by Ann Hulbert
But these complaints don’t adequately account for Stafford’s extreme unhappiness and her profound sense of dislocation—a real crisis. Some of the vaguer phrases in her letters to the Taylors over the summer seem to come closer to capturing her unease. The trouble wasn’t really politics or a particular personality. Stafford recoiled from a deeper sense of alienation from the literary company, who struck her as abject souls. “Mrs. Ames,” she wrote, referring to the kindly proprietress of Yaddo, “will, I am certain, protect me from these lost and desolated people.” In the same vein, she wrote a month later: “I could stay here—Mrs. Ames is very good to me—and lie abed all day and perhaps come down for dinner in the evening. But in this rarefied atmosphere with the vibrations of these tragic lives I simply cannot. I suppose I am on the verge of some sort of nervous crackup which the fever is not helping any.”
Just how disturbing she found this “desolated” company is suggested by a diary entry written years later, on December 27, 1949, the day after she had arrived for a second, shorter stay at Yaddo: “As the taxi brought me up the long road yesterday, winding between the lakes through the lines of trees joined to one another by dense fog, I felt the spooks of this place as I had done when I arrived for the first time, seven years before. The company is difficult and strange.… Poor, unsuccessful, lonely, they embarrass me.” Stafford’s response both times recalls Sonie’s ambivalence, entranced by Nathan’s visions of the artistic life yet also daunted by its uncomfortable loneliness.
Not that Stafford was under any illusion that she could avoid loneliness. She recognized that her own sense of exile was at once a source of inspiration and of terror. In cringing at her literary colleagues, she was cringing at herself—and at what was ahead. For Stafford, only twenty-eight, the life of art had already been tumultuous, and here at Yaddo in the throes of still further revisions of her seven-hundred-page manuscript, she looked around her and was apprehensive about what lay in store. Perhaps added to the lost souls unnerving Stafford was the least successful, most lonely and desolate writer of them all, her father, whom she was letting down once again. He had sent her money to come visit him in Oregon that summer, she wrote to the Thompsons, but instead she had gone to Yaddo. It was a double betrayal: ignoring his plea for companionship and pursuing the fate that had so frustrated him.
As if she sensed Stafford’s fear of contagious desolation, Caroline Gordon kept in touch throughout the summer, playing the role of mother, not critic—though she took care to bolster Jean’s literary confidence. (Oddly, Stafford didn’t mention Lowell, who had gone to New York to look for a job, in any of her letters.) Mrs. Ames, Gordon wrote, “is doing something for art when she stands by you,” and she chimed in with a condescending dismissal of McCullers: “her trouble is not with technique but lies too deep for words.” But mostly she conveyed her maternal concern; she had sent Stafford off in ill health, and look what had happened. Gordon freely admitted, in fact emphasized, her intrusiveness, as if she wanted to make sure Stafford took note of her unusual efforts—hoping to reassure Jean that she hadn’t been abandoned. “I wrote [Mrs. Ames] a note this morning, telling her how grateful Allen and I were to her for making you so welcome. A bit meddlesome of me, perhaps.” But the real target of Gordon’s efforts was Stafford’s mother-in-law. “I wrote Mrs. Lowell in desperation the other day, what I tried to make a very tactful note,” she reported to Stafford:
I deplored the fact that the children (I spoke of you and Cal as if you were babes whom I had had under my care all winter) … had had such heavy doctor’s bills. I myself was not very good at managing my own affairs so hesitated to give advice but it had occurred to me that it would be better to have a doctor’s bill to end doctor’s bills.… Allen pondered the letter and said he thought it was tactful, but of course he’s not much of a judge. If she doesn’t offer to pay the bill after the letter, she’s a—rock-ribbed New Englander. I hope I haven’t done wrong to horn in but I have been so worried and felt that something ought to be done.
Gordon was doing her best to make up for the rather different kind of meddlesomeness and lack of tact that had characterized their year together.
FOR THE LOWELLS, the life of art took a dramatic political, public turn in the fall of 1943. Cal had tried to enlist in the army throughout 1942, and in the spring of 1943 he had filled out an army employment questionnaire. (His answers were riddled with bizarre errors—he claimed, for example, that he had a dependent—which Stafford duly corrected before mailing off the form.) But suddenly he decided he wouldn’t serve. The day before he was due to be inducted, September 8, 1943, he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, with a “declaration of personal responsibility” attached. His case was in essence the conservative, anti-Communist one: the United States, bent on destroying Germany and Japan, would leave Europe and China “to the mercy of the USSR, a totalitarian tyranny committed to world revolution and total global domination through propaganda and violence.”
It is impossible to know how this stand had matured in Lowell’s mind, much less what Stafford thought of it. Tate, who had expressed reservations about the destruction of European civilization, was high among those blamed by Lowell’s mother. It’s true that a strange letter from Lowell to his grandmother suggests that Agrarian notions figured somehow in his decision: “You know more about American history than I do and can certainly judge whether our recent actions in this war are justifiable,” he wrote to his grandmother. “I think only a Southerner can realize the horrors of a merciless conquest.” (In his declaration he cited the Civil War as a warning about the perils of a war “carried through to unconditional surrender.”) But a letter from Tate to Stafford in November made clear that he was as taken aback as everyone else. In fact, he took the occasion to give a short lecture about Lowell’s evasion of responsibility, the implicit message being that the creative life is no excuse:
You know, Jean, that I am greatly distressed that I cannot feel as much sympathy for Cal in his plight as I might have felt a year ago. I have already told you about this, and I need say but little more. Early in the summer he was casting about for an escape from his social responsibilities, and I am sure that he would have gone ahead then had he not met the rude interference of Caroline and me. Then, later—after he had been in New York for a month—he told Caroline that she was to blame for your illness, that her cruelty to you at Monteagle had brought on your breakdown. He had no connection to it apparently—as indeed possibly he did not; yet I cannot conceive that Caroline did either. Then his resistance to the draft completed the pattern in my mind, a development towards complete escape from his obligations. Try as I will I cannot see it in any other way.…
You are involved in an enormously complicated situation, and all our sympathy is with you whether you want it that way or not. Cal will never really suffer—unless, of course, he gets into his mother’s clutches again.
Lowell didn’t see it that way at all. He evidently thought of his stand not as an evasion but as a shouldering of responsibility, which he was eager to broadcast. He and Stafford made numerous copies of his statement and distributed them widely. And he later said that it was “the most decisive thing I ever did, just as a writer,” though he emphasized that at the time “it was not intended to have anything to do with that.” Yet in some sense, it clearly did, as his mother realized, blaming it on his “poetic temperament.” He conceived of it as part of his revolt against moribund Lowellian, establishment traditions in the name of higher, creative principles. It was as though he and Stafford that summer each suddenly had a very different intimation of what lay ahead—uncannily prophetic ones in retrospect. While Stafford was panicked by the lonely, marginal life dedicated to art as she looked around her and thought of her father, Lowell was inspired by the opposite perspective. Though he had been reared on a notion of poetry that was explicitly not politically engaged, he had been taught that art took the “whole man.” It was an “aggressive stance,” and after fighting on paper with
words, he had seized a chance to fight his parents and other people with words and deeds.
Sentenced to a year and one day for draft evasion in October 1943 and transported to prison in Danbury, Connecticut, Lowell left Stafford to wage both battles. She had more revisions to do on Boston Adventure, after a break from the manuscript due to illness and the “declaration” drama. She was daunted by the prospect, she wrote to the Taylors in October:
I have not started any writing yet at all. Yesterday Lambert Davis talked to me on the phone and said ominously that they would probably want some more work on the novel. It made me thoroughly sick at heart but I gathered, at least, that the manuscript is definitely accepted and after this vacation from it I suppose I’ll be able to go back to it, heavy-hearted though I will be. They are anxious for Allen to read it but since I have only one copy, they don’t dare let it out of the office.… Allen was terribly sweet and we were again completely devoted to him and to the whole household.
