The Interior Castle (11 page)

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:

(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:

S
TAFFORD 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 than once. Ford’s counsel was to avoid direct autobiography in fiction:

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:

Hightower praised the prose but also confirmed her fears about flagrant influence, telling her that Wolfe had done it all first. Not that Stafford was surprised or even genuinely disappointed; the affinity could serve as
a source of legitimacy: “
I read Wolfe’s new book
The Story of a Novel
,” she wrote back to Hightower, “and as usual he stole the whole damn thing from me. I am going to write and say will you please stop writing books you bastard.”

Stafford wittily put her finger on the appeal of Wolfe as a literary model: far from being part of any exclusive confraternity, he presented himself as an amateur artlessly addressing amateurs. To imitate him was not an act of submission and appropriation but of self-expression. In place of the guilty sense of stealing from him, Wolfe generously granted a young writer the pleasure of being a fellow unbridled original. He was the influence that countenanced a kind of self-centered imperviousness to influence; he was a spokesman for the primacy of feeling over form. As Sinclair Lewis had described him in his Nobel Prize speech in 1930, Wolfe was “
a Gargantuan creature with great gusto of life,” at once an anomaly and an exemplar of raw American creative energy. It’s easy to see how
The Story of a Novel
spoke directly to Stafford’s temperament in a way that Ford and Ransom did not, for all of her declarations of discipleship.

Not surprisingly, the mixture of Wolfe’s romanticism and her teachers’ modernist classicism was an uneasy one. In
The Story of a Novel
, Wolfe tried to define his place in a literary world that seemed essentially alien, and the convictions he lyrically announced were distinctly at odds with the aesthetic principles espoused by Eliot and his followers—the “Wastelanders,” as Wolfe called them. Even Joyce, the rare influence he acknowledged, was only a faint echo compared with the clamor of his own inner voices: “
The book that I was writing,” he said of
Look Homeward, Angel
, “was much influenced, I believe, by his own book [
Ulysses
], and yet the powerful energy and fire of my own youth played over and, I think, possessed it all. Like Mr. Joyce, I wrote about things that I had known, the immediate life and experience that had been familiar to me in my childhood. Unlike Mr. Joyce, I had no literary experience.”

Mastery of formal technique, disciplined apprenticeship to “the tradition,” did not rank high for Wolfe. “
Whoever is impressed with the ‘classicism’ of T. S. Eliot,” he mocked, “should buy immediately a copy of that other fine modern expression of the classical spirit, The Thundering Herd, by Zane Grey.” As far as Wolfe was concerned, the man who suffers was the key, and the artist who creates would catch up somehow. He
described a great chasm between the “
whirling vortex and … creative chaos,” from which the substance of his fiction was born, and “the articulation of an ordered and formal structure”—a chasm Stafford knew all too well. Some fusion of the fire and the form might lie ahead, Wolfe said his editor told him, but the fire must come first: “
I was not, he said, a Flaubert kind of writer. I was not a perfectionist. I had twenty, thirty, almost any number of books in me, and the important thing was to get them produced and not to spend the rest of my life in perfecting one book.”

It is hard to imagine artistic directives less in sympathy with the teachings Tate passed on about tradition, craftsmanship, and the ideal of perfectionism—the importance of believing “
each poem he finished would be his last.” By the mid-1930s the Agrarian literary circle, which had initially made friendly overtures to Wolfe as a fellow Southerner, was predictably critical of him. Tate was directly hostile, saying that Wolfe “
did harm to the art of the novel” and “moral damage to his readers,” and Caroline Gordon denounced Wolfe’s “lack of artistic intelligence.” In an essay published after Wolfe’s death, John Peale Bishop wrote what amounted to a critical obituary. It appeared in the winter of 1939, in the first issue of the
Kenyon Review
, edited by Ransom, and in it Bishop summed up and expanded the formalist objections his colleagues Robert Penn Warren, R. P. Blackmur, and others had already aired. “
The force of Wolfe’s talents is indubitable,” Bishop wrote, “yet he did not find for that novel [
Of Time and the River
], nor do I believe he could ever have found, a structure of form which would have been capable of giving shape and meaning to his emotional experience.” The paradoxical result was that this writer so ravenous for representative experience was reduced to solipsistic impressionism. “
Incarcerated in his own sensibility,” Wolfe didn’t see that “at the present time so extreme a manifestation of individualism could not but be morbid.”

The criticisms were close to home for Stafford. Although Bishop may have praised her for competing with “the biggest boys meaning Joyce,” as she claimed, the obvious intermediary influence of that other big boy, Wolfe, apparently prompted Bishop to give her some advice about shape. He offered rather fundamental structural criticism, counseling her to tighten up her three streams of consciousness. Stafford didn’t follow the suggestion, citing Ford’s view that “
the characterizations were pretty clearly distinct”; she also had Evelyn Scott’s support for sticking to her
impressionistic technique. But she was obviously apprehensive about the reception her Wolfian rhetoric might meet among her more meticulous mentors. She carefully hedged her bets as she sent off the manuscript of
Which No Vicissitude
to Whit Burnett in January of 1938: “
Parts of it I am satisfied with. The prologue and the epilogue I was very fond of at the time, but since I have been working so steadily I can’t get excited about any of it now, a natural disgust I think.”

She was right to feel trepidation. Burnett’s criticisms were blunt, accusing Stafford of producing a mere formless flow of sensibility—and a none too interesting or elevating sensibility at that: