The Interior Castle (54 page)

When Stafford read “91 Revere Street,” she complained to Giroux that Lowell had deliberately parodied her own writing. Although there was nothing about her in it, there was more than a faint trace of her own literary style and voice.
Boston Adventure
lurked behind the cadences and texture of Lowell’s prose and the mythographic scale of his portraiture—or perhaps it was the other way around: here were versions of stories that Lowell must have told Stafford back in the days when she was at work on her own Boston tableau. Certainly the young Lowell looking “
forward to the night when my bedroom walls would once again vibrate, when I would awake with rapture to the rhythm of my parents arguing, arguing one another to exhaustion” recalled Sonie on her pallet in Chichester, listening to the storm between her similarly beleaguered father and resentful mother. The echoes between that novel and Lowell’s almost surreal narrative reverberated back and forth in his images and in his
sentences, crammed with detail and alliteration: “
On the joint Mason-Myers bookplate, there are two merry and naked mermaids,” he wrote, and then let his tongue chase his observant eye in extravagant Staffordesque style as he described them, “lovely marshmallowy, boneless, Rubenesque butterballs, all burlesque-show bosoms and Flemish smiles.…”

In a letter to Peter Taylor after his autobiographical story “1939” appeared, Lowell characterized his own radically new effort at memoir. Taylor’s portrait had wounded him, he confessed, but also deeply impressed and influenced him: he was ready to mine his own past overtly. Stafford and Liebling would have recognized the lure of melding truth and fiction:

The struggle to find a creative balance between inventing and forgetting was one that Stafford knew all too well after years of trying to transform her life into a novel.
So did Liebling, who had been impatient with the simplistic journalistic distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity since the start of his career. Both of them, not unlike Lowell, were ready to try a new strategy, which meant turning more explicitly to autobiographical memories than they ever had before.

F
OLLOWING UP
on his fond courtship by correspondence, Liebling came back briefly to the United States at the beginning of 1957 for a visit with Stafford, who was in the process of leaving Westport and setting up house in an apartment at 18 East Eightieth Street. (“
I was moving so that the confusion was perpetual but, on the whole, sweet,” she wrote to a friend.) He also came back to sign a contract with Simon and Schuster for a book,
Normandy Revisited
, in which he made his present and past self the subject of his reporting. He agilely shifted between his tour of France as a well-seasoned writer in the mid-1950s and his earlier visits as a student and war correspondent. Digressive in the extreme (Liebling
alluded to the great meanderer Laurence Sterne, one of his favorite writers, in his subtitle,
A Sentimental Journey
), he was ironic about himself as the aging tourist in calm times and nostalgic about the younger intrepid Liebling.
The project was the natural culmination of his experiments in more ruminative journalism, as his biographer, Raymond Sokolov, has emphasized. Liebling was still the objective reporter, but he was on new subjective terrain as he probed his memories and juxtaposed versions of himself.

Stafford was having less luck with her obstinate autobiographical novel, arid back in New York, she made the most of the distractions, attending plenty of parties, going to the opera with Robert Giroux, being escorted to dinner by various men. During the spring, feeling frustrated by how little she had accomplished, she evidently wrote to Liebling that she might not join him in Europe in the summer of 1957 as they had planned. Liebling sympathized with her troubles: “
The book’s the thing to think about,” he agreed. With his usual directness, he addressed her fears of what companionship might mean for their work; he was evidently thinking beyond a summer rendezvous to longer-term arrangements, and he had some worries about productivity himself. He was willing to go slowly, and put work first. “
It may be all for the best,” he wrote to her in early spring, “if we don’t constrain each other to depart from our respective courses—we’re stars of such fiery portent and Roman-candlescent magnitude—and if I make you come to Europe when you want to be writing in Eightieth Street, or if you woo me to the Gideon Putnam Hotel when I want to be in Djerba, the one who concedes may catch with a slow burn difficult to extinguish.” It was revealing imagery—ostensibly celebratory of their careers, but in fact clearly anxious: the stars risked falling, the Roman candles might sputter. In a similar half-facetious but frank tone, Liebling touched on their other worry besides work—health. He had had bouts of renal colic, and Stafford had been in the hospital again with a series of complaints: “
I don’t understand why you are sick all the time. Maybe you are a hypochondriac? Did you ever hear of them? They are like a Christian Scientist in reverse.…”

But in early August, though Stafford still hadn’t made it to Europe, they both had work published in
The New Yorker
, and Liebling took it as an auspicious portent: “
The New Yorker married us again in the August 3 number …; a big story by you, then a long fact piece by me. As you
have it, we complement each other, and it makes a fine New Yorker, but I wonder whether it’s pure coincidence, or matchmaking” Whatever the Whites had in mind, Stafford did finally head for England not long after the issue appeared, to enjoy two months of unproductive pleasure, only somewhat marred by a severe bout of Asiatic flu for Liebling. When he was up to it, he wined her and dined her and kept her entertained (he met her at Southampton in a Rolls, took her to Paris to the races at Longchamp). When they returned home together in November, they took separate rooms at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, though they were clearly a couple. A concrete obstacle to marriage remained, since Liebling’s second wife kept stalling on a divorce.

Even when the divorce came through, they didn’t get married for another year and a half, both evidently hesitant about the prospect—though that wasn’t what they said. Stafford claimed they “
kept getting too busy to get married,” and their life certainly was rarely dull. Stafford enjoyed the unfamiliar ambience of Liebling’s crowd, especially Walt Kelly and John Lardner of the self-described “The Formerly Club,” who gathered at Bleeck’s (once the Artists and Writers Club, the New York
Herald Tribune
hangout). Perhaps it was the lack of bustle in their literary lives that gave them pause. Stafford wasn’t writing much, only a few articles and a weak story, and Liebling’s
Normandy Revisited
didn’t sell well when it came out in 1958. But they finally got married, on April 3, 1959, and they launched their wedded life in Liebling’s well-known style: the reception was held in his favorite haunt, Tim Costello’s bar, and they moved into an elegant apartment at 43 Fifth Avenue.

The question of how to balance work and life in each other’s company had by no means disappeared. In fact, Liebling and Stafford were headed for comparatively dry stretches in their careers. Companionship, at least during the first years they were married, was an exhilarating distraction. Liebling was avid and eclectic in his interests and in his friends—he loved the curious corners of New York, he adored France. He was devoted to his friend Jean Riboud, whom he had gotten to know in New York, where Riboud had come after emerging from Buchenwald and where he had since become a great success as an investment banker (and later became president of Schlumberger); and Liebling was devoted to his bar cronies. The couple was energetically social, eating out often, serving elaborate feasts in their apartment (Liebling had a loyal housekeeper, Madella, to help), keeping up with Liebling’s cast of eccentrics—
and Stafford fell for the combination of high style and low living. She had always yearned to be drawn out of herself, and he succeeded in keeping her entertained and extroverted as no one else had.

For the monumentally productive Liebling, his literary output in the late 1950s and early 1960s was still impressive: along with piecework for
The New Yorker
, though somewhat less of it, he wrote two more books. Most of
Between Meals
, another nostalgic memoir, this time of his youthful appetites, ran in
The New Yorker
during 1959 and the whole appeared in 1962. In 1961 he published
The Earl of Louisiana
, a book about Earl Long, the governor of Louisiana, which had been prompted by a suggestion from Stafford, who had been intrigued by the place and its peculiar natives ever since she lived there with Lowell. For Stafford, the record for writing was bleak. She wrote some book reviews, none of them major pieces; a few articles, the most substantial of which, “Souvenirs of Survival,” was a chatty memoir of coming of age during the 1930s; and several movie reviews for
Horizon
in 1961. In 1962 Farrar, Straus and Cudahy published
Elephi: The Cat with the High IQ
, an engaging children’s story that sometimes verged on whimsy. Stafford also retold two tales from the Arabian Nights for a Macmillan series, another less-than-full-scale fictional effort for her.

