SOURCE: "The Lion in Winter: Jean Stafford's Heart of Darkness," in Village Voice Literary Supplement, June, 1992, pp. 31-2.

[In the following essay, D'Erasmo gives an overview of Stafford's career, providing insights into why she stopped writing .]

In one of Jean Stafford's most famous stories, "The Interior Castle," a young woman named Pansy Vannemann lies immobilized in a hospital bed after a disfiguring car accident. Retreating from her terrible pain, she imagines her own brain in voluptuous detail: "She envisaged [it], romantically, now as a jewel, now as a flower, now as a light in a glass, now as an envelope of rosy vellum containing other envelopes, one within the other, diminishing infinitely. It was always pink and always fragile, always deeply interior and invaluable." Stafford's model was St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, an account of the soul's progress through pain to enlightenment. Pansy, however, is no saint. Slowly but surely, her sacred retreat is ravaged by the surgeon, who probes farther and farther into her face until her interior becomes as spiritually disfigured and empty as her exterior is physically despoiled. By the end, the operation finished, Pansy is utterly leveled, "shut . . . up within her own treasureless head."

This strange, sad story is emblematic of Stafford's work, which at its best illuminates the vulnerable interior space between thought and action. Sometimes that space is the head, at other times the heart, but keeping its walls intact is always the plot beneath the plot. Characters in Stafford's novels and stories, like Pansy, float there, in an Eden of possibility; they think, they wait, they remember, they pick through their lives like refugees unable to leave the rubble. These interior narratives are both subtle and seemingly inexhaustible—though they go on for pages, one never tires of them. The exterior narratives that surround them, however, are brutal. Plot belongs to the police; Stafford will hold it off for whole chapters at a time, letting her characters roam in the fields of their dreams, then cram in a crushing series of terrible events at the end, more or less on the order of: And then they all died. Disfigurement was one of her favorite devices and themes, the irreversible spoiling of an often absurd yet lovely thing by time, violence, or plain bad luck; the temple she destroys over and over is a heart eagerly beating in an impossible direction.

In "The Interior Castle," it is Pansy's love for her own beautiful brain; in Stafford's novel The Mountain Lion, it is the geek love supreme between a sister and brother. In The Catherine Wheel, a 12-year-old boy and a Bostonstyle Mrs. Dalloway each believe the other to know their forbidden secrets of the heart. Even Stafford's work of proto-New Journalism, A Mother in History: Three Incredible Days With Lee Harvey Oswald's Mother, takes on a strange love, this time the unrockable devotion of a mother to her son, the most famous assassin of the 20th century. (Stafford, writing in 1965, seems to side with the Warren Commission on this one.) "Lee Harvey a failure?" says faithful Mrs. Oswald. "I am smiling. I think it took courage for a young boy to go to Russia at twenty, for whatever reason he went. I find this a very intelligent boy, and I think he's coming out in history as a very fine person." In Stafford's work, love always appears as an unnatural act, heavily framed and annotated by irony; her heroes and heroines defy logic for as long as they can, then cave in with varying degrees of humiliation.

The horror in "The Interior Castle," for instance, lies in being dragged, step by unwilling step, through the destruction of the only jewel in Pansy's cracked crown. The reader is helplessly caught between pity for Pansy and rage at her aggressor, who has science and logic on his side (he is, after all, fixing her face; he doesn't know he's destroying her inner life). By the end of the story the violence has been carefully rerouted in the direction of the sadistic doctor, whom one longs to kill. Stafford's joke on you is that you can't. Reality is a truck bearing down on hopelessly oddball victims, blinded by the headlights.

Read through Stafford's work and you will hear again and again this muffled sound of blows being delivered, sometimes at tormentors, but more often, unfairly, at the already tormented. Stafford can be intelligent, witty, and dear, like someone just tipsy enough to let loose with a few pointed insights; but she can also turn cruel and maudlin, like someone who's already had far too many and wants to show you her suicide scars for the third time.

