there is an immediate contentment, a sort of rapturous anaesthesia.” But she did move on, and her description of the final chamber avoided the ambivalence in her story. She offered the upbeat resolution suitable for
Vogue
. The chamber was neither a dangerous cloister nor a mere way station before rejoining the clamorous world. Instead, there was a perfect poise: “Tumult seldom penetrates the walls of the interior
castle which is, I find, in an ambiguous situation for, although it is very much
within
and I am very much the sole owner of it, the prospect it commands is of reality and of the world and of all the possibilities of experience which I had believed I had forsworn forever.”

This public, confident optimism of the cured patient, ready to reenter the world, was in stark contrast to the private fears Stafford confided to her journal in the spring: “
I have been here now seven months. Certainly I did not dream that I would see the leaves turn green when I saw them red in the fall. And even now, after all this time, I do not know where it will end nor how. I do not remember how one starts again and this is the hardest time of all, since I have left behind no life-lines.” Death had evidently not been far from her mind. Returning to life was not going to be easy.

A
S SHE PREPARED
to leave the hospital, Stafford sounded less certain in her letters about her readiness to face “the possibilities of experience” than she had in
Vogue
. Understandably enough, she was on the defensive. She was worried about money, burdened by medical bills she couldn’t possibly pay and bitter about an estranged husband from whom she could expect next to no alimony (
at that point Lowell had agreed to five thousand dollars over ten years). And she was anxious about the reception she could expect from her and Cal’s friends. Supplanted by Gertrude Buckman (whom Lowell talked of marrying) and tainted by her psychological troubles, would she now be the woman everyone wanted to avoid? In a particularly distraught letter to Lowell, she put her predicament in extreme, general terms. She would be emerging “
without money and without friends and this is harder for a woman than for a man,” she wrote. She despaired of being able to pick up where she had left off: “A man who is called a scoundrel remains, to most people, attractive.… A woman who has spent nearly a year in a hospital with a sickness of the spirit has, with the people she has known before, an ineradicable black mark. Who would wish to know me? Because I am defeated and miserable, I cannot be appealing.”

But she was leaving the hospital because her doctors judged her to have surmounted the worst of her defeat and misery, and in her more self-confident moments Stafford managed a quite different perspective on her situation. She announced that a break with that past was precisely the liberation she needed. Essential to her cure, she decided, was distance
from the close-knit literary circles she and Lowell had been caught up in since their marriage. She had never felt comfortable as part of a literary cabal, as she now characterized both their friends from southern days and from the
Partisan Review
set. The competitive, claustrophobic spirit of those associations, she concluded, had played no small part in bringing on the troubles she was only now slowly recovering from. (“
Bring a number of talented people together in a close area, and the neurotic tremors begin vibrating,” William Barrett commented of the
PR
crowd. “Americans, who have less of a tradition of the salon or literary circle, fling themselves at the business with greater innocence—and violence”) In a letter to Peter Taylor over the summer, Stafford credited her new understanding of her unhappiness to her doctors. In fact, the revelation was not new. Long ago—in Baton Rouge—she had linked her fevers and her thirst for alcohol with too many intimidating friends who were obsessed with books and were brutal, or at least not gentle, with people. “
I have been grateful, in this year, to be treated by my doctor as a human being and not as a writer and not as an outsider,” she wrote to Taylor; “if I can only remember how wonderful this relationship has been, I think I shall be able to protect myself from those situations in which I become shy and suspicious that I am being battened on because I have a small reputation or in which I am tormented because I do not ‘belong.’ ”