The Interior Castle (24 page)

A
RMED WITH HER
manuscript and contract, Stafford and Lowell left New York in July of 1942 to set up house with the Tates, who were leaving Princeton for Monteagle, Tennessee. Tate had not been rehired, and he and Gordon loved the small village and quaint summer resort where they had spent a productive stretch several years earlier. “
We always start working like hell as soon as we get here,” Gordon said, and both Tates were wound up to write. Allen wanted to start a sequel to his novel
The Fathers
, which had appeared in 1938, and Caroline was at work on
The Women on the Porch
. It was the right recommendation of the place for Stafford, who was poised to proceed with her novel, and apparently Lowell too was suddenly ready to write again. Sheed and Ward was cutting back on staff, and Lowell planned to undertake a biography of Jonathan Edwards. “
We will just hole up in a cottage on the mountain until we have finished our respective books,” Gordon wrote to Malcolm Cowley.

It was obviously not so simple as that, but it was a strikingly productive year, from July of 1942 to the next July—“
the winter of four books,” was the way Lowell remembered it. Tate and Lowell, in fact, barely got started on the books they had intended. Stymied with their projects, together they began editing an anthology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry. Then, inspired by the “
formal, difficult poems,” they turned to writing poetry again themselves. Lowell later looked back on that year, during which he wrote all of the poems in
Land of Unlikeness
, as a profoundly formative one, just as his first southern summer, in 1937, with the Tates at Benfolly had been. “In the beginning,” he later told one of his biographers, Steven Gould Axelrod, Tate “was not only an influence but often
the
(my) style of writing.” And the young poet’s comprehensive debt to the Tates transcended style; they also inspired him with
a theme, and, as Axelrod put it, with “something greater than either of these—a vision of a life totally committed to art, and an assurance that he too could achieve such a life.”

For Stafford as well, the year—the middle year of the roughly three she spent hard at work on
Boston Adventure
—was crucial. But her view of the experience was less glowing, more in line with Ford Madox Ford’s reaction to the Benfolly summer: “
Consorting with the Tates,” he said, “is like living with intellectual desperadoes in the Sargoza [
sic
] sea.” Work and play were fierce. For the Lowells, the industrious days began, at Cal’s behest, with attendance at Mass. Then it was time to retreat to their typewriters, though it wasn’t all quiet creativity among the foursome. There was plenty of noisy criticism as well, of which Stafford took the brunt: Gordon later recalled “
how often we all took a whack” at Stafford’s novel. Their evenings were filled with gossip, mostly literary and very mean—and, of course, with drink. Too much drink, Stafford acknowledged at one point: she had broken a vow to cut back, she told Taylor, and had seen “
for the millionth time what a prize jackass I am when I drink.”

By the spring Stafford had collapsed, sick once more, but what is most striking is how creatively resilient she seemed to be, despite the hard-driving company. She had arrived in Monteagle in the summer of 1942 with a draft of her novel already in hand, which gave her a clear sense of direction as well as important momentum, and she managed to leave in the summer of 1943 with seven hundred pages. Stafford’s themes, style, and vision of the creative life, like her husband’s, owed plenty to the Tates. But as
Boston Adventure
showed, she was a protégé who wandered from the paths of her patrons.

T
HOUGH
S
TAFFORD
doubtless refined her themes as she pounded away at her typewriter on the third floor of the big house, they had been worked out long before she arrived in Monteagle. “
Cal was very right when he exclaimed one night in Louisiana, ‘I’ve just discovered Jean is writing a Catholic novel,’ ” Peter Taylor wrote to Stafford in the summer of 1944 after he had read her finished manuscript. He went on to characterize the religious perspective that Lowell had seen at the outset and that he saw at its completion: “I had not realized (this will sound stuffy) that you have honestly integrated your Catholicism and your natural aestheticism by which I mean—however poor a choice of terms—your natural
revulsion to the coarseness of most human beings and the grossness of their lives.”
Boston Adventure
, as its original title,
The Outskirts
, suggests, was a story of exile—of social, but also of spiritual, exile. It was a version of the story that Stafford had tried to tell in
Autumn Festival
, and her protagonist this time, named Sonie Marburg, was a relative of Gretchen, like her an outcast from her family, searching for salvation in an alien society.

