Free The Interior Castle by Ann Hulbert Page A

in hers!” It was also a murderous thought, which appallingly found fulfillment in Maisie’s suicide.
    Stafford’s fictional portrait of Lucy’s circle was something of an exaggeration of the facts (of the sexual adventures, almost certainly; of her own drinking, perhaps less so).But it was not, it seems, an exaggeration of the couple’s impact on her as she was drawn into a self-punishing vortex and watched Lucy drown in it. Her relationship with Lucy was a terrifying experience of the power of the imagination to shape life in destructive ways, which was to be a recurrent theme of both her difficult life and her art. She had been lured to Lucy’s entourage by a vision of a decadent aristocracy of art, only to be confused about whether the derangement she discovered was the sign of a gift or a disease. Her fascination with Lucy’s antibourgeois daring, with her courting of chaos, was accompanied by fear. It was a confusion that Stafford, in precarious psychological and physical health for much of her life, took to her doctors and came back to again and again in disguised form in her fiction: Does the imagination that creates art also destroy life? Does it liberate or merely isolate the self?
    S TAFFORD TURNED to the first of a career’s worth of indirect treatments of the subject barely six months after Lucy’s death. The only public literary accomplishment of her college years was a play entitled
Tomorrow in Vienna
, centered on Beethoven’s death, which won first prize in the university’s Original One-Act Play Contest in 1936 and was performed on campus that April. In it Stafford revisited the suicide in altered form and dramatized her ambivalence about the relation between art and a “badly lived life.” Her highly declamatory scene was staged at a safe distance, in another country and another century. The spokesman of philistine, bourgeois common sense was Beethoven’s doctor: “Artists are great fools. They starve their bodies to nurture their minds and what do they have … bad liver, murmuring heart, crotchety disposition.” His hierarchy of value was clear: “Health is the most precious thing you have.”
    In her play Beethoven’s sensitive nephew Carl rejected any application of this reductive view to the great composer, but Stafford made him wonder about the justification for his own degenerate symptoms: Carl had just tried and failed to commit suicide, and his uncle had caught a fatalcold coming out in the rain to help him. “Too bad I failed, isn’t it?” Carl moaned. “If I had killed myself I wouldn’t have killed him. My life isn’t worth a farthing and now it’s going to take the place of his, the greatest life in the world.” The greatest life was necessarily a desperately unhappy, lonely one, according to Carl, who castigated the doctor for his fixation on health and celebrated Beethoven’s arduous dedication to fulfilling his genius: “You search the four corners of the earth for love and warmth, and your soul yells out in anguish. But the world is hostile eternally, even to those who make the most beautiful things.… Come death, come death, for the lonely man.”
    The implications of the rather stilted play were bleak: either your life is too sordidly insignificant to be salvaged from mundane unhappiness, or it is too great to escape spiritual torment. As the winter of her senior year arrived Stafford had guilty reason to fear the former and no reason to believe the latter: What beautiful thing had she made? In Joyce, Stafford summed up her essentially adolescent dilemma: “She believed herself to be uniquely diseased in spirit and if the fact occasionally made her proud, most of the time it made her miserable.”
    Stafford sought solace in religion, though years later she reported that her efforts were in vain. “I think you had left Boulder before I began instructions with Father Agatho,” she wrote almost a decade later to Edward J. Chay, perhaps her best friend among