by Ann Hulbert
How much of the account reflected her typical dramatizing is hard to say, but she was evidently unnerved. Hightower’s apartment was not a workable haven, and she soon told him that she had better move out to Concord to be safe. Stafford clearly wanted distance from Hightower too, or at least couldn’t manage in the flesh the intimacy she had described in her letters from Iowa. “The full articulation of passionate love” didn’t happen with the fevered eagerness she had conjured in words; living together faltered from the start, when Stafford told Hightower she was frigid. Whatever she meant by it, and whether or not it was true, he understood the message. It was one more stunning reversal, but the friendship didn’t collapse.
They continued to see each other after she moved to Concord, and Hightower planned a modest Christmas celebration. But on December 21 he received an urgent message to call Mount Auburn Hospital. He found Stafford swaddled in bandages and, learning of the accident, discovered that she hadn’t kept Lowell at a safe distance after all. A loyal bedside visitor for several weeks, Hightower finally sent a letter announcing the end of their relationship, to which Stafford replied with an atypically unadorned indictment of herself: “I will say nothing, only this: I love you, but my selfishness is so all consuming that I can’t help hurting you.” Two weeks later, she adorned it somewhat: “I want children, I want a house. I want to be a faithful woman. I want those things more than I want my present life of a writer, but I shall have none because my fear will make me unfaithful and desire cannot now be hoped for, it is too late and I have been too much revolted.” It was an echo of her declarations of frigidity and of the journal entry about her profound loneliness that she had sent him over the summer: here too she viewed herself tragically, as both victim and victimizer, maintaining that her “life of a writer” was no compensation for the emotional commitment and sexual fulfillment that eluded her.
Once Hightower had retreated, Stafford had few other places to turn during a very painful convalescence. Neither Lowell nor the Atlantic Monthly Press—the other Boston attractions that had drawn her—proved a source of much support. Lowell was not even at hand. He returned to Kenyon for the spring term of his junior year, leaving Blair Clark, a friend from his prep school days at St. Mark’s, to help Stafford deal with the lawsuit it had been agreed she would file against Lowell to pay for her hospitalization. Clark was also supposed to protect her from Lowell’s parents, which was a full-time job, if the rumors that reached Cal in Ohio about the Lowells’ bullying conduct toward her were to be believed. “About Boston,” Lowell chided his parents in the summer, “I gather many people think you have behaved shabbily about Jean’s accident. Such opinion is not my concern yet I cannot feel the action of my family has in all cases been ethicilly [sic] ideal.”
Stafford hadn’t managed to establish a literary life in Boston that offered much relief or gratification either, though she had been busy making herself known at the Atlantic Monthly Press from the moment she arrived. Her Neville manuscript, based on her Stephens experience, earned her praise from the editors there, whose report judged that “she can handle the English language as a skilled carpenter handles a chisel—with ease, deftness, accuracy, and rhythm,” but they indicated that she would have to rework it completely before they would consider a contract. In fact, Edward Weeks, the editor in chief, went so far as to suggest a rough outline for a fundamental overhaul of her “ironic, heartless story of a small college community” in a memo to another editor:
It seems to me that if the girl can link together the three points of interest now visible in her work (1) Gretchen’s affection for her German professor father and her revolt from the ranch (2) college life with its stimulus and dissatisfaction (3) and her experiences in Germany where presumably she finds that there are worse things than the life she has run away from in the United States, she would have a good book. I should presume that if parts 2 and 3 were bound together with a love story, the book would have a rising interest which it at present seems to lack.
Stafford was prepared to be a docile, and speedy, student. Eight days later, on December 9, Archie Ogden sent her a check for two hundred and fifty dollars as an option on the book and said they looked forward to a “sizable portion” of the manuscript six months later, on June 1, 1939.
The guidance Stafford received didn’t sound very promising. What Weeks had extracted from Stafford’s ungainly Neville undertaking—a jumbled gallery of satiric portraits hung on a plot line too arbitrary and ludicrous to be compelling—was a broad (and banal) outline of her autobiography. That was exactly what she had been trying to bury beneath the more objective enterprise of a larger social satire, at the advice of the readers of her first solipsistic venture, Which No Vicissitude. Not that Weeks had any reason to know the creative history of this fledgling writer, but even by his own standards, which were apparently mainly commercial, his advice was dubious. After all, he and his staff had just told her that the college theme was rather narrow and overdone, and a year earlier she had sent sections of her Germany diary to the Atlantic Monthly at the suggestion of Howard Mumford Jones, only to meet the objection that “there is too much about Germany on the market at present.”
The prospects for the book looked even less promising two weeks later, when Stafford found herself in the hospital, with a crushed nose, a broken cheekbone, and a skull fractured in several places. Ogden urged her to give “no further thought to that novel of yours until relaxation has taken every last kink out of your cranium,” but relaxation didn’t seem to be what Stafford wanted—and it certainly wasn’t what she got. After spending roughly a month in the hospital, she had to return twice in the spring for harrowing surgery on her nose. Her convaiesence was extremely uncomfortable (along with nose troubles and difficulty breathing, she was plagued by headaches). And it was lonely, though she didn’t go straight back to her Concord room. She was welcomed first by the Ogdens, with whom she had become friendly; then an acquaintance put her in touch with a wealthy Milton, Massachusetts, family, who took her in. Still, she felt bereft of close companions and was apparently finding solace in solitary drinking. By the summer, she admitted, however jokingly, to some concern: “I have taken the veil and at the moment do not think I will become alchoholic [sic],” she wrote to Hightower.
Meanwhile, the negotiations with Lowell, not to speak of those with his parents, were far from smooth. Once again, Stafford’s relationship with a man was radically unstable. His pursuit apparently continued to be unnervingly intense; he tracked her down at a friend’s apartment near dawn during a visit she made to New York that spring. She in turn continued to be thoroughly unpredictable, now eager to see him, now ready to denounce him. After welcoming Lowell’s company in New York, she anticipated his return to Boston for Easter vacation with trepidation. It seems that another trip to New York, during which she had seen Ford Madox Ford and his wife, had revived her fears. In a note to the Ogdens, she reported only half facetiously that the Fords, “convinced that Cal Lowell is really pathological and capable of murder, told me such horrible things about him that I am thinking of pressing Stitch [Evarts, her lawyer] into service to get out an injunction against him. He is due to arrive next week. I may have to find a hiding place.” But she didn’t, and when he arrived Lowell seemed “completely metamorphosed,” she said later. They enjoyed a genteel time visiting his elegant relatives, and by the time Lowell returned to Kenyon to finish the spring term, they were engaged, though Stafford kept the betrothal a secret.
It was only a couple of months later, in the early summer, that they had another dramatic falling out. Under the influence of Frederick Santee, his eccentric classics professor at Kenyon who knew doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Lowell abruptly ordered Stafford from Boston to Baltimore for yet another operation on her nose: Lowell was peremptory even, or perhaps especially, when he was acting out of guilt. Having arrived in Baltimore, Stafford panicked at the prospect of further surgery—to be undertaken without consulting her Boston doctors.
With Blair Clark’s help, she escaped on the train after a scene with Lowell on the station platform. Incensed by her and Clark’s medical apostasy, Lowell leapt to the conclusion that the two of them had betrayed him romantically as well. He was quickly talked out of his delusion, and he and Stafford were reconciled. During the summer, after Lowell returned from Kenyon, they visited often, their meetings apparently made more pleasurable by being forbidden according to the terms of their lawsuit, due to come to trial in November.
In short, it was hardly the convalescence the doctor would have ordered, or the circumstances most conducive to producing a novel. Yet despite abundant medical excuses for postponing and interrupting work, Stafford was understatedly stoic—a contrast to her style in later life, when her health problems consumed her. In a note to Ogden at the beginning of May, she apologized for her slowness and treated her troubles as a passing irritation only superficially related to her work: “Part II is going at a snail’s pace at the moment but I think when the effects of Dr. Butler’s insufficient anaesthetic wear off, I will be able to work with vigor having no further hospitalization to look forward to.” Lowell, however, seized the chance to develop a deeper connection between Stafford’s external ordeals and her imaginative undertaking. An early, unpublished draft of a sonnet entitled “On a Young Lady Convalescing from a Brain-Injury but Unable to write a novel in Concord, Mass.” (parts of which were subsequently reworked into “Salem” and “Concord” in his first book, Land of Unlikeness) is not a polished literary effort (or, obviously, a reliable factual source). But it is a suggestive projection into that mysterious realm where experience is transmuted into symbols. Lowell didn’t pretend to be an omniscient mind reader. In fact, his theme was the confusion in the young lady’s brain and the effort to find a form for the destructive disorder within:
Jollying the sight, the snowdrift skips and drifts;
Wagon-ruts show glassy in the stuttering pains;
Screwloose, each mouselike heartbeat thumbs at rifts
Snowing deluge, monstrosity in [of] her brain’s
Shutter-splintering, nerve-hallucinating drafts!
Sprung from her skull a surf of billowing heads
Oppressed by [in] their surroundings—fountainheads—
Are grounding here like the matchwood of rafts.
Concord enframes these ruptured floes of lot
In a cracked setting—Concord where Thoreau
and Emerson were preachers—named for peace
And famed for its embattled farmers’ shot—
Confusion—Characters storm in her brow
For the scrawled characters of her release!
After the fierce octave based on dynamic nature analogies, Lowell’s cadence suddenly slowed in the sestet, and he suggested a more static, historical set of symbols to give shape to the chaos: the New England images that eventually dominated the final poems inspired by this draft. But here the image of Concord was only introduced, its ironic implications—named for tranquillity, it was famous for rebellion—merely suggested before violent confusion returned.
Certainly Stafford hadn’t yet worked out her symbolic geography, in which cold New England (a setting of both tranquillity and rebellion for her, too) would occupy such a prominent place, when she began to write again in the turmoil of early 1939. She was nonetheless able to write—in fact to prove herself a “fast worker,” as Ogden had described her to the Atlantic Monthly Press’s business office. But Lowell’s poem emphasized what Stafford herself didn’t tell her editors: the writing was far from painless. The bland landscape that Weeks had sketched in his outline didn’t offer the creative release she needed, to judge by the manuscript that was emerging; the characters were indeed storming in her brow, but scrawling them out on paper was no liberation. The section she delivered to Ogden in April bore little resemblance to the upbeat bildungsroman the Atlantic Monthly Press staff had suggested. Confiding to Stafford (even though it was against the rules) that the initial editorial report was less than favorable, Ogden tried to suggest the problem, which was one she had been told about before: the story, he said, was heartless. Whit Burnett had bluntly made the same criticism more than a year earlier about Which No Vicissitude: “Verbally I think you are one of the most brilliant persons I have ever read, but I think all of these people are not merely lost, they are damned and I must say pretty repulsively damned at that.”
Ogden put it somewhat more gently. The reader, he said,
is impressed with the cleverness of the writing and the technique of the story, the gradual development of the pattern, but his emotions are not involved nor his sympathies engaged by any one character in the book. Artistically this is perhaps not a fault, but from a sales point of view it most certainly is. There must be one character with whom the reader can laugh and cry, rejoice and regret. It all sounds sticky and sentimental, but I trust you understand what I mean and I do not doubt that you will have such a character in the book by the time you have done your final revision.
Rather than the conventionally encouraging story of revolt and reconciliation that Weeks had outlined, Autumn Festival, as the novel was titled, was the record of a tortured consciousness. And the revised manuscript that she submitted in September, after which she left for two months at Mary Lee’s ranch in Colorado, was not much different. It was more of the “exhibitionistic self-abuse” she had vowed to avoid after Which No Vicissitude, and yet it was also a kind of perverse precursor to Boston Adventure, the novel she ended up publishing five years later. There, playing off an almost mythic image of Boston, she found a successful way to tell her unconventional story of social ostracism and then infiltration, which eluded her so long as she struggled with a German setting.
