The Psychological Novel

Author(s): Jean Stafford

Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1948), pp. 214-227
Published by: Kenyon College
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Jean Stafford

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL'

M 4 Y TITLE sounds in these days like a cliche and in all days

it is, I think, a tautology; a cliche because for so long now
there has been so much talk about Freud and his fellows and their
literary uses - a great deal of it talk through an old hat - and a
tautology because the novel does not exist that is not psychological,
is not concerned with emotional motivations and their intellectual
resolutions, with instincts and impulses and conflicts and behav-
ior, with the convolutions and complexities of human relation-
ships, with the crucifixions and the solaces of being alive. I am in
danger, to be sure, of keeling over on this tack and saying that all
fiction is actually fact, that novels are psychology, and if I should
be nothing more for me to say, and in my traumatic embarrassment,
be nothing more for me to say and in my traumatic embarrassment,
I should be obliged to spend my forthcoming honorarium on a
visit to a psychologist who would not, I am very sure, be content
with a copy of one of my books as payment of his fee in kind.
But lately we have come to assign a special meaning to the
word "psychological" and we use it to label a sort of writing which
we distinguish from the "historical" novel or the novel of ad-
venture or of uncomplicated romantic love. It involves a sub-
jective scrutiny of the human heart and mind, usually the author's
own heart and mind, often in a sort of imagined removal from the
everyday and active world, and more often than not communicated
by a method that is not inhibited by the restrictions of traditional
1. A paper read at the Bard College Conference on the Novel.

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 JEAN STAFFORD 215

rules. One thinks at once of Proust's painstaking and loving ex-

amination of his past experience, his patient exploration of his
relationships with his mother and his grandmother and his lovers
and his friends and his servants, and the effect of gardens upon
him, and of the sea, and of conversation, and of the remembered
taste of tea-cakes. One knows that his diagnostic methods cannot
be entirely different from those of the psychoanalyst who rejects
no part of his patient's reflections. Similarly, the stream-of-con-
sciousness of James Joyce resembles the method of free associa-
tion, and the ordered interior monologue of Mrs. Dalloway, a
modification of this. Because Proust is an artist, his novel tran-
scends its technique and is a novel and does not smell of the clinic;
but unfortunately few writers can use so subjective a system and
remain as objective as he does, and his imitators seem generally
to fetch up in a morass of inartistic and embarrassingly personal
soul-searching which is not any newer and not any less sentimental
than The Sorrows of Werther.
There is the tendency to think that psychological fiction must
find its matter in the vile or the strange or the perverse and this can
only mean that we are confounding "psychology" with "abnormal
psychology" or with psychiatry or even with teratology, which is
the study of monsters. And along with this misconception has gone
the fad of borrowing the vocabulary of psychology rather than its
methods of analysis and deduction; and it is fashionable to be
forthrightly and ungraciously autobiographical as if Freud had
come as the emancipator of the skeleton in the closet. The skele-
ton remains a skeleton and one skeleton does not look very much
different from another. It would be hard to count the novels
of recent years which have been strip-tease acts in the psychiatric
ward or on the psychoanalyst's couch; when the last garment is
flung off, there is again the familiar set of bones whose only claim
to being unusual is that some of them are out of joint: but "out of
joint" is synonymous with "inarticulate."
There can be no question that we are deeply in Freud's debt.

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 216 KENYON REVIEW

He has made our moral attitudes

fied our habits of observation, m
and to the patterns and symbols
insights, sharpening our sense of
this even though few of us have
have read him well. We know ab
as soon as we know about the Am
know about it not through refer
Words like "masochism" and "sadism" and "sublimation" and
"compulsion" are the property of everyone; and we all know that
our dreams are not what they seem but are the disguised symbols
of our subconscious desires; and we know that our characters be-
gan to form in our plagued infancy; and it is no longer possible
to accept our families nor the world about us without a sort of
shrewd mistrust. But it is all too easy to acquire the notion that
what Freud discovered was new, that these abstract words denote
something peculiar to our times, to imagine that the emotions are
the product of the 20th Century, invented to occupy the time and
fill the pockets of psychiatrists, a breed that emerged suddenly and
somehow adventitiously. It is possible, in this infatuation, to for-
get that Shakespeare knew as much about people as Freud did and
that he said it all very much better. People have been losing their
week ends from the beginning of time and if they have only just
recently been ending up in Bellevue, they have ended up in other
places just as interesting. Dickens' little man in Bleak House
went up in spontaneous combustion from drinking too much gin,
and Huckleberry Finn's father, no slouch when it came to the bot-
tle, died dead drunk. This is not a criticism of Mr. Jackson's
book but only a reminder that booze has been going to the heads of
characters in books for a long time and that we do not need science
to tell us what happens to them then. We do not make a drunk
any drunker by calling him a dipsomaniac nor do we alter the al-
coholic content of whiskey by calling it a substitute for love. In
general, I think, the writers who steal the doctors' thunder get

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 JEAN STAFFORD 217

only second-hand thunder that the doctors stole from them in the
first place.
Henry James is no more Freudian than Freud is Jamesian and I
am offended by Mr. Clifton Fadiman's remarks on "The Jolly
Corner" which he has included in his collection of James's short
stories; he says that this story is really a psychoanalysis in which
the author is at once the patient and the doctor. This strikes me
as a rather foolish sort of literary criticism and, in a sense, an im-
pertinent sort since it lowers the story from its great stature as an
imagined and constructed work of literature to the level of a
dressed-up case-history, a public exhibition of James's private life.
I do not say that Fadiman is altogether wrong but that he is not
precise, for certainly James could not have imagined that he was
addressing an audience of psychiatrists, and for literary purposes,
it is more to the point to investigate his artistic intention than the
medical by-product of his result. And what more, really, is Fadi-
man saying than that James is so dedicated to telling the truth
about reality that even science cannot tell it better? The implica-
tion in this sort of criticism is that writers like James have been
the prophets of the new scientists instead of their teachers. Ed-
mund Wilson brilliantly disposed of the idea that The Turn of
the Screw was a ghost story, arguing in a thoroughly convincing
way that the ghosts were not seen by the children nor by anyone
else save the neurasthenic governess and were, therefore, only the
hallucinatory projections of her emotional deformities. But now
James's notebooks have been published and in them James says
that The Turn of the Screw is a ghost story and it seems to me
that he is in a better position to judge what he meant than Wilson
unless he is prophetically pulling the wool over Wilson's eyes.
Recently I got in the mail a prodigious sample of this confu-
sion of a science with an art and this delight in ambulatory mad-
ness. A person from the middle west wrote to me introducing
himself as the editor of a new quarterly to be called "Neurotica"
and this is what he said:

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 218 KENYON REVIEW

The rebels against boredom, dullness and security, whether they be

artists, writers, scientists or dilettantes, have one token they share in
common; the farewell slap given by the inane majority.

The slap takes many forms, but the one that is flung with the word
"neurotic" is the challenge to a new magazine . . . NEUROTICA.

The editors of NEUROTICA would like you to be among its grow-

ing list of contributors. Enclosed is an arbitrary listing of possible
article headings and gists of ideas meant only to suggest a mood, in-
dicate a spirit. More important is: new material that we hope will
make its way to our offices to help in the cultivation of a side street in
the publishing field, a magazine that explores, in both fiction and
non-fiction the problems, interests, and tastes of the neurotic person-
ality. Particularly we are interested in securing original works that
have the potency, beauty, strangeness of interest to penetrate the
lethargy of the jaded.

Since our payment is small, the main compensation comes from hav-
ing helped to create the written bric-a-brac that builds the cenotaph
to those named and nameless who sought a cheap elixir to postpone
madness.

