by Ann Hulbert
Fire from the sun fills the air. Rivers and oceans run over the earth. But the quintessence dwells in the spheres beyond the moon.1
1. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel, well i couldn’t help it do you think it isn’t cricket it’s just that flower, spider, pulse that is so very reminiscent, isn’t it?
Hightower praised the prose but also confirmed her fears about flagrant influence, telling her that Wolfe had done it all first. Not that Stafford was surprised or even genuinely disappointed; the affinity could serve as a source of legitimacy: “I read Wolfe’s new book The Story of a Novel,” she wrote back to Hightower, “and as usual he stole the whole damn thing from me. I am going to write and say will you please stop writing books you bastard.”
Stafford wittily put her finger on the appeal of Wolfe as a literary model: far from being part of any exclusive confraternity, he presented himself as an amateur artlessly addressing amateurs. To imitate him was not an act of submission and appropriation but of self-expression. In place of the guilty sense of stealing from him, Wolfe generously granted a young writer the pleasure of being a fellow unbridled original. He was the influence that countenanced a kind of self-centered imperviousness to influence; he was a spokesman for the primacy of feeling over form. As Sinclair Lewis had described him in his Nobel Prize speech in 1930, Wolfe was “a Gargantuan creature with great gusto of life,” at once an anomaly and an exemplar of raw American creative energy. It’s easy to see how The Story of a Novel spoke directly to Stafford’s temperament in a way that Ford and Ransom did not, for all of her declarations of discipleship.
Not surprisingly, the mixture of Wolfe’s romanticism and her teachers’ modernist classicism was an uneasy one. In The Story of a Novel, Wolfe tried to define his place in a literary world that seemed essentially alien, and the convictions he lyrically announced were distinctly at odds with the aesthetic principles espoused by Eliot and his followers—the “Wastelanders,” as Wolfe called them. Even Joyce, the rare influence he acknowledged, was only a faint echo compared with the clamor of his own inner voices: “The book that I was writing,” he said of Look Homeward, Angel, “was much influenced, I believe, by his own book [Ulysses], and yet the powerful energy and fire of my own youth played over and, I think, possessed it all. Like Mr. Joyce, I wrote about things that I had known, the immediate life and experience that had been familiar to me in my childhood. Unlike Mr. Joyce, I had no literary experience.”
Mastery of formal technique, disciplined apprenticeship to “the tradition,” did not rank high for Wolfe. “Whoever is impressed with the ‘classicism’ of T. S. Eliot,” he mocked, “should buy immediately a copy of that other fine modern expression of the classical spirit, The Thundering Herd, by Zane Grey.” As far as Wolfe was concerned, the man who suffers was the key, and the artist who creates would catch up somehow. He described a great chasm between the “whirling vortex and … creative chaos,” from which the substance of his fiction was born, and “the articulation of an ordered and formal structure”—a chasm Stafford knew all too well. Some fusion of the fire and the form might lie ahead, Wolfe said his editor told him, but the fire must come first: “I was not, he said, a Flaubert kind of writer. I was not a perfectionist. I had twenty, thirty, almost any number of books in me, and the important thing was to get them produced and not to spend the rest of my life in perfecting one book.”
It is hard to imagine artistic directives less in sympathy with the teachings Tate passed on about tradition, craftsmanship, and the ideal of perfectionism—the importance of believing “each poem he finished would be his last.” By the mid-1930s the Agrarian literary circle, which had initially made friendly overtures to Wolfe as a fellow Southerner, was predictably critical of him. Tate was directly hostile, saying that Wolfe “did harm to the art of the novel” and “moral damage to his readers,” and Caroline Gordon denounced Wolfe’s “lack of artistic intelligence.” In an essay published after Wolfe’s death, John Peale Bishop wrote what amounted to a critical obituary. It appeared in the winter of 1939, in the first issue of the Kenyon Review, edited by Ransom, and in it Bishop summed up and expanded the formalist objections his colleagues Robert Penn Warren, R. P. Blackmur, and others had already aired. “The force of Wolfe’s talents is indubitable,” Bishop wrote, “yet he did not find for that novel [Of Time and the River], nor do I believe he could ever have found, a structure of form which would have been capable of giving shape and meaning to his emotional experience.” The paradoxical result was that this writer so ravenous for representative experience was reduced to solipsistic impressionism. “Incarcerated in his own sensibility,” Wolfe didn’t see that “at the present time so extreme a manifestation of individualism could not but be morbid.”
