by Ann Hulbert
CHAPTER 8
Connecticut
WHEN LOWELL was released from prison in March of 1944, Stafford undertook what was to become an increasingly preoccupying project over the next couple of years: house hunting. She searched Connecticut for a place to rent, well aware that she and Lowell were about to settle in greater solitude than they had yet known in their married life. This time there were no patrons, either critical or Catholic. They would be living by themselves, and they would be a train ride away from the literary bustle of New York. She found a house with a picturesque address—Harbor View, Ocean Avenue, Black Rock—and the right pedigree. It was owned by a Roman Catholic priest. The reality, however, was far from bucolic. Relishing the unsavory details, Stafford sketched a comic portrait for Cecile Starr:
I myself have nothing to report although I could on request write volumes on the odor of low tide in this unpleasant fen known grandiosely as a “harbor.” At present the tide goes out some time after midnight and when the process is complete, our rooms are instantaneously invaded by a stench that wakens us like gunshot. It lingers in our hair and clothing and coats the caramels and gets into the apples. It does not more closely resemble a stockyard than a small boy who traps skunks, nor is it more like a condemned privy than an ice-chest in need of attention. It is an essentially organic odor, and probably the most powerful I have ever experienced.
What she really longed for was a beautiful house to buy, and her daydreams were fed by Harcourt, Brace’s efforts on behalf of her book. Her publishers had decided to promote Boston Adventure vigorously, evidently gauging that it had a potentially wide readership. Stafford had every reason to think that she might actually make some money on her first novel. It was not a prospect familiar to her circle of poets and critics (or, for that matter, novelists: neither of the Tates had earned much from their fictional labors). Stafford was more than a little distracted by high hopes during the spring and summer, and somewhat sheepish about her fantasies. Certainly her optimism and domesticity were out of tune with the times, as a visit from her brother, who was about to be shipped off to France to serve in the airborne field artillery, must have reminded her. But rather than dwell on worries about his future, she marveled above all at the ease and pleasure of their time together after such a long separation: they hadn’t been in touch since their short reunion in Oregon six years earlier, after her return from Europe. She was aware of the fragility of her contented visions, but couldn’t banish them: “Our dreams are probably the most dangerous and very likely will all collapse, for we have based them on my book,” she wrote to Eleanor Taylor in June, describing the advance publicity and the Hollywood interest that Boston Adventure was attracting. “You will understand the violent spasm this has flung us into. We so passionately want a house that we have become very unattractively materialistic.”
The “we” seems not to have been Stafford’s imperial projection of her own desires onto Lowell. Her worst fears about his unworldly aspirations, which she had confessed in her letter to Peter Taylor in February, had not been fulfilled. Despite his prison rhetoric, Lowell gave little indication of yearning for the soapbox and the ascetic religious life (though both he and Stafford went on a satisfyingly rugged Trappist retreat in June). On the contrary, once he had completed his parole stint cleaning the nurses’ quarters of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport, Connecticut, he turned to poetry with zeal after months of not writing. And, completely contrary to Stafford’s expectations, he seemed ready for a stretch of pleasurable domesticity. He too was eager to dream of countrified comfort—and was greatly disappointed when he saw the view that went with the scenic Black Rock address. He had looked forward to a wide vista of ocean.
But Lowell’s house reveries took second place to his writing. Stafford, by contrast, admitted that her work was completely derailed. It was a well-earned lapse in concentration. She had a winter of intensive revision to recover from and laurels to rest on: in addition to her forthcoming novel, two stories had been published by the spring (“The Darkening Moon” and “The Lippia Lawn”) and another was scheduled to appear in the fall (“A Reunion”). Still, the fallow stretch was hard. “Cal … is working with the same intensity that he did in that great period of fertility in Monteagle,” Stafford proudly announced to Peter Taylor in July. To Eleanor Taylor, she went on to confess that his productivity had its corrosive effect on her: “Cal has started writing poetry again and his intensity and industry make me feel completely worthless. I have done nothing at all this summer. However, I rarely do work in the summer but that’s no excuse.” Her imagination, she emphasized again, was devoted to house fantasies so vivid that she couldn’t resist describing her dream to Eleanor: “I imagine it as being on one of the tongues of land that project into Long Island Sound and fancy a lawn going directly down to the water. I wish it would be a hundred years old with its original floors and many fireplaces and with the tallest possible trees. This is the shocking way I spend my time!”
The domestic vision generally seemed to take the Tates as a model. That is, Stafford had in mind artistic fraternizing within her dream house, though for the time being she and Lowell were enjoying the experience of married life, just the two of them, far more than she could have anticipated: “Despite the ugliness and the heat we continue to enjoy this solitude. It may be a sign of age in us but whatever it is I’m glad we have become so happily independent. And now, after this summer of finding so much pleasure in one another’s society, New York is unthinkable. A house is mandatory.” But she didn’t intend the house to be a haven of solitude. A letter to Eleanor Taylor sheds some light on a deep-seated paradox in Stafford’s sense of her relation to a larger literary world. Surrounded by writers, she felt her fever rise, but without them she felt abandoned, uncreative. “Actually I think few things are more stifling to creative energy than loneliness,” she wrote to Taylor. “I wish we were established somewhere in a roomy house and you could come live with us and do nothing but write.” The sense of isolation that was a main wellspring of her imagination was at the same time, she knew, a source of paralysis. A house of her own seemed to beckon as one place where the tension might be eased—somewhere she could retreat and yet also feel rooted, enjoy both independence and camaraderie; somewhere she could perhaps find fulfillment as both a writer and a woman.
THE THREE STORIES that Stafford published that year—“The Darkening Moon” in January in Harper’s Bazaar, “The Lippia Lawn” in the spring issue of the Kenyon Review, and “A Reunion” in Partisan Review in the fall—all treated the central theme of exile. In fact, the image that lurked behind all of them was banishment from the garden, a religiously evocative drama that Stafford gave three very different secular treatments. Although the stories were doubtless all begun before Boston Adventure was finished (it is hard to fix just when and in what order they were written), none gave any sign that Stafford had that ambitious novel in her. Each tends to rely on rather heavy-handed manipulation of symbolism, but together they offer an overview of this stage of Stafford’s stylistic development and an introduction to the origins of the preoccupying theme of homelessness.
It is striking that all three stories focused, directly or indirectly, on the figure of the father, who was virtually to disappear from Stafford’s fiction after Hermann Marburg’s comparatively brief appearance in Boston Adventure. “A Reunion,” though published last, was the least mature of the stories, harking back to her early static, histrionic efforts; it was a kind of companion to “And Lots of Solid Color.” This time it was the father figure whom Stafford exposed in his heartless myopia. The plot was not taken from life, though the portrait of the protagonist’s self-pitying father in part was. The first-person narrator of this story, whose mother had died at her birth, returned to visit her father after a seven-year absence, wondering if their lifelong estrangement would have altered at all. But in his eyes, and in her own, she remained the guilty daughter, an unwitting murderer. Though he welcomed her into his gard
en, it was a shrine to the dead mother, and she was an intruder—likened, in a less-than-subtle closing image, to a beetle her father injured and then left to die.
The lush garden of “A Reunion” recalled the Covina, California, paradise, which was explicitly invoked in “The Lippia Lawn” (included, as was “The Darkening Moon,” in Stafford’s Collected Stories). In the 1970s, in a brief sketch of her California origins, Stafford claimed that she had only recently come upon the name for the kind of lawn that had surrounded her Covina house, though she had spent years perusing horti-culture books. As she must have known, her own fiction gave the lie to that claim. “The Lippia Lawn” took as its starting point and symbol the search for—and discovery of—the elusive name of the plant, lippia, of her childhood. In fact, Stafford’s subsequent claim of forgetfulness is an illustration of the theme of the story: nostalgia for a purportedly Edenic past is dangerous. It is better not to remember the lost paradise.
In place of the overwrought meditation of “A Reunion,” Stafford was now in control of the intricate yet concrete introspective style she elaborated in Boston Adventure. The first-person narrator of “The Lippia Lawn” summoned up memories of her past, jogged into the rumination by an arbutus plant she came upon during a walk with an old man on the Cumberland Plateau (a setting inspired by Stafford’s Monteagle stay). She realized that the trailing arbutus reminded her of the lippia lawn of her youth, a past that she had evidently done her best to bury. In a scene that suddenly acquired symbolic intensity, she found herself wrestling with the tenacious plant, aiming to retrieve a cutting for the old man (another unsympathetic father figure, as the story proceeded to reveal). “It was as though the root was instinct with will. There was something so monstrous in its determination to remain where it grew that sweat, not from exertion but from alarm, streamed from my face.… Something prevented me from cutting it,… a sort of inexplicable revulsion at the thought that the knife might not cleave through.” The plant had become a sinister symbol of a past that couldn’t be domesticated. While her companion ranted nostalgically about the once lush landscape—“It’s a crime, I tell you! When I was a boy this place was Eden!”—she was thoroughly unsettled by memories of the past. His constant refrain of rootedness was like “a phrase of music once admired and now detested.” To recall her own Eden vividly would be to confront her exile; her fall from innocence was best left unexamined.
In “The Darkening Moon,” Stafford turned to a dramatically different terrain and style, harbingers of the texture of The Mountain Lion and of Stafford’s subsequent Colorado stories. This was the first of her western stories, featuring a twelve-year-old character named Ella and told by an omniscient narrator who favored exact, objective description over subjective meditation, a colloquial over a refined manner. The story was about the dawning of a divided consciousness, the moment of maturity when Ella suddenly recognized the end of an unreflective unity between herself and the external world, her mind and her body. Nature abruptly turned ominous and unwelcoming: she was cast out.
This time the garden was not a tended enclave but the looming, rugged country of Colorado. Ella began the story courageous and comfortable in that world, thanks to her deceased father’s lesson years before on a night fishing trip, when he left her alone by the riverbank with these reassuring words: “There ain’t nothing to harm you, sister. The animals is all there is and they won’t be looking you up.” But this night, baby-sitting for a neighbor, Ella let her imagination take over from her senses, and she was profoundly disoriented. Unnerved by the mystifying eclipse of the moon, Ella was revisited by a darker version of her childhood fishing trip. She had fallen into the river up to her waist, and the fish had “swarmed slimily” all over her. At her father’s instruction, she had picked up the “fat slithering blobs in her bare hands,” and to her terror, the fish blood had been smeared on her. “The horror of the reptilian odor” came back to her now, and Ella cried out for her father, but there was no comfort. The imagery of the story was unmistakably sexual: Ella’s own body was about to become unfamiliar; the moon’s rhythms and new fears and desires were about to hold sway. The old Edenic confidence had become part of the irretrievable past.
Despite the common theme, the stories were strikingly different in formal execution. It was as though Stafford had decided to practice a variety of techniques and tones as she continued to revise Boston Adventure, where her very different task was to unify the parts of that ambitious whole. And she was sampling different literary outlets. She had been welcomed in the quarterlies of both the New Critical and the New York camps, and somewhat to her chagrin, she wrote Hightower, she had dipped down to Harper’s Bazaar, which clearly didn’t rate with her literary circle (though it paid well). She was drawing on material from the relatively distant past—her family, not her current life. It was only when her novel was finally in her editors’ hands that she turned to the present, or near present, for inspiration for the rest of the short fiction she wrote during their year and a half in Connecticut. But before she was ready to turn to those quite different stories, she faced a tumultuous autumn, beginning with the appearance of Boston Adventure in September of 1944.
“A REUNION” appeared in the same fall 1944 issue of Partisan Review as a review of Boston Adventure by Andrews Wanning, dramatizing the distance Stafford had come: the author of comparatively slight exercises in sensibility had produced a Proustian epic. Most of the reviewers, like Wanning, had high praise for the unconventional ambition of the novel, though several confessed to being mystified by the peculiarly passive heroine. Just what Sonie’s fate might be, once she had dreamed her way out of her un-Edenic childhood to the pinnacle of New England civilization, only to be drastically disenchanted, was far from clear.
Stafford’s own fate looked very promising, though she was genuinely modest about her artistic accomplishment. Her novel did very well very quickly: forty thousand copies were sold within a few months of publication, and as a Book League selection, Boston Adventure went on to sell almost two hundred thousand more copies. A condensed armed services edition of more than 125,000 also appeared. But Stafford played down the success. As she—like her mentors and friends—hastily emphasized, commercial success was hardly a measure of merit. Stafford had evidently been worried all along that Harcourt, Brace might be taking a lowbrow approach, and had consulted Philip Rahv about the popular title her publishers had proposed. He suggested some tonier possibilities, acknowledging the delicate line she was treading: “Your book struck me as the best first novel by an American writer that I have read in quite a few years. I am sure it will be a great success. Congratulations!” he wrote to her, endorsing bestsellerdom. But he also advised a more refined presentation: “I’ve thought about that title rather intensively, and all I can manage are the following: 1) A Boston Venture (takes the sting out of “adventure,” I mean the sting of romantic and popular appeal). 2) The Siege of Boston 3) Late Pilgrimage—or Belated Pilgrimage. I like the first title best.”
Stafford was also eager to subordinate her noisy debut to Lowell’s virtually simultaneous, more elite publication with the Cummington Press. “Cal’s book [Land of Unlikeness] … came out just three days before mine and I cannot tell you how relieved I was to have him beat me into print. His is a ‘fine’ edition, very beautiful and so expensive that he’s sure no one will ever buy it,” she wrote to the Thompsons. There were clearly some competitive tensions as their two careers were launched, but Stafford seemed more than happy to defuse them with modesty. To Hightower, she was excited but self-effacing: “The success of this book is both ludicrous and disgusting. It would never, never have happened at any other time in the history of publishing, but books, all books, are selling like mad.” (Perhaps a little envious, Caroline Gordon somewhat tactlessly emphasized the hype involved: “It looks as if it would certainly sell. I believe they are spending enough money on it to make it sell,” she wrote in the early fall.)
Just in case anyone thought she mig
ht be corrupted by popular success, Stafford outlined her plans for a highbrow sequel. As she described it to Hightower, it was going to be a literary leap beyond Boston Adventure, and the subject was not exactly best-seller material:
I hope it’s going to be worlds better. It will, if I can do it right, be at any rate a good deal more profound.… I want you not to jump to conclusions when I tell you the scene is laid in Heidelberg. It is not that foul old thing I did for Archie Ogden. It is Heidelberg physically. And that’s about as far as it goes. It is to be another satire, this time on expatriate Americans. But the body of it is to be a religious conversion and my principal character is a Benedictine monk named Dom Paternus.
Sonie’s fate wasn’t going to have the sting of popular or romantic appeal. Her future was apparently to be a religious one; Stafford planned for her to discover the spiritual significance of her “red room.”
If commercial success was somewhat suspect among their circle (Lowell hastened to write Tate that “we are neither respectable nor rich”), it was an even more delicate issue for Stafford among her family, in particular her father. She might have been able to skirt the subject; she had put many miles between herself and him, and seen to it that they were not in close touch. But that fall there was a family crisis. In early October, as she was in the midst of organizing yet another move (to Westport, to another rented house, which they called The Barn—this one closer to her dreams), Stafford received the stunning news that her brother, Dick, had been killed in France in an ambulance accident. Though she and Dick had not been close for years, their two brief and happy reunions, one so recent, had obviously stirred up the past. For her it was a relationship dominated by imaginative nostalgia—he was the idol and elusive ally of her youth—which perhaps helps explain the momentous blow his death was for her: dead, he became an immutable, even more imposing presence.