The Interior Castle (12 page)

Stafford’s reaction was strikingly mature; if the twenty-two-year-old felt devastated, she was not about to betray any emotionalism. In her reply to Burnett, she sounded like a diligent craftsman who had merely been trying out some tools of the trade, not expressing her deepest passions.
She showed herself capable of viewing her work with a coldly surgical eye:

As Stafford assured Burnett, the new book she was now embarked on was definitely not another personal miasma. It was a satire of
Stephens College, she announced, and she emphasized that it had the imprimatur of approval from her stricter teachers, his friend Ransom as well as Howard Mumford Jones, whom she had seen at the MLA conference in Chicago in December:

But Stafford was not quite the undaunted protégé that she claimed to be. As the rejections flowed in during the spring of 1938—she didn’t get a Houghton Mifflin fellowship, her Germany journal was turned down by Holt, by Farrar, and by Vanguard—she foundered. And then Stephens had its revenge on the teacher who so roundly ridiculed the institution. According to Stafford’s somewhat oblique accounts in letters, the head of her department informed her that she wouldn’t be invited back, citing complaints about her attitude from faculty and students. What was more peculiar was his insistence that she go to a doctor for a test, the
implication being that she had venereal disease; the suspicion was apparently based on gossip about the various ailments (colds, headaches, intestinal flu, a face rash) that had indeed continued to trouble her through the year. Stafford lashed back with a vehement denial, and apparently no medical proof was offered then (or has been offered since). After first backing down and offering to rehire her, the college in the end simply declined to renew her contract.

In her isolation, Stafford turned for sympathy not to the confraternity but to Evelyn Scott, a far less forbidding influence. Scott was full of encouragement (and solidarity: she wrote an outraged letter to the Stephens administration). She was also ready with disparagement of the “Tate-Ransom crowd.” Twenty-two years older than Stafford and an early and fervent feminist active in the women’s suffrage party in Louisiana, Scott had begun her literary career in Greenwich Village in 1920 with the publication of
Escapade
, a self-dramatizing account of her six-year sojourn in Brazil with a married man twice her age. Although Scott’s declamatory literary style, her romantic personal style, and her combative unconventionality made Stafford somewhat uneasy, they also answered a need. Scott spoke up for artistic instinct and impulse and criticized the intellectual and critical cabals from the outside. “
Davidson’s [
sic
] certainly right about Ransome’s [
sic
] book—‘solemnly silly’ it is,” she wrote to Stafford, evidently referring to
The World’s Body
, a collection of essays that Ransom published in 1938. “All that Tate-Ransom crowd has set out to revive ‘the mysteries’ in their worst meaning, in order that same Tate-Ransoms may be sure of dictatorial officiation at the altar. And yet they have genuinely at least minor talent.” She laid the ultimate blame for the claustrophobic enterprise on Pound, about whom she was scathing. “Pound has written some lovely lines that are his own,” she granted,

Scott’s letters at once presumed and urged a distancing from that select male circle; she addressed Stafford as a fellow outsider, and she argued that such ostracism was crucial to real creativity. At the same time, Scott presented herself as an earthy counterweight to the high priests. Her role, as she saw it, was to be an uncoercive source of encouragement, to urge artists like Stafford “
to cultivate their own real distinctions independently.” That did not seem to mean offering practical advice—in fact, Scott conveyed an air of ineffectualness as the spirited artist and outsider—but it certainly did mean extending extravagant praise: “
Your depth of insight convinced me not only of the talents I had already recognized but of vision for their application which must surely, at last, give America one grown-up artist—one, at last, capable of more than an inchoate pioneer’s challenge to Europe,” Scott wrote to Stafford, and summarily dismissed the competition. “So far, the men at their best are poetic babies, the women usually temperamental schoolmarms.… There is a tremendous Tightness about you—responding with your whole being, as the artist should, you leap ahead of the piecemeal education of years.”

T
HE CONFLICTING LESSONS
Stafford learned from her teachers involved more than artistic technique. Scott’s grand endorsement clearly implied a vision of artistic inspiration, not just of execution, of life, not just of craft. And it was not a vision that fit very comfortably with the outlook of Stafford’s other, less impetuous mentors. Stafford wasn’t sure she could, should, or wanted to respond with her “whole being,” whatever that might be construed to mean. Scott and Wolfe subscribed to the notion that the artist’s extraordinary “being” was the essence of his art, that his distinctive personal emotions made him remarkable, that a life of suffering was in some sense a sign of creative election. “
The crucifix of the artist,” Scott wrote Stafford after one of her many spring disappointments, her bad news about the Houghton Mifflin fellowship, “is in a measure due to the fact that his very impressionableness, which heightens his sense of life generally, also heightens his susceptibility to false or dampening atmosphere.”

The dictum of Eliot’s that loomed behind the views of the “Tate-Ransom crowd” sounded almost diametrically opposed: “
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.” But the notion wasn’t exactly straightforward. Ostensibly erecting a barrier between art and life, Eliot’s pronouncement actually acknowledged that the artist’s personal passions were indeed the motivating material, however separate they were from the aesthetic effect of his creation. Eliot’s prescription of impersonality rested on an intimate, if negative, relation between life and art: “
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Tate’s teaching was a similarly confusing guide to the relations between art and life; its contradictoriness forcibly struck Lowell when he first arrived in Tennessee. On the one hand, Tate declared that art had nothing to do with feeling but only with craft; on the other hand, his belief that “
each poem he finished would be his last” implied unqualified, total commitment. “
We claimed,” Lowell recalled much later in life, “the whole man would be represented in the poem.”
For all the anti-romanticism of the formalists, they too inescapably implied that suffering was ultimately a requirement of the true artist who aimed at producing “significant” aesthetic effect, even if the connection between the “personal emotion” and the “art emotion” was impossible to trace in any useful way.

Stafford later called the summer of 1938 “
the worst summer of my life.” Her personal life and artistic career were in disarray, and she seemed continually, sometimes desperately, off balance. She had been rebuffed by Stephens and rejected by editors, but two men were clearly very interested in her. She and Hightower had a long-awaited reunion that summer, and their correspondence increasingly turned to questions of their future, apart or together. Meanwhile, Lowell was evidently pressing his case. Stafford struggled on paper with her experience, not sure whether her aim was to escape it or to express it. She was distracted by the dilemma she had confronted as a student, which was now posed with a new seriousness: What kind of constructive relation could she hope to establish between her susceptibility to a disorderly life and her aspirations for art? Stafford’s response was, characteristically, a mixture of extremes: a desire for ascetic detachment—an escape from her personality and emotions—and an instinct for romantic self-dramatization.

Without a job and without a publisher in the summer of 1938, Stafford headed home, which now was Oswego, Oregon, where her parents had moved roughly two years earlier, following Dick, who had left Colorado for the Northwest. Stafford’s destination inspired anxiety, and her
trip out West was far from emotionally calm. She met Hightower in Albany, and they boarded a train to Michigan, where he was to pick up a car for his father, which he would then drive home to Salida, Colorado. On the way, he declared his love, and in Geneseo, Illinois, he booked one room in a motel for the two of them. But Stafford balked at going to bed
with him. Frustrated and furious, he was tempted to put her on a bus, but he weakened the next morning: her company was too good to part with, so they carried on. In Salida, Stafford suddenly decided she was in love, and though they didn’t sleep together, she and Hightower enjoyed several infatuated days. “
I started loving you just after we got on the wrong road or thought we got on the wrong road up to Salida and it was a nice night,” Stafford wrote shortly after her visit. “One of the things was the way your right wrist looks when it’s driving a car. Another was that I began thinking and realizing that you are the only person who
always
laughs at the right things.”

The cheerful mood of infatuation was fleeting.
During a stopover in Boulder, her erstwhile mentor Edward Davison was less than encouraging, observing that her career wasn’t going anywhere and counseling marriage as the alternative, and
the Thompsons remarked that she seemed completely at loose ends. Then, after an uncomfortable train ride, Stafford arrived in Oswego, to confront again the marriage and the career that most depressed her. Her father, who worked as a carpenter in the Portland shipyards, seemed to her more eccentric than ever, and her mother more infuriatingly conventional, urged on in her banal domesticity by her sister Ella, who had come to live with them. Stafford’s spirits were low as she awaited replies to the job applications she had sent out, but she did her best to rally by turning to her writing. In despair she checked the empty mailbox every morning, and with discipline she sat down at her desk each day to work, mostly on her Stephens novel. She emphasized the strictness of her literary regimen to Hightower: “
I have a desk here and privacy. My books are available. The light is good. The desk is a large, rectangular table.… I cannot work when I feel I am living in a week-end; I am not a success when I am writing on the arm of a chair or on a front porch. I have to be
inside
at a stationary desk.”

She also stressed her efforts to impose structure on the novel about Stephens, lamenting the laxness that came too naturally. “
I am doing in it exactly what I did in
Which No Vicissitude
and it’s no good,” she wrote to Hightower at one point. “I realize that what Whit Burnett says is true—words, merely, unsupported by thought or action are utterly dull.” She was making a concerted effort to establish a sense of distance from and control over her material: “It is funny and insofar as possible I am going to keep it on the comic side as I feel that is healthier and probably a more effective vehicle for satire,” she informed Hightower, and then
described her specific strategy, which was to steer clear of an autobiographical perspective. “The desperate, soulful elements will be introduced through a student. I just got that idea and think it is a good one. My protagonist is not an artist.”

From the chapters of the manuscript that remain, it’s clear that Stafford had real trouble sustaining her satiric distance in her portrait of Stephens. She began with well-etched comic scenes of elegantly robed teachers and scantily clad girls lining up for the opening-day procession at Neville, as she called the school. But Stafford’s caricature of commercialized education was cut short, for she succumbed to the temptation to plumb the disoriented soul of Gretchen Marburg, her autobiographical protagonist, an unhappy teacher at the school. Abruptly her language loosened, the momentum slowed, and the comic edge was dulled as alienated, persecuted Gretchen took over the narrative. Perhaps sensing the problem, Stafford tried another tack on the subject, a nonfictional treatment, which would presumably enforce greater objectivity. A visit from her brother, now a forest ranger, may have helped inspire it. “
A rather nice gent,” as she wrote to Hightower, Dick Stafford breezed in as a model of contented anti-academicism; “the original critic of colleges,” he did not “believe in working except with his hands.” During the summer, alongside the novel, she wrote an article entitled “A Manicure with Your Diploma,” which she sent off to the
Atlantic Monthly
—only to receive one more rejection, on the grounds that the magazine had already printed its quota of acid commentary about education.