But in Sonie, Gretchen’s temperament was tamed by a more mature imagination—her own and her creator’s. Where Stafford’s earlier heroine had been consumed by adolescent self-loathing and disgust with the world around her, Sonie was more patient and ironic in her explorations of her alienation; if Gretchen was a damned soul, Sonie was a spirit in purgatory. It marked the kind of tempering of sensibility that, interestingly, was not much in evidence in Lowell’s
Land of Unlikeness
, which consisted largely of poems that emerged under the Tates’ roof at the same time that
Boston Adventure
was taking revised shape. As R. P. Blackmur wrote of Lowell’s poems, “
There is not a loving metre in the book,” echoing the Atlantic Monthly Press’s reactions to Stafford’s earlier novel. “What is thought of as Boston in him fights with what is thought of as Catholic; and the fight produces not a tension but a gritting. It is not the violence, the rage, the denial of this world that grits, but the failure of these to find
in verse
the tension of necessity; necessity has, when recognised, the quality of conflict accepted, not hated.” Stafford had discovered the tension of necessity in Sonie’s narrative. In mesmerizing prose, she created a character who confronted the divisions in herself with an eerily calm, fatalistic curiosity.

Stafford’s novel was not religious in the same sense that Lowell’s contemporaneous poems were. She was not working with explicitly Christian symbolism, aiming to articulate an apocalyptic religious myth, as he was. (He said later that he had been “
much more interested in being a Catholic than in being a writer”) But her basic inclination, like that of her teachers Tate and Ransom (and, behind them, T. S. Eliot), was to see, as Taylor observed in his letter, mankind as fallen and art as a kind of redemptive witness to that plight. And like Lowell, Stafford was fascinated by the opposition between Catholicism and Boston. Dividing her novel into two parts, she juxtaposed an Old World vision of spiritual damnation with a New World vision of social salvation. Sonie hoped to escape her lowly, blighted past and redeem herself amid high Boston
society. But Stafford didn’t grant her such a simple pilgrimage. Boston was hardly the salvation Sonie expected, and Stafford offered another alternative, the life of art—only to deny her that as well. Stafford was not proposing Sonie’s tale as a portrait of the artist as a young woman. The only prospect of transcendence she held out for Sonie was a contemplative, not a creative, retreat from the corrupt world—a retreat that threatened to mean losing her mind rather than finding her soul.

Sonie’s spiritual and social journey began in Chichester, a little village across the bay from Boston where she lived in near destitution with her tormented German father, Hermann, a lapsed Catholic, and her histrionic Russian mother, Shura, immigrants with nothing to cling to in the New World. Her odyssey took an unlikely turn when her childhood fantasy was fulfilled. She was invited to live in the well-appointed Pinckney Street house of Miss Pride, the embodiment of Boston propriety (and, it turned out, of petrifaction) who regularly vacationed at the Hotel Barstow in Chichester and had become Sonie’s idol. For years the child had been consumed with admiration of the impeccably bred visitor, and with envy of Miss Pride’s niece, Hopestill Mather, Sonie’s age and a lucky inhabitant of Pinckney Street. The image of the spinster’s old house—hallowed in Sonie’s mind by tradition, by association with some vague ideal of civilization—emerged as the presiding symbol of the book. In her daydreams Sonie adorned those solid, orderly rooms with concrete details, drawing on her knowledge of Miss Pride’s immaculate Hotel Barstow room, which the child cleaned when her mother, the chambermaid, wasn’t feeling well. But the cruel recognition crowning Sonie’s quest was that darkness and isolation existed in the aristocratic order of the Boston elite too. Her life with Miss Pride proved to be anything but a liberation. Garbed in civility and enlightenment, the solitude there was even more chilling.

