The Interior Castle (19 page)

Stafford and Lowell were perhaps not quite the wholehearted recruits Ransom judged them to be. During the spring, in the turmoil following their marriage, they had talked dramatically of escape from the opprobrium of Boston, from the philistinism of America, and not least from the claustrophobia of the academy. As Hightower and his new wife prepared to leave for China, Stafford sometimes dreamily, sometimes desperately, spun out fantasies of joining them. It was an old rebellious plan dating from her days in Boulder with Hightower; they had made it as far as Heidelberg, but they had told each other the real goal was to flee the West. Now Hightower was making good on the adolescent scheme as he entered adulthood. Stafford was envious, and Lowell, she told Hightower, was as ready to take a momentous step as she was.

In fact, it was really she who was frantic to flee during the low weeks after their wedding, and she was briefly convinced that above all she needed to escape from Lowell. As she prepared to go to Kenyon for his graduation in June 1940, she wrote to Hightower, pleading with him to come see her on his way out West en route to China. They ended up meeting in Omaha in the middle of the night at the end of May. Stafford’s cry for help was reminiscent of the agonized letters she had sent him in the past: she didn’t love Lowell, couldn’t live with him, and had discovered, she claimed, that her earlier avowals of frigidity were in fact true (she admitted that she had been lying, or thought she had been lying, before). She wanted only Hightower, and she proposed that they both abandon their spouses and disappear. Hightower wasn’t interested, and Stafford wasn’t really surprised. Fatalism quickly set in: “
I feel exiled and it breaks my heart to think I am extraneous to your life,” she wrote to him as she proceeded along the path that had been laid out for the wife who was now part of Lowell’s life.

She and he moved South flattered by the solicitude of Lowell’s mentors yet somewhat disappointed that their situation was so academic. And Stafford couldn’t even look forward to teaching or taking classes:
she was not enthusiastic about the secretarial duties that awaited her. Newly arrived in Baton Rouge in June, she wrote to Hightower and tried to conjure up the atmosphere for him. “
This place, Robert, is a university and it is like every other university I have seen,” she began in a world-weary tone, but as the rest of her description revealed, the place was in fact more caught up in its own divisive affairs than most campuses. The debate over the teaching of English was in full swing:

The spirit in the
Southern Review
offices was similarly combative. “
The place is revealing,” she wrote to Hightower the same month. “Letters from contributors are rec’d with shrieks of laughter, mss are sneered at, rejection slips go out furiously. The Atlantic Monthly looks like a bunch of kind old ladies.” The quarterly was gearing up for a major offensive in the New Critics’ campaign to convert the academic world, or at least to establish a respectable place for their kind of criticism in it. During Stafford’s year at the
Southern Review
, its issues were crowded with articles making the case against historical scholarship and in favor of close commentary and the modernist approach to literature. The culmination of the campaign came in a symposium entitled “Literature and the Professors,” conducted jointly with the
Kenyon Review
in the autumn 1940 issues of the two magazines.

At LSU, Lowell experienced the pedagogical and critical ferment firsthand. His initial response, like Stafford’s, was a degree of detachment from all the academic earnestness. “
I am not looking for a vocation or marking time,” he wrote to his grandmother, sounding nonchalant. “If war comes and they want me, I’ll gladly go; if not, I’ll continue in this peaceful and sedentary occupation of university work. I suppose writing is something of a career, something that steadily grows more secure and substantial.” In a letter to Robie Macauley, one of his Kenyon
housemates, he began in a similarly aloof manner: “
About L.S.U. I have taken as my motto, ‘In Rome consort with the Romans and never do as they do.’ Here reign the critical approach, ‘the aesthetic approach,’ ‘metaphysical poetry,’ ‘drama in the lyric’ etc. The students are weak and worthy.” But then his letter took an unexpected, elliptical turn:

The letter was an oblique augury of what was to come: chafing in the role of student, Lowell was inclining toward discipleship, a discipleship that went beyond the expectations even of his English teachers—and beyond his own. Contrary to what he had claimed to his grandmother, he was looking for a vocation; evidently it was not so easy to wait patiently while his writing efforts grew steadily (or unsteadily) “more secure and substantial.” He needed a calling, not “something of a career.”

At first Lowell found a satisfactory mission in distinguishing himself from the “weak and worthy” students. He quickly earned the respect of Warren and, especially, of Brooks. He was not one of the dilettantish college boys but a colleague engaged in the project of establishing criticism as a profession, for that was essentially the New Critics’ intent: to stake the claim for the study of poetry that was implied in Eliot’s claims for the writing of it—that it was not a personal, impressionistic, belletristic endeavor, but an occupation anchored in tradition and guided by exacting, prescriptive principles and techniques. It was a discipline that demanded total dedication and required a pure, formalistic approach that historicist and other critics failed to appreciate. “
The opposite of the professional, the enemy, is the man of mixed motives,…” Eliot wrote. “Surely professionalism in art is hard work on style with singleness of purpose.” That was the kind of uncompromising prescription that Lowell thrived on.

Stafford’s predicament was rather different, and so was her perspective. Rather than musing about her writing career, much less about a literary vocation, she was starting a job, which right away meant hard work on shorthand. Her assessment of her situation was a wry echo of
Lowell’s report to his grandmother. “
My life seems annually more fogged and my retrogression is steady—now I’m a secretary,” she wrote to Hightower in June. “And will the next be a telephone operator or will I be the receptionist in a city laundry? This is not gloom, merely curiosity.” Wryness continued to dilute resentment. She was quite amusing, and cutting, about her labors and her colleagues. She followed the critical controversies from her clerical perch, then wrote letters that mixed skepticism with obvious excitement at being in the midst of the ferment.

She readily assumed the role of housekeeper as well as breadwinner. Though she enjoyed complaining about unpacking in the heat, fixing up their apartment was a preoccupation that gave her pleasure. As the wife of a promising young poet in 1940, Stafford fully expected that domestic distractions would hem in her own writing life. She was prepared to be the comparative amateur, to dilute artistic motives with practical ones. But her role was not simply socially ordained. Stafford found domestic details and duties very seductive—she was, as she acknowledged, her mother’s daughter in her willing absorption in the homely sphere of orderliness. She sometimes suspected that her nesting zeal was a reaction to the sense of uprootedness she had felt as a child, thanks to her father’s fantasies. Her domesticity was doubtless also encouraged by Lowell’s utter abstraction from such concrete concerns, his penchant for high, austere discipline. Not least important, there were models for their respective roles: cerebral Allen Tate and capable Caroline Gordon, who was renowned for running crowded households with one hand and writing crowded novels with the other.

Renowned but not, for the most part, doubly respected. The writer wife had to be intense about her literary work (or she would never get any done), and yet according to a critic whom Stafford herself admired, the competing pressures of home and writing meant that she was unlikely
to be intellectual enough about her art. “To be intellectual,” Ransom wrote in “The Poet as Woman,” “is to be disciplined in technique and stocked with learning, a very great advantage for every purpose, and even for fertilizing the pleasures of imagination.” It was, he continued, an advantage largely denied women “
because they are not strict enough and expert enough to manage forms,—in their default of the disciplines under which men are trained.” Granted, there was a certain compensating literary gift that accrued to women as the keepers of the house, as Ransom acknowledged in his essay “Sentimental Exercise”:

But it was a gift that women writers, lacking discipline, were in danger of indulging to excess, he suggested. At least at the outset, Stafford threw herself into the management of her ménage, which in true Tate fashion quickly became crowded and complicated. There were problems with the woman whom they hired to clean. There was lots of socializing, not just with the Warrens and Brookses, but with numerous friends and literary figures passing through—among them the Jarrells and, awaited with some trepidation, the British critic I. A. Richards and his wife.

And there were two boarders—“
a great gauche lummox of a girl from Memphis who is my assistant,” Stafford wrote to Hightower, and Peter Taylor, who was by comparison “considerably more attractive but wants a brain.” In fact, that fall Stafford and Taylor became the close friends they turned out to be for life. Though they and Lowell proved to be a sturdy trio, relations were not without strain, especially at the start.
There was an obvious and immediate affinity between Stafford and Taylor that, as Robie Macauley observed, left Lowell feeling slightly excluded. The two of them were great talkers, their style witty where Lowell tended to tongue-tied ponderousness. In the prevailing literary hierarchy, their interest—prose—was less elevated, and they could both joke about their want of brains as no poet, or certainly not Lowell, would.

The emotional ease and directness between them doubtless stood out as Lowell grew ever more intellectually preoccupied—but not too preoccupied to notice and finally to intervene. Stafford’s description of the scene, in a letter to Hightower in October, was flippant but revealing: “
Peter & I got incredibly drunk and exchanged words over the extent of Peter’s love for me & the peril of it so that Cal, who spent the evening talking with Mr. Brooks about belief, did not speak to Peter for 1 week thereafter.” Lowell was the stern pedant in the household—though he also had a comical streak, too often overlooked. In Baton Rouge he introduced Stafford to one of his favorite games, featuring a humorous cast of animal characters called “
berts,” pronounced “bear” in French fashion.
He was Big Bert, she was Bigless Bert, alter egos through whom they could be wittily expressive with each other—and droll with the friends whom they initiated into the game.

But as the fall progressed, Lowell’s preoccupation with belief intensified as he read theology,
plowing through Étienne Gilson’s
The Spirit of Medieval Philosophical Experience
and his
Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
, then turning to E. I. Watkin, John Henry Newman, Jacques Maritain, Blaise Pascal, Gerard Manley Hopkins. He began to take instruction with Father Shexnayder at LSU. The leap from reforming the English curriculum to reforming the soul was not as large as it looked. Implicit in the formalist literary mission, as Eliot’s own conversion had already suggested and Tate’s would later, was a religious conception of the word as the way to truth. Though the critics didn’t play up the religious dimension of their views as they vied for influence in English departments, it was perhaps no surprise that Lowell readily fastened on to it. “
The religious mind would seem, in the end,” the critic W. K. Wimsatt wrote much later, “to be more hospitable to the tensional and metaphysical view of poetry than the naturalistic mind is able to be.” Elsewhere he and Cleanth Brooks summed up the perspective lurking behind their literary position as “
the vision of suffering, the optimism, the mystery which are embraced in the religious dogma of the Incarnation.” And as Lowell’s teacher at St. Mark’s, Richard Eberhart, had remarked years before, his protégé’s early efforts at poetry showed that “
his mind was heavy and that it was essentially religious.”

Lowell was increasingly adamant about the
new order and direction in his life and insistent that his devotional regimen embrace the whole household. That meant two rosaries a day, Mass in the morning, benediction in the evening, only suitably serious books, fish on Fridays. A pious attitude was required, and impious habits (smoking and drinking) were fiercely discouraged. Stafford, not surprisingly, was deeply ambivalent. She too had recognized religious inclinations in herself and had acted on them. But her sessions with Father Agatho during college (a failure, thanks to her “indolence”) had led her to suspect her mind wasn’t naturally “heavy” and disposed to rigorous discipline (as her English teacher Miss McKeehan had also gently suggested in another context). In the last story published in her lifetime, “An Influx of Poets” (1978), the most directly autobiographical she ever wrote, Stafford put more emphasis on
the desperation of her youthful search for faith, but still there was an air of futility about it: