The Interior Castle

by Ann Hulbert

  Say a novena for me—you’ve got to. Our lies—yours and mine—have to remain forever and our truths must always be implicit in a casual affection and implicit only to us—and I shall never know, I suppose, how vain I am. I am a great fool and incidentally Cal knows it.… I told him about the German and he was absolutely stopped in his tracks & revolted. What wd he do if he knew me? P.S. He just came in and said you’ve got to stop drinking and I mean even 1 drink and I was panic-stricken for fear he wd take my rum away. It was very definite, very true and yet I shall perhaps not marry him & if I do not I shall be invisible for the rest of my natural days.

  Stafford was much calmer when she wrote again, two days after the wedding. She and Lowell had parted in Cleveland, where they had gone by train after the wedding—he heading for Kenyon (where she wasn’t welcome), she for her sister’s ranch. “I am beginning to see what comfort there is in being married. He will, I think, make an honest woman of me,” she wrote from Chicago, a lyrical fondness leavening her foreboding. But she was quick to undercut any suggestion of simple domestic harmony; comfort would not come easily to this less-than-malleable wife. Stafford might fear invisibility, but she had no illusions that she was helplessly vulnerable. Once again, she acknowledged her own skills as victimizer, of herself as well as of others: “How typical that I should have had a honeymoon on a train and in Cleveland. And while I may lay it all to external circumstances in my soul I know it is only my peculiar genius for the uncomfortable. Poor Cal! What a life he will have with me.”

  In a third letter Stafford displayed yet another perspective, suddenly neither desperate nor wistfully fond. Instead, she declared herself coldly resigned to her fate. She now viewed her admission of her inadequacies in German to have been a moment of sincere self-exposure that she regretted: “It was an absolutely needless confession.” Similarly, she revised the warm tone of her Chicago reflections, reporting on the “utter dreariness of our leavetaking in Cleveland, he on a bus to Gambier and I on a train to Chicago thinking in our numb way that now we were married and the worst was over.” Her mood was bleak: “I have no very terrible fears. I have had only one letter from him, and that chilled me to the bone.” Meanwhile, she heard plenty from the other Lowell’s, firsthand and secondhand: “Gossip that is said about me in the Chilton Club and so forth, initiated by Mrs. Lowell and turned into neat phrases by Merrill Moore before she publishes them in the club as well as in letters. The Tates stand by us but they are our only support.… I have been stirred up continually by the evil predictions for Cal’s destruction through me.…”

  Yet for all the apprehension that Stafford obviously felt—and that, for obvious reasons, she emphasized to Hightower—she also had fulfilled an ambition. The first letter Lowell wrote as husband to his wife had perhaps “chilled” her, but to judge by one he sent to his parents at roughly the same time, he was taking the occasion of his new married maturity to display exactly the peremptory determination that had attracted her. There was to be no veering off into invisibility for him, that was clear. “You may enjoy talking about my sacrificed fellowship [to Harvard] and forced marriage,” Lowell wrote to his mother:

  The first is uncertain and the second untrue. Naturally I find such gossip very undignified and annoying.…

  I am not flattered by the remark that you do not know where I am heading or that my ways are not your ways. I am heading exactly where I have been heading for six years. One can hardly be ostracized for taking the intellect and aristocracy and family tradition seriously.

  That was precisely what Stafford yearned to take seriously and found mortifyingly skewed in her own obscure heritage. Not that Lowell was uncritical of his elevated background, or that Stafford was either. Taking the tradition seriously entailed applying a critical perspective—as Lowell made clear in his valedictory address at his Kenyon graduation: “Customs are not a culture, Boston is no longer Athens. I am emphasizing a glaring problem, our aristocracy … has special advantages but no superior way of life.” In the Agrarian vision of the ideal hierarchical literary order, Lowell had found rigorous prescriptions for the true cultural, critical elite that society required. Strenuous discipline not decadence, energy not enervation, were required for the artistic labor of transforming recalcitrant experience into aesthetic form. In fact, arduous struggle was perhaps the most important sign, and justification, of exclusivity; “dualism, division, tension, and conflict, the clash of desires, evil and pain,” as two New Critical theorists, W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks later put it in Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957), were the key to the mature literature and criticism required for a sound society.

  Stafford’s accounts to Hightower made clear just how central struggle was to her relationship with Lowell, and she emphasized that she was in a sense well equipped for it, with her “peculiar genius for the uncomfortable.” But she was also conscious of that “genius” as an ambiguous attribute. It was “peculiar” because, as the rest of that passage suggests, it removed her from the role of accommodating woman and wife, or of facile woman writer. She certainly was not one of the “Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls,” women who are “unbeautiful and have comfortable minds,” as E. E. Cummings caricatured the staid, sentimental scribblers whom the modernists scorned.

  But her readiness for rigor didn’t mean that her course was clear, that admission to the exclusive circle of Lowell’s teachers and friends was straightforward, especially for someone as defensively sensitive about belonging as Stafford. Once again she turned for counsel, and encouragement, to the only woman among the literary guides she had cultivated, to the writer who was well aware of the antifeminist inclinations of the “Tate-Ransom crowd.” In a letter to Evelyn Scott not long after the wedding, Stafford must have expressed her disappointment about her rejected novel and her confusion about what lay ahead, confessing insecurity about having crashed not just Boston, but the southern literary elite as well. On April 30, 1940, Scott sent her a letter with reassurances and advice:

  The tale is dismal and I am so sorry. Dismal, that is, in the literary sense. I don’t think the marriage sounds dismal; and my observation bears out the frequent lasting success of alliances originating in an atmosphere of scraps and calamities. I think nature rather likes these. The ego seems to gratify some double craving, when, out of external and emotional turmoil, arises the edifice of a new, unanticipated relationship.… [T]ry out Mr. Ransom’s suggestion [that she work at the Kenyon Review and Lowell teach a course in English and one in Latin]. He has a real interest in your husband and is willing, I gather, to make paternal efforts for his talents; and you may persuade him (Ransom) that “feminine” art is not, after all, any more femine [sic] in his meaning than “masculine” art is masculine in the same sense—in short that not all women writing exploit their sex in ways external to art (as he has suggested of Edna Millay).

  Scott was charging Stafford with a rather intimidating mission, which revealed the awkwardness of her predicament now that, through Lowell, she had entered the inner orbit of the southern writers, whose campaign to spread their formalist literary views was shifting into high gear. In essence, Scott suggested that Stafford make the most of her connection to their star protégé to persuade Ransom that women writers don’t exploit their sex. Her ego, capable of forging an alliance out of turmoil and strain, Scott implied, would be part of her proof that women do not simply “[live] for love,” as Ransom had written in his essay on Millay, “The Poet as Woman,” in The World’s Body. On the contrary, she could show that they can claim some of the calculating discipline he assigned to man, whom he defined as “an intellectualized woman.”

  Just how uncomfortable a predicament she had gotten herself into, Stafford seemed to realize with sudden and devastating force when Hightower wrote to tell her he was marrying Bunny Cole, one of her former roommates in Cambridge. In a succession of bitter letters to him, Stafford condemned Cole for her frivolous female qualities—she was a mere “ornament,” a “
cottonhead,” stupid and “untaught.” Stafford claimed to be insulted—at least she had had the decency to betray Hightower for someone who prompted “respect … awe of a superior mind and a shining talent”—but the truth was more complicated. In a moment of merciless self-revelation, Stafford confessed to Hightower her sense of exile from the softer qualities, from love:

  I’m a bitch, yes, and I’ve hurt you and brutality is my way because tenderness frightens me and I’m no hand at accepting what does not benefit me. I’ll always be brutal to you and humorous, except when under the influence, and, under the influence, my maudlin incoherence will be the exhibit of a fool but in reality the release of my heart-broken, inconsummate love, which, being inconsummate must be friendship but it preserves the jealous tenderness of romantic love. If I am ungenerous, it is because I am passionate. If I am unforgiving, it is because I can only hate what comes between us.…

  In myself, I am not a bad woman, but my appearance in people’s lives is usually a disastrous accident.

  Her appearance in Lowell’s life literally had been marked by an almost fatal accident. But as she indirectly acknowledged, the fact that she hadn’t disappeared from his life was the result of dogged will, hers and his. And as Scott suggested, their future together was likely to entail more tenacity than tenderness. “Thank God we are both writers and have as a model the superb marriage of the Tates,” Stafford wrote to Hightower as she looked ahead. That model did not augur peace, but it turned out to be, certainly for Stafford, a remarkable prescription for productivity.