For the Southerners, the North, especially New England, played a crucial role in the drama of deracination, and both Stafford and Lowell were fascinated by the myth of the “
abstract-minded, sharp-witted trading society” of New England versus the “simple … personal and dramatic … sensuous” southern mind, as Tate put the contrast in his essay in
I’ll Take My Stand
. But their allegiances were, understandably, not so clearcut. Though Stafford, the Westerner (and now a New Englander by marriage), was acutely aware of the formative power of place, she could also become exasperated with the dogmatic views of her hosts. She had
listened to countless conversations about the importance of regionalism, a favorite topic among the Tates and the assorted company that gathered at Monteagle. The chauvinism was sometimes expressed in an appealingly humble style. “
Thank God for being a Southern writer,” Caroline Gordon exclaimed to a friend in 1937, citing the Civil War as a rich source of inspiration. “I do feel at times that in comparison with the rest of you we are sitting in at a game where the cards are already stacked.… Our stuff due to the upheaval of ’64 is lying around loose for any fool who has a big tow sack to pick it up.… If you are from other parts of the country it seems these days that you have to use much more skill to strike a vein of the real stuff and get it out.” But sometimes the smugness roused Stafford to indignation. “
We had this statement ‘I cannot feel that anything out of the south is of any consequence,’ ” she reported in a letter to Taylor:

Like Lowell, whose ambivalence about New England emerged in the poems he was writing at the time, Stafford was evidently inspired in part by the southern prejudice about the North to write about the place herself—make a better book of it. Unlike her husband, however, she wasn’t writing from the inside. In Baton Rouge, Stafford had written to Hightower announcing that her new novel was her “first un-autobiographical” effort, which was in an obvious sense true. It was not as though she could portray New England from intimate knowledge: she had lived in Cambridge and skirmished with the Lowells only briefly, and her reaction had been confused. She had been at once enthralled and repelled by the clannish elite that had given her such a cold shoulder. But if Sonie’s lurid Chichester childhood and her frigid Boston coming-of-age bore little resemblance to Stafford’s actual life, the progress of Sonie’s mind reflected the growth of Stafford’s own.
Boston Adventure
was the portrait of an adventurous yet vulnerable imagination struggling to make sense of the world. It was steeped more in literature
than in life—especially in Proust and James, an intimidating tradition but one that Stafford wasn’t afraid to turn to her own uses.

In an important essay on James published in
Partisan Review
during Stafford’s Monteagle spring, “The Heiress of All the Ages,” Philip Rahv focused on the development of James’s principal heroine, his daring young American woman. She was the star of his international drama, which turned on issues of central interest to the southern critics, who were among the first advocates of the James revival. James offered not merely a model of formalism but a version of the conflict of values they identified in their own national drama. His juxtaposition of innocent, idealistic Americans with sensuous, experienced Europeans was not so different from the Agrarians’ opposition between Northerners and Southerners, for as both Tate and Ransom made clear in their contributions to the Agrarian manifesto,
I’ll Take My Stand
, the South was America’s Europe, the repository of tradition, of landed attachments, in an otherwise shallow-rooted country. James’s contrast was evidently helpful to Stafford as she worked to complicate the conflicts in Sonie’s Boston adventure.

Not that she simply followed his lead. Instead of a Jamesian heiress, a “
passionate pilgrim” sent forth from innocent New England to encounter in Europe the “social successful worldly world,” as Rahv called it, Sonie Marburg was a pauper on what looked like the reverse journey. She started out across the water from Boston with her European parents. Physically she was not far away: “
On a clear morning, looking across the green, excited water, littered with dories and lobster-pots and buoys, I could see Boston and its State House dome, gleaming like a golden blister,” Sonie began. But spiritually she was miles away, her life in Chichester a socially unsuccessful impoverished world. Sonie ended up in the heart of New England, but it was far from innocent.

If James was one lurking literary model whose international theme Stafford in a sense transposed, Proust was the presiding influence. Here too Stafford inventively adapted. “
With its first page, tuned to the glazed and dying night-music of Proust’s Overture,” Alfred Kazin wrote in his review, “ ‘Boston Adventure’ brings us into the mind of a young girl so high in her style and so low in society that one’s first impression is that Gorky’s tramp characters have stolen into the cork-lined room.” The strange tension at the center of Stafford’s novel was the disjunction between
Sonie’s sensibility and her circumstances. She sounded, as Stafford herself said early on, like C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust—elevated and archaic—yet her origins and her destiny were a world away from Marcel’s. Although
Boston Adventure
, narrated in the first person, was proof of Sonie’s prodigious imagination, Stafford emphatically denied her character the fruitful circuit that Proust granted Marcel. Sonie was Miss Pride’s disillusioned secretary—an amanuensis charged with a hopeless project, the old lady’s memoirs—not a real writer. She never enjoyed Marcel’s miraculous triumph of simultaneously renouncing the corrupt world and possessing it in the creation of a work of art.