The Interior Castle Read Online Free PDF Page B

she routinely deflated her characters’ flamboyant declarations of martyrdom. “It wasn’t everyone who had suffered so. And she so young!” exulted a character called Sarah, who had just announced that “her family was her barrier to happiness.” Polly, Sarah’s younger sister, promptly undermined that self-dramatizing despair, commenting on all her relatives, including her sister: “They were asses. They were so stupidly serious.” In other stories about the Smiths, Stafford portrayed Ursula, the baby (her counterpart), as a forlorn creature—but also made fun of her often theatrical unhappiness.
    Above all, Stafford’s exaggerated irony was a way to emulate her father’s peculiar literary enterprise, even as she mocked it. When she was about fifteen she poked fun at their common, undisciplined approach to their literary occupation in a humorous portrait called “Fame Is Sweet to the Foolish Man,” about a summer trip she and her father had taken to a cabin in the mountains. They intended to spend the vacation writing, promising their family that “before August was over we would have gained national recognition for our outstanding work in the literary field.…” Instead they were seduced from thoughts about “the philosophy of the short story and the movement of the drama to the extraordinarily inviting snow-capped peaks and cool shaded lakes.” In another story, she described Mr. Smith huddled in the basement “pounding out ‘shorts’ and ‘squibs’ on an ancient Remington.… Mr. Smith was always surprised and flattered when he received a check. He would chew a match thoughtfully and say, ‘May Plutus be praised.’ He was never quite sure about his classical references but since the rest didn’t know the difference he could consult Bullfinch [
sic
] before he said anything else.…”
    Stafford sometimes focused her wit not on her father himself, but on his incongruous fixations—Latin and bizarre tall tales. In “Our Latin Teacher,” she facetiously celebrated an implausible romance between two Latin teachers, who fall in love “with only the true passion that a hysteron proteron can inspire, happy mortals that they were in comparison to us who had never felt our heartstrings pulled by the sight or the sound of Latin rhetoric.” At thirteen, in “Miss Lucy,” she produced a curiousnarrative in colloquial dialect, which was a specialty of her father’s and which continued to fascinate her throughout her writing career. Told from the perspective of an innocent boy, it featured his extremely odd relative Lucy, who was “the most imaginative of all our family. She always is or has a new character and she keeps us in gales of laughter from dawn to night. She is far from insane but to one who does not know her peculiar manners, she gives that impression.” Outlandish Lucy sounds like a not-so-distant relative of Stafford’s father, or an imagined version of Stafford herself grown up.
    Flattering her father by imitation, Stafford’s humor at his expense seems to have amused him—which was at least in part what she intended. The spirit of their curious literary alliance (and an augury of its evolution) was captured by a photograph that John Stafford made a point of showing, roughly thirty years after it was taken, to Stafford’s second husband, Oliver Jensen, with whom he carried on a brief correspondence:
    I am sending you just as soon as I can locate it my favorite picture of her. She knows what it is. She was about 12 or 13 when I took it. She had come into my basement yarn factory dressed up as a young man sporting my own blackthorn stick and by the Powers she did such a whale of a good job of impersonating, I didn’t know who the Devil [
sic
] that for a fleeting instant it was given to me to believe or at least to hope that I was being honored by the very personable agent of some hopeful editor who had heard of me but who had never seen any of my stuff. When I came out of my