by Ann Hulbert
There was an influx of poets this summer in the state of Maine and ours was only one of the many houses where they clustered: farther down the coast and inland all the way to Campobello, singly, in couples, trios, tribes, they were circulating among rich patronesses in ancestral summer shacks of twenty rooms, critics on vacation from universities who roughed it with Coleman lamps and out-houses but sumptuously dined on lobster and blueberry gems, and a couple of novelists who, although they wrote like dogs (according to the poets) had made packets, which, because they were decently (and properly) humble, they were complimented to share with the rarer breed.
The young Cora, suffering from headaches and unhappiness, was distinctly on the outskirts, estranged from her poet husband, Theron Maybank, and skeptical of “Theron the poet’s poet friends. He was beside me and they were in all the rooms around me and in the barn, but I was dead to their world, and they, thereby, were dead to mine.” She was like a ghost hostess, actively arranging the domestic details of the influx but passively aloof from the artistic, erotic intrigue. Not that she was unaware of it. Cora saw, as through a hazy scrim (of drink, she acknowledged, and depression), all the flirting and flattering going on—especially between her husband and Minnie Rosoff, the Gertrude Buckman character whose visit was the most fateful of the entire influx. But out of a perverse instinct for escape and for self-mortification (precisely the opposite of the poets’ self-preening inclinations) she could only abet the adulterous romance: “I helped in every way to make the match which was already a fait accompli and which, when I discovered that it was, was to hurtle me off the brink on which I had hovered so long into a chasm.”
The older Cora was very much present, recounting and commenting on events, in an outspokenly colloquial and rather curmudgeonly style that established the distance she had traveled since that summer. Where the young Cora was blind and self-destructive, the older Cora had a therapeutic clarity. She was not venting bitterness; her tone was too entertainingly farcical for that. She was simply setting the record straight with satiric zeal. “(Mine! Remember, Cora Savage, if you forget all else, that this is your house),” she scolded her past self in one of the conversational parenthetical asides that litter the story. “(God almighty! Never was a man so set on knocking the stuffing out of his bride!),” she exclaimed at another point. The effect, along with her device of casting the poets (and herself) as children, was to knock all of them off their pedestals, to offer an irreverent look into the legend. The “baby bards,” as she described them, were infantile in their self-absorption—but not innocent, by any means. This was the point at which their flailing ambitions were becoming more focused. “(Though they were no longer enfants terribles, the blood of despots was in their veins and they would very soon usurp their elders’ thrones and their dominions),” the older Cora reported, looking back.
Young Cora was oppressed by the poets’ self-importance, but docilely played her role as helpmeet, typing endless revisions of Theron’s poems and listening to endless recitations of poetry. In the story the older Cora wasn’t docile at all and was perfectly prepared to risk philistinism in declaring her position. “I was in this throng of litterateurs (three poets in one medium-sized room constitutes a multitude), enjoying nothing.” The once-loyal typist was none too respectful: “(I admit they were brilliant poets, if you happen to be interested in that sort of thing), but if they changed an ‘a’ to a ‘the’ the whole sonnet had to be typed over again. And I grant that such a change can make all the difference in the world (if, that is, you happen to be a poet or a lover of poetry), but why couldn’t the alteration be made by hand?” The once-silent auditor, trapped into “listening to the poets listen to themselves and not to one another,” confessed that “she took a drink as the poetry was read, but drink didn’t help.”