The criticisms were close to home for Stafford. Although Bishop may have praised her for competing with “the biggest boys meaning Joyce,” as she claimed, the obvious intermediary influence of that other big boy, Wolfe, apparently prompted Bishop to give her some advice about shape. He offered rather fundamental structural criticism, counseling her to tighten up her three streams of consciousness. Stafford didn’t follow the suggestion, citing Ford’s view that “the characterizations were pretty clearly distinct”; she also had Evelyn Scott’s support for sticking to her impressionistic technique. But she was obviously apprehensive about the reception her Wolfian rhetoric might meet among her more meticulous mentors. She carefully hedged her bets as she sent off the manuscript of Which No Vicissitude to Whit Burnett in January of 1938: “Parts of it I am satisfied with. The prologue and the epilogue I was very fond of at the time, but since I have been working so steadily I can’t get excited about any of it now, a natural disgust I think.”
She was right to feel trepidation. Burnett’s criticisms were blunt, accusing Stafford of producing a mere formless flow of sensibility—and a none too interesting or elevating sensibility at that:
I do not think this book will do you much good as a writer if it is published. I imagine this reaction on my part will come to you as somewhat of a shock, but I become more and more convinced as time goes on that this whole stream of consciousness thing is a blind alley out of which a writer has got to pull himself before he becomes a writer at all. I really hope that your next book will not be done in this interior monologue framework at all.
The best things about this book are the occasional objective descriptions and those for any reasonable reader are essentially the only readable parts in it. It seems a shame that the kind of writing that goes into those parts is so relatively small in proportion to the great bulk of meandering around in the inside of these people’s minds. Their insides become extremely boring. And so far as the sexual elements are concerned, I do not think most of the sexual parts are at all convincing. They strike me as intended more for shock than for character delineation. The Lesbian and homosexual parts seem to me overdone.…
All the foregoing words seem to me to be pretty brutal but I think this whole book is a miasma that should have been gotten out of your system and now that it is out of your system I say, the hell with it. You are too good a writer to stay in that pocket of exhibitionistic self-abuse.
Stafford’s reaction was strikingly mature; if the twenty-two-year-old felt devastated, she was not about to betray any emotionalism. In her reply to Burnett, she sounded like a diligent craftsman who had merely been trying out some tools of the trade, not expressing her deepest passions. She showed herself capable of viewing her work with a coldly surgical eye:
Yes, I know what’s the matter with it. I agree, too, that stream-of-consciousness is dying a probably justifiable death. For four years I have been writing that stuff and for four years I have been saying to myself “Thank God, eventually I will get through with this.” And I am through. I have begun my new novel and there are only a few traces of the “mutation style” left. Those I will clear out on revision. But I can’t condemn myself entirely, as I imagine you had no intention that I should. I still feel that there is a cert
ain validity in this manner of writing. An outmoded validity to be sure (that is, I recognize, a paradox), and I am not sorry I experimented in it. If I had not read Joyce I would never have written. If I had not written this book, I wouldn’t have known anything about words. Perhaps I don’t yet, I don’t know.
As Stafford assured Burnett, the new book she was now embarked on was definitely not another personal miasma. It was a satire of Stephens College, she announced, and she emphasized that it had the imprimatur of approval from her stricter teachers, his friend Ransom as well as Howard Mumford Jones, whom she had seen at the MLA conference in Chicago in December:
He, as well as most of the people there who do not, as an organization, subscribe to the modern method of Progressive education, was delightedly horrified by my tales of Stephens and said to me, the only thing to do is to keep careful notes and write a novel about the place; that I had intended, but I believe now that I have been assured that it’s a good idea … I’ll begin it sooner than I had planned.