There have been three Stafford biographies in the past five years; all three have had a hard time explaining why she drank so much, wrote so little, and seemed to cultivate her own decline. David Roberts's Jean Stafford: The Life of a Writer is the most unenlightened of the crop. He seems to believe that Stafford's woes can all be traced back to not getting enough dates in high school: "Did she take refuge in intellectual superiority because she could not compete in terms of clothing and makeup?" Charlotte Margolis Goodman's The Savage Heart is a detailed, feminist reading that tries to understand Stafford's relationship to other women, and women writers, and the sticky wicket of gender in her work. Ann Hulbert's The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford, is insightful on the art, somewhat less so on the life.

Stafford was born in 1915, the youngest of four children, to an upright Scottish Presbyterian mother and a cowboy manqué father who spent his life, and his large inheritance, writing Westerns that no one wanted to read under such pseudonyms as Jack Wonder and Ben Delight. Early on, Stafford seemed to have no use for the female side of her family. If she ever really liked the ceaselessly optimistic mother who tried (and failed) to endow her with a sunny disposition, she didn't show it much; she parodied her two older sisters, Marjorie and Mary Lee, as beribboned conformists in both The Catherine Wheel and The Mountain Lion. Stafford was her father's daughter in temperament and ambition, but as she grew older and he grew crazier she avoided him more and more. Hulbert suggests that Stafford's sense of irony was her saving grace, the "liberating aesthetic distance" that enabled her to create. She started with her father, fencing him off with invisible quotation marks. The only person in her family Stafford ever claimed to love unreservedly was her brother, Dick, an unliterary outdoorsman who died in a jeep accident in 1944 while serving in the military, but none of the biographies are too convincing on the bond between them. Dick seems less like an ally than the closest neighbor on a very broad plain; his death may have made him more suitable for rose-colored memories. "For all practical purposes," Stafford wrote Marjorie later in life, "I left home when I was 7." She may not have been just bragging.

Marjorie and Mary Lee's accounts of Stafford family life make it sound like Meet Me in St. Louis, but according to Stafford, who seldom saw her parents between her college graduation and their deaths, it was apparently closer to Long Day's Journey Into Night. Roberts quotes from Stafford's highly autobiographical, unfinished, and unpublished novel In the Snowfall; here, the father is a nasty, crazy figure who becomes particularly vengeful when his daughters begin to reach sexual maturity. The abuse gotten and given in Stafford's adult life suggest abuses received in her early life, but whatever happened to her as a child, she clearly chose very young to stage her battles on her father's turf: writing. Some of the most arresting of her letters and early work show Stafford on the thorny cusp of becoming a writer—trying out styles, posing, boasting one moment, denigrating herself the next. "Have not embellished. Am not embarrassed. Know now for sure I'm good—like hell. Will doubtless spend my life writing novels," she wrote to a friend in 1937, high from having her work considered by Harper's and Scribner's. Stafford came at writing like someone busting into a saloon, ready to fight every man in the place for her fair share.

Unfortunately, the man she chose to fight first (or second, after her father) was Robert Lowell, who accidentally smashed up Stafford's face in a car wreck when she was 23; he smashed it up intentionally two years later when he hit her and broke her nose. Like the narrator's ravaged face in Duras's The Lover, Stafford's sometimes seems more inevitable than accidental, the face within that had been waiting to emerge, and one she wore with sardonic pride thereafter. She married Lowell, who nearly killed her on at least two occasions. When the marriage broke up, she broke down in what would be the first of many collapses. And while his crowd of New Critics, Partisan Review-ites, and poets grooming their poetic excesses could forgive Stafford any sort of psychic torment, many of them cut her for good when she was embraced by The New Yorker, an institution they regarded as unintellectual, the lazy way out of the hell of creation.

Sadly, Stafford seems to have been tempted to prove them right. She wrote steadily less and in shorter forms as she grew older. She was briefly married to a good-hearted editor from Life, Oliver Jensen, who evidently bored her to death. In 1959, she married expansive, flashy, loving A. J. Liebling and was happy, everyone says, for the first time. He died of pneumonia in 1963, and she moved out to East Hampton. After 1965 she stopped writing fiction. When she died in 1979, she left everything to her cleaning lady. While it makes for better myth to believe that Stafford was burned by venturing too close to Art's pure Sun, a substantial part of the truth is that she drank herself down. She had a glass jaw where life was concerned; with each lost bout she retreated farther.

