The Interior Castle (53 page)

The key was distance. Stafford needed to detach herself from disturbing reminders of Lowell, who had suffered another breakdown after his mother’s death in 1954, and she needed a respite, too, from her uncooperative novel. A London visit the summer before had been therapeutic, though cut short by financial worries. This time the trip was shaping up as a disaster. Stafford was sick with bronchitis after a grueling boat crossing, and her rented flat at 20 Chesham Place faced a noisy construction site—not an ideal convalescent spot.
Despite her health, she socialized with energy (and with well-connected company: George Orwell’s widow, Freud’s grandson, and Walker Evans one night; Dorothy Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, on several other occasions). As was her habit when
she was unhappy and convivial, she was drinking too much, with the usual bad results: her frame of mind was hardly better than the state of her body. Her physical and psychological trials were oppressively familiar, as Stafford lamented in a letter to her friend Ann Honeycutt:

Once again, the past all too easily engulfed her. Looking ahead, she confessed that her hope of somehow mastering that “dreary story,” with a doctor or on paper, was fading. And as she wrote to another friend, at forty-one the energy to plunge into the present eluded her: “
After the age of 22, the search for experience is narrowing and harrowing.”

But her trip took a welcome turn when she met A. J. Liebling, a fellow
New Yorker
writer who was also in London and who looked her up at Mrs. White’s urging. He couldn’t rescue her from her past, nor did he succeed in reinspiring her about her literary future. What he did do, though a decade older than she and not as energetic as he had once been, was to show her how the search for experience could be very different from anything she was used to. Attend to your appetites and avoid literary intellectuals were among the first principles of this voracious eater and prodigious journalist, who wrote about the war, New York City lowlife, food, the races, boxing, politics, the press, and anything else that struck his wide interest. His precepts were hardly familiar ones for Stafford.

Let me take care of you was Joe Liebling’s dominant tone with her, which was equally unfamiliar. The invitation was one she was thoroughly ready to accept, as was clear from a letter Stafford wrote to Honeycutt with further news of her London psychiatrist and her state of mind. The letter offers perhaps the best insight into the seemingly odd but immediate bond between huge, prolific Liebling and Stafford, the “problem feeder” and now problem writer. So often the defensive victim, Stafford described a new willingness to acknowledge her vulnerability, and an unapologetic desire to depend on someone. That someone could not, obviously, continue to be her doctor, though she had seized on to
him as her temporary guardian. Her new psychiatrist, she wrote to Honeycutt,

Liebling, in his gallant, gluttonous way, knew how to court fragile women (his first wife, Ann McGinn, turned out to be schizophrenic), and Stafford was ready to be scooped up: he was an ideal emissary from
The New Yorker
, for which she had such strong familial feelings. The fantasy of adoption was not a new one; orphans surfaced in her fiction, and in “The Bleeding Heart” she had spun out a young woman’s delusory fixation on a father figure. (In a letter to Nancy Flagg Gibney, Stafford tried to explain her sense of needy estrangement: “
I have looked on myself all my life as an orphan who had siblings and living parents … and have spent a great many of my years being involved in some aspect of rejection: dying a thousand deaths over being rejected or dying a million over rejecting.”)

Nor was the reality of finding refuge with protective men new—Dr. Cohn, and Jensen even, had played that role. But where Stafford had always been acutely aware of the dangers of dependence (father figures in her world were not to be relied upon—rejection always lurked around the corner), with Liebling there was romantic fondness as well and hope for a “safe path.” It was a well-grounded hope. Liebling was a notably clear-eyed rescuer, confident in his reassuring powers but never overconfident or condescending. He sized himself up in a letter during a moment of trouble for Stafford while they were apart:

That summer Liebling was more than a year into a trial separation from his demanding second wife, Lucille Spectorsky. It had been her idea, after years of difficult relations between them, and though Liebling hadn’t quite made an explicit break, he was clearly in need of company, physical and emotional. While he waited on Lucille’s whims, he pursued women, many of them much younger than he, with what one of them, Nora Sayre, the daughter of a
New Yorker
writer, described as “
the abrupt lunge of a man who rather expects to be rejected.” Stafford, another
New Yorker
daughter, was a different case. When he called into the magazine’s London office from his rooms at Dukes Hotel to check on a piece and found Stafford there, picking up her mail, he invited a woman to tea who promised to be more than an acolyte likely to rebuff him before too long. She was a colleague, a writer whom he had long admired and who, he had reason to know from the Whites, admired him. And he doubtless also knew from them that she was lonely.