But Stafford was not quite the undaunted protégé that she claimed to be. As the rejections flowed in during the spring of 1938—she didn’t get a Houghton Mifflin fellowship, her Germany journal was turned down by Holt, by Farrar, and by Vanguard—she foundered. And then Stephens had its revenge on the teacher who so roundly ridiculed the institution. According to Stafford’s somewhat oblique accounts in letters, the head of her department informed her that she wouldn’t be invited back, citing complaints about her attitude from faculty and students. What was more peculiar was his insistence that she go to a doctor for a test, the implication being that she had venereal disease; the suspicion was apparently based on gossip about the various ailments (colds, headaches, intestinal flu, a face rash) that had indeed continued to trouble her through the year. Stafford lashed back with a vehement denial, and apparently no medical proof was offered then (or has been offered since). After first backing down and offering to rehire her, the college in the end simply declined to renew her contract.
In her isolation, Stafford turned for sympathy not to the confraternity but to Evelyn Scott, a far less forbidding influence. Scott was full of encouragement (and solidarity: she wrote an outraged letter to the Stephens administration). She was also ready with disparagement of the “Tate-Ransom crowd.” Twenty-two years older than Stafford and an early and fervent feminist active in the women’s suffrage party in Louisiana, Scott had begun her literary career in Greenwich Village in 1920 with the publication of Escapade, a self-dramatizing account of her six-year sojourn in Brazil with a married man twice her age. Although Scott’s declamatory literary style, her romantic personal style, and her combative unconventionality made Stafford somewhat uneasy, they also answered a need. Scott spoke up for artistic instinct and impulse and criticized the intellectual and critical cabals from the outside. “Davidson’s [sic] certainly right about Ransome’s [sic] book—‘solemnly silly’ it is,” she wrote to Stafford, evidently referring to The World’s Body, a collection of essays that Ransom published in 1938. “All that Tate-Ransom crowd has set out to revive ‘the mysteries’ in their worst meaning, in order that same Tate-Ransoms may be sure of dictatorial officiation at the altar. And yet they have genuinely at least minor talent.” She laid the ultimate blame for the claustrophobic enterprise on Pound, about whom she was scathing. “Pound has written some lovely lines that are his own,” she granted,
but to me he is the high-priest of parlor esotericism—not an artist, but a would-be Brahmin.… Pound grudges life—any life—which he cannot make pay toll to himself. He has a mean little ego that has been sustained by its semi-devouring of other talents—a devouring camouflaged as selfless dedication to perfectionism. I know half a dozen he has flattered into bondage for years; first learn the mumbo-jumbo of Poundism and he will support you thereafter as a worthy, but necessarily inferior, Pound. Evidently, to judge by Ransom’s book, this is what has happened there in some degree.
Scott’s letters at once presumed and urged a distancing from that select male circle; she addressed Stafford as a fellow outsider, and she argued that such ostracism was crucial to real creativity. At the same time, Scott presented herself as an earthy counterweight to the high priests. Her role, as she saw it, was to be an uncoercive source of encouragement, to urge artists like Stafford “to cultivate their own real distinctions independently.” That did not seem to mean offering practical advice—in fact, Scott conveyed an air of ineffectualness as the spirited artist and outsider—but it certainly did mean extending extravagant praise: “Your depth of insight convinced me not only of the talents I had already recognized but of vision for their application which must surely, at last, give America one grown-up artist—one, at last, capable of more than an inchoate pioneer’s challenge to Europe,” Scott wrote to Stafford, and summarily dismissed the competition. “So far, the men at their best are poetic babies, the women usually temperamental schoolmarms.… There is a tremendous Tightness about you—responding with your whole being, as the artist should, you leap ahead of the piecemeal education of years.”
CHAPTER 4
Men
THE CONFLICTING LESSONS Stafford learned from her teachers involved more than artistic technique. Scott’s grand endorsement clearly implied a vision of artistic inspiration, not just of execution, of life, not just of craft. And it was not a vision that fit very comfortably with the outlook of Stafford’s other, less impetuous mentors. Stafford wasn’t sure she could, should, or wanted to respond with her “whole being,” whatever that might be construed to mean. Scott and Wolfe subscribed to the notion that the artist’s extraordinary “being” was the essence of his art, that his distinctive personal emotions made him remarkable, that a life of suffering was in some sense a sign of creative election. “The crucifix of the artist,” Scott wrote Stafford after one of her many spring disappointments, her bad news about the Houghton Mifflin fellowship, “is in a measure due to the fact that his very impressionableness, which heightens his sense of life generally, also heightens his susceptibility to false or dampening atmosphere.”
The dictum of Eliot’s that loomed behind the views of the “Tate-Ransom crowd” sounded almost diametrically opposed: “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.” But the notion wasn’t exactly straightforward. Ostensibly erecting a barrier between art and life, Eliot’s pronouncement actually acknowledged that the artist’s personal passions were indeed the motivating material, however separate they were from the aesthetic effect of his creation. Eliot’s prescription of impersonality rested on an intimate, if negative, relation between life and art: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
Tate’s teaching was a similarly confusing guide to the relations between art and life; its contradictoriness forcibly struck Lowell when he first arrived in Tennessee. On the one hand, Tate declared that art had nothing to do with feeling but only with craft; on the other hand, his belief that “each poem he finished would be his last” implied unqualified, total commitment. “We claimed,” Lowell recalled much later in life, “the whole man would be represented in the poem.” For all the anti-romanticism of the formalists, they too inescapably implied that suffering was ultimately a requirement of the true artist who aimed at producing “significant” aesthetic effect, even if the connection between the “personal emotion” and the “art emotion” was impossible to trace in any useful way.
Stafford later called the summer of 1938 “the worst summer of my life.” Her personal life and artistic career were in disarray, and she seemed continually, sometimes desperately, off balance. She had been rebuffed by Stephens and rejected by editors, but two men were clearly very intere
sted in her. She and Hightower had a long-awaited reunion that summer, and their correspondence increasingly turned to questions of their future, apart or together. Meanwhile, Lowell was evidently pressing his case. Stafford struggled on paper with her experience, not sure whether her aim was to escape it or to express it. She was distracted by the dilemma she had confronted as a student, which was now posed with a new seriousness: What kind of constructive relation could she hope to establish between her susceptibility to a disorderly life and her aspirations for art? Stafford’s response was, characteristically, a mixture of extremes: a desire for ascetic detachment—an escape from her personality and emotions—and an instinct for romantic self-dramatization.
Without a job and without a publisher in the summer of 1938, Stafford headed home, which now was Oswego, Oregon, where her parents had moved roughly two years earlier, following Dick, who had left Colorado for the Northwest. Stafford’s destination inspired anxiety, and her trip out West was far from emotionally calm. She met Hightower in Albany, and they boarded a train to Michigan, where he was to pick up a car for his father, which he would then drive home to Salida, Colorado. On the way, he declared his love, and in Geneseo, Illinois, he booked one room in a motel for the two of them. But Stafford balked at going to bed with him. Frustrated and furious, he was tempted to put her on a bus, but he weakened the next morning: her company was too good to part with, so they carried on. In Salida, Stafford suddenly decided she was in love, and though they didn’t sleep together, she and Hightower enjoyed several infatuated days. “I started loving you just after we got on the wrong road or thought we got on the wrong road up to Salida and it was a nice night,” Stafford wrote shortly after her visit. “One of the things was the way your right wrist looks when it’s driving a car. Another was that I began thinking and realizing that you are the only person who always laughs at the right things.”