Stafford became a critical and popular star when she published her first novel, Boston Adventure, in 1944. Hulbert situates her not among the modernists, New Critics, and poets she hung out with, but in an American literary tradition of Henry James, Henry Adams, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, gracefully arguing that Stafford learned her irony at the knee of Mark Twain (Roughing It, says Hulbert, was on Stafford's bedside table when she died) rather than T. S. Eliot. In this first novel, however, Stafford can't yet lay claim to Twain, heading East full-tilt into Boston along endless avenues of Jamesian prose:

Here came the car! Slipping round the corner of the Hotel, its long black snout caught the rays of the sun which shot fitfully into my eyes. It stopped and Mac, the chauffeur, stepped out. He was a thin, sharp, silvery young man, who, in his gray livery, looked like an upright rat. He suffered from some strange distemper that caused his feet to swell, but though the valetudinarians on the veranda perpetually foretold Miss Pride's doom when the man while driving should die at the wheel (for they were enough acquainted with his symptoms to know that foot swelling indicated a rheumatic heart for which there was no cure), she kept him on and about twice a week was handed into the car by his lean, gray paws which, since they went out and withdrew so quickly, seemed to abhor their contact with the dessicated elbow that they briefly cupped.

Stafford's half-Russian, half-German working-class heroine, Sonie Marburg, manages to shine through the Writing in which she is entangled, but barely. She sounds stilted, like someone playing dress-up: "I sank into the chair at the writing desk, faint with a conflict." The conflict giving Sonie the vapors throughout the novel revolves around class, but while she struggles valiantly to maintain her identity as she journeys through Boston's upper crust, she is formally suffocated, wrapped in yards and yards of chintz-covered Jamesian sentences that clash with Sonie's Dostoyevskian family background in the first half of the novel, and then the Proustian loss-of-innocence saga she walks into in the second half.

Hulbert finds much to admire in Boston Adventure, particularly the rich pattern of symbolic imagery Stafford was able to control, but the novel feels cluttered with concrete and psychological scenery. The last we see of Sonie, she's working as a secretary to a domineering Bostonian, Miss Pride. Her spiritual retreat, the only one now open to her, is a recurrent vision of a "red room" furnished with books and Louisa May Alcott's writing desk. The red room feels like a stylistic escape hatch as well, the possibility of a way out of the claustrophobic excess of sensibility into a more sparely furnished female literary tradition of working girls—Alcott's Jo, and, of course, Jane Eyre, who had her own terrifying red room. In Stafford's hands, the red room's danger is its singularity: "I had made for myself a tamed-down sitting room in a dead, a voiceless, city where no one could trespass, for I was the founder, the governor, the only citizen." Hulbert reads Sonie's fantasy as an "ambivalence at the heart of the escape, for it was a kind of imprisonment of its own." But Stafford was as guarded a writer as she was a person; the moat of despair and failure with which she ringed an image that she used throughout her life may have been as much a defensive move as a diagnosis; perhaps in her young ambivalence about her entitlement to the room, she painted it as gloomy and forbidding.

Later, in The Mountain Lion (1947), Stafford's adolescent and cerebral heroine Molly would think of herself as "a long wooden box with a mind inside," a similar image of safety encased in death. The Mountain Lion is easily the best of Stafford's novels. It's a double-headed bildungs-roman, the story of the deepening estrangement between Ralph and Molly Fawcett, the youngest siblings in a large California family. Ralph and Molly, unlike their buoyant older sisters and socially correct mother, are irritable, oversensitive, and ugly.

From some obscure ancestor they had inherited bad, uneven teeth and nearsighted eyes so they had to wear braces and spectacles. Their skin and hair and eyes were dark and the truth of it was they always looked a little dirty.. . . They could not sit on a chair without looking as if they perched on a precarious cliff, and if they were suddenly addressed by a strange elder, they suddenly swallowed in the middle of their words and tears came to their eyes, steaming their glasses. They were always getting cut and bruised and bumped, and this seemed so inconsiderate . . . when Mrs. Fawcett felt the way she did about injuries that could so easily turn into lockjaw.