But this was not a simple feminist complaint against the elitist, over-bearing bards. One could doubtless be written, as Delmore Schwartz suggested in a poem he wrote just before his marriage fell apart:
All poets’ wives have rotten lives,
Their husbands look at them like knives …
Exactitude their livelihood
And rhyme their only gratitude,
Knife-throwers all, in vaudeville,
They use their wives to prove their will—
Marjorie Perloff has played out the suggestion in her essay “Poètes Maudits of the Genteel Tradition,” in which she points out the pattern of “the prodigal poet, the unselfish and forgiving wife or mistress” that seemed to characterize the private lives of these same poets (and was then presented for public consumption in their poetry). In a sense Stafford’s story could be read as the record of the emergence of that pattern: aside from the Tates’ troubles and the Schwartzes’ divorce, the Lowells’ Maine turmoils were the first of the dramatic marital difficulties that were to become a theme of Lowell’s and Berryman’s lives in particular. Stafford was more than ready to point the finger at the poet-husband: she drew on Theron’s outrageous behavior for much of the colorful, witty drama and repartee of her story.
But at the same time, almost as if offering her autobiographical story as a commentary on the autobiographical poetry that the poets—especially Lowell—had been writing out of their personal troubles throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Stafford undercut any effort at self-vindication or inflation of the episode. She, unlike the poets, was not about to project her private troubles as historic turmoil, or to write herself a tragically heroic role. The story was finally less about the poets’ injustices to her than about her injustices to herself. There was no clear-cut victim and victimizer. It was her own psychological distress, not the poets’ pretensions, that afflicted her most: “I knew—although I did not want to know—that I could not honestly attribute [the headaches] to too many iambs and too many dithyrambic self-congratulations by the baby bards.” It was her own passive will at work, bidden by an inchoate desire for escape, that undid the marriage as much as Theron’s peremptory moves. Not that Stafford substituted a kind of ennobling self-castigation for self-justification. Her strategy was satiric deflation throughout. Her failure to plead her case, to have a straightforward revenge, infuriated at least one of her friends, Nancy Flagg Gibney, who felt she had missed a historic opportunity:
But great as you are, Madam, I have for once a bone to pick. This story must be read as autobiography, not fiction, and I wish you had written it as such. Cora Savage like hell, heavenly though her name is. Robert Lowell is up against precisely Jean Stafford, no little hapless schoolteacher in over her head, inheriting goading cash from antipodal aunts, but a blazing genius with better looks and taste and sense than he has, and the achieved success that he only longs for. Of course he had to beat the stuffing out of you, and of course he couldn’t do so. Not quite. You were a woman so liberated that you could afford to be a slave. No matter how many fish you fried, how many dishes you washed, how hard you tried to expiate your sins of superiority, he knew it was a gag, and so did you. You say—“the man I wanted to flee because, in failing to commit myself entirely to him, I knew he would not commit himself to me.” But surely you know that he was entirely committed to you, and to your destruction.… You had the war between the sexes fought out on the highest possible plane Miss hydrogen-bomb-bearing Savage, and I wish you had reported it straight.
But precisely what seems to have liberated Stafford years after the Maine summer to rework this section of her stalled novel for publication was the sense that she no longer needed to see it as a war. Time had allowed a cooled perspective. She was free to let irony replace the agony of betrayal. In this case, the domestication was devastating, as she cast the episode comically as a story about children and a bygone time, not about important poets whose lives had acquired the status of cultural symbols.
The truth, of course, was not so comical. And the power of “An Influx of Poets” is that, for all its witty shapeliness, it does capture some of the shapeless confusion, the real desperation of that summer.
The trouble was clear to the earliest visitors, John Berryman and his wife, Eileen Simpson, who glimpsed the marital tensions and Stafford’s distress beneath the mostly convivial, intensely literary stay. Jean’s “somber mood was growing more obvious every day,” Simpson remembered in her portrait in Poets in Their Youth, which captured Stafford slipping from ordinary depression into more serious disequilibrium. Caustic as always, and a solicitous host, she was nonetheless drinking more and more and sleeping less and less. Lowell certainly seemed dead to her unhappy world, endlessly verse swapping and talking with Berryman, and Stafford became ever more distant. She drank against his wishes, from bottles hidden around the house, and she was awake at night, her insomnia a solitary vigil (though one night she told her Lucy story to a sleepless Berryman, the third poet to urge her to put it into prose). A letter in June from Stafford to her sister Mary Lee, to whom she often confided her unhappiness at this stage of her life, conveyed her mixed mood, which easily shifted to real bleakness:
Everything is going much better in one way—so that day to day existence is easier—much worse in another; it will be harder to make the break. In my absence [in Pennsylvania and New York] Cal realized the horror of solitude. Now I do not know what to do. In some ways the problem is not terribly complex. I am suffering from years and years of accumulated fatigue not only from working too hard but from knowing too many people. Being a writer and being married to a writer is a back breaking job and my back is now broken.
Stafford cast her predicament in literary terms. The allure, and burden, of being married to a promising, difficult writer—and being one herself—had been clear to Stafford from the start. And the tension between dreaming of the communal literary life and dreading the arrival of litterateurs was a familiar one, dating back to her feverish days in Louisiana. Now the allures and dreams seemed to have faded almost completely. It was clear that Stafford was looking for a way out. She announced her verdict in a flip tone, but behind it lurked serious intentions: “I’ve now decided,” she told Mary Lee, “that writers shouldn’t be married and certainly women writers shouldn’t be unless they are married to rich responsible husbands who fill their houses with servants.” She sounded almost like the older, wiser Cora Savage speaking, who had put those poets behind her.
By August neither Lowell nor Stafford was sounding remotely flip, and an end was in sight. Gertrude Buckman had arrived in a plane and captivated Lowell while Stafford watched, her passivity a spur to their affair. Lowell wrote to Taylor, leaving out the specifics but emphatic about the impossibility of life with Stafford:
I don’t care for confessions, but I suppose I must tell you that everything is chaos between us. Jean is driving like a cyclone and we both have had about all we can stand and more. Right now I think I’ll go to New York sometime in September.… Jean has a lot of plans, none of them too good, including going to Hollywood. Anyway, we have got to leave each other alone and the future to time.
Stafford, writing to Cecile Starr, sounded much less composed and wasn’t yet ready to announce the end. In fact, she claimed she felt some calm might be at hand:
There has been such a stream of visitors ever since Memorial Day that I was half out of my mind and so was Cal. I was half out of my mind with all sorts of anxieties and was drinking too much—as I do, you know—and had got no work done at all since April and in general I thought I was at the end of everything in my life. Now that everyone has gone and no one else is coming and the leaves are beginning to turn … I feel as if I were recovering from a long and feverish sickness, one that has covered a great many years, and I have some kind of hope that I will at last be able to pull myself together.… Our plans are as vague as they have always been.
When she wrote a little later to Peter Taylor, the hope had faded, the recovery seemed out of sight again. Stafford too was silent about specifics—there was no mention of Buckman—and, far from blaming Lowell, she shouldered responsibility for the disaster, though it was clearly more complicated than that. Neither of them stable at the best of times, both had drastically lost their balance. That Stafford still had the poise to bear the guilt for the failure was a sign of hard-won maturity, but at the same time a last act of self-punishment:
I have wanted to write to you ever since Cal told me he had written but there have been so many people here and besides I have been rather too miserable to be coherent. It is just barely possible that if I can ever pull myself together something will work out for us but I love Cal too much now to allow him any longer to be subjected to what seems to amount almost to insanity. I am very much afraid of the future, but I will pull through somehow. What I most need now is to go far away somewhere to a place where I know no one and cannot therefore be influenced by the wrong people.
I am almost altogether to blame for my life being the ruin it is.
She was right, her sickness wasn’t over, and its course continued “like a cyclone,” sweeping away a house and a husband. Stafford was left to rebuild a life, which inevitably was a literary life, despite her vows to avoid the creative company. But it was a strikingly different literary life, a world away from the poets and critics among whom she had come of age.
