The Interior Castle Read Online Free PDF Page A

Mary Lee, who was his first disciple in the family, an avid reader and budding writer as a child and later an excellent college student. Marjorie’s foray into print stands as her own proof of the family’s literary self-conception (though she had started out wanting to be an artist); in her prose, with its slightly mannered blend of provincial conventionality and idiosyncratic quaintness, McKillop and Stafford styles seem to mix.As for Dick, his response to the paternal presence emerges as a quietly graceful escape: he pursued the time-honored Stafford path, away from words and into the wilderness. But unlike his more aggressive forebears, he cultivated a naturalist’s detachment, leaving the family house on the Boulder hillside whenever he could to hike and explore in the surrounding mountains. To his father’s disappointment, Dick wouldn’t take a gun.
    That perhaps the youngest Stafford was more aloof, somehow more troubled early on by the family’s trials, emerges even from Marjorie’s genial account. “Jean was a quiet child who did not whine, yell, or have tantrums like the rest of us. She usually waited to voice protests until she had thought of something incisive and withering to say.” As Stafford herself told it, words were her recourse very early on. They were evidently at once a refuge in her loneliness and a way of encountering her father on his own ground. Stafford later said that she “pledged allegiance to the English language,” which was the guiding light of John Stafford’s life, and her verbal precociousness was a source of pride within the family. It seems to have counted for less in her relations with her brother, Dick, though she rarely offered more than abstract testimonials of her youthful devotion to him. Perhaps the most vivid image of their friendship, captured in a photograph that became very important to her, was of happily united action, rather than combative speech: Jean, small and smiling blissfully, riding on the back of her brother’s bicycle, confidently holding on to him. “Sometimes when my eye falls on it,” she wrote later, “I go rather funny in the head at the spectacle of such joy.”
    But her most reliable source of pleasure, and of self-confidence, was language. In retrospect Stafford emphasized how physical her early engagement with words had been. She liked to claim that she had learned Braille in kindergarten (though her family told her she must have beenremembering an abacus), and her first novel, a thriller written in seventh grade and set in the British Museum, was memorable for its form not its substance: “I typed it all out in upper case letters on the biggest and oldest and loudest typewriter ever seen.… I filled in the punctuation by hand with colored pencils.” Under her father’s influence, she developed the taste for the incongruous textures of language that became a hallmark of her virtuosic style. She learned some Latin, read his favorite highbrow and lowbrow authors, and pored over the dictionary, cultivating a vocabulary as exotic and as colloquial as his.
    By high school she had also cultivated a tone of arch irony and a prose of strident individualism rather like her father’s. (Even in elementary school, she apparently took pains to stand out, and John Stafford was the inspiration:a friend, Howard Higman, remembered her walking from school, slowly and awkwardly, dragging her father’s saber with her.) At Boulder State Preparatory School, which she attended from 1929 to 1932, Stafford was a good student (except in math) and above all a conspicuous nonconformist—though you wouldn’t guess it from a demure photograph, probably a school portrait, of sixteen-year-old Jean, her face looking innocently pretty above the ruffled collar of her dress. She was a member of a small group of self-styled literati who favored exotic reading (O’Neill, Boccaccio’s
Decameron
, Voltaire’s
Candide
, as Higman recalled) and conducted “Voltaire