For Liebling, their first meeting over drinks at Dukes was probably a tantalizing glimpse of Stafford’s uneasy mix of fragility and toughness, as the raffish, hard-drinking side of the impeccable prose stylist emerged. Appropriately enough, the two of them broke the ice by making fun of their matchmakers, the valetudinarian Whites. They took to each other right away, and the courtship proceeded in high style. In England, Liebling swept her up into his life—escorting her in a hired Rolls-Royce to the races, entertaining her in pubs and at plentiful meals. At some point she paid a solo visit to Heidelberg, and she arranged her own side trip to Brussels for a congress of poets (not Liebling’s kind of event). The active
summer was exactly what Stafford needed, as she wrote to her agent, James Oliver Brown: “
I’ve been having far too good a time and never want to come home or work or do a blessed thing except to be pleased in just the way I’m being pleased.”

But Stafford did sail home in October, and Liebling set off traveling for
The New Yorker
—continuing to woo her attentively during the year they were apart. His letters reveal how fascinated, and curiously intimidated, he was by her dramatically literary life, for all of his commanding, confident style. Above all, he was full of praise for her writing, which he was reading and rereading as he traveled to Italy and the Middle East on assignment. “
I seem to have held a very great lady in my arms at all those race meetings,” he wrote to her just after she had gone. “It was a very great honor! I’ve been reading ‘Children Are Bored on Sunday,’ and really you are a better writer than almost anybody I know.”

But he also admitted to quick jealousy about her emotional past, which for him was entangled with her literary history. Her life among the literary quarterly writers elicited what was for him a habitual defensive mockery of a cultural milieu so different from his own. In two decades at
The New Yorker
, he had distinguished himself as an artful stylist and a journalistic innovator, but his loyalties and temperament allied him with the newspapermen among whom he had begun his career; “intellectual” for Liebling was a term of scorn. His reading of
Boston Adventure
gave him an occasion to stake his claim against those wan men in Stafford’s high literary past: “
All through the last 100 pages I was wondering who was going to get Sonie … prepared to be jealous of any one of them. You can see how impersonally I take literature, and how completely I detach fictional characters from reality,” he wrote to her from Naples, mixing flirtation and criticism. “You couldn’t fool me for a minute with the black hair. When the book ended with Sonie uninvaded, I wanted to go back and beat up all three of them for passing up such an enchanting bet.”

It was a flattering combativeness, but Liebling warned Stafford that he was prone to carry it too far:

Most of the time, Stafford didn’t mind having her tail pulled about her past. As Wilfrid Sheed, the son of her former employers, the Catholic publishers Frank and Maisie Sheed, observed, “
Liebling and his set had supplemented the back-biting of the poets with the jaunty irreverence of the sports press box and Jean absorbed this too, and I think felt very American about it.”

Still, both of them clearly were aware of a tension between Stafford’s highbrow,
PR
pedigree and the lowlife reporter tastes that Liebling liked to cultivate. He faced it head-on and with fond praise always encouraged Stafford’s literary course. At the same time, he seems to have disarmed her physically. His wholehearted embrace of her was more than figurative, and despite Stafford’s long-standing fears of sexual aloofness, she welcomed him in bed. They enthusiastically overlooked the incongruities between them—not the least of which was the almost comical physical contrast, well-rounded Liebling and well-worn, angular Stafford. “
I want you to write because you’re a great woman, and I love what you write, and because you’ll never be happy—for more than one afternoon or one night at a time—unless you do yourself justice,” Liebling saluted her, and then got down to more concrete details. “I’ll not give you up, and I’ll combine things to have you together with me as soon as possible, and I’ll make love to you as much as I want, which is certainly as much as you’ll want, and we’ll see wonderful things together and mortise our minds like the rest of us.”

In fact, what was more notable than the disparities between them, at least from the outside and at the outset, was this mortising of their minds. There was a convergence in the broad direction of their literary course at this stage of their lives, when middle age was clearly weighing heavily on them: they were both drawn to nostalgic efforts at memoir. It was also the enterprise on which Lowell, the literary man they both made a show of disparaging, had embarked. They took early note of his explorations, which were quickly to acquire a kind of representative significance for a literary generation, as Lowell’s personal agonies became the archetypal ordeal of the artist, the social outcast.

Liebling and Stafford watched the emergence of Lowell’s
Life Studies
with, it seems fair to say, at least a preliminary sense of identification. No sooner had Liebling confessed his jealousy of the
PR
circle in early 1957 than he reported to Stafford (whom he often fondly addressed as “Cat”) that he had found an issue of the magazine in his hotel in Israel, immediately delved into it, and actually liked a piece by his rival: