The Interior Castle (55 page)

Making chronological sense of the jumble of pages is difficult, but it was apparently during her years with Liebling that Stafford shifted from efforts to build on
Boston Adventure
to an attempt to shape her book around a more explicit family memoir. It meant turning from comparatively recent memories—of her marriage to Lowell—to the more distant past. That may have made the enterprise seem safer, though it was still an unnerving psychological step: she was testing her aesthetic strictures against personal exposure and was clearly ambivalent. Watching Lowell at work in
Life Studies
, dramatically flouting the principles of impersonality, stirred her up. She wrote to Peter Taylor in early 1958 that she was appalled at the direction in which Lowell’s work was heading: “
You will have read Cal’s new poems in
Partisan Review
. I cannot think why they were published. He has been sick again and I dare say you know this too. I feel terribly sorry for Elizabeth.… The poems made me really very angry, not only with Cal but with all the people that further this obscene egocentricity in him—and, of course, angry with myself for being even now affected by recollections of him.”

It was no surprise that the
PR
sampler of Lowell’s poems agitated her. The grand proportions of his autobiographical project were clear, and so were its intimate sources. In two of the poems, “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” inspired by his prison term back in 1944, and “To Delmore Schwartz,” a portrait of the winter of 1945 to 1946 in Cambridge, Lowell revealed how high he was prepared to elevate his own experiences; he raised two episodes during his life with Stafford to emblematic historical status. In two more of them, “Man and Wife” and “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” he showed how close to the heart he was prepared to probe. The declamatory confessional style went against all of Stafford’s instincts, but her denunciation perhaps also masked a certain defensiveness.
After all, she was notably absent from all the poems, near though they came to her life.

Whether or not Stafford’s reaction to Lowell’s poems directly affected her own work, it seems to have been around this time that she abandoned, at least for a while, her efforts to draw on her past with him for her novel. In turning to her family instead, she was embarking on a project that was grandiose in its own strange way. Her inspiration came in the form of a dream that she took surprisingly seriously. It was as though she hoped that by following half-conscious associations she might find a pathway into terrain that had so far resisted more direct exploration. Stafford had long made a habit of scribbling down fragments of her dreams in stray notebooks and on scraps of paper. More recently she had become a devotee of the Ouija board, entranced by the game of coaxing testimony from unplumbed depths of the mind, a pastime she took quite seriously. Among certain friends, she would pull out the board when she had been drinking, and together they would summon voices, everyone hoping that Liebling wouldn’t intrude, since he firmly disapproved of the séances. Her brother’s name often materialized on the board, his spirit trying to make contact, Stafford was certain. Similarly, the dream that suddenly inspired her new literary project was a quest for her kin. “
On a winter night, I dreamed these words,” she jotted down: “ ‘Look anywhere and you will find roots. Samothrace. Gadopolis.’ It was then revealed to me, through an intelligence existing outside me in the upper air, rather like a disembodied history professor, that my Scotch ancestors had arrived at the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde only in the seventeenth century and that they had come there by a circuitous route from Samothrace.”

Stafford seized on this strange message as a guide for her next project, which she aimed to pursue alongside her novel. “
My dreams are … rarely so instructive as this one or, indeed, so autobiographical,” she explained in some notes. “I was pleased that after years of serving me nothing but travesty and tomfoolery my unconscious mind had at last yielded up something I could cogitate and, conceivably, check.” She knew it all sounded outlandish and took pleasure in the oddity of her enterprise. Her literary goal was as counterintuitive as her inspiration: “I am going to put this material to two uses: the provable and factual aspects of it I am incorporating into a novel; the mythical, the fictitious parts of it will comprise a work of non-fiction.” In the end, her curious investigations
blurred into her continuing efforts to reshape her novel. Her mythological memoir never fully materialized, though some friends saw tantalizing pieces.

Before she was ready to write anything, however, she had research to do. The dream led her first to amateur genealogical sleuthing, something this would-be orphan had never imagined herself doing. She wrote letters to relatives, asking for information and memories of the McKillop and Stafford clans before and after they had come to America. Her inquiries didn’t bear much fruit, but what news she received she used to buttress her long-standing archetypes of her ancestors: the adventurous Staffords, the deadly prim McKillops, “
plain, thrifty, law-loving United Presbyterians who went to church all day on Sunday and read Foxes
Book of Martyrs
with outraged pleasure.”

Stafford then moved on to slightly more scholarly investigations, dabbling in the archaeological findings of Phyllis Williams Lehmann and Karl Lehmann, director of the excavations on Samothrace. Again her method relied on intuitive associations rather than rigorous study. With her eyes closed, she opened
Samothrace, the Ancient Literary Sources
, the first volume in a series about the dig, and came upon a discussion of exporting rites involving Demetore and Core to an island near Britain. “
Why shouldn’t the island have been Arran?” Stafford asked, undaunted by the unprovability of her hypothesis. She plunged ahead, making other tenuous connections. Excitedly she linked Core, the goddess, and Corrie, a village on Arran, and Chora, the main village on Samothrace. Her reaction when that thread snapped was calmly to acknowledge the pre-posterousness of all her speculation, and then to carry on with it anyway: “I learned to my disappointment that Core simply means ‘maiden,’ Corrie means ‘cauldron,’ and Chora is no more than the word for ‘village.’ No matter, I was by now deep in my myth and so, indeed, was my husband.”

When Liebling left for Europe in the fall of 1959 to cover the British elections, Stafford was ready to go with him and follow her fantasy even further. The plan was for her to go to Scotland by herself first and then head for mainland Greece and Samothrace with Liebling. On the eve of their departure, she got a letter from Karl Lehmann that helped put the adventure in a perspective that suited Stafford’s own inchoate but obviously high expectations for her bizarre project. “
As an old student of Greek mythology, I am much amused with your ancestral dream,” Lehmann
wrote in answer to a letter in which Stafford had evidently described her quest. “I have often wondered how long it takes for a legend deriving mortals from divine or heroic ancestry to form itself, and what the processes involved are. I now see that dreams, poetic imagination, and adventurous travels all play their part in it, and that it might just happen within one person’s lifetime.” Taking that somewhat jocular comment as the imprimatur of expertise, Stafford noted down that she “
felt now that I had been issued a legal hunting license.”

Traveling was, as usual for Stafford, an ordeal—especially a grim boat ride to the Isle of Arran in the early morning. But once there, she was greeted by shocks of recognition, which were really what she had come to find: she had transformed the search for a home from the metaphorical theme it was in so much of her fiction into an actual undertaking. On a stroll through the main village, she was taken aback by the sight of a nine- or ten-year-old girl tying her shoelaces. “
I was at the castle gates before I knew who she was: she was the replica of myself as I had been in grammar school and she and I were one, pausing in the early autumn sun to re-do the shoelace that presently would come undone again and catapult us to our knees to wound us freshly.” It was a freighted image of vulnerable childhood, and Stafford was excited but also unnerved by the exposure of her identity as she stumbled upon so many familiar faces:

She then rejoined Liebling, and they flew to Athens and from there sailed for Samothrace, where they seem to have had a very good time, guided around the island by a young Greek with whom they became friends. After her Arran adventure, Stafford wrote a letter to her agent, James Oliver Brown, brimming with an optimism she hadn’t felt in a long time: “
The trip was fantastically, thrillingly fruitful.… If I don’t get a story out of this, I’m not and never have been a writer.”

She and Liebling came back inspired to write, only to be disappointed. The early 1960s turned out to be less fruitful, certainly for Stafford, and
they could no longer claim that distracting companionship was the main obstacle to work. They were drifting apart somewhat, but not into solitary productivity. Liebling was discouraged by the comparatively poor sales of his books, worried about money, and felt less and less well as kidney troubles and gout took their toll. In the summer of 1960 he went by himself to do more work on
Between Meals
at the house in East Hampton, Long Island, that he had bought with his second wife.

That same summer Stafford headed out to Reno on an assignment for
Horizon
to write about the filming of
The Misfits
, and she stopped for a visit with her sister Mary Lee in Hayden. That was a calm reunion, and Stafford’s analysis of why it went smoothly perhaps sheds some light on her literary struggles. “
My weekend in the bosom of my family wasn’t really bad at all,” she wrote to Nancy Flagg Gibney. “I like my sister in her own house but can’t stand her in mine—I can slip back into my western girlhood with no trouble at all, but she is completely irrelevant to my eastern adulthood.” It was linking her past and her present that posed the real problems, and as she was leaving she sounded anxious about her still-unfinished work: “
Really, when I come back, I’d like to settle down to Samothrace and the novel and not interrupt these two projects until I’m finished.”

Such purposeful declarations were common (and often well publicized: in 1960 a magazine
called the
Griffin
announced that Stafford’s novel, billed as a sequel to
Boston Adventure
, was due out the following spring). She had reason to hope she might face fewer distractions from her work. She was spending less time gallivanting with Liebling and his friends, and in a letter to Peter Taylor, she emphasized her sense of estrangement from her old literary circle: “
It’s been so long since I’ve seen any specifically literary people. To be sure I hear about them—hear about Cal all the time and how Philip Rahv and Allen and everybody else has taken a new lease on life now that he’s got a new girl and he and Elizabeth for the dozenth time are talking divorce.” But the truth was that Stafford was not close to done with her novel or with her Samothrace project. As in the past, comparative peace was not as conducive to work as she had hoped.

Instead, she seemed to feel dispirited by her isolation, and by her own sense of inertia. As if to compensate, in 1962 she stirred up unhelpful commotion with her publishers: she decided to break with her editor at Random House, Albert Erskine, whom she had owed a manuscript for
seven years, and to sign up with Robert Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Erskine was an old friend from
Southern Review
days, and it was clear from the drama of the rift that Stafford was projecting her sense of failed promise onto him. She explained in a letter that she wanted to be released from her contract “
for a number of reasons,” and went on to say that “the only one that needs to be stated is that, in spite of all our making a joke of it, I have an eccentric but ineradicable sense of being still your not very competent secretary, subject to scolding and I hate being scolded.… Nor can I help feeling very strongly that this has contributed to my block.” It was all rather implausible, as she half acknowledged in this letter (but forgot as their correspondence heated up): Erskine had in fact been a studiously unaggressive editor. In bitterly recalling her secretary days, she was really lamenting her stalled career, not his scoldings.

Later that spring she signed a contract with Farrar, Straus and Cudahy for twelve thousand dollars, seven thousand dollars to buy her way out of her Random House contract, five thousand dollars for new work. The deadline for her novel was now set in January 1965; a collection of short stories, to be titled
Bad Characters
, was due in 1964. There was also talk of her Samothrace project, but her new publishers were less excited about it than she. “
Robert [Giroux] is very worried about the Greek-Scotland book (this is very much off the record),” James Oliver Brown wrote to her. “They want a novel and it is a novel for which they are gambling.” Gambling was an accurate though not very kind way to put it: hopes, Stafford’s included, were hedged. She kept a low literary profile over the next several years, though she gave a very visible boost to another career, convincing the jury of the National Book Awards on which she served in 1962 that a novel called
The Moviegoer
by an unknown novelist named Walker Percy in Louisiana should win the prize. The unexpected award caused a stir, including the charge that it was all really Liebling’s, not Stafford’s, doing. It was true that Liebling had alerted her to the book, but the novel proved to be one she too was ready to champion—a case of collaborative enthusiasm not unlike the fascination, first Stafford’s and then her husband’s, that had inspired Liebling’s book about that other Louisianan, Earl Long.