The Interior Castle (51 page)

There was an undercurrent of irony throughout, as though he were drawing on an old comic homespun parlance he had shared with his daughter during her youth, and yet also acknowledging the great distance that now loomed between them. “
Jean, why the Sam Hill don’t you jump a plane some day and come out here for at least a few days,” he wrote to her in 1955. “You and I could have a good visit, reminiscent of our great summer at Mrs. Meyer’s house in El Dora.” It was an invitation that made Stafford cringe and stay East (in real life), and yet it helps explain her ability to make the trip back in her fiction. John Stafford was recalling a retreat to the mountains that the two literary Staffords, father and daughter, had made in the 1930s, both of them full of plans to write.

It was the trip that Jean had commemorated as a child in her story “Fame Is Sweet to the Foolish Man,” in which she good-humoredly mocked both herself and him: “
But each knew that the other was weakening—that his thoughts were turning from the philosophy of the short story and the movement of the drama to the extraordinarily inviting snow-capped peaks and cool shaded lakes.” They had been united in a Twainian world of well-intentioned delinquency, and the delight was doubled because here the father, far from an authority figure, was a companion in dereliction. Together they had escaped ordinary society for
independent adventure, which they conceived in solitary, high literary terms. They planned to spin out their imaginative fantasies on paper amid the peaks. But distracted by each other and by their surroundings, they had settled for more mundane experience—in the end, the experience of failing to find the perfect creative retreat. That was not a great frustration, as Stafford told it. Instead, it was an ironic comeuppance that both of them were able to take in stride.

During the 1950s, Stafford found herself able again to draw on that mocking comic treatment of the anticlimactic Colorado adventures of her childhood, adventures that otherwise seemed to overwhelm her. It was as though she had discovered a way imaginatively to recover the spirit of her childhood before she had felt her father’s shadow everywhere. Stafford wasn’t writing purely autobiographically by any means (in several of the Adams stories, the father was the stolid manager of Safeway, an ironic inversion if there ever was one). But she was staking a claim to her western heritage, and indirectly addressing enchantments and disenchantments from her past. On the surface, it was a significant departure from her
New Yorker
-style stories, with their sophisticated manner and comparatively enervated characters. In the central group of Adams stories, Stafford was writing about rambunctious children, and like Twain, she was definitely not writing for genteel grown-ups. Her aim was, like his, “
to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in,” as he put it in his preface to
Tom Sawyer
. Despite the stylistic novelty, Stafford’s underlying theme drew on her persistent preoccupation—the impossible dream of escape, which expressed itself contradictorily in a desire for solitude and a dread of loneliness. The notable difference was that in these stories, as in “Fame Is Sweet to the Foolish Man,” the failure really to flee, either oneself or society, was not a psychic crisis but a comic adventure.

“The Healthiest Girl in Town” (1951), Stafford’s first Adams story, signaled the shift in tone in an outspoken way. Its very title suggested that she had in mind an ironic commentary on herself and her neurasthenic reputation as well as on her fiction. (After all, Stafford was well known as one of the least healthy girls in town. Describing the literary crowd at a New York party in the late 1940s, the eclectic writer and artist Weldon Kees gave her a starring invalid role: among the guests were
“
people you thought were permanently settled in sanataria, like Jean Stafford, looking more ravaged and nervous than you had thought possible”) She hadn’t yet introduced the protagonist who regularly appeared in subsequent stories, Emily Vanderpool. But young Jessie, who told the story in the first person—a rarity for Stafford—was Emily’s forerunner, a tomboyish girl who stood out for her vigor in a town heavily populated by tuberculars.

In the story Stafford reversed the usual pose of alienation. This time it was the sturdy exiled from the weak. Arrived in Adams with her mother, a nurse, Jessie felt left out among “the ailing citizenry.” And the drama took the opposite turn. Rather than retreating to resigned isolation, Jessie in the end triumphantly asserted her independence and affirmed the energetic pursuit of experience: she was healthy and happy to be that way. But she was not granted her zest without first suffering the familiar insecure desire to belong, which Stafford played for all its comic potential. She satirically portrayed illness as an elite social category and developed her character’s class anxiety in clever episodes that also perfectly captured the cadences of childhood—and were very funny. Jessie made an incongruous aspiring invalid. She was ridiculed by the spindly, sickly Butler girls (from Boston), who vaunted their invalidism in a succession of well-paced scenes:

There was obvious self-mockery involved in the story. After all, Stafford, unlike Jessie, did in a sense succumb to the romantic allure of illness to escape her hickness—and she ended up in a different kind of sanitarium. (Young Jessie, like Stafford from childhood on, pored over medical tomes, studying symptoms in hopes of developing them; but whereas Jessie got over the fixation, Stafford didn’t.)

Emily Vanderpool was a still more autobiographical protagonist,
whose salient characteristic was not her health but her “
awful tongue.” Stafford explicitly admitted her affiliation in her introduction to her second story collection,
Bad Characters
(1964):

Emily was the good-hearted “bad” girl with a susceptibility to dubious associations, which led her into adventures that discomfited the conventional world—and that backfired on her. She was at once a rebel and a show-off, eager to stir up her family and the townsfolk, but also dying to be a star; she was alternately “
possessed with a passion to be by myself”—which was when her malicious tongue came into play, antagonizing all those nearby—and desperate for companionship. But this girl Tom Sawyer had no Huck to escape with. (“
Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance.”) Instead, as Stafford depicted her predicament in the two best Vanderpool stories, “Bad Characters” (1954) and “A Reading Problem” (1956), Emily stumbled on inadequate substitutes—outcasts who were indeed gaudy, but who were not the seriously subversive influence that Huck was.

