Read The Interior Castle Online
Authors: Ann Hulbert
While Stafford presided over the daily, practical order, Lowell imposed the higher vocational discipline. During the Monteagle year, as Taylor remembered it, the couples productivity—for the first time since their marriage, both of them were enjoying a fertile writing stretch at the same time—did not mean peace or easy companionship between them. It was a perpetually combative union. Lowell was stern, not least because Stafford was drinking a good deal (he had stopped). Back from a bibulous visit with Taylor, who was stationed at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, Stafford wrote Peter a chagrined letter, which revealed more about the strains between her and Lowell than she perhaps suspected:
When [Cal] asked me had I been drinking I automatically said no (or rather humph-uh) which falsehood I will be glad to have perpetuated by you, although I cannot tell you the shame I feel in making such a request. The fact is that he has forbidden me 1) to drink ever again 2) to read the newspapers 3) to read any novels save those by Dostoievsky, Proust, James and Tolstoy 4) to get a paying job when he goes into the army. In making these prohibitions he is quite justified if tyrannical and I am not complaining.… The point of all this is that I have no fear of his indignation or scolding, but rather that I don’t want him to worry about me when he goes into the army.
Imperious about the regimen of life, Lowell presumably joined in the criticism of Stafford’s art as well. He certainly was not a shy critic of his teachers. Tate credited him with, among other things, “
constant criticism” of his translation of the “Pervigilium Veneris.” Gordon, too, was apparently attentive to the suggestions of a young man who impressed her more and more. As for Stafford’s fast-growing manuscript, Gordon had emphasized that there had been
three
whackers at work on it.
Sick on and off at Monteagle (as was Gordon), Stafford was suddenly laid low again by her mysterious fever during the summer at Yaddo. But the suffering, she acknowledged in a letter to the newly married Taylors, was more than physical. (During the spring at Monteagle, Taylor had wooed Eleanor Ross, a poet and former student of Gordon’s who had come to visit the Tates.) In July, not long after she had arrived at the
writers’ colony, Stafford wrote in distress, her jauntiness forced: “
Imagine the Bean Bert [a nickname from Baton Rouge days] having a nervous breakdown. It is too grotesque and I am real cross at myself. My humor has departed. Everything seems bitterly grave. This is caused by Yaddo.” In August she elaborated on her symptoms—continuing fever, continuing loss of weight—the diagnosis of which was still unclear: “
Either a tubercular or a streptococcic infection of the kidneys,” a doctor had evidently told her. On top of that, she was worn down by “
nervous exhaustion.” She offered some concrete reasons that she found the literary surroundings uncongenial, however luxurious the setting (which she relished describing). She took an immediate, perhaps slightly competitive, dislike to Carson McCullers, with whom she shared a bathroom, and she was clearly not in sympathy with the prevailing politics of the assembled company: McCullers “
is by no means the consumptive dipsomaniac I’d heard she was, but she is strange.… They are all left. Perhaps the most irritating of all is Mrs. McCullers who, although she is a southernor [
sic
], passionately hates the south.… [Another] loathes Allen’s criticism and thinks Ransom is impossible,… regards Blackmur as a person of no significance whatever.”
But these complaints don’t adequately account for Stafford’s extreme unhappiness and her profound sense of dislocation—a real crisis. Some of the vaguer phrases in her letters to the Taylors over the summer seem to come closer to capturing her unease. The trouble wasn’t really politics or a particular personality. Stafford recoiled from a deeper sense of alienation from the literary company, who struck her as abject souls. “
Mrs. Ames,” she wrote, referring to the kindly proprietress of Yaddo, “will, I am certain, protect me from these lost and desolated people.” In the same vein, she wrote a month later: “
I could stay here—Mrs. Ames is very good to me—and lie abed all day and perhaps come down for dinner in the evening. But in this rarefied atmosphere with the vibrations of these tragic lives I simply cannot. I suppose I am on the verge of some sort of nervous crackup which the fever is not helping any.”
Just how disturbing she found this “desolated” company is suggested by a diary entry written years later, on December 27, 1949, the day after she had arrived for a second, shorter stay at Yaddo: “
As the taxi brought me up the long road yesterday, winding between the lakes through the lines of trees joined to one another by dense fog, I felt the spooks of this place as I had done when I arrived for the first time, seven years before.