As the novel progresses, Ralph veers off into normality while Molly remains true to their high standards of awkwardness. She never succeeds in becoming a regular girl; Stafford's genius is in shifting back and forth between Ralph's exasperated, separating perspective and Molly's angry, devoted one. The novel is a valentine of mismatched, perfectly matched hearts, each one made up of a thousand tilted observations, impressions, judgments, and fantasies.

Fortunately, Stafford is never able to make Ralph's transition to manliness entirely convincing. He still has quite a bit of quirkiness left in him, enough for sizable wells of discomfort and alienation even as he lusts after girls and guns (Molly, meanwhile, writes furiously, makes lists of all the people she hates, and wants to marry the family dog). Unfortunately, Stafford decides to resolve the tension she's created by having Ralph shoot Molly accidentally, believing she's a mountain lion. Stafford cannot resist undercutting even her heroine's grand exit: "Uncle Claude [carried] his dead sister with her ruined head. They had tied a handkerchief around her forehead so you could not see the hole, but the blood had soaked through; relaxed like that in Uncle Claude's arms she looked like a tall, slim monkey."

Except for its explosive ending, The Mountain Lion balances the interior text of Molly and Ralph's renegade dreamlife and the exterior countertext of growing apart and joining the social order, each ironizing the other. There are no heroes in this novel, only antiheroes in various stages of denial. It is a joy to read precisely because of everything it does wrong by New Critical standards: intensely autobiographical, unpatterned in its imagery, and structurally lopsided, The Mountain Lion is a changeling, part fact, part fiction, a collision of myths of self, half-understood texts, and ungrounded assertions. No one is better than Stafford at delineating the space between one person and another, the mutually constructed magic kingdom of completely distorted perspective. In The Mountain Lion, she uses the process of disconnection to outline a lost island of connection; it is formally helter-skelter, but psychologically brilliant.

In her last novel, The Catherine Wheel (1952), Stafford attenuates connection even further, making one pole a boy yearning for the lost attention of his best friend, the other a grown woman having an affair with her best friend's husband. As Goodman has pointed out, this last novel deserves more critical attention than it has received. Here, James and Wharton are far more elegantly infused than in Boston Adventure; like The Mountain Lion, it details the whorls and imprints of consciousness, conveys the same feeling that a singular interior landscape is at stake, but without as much wise-cracking. Stafford is gentler with Katherine and Andrew than with Molly and Ralph, as if they were somehow more delicate. The connection between them is wholly metaphysical, uncomplicated by blood ties; together, they are many stories about the meeting of true minds. This novel moves slowly and grandly, like a barge. You can feel Stafford proceeding carefully toward a high but imaginatively loose style—until Katherine goes up in flames.

After The Catherine Wheel, Stafford tried unsuccessfully for many years to complete her novel In the Snowfall. She got contracts for it, broke contracts, got new ones. She was often very witty. She was often very drunk. She was often in the hospital with ailments of mind or body. She once wrote to a friend, "You and I might as well make up our minds that we are going through the rest of our lives—or part of it—buttressed up by doctors," and so she was. Both Goodman and Hulbert point out that the red room, the interior castle, more and more came to resemble a hospital room. Stafford's writing life was saved for a time by The New Yorker, especially by her editor, Katherine White, who elicited brief performances from her that have been called masterpieces of the form. As accomplished and delightful as these short stories are, however, it is difficult not to feel that Stafford had been somehow permanently winded. Too often, the stories succumb to the law of the Story, plot noiselessly organizing and tidying so as not to overtax a permanently convalescing writer. The liberating distance is increasingly just too distant; irony, like alcohol, is best used in moderation.

As Stafford's life shrank, her tropes of self grew grander—rooms became castles, flaws became tragedies. The last story she wrote, "The End of a Career," appeared in 1956, more than 20 years before her death. Here, heroine Angelica Early is internationally renowned for her beauty; as it ebbs with age, she spends more and more of her time trying to preserve it while the myths about her grow—she has a fierce lover, she has a terrible disease. Angelica stays inside, protecting her skin and feeding the fictions about her, until one day she looks down and realizes her hands, like Dorian Gray's mirror, are telling the time. When she accepts the gift of a pair of gloves, she is defeated: "Dora came in to run her evening bath, and found that her heart, past mending, had stopped."