  CHAPTER 6

  Catholicism

  LOWELL’S SURROGATE FATHERS saw to it that he and his new wife had somewhere to go after graduation. Hoping to keep them close to home, Ransom tried to arrange a teaching stint at Kenyon for Lowell and a job for Stafford on the Kenyon Review, the literary quarterly he had launched two years after coming to the college in 1937. The prospect was not quite as perfect as it looked. Though the magazine was already well known as a home for serious poetry and for the New Critical approach to literature, dedicated to close textual readings, Stafford’s role was to be lowly: a typist. And Lowell, though championed by Ransom, was finally rejected as too immature by Kenyon’s president. An alternative plan was promptly devised, and the couple ended up safely ensconced with another branch of the literary family. In the summer of 1940 Stafford was offered a secretarial job in Baton Rouge at the Southern Review, the Agrarian quarterly where the New Criticism was also in the ascendancy, and Lowell began taking classes at Louisiana State University on a junior fellowship. As Ransom wrote to the Tates (who had suggested the fallback plan of setting up house in Tory Valley, in Dutchess County, New York, where, Caroline Gordon remembered, “we spent our first year of wedded life. It was tough but healthy”), the arrangement was the next best thing: “I told [the president of LSU] I would have only envy of him if he got that team (Cal and Jean) as it was precisely the team we’d wanted here.”

  Instead of remaining with Ransom, the senior guide of the southern literary circle who was known for his courtly kindness, Stafford and Lowell found themselves among his followers, who tended to be fiercer. The physical climate in Baton Rouge inspired sluggishness—Stafford liked to exclaim over the preposterous heat, and everybody liked to drink a lot—but the intellectual climate was invigorating. The two years they spent in the South were a formative time for Stafford. She was fascinated and appalled by the landscape. “Louisiana, on the whole, is lovely, but it is lethal, teeming with serpents, disease, spiders, tainted meat. I’ve never seen anything so lush, and I’ve never been anywhere that I was so little tempted to go barefoot.” She was equally divided about her other discoveries that year. She was learning the full extent of her husband’s intensity, as Lowell turned from zealous literary criticism to zealous Catholicism. And while she coped with her secretarial chores, she was finding out how disciplined a student, of belief and of fiction, she could be. The Lowells’ start together was tough, as Gordon characterized her own first year of marriage, but not healthy. Stafford was sick—with fevers, a bad cough, flu, and kidney infections—a good deal of the time.

  The main draw in Baton Rouge was Robert Penn Warren, one of Ransom’s former students, as well as a great friend and protégé of Allen Tate and one of the contributors to the Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, in 1930. With Cleanth Brooks, Warren was co-editing the Southern Review in the proselytizing spirit Tate had endorsed when the quarterly was founded in 1935. The editor, Tate instructed in “The Function of the Critical Quarterly” (1936), “owes his first duty to his critical principles, his sense of the moral and intellectual order upon which society ought to rest.” Meanwhile in the classroom, Warren and Brooks were unsettling the LSU English department with their heretical interpretive techniques, which had been codified two years earlier in their influential textbook Understanding Poetry (1938).

  The Lowells had arrived during an important transition for the erstwhile Fugitives: they were consolidating in a new cause, one that consumed them through the 1940s. Their Agrarian goal of restoring the traditional hierarchical society they revered in the Old South had been derided in both the North and the South; the urban, industrial economy showed no signs of giving way before the imprecations, however eloquent, of “Twelve Southerners” in I’ll Take My Stand. So they increasingly devoted their attention to a more manageable crusade. Their aim was to reform the teaching of English in American colleges and universities, where literature, they argued, was buried under the weight of erroneous readings. Historical scholarship had to give way to a new focus on textual criticism, on the intrinsic elements of a literary work rather than on extrinsic influences and sources. Above all, the southern explicators emphasized the linguistic and structural tensions within the literary work, issuing in irony, ambiguity, and paradox. And, following Eliot, they championed a new perspective on English poetry that elevated the metaphysical poets as models of the “unification of sensibility” essential to poetry—intellect and emotion maturely joined and rendered effectively indistinguishable. In 1940 the New Critics were still on the outskirts of the academy, rebels scattered through English departments in the South, but they were determined to make inroads.

  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.

  Sh
e 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:

  Talk in academic gatherings is of … (1) language requirements for the degree PhD (2) the deficiencies of the Freshman English curriculum and (3) the necessity of subordinating historical scholarship to criticism or vice versa. And Cal says, I wish we had gone to China. Sat. night we ate at the Brooks’s … and had food on our laps in a brightly lighted and much too small room and we were there for six hours hearing those three things.… Now mind, they were all delightful, charming, amusing people but it is a university. It is academic. It is that and nothing more.