The company is difficult and strange.… Poor, unsuccessful, lonely, they embarrass me.” Stafford’s response both times recalls Sonie’s ambivalence, entranced by Nathan’s visions of the artistic life yet also daunted by its uncomfortable loneliness.
Not that Stafford was under any illusion that she could avoid loneliness. She recognized that her own sense of exile was at once a source of inspiration and of terror. In cringing at her literary colleagues, she was cringing at herself—and at what was ahead. For Stafford, only twenty-eight, the life of art had already been tumultuous, and here at Yaddo in the throes of still further revisions of her seven-hundred-page manuscript, she looked around her and was apprehensive about what lay in store. Perhaps added to the lost souls unnerving Stafford was the least successful, most lonely and desolate writer of them all, her father, whom she was letting down once again. He had sent her money to come visit him in Oregon that summer, she wrote to the Thompsons, but instead she had gone to Yaddo. It was a double betrayal: ignoring his plea for companionship and pursuing the fate that had so frustrated him.
As if she sensed Stafford’s fear of contagious desolation, Caroline Gordon kept in touch throughout the summer, playing the role of mother, not critic—though she took care to bolster Jean’s literary confidence. (Oddly, Stafford didn’t mention Lowell, who had gone to New York to look for a job, in any of her letters.) Mrs. Ames, Gordon wrote, “
is doing something for art when she stands by you,” and she chimed in with a condescending dismissal of McCullers: “her trouble is not with technique but lies too deep for words.” But mostly she conveyed her maternal concern; she had sent Stafford off in ill health, and look what had happened. Gordon freely admitted, in fact emphasized, her intrusiveness, as if she wanted to make sure Stafford took note of her unusual efforts—hoping to reassure Jean that she hadn’t been abandoned. “
I wrote [Mrs. Ames] a note this morning, telling her how grateful Allen and I were to her for making you so welcome. A bit meddlesome of me, perhaps.” But the real target of Gordon’s efforts was Stafford’s mother-in-law. “
I wrote Mrs. Lowell in desperation the other day, what I tried to make a very tactful note,” she reported to Stafford:
I deplored the fact that the children (I spoke of you and Cal as if you were babes whom I had had under my care all winter) … had
had such heavy doctor’s bills. I myself was not very good at managing my own affairs so hesitated to give advice but it had occurred to me that it would be better to have a doctor’s bill to end doctor’s bills.… Allen pondered the letter and said he thought it was tactful, but of course he’s not much of a judge. If she doesn’t offer to pay the bill after the letter, she’s a—rock-ribbed New Englander. I hope I haven’t done wrong to horn in but I have been so worried and felt that something ought to be done.
Gordon was doing her best to make up for the rather different kind of meddlesomeness and lack of tact that had characterized their year together.
F
OR THE
L
OWELLS
, the life of art took a dramatic political, public turn in the fall of 1943. Cal had tried to enlist in the army throughout 1942, and in the spring of 1943 he had filled out an
army employment questionnaire. (His answers were riddled with bizarre errors—he claimed, for example, that he had a dependent—which Stafford duly corrected before mailing off the form.) But suddenly he decided he wouldn’t serve. The day before he was due to be inducted, September 8, 1943, he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, with a “
declaration of personal responsibility” attached. His case was in essence the conservative, anti-Communist one: the United States, bent on destroying Germany and Japan, would leave Europe and China “to the mercy of the USSR, a totalitarian tyranny committed to world revolution and total global domination through propaganda and violence.”
It is impossible to know how this stand had matured in Lowell’s mind, much less what Stafford thought of it. Tate, who had expressed reservations about the destruction of European civilization, was high among those blamed by Lowell’s mother. It’s true that a strange letter from Lowell to his grandmother suggests that Agrarian notions figured somehow in his decision: “
You know more about American history than I do and can certainly judge whether our recent actions in this war are justifiable,” he wrote to his grandmother. “I think only a Southerner can realize the horrors of a merciless conquest.” (In his declaration he cited the Civil War as a warning about the perils of a war “
carried through to unconditional surrender.”) But a letter from Tate to Stafford in November made
clear that he was as taken aback as everyone else. In fact, he took the occasion to give a short lecture about Lowell’s evasion of responsibility, the implicit message being that the creative life is no excuse:
You know, Jean, that I am greatly distressed that I cannot feel as much sympathy for Cal in his plight as I might have felt a year ago. I have already told you about this, and I need say but little more. Early in the summer he was casting about for an escape from his social responsibilities, and I am sure that he would have gone ahead then had he not met the rude interference of Caroline and me. Then, later—after he had been in New York for a month—he told Caroline that
she
was to blame for your illness, that her cruelty to you at Monteagle had brought on your breakdown. He had no connection to it apparently—as indeed possibly he did not; yet I cannot conceive that Caroline did either. Then his resistance to the draft completed the pattern in my mind, a development towards complete escape from his obligations. Try as I will I cannot see it in any other way.…
You are involved in an enormously complicated situation, and all our sympathy is with you whether you want it that way or not. Cal will never really suffer—unless, of course, he gets into his mother’s clutches again.
Lowell didn’t see it that way at all. He evidently thought of his stand not as an evasion but as a shouldering of responsibility, which he was eager to broadcast. He and Stafford made numerous copies of his statement and distributed them widely. And he later said that it was “
the most decisive thing I ever did, just as a writer,” though he emphasized that at the time “it was not intended to have anything to do with that.” Yet in some sense, it clearly did, as his mother realized, blaming it on his “
poetic temperament.” He conceived of it as part of his revolt against moribund Lowellian, establishment traditions in the name of higher, creative principles. It was as though he and Stafford that summer each suddenly had a very different intimation of what lay ahead—uncannily prophetic ones in retrospect. While Stafford was panicked by the lonely, marginal life dedicated to art as she looked around her and thought of her father, Lowell was inspired by the opposite perspective. Though he had been reared on a notion of poetry that was explicitly not politically engaged, he had been taught that art took the “
whole man.” It was an
“aggressive stance,” and after fighting on paper with words, he had seized a chance to fight his parents and other people with words and deeds.
Sentenced to a year and one day for draft evasion in October 1943 and transported to prison in Danbury, Connecticut, Lowell left Stafford to wage both battles. She had more revisions to do on
Boston Adventure
, after a break from the manuscript due to illness and the “declaration” drama. She was daunted by the prospect, she wrote to the Taylors in October:
I have not started any writing yet at all. Yesterday Lambert Davis talked to me on the phone and said ominously that they would probably want some more work on the novel. It made me thoroughly sick at heart but I gathered, at least, that the manuscript is definitely accepted and after this vacation from it I suppose I’ll be able to go back to it, heavy-hearted though I will be. They are anxious for Allen to read it but since I have only one copy, they don’t dare let it out of the office.… Allen was terribly sweet and we were again completely devoted to him and to the whole household.
She had funny stories about some of her further revision travails. She had visited Bellevue Hospital to find out about paupers’ burials (Harcourt, Brace complained that Ivan’s burial was too implausible) and had been given a comical runaround. She had to cut, and diminish the melodrama of Hopestill’s ending, and she worked hard. To the Thompsons, she later painted a bleak picture: “
It was a rather bad winter for brooding—there is probably nothing more desolate than living in a New York apartment alone.… I spent the better part of six months huddled in front of the fireplace working on revisions of the book and almost never leaving the house.”
In fact, she did leave the house (she had rented an apartment on Stuyvesant Square) and had a break from her brooding.
Two of her closest friends that fall and winter were Gertrude Buckman, who had separated from Delmore Schwartz earlier that year, and especially Cecile Starr. In getting to know Starr, who hailed from a cultivated Nashville family, Stafford took evident pleasure in renewing her southern connections. Starr’s uncles, Milton and Alfred, had been members of the Fugitives, and her close friend Patrick Quinn had been a friend of the Lowells at LSU. At the same time, it was a relief to her that Cecile Starr was not
part of the New York literary scene. Their relationship was uncluttered, as few of Stafford’s were, a respite from the competitive cultural scene. She had a kind and solid friend in Starr, and counted on her for support, psychological and practical.