I do not find this prose crystal-clear and so perhaps my reaction to

the letter is frivolous; there may be something worthwhile here
that I am too loutishly well-adjusted to perceive. I cannot tell
what connotation the word "cheap" has in the last unusual clause,
"a cheap elixir to postpone madness," so that I do not know
whether my audience is going to be vulgar or impoverished or,
possibly, stingy. I would not have any idea of how to go about
creating a piece of written bric-a-brac (I can only think of poly-
chrome) to make a tomb for some people who have names and
some who have not and who, since they only "postponed madness"
by drinking the stuff, perhaps went mad after they died.
When I looked at the "arbitrary listing of article headings"
which were intended to "suggest a mood, indicate a spirit," I
wondered if this were a leg-pull administered by one of my friends
or by a frolicsome Freshman at Harvard. For these were some of
the subjects toward which I, as a writer of fiction, might like to
direct my talent:

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 JEAN STAFFORD 219

The Castration Complex in Animals

Aspects of Midwest Baudelaireism
Touches in Hollywood Films that only a Neurotic Would Spot
Some Strange Turns of Apperception in Isomorphic Symbolism
Can You Slap Your Mother: a Semantic Problem
The Drive to Be a Misfit and Its Reward

The mood that is suggested to me is black and the spirit indicated

is a quick elixir in a shot glass. The question presents itself: what
person in me is the letter-writer addressing? The novelist or the
neurotic who he assumes, a priori, I am? Does he think that I am
a neurotic because I am a novelist or a novelist because I am a
neurotic? And does he think that because I am a neurotic novelist,
I am therefore equipped to write a literary essay on "The Castra-
tion Complex in Animals," or "Some Strange Turns of Appercep-
tion in Isomorphic Symbolism," a subject to which I have never
given a moment's thought in my whole life, partly, I suppose,
because until a few days ago I did not know what "isomorphic"
meant and I only looked it up then because I did not want to seem
an illiterate boob. I found that isomorphism is "superficial simi-
larity in organisms that are phylogenetically different, resulting
from convergence." The information did not inspire me to look
up those other words. I was much more interested in a picture on
the same page of the dictionary of a being called an "isopod" who
is described as "any of a large order of small sessile-eyed crusta-
ceans in which the body is composed of seven free thoracic seg-
ments each bearing a pair of legs typically alike in size and direc-
tion." I think that if I were pressed very much and offered a sum, I
might be able to write a story about an isopod who, through some
hideous misfortune, was born with legs that did not all go in the
same direction so that all its life it did not know where it was
and was destroyed at last by a lobster from Maine with which it
identified itself out of a complicated neurosis, one symptom of
which was a psychosomatic disorder of its sessile eyes. In fairness
to Mr. X of NEUROTICA, I suppose I must believe that this sub-
ject was not meant for me but for a learned critic; that "The Cas-

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 220 KENYON REVIEW

tration Complex in Animals" was intended for a neurotic veteri-

narian who is also invited to this bric-a-brac bee; and "Aspects of
Midwest Baudelaireism" was probably intended for a poet - per-
haps for Paul Engle who lives in Iowa City - or for the Drs.
Menninger who cure alcoholics in Kansas. But let me look for a
minute at a subject that was meant as much for me as for the other
people whose unstable company I now theoretically keep: "The
Drive to Be a Misfit and Its Reward." Since for the sake of argu-
ment, I am a rebel against security, it is natural - indeed, it is
normal - for me to have a powerful drive toward being a misfit,
but I do not know what my reward is going to be: you have seen
my isopod murdered in cold blood by a lobster from down east
and you already know without my telling you any details of the
plot that this uncomfortable and certainly unrewarding end comes
to him not because he is a successful rebel against security but be-
cause he is a victim of insecurity. I do not mean that his unfitness
to survive makes him ineligible to be the protagonist of my story-
on the contrary, I have grown very fond of him and see in him a
world of possibilities - but that I must not let my affection for
him run away with me; I must not be so charitable that I try to
persuade you that his deformed legs are attractive or that his life
has been a desirable one that you should strive to imitate. 1, the
author, and you, the reader, must be objective and not envy the
isopod nor wholly identify ourselves with him as the poor isopod
has identified himself with the lobster. I cannot possibly pretend
that his demise was a reward that he was glad to get, and there-
fore I do not feel that I am qualified to write for NEUROTICA.
I do not argue, you understand, for happy endings but only for true
endings based upon true premises, for that detachment from our
characters' eccentricities and misadventures that prevents us from
making them into improbable prodigies but that, on the contrary,
enables us to be psychologically sound. There is no subject that
is not fit for fiction, but if we use skullduggery to deceive our
readers and, by the same token, ourselves, we will be either bores

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 JEAN STAFFORD 221

or villains, and naturally I go

society of people who want to
good. I would never have forg
vinced me in A Handful of Du
was not only dramatic but wa
captured by a loony in the jun
made me read Dickens aloud to

I MUST APOLOGIZE for being unsporting, for I have shot at

and I hope I have killed a sitting bird. Unfortunately, most of the
game is not so easy and one is led astray, while hunting it, by the
will-o'-the-wisp of fashion which, from a distance, looks like the
real thing. But if we are not headlong, we will eventually bag
what is useful and leave behind what is not.
To be writers, then, we must be psychologists and to be good
writers we must be good psychologists, and this is only another way
of saying that we must be experts in the study of reality and cool
judges of our own natures. We are not doctors, whose task is to
cure, nor are we courts of law whose task is to condemn. If we
assume either of these roles and are wanting in irony and are the
servants of our pride and prejudice rather than of our sense and
sensibility, we may bog down in self-pity or we may distort our
personal misfortune into polemic or our idiosyncrasy into gospel.
This is the error into which have fallen the people whose best-
selling novels are described in the advertisements as "important
social documents." These are the sermons, embedded in stories,
that bear a message, that are preached in language that can be
understood by that famous man of our times, the man in the street;
they are the works that are called "scathing indictments" and
"fearless exposes." I do not know what would have been the
professions of these writers in another age; some of them would
have been essayists and some would have been evangelists and a
few might have been martyrs and many would have been hangmen
and a lot of them would have been the man in the street; but al-

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 222 KENYON REVIEW

most none of them would have been novelists and, in point of

fact, almost none of them are novelists now. I read the novel
called The Snake Pit, which gave an account of the nervous col-
lapse and the incarceration in a state mental institution and recov-
ery there of a sensitive lady writer. It was difficult to determine
what the book was about, whether it was a prolonged joke about
nervous breakdowns, whether it was an attempt to prove that
suffering will cease in spite of the nosy interference of medicine,
whether it was an attack on the conditions to be found in state
hospitals, or whether it was only a pastoral yarn on the theme that
the course of true love never does run smooth. Subsequently, I was
set straight on this point by advertisements that told me it was an
attack on the hospitals. I was given the further information that
this was a "true" story and the reason it was true was that the
author had actually been in a state mental institution and therefore
knew what she was talking about. The publication of her novel
was followed shortly by some articles on the same subject which
paraphrased, in non-fiction, her fictionalized account. I thought
about the book again, and while I was very sorry indeed that the
hospitals are so badly understaffed and so shockingly mismanaged
and so dirty and that the patients do not even have any decent
playing cards, it did not really give me pause. It might have done
if I had believed in the story, if, in the first place, I had been per-
suaded to feel and see and have faith in these causes and the nature
of the heroine's tragedy; a sensitive lady writer is not the most
agreeable protagonist in the world anyhow because she always
tends to write the book herself, and I did not like this one and
I did not believe in her for a minute; if I had, I daresay it would
have followed that I would have been convinced by all her ad-
ventures in the asylum and, at last, by her cure and the story's
staggeringly happy ending. But as it was, her calamity and her
bravery seemed very much fixed up and very much beside the point
of my own life; such implausible things, I thought, really do only
happen to implausible people in books and there is nothing for me,

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 JEAN STAFFORD 223

a lady writer not in a book, to be afraid of.

But there is a story by Chekhov called "Ward No. 6" which
does badly scare me, and I know, because Chekhov has never trick-
ed me, that what he is telling me is true, that it is hideous to be
mad, that madhouses are the most awful places in the world and
that I must do everything I possibly can to keep from going mad
even though I might be lucky enough to lose my mind in a clean,
well-lighted bin. Perhaps I am showing myself to be selfish and
ingrown, addicted to interpreting what I read in the light of what
I want for myself and not what I want for the world in general;
but I have an idea that I am not very much different from other
readers, and I wonder how much good these do-good books do.
One hears it said that while they may fail as novels, they are still
important and useful as tracts - and besides, they all make splen-
did movies now that Hollywood has suddenly discovered the hu-
man mind and race prejudice and alcoholism and juvenile delin-
quency. But I submit that this isn't enough, that a good novel
must stand without crutches and that any novelist must be willing
to be judged in the terms of his craft and not in those of other
crafts. I would not take my business to a lawyer who knew no
law but who played the fiddle well, and I would not study Latin
under a teacher whose Latin was faulty but whose botany was first-
rate. And similarly, I want to read novels by novelists and not by
cranks - whether they are popular best sellers or obscurantist axe-
grinders like Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen - who black-
mail me into violent attitudes by hollering at me that such and such
is so whether I believe it or not.
It is true that if we ignore the horrifying wounds of our society,
we will be irresponsible, but we will be equally irresponsible if we
do nothing but angrily probe them to make them hurt all the
more, and we will not heal them by scolding like magpies. As
human beings, and therefore as writers, we are confronted by wars
and the wickedness that makes them, and the famine and disease
and spiritual mutilations that follow them, by the shipwreck of

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 224 KENYON REVIEW

our manners and our morality, by an almost universal sickness of

heart. And the most romantic writer and the most diligently light-
hearted clown of a writer cannot fail to be touched by the massive
mood that lies upon the whole world. Still, we are not entitled
to be slovenly and hysterical because the world is a mess nor to be
incoherent because governments do not make sense; intolerance
hardly seems the weapon most effective to fight intolerance, and
fanaticism has no place in literature unless it is embodied in a
character or a situation to serve a literary, not a missionary, pur-
pose. Humphrey Slater's recent book, The Heretics, deals grave-
ly and well with the brutal persecutions of the Albigensians in the
Middle Ages which brought about the pathetic Children's Crusade,
but Slater is not himself brutal, and tragic as his story is, it does
not leave one's feelings in disarray.
Our essential problem, bad as our world is, is not different from
that of serious writers at any other time in history, and this is true
even in spite of the atomic bomb. For the problem is how to tell
the story so persuasively and vividly that our readers are taken in
and are made to believe that the tale is true, that these events have
happened and could happen again and do happen everywhere and
all the time. This was Dostoievsky's problem when he wrote
about a crime of passion and the reasons why it was committed
and the effect of it upon the criminal; it was Jane Austen's problem
when she wrote about the manners in bourgeois drawing rooms
where young ladies schemed to get themselves married; and it was
Flaubert's when he wrote Madame Bovary and told the story of
what today we would call a "neurotic" woman. Crime and Punish-
ment and Pride and Prejudice and Madame Bovary can all be call-
ed psychological novels since they investigate motives and they re-
port, not through exposition but through credible action, the causes
of events and the influence of these events on the lives of their
characters. And like all good psychologists, Dostoievsky, Jane
Austen, and Flaubert remain impartial and do not sit in moral
judgment upon their created people but allow the reader to draw

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 JEAN STAFFORD 225

his own conclusions. Sinclair Lewis, probably a man of very consid-

erable ability, does not grant this privilege to his reader but de-
mands that he despise characters who are not really despicable but
are only foolish and to sympathize with others who are not really
likeable but are only pitiable. Main Street could have been a very
good book if Lewis had presented the facts and let it go at that;
but, unfortunately he all but froths at the mouth in his defense of
sensibility against the outrages of small-town midwestern insensi-
bility, and because of the obtrusion of his personal passion he ob-
scures the universal issues and writes of such specific and contem-
porary affronts that the book seems as meaningless as old slang
twenty years after its publication. If he had been a sound psychol-
ogist, he would have known that Carol Kennicott's really inter-
esting misfortune was not that she was forced to be acquainted
with people who read Edgar Guest and spoke like barbarians but
that she went so completely to pieces over these and similar trifles.
Unlike Emma Bovary's disintegration, hers seems to be one that
could have taken place only in a particular part of America and at
a particular time. And thus Lewis has failed to tell anything but
the most ephemeral and local sort of truth.
I have concluded that probably the reason writing is the most
backbreaking of all professions is that it is so very difficult to tell
the truth. Even though we may know certainly that our percep-
tions are accurate and that only one set of conclusions can be drawn
from them, we are still faced with how to communicate the find-
ings perceptively and conclusively. The language seems at times
inadequate to convey exactly what we have seen and what we have
deduced from it and much too often writers shirk their responsi-
bility and take refuge in rhetoric - as the preaching novelists do
- or in snobbish, esoteric reference, as Henry Miller and his fol-
lowers do, in samples of language other than their own and in
jargon, and in elaborate approximations that almost but do not
quite say what they mean. But the language is quite able to take
care of any of our needs if we are only affectionate and respectful

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 226 KENYON REVIEW

toward it and, above all, patient with ourselves: patient, not only
in our hunt for the proper words themselves, but patient in wait-
ing for our observations to mature in us, to lose their confused im-
mediacy so that their timelessness will emerge and their meaning
will become available to our reader and applicable to him as well
as to ourselves. The towering example in our times of creative
impatience is the work of Thomas Wolfe, whose enormous energy
drove him like a lunatic to write passages of great power and in-
tensity but, much more often, to beat drearily about the bush for
page after page in a sort of banal delirium which communicated
nothing but the vague feeling that a genius was in the vicinity but
was loafing on the job. It was his habit as a writer seldom to
leave the crowded, noisy chambers of his own mind, and in con-
sequence his books are mostly raw, boyish emotion and almost no
grown-up thought; in his extraordinary, humorless narcissism, he
spent the language as prodigally as if it grew on trees. One turns
with relief from such a muddled, spendthrift pool-gazer as Wolfe
to a pinchpenny like Hemingway at his best, in, for example, The
Killers in which ,without ever resorting to psychological exegesis,
he produces a small work of permanent wisdom, a psychologically
accurate portrait of sentimental toughs.
I do not think it matters what one writes about nor what meth-
od one selects to use; one may be altogether autobiographical or use
none of one's own experience; it is equally good to innovate and
to stick to the traditional rules; one may employ an omniscient ob-
server or tell the tale without a guide. None of this matters if the
eye and the ear, and therefore the pen, remain loyal to reality. Like
the psychiatrist, the novelist must see his characters at once as in-
dividuals and as members of the human race; like him, the novelist
must determine why they speak as they do and why they behave as
they do and what in their nature causes them to react as they do to
the situations into which he, their omnipotent sponsor, puts them.
The first chapter of Pride and Prejudice contains as sound
psychology as it is possible to find. It might, indeed, have been

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 JEAN STAFFORD 227

more titillating if Jane Austen

possibly a sinister undertone that hints at incest in Mr. Bennet's
preference for his daughter Lizzy; and Mr. Bennet is even some-
thing of a sadist in taking with such tormenting calm the news,
that so inspires his wife, of the arrival in the neighborhood of a
bachelor of large fortune; and Mrs. Bennet is a possessive mother
and she does not understand her husband at all and she has attacks
of nerves which doubtless stem from all sorts of hidden frustra-
tions and resentments.
But while all the implications are there and could be made
much of, there is no doctoring in Jane Austen's tone: there is psy-
chology and there is truth and there is the calm acceptance of the
vagaries and the vanities and the self-defeats of all people at all
times; she knows that men are different from women and that
while Mr. Bennet and his wife are individuals with individual
problems, they are not any different from anyone else in their
fundamental architecture of feeling and of conduct. Examples
could endlessly be multiplied and they could be taken from every
writer we are accustomed to think of as a "great" writer, from
Hawthorne, or Melville, or Tolstoi, or Hardy or Thackeray, and
even from Dickens when he is not being a goose. But it is not
necessary if you agree with my original premise that a psychologi-
cal novel is the same thing as a novel.

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