In Autumn Festival, a draft of which survives, Stafford took Weeks’s outline and gave a morbid twist to each of its proposed optimistic episodes to produce a portrait of radical alienation. Her protagonist, Gretchen Marburg, endured an unhappy childhood in America, full of ambivalence about her German father, Hermann Marburg. Mocked as a “Hun,” she felt excluded and marked forever: “There was never a time she did not know that she was largely German.… Next to Bolshevik, that had been the worst thing in the world to be.” Her adolescence was similarly loveless and insecure. Her brother’s friends laughed at her, and her one frail effort at romance turned to hate when she was rejected.
The focus of the story was Gretchen’s year at the University of Heidelberg, her father’s alma mater, where she went after college in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, with her brother, Karl. She wasn’t appalled by far worse things than she ran away from at home, as Weeks had prescribed. On the contrary, she discovered a strange salve for her self-loathing loneliness in Nazism, to which she subscribed with desperate fervor. “In America, Gretchen had been kithless; in the country of her own blood, she felt assimilated with a natión.” As for the love affair the Atlantic Monthly Press proposed for “rising interest,” Gretchen’s attachment to the young Nazi aviator Rheinhard Rössler was a chilling union, contrived mainly to ensure her acceptance as a loyal Nazi. For this was a young woman in search of a violent, punishing embrace: “There might be, as the aviator said, here something to take in your two hands; maybe you could wrench a tree by the roots. You could believe in something hard and brutal like the Hebrew God that could scare the daylights out of a sinner and scorch the sinews of an idolator.”
But Gretchen also aspired to revenge against the world, convinced in her loneliness that she was sinned against as well as sinning. She found a pretext for it in her frantic determination to prove her faithfulness to the Nazi cause. “Like the Catholic in whom the ritual grows and grows until it becomes all, so she rejected nothing of National Socialism.” In fact, she went so far as to inform on her own brother, an anti-Nazi, as well as on several of his friends and an old humanist at the university, Professor von Reisenhoff, her father’s mentor during his student days. While Rössler was being killed in Spain, soldiers were pillaging on the home f
ront as well: they stormed Professor von Reisenhoff’s apartment, thanks to Gretchen’s tip. Appalled by what she had done, in self-defense she murdered a drunken Nazi in the mêlée that ensued. But the writing leaves it far from clear that her eyes were opened in the process. After a brief and fearful refuge in drunken oblivion herself—the novel is full of “drinking and howling and flirting with strangers” as an escape from self-hatred—Gretchen was rescued by the chance to leave Germany, arranged by one of Rössler’s friends.
The novel was an exercise in venting self-disgust and revulsion with the world. It was an outpouring that Stafford seemed to be powerless to redirect in more positive directions, even though that was her own creative aim, not just the commercial desire of her editors. During the previous summer she had exhorted herself, in correspondence with Hightower, to purge her writing of its defeatist strain. That she found it very hard to avoid was suggested by the insistence of her rhetoric: “I will not write any more books that are discouraging; I will not be a writer of defeat.… I will not teach anyone a doctrine of futility, and I will not delight anyone with violent burlesque.… It is wrong to put futility and disease down on paper.” The remedy she had usefully identified was comic irony, which she tried with very uneven success in her Neville novel. The trouble with Autumn Festival was that she doomed any effort at tragic ironic tension by rendering her protagonist in such profoundly unsympathetic terms. For a brief moment, during the fall of 1938 when she had written to Hightower about embarking on her portrait of the artist (which she apparently quickly abandoned), Stafford had managed to feel fondness for a heroine with the same name—and had remarked upon it: “I like Gretchen Marburg now as I did not before.” But sympathy eluded her when she set to work on Autumn Festival in 1939. Instead of the protagonist pulled between love and literature whom she had described to Hightower, what emerged was a character incapable of love who in her guilty, agonized isolation concluded that “You could anaesthetize yourself in one of the two German ways: the Reich way or the way of books”—and chose the Reich way.