by Ann Hulbert
TAKING CARE OF HERSELF was not Stafford’s priority that year in Monteagle. Taking care of her novel was, and that was taxing work. Stafford’s thematic ambitions, which had taken at least rough shape in the manuscript that had convinced Harcourt, Brace to offer her a contract, were demanding. By the time she joined the Tates, her labors were evidently devoted above all to problems of style and structure: there was more than a year of arduous revising ahead of her. The first stretch, spent at Monteagle, was the formative stretch of rewriting, and if the Tates didn’t direct her style in quite the domineering way they did Lowell’s, they were nonetheless a presiding influence. Stafford worked zealously, apparently spurred on by the productive household and in turn intimidating them with her intensity. Writing to Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon described the exhausting scene: “Four of us here on this mountain top, leading what would be an idyllic existence if it weren’t for the news from the outside world and for the surges of creative energy which shake the house. I guess I’m identifying Jean’s typewriter with her Muse. Sometimes it sounds like the sea breaking on rocks or a small explosion.”
Stafford was nobody’s docile student, but it seems fair to say that along with her muse, her mentors and their literary views helped to guide her energetic typing and retyping. Certainly the reigning ethos of laborious craftsmanship left its mark. The New Critics wholeheartedly subscribed to Eliot’s view that “the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour,” as he wrote in “The Function of Criticism” (1923); “the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative.” Lowell recalled years later that he had kindled to Tate’s insistence that “poetry … must be tinkered with and recast until one’s eyes pop out of one’s head.”
Critical prescriptions for tinkering with fiction were less dogmatically formulated. In fact, Tate sounded downright lax about the techniques of fiction in an essay by that title published in 1944 (the writing of which probably dates roughly from the Monteagle year):
There must be many techniques of fiction, but how many? I suppose a great many more than there are techniques of poetry.… The novel has at no time enjoyed anything like the number and the intensity of objective conventions which the drama, even in its comparatively formless periods, has offered to the critic. The number of techniques possible in the novel are probably as many as its conventions are few.
Such a refreshingly informal perspective was surprising from a man better known for his insistence on high discipline and strain. But in practice, the openness seems to have left plenty of room for meddling in Monteagle, and not only by Tate. As Caroline Gordon acknowledged in retrospect, Stafford had by no means been left alone. When Gordon set about revising her own novel during the summer of 1943, not long after the foursome had disbanded, she wrote to Stafford, cringing at the memory of the younger woman’s revision ordeal and offering a glimpse of the ruthless critical method in the Tate household. Apparently Tate was the reigning arbiter, despite Gordon’s more extensive experience with fiction. “I am so sorry about your fever coming back,” she wrote to Stafford, who was by then having a difficult time at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York:
The hell of it is that you had hardly got on your feet. I am in a position now to sympathize with you even more deeply than I did when we were all taking whacks at your novel there on the mountain. Allen has finally finished reading mine and I have started the revision. But there are two chapters that he thinks are perfectly foul. I don’t like them either and had already rewritten them several times. The other day I hauled off, took a fresh start and wrote a substitute chapter, which, according to Allen, had exactly the same faults as the original. God knows how many times I’ll have to repeat this performance. I don’t mind the suffering so much, or rather I can stand it, but what worries me is that whenever I get stuck on a place like this it shows.
The Monteagle treatment of Stafford evidently had been memorably rough, for Gordon came back to the subject again in the fall: “I have decided that your mysterious fever came not from sinus or anything else but from having your novel torn to pieces by fiends in the guise of friends,” she wrote apologetically.
If the flexibility of the New Critical approach to fiction meant that Stafford was inundated with advice, the absence of a prescribed, intensive method was perhaps what saved her. Certainly she prospered creatively with all the help, even though she felt beleaguered and got quite sick. (And she was bitter, years later, at Lowell’s imputation of excessive dependence on her mentors. “I have not ever forgiven him and I do not know if I ever shall for saying … ‘Just remember that Boston Adventure would have been much poorer than it was if it hadn’t been for the Tates,’ ” she wrote to Peter Taylor after she and Lowell had separated.)
