The Interior Castle (47 page)

The choice between isolation and mingling posed in the stories was not clear-cut. On the one hand, retreat seemed to promise self-sufficient calm, whereas sociability involved self-compromising struggle. On the
other hand, there was something ominous about the passivity implied by detachment—a sense that escape into the lonely psyche might well not offer peace or creativity. But Stafford kept these stories light, playing on the social ironies of her theme rather than exploring darker psychological implications. They apparently were not a struggle to write, and
The New Yorker
was pleased to print them.

Stafford began to have more trouble later in the fall of 1949 and in the course of 1950 as she and Jensen settled down together. Her ongoing struggles with
In the Snowfall
seemed to cast a shadow over all her work. Progress, which was always uneven at best, apparently slowed disastrously after a visit in the summer of 1950 from her sister Mary Lee. The intrusion of her past must have stirred her up. She felt exposed—it was the first time any member of her family had seen her with house and husband—and she felt judged: her sister came bearing tales of their father’s increasingly sad straits. And though Stafford had held it against Lowell that he had had nothing to do with her family, Jensen’s interest was perhaps threatening. He had initiated a correspondence with her father, who wrote back and even sent along a pair of deerskin gloves. At the same time, her relations with Jensen were becoming strained as she complained of his endless socializing with tedious friends and he hounded her about her drinking, which got worse as her writing difficulties mounted.

Starting in the fall of 1949 Stafford turned to the darker suggestions of her theme in four of her most notable stories. Two of them stood out as exceptions to
New Yorker
urbanity, as several critics remarked, and the other two were rejected by the magazine. Katharine White was unsettled by “A Country Love Story” (originally entitled “When the House Is Finished, Death Comes”), which appeared in the spring of 1950 (and won an O. Henry Award, her third). It is a “
fascinating and poetic and puzzling piece of writing—not too personal I would think if certain things were done,” she wrote to Stafford. “It fascinates me completely, but also bothers me.” Inspired by “the incident” with Lowell during the spring of 1946 at Damariscotta Mills, the story was about the psychological dangers of submissive retreat. A couple living alone in the country grew increasingly estranged, the husband withdrawing into his work as he convalesced from a long illness, the wife sinking into depression when she was brutally rebuffed by him. Instead of finding peace in their solitude, they were caught up in a self-destructive drama. He accused her of
infidelity and was consumed by jealous visions. She internalized the (false) charge and imagined herself adulterous and guilty, slipping into a fantasy world that was a source both of comfort—her imaginary lover was a solace in her isolation—and of fear. Was she going mad? “
From every thought, she returned to her deep, bleeding injury. He had asked her if she were going mad.”

Once again, Stafford set up a relation in which passivity invited mental tyranny, isolation invited enslavement. A curious diary entry reflecting on the role she played with Lowell, apparently written in the midst of work on
In the Snowfall
, suggests that in her story she was drawing on an interaction she knew firsthand. Her journal snippet was a cold self-diagnosis:

In “The Echo and the Nemesis” (originally entitled “The Nemesis”), which appeared in
The New Yorker
in December of 1950, Stafford pursued the theme of tyrannizing selves to a further extreme. It was another unusual story for the magazine, as Granville Hicks remarked in a review of Martha Foley’s 1951 anthology of
Best American Short Stories
, where it was reprinted. “
Jean Stafford’s ‘The Nemesis’ on the other hand is a dark and sensitive study of psychological abnormality, not at all in the New Yorker vein,” he wrote. Stafford took a step beyond “A Country Love Story,” this time probing full-fledged mental illness. The trouble was essentially the same—the lack of a self, the inability to lead a real life—and at first the story seems merely a variation on a familiar subject.

The protagonist, Sue Ledbetter, was another agonizingly shy American student in Germany who half yearned to join the boisterous youthful crowds but who was drawn instead into a friendship with Ramona Dunn, an imperiously pedantic student of philology—and “
fat to the point of parody.” Ramona “did not seem to mind at all that she was so absurd to look at, and Sue, who was afire with ambitions and sick with
conflict, admired her arrogant self-possession.” Dr. Cohn wrote to Stafford admiringly of the story: “
No doubt remains—your craftsmanship is superb. And so is your psychology.” He rightly observed the device of doubling signaled by the story’s title: “Sue and Ramona are mirror images, through a glass darkly, indeed very darkly, a dual person and so of course also one.” But the story took a further turn, as Stafford carried the doubling one level deeper: fat Ramona, suffering from
adiposis dolorosa
, cultivated schizophrenic delusions in her unhappiness—an unhappiness, the story hinted, that had its origins in incest. She fantasized a thin, dead twin named Martha, who was in fact her old self.

There was nothing wan in Stafford’s portrait of pathology as she unveiled layer after layer of Ramona’s delusions in scenes so melodramatic they verged on dark comedy. In Ramona, Stafford vividly showed innocent Sue and her readers a more deranged version of the victim/tyrant relation than she ever had before. As Ramona announced to Sue at the end, “ ‘
I am exceptionally ill.’ She spoke with pride, as if she were really saying, ‘I am exceptionally talented.…’ ” Her obsessional appetite—her vanity and passionate self-devotion, to borrow the terms from Stafford’s diary—led to deep unhappiness, yet once again Stafford complicated her story by suggesting that Sue’s unvoracious outlook on life, her inability to lead a real life on her own, was hardly an ideal alternative. “You have such a trivial little life, poor girl,” Ramona told her, and the story confirmed the verdict. “It’s not your fault. Most people do.”

Ominous though the stories were, Stafford’s protagonists were young and her endings, however bleak, did not rule out all hope. In “The Echo and the Nemesis” Sue—fleeing from a waiter who innocently asked her, “
Are you afraid to get fat?”—perhaps had an independent life ahead of her. At the close of “A Country Love Story,” the wife sat “
with her hands locked tightly in her lap, rapidly wondering over and over again how she would live the rest of her life.” Was there any escape from this vision of life as a divided self, at once tyrant and victim, at the mercy of an unappeasable hunger for love, or at least for some acknowledgment of one’s existence? That was the question Stafford addressed in two other stories written around this time, both of them about the fate of older characters, neither of which made its way into
The New Yorker
. Her answers were far from heartening, as Katharine White’s reaction to “Life Is No Abyss” (which eventually appeared in the
Sewanee Review
in the summer of 1952) suggested. White had clearly discussed the idea of the story—a
girl’s confrontation with two crones in a poorhouse—with Stafford before. “
As you described your actual visit to me,” White wrote, “your compassion, of course mixed with distaste and horror, came through strongly. If this compassion doesn’t register somehow, one can’t help wondering why the story was written.”

But White failed to understand that precisely the point of the story was to convey spiritual terror at the loveless face of existence as revealed in the two old women. One of them had turned against her relatives in a rage of vengeful sadomasochism. The other, blind and witless, was cut off from the world and consumed by an “
empty ecstasy.” Stafford described that ecstasy in a passage reminiscent of William James’s appalling image in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
of an epileptic idiot in an asylum, an image that overwhelmed him with “
a horrible fear of my own existence.” Stafford’s old woman was equally, horrifyingly, vacant:

And yet by comparison to the other crone, who was perversely settling her scores with the world, this abandoned soul “
who can’t take anything and can’t give anything” seemed to inhabit a “state of grace,” however terrifying. The only escape from the cruel complexity of passion, Stafford suggested, was a pure, detached irrationality.

Or else a pure, detached rationality, the alternative she explored in the ironically titled “I Love Someone,” which ended up appearing in the
Colorado Quarterly
the same summer. It was the monologue of a middle-aged spinster surveying her own life after the shocking suicide of a friend. She described with a chilling calmness an existence devoted to the studious avoidance of any involvement beyond herself, of taking anything or giving anything. “
The fact is there has been nothing in my life,” she announced. “From childhood I have unfailingly taken all the detours around passion and dedication; or say it this way, I have been a pilgrim without faith, traveling in an anticipation of loss, certain that the grail
will have been spirited away by the time I have reached my journey’s end.” Her state of grace, she acknowledged, was an empty accomplishment: “
I, who never act on impulse, know nearly precisely the outcome of my always rational behavior. It makes me a woman without hope; but since there is no hope there is also no despair.” She had paid a high price for her placidity and confessed to a curiosity to “
penetrate at last the mysterious energy that animates everyone in the world”—except that she knew what it entailed: to venture forth in search of love was to encounter hate. Once more Stafford set out the alternatives of immersion and retreat, and granted retreat a victory at the same time that she revealed how hollow it was. “My friends and I have managed my life with the best of taste,” Stafford’s narrator declared in closing, “and all that is lacking at this banquet where the appointments are so elegant is something to eat.”

S
TAFFORD WAS NOT
, for the most part, writing autobiographically in the most direct, concrete sense. It is fruitless, for example, to plumb “A Modest Proposal” for her sentiments on the occasion of her final break with Lowell. “A Country Love Story” comes the closest to a confessional account of a traumatic personal experience, but here too Stafford pulled back. The husband’s effort to strangle his wife that climaxed an early draft—which was apparently the actual, violent source of the story—was cut in the final version.

But in these stories, and in
The Catherine Wheel
, the novel she turned to when she abandoned
In the Snowfall
, Stafford was writing autobiographically in a thematic sense, as she worked through a transition in both her life and her writing. She was trying to find out whether living at a “low pitch” was a possibility for her, and what kind of price it might entail. Was she capable of sustaining a level of peace and detachment that could spare her the turmoil she had known during her marriage to Lowell? And she was trying to find out just how immediately from life she could draw her fictional material. How much could she afford to immerse herself in the drama of her past and of troubled personal relations, and how much did she need the distance and decorum of style to tame it? She addressed the dilemma in different forms in her fiction, where her inclination seemed increasingly to detachment.

In the early 1950s the dilemma was also surfacing with renewed intensity in her life, as the first year of relative calm in her marriage with
Jensen began to give way to trouble. The acclaimed writer he had married on very brief acquaintanceship was, he discovered, far unhappier than he had ever dreamed. Drinking heavily and plagued with medical troubles, Stafford was in and out of the hospital. And her past continued to haunt her with an intensity that Jensen, whose exposure to her father and Mary Lee had been entirely cordial, found difficult to fathom. Her sessions with Dr. Sherfey seemed to him counterproductive; at least her depression only increased. During a rare trip out to Mary Lee’s ranch in Colorado in August of 1951, when her father was visiting as well, Stafford summoned up a bleak hope that she might be able to explain the torment of her past and perhaps overcome it. “
I think maybe at last I shall be able to convey to Dr. Sherfey and to you exactly what this blight has been that has twisted and hallucinated me all my life and perhaps you, Oliver, will finally understand my unnatural feeling toward my father,” she wrote to him as she was about to return to Westport. “Seeing him again I am amazed that all of us did not commit suicide in our cradles. Maybe at last I can get rid of some of the poison.”

When she got back, she retreated to the hospital, thoroughly shaken by her visit with her father and clearly not eager to return to Jensen. “
I don’t want to go,” she wrote to Mary Lee about the prospect of leaving the hospital, which was once again her asylum. “I never want to leave this simplicity and the utter freedom of this small space in which there is nothing superfluous.” She did come home, and she managed to finish
The Catherine Wheel
that fall, but there was no real rapprochement between her and Jensen. They were a world apart, as had seemed so obvious to many of their friends when they married, and now the distance meant strife. Stafford was scathing about his middlebrow journalistic crowd. (He left
Life
soon after they married, and became associate editor at
American Heritage
in 1954.) Jensen was equally dismissive of her literary circle, convinced that the company was unhealthy; he was impatient with their eccentricities, their excessive drinking, and put off by all the backstabbing. The quarrels between the two of them—which usually began, Jensen remembered, with “
the three big topics of our era: Communism, the Catholic Church, Psychiatry”—were fierce.