The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford.

Although there have been two critical biographies of Jean Stafford in the last few years, they have for the most part stressed the rather easy themes of estrangement and division in her work. They have not dared to analyze significant epistermological and theological problems which troubled her, and for that matter, produced her best work.

Perhaps this critical biography will point the way to a reconsideration of Stafford as a "religious" writer. It is possible to claim that she converted to Catholicism because of the domination of her first husband, the poet Robert Lowell, who was writing his early, contorted, and complex works. But this idea (although partially true) is somewhat "convenient" - and simplistic.

If I consider that Stafford was always interested in the power of language, I also assert that she recognized the difficult, slippery value of words. Could they be used to express those experiences "beyond language"? Could she employ them to express the mystical longings she felt? Could language capture consciousness?

Stafford's "master" was Henry James (at least in her early novel Boston Adventure). She was attracted to James because she recognized that he grappled with similar questions. When I read such "odd" fiction as The Turn of the Screw, I recognize that James developed a sophisticated style which, in effect questioned the ability of words to grasp "reality". James was fascinated by the ghostly vision, by the mystical revelation. (So, of course, were his father and his brother.) But James understood that transcendental - and earthly! - experience eluded him. Words are, in the end, inadequate; they cannot "interpret"the religious experience, the visitation of grace. Thus The Turn of the Screw is, finally, a fiction about the limitations of narration and interpretation.

Although Hulbert mentions the Jamesian influence on Stafford, she doesn't emphasize the points I have just made. But she does recognize that Stafford is interested in the ultimate seriousness of words - and their doubtful validity for "visions".

In her most interesting chapter - the chapter which will be used in the future by all Stafford critics - Hulbert stresses the point that "The Interior Castle" - perhaps one of her finest stories and one of the best American stories - is indebted in part to the text of Saint Teresa of Avila. Here is Hulbert: "Teres's supremely tantalizing and inaccessible castle - a series of glimmering receding chambers beset by wicked serpents at its walls - provided Staffford with a central symbol: the bounded circle of the self in thrall to darkness without and in search of illumination within." Thus, I again maintain that Stafford's story and, perhaps, many of her best ones deal with the ability of metaphoric language to render - a Jamesian word-supernatural experience.

I leap here. Let me suggest that Stafford wrote few works because she understood the meaninglessness of language - the power of silence. Although she tried to write in her later years, she turned to reviews viechildren's books; to letters to the editor. Hulbert doesn't explain Stafford's reviewing practices. But don't children's books deal indirectly with magical visions, strange illuminations? (Think of Maurice Sendak.) Don't letters to the editor expressing distaste for cliches used by others demonstrate her continuing obsession with the difficulties of words?

I don't want to transform Stafford into a sophisticated philosopher. She is not Wittgenstein!

I may be misreading Hulbert's book in certain ways, but I am, nevertheless, grateful for her brilliant, daring insights.