She had funny stories about some of her further revision travails. She had visited Bellevue Hospital to find out about paupers’ burials (Harcourt, Brace complained that Ivan’s burial was too implausible) and had been given a comical runaround. She had to cut, and diminish the melodrama of Hopestill’s ending, and she worked hard. To the Thompsons, she later painted a bleak picture: “It was a rather bad winter for brooding—there is probably nothing more desolate than living in a New York apartment alone.… I spent the better part of six months huddled in front of the fireplace working on revisions of the book and almost never leaving the house.”
In fact, she did leave the house (she had rented an apartment on Stuyvesant Square) and had a break from her brooding. Two of her closest friends that fall and winter were Gertrude Buckman, who had separated from Delmore Schwartz earlier that year, and especially Cecile Starr. In getting to know Starr, who hailed from a cultivated Nashville family, Stafford took evident pleasure in renewing her southern connections. Starr’s uncles, Milton and Alfred, had been members of the Fugitives, and her close friend Patrick Quinn had been a friend of the Lowells at LSU. At the same time, it was a relief to her that Cecile Starr was not part of the New York literary scene. Their relationship was uncluttered, as few of Stafford’s were, a respite from the competitive cultural scene. She had a kind and solid friend in Starr, and counted on her for support, psychological and practical.
For being back in the New York literary whirl was not the exhilarating experience it had been the first time around, in 1941–42, during the Lowells’ Sheed and Ward year. This time Stafford ventured out alone, without Cal, to face the intimidating Partisan Review crowd—and then found she had to defend him in absentia. It was the kind of fight she felt completely inadequate to wage. In a long letter to the Taylors in November, she graphically dramatized her predicament. She had just been to Danbury to visit Lowell and waxed uncharacteristically romantic: “He is the most attractive and lovable man I know.… And I cannot tell you how glad I am that I am married to him and how sick down to my bones it makes me that he isn’t in this room and won’t be for ages.” As in her earlier letters to Hightower, she seemed better able to love at a distance, and on paper. But the mood was quickly shattered:
I have had such a revolting experience. After I got back from Danbury, I went to a cocktail party at the Rahvs. I got there very late—never should have gone, of course; I was wretched and should have gone home with my wretchedness and spent the evening looking at the snapshots of Cal—and not only was everyone quite drunk, but Philip Rahv had told everyone about me and Cal. (I should say here, by the way, that the greatest snobs in the world are bright New York literary Jews and the name Lowell works like love-philtre.) So that total strangers came up and asked me how Cal was. A certain Mr. Sidney Hook said to me, “Your husband is a heretic. He cannot be a conscientious objector and a Catholic for he is going against the dictates of the Pope.” This happens to be untrue and it is an un-nice thing to be told by a logical positivist that your husband is a heretic. We had a little set- to over Saint Augustine (I was on steady enough ground here because I have recently been reading the confessions and reading them hard.) and had a generally distressing conversation. Of course he had everything at his fingertips and I daresay he is a distinguished man—if you go in for that kind of distinction. At any rate, when the crowd thinned out, a few of us went to dinner and then to a PR editor’s house to go on drinking. Mrs. Sidney Hook … commenced to bait me and when I said “I can’t discuss the Spanish war with you because I don’t know enough about it. I know only the Encyclicals. But I am very sure there is something to be said for Franco,” she screamed across the room, “Sidney, there is no point in talking to this girl. She thinks there is something to be said for Franco.” And suddenly, as if there were large onions before my face, tears began to stream down my cheeks. They were automatic tears and very large ones and I couldn’t stop them. Finally the woman gave me her handkerchief and presently they left.
In the middle of the distressing scene—a snapshot of the legendary, unending PR-style party—Stafford was still able to watch it and then recreate it, deftly inserting irony alongside the agony. Her comment about Franco seems to have emerged unbidden; she was perhaps parroting a throwaway line of Lowell’s. Once again the literary world had undone her, but this time she saw more clearly than she had at Yaddo the degree of her ambivalence. She went on to give the Taylors her postmortem of the event, sizing up her situation with acuity:
This morning when I woke up I felt like something out of its shell. Crying in front of people! And I analyzed it out and realized that what had happened was that I was lonely and isolated and that there had never been such a stupid move on my part as to go amongst such cruel people immediately after seeing Cal. For I had been told by ¾ of the men there that Cal was a fool or was hysterical, etc. etc. And suddenly everything broke like a glass and there I was, in tears.… I wish I could talk to you long and completely about literary people in New York. They are such cut-throats, such ambitious and bourgeois frights and yet I, in my stupid lack of integrity, continue to see them.
And it wasn’t just Partisan Review people whom Stafford had to battle on Lowell’s behalf. Perhaps even worse, she had to face her mother-in-law. In a couple of remarkable letters, Charlotte Lowell—“Charlotte Hideous” to Stafford—coldly lectured her daughter-in-law about the inadvisability of drawing on Lowell’s trust fund while he was in prison (as Cal had wanted) and insinuating none too subtly that Stafford was to blame for letting “Bobby” get into this fix. “He will be completely penniless when he is released if you care to impose upon his generosity,” she warned. “I hope, Jean, for your own sake as well as for Bobby’s, that you will see in the present situation an opportunity for courage, selfdevelopment, and integrity of purpose.”
In finishing Boston Adventure, which she was on her way to doing by the turn of the year, Stafford had shown all three—though Mrs. Lowell would hardly have seen it that way, not least because the product of Stafford’s perseverance was a spirited satire of Mrs. Lowell’s own precincts. But in February of 1944 as Lowell’s sentence neared its end (he was granted parole in March), Stafford’s courage faltered and her sense of Lowell’s own self-development and integrity was shaken. According to a retrospective account of the year, she had “great trouble with the church … could not believe and suffered great tortures.” Whatever new wave of doubts she may have had, they were augmented by the increasing religious zeal Lowell displayed in prison. She talked with a priest in New York who also knew Lowell, who confirmed her impression that Cal had become “more Catholic than the church,” but as she confided to Peter Taylor, that was small comfort. Ahead of her loomed life with a man whose fervor dwarfed even his previous religious dedication. Her letter to Taylor spelled out the specifics, and it tends to confirm her later declaration that the term in jail was not so hard for Cal, for he was “crazy” (she was not being merely figurative). Certainly his plans were outlandish:
It i
s not right for me to burden you with this just before you go overseas, but you are probably Cal’s closest friend. I see I’ve given you no facts. Roughly this is it: after the war, what Cal wants to do (he cries, “This is to be my life and I will not be hindered”) is to be a sort of soap-box preacher with an organization called the Catholic Evidence Guilds which operate in city parks, etc, preach and answer the posers of hecklers. I cannot write this down without seeing you smile.… And when I inquire of him how we will live, he points to the Gospels and says that we must not worry about that, that God will take care of us, that one cannot be a wage-slave but must have leisure in which to serve the church.…
I am frightened, feel that it will be three years before Cal has recovered from the pleasurable monasticism of the penitentiary.
Once again, it was an eerily prophetic pronouncement. Not that Lowell took to the soapbox, trusting to God’s support. On the contrary, Lowell and Stafford turned again to writing, and Stafford spent a great deal of time and energy worrying about how and where they would live. But it was less than three years before it was clear that neither of them could recover from the unhappy monasticism of their marriage. If one can credit unprovable claims and rumors, the sexual side of their relationship had long since deteriorated (the Tates gossiped about it at Monteagle, and Stafford herself later declared that sexual relations between them had ended when Cal became a Catholic). They had cultivated their separate retreats, which also served as punishments, of themselves and of each other. Lowell had not only the “monasticism of the penitentiary” but his Catholic observances; Stafford her retreat at Yaddo, her domestic preoccupations, and her drinking. Yet over the next three years, despite distractions and unhappiness, they also adhered to their other devotion, writing, and they produced work that arguably ranked among the most important of their careers. Being cloistered together was far from simply destructive.