More than a decade later Philip Rahv saw occasion to take issue with the New Critics’ aggressive inroads into the criticism of fiction. In “Fiction and the Criticism of Fiction” (1956) he maintained that the “effort to deduce a prosaics from a poetics is au fond doomed to fail, for it is simply not the case that what goes for a microscopic unit such as the lyric poem goes equally well for the macroscopic compositions of the writer of narrative prose.” Though Rahv may have been right that by then the New Critics’ method had hardened into an excessive emphasis on style, his article also serves as a reminder of the underlying interest that had animated them at the outset, that inspired Rahv himself as well, and that was crucial to Stafford’s revisions. Rahv denounced the New Critical preoccupation with style in the name of a novelistic virtue that Ransom himself had heartily endorsed in his essay “The Understanding of Fiction” (1950): concreteness. At the heart of that most empirical of genres, Rahv believed, there should be “solidity of specification.” Ransom put it only somewhat differently. He suggested that the novel’s power was to express and appeal to the affections over the intellect by transforming the “world of utility” and abstraction into “the world of objects built up in the fulness of their actual being.”
As for the New Critics’ obsession with symbols and mythic patterns, which Rahv also felt was misplaced in treating fiction, Tate at least had expressed a distinctly moderate view in comments about his own novel, The fathers. His main aim, he said, was to accommodate both symbolism and concreteness, stressing that realistic texture took primary place: “I wished … to make the whole structure symbolic in terms of realistic detail, so that you could subtract the symbolism, or remain unaware of it, without losing the literal level of meaning … but if you subtract the literal or realistic detail, the symbolic structure disappears.” Although it’s arguable that his symbolic touch was not as light as he hoped in his own novel, he seems to have offered useful advice to Stafford. In a couple of letters to her during the spring of 1943, Lambert Davis emphasized how helpful it must be to have Tate’s suggestions and mentioned that he had talked with Tate about one particular problem of symbolism—the choice of book (in the end Riders of the Purple Sage) to represent Sonie’s father.
The successful balance in Boston Adventure between carefully structured patterns of symbolic imagery and density of specific detail was doubtless the product of Stafford’s endless revisions, begun under the auspices of the Tates. In a crucial step beyond her old “words, merely” problem, she had found not only themes but a newly concrete style that suited her natural inclination to captivate through carefully wrought language rather than through the representation of raw experience and action. The central symbolic pattern of the novel, which must have required plenty of tinkering to get right, sheds light on the organic relation of Stafford’s stylistic method and her themes. Sonie’s vision of Miss Pride’s Hotel Barstow room and her actual experience of it, then her vision of Miss Pride’s Pinckney Street room and her experience of it, and finally her vision and experience of her own “red room,” give the novel its underlying structural unity. The imagery links Books One and Two, establishi
ng ironic cross-references between them, and it helps set up the key counterpoint of the novel: the play between internal and external worlds. Sonie’s fascination with these evocative chambers, which seem to speak to her of some peaceful tradition that she has been born without, has a metaphysical as well as a social resonance. Stafford had found a place for her meditation on St. Teresa’s castle of receding rooms.
The room that began its existence in Sonie’s mind (Miss Pride’s room) became in the end an image of that mind (the “red room”). As Stafford developed the symbol, it acquired a new dimension: house evoked head, the outer room became an inner chamber, windows were linked to eyes. For Sonie the Chichester dreamer, Miss Pride’s room offered an escape from subjective hell into objective calm. Yet for Sonie the Bostonian, it became an objective hell from which she tried to retreat to subjective calm—only to discover that there was no real escape. Miss Pride could peer in through the windows. Just as no room in the world was the salvation she dreamed of, so the mind was not the asylum she hoped. In fact, it might be precisely the asylum she had feared all of her life: Miss Pride’s small, piercing eyes evoked Shura’s huge, terrifying eyes. Thus Stafford implicitly returned at the close to the little cottage, barely bigger than a room, rocked by raging passions, where the stove blazed in the middle of summer. With this tour de force, Stafford proved herself an exemplary student of symbolism who was faithful at the same time to the world of objects.
AS IT WAS for Lowell, the year with the Tates was for Stafford not only an education in technique. It was also a lesson in life. The Monteagle household was her first extensive and intensive exposure to the life devoted to art. For all of her desire to consort with sensitive artists, Stafford was less at ease amid the creative, often claustrophobic, tumult than she perhaps expected. At Yaddo, where Stafford spent the summer months of 1943 after leaving Monteagle, she collapsed. It was the culmination of anxieties that had evidently been building. Stafford had been especially shaken by a bad quarrel she had had with Gordon in the spring (about what it’s not clear): “I guess it wasn’t as serious as I make out,” she wrote to Taylor, but she evidently felt that she had completely lost control: “it gave me a violent attack of vertigo and completely bewildered me because it’s the first time I’ve burst out like that at anyone but Cal or my family.” The fight, as Stafford herself suggested, was the eruption of her ambivalence about her Monteagle “home”: she fought because it felt like family and then found herself the stunned, stranded outsider again.
The life of art exemplified by the Tates was a taxing one. To judge by their relationship, the dynamic between married writers was not simple or smooth. And the Tates were a particularly pertinent model for the young Lowells. From early on in their marriage, Cal especially had looked to the older writers as guides on the literary path they hoped to follow. Some of the parallels were obvious. Gordon wrote prose, Tate poetry and criticism. Both were strong willed, combative, and addicted to gossip, especially literary gossip. Tate, like Lowell, tended to be abstract and impractical, while Gordon and Stafford prided themselves on their mastery of the mundane details of household management, and of career advancement. Gordon, with years of practice at feeding, housing, and organizing crowds of literary company on meager budgets, set dauntingly high standards for Stafford. Caroline was an autocratic organizer, who doubtless didn’t make it easy for Jean to find her useful niche during the Monteagle year (just as Stafford later complained about the intrusive wives in her kitchen when she had her turn at playing hostess of an equally rustic salon).
But there was a subtler, internal parallel as well. For ten years, Gordon had worried about Tate’s comparatively dry stretch, when he was writing next to no poetry. She felt “a little guilty,” she had written to Katherine Anne Porter at one point, “the supposition being that he might be writing if he were married to someone else.” She had also felt creatively somewhat cut off from him: “He really has no interest whatever in the modern novel,” she had written to Josephine Herbst a decade earlier; “I never even think of showing him anything I write unless he hounds me into it.” Tate’s friend (and one of Stafford’s teachers at the Writers’ Conference in 1937) John Peale Bishop had once probed the lurking competitiveness that Gordon alluded to: “I wonder if Caroline’s success hasn’t had something to do with your silence,” he wrote to Tate. “I don’t mean that you begrudge it to her, nor that she doesn’t richly deserve it, and more. But the relation between a man and a woman is very complicated.” On the surface the relation seemed to be simplified that year in Monteagle, when Tate was suddenly engaged again, both in his own poetry and in her prose—and Gordon was eager to defer to his judgment. A withering critic in her own right, as her students and letters attest, she was notably self-effacing and willing to labor long and hard when it came to her husband’s criticisms. But as subsequent years were to show, friction between them was far from resolved.
A similar assessment might have been made of the younger couple, and Stafford, it seems, tried to take her cue from Gordon in coping with the tensions. The mixture of household dominance and literary deference came quite naturally to her, and she too was relieved at Lowell’s return to writing—though she expressed some skepticism at the outset. “He has commenced to write poems again,” she wrote to Taylor in the fall. “But I have long since ceased to be hopeful about these fits and starts.” Yet when he continued, she was not just hopeful but energetically helpful, typing poems to be sent out for submission, charting acceptances (three taken by Partisan Review by early 1943: “We are hoping that this will make that party in Gambier Ohio [Ransom at the Kenyon Review] stir his stumps”), assisting as Cal worked on assembling a manuscript to send off to Eliot. “I have intended all week to write you,” Stafford wrote to Taylor in the spring, “but between cleaning up after the kittens and typing poems for Cal I have had very little time. We got the manuscript of his book off to Eliot yesterday—Allen thinks he may be able to get it published by Faber and Faber.”
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 p
oet 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.”