Only two more stories appeared during this time, neither of them in
The New Yorker
. Her exile from its pages coincided with the retirement of Katharine White, her longtime patron and champion at the magazine, but the stories—“The Children’s Game” and “The Scarlet Letter”—were both weaker than her best (as White herself frankly told her about the first, which was based loosely on her Brussels trip). Even “A Reasonable Facsimile,” the story that had appeared along with Liebling’s piece in the August 1957
New Yorker
, showed a certain strain as Stafford groped for material, skirting autobiography. Set in Colorado, it was an unusual story, about an old professor whose peace was destroyed by a predatory acolyte who invaded his life. It was far from her Vanderpool vein, and she explained to the Thompsons that it was pointless to mine it for personal clues: the model was not a teacher from her alma mater—or, for that matter, one of her subsequent mentors. The story was born of more detached inspiration: she had been reading the correspondence between Harold Laski and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

In retrospect, Stafford tentatively traced her creative block to contentment: “
During our marriage, which was short, I was
extremely
unproductive.
It was a source of woe to Joe. I could never figure out why it happened. Perhaps it’s too simple an explanation, but I was happy for the first time in my life. He thought that if I wasn’t writing, it meant I was unhappy with him.” Years before, during her sessions with Dr. Sherfey, she had tried out the same analysis: that suffering was the source of her inspiration, that a “cure” might mean the end of creativity. But she had also expressed skepticism about the portrait of the artist as neurotic, and she knew that happiness was not her imagination’s only enemy by any means. Some literary strain may have lurked between Stafford and Liebling.
She told Blair Clark that she feared her own writing might inhibit Liebling’s productivity, which can’t help sounding farfetched, but perhaps served as a partial excuse for silence.

What is more plausible is that Liebling’s productivity daunted her; certainly with Lowell, she had known the frustrating rhythm of fallow times for herself during his fertile stretches. But above all now it was more mundane, domestic distractions that slowed her down. These had always exerted a powerful lure, and her bustling life with Liebling gave her plenty of pretexts for avoiding her typewriter. Drinking, which Liebling alone of her husbands did little to discourage (he was hardly in a position to police appetites), now plainly encroached on her work—both as a source of her troubles with writing and as a solace in the face of them.

Another source of her creative block was, however, literary. Her difficulties, after all, had begun long before she met Liebling—and they were not very different from troubles she had had with another, much earlier novel,
In the Snowfall
. She herself had offered a revealing analysis of that struggle: her material had consisted of memories too powerful to work with. Back then, she had acknowledged what was plain from her unfinished pages, that Lucy McKee frustrated all her efforts at imaginative distance. Stafford hadn’t quite faced up to her father as an even more unmanageable figure lurking in the background of her story. But he clearly was an unwieldy presence—begging to be reshaped in her fantasies, yet stubbornly resisting it—and he continued to be unwieldy a decade and a half later as she floundered on her fourth novel. Lowell seems to have presented similar problems.

The surviving manuscript of her attempt at a novel is a tangle, encompassing several different drafts—or, rather, abortive starts of drafts, the same opening chapters rewritten again and again. In a version that was
envisaged as a sequel to
Boston Adventure
, usually titled
The Parliament of Women
or
The Dream of the Red Room
, she struggled to transform her life with Lowell into Sonie’s pilgrimage toward a terrifyingly empty maturity and to mix social satire of suburbia (modeled on Westport) and spiritual tragedy. In a draft labeled
The State of Grace
, generally subtitled
Varieties of Religious Experience
, Stafford was evidently trying a broader autobiographical novel. She had abandoned
Boston Adventure
as her base and was instead building on her Colorado past, opening with fiercely caricatured scenes of life among characters inspired by her Stafford and McKillop grandparents.