The Interior Castle

by Ann Hulbert

  Just what the shape and structure of their lives in New York would be was far from clear, but Stafford at least had the prospect of potentially more time to herself to write. The Lowell’s were no longer student and secretary. She and Cal were setting forth on newly independent footing, and this time he was the one heading for the daily job. Stafford had been turned down once more for a Houghton Mifflin fellowship, but with her outline in hand and Proust foremost in mind, she was poised to plunge into her novel. Her illness had provided her with the preliminary momentum. She knew it would be a struggle to sustain it, given the bustling life in their household, which she acknowledged she hadn’t managed gracefully: “It has been a dreadful arrangement here and I have not been good about it. It enraged me during the winter to come home at noon & find both [Cal] and Peter Taylor still in their pajamas, having spent the morning reading or writing while I had been cutting stencil and wrestling with ‘Accounts Receivable.’ ” Now she and Lowell could wrestle with new balances and imbalances.

  BEFORE THEY HAD SETTLED on New York, the Lowells had been thinking of returning to Cambridge—but not, Lowell was emphatic, to the familiar fold. “We must avoid, [Cal] says, social Harvard and literary people and must be surrounded by Catholics,” Stafford wrote to the Thompsons, her Boulder friends, in the summer of 1941. It was a droll scenario but also an intimidating one. The incongruity of a popish enclave in Puritan New England, presided over by a Lowell, clearly appealed to Stafford’s comic sense; but the intensity of belief and rebelliousness she could predict from Lowell, especially at such proximity to his family, didn’t.

  By comparison, New York was a relief. Not that life was relaxed and tolerant, but the Lowells succeeded in mixing religion and literature. They were surrounded by critics as well as Catholics, and the critics were not just the familiar southern faces. In the city, Stafford and Lowell associated with the literary circle around the Partisan Review, very different from the Fugitive set and worlds away from the Brahmin, Harvard ambience. Yet despite the surface opposition between the urban Jewish intellectuals and the southern Agrarian critics, there was, as Irving Howe observed in his memoir A Margin of Hope, an underlying affinity—the critical energy of the marginal. “I came to feel that,” Howe wrote,

  clashes of opinion aside, there was something symmetrical in the situations of the writers from Nashville and the writers from New York—both groups semioutsiders starting to break into the central spaces of American culture, yet unwilling to succumb to its slackness, its small optimisms. There was enough disagreement between the two groups to create tension, enough respect to begin friendships.

  Tension and friendship certainly were staples of the Lowells’ New York sojourn from the fall of 1941 to the summer of 1942.

  Stafford was still sick when they arrived in New York (where a doctor finally diagnosed pneumonia), but she did her best to get herself and Lowell settled. She found an apartment at 63 West Eleventh Street, and Lowell was especially pleased because the landlords were Catholic. The two of them began working at Sheed and Ward, Jean part-time. “We are both excited at the moment about proper editing,” she announced.

  More exciting, though, was the literary company they quickly came to know. Right away they had invitations from the Tates to visit them at Princeton, where Allen had been hired on a grant from the Carnegie Foundation for an experimental program to teach the creative arts. Through them they met Richard Blackmur, who had taught with Tate in 1939, Tate’s first year at Princeton (and whom Tate later accused of having a hand in his firing in 1942). The Tates were also their entrée into the Partisan Review crowd. The older couple introduced them to Philip Rahv, the co-editor (with William Phillips) of the magazine, and his wife, Natalie, “both of whom are very nice,” Stafford judged—not quite the adjective most of Philip Rahv’s colleagues, least of all Tate, would have used. As Howe observed, Tate and Rahv made perfect opponents, both zealous for battle, which didn’t stop them from also being close—but far from calm—friends; “nothing but ideas stood between them.” Randall Jarrell was in and out of New York that fall, staying with the Lowells between trips to lecture at Princeton and to see Edmund Wilson on the Cape. Delmore Schwartz was teaching at Harvard, but they inevitably heard plenty about him. He had been the talk of the PR circle, and the Southerners, ever since he had published In Dreams Begin Responsibilities in 1938. “Your poetic style is beyond any doubt the first real innovation that we’ve had since Eliot and Pound,” Tate had written to Schwartz. Not least important, the Lowells also met Robert Giroux, a young editor at Harcourt, Brace, shortly after they arrived.

  This fluid circle of semioutsiders welcomed the young protégés of the Nashville writers. As she had back at the Writers’ Conference in Boulder, Stafford made a good impression—on the Catholics as well as the critics. Frank Sheed, the founding editor of the Catholic publishing house, was always ambivalent about Lowell and his messianic manner, but he doted on Stafford. The Rahvs seem to have assumed something of the same parental role that the Tates did toward the Lowells. Stafford gossiped and mingled with agility, distinctly more polished than Lowell.

  But she also stood apart, the outsider among the semioutsiders. At the same time that Stafford successfully aimed to be socially captivating, she instinctively resisted being brought entirely into the circle herself—lonely though the Colorado girl often felt “in alien corn.” Her distance was evidently a source of insecurity, but it also gave her a vantage point from which to play the ironic, incisive observer of the literary alliances, more and less precarious, around her. Her continuing struggle with Catholicism, which threatened to be all-consuming, was also grist for satiric storytelling. In a letter to Peter Taylor in October, she reported on Catholic developments and delivered one of the deadpan anecdotes that were her specialty; the more uncomfortable the circumstances, the more comic her rendition of them was. Her role in the stories was well turned. She was the docile victim, but also the understated commentator:

  I should tell you about the Catholic Worker.… Cal insisted that I do Catholic work so finally I went down to the offices of the newspaper which is run, as I suppose you know (or ought to) by a woman who used to be a communist and has written her autobiography which is called “From Union Square to Rome.” The first time I went down, I was terrified just by the approach to the place. It is a block from Pell St. and two from the Bowery, just off Canal. I had to walk seven blocks through the kind of slums you do not believe exist when you see them in the movies, in an atmosphere that was nearly asphyxiating. The Worker office was full of the kind of camaraderie which frightens me to death and I was immediately put at a long table between a Negro and a Chinese to fold papers, a tiring and filthy job. The second time, it was about the same except that Mott St. seemed even more depressing and that time I typed. After I had described the place to Cal, he immediately wanted to go down and live there. I vainly argued against it. Finally a priest whom he admires told him his work should be intellectual. And now we are quite happy here in a respectable neighborhood and henceforth I do not have to go to the Worker but instead I have to go to work in a friendship house in Harlem under a Baroness de something.

  Cal’s fanaticism, as Stafford wittily told it, was an offense against taste, and she cast herself in the role of fastidious (even racist) snob. And then she concluded with an all-lived-happily-ever-after cadence. But the truth was, despite the note of self-mockery about her aesthetic delicacy, she was viscerally repelled by the clamor on the streets, as a later journal entry suggested: “We went to look for an apartment on Mott Street. The pressure of people was almost entirely physical and the noises nearly drove me mad.”

  Nor did devotion to the intellectual dimension of Catholic endeavors suit her much better. In a diary entry that apparently dates from several years later, Stafford recalled her work with Sheed with a different kind of shudder:

  I remember the translation of [the Confessions], 12 hour days, from dark and wintry seven until seven in the small, En
glish-cool bare and cluttered office in that old house with its broad, commanding marble stairway, our smudged windows overlooking 5th Ave. as it peters out below 14th St. The tea, as dark as broth, in pasteboard containers and the yeast buns came from the luncheonette, handy on the corner. My typewriter was tall and stiff and Sheed, forever in overshoes and sometimes in a dinner jacket in which he had slept in the back office, translated indefatigably and excellently and with so little evident delight that everything about him—including his faith—came to me to seem learned rather than experienced.

  Where Lowell seized on to Catholicism as, among other things, a bridge—however fragile at times—between learning and experience, between spirit and fact, Stafford often found herself looking into the chasm between them. Her religious travails seemed to call attention to her discomfort both with faith and with the vulgarity of the physical world.

  Literary mingling, however intense, could offer a kind of refuge from zealous Catholicism. It was company in which the goal was more congenial—some harmony between life and art. Though Stafford sometimes found the bookish camaraderie quite frightening in its own way, she didn’t complain to Taylor about the impinging crowds of writers (as she had the year before to Hightower). After she recovered from her pneumonia, there was no word of fevers in the autumn. She felt equal, it seems, to the literary scene. Jarrell was “a rather exhausting joy to see,” she reported jauntily. She urged Taylor to try to make it to a cocktail party being held by the Rahvs for Robert Penn Warren, “because it ought to be kind of fun.” She eagerly kept her eyes and ears open on their trips out to Princeton and summed up her impressions with typical, far-from-intimidated tartness: “We met Blackmur later in the evening. He talked to no one even when he was speaking, not even to Tate. The most interesting thing he said was that you could get all of James unbound for about 7 dollars.”

  But for all of the literary socializing, Stafford was also obviously pleased to be able to report that when Robert Giroux came to dinner for the first time in October, he “said that it came as a complete surprise to him that I was at the Southern Review, that I knew Mr. Ransom … in fact, that I was anything but a quiet talented mole working year after year on a novel down on nth St.” She liked the idea of having connections, of being a protégé with access, but she liked perhaps even more the chance to claim all that and yet remain a solitary, independent outsider pursuing her own course.

  That fall she was steadily at work on The Outskirts, the working title for the novel that eventually became Boston Adventure. The semioutsiders didn’t distract her, and Lowell’s continuing pursuit of piety rather than poetry didn’t deter her from the project she had under way: an anatomy of the real insiders—the Bostonians who were safely two hundred and fifty miles north. “It’s a conscious imitation of Proust, or as Cal says, of Moncrieff’s Proust,” she wrote to Hightower in September. “He is an exacting master, but Ransom (I don’t put much stake in this since he doesn’t like and doesn’t read novels) wrote that I had sold him on Proust. Actually, there may be an uncomplimentary ambiguity in his remark.” She cheerfully admitted to imitation, and then jokingly to bad imitation, out of an evident confidence that she was embarked on a literary endeavor that at last suited her.

  Stafford was obviously working hard and productively. By early 1942 she already had a manuscript in shape to submit to Harcourt, Brace. As Giroux recalled it, Frank V. Morley, the editor in chief, passed him Stafford’s manuscript one Friday with a note attached: “It is well written in a way that creeps on relentlessly, giving the interior life of the heroine, Sonie. I found that it kept hold of me; but will it keep hold of a public? Other opinions on this—RG, please?” When Giroux boarded the train that day for a weekend in Connecticut, he settled in with the manuscript—and was so absorbed that he missed his station. Shortly after that he persuaded Morley to take on the book and was assigned to be Stafford’s editor (as he remained until mid-year, when he left to become an officer in the navy). In April at the Tates’ house in Princeton, where Stafford and Lowell had come with Giroux to hear Jarrell lecture, Caroline Gordon seized the chance to make the signing of the Harcourt, Brace contract a witnessed event. She set out candles on her desk, and Stafford closed the deal in flickering light among friends. With that secular ritual, her literary vocation had acquired an external sanction. From secretary, she had not progressed to receptionist in the city laundry, the path she had predicted to Hightower in Baton Rouge. It was a real contract, she wrote to the Thompsons, “not the twaddle I had with the Atlantic Monthly”—two hundred and fifty dollars on signing, two hundred and fifty dollars on delivery.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Tates

  ARMED WITH HER manuscript and contract, Stafford and Lowell left New York in July of 1942 to set up house with the Tates, who were leaving Princeton for Monteagle, Tennessee. Tate had not been rehired, and he and Gordon loved the small village and quaint summer resort where they had spent a productive stretch several years earlier. “We always start working like hell as soon as we get here,” Gordon said, and both Tates were wound up to write. Allen wanted to start a sequel to his novel The Fathers, which had appeared in 1938, and Caroline was at work on The Women on the Porch. It was the right recommendation of the place for Stafford, who was poised to proceed with her novel, and apparently Lowell too was suddenly ready to write again. Sheed and Ward was cutting back on staff, and Lowell planned to undertake a biography of Jonathan Edwards. “We will just hole up in a cottage on the mountain until we have finished our respective books,” Gordon wrote to Malcolm Cowley.

  It was obviously not so simple as that, but it was a strikingly productive year, from July of 1942 to the next July—“the winter of four books,” was the way Lowell remembered it. Tate and Lowell, in fact, barely got started on the books they had intended. Stymied with their projects, together they began editing an anthology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry. Then, inspired by the “formal, difficult poems,” they turned to writing poetry again themselves. Lowell later looked back on that year, during which he wrote all of the poems in Land of Unlikeness, as a profoundly formative one, just as his first southern summer, in 1937, with the Tates at Benfolly had been. “In the beginning,” he later told one of his biographers, Steven Gould Axelrod, Tate “was not only an influence but often the (my) style of writing.” And the young poet’s comprehensive debt to the Tates transcended style; they also inspired him with a theme, and, as Axelrod put it, with “something greater than either of these—a vision of a life totally committed to art, and an assurance that he too could achieve such a life.”

  For Stafford as well, the year—the middle year of the roughly three she spent hard at work on Boston Adventure—was crucial. But her view of the experience was less glowing, more in line with Ford Madox Ford’s reaction to the Benfolly summer: “Consorting with the Tates,” he said, “is like living with intellectual desperadoes in the Sargoza [sic] sea.” Work and play were fierce. For the Lowells, the industrious days began, at Cal’s behest, with attendance at Mass. Then it was time to retreat to their typewriters, though it wasn’t all quiet creativity among the foursome. There was plenty of noisy criticism as well, of which Stafford took the brunt: Gordon later recalled “how often we all took a whack” at Stafford’s novel. Their evenings were filled with gossip, mostly literary and very mean—and, of course, with drink. Too much drink, Stafford acknowledged at one point: she had broken a vow to cut back, she told Taylor, and had seen “for the millionth time what a prize jackass I am when I drink.”

  By the spring Stafford had collapsed, sick once more, but what is most striking is how creatively resilient she seemed to be, despite the hard-driving company. She had arrived in Monteagle in the summer of 1942 with a draft of her novel already in hand, which gave her a clear sense of direction as well as important momentum, and she managed to leave in the summer of 1943 with seven hundred pages. Stafford’s themes, style, and vision of the creative life, like her husband’s, owed plenty to
the Tates. But as Boston Adventure showed, she was a protégé who wandered from the paths of her patrons.

  THOUGH STAFFORD doubtless refined her themes as she pounded away at her typewriter on the third floor of the big house, they had been worked out long before she arrived in Monteagle. “Cal was very right when he exclaimed one night in Louisiana, ‘I’ve just discovered Jean is writing a Catholic novel,’ ” Peter Taylor wrote to Stafford in the summer of 1944 after he had read her finished manuscript. He went on to characterize the religious perspective that Lowell had seen at the outset and that he saw at its completion: “I had not realized (this will sound stuffy) that you have honestly integrated your Catholicism and your natural aestheticism by which I mean—however poor a choice of terms—your natural revulsion to the coarseness of most human beings and the grossness of their lives.” Boston Adventure, as its original title, The Outskirts, suggests, was a story of exile—of social, but also of spiritual, exile. It was a version of the story that Stafford had tried to tell in Autumn Festival, and her protagonist this time, named Sonie Marburg, was a relative of Gretchen, like her an outcast from her family, searching for salvation in an alien society.

  But in Sonie, Gretchen’s temperament was tamed by a more mature imagination—her own and her creator’s. Where Stafford’s earlier heroine had been consumed by adolescent self-loathing and disgust with the world around her, Sonie was more patient and ironic in her explorations of her alienation; if Gretchen was a damned soul, Sonie was a spirit in purgatory. It marked the kind of tempering of sensibility that, interestingly, was not much in evidence in Lowell’s Land of Unlikeness, which consisted largely of poems that emerged under the Tates’ roof at the same time that Boston Adventure was taking revised shape. As R. P. Blackmur wrote of Lowell’s poems, “There is not a loving metre in the book,” echoing the Atlantic Monthly Press’s reactions to Stafford’s earlier novel. “What is thought of as Boston in him fights with what is thought of as Catholic; and the fight produces not a tension but a gritting. It is not the violence, the rage, the denial of this world that grits, but the failure of these to find in verse the tension of necessity; necessity has, when recognised, the quality of conflict accepted, not hated.” Stafford had discovered the tension of necessity in Sonie’s narrative. In mesmerizing prose, she created a character who confronted the divisions in herself with an eerily calm, fatalistic curiosity.