The Interior Castle (37 page)

But true to the epitaph of Lowell’s draft of
Land of Unlikeness
, death did come when the house was built. The troubles began in the spring, and they culminated in “
That awful summer!” That was how Stafford opened the short story, three decades later, in which she presented a version
of the events that led to her collapse, and the collapse of her marriage to Lowell.

“An Influx of Poets,” extracted from Stafford’s last, unfinished novel,
The Parliament of Women
, and published in
The New Yorker
in November 1978, has understandably enough been mined for facts. It was clearly an autobiographical story, an appropriately stylish record of a season that in retrospect stood out as a turning point not only in Lowell’s and Stafford’s lives but in the collective life of a loose literary circle—the promising writers whom the newly established Lowells overeagerly invited to come visit. The Rahvs and the Blackmurs were part of the literary Maine circuit that year too, but the ferment was taking place at Damariscotta Mills. It was a summer when the younger writers were on their own turf, away from their mentors, declaring their ambitions to one another—a memorable moment of high hopes. John Berryman, one of the steady stream of visitors (which included the Taylors, Robert Giroux, Patrick Quinn, Eileen Simpson, Delmore Schwartz, Gertrude Buckman, and others) called it his “
last summer of innocence.” From the exhilarating heights of the crowded summer, the Lowells’ subsequent fall seemed to mark the border between promise and reality: with their house in 1946 and then with their second books in 1947, they stepped into their own—and it was clear that the way was not going to be smooth. Their books were successes—Lowell’s won him the Pulitzer Prize; Stafford’s was well reviewed—but their lives were difficult.

Stafford’s story merely alluded to the spring, which was the traumatic start of the troubles between her and Lowell. It was such a harrowing time, perhaps, that it could not be tamed into a story. “
It has been the most confused and difficult spring of my life, I do believe,” she wrote to Cecile Starr as it ended. “I have got so accustomed to the confusion that now, when there is quiet and little to worry about, I am still unable to be calm.” Her letters gave only a general clue to her distress. For the most part, she played the role of long-suffering but resilient hostess. But shortly after she finished
The Mountain Lion
, there seems to have been a violent scene between her and Lowell, who had just returned from a Trappist retreat.
She called it “the incident,” as distinct from “the accident,” the other memorable shake-up at the hands of her husband (the New Orleans episode, when Lowell broke her nose, never seemed to figure in her memories): she claimed that Lowell beat her up and threatened
to kill her. Clearly something happened that was disturbing enough to surface later in one of her stories, “A Country Love Story,” in 1950 (originally titled “When the House Is Finished, Death Comes”), and in Lowell’s
The Mills of the Kavanaughs
. The scene was strikingly similar in both (though Stafford excised it from her final story): the husband, in a seizure of jealousy, tried to strangle his wife in bed. So were the details of the setting—the Damariscotta Mills house looming, as Stafford put it, “
as if it were their common enemy, maliciously bent on bringing them to disaster,” the snowplow clanging in the quiet night, its lights ominously blinking. And a larger theme lurked behind both of their portraits of marital crisis: the fear of mental collapse.

Whatever actually happened between Lowell and Stafford, they were profoundly estranged. The tensions of the winter had mounted to a breaking point. All the distractions they created for themselves and all the energy they devoted to their writing could not, evidently, cure or deflect their unhappiness with each other. As she wrote in the story, “
it seemed to her that love, the very center of their being, was choked off, overgrown, invisible.” Her novel finished, her husband aloof (and then, immediately after “the incident,” his parents in Maine for a visit), Stafford lost what equilibrium she had had. During the spring she was “
seized with the terror of losing my mind,” as she wrote to Lowell a year later. “This is not a casual statement nor is it a common experience, and it is, of all the terrors I have had, the very worst.” She was drinking a great deal (Lowell was not), tensely dependent on her trips to and from the nearest liquor store in Bath. (They had no car, but the local sheriff was her willing chauffeur.) Insomnia returned, and she was plagued by terrible headaches. At the recommendation of a doctor she was then seeing, she left to rest at a farm in Pennsylvania but quickly fled what she described as a “
nest of ex-Communists.” After spending a few lonely days going over the galleys of
The Mountain Lion
in a hotel across from the Algonquin in New York, she returned to Maine—and “that awful summer” began.

“An Influx of Poets” is remarkably free of bitterness. It had taken a long time—decades—for Stafford to find the right tone and perspective to write about what had happened in Maine. The immediate circumstances had been galling: her husband’s flagrant flirtation with one of her erstwhile best friends, Delmore Schwartz’s ex-wife, Gertrude Buckman. The repercussions had been long-lasting. Stafford’s marriage to Lowell
always loomed as the formative chapter of her life, its collapse as a traumatic event. It would not have been a surprise had she, with her “
tongue of an adder,” dedicated the story to fierce revenge. In fact, that was the hope, or at least the expectation, of many of her friends (some of them remnants of that old literary circle, others of them allies from subsequent, very different, milieus). Certainly her anecdotal tendency, with rare exceptions, was to cast Lowell as the villain, herself as the victim. But on paper, she once again discovered the detachment that so often eluded her in life—and that enabled her imagination to work, dramatizing a more complicated account.

Her inspired narrative strategy was to juxtapose her younger self (Cora Savage in the story) with an older Cora who was telling the story many years later. Both were subjected to the same satiric irony that informed the story as a whole, and the facts were altered just enough to give the two of them a philistine air to set off the poetic pretensions of the rest of the company. Thus young Cora was not a writer, though she had an ornate style. She was merely the wife of a poet, and she had bought her house with a legacy from her aunt, rather than with the proceeds from a best-selling novel. Not that authorship would have elevated her much. In a survey of the Maine literary scene, Stafford made clear that prose writers were at the bottom of the heap in any case:

The young Cora, suffering from headaches and unhappiness, was distinctly on the outskirts, estranged from her poet husband, Theron Maybank, and skeptical of “
Theron the poet’s poet friends. He was beside me and they were in all the rooms around me and in the barn, but I was dead to their world, and they, thereby, were dead to mine.” She was like
a ghost hostess, actively arranging the domestic details of the influx but passively aloof from the artistic, erotic intrigue. Not that she was unaware of it. Cora saw, as through a hazy scrim (of drink, she acknowledged, and depression), all the flirting and flattering going on—especially between her husband and Minnie Rosoff, the Gertrude Buckman character whose visit was the most fateful of the entire influx. But out of a perverse instinct for escape and for self-mortification (precisely the opposite of the poets’ self-preening inclinations) she could only abet the adulterous romance: “
I helped in every way to make the match which was already a fait accompli and which, when I discovered that it was, was to hurtle me off the brink on which I had hovered so long into a chasm.”

The older Cora was very much present, recounting and commenting on events, in an outspokenly colloquial and rather curmudgeonly style that established the distance she had traveled since that summer. Where the young Cora was blind and self-destructive, the older Cora had a therapeutic clarity. She was not venting bitterness; her tone was too entertainingly farcical for that. She was simply setting the record straight with satiric zeal. “(
Mine! Remember, Cora Savage, if you forget all else, that this is
your
house),” she scolded her past self in one of the conversational parenthetical asides that litter the story. “(
God almighty! Never was a man so set on knocking the stuffing out of his bride!),” she exclaimed at another point. The effect, along with her device of casting the poets (and herself) as children, was to knock all of them off their pedestals, to offer an irreverent look into the legend. The “
baby bards,” as she described them, were infantile in their self-absorption—but not innocent, by any means. This was the point at which their flailing ambitions were becoming more focused. “(Though they were no longer enfants terribles, the blood of despots was in their veins and they would very soon usurp their elders’ thrones and their dominions),” the older Cora reported, looking back.

Young Cora was oppressed by the poets’ self-importance, but docilely played her role as helpmeet, typing endless revisions of Theron’s poems and listening to endless recitations of poetry. In the story the older Cora wasn’t docile at all and was perfectly prepared to risk philistinism in declaring her position. “I was in this throng of litterateurs (three poets in one medium-sized room constitutes a multitude), enjoying nothing.” The once-loyal typist was none too respectful: “(I admit they were brilliant
poets, if you happen to be interested in that sort of thing), but if they changed an ‘a’ to a ‘the’ the whole sonnet had to be typed over again. And I grant that such a change can make all the difference in the world (if, that is, you happen to be a poet or a lover of poetry), but why couldn’t the alteration be made by hand?” The once-silent auditor, trapped into “
listening to the poets listen to themselves and not to one another,” confessed that “she took a drink as the poetry was read, but drink didn’t help.”

But this was not a simple feminist complaint against the elitist, over-bearing bards. One could doubtless be written, as Delmore Schwartz suggested in a poem he wrote just before his marriage fell apart:

Marjorie Perloff has played out the suggestion in her essay “
Poètes Maudits
of the Genteel Tradition,” in which she points out the pattern of “
the prodigal poet, the unselfish and forgiving wife or mistress” that seemed to characterize the private lives of these same poets (and was then presented for public consumption in their poetry). In a sense Stafford’s story could be read as the record of the emergence of that pattern: aside from the Tates’ troubles and the Schwartzes’ divorce, the Lowells’ Maine turmoils were the first of the dramatic marital difficulties that were to become a theme of Lowell’s and Berryman’s lives in particular. Stafford was more than ready to point the finger at the poet-husband: she drew on Theron’s outrageous behavior for much of the colorful, witty drama and repartee of her story.

But at the same time, almost as if offering her autobiographical story as a commentary on the autobiographical poetry that the poets—especially Lowell—had been writing out of their personal troubles throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Stafford undercut any effort at self-vindication or inflation of the episode. She, unlike the poets, was not about to project her private troubles as historic turmoil, or to write herself a tragically heroic role. The story was finally less about the poets’ injustices to her than about her injustices to herself. There was no clear-cut victim and
victimizer. It was her own psychological distress, not the poets’ pretensions, that afflicted her most: “
I knew—although I did not want to know—that I could not honestly attribute [the headaches] to too many iambs and too many dithyrambic self-congratulations by the baby bards.” It was her own passive will at work, bidden by an inchoate desire for escape, that undid the marriage as much as Theron’s peremptory moves. Not that Stafford substituted a kind of ennobling self-castigation for self-justification. Her strategy was satiric deflation throughout. Her failure to plead her case, to have a straightforward revenge, infuriated at least one of her friends, Nancy Flagg Gibney, who felt she had missed a historic opportunity: