The Interior Castle (20 page)

In Baton Rouge, a deep passivity seemed to come over her in the face of Lowell’s fervent mission. This time, instead of straying from the path, she was pulled along by Lowell. “An Influx of Poets” dramatized her unconsciously acquiescent detachment as her husband, whom she called Theron in her story, swept her up in his all-consuming new cause:

Stafford’s protagonist was both observant and distracted, accurately sizing up Theron’s teacher but then stunned to discover her own situation: the priest’s “austerity was right up Theron’s alley, and before I knew what had happened to me, I had been dragged into that alley which was blind:”

What Stafford left out of the story was her own alternative mission, writing. She was groping there, too, but it was clear that she felt her efforts at literary discipline, at greater control of her craft, offered a more congenial route to order and meaning than the religious observances that Lowell urged ever more forcefully. She was also skeptical of the emphasis on criticism. She worried that Lowell was neglecting his poetry: “
Cal is to make a new edition of Herbert which will be published by LSU Press. He is immensely respected here, particularly by Cleanth Brooks who asks his advice on all literary questions,” she wrote to Hightower proudly, but she went on to express apprehensions. “Cal has not written any poetry for five months and I would rather have him a poet first and
by his merit establish his invulnerability.” She knew how difficult it was to claim writing as her priority amid her many mundane preoccupations, and yet it was an important source of stability and self-definition for her; she was afraid of the effect of divine preoccupations on Lowell—and on herself. Through the winter and spring, while her daily life with Lowell became more difficult and the devotional routine more demanding, Stafford was at last experiencing a literary breakthrough of sorts. Her faith was frail, and a source of conflict with Lowell, but her religious struggles proved to be important inspiration for her writing.

E
ARLY IN THE FALL
, Stafford evidently tried to explain to Evelyn Scott something of her newly structured approach to writing. To judge by Scott’s alarmed reply, Stafford emphasized impersonality—not what her former teacher wanted to hear. Apparently she didn’t, however, mention the growing role of Catholicism in her life with Lowell. Her quest for some external discipline and vision to guide her writing seems to have been cast in more general terms. As she had at the Writers’ Conference, Scott urged rebellious independence and vigorous self-expression:

But Stafford was clearly in a humble, methodical frame of mind about her writing. She was prepared to be a ruthless judge of the inchoate outpourings that had so far proved unpublishable. She was determined to address a creative dilemma: she needed a larger framework of meaning and symbolism for her writing, yet also a closer focus on concrete detail. In the same letter to Hightower in which she had worried over Lowell’s neglect of his writing, she calmly assessed her own literary situation. She was heartened by progress on a story that drew on a daydream of a peaceful room that she had obviously discussed with Hightower before:

She was right that the “present” story was a turning point. Based on her experience in the hospital after the accident with Lowell two years earlier, the
twenty-seven-page manuscript (never published) was in a sense her answer to Lowell’s poem “On a Young Lady Convalescing from a Brain-Injury but Unable to write a novel in Concord, Mass.” It was a story about that convalescence, in which she discovered a key scene for her first novel,
Boston Adventure
, and sketched a draft of what was to become perhaps her best-known story, “The Interior Castle” (1946). She had, in fact, found the deep symbolic landscape that informed her fiction for many years.

St. Teresa of Avila was her inspiration. Stafford’s account in “An Influx of Poets” of her discovery of the saint is revealing. “
Theron once told me that I was going through the dark night of the spirit and I should meditate and read John of the Cross. I did, with a certain kind of recognition, read St. John’s friend Teresa’s ‘Interior Castle.’ …” The emphasis was on a disobedient independence of mind: told to read St. John, she read St. Teresa instead. Her need was less for abstract meditation than for some sense of empathy, and she gravitated to the more accessible Spanish saint, and a woman, to find it. It could hardly have been more symmetrically scripted. While Lowell set about mastering the intellectual intricacies of Catholic doctrine, Stafford made her way to a mystic—and not to the Thomistic St. John recommended by her husband but to untutored, colloquial Teresa.

St. Teresa was a very suitable teacher, well known for her merciful concern about recalcitrant creatures. In particular the saint sympathized with certain weaknesses of the soul that Stafford felt she knew well. St. Teresa didn’t assume a focused, contemplative intellect, and she was notably lenient about two other handicaps, a wayward will and a vivid imagination. In fact, she took pains to explain that she was not writing
for those with methodical minds and good concentration. “
It would be a mistake if you pay attention to what I say about prayer,” she told the clearheaded, recommending instead the standard texts about discursive meditation as useful instruction for them. Her audience, she emphasized, consisted of those with “souls and minds so scattered that they are like wild horses no one can stop.” And she understood that discipline, though essential, was best applied less stringently to these at once fierce and fragile wills.

St. Teresa’s tolerant, practical attitude as a teacher was mirrored by her tone as a writer, which made her a particularly good guide for Stafford. Teresa’s style was marked by its wit and colloquial intimacy. She was not an intimidating adept delivering gnomic insights, but a woman struggling to give some expression to the ineffable, some structure to amorphous mysteries. Sympathetic to the weaknesses of her students, she acknowledged versions of them in herself—or at any rate set out to accommodate them in her own methods. Thus she made no pretense to rigorous intellectual presentation. Instead, she emphasized her humble role as amateur thinker, putting pen to paper only because she had been instructed to do so, and even then being constantly distracted from her task by all sorts of other business. Throughout her most famous work,
The Interior Castle
, she lamented how often she had been interrupted and she apologized for losing her place, for repeating herself, for failing to be clear.

But the greatest distinction of St. Teresa’s style was its metaphoric profligacy. Though all mystical writings necessarily work through concrete symbols and analogies, Teresa was renowned for her extravagant recourse to elaborate imagery—certainly compared with her follower John, whose poetry employed spare, archetypal symbols and whose prose tended to more abstract terminology. (“
To judge by his language alone,” the editor of his complete works commented, “one might suppose at times that he is speaking of mathematical, rather than of spiritual operations”) Where John devoted himself, in a large proportion of his classic,
The Ascent of Mount Carmel
, to urging a vigilant mistrust of the imagination and its visions as impediments to true communion with God, St. Teresa based her classic,
The Interior Castle
, on a trust in vision. She urged her readers to imagine “
our soul to be like a castle made entirely out of a diamond or very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms,
just as in heaven there are many dwelling places.” And she proceeded to describe the edifice, its dangers and its potential delights, in vivid detail.

St. Teresa’s colloquial welcome to the wayward spirit and her invitation to the imagination clearly spoke to Stafford as little else on Lowell’s Catholic reading list did. She was looking for some form in which to conjure with the pain of consciousness, the sense of estrangement that was the emerging subject of her fiction—and the persisting fact of her life. In
The Interior Castle
she found a powerful set of images to help her translate the kind of psychological agonies she had visited upon her character Gretchen into the terms of a spiritual ordeal. Teresas supremely tantalizing and inaccessible castle—a series of glimmering, receding chambers, beset by wicked serpents at its walls—provided Stafford with a central symbol: the bounded circle of the self, in thrall to darkness without and in search of illumination within. Teresa taught the way from the outer, cloudy chambers where the senses were besieged to the inner, irradiated room where the soul met God. For the devoted and blessed among her students, the prison house became a transcendent palace.

The castle was an encompassing mystical metaphor for Stafford to work into her own, more mundane writing. As she acknowledged to Hightower, her first efforts were “obscure, allegorical.” But she was striving for greater concreteness, and it seems clear that William James in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(a title she later considered borrowing for a novel she never finished) helped her make the crucial bridge between the empirical and the spiritual. It is no surprise that she would have turned to him in her religious travails, for she, like so many others in the 1940s, was avidly reading his brother; it was the peak of the Henry James revival in America. William James’s acute description of the physical, psychological, and epistemological qualities of religious consciousness offered a perspective that might well have spoken to Stafford as she tried to adjust to life with Lowell the convert. In particular, James’s chapter on mysticism seems to have provided one footnote that was evidently just what she needed.

The chapter turned to St. Teresa, whom James cited as “
the expert of experts” on the ultimate mystical state, but first he paused to probe a more accessible stage of mystical experience. “
I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol,” he explained,
and elaborated: “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.… It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core.” Stafford certainly would have recognized this route to illumination, or at least warmth, through alcohol. She had been drinking far more than casually ever since college. But it was James’s reflections on more presentable, medical anesthetics that seem to have pointed her toward a profane, literary approach to divine Teresa. In a lengthy footnote James quoted the firsthand account of “
a gifted woman [who] was taking ether for a surgical operation”—a woman, clearly, with whom Stafford had something in common. “I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remembered having heard it said that people ‘learn through suffering,’ ” the woman began, “and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much that I said aloud, ‘to suffer
is
to learn.’ ” She then proceeded to describe what she saw, which “was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words.” Her experience was of merciless torture suddenly issuing in enlightenment:

Stafford too was a gifted woman who had become well versed in the varieties of anesthetic experience, and of pain, thanks to operations on her head after the accident. While her skull was aching as she worked on
Autumn Festival
, she explored the path from physical suffering to some kind of metamorphosis of the spirit, however fleeting. There was a curious trial run of the notion of anesthesia as revelation in the manuscript of that novel. The passage stood out, an incongruous digression in her narrative. Stafford didn’t try to integrate it, but was intrigued by its possibilities: