The Interior Castle (32 page)

In the spring of 1945 she received two awards. The National Institute of Arts and Letters gave her a one-thousand-dollar prize for
Boston Adventure
, and the Guggenheim Foundation granted her a fellowship to write the sequel to that novel. (Lowell had wanted to apply for a Guggenheim at the same time, but the Tates had discouraged him. No couple had ever won in the same year, and they judged Stafford the likelier candidate.) The prize was one more recognition, from the right highbrow quarters, of her past accomplishment. Even more important, the fellowship was an endorsement of her future efforts. In fact, nobody on the Guggenheim committee—nobody who had read Stafford’s work so far—could have foreseen the completely different kind of novel that she was about to start.

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1945 Stafford was ready to act on her home-owner dreams, thanks to her windfall from
Boston Adventure
—
roughly twenty thousand dollars by then. This was now house hunting in earnest. The Lowells’ lease at The Barn was up in July, and they headed for Maine. The couple rented a cottage in Boothbay Harbor, and the search for the ideal house began. Stafford found it in Damariscotta Mills, roughly fifteen miles inland from the coast. The fantasy she had described to Eleanor Taylor a year before had all but come true. “
It is about 100 years old,” she wrote to Cecile Starr in late August, “has a barn attached to it which we are going to make into two vast studios, has fine old trees, a 12 mile lake in the back yard and within a stone’s throw, the oldest Roman Catholic church north of southern Maryland.” The white clapboard house also had the old floor and numerous fireplaces that she had prescribed.

It needed a good deal of work as well, and home improvement was a preoccupation that Stafford was eager to introduce into her life. For the next six months, she coordinated repairs and renovations, often at long distance, since it was clear that she and Lowell couldn’t live there through the winter. In fact, they didn’t envisage living there full-time for quite a while, as Stafford explained to the Thompsons: “
I imagine it will be some years before we can live in it the year round—we can’t afford to yet and we’re frightened about isolation anyway.” Their Connecticut year had been surprisingly calm, given their less than placid marriage, but a small village in Maine was a true rural retreat—and the nearest city, Boston, was more problematic than New York. As the home of Lowell’s parents, it hardly provided a welcome relief for either Cal or Jean.

So at the same time that Stafford undertook elaborate home-improvement plans, the Lowells undertook elaborate house-sharing
plans with the Tates once again. They decided they would spend the fall and winter in Sewanee, Tennessee, with the Taylors for company along with the Tates, while work was under way in Maine. “
Two families living together always get in each other’s hair,” Gordon wrote jauntily in August, “but as far as we are concerned we would love to have you and Cal living with us again. We like living with the Lowells better than anyone else we’ve ever tried.” “The winter of four books” was the galvanizing memory.

The Monteagle sequel never happened, though amid the disarray that ensued instead, it proved to be a winter of two books.
In December of 1945 Lowell sent off the manuscript of
Lord Weary’s Castle
to Philip Rahv, who forwarded it to Lambert Davis at Harcourt, Brace a few weeks later;
Stafford had previously shown the poems to Giroux, who became the book’s editor. Then in January of 1946 Stafford herself signed a contract with Harcourt, Brace for
The Mountain Lion
. She had shown a draft to her editors, and she finished the novel that spring.

In retrospect, the collapse of the Sewanee arrangement—in fact, the whole course of that fall and winter—looks like an augury of troubles to come for Lowell and Stafford, as the Tates showed the way toward domestic chaos. All of a sudden in September Caroline and Allen announced that they were separating, so the Tennessee plan was off. Though unexpected, the abrupt separation (soon to be just as abruptly reversed) was not a total surprise. If anyone knew the Tates’ stormy marriage, it was the Lowells, and Allen’s girlfriends were legendary. For the next couple of months the Lowells heard all about the marital troubles—a divorce was planned for December—in letters from both Tates as well as from endless secondhand gossip.

In November Stafford was drawn into the drama. The Lowells had invited Gordon to camp out at Damariscotta Mills while they were in New York and Boston, and Stafford joined her one late weekend around Thanksgiving while Lowell stayed on in Boston. Doubtless abetted by drink, the visit unraveled into violence in a scene that outdid the traumatic fight between them in Monteagle. Gordon quizzed Stafford about Tate’s infidelities, and Stafford made the mistake of all too willingly supplying the names she knew. “
Everything crashed in a most terrifying event,” as Gordon began throwing and breaking things, prompting Stafford to call the police in a panic that once again seemed out of proportion. When her intimates (now Gordon, in the past Lowell) lost control
or perspective, she was seized by the fear that it was she who was losing her grip. “
I shouldn’t tell you all of this, for it will frighten you,” Stafford wrote to her sister Mary Lee in great distress, “but Cal will protect me and if I crack up, I will go to a sanitarium.” Her dread that she was losing her mind seemed outlandish—a Sonie Marburg nightmare—but in retrospect it, too, looks like a warning of troubles in store.

One extended literary family had been disastrously shaken. In mid-January of 1946 the Lowells tried another arrangement while they waited for winter to subside. They joined Delmore Schwartz and his cat (he had been divorced from his wife, Gertrude Buckman, two years earlier) on Ellery Street in Cambridge. “
One might think that this was not a household but a literary movement,” Schwartz wrote to Helen Blackmur, exulting in the trio’s productivity. In “To Delmore Schwartz” in
Life Studies
more than a decade later, Lowell was fondly, grandly nostalgic. It was a household in disarray—the poem was filled with drinking—but the poets were possessed, which was what they were convinced poets should be. The image of the mad artist prevailed in the poem, which implicitly predicted greatness and, as important, agony for its heroes. “
Underseas fellows, nobly mad, / we talked away our friends,” the speaker recalled. And Schwartz was given the dark variation on Wordsworth’s lines: “We poets in our youth begin in sadness; / thereof in the end come despondency and madness.”

Stafford the prose writer, though conspicuously absent from the poem, smoked and drank and typed along with them. And she joined in the talk, about their friends’ lesser fates and their own momentous ones. As John Berryman later wrote about his own sojourn in Cambridge with Schwartz, the heady expectation of fame was never far from their thoughts. Glory was to be not simply a reward for their labors but a guide for their lives. Berryman described the intoxicating ambience in a “Dream Song” addressed to Schwartz:

They fed each other’s ambitions, anticipating a public dimension for their private lives. Schwartz, who had already known success, relished the role of the encouraging mentor (he was trying to arrange a Briggs-Copeland lectureship at Harvard for Lowell). And it is safe to say that he led the way in conceiving of his life in heroically representative terms and in suggesting by example that autobiography could be the center of art. With his long poem
Genesis
(1943), he had aspired “
to ‘express’ the ‘Spirit of America.’ ” His autobiographical protagonist proclaimed: “
No matter where he was, what he felt, what event, he was to himself / The center of the turning world.” The mythologizing was not all golden. The poets, “nobly mad,” thought of themselves as in some sense in tune with the dark currents of their time, a theme Lowell later developed much more fully.

Stafford, who had tasted fame too, was caught up in the dramatic generalizing about themselves and about the Zeitgeist, as she recalled five years later. Among her contributions to the discussions was her Lucy story, a “
suicide that had come at the end of a spectacularly ugly life”—a dark tale that struck her and the poets as emblematic of the thirties: “The actions were motivated by the dislocations of the twenties that had still not been set right, by the depression, by the end of prohibition, by the New Deal.” It was her life written large, and “
my friends said I must write it down, that it was obviously my next novel and that it was, so to speak, ready made. I should write it, they said, just as I had told it to them.” She couldn’t start right away, since she was trying to finish
The Mountain Lion
, but she was inspired, as they were, by the prospect of tragic generational portraiture.

The manic harmony on Ellery Street lasted roughly two months. After a visit to the elder Lowells on Marlborough Street, Schwartz’s lurking envy of Lowell’s background turned to open resentment. The Brahmin surroundings and the implicit anti-Semitism were too much for him. The mentor became a tormentor, endlessly mocking the Lowell family. More serious, he began, according to his biographer, “
circulating malicious rumors” in an effort to undermine the Lowells’ marriage. (
His gossip was apparently about Stafford’s supposed interest in other men, among them him, which few friends credit as being serious.) To judge from a letter Stafford sent to Cecile Starr from Cambridge, this was not the first sign of tension. Dental work was keeping her in town, but Stafford had been feeling jittery in their temporary household for some time
and was ready to leave. In fact her letter, which progressed incongruously from jauntiness to bleakness, suggested a state of real agitation:

It is a revealing letter, which sets up correspondences among Stafford’s house, her work, and her health that are central to an understanding not just of this formative phase of her life with Lowell, but of the rest of her life as well. The house seemed to be the key element, which could distract her from and yet also support her in her creative and physical ordeals. Both she and Lowell were preoccupied (in significantly different ways) with the image of the castle at this point, a metaphor that points to the contrasting visions that seemed to be guiding their lives and work during this unsettled stretch. Stafford had been reading St. Teresa’s
Interior Castle
again during the summer of 1945 and probably reworking her accident story, in which she developed the analogy between chambers in a mansion, or castle, and the head. The castle, though under assault, offered refuge; the head, though buffeted by distractions, contained the safe inner sanctum where the soul could experience transcendence.

Lowell’s book of poems took its title,
Lord Weary’s Castle
, from an old English ballad, which he understood to tell a very different story from St. Teresa’s—the story of the apocalypse, as Steven Gould Axelrod has explained. In the ballad Lord Weary denied payments to Lamkin, the man who built his castle. Spurned, Lamkin came to the castle and killed Lord Weary’s family. The allegory Lowell intended, according to Berryman in his review of the volume in
Partisan Review
, was the end of days: Lord Weary’s castle was the modern world, a “
house of ingratitude, failure of obligation, crime and punishment,” and Lamkin was the Lord who destroyed “the faithless house He built.” On the title page of the manuscript, Lowell wrote, “
Death comes when the house is built.”

The Lowells called the house at Damariscotta Mills Lord Weary’s Castle, though for Stafford—at least at first, while it was being fixed with her money and her loving attention—it promised liberation. For Lowell, always more ambivalent about domesticity, it seemed to mean imprisonment. He and Stafford were increasingly tense around each other that winter, her drinking and his efforts to curb it a source of constant quarreling. Her obsession with the Maine house meant her withdrawal from him, and he found as many pretexts for escape as he could. He went on another Trappist retreat in late March, began taking long bird walks when he was at Damariscotta Mills, and went as often as possible to New York, where both Taylor and Jarrell were living. On his return from one trip to the city, he certainly didn’t repay his Lamkin in gratitude. Stafford described his reaction to her improvements in a letter to Taylor: “
When he came back and found the house fresh with all its wallpaper and its new paint, he exploded and said that it was cheap, that it was immoral, and that I had done the whole thing out of a sadistic desire to stifle him.”

Stafford by contrast was rejuvenated. Her letters about the ordeals of life in her unfinished house were filled with exhilaration and an uncharacteristic hardiness. She flipped the metaphor around: she likened the castle to her body, rather than her body to a castle—except that where the house was touchingly infirm, its habitually sickly proprietress was suddenly flourishing: “
We have had a taste of really rigorous country life: our pipes freeze and burst in the most heart-rending fashion,” she wrote to Allen Tate in January when they spent some time in Maine before going to Cambridge.