Emily’s brushes with the unwashed—in “Bad Characters” she got mixed up with Lottie Jump, an eleven-year-old shoplifter from the wrong side of the tracks; in “A Reading Problem,” she crossed paths with a preacher con man and his scrawny daughter—introduced excitement into her life, but they didn’t really threaten her connection with the “respectable” world of Adams and her family (a far more conventional clan than the real-life Staffords). The willful girl whose taste for solitude had gotten her into trouble ended up somewhat chastened and more sociable. In fact, the ironic moral of the stories was that it was Emily’s very anti-sociability that made her a good citizen: a high-spirited, independent girl could prosper in dull Adams after all. Not that she was going to stay there: “
Yes, sir, Emily, you’re going to go places,” the local sheriff told her
admiringly in “A Reading Problem” But in the meantime, she could happily settle for escapades instead of true escape—as Stafford had done with her father in the mountains.

As in her youthful fictional efforts, Stafford was busy experimenting with dialects, again in Twainian style. In “Bad Characters,” it was Lottie Jump’s tongue that especially enthralled Emily: “
I had never heard such gaudy, cynical talk and was trying to memorize it all.” Equally enthralled herself, Stafford devoted a great deal of attention to capturing accurately the telltale vernacular of her low characters. In “A Reading Problem” Evangelist Gerlash and his daughter Opal spent twelve pages trying to talk Emily out of some money or food in a comical hybrid of stentorian sermonizing, huckster talk, and backwoods slang. Occasionally a hokey, inauthentic note crept in, but Stafford managed to make much of the humor—and pathos—of the stories ride on the dialogue, coupled with her flair for the perfectly placed detail.

The Vanderpool stories painted a surprisingly cheery picture of childhood in Adams, and the grown-up Emily who narrated the stories seemed to have turned out to be a very witty character with a wholesome perspective on her past. There was no hint of the real trauma of Stafford’s youth, or at least what she later came to see as the trauma: her strange father, whom she saw in a different light after a period of childish adulation—as a version of Huck Finn’s pap, the man who kept his family forever on the margins of respectability. He was the figure who made escape imperative and yet also impossible, the character she tried to limn in
In the Snowfall
. Stafford had real trouble writing about him, though she did allude, however indirectly, to problematic paternal influence in her one other collected story (aside from “The Darkening Moon”) about young children, “Cops and Robbers.” Published in 1953, “Cops and Robbers” was a story notably
not
set in Adams but in Westport, and the tone was completely different from the spirit of her western stories. She drew on an incident from her own childhood that loomed large years later, at least in the memory of her sister Marjorie. In his penury, John Stafford had started cutting his family’s hair himself, to the mortification of his youngest daughter, who once rebelled midway through and sported a ragged look for months. In her story, young Hannah’s golden locks—which were just like her mother’s extravagantly admired hair—were shorn by a barber at the instruction of her father, who was wreaking indirect revenge on his wife. It was a devastating portrait of a child’s fall
from innocent security into loveless anonymity: “
She felt that she was already shrinking and fading, that all her rights of being seen and listened to and caressed were ebbing away. Chilled and exposed as she was, she was becoming, nonetheless, invisible.”

In two very different Adams stories that appeared the same year as “Cops and Robbers,” sandwiched in among her Vanderpool tales, Stafford again alluded, again indirectly, to that darker version of her past. Here the “children” were grown-up, and the stories she told were of entrapment. They shared the vernacular vigor of Stafford’s sunnier Adams stories but reversed the Vanderpool plot line of progress toward healthy maturation. She avoided fathers altogether, making her characters orphans. The narrator of “In the Zoo” and Polly Bay, the protagonist of “The Liberation” (both published in 1953), could hardly have been less like resilient Emily, who prospered rebelliously in Adams and then presumably moved on, well prepared for abandoning her provincial past. Here Stafford portrayed an insidious destruction of spirit that rendered her characters, when they finally did manage to leave, anxious souls ill equipped to face the world.

In the antipastoral Adams stories, Stafford’s protagonists were passive creatures who couldn’t fight back against the influences that oppressed them but could only try to flee. In “In the Zoo” two middle-aged sisters, meeting in Denver, were suddenly overcome by memories of the dismal past they had spent fifty miles north in Adams, where their view of the world and of themselves had been eroded by Mrs. Placer, their foster mother. A Dickensian figure, she ran a boardinghouse and dedicated herself to proselytizing a view that echoed John Stafford’s bleaker attitude, that “
life was essentially a matter of being done in, let down, and swindled.” Polly Bay in the ironically titled “The Liberation” finally worked up the courage to escape the tyrannical provincialism of Adams to marry an Easterner, only to learn, just as she was ready to depart, that her fiancé was dead. Bravely, she set off anyway, but Stafford deftly conveyed the naïveté of her valor in the concluding sentences of the story: “
How lonely I have been, she thought. And then, not fully knowing what she meant by it but believing in it faithfully, she said half aloud, ‘I am not lonely now’ ”

What was striking in Stafford’s Adams stories was the distance she established from the troublesome landscape of her past, which not so long before had frustrated her efforts on
In the Snowfall
. With her roguish
girls, she had discovered a comic voice that was a welcome counterweight to the highly wrought prose of
The Catherine Wheel
. Even in the darker stories about older “children”—the intimidated orphans—Stafford managed to convey psychological suffocation without getting caught in the tortuous narrative of introspection that had tangled her third novel. Instead, she found a tragicomic approach that worked. She turned to drama and above all to dialogue, direct and indirect, as the external clues to casts of mind. Her virtuosic style was ideally suited to capturing the nuances of speech, and in these stories she found a way to make language itself one of her main subjects, without succumbing to mere surface preoccupation with style.