PART IV
Manhattan and Other Islands
1946–1979
CHAPTER 10
Patterns
IN SEPTEMBER 1946, Stafford and Lowell left Maine by train, and as she told it in “An Influx of Poets,” the trip from Damariscotta Mills was the culmination of their estrangement. It was a bleakly symmetrical ending to a marriage that had begun less than smoothly with a train ride: they had spent their brief honeymoon en route to Cleveland in 1940, and when they had separated in the station (Lowell on his way to Kenyon, Stafford to her sister’s ranch), Stafford had been full of doubts about the vows she had just taken. Now the lonely fall of 1946 continued to echo past scenes. In New York, Stafford soon went to the New Weston Hotel, and the next several months were full of “scary days.” That’s what Stafford had called her nightmarish stay in New York after fleeing from Iowa in 1938; this time she was even more disoriented. Then she had been wondering when and how her literary career would begin, and she had been entangled with two men, Hightower and Lowell. Now she was wondering if that career had peaked, and she was distraught over her husband’s betrayal. And this time the frightening days lasted much longer than they had eight years earlier. As she described it later, the fall in New York was an abyss of rage and humiliation, and above all of loneliness. She drank wildly—suicidally, she said in retrospect—and ate and slept very little. Finally she turned to doctors for help, recalling yet another New York scene from her past. In 1937 she had gotten off the boat from Heidelberg alone and feverish and had spent most of her time in the city as a patient in Brooklyn Hospital, writing despairing letters to Hightower. This time, in late November, in more psychological than physical trouble, she signed herself into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic at New York Hospital.
Amid what looked like a notably unsteady life, there were uncanny patterns and correspondences. In a letter to Peter Taylor the month she entered the hospital, Stafford expressed her fear of the inauspicious shapes her life seemed to take. “There was something wrong in me to marry [Cal],” she wrote, “for he was so much like my father whom first I worshipped and by whom I later felt betrayed.” Recognizing this central echo in her life, she shuddered at all the other reverberations:
This is not psychiatric cant even though the psychiatrists have told me that this is just what I did, married my father, just as the same perverseness made Cal marry his mother.… I disobeyed him as I disobeyed my father; he was cold as my father had always been and he was economically and domestically irresponsible as my father had always been. And he read his poems aloud to me as my father had read his stories for the pulp magazines. And his manners were courtly or they were uncouth and he was slovenly, as my father was. My father didn’t have his wit nor his brilliance. They were both violent men in every way. This pattern
terrifies me. All the patterns of my life terrify me and this is why, in the constant torment of my fear, I have had to seek someone who really can be my father and can protect me.
For the next year and more, psychiatrists were Stafford’s source of support (as doctors of one sort or another were to be for the rest of her life). She was not, however, a simple and tractable patient. Her attitude toward psychiatry, as her phrase “psychiatric cant” suggested, was at base skeptical, a view she shared with many of her friends, certainly with Lowell, who at this stage was less than sympathetic, as Stafford indicated in “An Influx of Poets”: “He was, despite his eccentricities and his rebellion, an intransigently conventional man,” she wrote of her character Theron; “thus his diehard repudiation of psychiatry as poppycock, a Viennese chicanery devised to bilk idle women and hypochondriacal men.”
It was Robert Giroux and Cecile Starr, two of Stafford’s most loyal friends during the frightening autumn, who urged her to try psychotherapy, less out of faith in that course than out of desperation. Starr had welcomed Stafford to her apartment when she arrived in New York, and had tried in vain to help her stop drinking and begin sleeping again: “If it had not been for Cecile,” Stafford wrote to Lowell later, “I would have killed myself.” (At one point they retreated to Connecticut for some peace and distance from the hard-drinking literary crowd, whose company only added to Stafford’s anxieties, Starr could see.) More drastic measures were clearly called for, and before long Stafford’s unhappiness overcame her resistance. She was ready to find help wherever she could, even though enlisting doctors seemed to her an admission of defeat, as she wrote in the early fall to her sister Mary Lee. It was a letter of confession, but also of warning; she wanted no comfort or visits from close relatives: