The Interior Castle (33 page)

She used similar anthropomorphic imagery for her invalid house in most of the homesteading letters she sent her friends that winter and early spring.

And though she wrote to Cecile Starr, in terms similar to those she used for her house, that her new novel was “pallid and loose-jointed,” the truth was that she was nearly finished with the most vivid and taut
novel she ever wrote. Her work, like her body, seemed to be thriving while her house was convalescing. As Stafford herself later said of her first and second novels, “
They were entirely different books, those two.” She could hardly have strayed further from the sequel to
Boston Adventure
she had initially planned. As she explained it,

Though she emphasized the contrast, Stafford recognized that her second novel did not represent a radical transformation in her as a writer. On the contrary, she felt that the two books expressed two poles of her imagination, equally important. “What I would like eventually to do,” she said, “is to fuse the two manners.” From James she had traveled to Twain, an incongruous pair of models who had seen nothing in each other but in both of whom Stafford found a great deal.

The Mountain Lion
was Stafford’s emphatically American book. She had discovered a colloquial voice that could barely be glimpsed in the elegance of her earlier prose, and she had perfected her gift for staging small epiphanies in her choice of concrete details. In her trim new novel she let those details do their work and dispensed with the discursive integuments she had favored in
Boston Adventure
. She was “
less inclined,” as Lambert Davis at Harcourt, Brace praised her, “towards some of those baroque effects that we talked about in connection with the first book.”

At the end of that book, she had left Sonie on the brink of maturity after what amounted to a protracted adolescence, in which Sonie watched but did not participate in a decadent drama of another woman’s coming-of-age. In fact, each fateful step Hope took toward sex and marriage meant greater passivity for Sonie, who was deprived of Philip and exiled to the periphery. Hope’s death left her facing adulthood, disillusioned and disoriented. Sonie’s future seemed to require some form of transcendence, but Stafford left it far from clear that art was the answer. Her subsequent plans suggested that she had decided religion might hold out hope for her.

But from the start Stafford had trouble pursuing her
Boston Adventure
plot: she couldn’t carry Sonie forward into the future. Instead, she ended up replaying the past, with a new set of characters, in
The Mountain Lion
. It was a novel about childhood, and about the death of childhood. In a sense, it was a radically revised version of Book One of
Boston Adventure
, with a denouement that solved the larger question: for Stafford’s new heroine, there would be no maturity. The key to the revision of Sonie’s childhood was Stafford’s shift from a mythic rendition of the ordeals of childhood to a much more directly autobiographical treatment. Set in California and Colorado and drawing on her own family lore, the novel was nonetheless far from nakedly confessional: she did not abandon the edict of impersonality. But like Lowell, who was beginning in some of the poems of
Lord Weary’s Castle
to attempt more personal themes, Stafford now seemed more prepared to consult her own experience. Still, it had to be experience at some remove, and her childhood proved to be an accessible subject. By contrast, she evidently had difficulty drawing from her more immediate, mature life of religious and marital turmoil—and of artistic success—as she contemplated her original sequel. It was a problem that had first presented itself years before in her initial unpublished efforts,
Which No Vicissitude
and
Autumn Festival
. Writing about her recent past—her college and German adventures—she had found herself struggling unsuccessfully to overcome a solipsistic self-loathing.

In
The Mountain Lion
Stafford discovered a new comic and symbolic clarity with which to tell a tragic story. The shaping vision, as she said more than once, came almost unbidden. The novel does seem to have been written more directly from the subconscious than Stafford was used to, certainly more than her first book was. Begun in the summer of 1945, it was finished roughly nine months later, in April of 1946—remarkably rapid progress, especially given the many distractions of that fall and winter. To be sure, it was not half the length of
Boston Adventure
, but it was written with a degree of polish that suggests longer labors, particularly for as dogged a reviser as Stafford. When she wrote to Cecile Starr in March about its loose jointedness, she gave no hint of arduous readjustments she had already made—and made with astonishing swiftness. Between January and April (she had one particularly productive stretch alone at Damariscotta Mills, while Lowell was off on one of his trips), she apparently reconceived the basic structure and dynamic of the novel in a radical way. This time, the transformation was definitely not
to tame her story—as she had needed to do with
Boston Adventure
, correcting for its melodramatic tendencies. Instead, she reworked the novel so that it addressed even more directly a theme that had lately surfaced as an especially fraught one: her relationship with her brother, whose death had evidently roused powerful memories.

In a letter early in 1946, Robert Giroux, back from the navy and again her editor, exclaimed over Stafford’s revision and offered a quick reading of the newly aligned novel. His analysis makes a good introduction to the strange and poignant love story of ten-year-old Ralph and eight-year-old Molly Fawcett, brother and sister, whose path to maturity led them away from their California home to the rigors of Colorado—where, when the story closed six years later, they were lost to each other:

Giroux emphasized what few readers do: that Ralph’s story was really in the foreground, rather than Molly’s. At least that was the way Stafford had originally structured the novel, as Giroux’s letter indicated. And in fact, it was true of the finished novel as well, in which Molly’s character emerged largely through Ralph’s perceptions of her. Yet as Stafford revised and Molly loomed larger, it was that “
creature of funny precocity and awful pathos,” as the poet Robert Fitzgerald characterized Molly in a review, who gradually usurped the more memorable place in the novel. Much of her power derived, in fact, from her peripheral and passive position. And Molly’s pathos was awful rather than sentimental because Stafford successfully distanced her, even as she granted her a growing role. It was a difficult feat. As Stafford revealed in a distraught letter to Lowell written a year later from the hospital, where she had gone in a
state of nervous collapse, Molly was a creature far too close for comfort. In the midst of psychological turmoil, Stafford saw the book, that girl, and her own life as inextricably and tragically connected:

Precisely that agonized identification was what Stafford avoided in the novel itself, where a kind of merciless sympathy was at work. As one critic has noted, it is a “
double bildungsroman”—the intertwined stories of siblings who journey from childhood union to adolescent conflict to a final resolution, in this case tragic. For Stafford, this pairing was a variation on the device of doubling that already in her first novel had been a key to dramatizing the idiosyncratic development of her autobiographical protagonist. Both Nathan and Hope served as foils to Sonie, characters who lived out alternate fates while she watched from the sidelines, frustrated—and yet also in her peculiar, self-punishing way fulfilled—by her own marginal status. Using these second selves, Stafford had found a way to avoid the monstrous solipsism of Sonie’s predecessor, Gretchen Marburg.

In
The Mountain Lion
the doubling was much more explicit. These two bespectacled misfits were equally sickly, ugly, precocious, and unconventional, and they shared pride in their pariah status, defiantly scornful of their conformist mother and two older sisters (Mr. Fawcett had died years before). But Ralph, two years older, was beginning to feel the pull
of a world beyond their idyll of estrangement, whereas Molly was unable to imagine any other life. Her devoted solidarity with Ralph increasingly seemed to him an imposition rather than a gift, and he felt guilty for his apostasy:

Through Ralph’s ambivalent vision—he was disoriented by the distance he felt opening between him and his sister—Molly’s hopeless loyalty emerged as a moving mixture of the noble and the neurotic. As the novel progressed and Molly slipped further into her own isolated world, Stafford used the peculiar pair to offer different perspectives on her alienation, the view from the outside and from the inside. Ralph, growing into a newly vigorous body and strong desires, watched his sister barricade herself within her eccentric mind, denying maturity. If Stafford had wanted to test that quality she feared she didn’t have, compassion, she couldn’t have set more exacting conditions for herself. She succeeded in making Molly—“
this scrawny, round-shouldered tall thing, misanthropic at the age of twelve,” saddled with brains and bitterness and “a savagely satiric nature”—a tragic figure. In Stafford’s pages, the suffering of children could not be more serious.

Doubling was the principle of the entire, studiously symmetrical novel—which itself was a curiously inverted reflection of her first novel. As Giroux’s letter indicated, the basic dichotomy of
The Mountain Lion
was between the
Bonney merchants and the Kenyon men, between effete California and rugged Colorado. The division oriented the world for Ralph and Molly, who started out the novel eagerly awaiting the annual visit of their favorite relative, Grandpa Kenyon—and who were devastated when he collapsed, dead, on the front porch. The rest of the novel traced their troubled shuttling between the two poles—between their tame California home and the Colorado ranch where they began to spend summers with Grandpa Kenyon’s son, Uncle Claude.

It was the redskin-paleface distinction of
Boston Adventure
viewed this time from the Twainian, rather than the Jamesian, perspective. And this time the raw frontier won out over the cultivated city. Sonie yearned for
an escape to the orderly capital; Ralph and Molly dreamed of escaping from the “
sissy life” presided over by their mother and sisters and their ancestors on the Bonney side of the family, about whom they had heard much moralizing lore. To them, Grandfather Bonney, their mother’s father, represented all that was hypocritically genteel. Their bond with Grandpa Kenyon, their mother’s stepfather (Grandfather Bonney died young, and Mrs. Bonney made an “
unseemly second marriage”), was an incongruous one: two gawky, sickly children smitten with a leathery old man—a rough rancher from Colorado who was for them “
half legendary,” ruddy like an Indian and imposing like a “
massive, slow-footed bear.”

The echo of Hermann Marburg, who entranced Sonie with tall tales of the West he had never seen but yearned after, was clear. But Stafford thoroughly revised the scene of childhood. An almost too idyllic walnut farm in California supplanted the hell of Chichester. In place of Shura Marburg stood fussy Mrs. Fawcett, her clucking no comparison to her predecessor’s manias. And this time the father was gone from the start. Stafford commented on the omission, but in fact
The Mountain Lion
marked a step closer to the charged subject, for Ralph and Molly were looking for a father—unlike Sonie, who found a mother substitute in Miss Pride. Once again, Stafford’s Twainian style allowed her to address, however indirectly, her own search for some accommodation with her father.