The Interior Castle Page 8

But rather than succumb to self-pity, she portrayed herself as an ambitiously creative soul. In her letters to Hightower, who had remained in Paris with Berueffy, she was full of plans for her literary life. She enjoyed cultivating the image of the alienated American artist; at the same time, she yearned for the disciplining company of fellow creative spirits in a civilized setting—that is, in Europe. “Its hideous and I am the unhappiest mortal alive,” she informed Hightower and Berueffy during the spring in the ironically histrionic style that characterized their correspondence. “I can’t stay in America next year unless I completely repudiate the whole past and live in some foreign quarter.… I am going to try to get a job here & if I can’t I’ll go west & finish the novel at [her sister Mary Lee’s] ranch. If I sell it I will come to Europe at once.… I’m miserable at the thought of never being around you guys again & being stuck in this wretched filthy Babbitt-ridden country.” And she was miserable at being stuck in her “revolting body which is an old wadded up bunch of rubbish and musk and bilgewater.” This romantic agony gave rise to classical inclinations, Stafford claimed: “Having had to be conscious of my body for so long, during the rare intervals that I don’t hurt, I have become savagely spiritual and I swear, having realized that the only time your brain can work is when it is not bothered with a malfunctioning body, that I am going to get healthy and I want to get on the earth somewhere with some books, paper, piano, 2 typewriters and you boys”—her fellow artists, as she conceived their creative trio.

  As Hightower could sense from her letters, Stafford’s sights were soon trained at least as intently on more established artists as they were on her two neophyte literary friends in France. During a brief recuperating visit with her sister Mary Lee, she toyed with the idea of retreating there to write, but the isolation inspired anxiety: “I am afraid of following in my pa’s footsteps,” she wrote to Hightower. When she went on from the Hayden ranch to the Writers’ Conference in July, she found much more promising models, worlds away from her father’s anachronistic obscurity. In Boulder this time she discovered and was discovered by teachers who had come of age in the 1920s as the American literary landscape was being transformed by the revelations of modernism. In fact, the parade of authorities extended even further back, to the world of letters out of which modernism had sprung, in the person of Ford Madox Ford, the guest lecturer for the conference. “When I knew Ford in America,” Robert Lowell later reminisced of his meeting with him then, “he was out of cash, out of fashion.… He seemed to travel with the leisure and full dress of the last hectic Edwardian giants—Hudson, James, and Hardy.…”

  Ford had been staying at Benfolly, Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon’s house in Tennessee, which had become a gathering place for the Agrarians, an ideal setting for that southern group’s prescribed regimen of intense literary work amid a rural landscape. Although Tate didn’t come to Boulder, the conference boasted his fellow poet and erstwhile teacher John Crowe Ransom. They had become close friends during the 1920s when both were Fugitives, members of the close-knit Vanderbilt University circle whose journal, The Fugitive, was devoted to publishing modernist poetry. By 1930 a larger cause inspired them—revitalizing southern literature and traditional southern ways—and they had produced a manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. John Peale Bishop, another friend and champion of a vital literary South who also knew the European modernist scene firsthand, was in Boulder too. So was a then-obscure face from the North: bringing up the rear of the southern entourage was a new young follower and aspiring poet, twenty-year-old Robert Lowell, who had been camping on the Tates’ lawn since his migration south that spring, a detour between Harvard and Kenyon College, where he was to take up studies with Ransom. There were also a few who fell outside that fraternity: at opposite poles, Howard Mumford Jones, the old-style academic critic, and Evelyn Scott, a writer of the lush Mabel Dodge Luhan school of “carnal mysticism,” whose novel The Wave had been a best-seller in 1929. (Sherwood Anderson also attended, but Stafford ended up having little to do with him.)

  To judge by her reports to Hightower, Stafford was a model of poised confidence and ingratiating charm as she eagerly took advice and cultivated connections. She arrived with plenty of manuscripts to show around: a short story, eight poems, two hundred pages of excerpts from the journal she had kept in Germany, and one hundred and five pages of the novel she had mentioned to Martha Foley, evidently about Lucy and Andrew. She promptly, and for the most part approvingly, sized up the faculty:

  This John Crowe Ransom (poet) is swell. Goes in for metaphysical poetry chiefly and is batty on subj. of Donne. John Peale Bishop is nuts on the subj. of Joyce. I shd. fare pretty well with him. I haven’t seen Sherwood Anderson nor Ford Madox Ford yet. Evelyn Scott is in the background and I hope to have no traffic with her. She writes the most ponderous stuff I have ever read. The only thing I read was The Wave about three years ago and I don’t remember one single thing from it. Bishop said today that the only important things in modern English were Ulysses, Hemingway and Proust. That is a joy after Davison’s usual henchmen who canonize Priestley and Maugham …

  (Revealingly, she closed with a vote for a master closer to home: “I read Huckleberry Finn again when I was at the ranch. It is the best book that ever came out of America”)

  The faculty in turn apparently thought very highly of her and of her novel, which despite her promises to Foley six months earlier evidently remained very Joycean indeed—an intertwining of three streams of consciousness. Stafford was giddily self-aggrandizing in her letters to her friends, who were getting ready to return to America. Bishop, she immodestly (and perhaps inaccurately) reported to Hightower, “said I had an eminent nerve writing s. of c. [stream of consciousness] and thereby putting myself up to compete with the biggest boys meaning Joyce. Said I cd. however make the grade.” She considered Scott’s flattery worth quoting too: “Said if I can get away from the academic will become great writer.”

  Moreover, it looked as though the talk might be followed by action. Burnett was considering running the story and some of her poetry. Jones left with some journal excerpts to show to the Atlantic Monthly. Scott, whom Stafford did not in fact snub as she had planned, “says she’ll browbeat Scribner’s into printing my book. Whit Burnett, however, wants it himself. It’s wonderful having Harper’s and Scribner’s fighting over me with the Atlantic in the background.” Stafford indulged in a final spin, which her correspondents may well have found a little much: “Have not embellished. Am not embarrassed. Know now for sure I’m good—like hell. Will doubtless spend my life writing novels.”

  Not far beneath Stafford’s flip confidence lurked insecurity about her literary career. Certainly her new teachers, whatever specific praise they meted out to her, preached a generally intimidating, elite view of the literary vocation. Stafford was presumably one of the few who sat through Ford’s lecture, “The Literary Life,” an occasion that Cal Lowell at least saw as a dramatic confirmation of the old man’s main theme—the sacred nature of the literary calling and the total dedication that it demands. “I watched an audience of hundreds walk out on him,” Lowell wrote years later, “as he exquisitely, ludicrously, and inaudibly imitated the elaborate periphrastic style of Henry James. They could neither hear nor sympathize.” Lowell, the teachers’ young attendant and acolyte, with whom Stafford struck up an acquaintanceship, doubtless also preached intense creative commitment. In his intense way, this New Englander had quickly become an ardent disciple of the Southerners, and proselytizing came naturally to him.

  Lowell was probably Stafford’s guide to the American mandarins (though she evidently impressed him that summer with her cosmopolitanism, somewhat misleadingly parading her mastery of German: “Towmahss Mahnn: that’s how you said it … / ‘That’s how Mann must say it,’ I thought,” he wrote in a poem decades later). During his stay with the Tates he had been eagerly absorbing his hosts’ and Ford’s stringent teaching that the literary life was no “butterfly existence,” that art �
�had nothing to do with exalted feelings or being moved by the spirit. It was simply a piece of craftsmanship”—arduously undertaken, producing “something warped, fissured, strained and terrific.” Some years later in his essay “Techniques of Fiction” (1944), Tate wrote down what he evidently told young Lowell, and it is easy to imagine the wisdom being passed on to Stafford that summer:

  The only man I have known in some twenty years of literary experience who was at once a great novelist and a great teacher … was the late Ford Madox Ford. His influence was immense, even upon writers who did not know him, even upon other writers, today, who have not read him. For it was through him more than any other man writing in English in our time that the great tradition of the novel came down to us.

  Firsthand exposure was an opportunity to be taken seriously, for as Tate continued: “There is an almost masonic tradition in the rise of any major art.… The secrets of this aptitude … survive in the works themselves, and in the living confraternity of men of letters, who pass on by personal instruction to their successors the ‘tricks of the trade.’ ” The “tricks of the trade” were the opposite of facile; the craft, according to Tate and Ransom, was the arduous essence of art.

  Eighteen days among the confraternity—the duration of the conference—hardly counted as a full exposure to the tradition that was so essential to the formation of the individual talent. For Lowell, the intensive initiation continued, first a stint as secretary to Ford (“As he is a very great master of English prose,” Lowell announced, “the training is very valuable and I would not want to miss the opportunity”), then three years as Ransom’s student at Kenyon, in Ohio. For Stafford, who reluctantly set off to teach freshman English at what she called a “charm school,” Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, the ties were considerably more tenuous, as they had been from the start. Still, she had made inspiring contact with new teachers, and she had discovered a forceful young man whose ambitions and confidence easily kept pace with her own.

  Maintaining those ties was very important to her in her new uncongenial setting: teaching was merely the means to her real end, writing—and Stephens, the only place she had been offered a job, was especially mortifying. Whatever anxiety she felt about her teaching skills paled beside her disgust with the ludicrous curriculum she was required to teach: “Freshman English was known as ‘Communication.’ Two days a week the students were taught composition, and on the third they were taught conversation, the recommended textbook for which was the Reader’s Digest.” And she was scathing about the frivolous students, who brought their knitting to class and wrote themes entitled “A Short History of Fingernail Polish.” Stafford wasn’t making it up, and she did her best during the year to cultivate detachment from the idiocy surrounding her. She made only one real friend among the faculty, a fellow English teacher named William Mock, who knew Paul and Dorothy Thompson, Stafford’s Boulder friends. Mock was equally disenchanted with the surroundings, and the two of them spent a lot of time escaping the school in Mock’s car, but it was soon clear that their feelings for each other did not quite measure up. Happily wined and dined by her plump, affluent colleague, Stafford did not fall in love and envisage marriage, as Mock did. She was busily confiding in Hightower, who was now back and studying Chinese at Harvard, and apparently Lowell kept in at least intermittent touch as well.

  Stafford certainly hadn’t forgotten her serious teachers, and throughout the fall she kept up her connections and pursued their modernist curriculum. In December she went to the Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in Chicago, where Ransom aired the possibility of a job at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, where Allen Tate was teaching. (“I don’t know how much you know about Tate,” Stafford eagerly wrote to Hightower after the meeting, “but what I know is that he knows everybody, especially Pound and Ford Madox Ford.”) Stafford only slightly exaggerated Ransom’s enthusiasm, to judge by his prompt letter to Tate. “The sanest and most charming and at the same time most promising girl at the Boulder Writers’ Conference last summer was Jean Stafford,” Ransom wrote to his friend on January 1, 1938:

  Her best work is fiction; she has a novel pretty far along. She has had a year of graduate study of some kind in Germany (last year) and is a BA, perhaps an MA, of Colorado. She’s teaching unfortunately, at Stevens [sic] College in Missouri.… Naturally she wants to get away next year. She would give up her salary as an instructor and take an English assistantship or fellowship at the right place. She is a fine person and a competent scholar and teacher so that no risk is involved in dealing with her. She may have a considerable creative talent, I have not seen enough to tell.

  (In the same letter, Ransom relayed an even more glowing assessment of Lowell: he “is a fine boy, very definitely with great literary possibilities. I don’t know whether he’s better as a critic or a poet, but he’s making fast progress in both lines”)

  In turn, Stafford took care—and a little license with the truth—to declare her allegiance to the canon and the confraternity. She sketched a colloquial map of the terrain for Hightower: “Ford is a big man. He was chummy with Conrad and Hardy and the rest of them. He loves Ezra Pound deeply. He was the first to recognize the great value of Ulysses. He is interested only in the revolutionists. He loves Hemingway. All these boys were together in Paris. They had a magazine. Ford is pa to them all.” To Ford, whom she wrote in February asking for a recommendation for a Houghton Mifflin fellowship, she sent a self-portrait as the ideal modernist disciple. Wittily disparaging about Stephens, she lamented the uselessness of the “voluminous notes” she claimed she had studiously assembled in Heidelberg for “courses I would have in James Joyce, and seminars I would have in the poetry of Ezra Pound.” Stafford may not have made an altogether plausible explicator of the masters, but she was thoroughly convincing as an avid student of the Paris scene:

  Not long ago I read your preface to A Farewell to Arms. I was sorrier then that I had left Paris than ever before. What I wanted most at the moment was to find someone to talk to about the preface.… Well, I should have known better than to read anything more, but I began It was the Nightingale and now I am done for. When I read I take myself very seriously, and my empathic responses are such that I not only write in the same manner as my author, but I feel that I am my author, and I am impatient to finish the book so that I can begin writing again. I am not humbled. I am just impatient.

  STAFFORD HAD BEEN writing impatiently ever since she had arrived at Stephens and was evidently—and not surprisingly—finding that it was harder to write like a good student than to sound like one. She was working on the book that she had shown at the conference, the Joycean novel about Lucy and Andrew. It was entitled Which No Vicissitude, she told Ford—“something from a poem by Wordsworth that I’ve almost forgotten—‘the tomb / Which no vicissitude can find.’ ” Amateur stream of consciousness was not exactly the most likely avenue to disciplined craftsmanship. Imitation of other approved models helped, but her instincts led to a florid manner and to autobiography, not to the taut, impersonal style and carefully hewn structure that her teachers favored for poetry. “I have done some good writing in my novel but i am sure i stole it all. there are several things I can trace directly to Eliot,” she wrote to Hightower in the fall. The book, she knew, was in desperate need of pruning: “The novel is still too lush and I’m trying furiously to cut out about half of the tapestry.” To demonstrate a new stylistic austerity, she sent on some fragments from a story about a cat run over by a car: “Well, I don’t know if you can get any idea about what it’s about, but that’s the style I’m using which in comparison to the rest of my stuff is as pristine as Hemingway.”

  In fact, Stafford had learned a trick of the trade from Ford that might have helped her, but she was unable to put it into practice yet. It wasn’t until years later that she even revealed his tip, in her 1951 essay “Truth and the Novelist,” in which she acknowledged that she had made the mistake of ignoring the advice more t
han once. Ford’s counsel was to avoid direct autobiography in fiction:

  With the generosity that made him beloved of his pupils, [Ford] read and commented on my aimless and plotless short stories and on inchoate chapters of novels that were destined to die unborn. One time, in appraising a character he found disproportionately unsympathetic, he asked me how closely I had drawn the portrait from life, and when I replied that I had been as sedulous as I knew how, he said, “That’s impolite and it’s not fiction.” He went on to observe then that the better one knows one’s characters in life, the harder it is to limn them in fiction because one has too much material, there are too many facets to tell the truth about, there are whole worlds of inconsistencies and variants, and objectivity will fade when one’s personal attitude is permitted excessive prominence.

  Which No Vicissitude was likely the manuscript in which Ford had found that unsympathetic, barely fictional character. For all the Eliotic passages she added and the Hemingway-inspired trimming she did, it seems that Stafford’s novel owed more than a little to a literary model—Thomas Wolfe—who was not exactly congenial to her modernist mentors. The only remnants of the manuscript itself are a one-page prologue, a two and a half-page epilogue, and an excerpt from one of the three streams of consciousness, all of which she sent on to Hightower in December of 1937, shortly before mailing her manuscript to Whit Burnett. “When I wrote them I thought they were literature,” she told Hightower, “but now they seem almost on the pulp side.” Clearly she wanted to be reassured that she was wrong. In a quaint footnote to her prologue, she voiced some anxiety about the transparency of the inspiration behind the closing lines of that section, which were indeed lush:

  Which of the three of us has died? What is the color of the hair that grows corruptly in the tomb? What is the shape of the face, what are the planes of the hands? Silence, and immaculate as dawn, the earth lies over one. A handful of flowers, a spider’s life, a pulse of blood. Two mourners looked into their hands. Whose hands are these? they cried.