The Interior Castle (14 page)

Stafford’s thoughts on the question of competitive ambition must have been prompted in part by her correspondence with Lowell. Unlike Hightower, he certainly wasn’t lacking in zealous dedication to his calling and was doubtless wooing her in fiercely literary terms—as fierce as her own. That must have been a challenge, but it may well also have been a relief to meet her match, an admirer who was equally divided about the allure of art and of love. For there was a selfish safety in mutual artistic determination, as Stafford clearly understood. There was also real danger if that determination wasn’t equal, warned Evelyn Scott, whom Stafford evidently wrote for advice on her dilemma:

It was a less than romantic way to conceive of marriage—a calculated alliance of artistic talent. Stafford made very little effort to couch her attitude in emotional form, to smooth over the abrupt rebuffs. In fact, she sometimes seemed to go out of her way to be blunt and cold to Hightower, as if her unsentimental style were a sign of her literary seriousness and thus a justification of it. It is difficult to tell how much true confidence lay behind her surface displays of certainty in her talent, or how much her assertive coolness toward Hightower was bolstered by a dalliance with Lowell.

The likelihood is that Stafford’s stern pose as ascetic writer was none too firm, especially given how quickly it crumbled in September. Suddenly she had occasion to question her attractiveness and her talent, and her attitude was radically transformed. First Hightower told her that in the course of their summer frustrations he had fallen in love with a music
teacher in Salida. He delivered the news in person at her sister Mary Lee’s ranch in Hayden, where he and Jean finally met at the end of August after months of aborted plans for a visit. Stafford was devastated, even though she herself had already announced that they shouldn’t pretend any longer that they were in love. Soon after their visit, she left to enroll at the University of Iowa, where she had belatedly been offered a fellowship—the one good piece of official mail she had received all summer. Although it promised to be the perfect solution to her problems (“
That’s the place where you substitute a novel for a dissertation, so most of the year I could be writing,” she happily told Hightower), she was depressed almost as soon as she arrived. “
I hate all this,” she wrote to him at the end of September. “I hate it like hell and I shan’t like it any better as time goes on. I am not smart enough for this place. My colleagues are all intense, erudite young men with PhD’s who make jokes about Gothic jan stem verbs at which I cannot very well laugh.” In her misery she was up to her typical wit, but the rest of the letter suggested the extent of her desperation.

That letter was the first in a month-long succession of cries for help that could hardly have sounded less like the summer’s declarations of self-reliance. To be sure, she was practiced at expressing histrionic rage at her plight, and Hightower was used to hearing it—and even to venting it on occasion, though he generally saw and put things, not least himself, in a distinctively steady, unillusioned perspective. But what was utterly unfamiliar about Stafford’s stream of letters was the rhetoric of romantic love with which she responded to a crisis that clearly dwarfed her Stephens agonies or her summer troubles. “
Darling (oh, hell, I can’t help it. I cannot be a Modern Woman. I want you with every muscle in my body and every dream in my soul) what are we waiting for?” Framed in altogether uncharacteristic, clichéd language, her declarations of love sound unsettlingly inauthentic. It wasn’t that they were purposefully deceitful claims about emotions that didn’t exist. Rather, they sound like desperate efforts to conjure up feelings that didn’t come naturally, if they came at all. Her dilemma was a variation on the problem of “words, merely, unsupported by thought or action” that she encountered in her fiction. In her love letters that fall she seized on the most well-worn words, counting on them, issued in overwrought abundance, to summon forth in her the sentiments conventionally attached to them. Suddenly the possibility of romantic, imaginative engagement with another person
seemed to offer the only escape from the suffocation of her own sensibility, “
the
sickness of my soul,” as she put it.

It implied a subordination of the artistic imperatives that only a month before had been paramount. Then Stafford had firmly denounced domestic yearnings on the grounds that they threatened to undermine more elevated literary aspirations; now she emphatically endorsed them. All calculated planning about which circumstances would be most conducive to creativity seemed to have become irrelevant. Stafford’s proposal was that she come immediately to Cambridge to join Hightower, who was understandably disoriented by this sudden about-face. The single-minded writer had been replaced by an equally single-minded woman. “
I want to be a woman,” she proclaimed to Hightower in that same first letter, “and I want to be your woman.” Susceptible to her avowals, he was also wary (and weary), unable to tell “
if you have told the truth this time” and unprepared to endure yet another disappointment.

Her response a few days later was a revealing rhetorical performance, a four-page handwritten letter with barely a blot. It began with a calm reinterpretation of their past, in essence explaining her succession of rebuffs as a gradual progression toward intimacy, and it culminated with a lyrical declaration of her mature passion, her arrival at womanhood. It is a strange document, detached despite Stafford’s efforts to convey real immediacy of feeling, studied even though she clearly aspired to spontaneous sincerity. Every love letter is a delicate balance between saying what one feels and what one thinks will sway the beloved; ideally, the two are so interdependent that the distance between them effectively disappears. The poignancy of Stafford’s letter is that it was so transparently manipulative—and that the audience she aimed to seduce was not simply, or even primarily, Hightower but herself. She all but acknowledged her own need, explaining her previous outpouring and prefacing this one by telling him that she was “sick … of
not
being sentimental, not romantic, not womanly.” An extended passage showed Stafford’s anxious efforts to convey, and to feel, a sense of connection to a consciousness and a body beyond her own. But even as she reached for physical confirmation of her abstract declarations, she seemed to shy off into sentimental fantasy:

Hightower was thoroughly bewildered by Stafford’s soliloquy. By now he had reason to suspect a disproportion between what she expressed on paper and in person, but it wasn’t, as she said, that paper cramped her style. On the contrary, distance and the mediation of written words seemed to act as a stimulant for her—not simply to uncover buried feelings but often to invent desires and imperatives out of needs and doubts. Hightower was hesitant to succumb to the prose, sensing how uncertain the underlying passions were, yet the temptation was there. “
I have not read your letter again; I am afraid to,” he told her in tribute to her powers of persuasion, but he also chided her for exploitation. “I hope you realize that it was unfair. You ought not take advantage of your art in [this] situation.”

Whether or not Stafford realized it was unfair, she was frantic, and for the rest of October they exchanged letters, hers protesting love and impatience for their reunion, his more hesitant and practical—he had no money, he would have to find a new place to live—though increasingly ardent. Her letters, as his reaction attested, had worked their intended
effect. “
My love for you is as [last summer] a complex of many kinds of love, but it is as a woman that I most want you,” Hightower wrote in early October. “For it is only with your last letters that I have realized you are a woman, and a woman that I am passionately in love with.” By the end of the month he had found rooms and urged Stafford onward—only to receive a stunning response from her. With the same suddenness as it had begun, the romantic rhetoric ceased and the remote writer reappeared. She couldn’t come, she stated flatly: “
I want to be impetuous, but I know that we would be probably regretful. I hope you will receive this with a combination of relief and disappointment.”

Her reasons were partly the practical considerations she had previously ignored—no money—but above all they were literary. Stafford explained that she had started writing again and touted a day-old project with the greatest confidence: “This book, I think, may sell.” She eagerly outlined her theme to Hightower, perhaps realizing that it was an indirect way of acknowledging and half-explaining her schizophrenic behavior. Her subject, she explained, was the dilemma of the woman writer in search of some integration of her literary and emotional identities:

What is most striking is not the vagueness of Stafford’s plan, but the certainty with which she outlined an experience of integration that so clearly eluded her. In the very same letter in which she declared to Hightower the need to establish separate compartments for literature and love, she announced as her fictional theme the fundamental unnaturalness of such a distinction. In fact, she herself directly confronted that contradiction in closing. “I know this sounds frightfully matter-of-fact,” Stafford
wrote in her last paragraph, acknowledging the great transformation of the romantic soliloquist of a few days before. “It is something I do not understand. Sometimes I feel that I really
do
have a masculine mind. I cannot otherwise explain how it is that loving you as I do I can separate myself from you for the sake of my book.”

Or could it have been in part for the sake of Cal Lowell? Stafford was obviously very confused, and the clarity of that letter was a deceptive, and probably self-deceiving, illusion. Only a few days after declaring her intention to stay at Iowa, Stafford fled in the middle of the night, telling Hightower she was on her way. Once again, she was ready to be romantically impetuous, but it wasn’t exactly pure love for Hightower that spurred her on. On her way to Boston, she met Lowell in Cleveland. She gave a rather flippant account of their meeting in a letter to her third admirer, Bill Mock: “
I wrote him [Lowell] and said meet me [in Cleveland] and he did and we drank a good deal of beer and he said he was in love with me and wd. I marry him and to avoid argument I said sure, honey, drink your beer and get me another one.” From there she went to New York, where she spent what she later described as “
some rather scary days” alone in Manhattan (Lowell had gone back to Kenyon), not eating and staying in run-down hotels. Finally, several days late, she went on to Boston. The lure apparently was not simply Hightower waiting with an apartment, but a message from A. G. (Archie) Ogden, an editor in the Atlantic Monthly Press book division to whom she had written about her Neville novel. He had invited her to lunch with the editors.

Just what kind of a mind did she have? Stafford was clearly asking herself that question when she arrived in Cambridge, her disequilibrium no longer merely a matter of words but of actions. Once again Evelyn Scott sent on reassurances that her romantic impulsiveness was proof of her artistic spirit—proof not so different from the evidence Scott herself had provided some twenty years earlier in disappearing to Brazil. “
There is nothing ‘pathological’ (heaven forbid such nonsense) in your having done this, though of course it is all ‘unrealistic’—I mean disappearing is almost impossible as the world shrinks,” she wrote Stafford on November 12: