Free The Interior Castle by Ann Hulbert Page B

the intelligentsia. “They did not, I’m afraid to say, have the result they should have, not through any fault of Father Agatho’s but through my own indolence …” (It was not the first time, apparently, that she had turned to the Church in her unhappiness. She claimed that during high school she had visited a local priest in secret.)
    Then, in the last semester of her senior year, Stafford unexpectedly stumbled, quite literally, first into a more mundane source of daily comfort and then into a chance to pursue her higher literary ideals. One morning in February 1936 she fainted while she was modeling. Worried that her “undisciplined eating arrangements” were the cause of her wooziness, Paul and Dorothy Thompson, a graduate student couple whom Stafford had met through the English department, invited her to have breakfast regularly with them. Their house was a convenient stopping place on Stafford’s route to the campus from her rooming house, where she lived again after Lucy’s death. On Sundays, her breakfast visits would last through dinner, and the Thompsons didn’t begrudge herthe time and company. “We both like her,” Paul Thompson jotted in the diary he assiduously kept. “She is terribly lonely, and no one much regrets the loss of study her being here involves.”
    The Thompsons could hardly have been less like the Cookes, and their acerbically witty but far from wild household became a refuge for Stafford. The entertainment was Monopoly, anagrams, and clever, amusing literary games—not exactly the artistic life on the edge. Apparently Stafford didn’t talk much about her creative aspirations, for although the Thompsons admired Jean’s play that spring, they didn’t think of her as a writer—wouldn’t have said she thought of herself as a writer. Her bohemian life beyond their house was something of a blur, though friends would come by for her and she would reappear later looking bedraggled and feeling sick. The Thompsons helped tend to her fragile health, which they ascribed at least in part to her unstructured habits—perhaps some dissipation, they suspected. Stafford’s lifelong proclivity to disease had begun, and, it seems clear, her tendency to drink too much. She was notably frail that spring, as Paul Thompson’s diary recorded: a tonsillectomy in March, an attack of appendicitis at the beginning of May and another at the end of the month, and then another in June, shortly before the Thompsons departed to spend the summer in London.
    Thanks to a second piece of luck that spring, Stafford herself had plans to go to Europe in the fall. Not long after she had collapsed in art class, she had seen a notice on a bulletin board that the University of Heidelberg was awarding fellowships to American students. It looked like a practical answer to the unrealistic schemes of the intelligentsia, who longed for their turn to be a lost generation. As Stafford recalled many years later, “Landlocked, penniless, ragtag and bobtail, we planned splendid Odysseys. Europe was to us the land of opportunity, and more than that, it was the world, not this halfway house in which we dawdled, where the only glory and the only grandeur were what we read about.” She and Lucy had also talked of a trip abroad, and after their daughter’s death,Lucy’s parents evidently agreed to lend Stafford money to see that plan through.
    The Heidelberg fellowship was sponsored by the German government, which was eager to refute American denunciations of the nazification of German education, but Stafford was paying no attention to the ominous political signs. It was wider culture she sought. She had had a firsthand taste of it in her own country during the previous summer, in1935, assisting at the well-regarded summer Writers’ Conference annually held on the Boulder campus under the direction of a resident poet and English teacher named Edward Davison, who had taken a personal and professional interest in her. At his