Free The Interior Castle by Ann Hulbert

depraved world of Maisie Perrine. Joyce entered the gates of the university in search of a life that fulfilled an inchoate desire for artistic distinction: “Maisie herself was a symbol, but rather an atavistic one as if she had been held over from the jazz age. She and her household were composed in the earlier decade by Fitzgerald, Huxley, and Coward. And Joyce, feeling herself to be identified with no time, wanted to examine these figures of history at first hand.” But entering the precincts of the household, where “Bohemianism … must dictate every event, even the most commonplace,” was not so easy for penurious, studious Joyce. “From the beginning she was called scholarly, and it amused Maisie to point out what a rare combination she was of the blue-stocking and the Bohemian.” The true incongruity was internal. Joyce guiltily betrayed her father and her intelligentsia friends, who were “consumed with indignation at the unfair order of things,” by being herself consumed with envy of the rich and desiring “nothing so much as to imitate their ways.”
    But Stafford quickly abandoned any serious effort at generational portraiturein the ill-disguised fictional drama of her own ordeals. She couldn’t sustain the social focus on an experience that had shaken her so personally, thoroughly undermining her sense of integrity and independence in the world. The various drafts of
In the Snowfall
are remarkable not for their social sweep or emblematic action, but for the vivid immediacy with which they reflect Stafford’s imaginative enthrallment to Lucy, as if that trauma had only recently happened. Despite the intervening years, Stafford still wrote with the adolescent passion and lack of balance that belonged to her younger self. While she worked on the manuscript, which reads like a disjointed, self-dramatizing journal, she graphically relived the memory of Lucy’s perverse power and of her own degrading submission to it.
    It is no coincidence that Joyce’s great and fatal temptation was essentially the same one that doomed her author’s efforts to shape her novel successfully: unguarded confession. It was the price of admission to Maisie’s society—as well as the temptation that Stafford herself in retrospect couldn’t resist and that she found sabotaged her imagination. The danger of self-exposure was a theme she returned to again and again in her life and in her writing, as she careened between the urge to exhibitionism and the desire for isolation. Joyce’s ethic at the outset was studiously circumspect: “My own morality was eccentric and purblind. My only code was practical, and I believed that integrity was the result of reticence, that silence was insulation and that calamity followed when protection was stripped off; secrecy was the flesh that sheathed the nerves.” But in Maisie’s circle, the nerves were not to be sheathed, either from experience or from the recounting of it, and Joyce was wooed by the wild words: “Maisie’s history, told to Joyce, is of affairs, gonorrhea etc. Joyce is innocent, understands no society but her own family … believes Maisie’s to have been the complete life, and her own to have been insipid and unrealistic.”
    Under the supervision of Maisie, Joyce spiced up her pallid experience, and she renounced her reticence. “Joyce had learned that night to drink.… [And] quite forgetting her lifelong habits decided she had been foolish to be a listener and not a talker, for the talkers seemed to have much the better time of it.… [T]he former clean stinginess of her life was gone now that she had broken her pledge of self-concealment.” Alcohol offered a rescue from marginality, but it also meant vulnerability. Finally Joyce’s tenuous sense of integrity was utterly lost: “She did notwant to know Maisie but wanted to be her; it was a suicidal thought and she shuddered. If only she could exist as vividly in the minds of those people as they existed