The Interior Castle (17 page)

At the time, the impact of rejection may have been softened by a development in another quarter: she made public her engagement to Lowell when he returned from Kenyon for Christmas vacation and they saw each other in Cambridge, where she was now sharing an apartment with two Vassar graduates. It is even possible that Stafford’s publishing setback played some part in encouraging her to solidify their plans. In December of 1939, the same month that her manuscript was turned down by the Atlantic Monthly Press, she wrote to Hightower to announce, “
I am engaged to marry Cal Lowell,” a prospect that she described in chilling
terms: “You said it would happen … and I did not believe it. Then I hated him but he does what I have always needed to have done to me and that is that he dominates me.”

It is possible to wonder whether Lowell the college senior would have been able to dominate—and whether Stafford would have been so sure she needed it—had he confronted an author who had just sold her novel. For it seems clear that creative aspirations and anxieties played an important part in their relations, which from the start had obviously thrived on great strain. To say this is not to minimize the psychological interplay that Stafford herself saw at work: her masochistic inclinations and his aggressive impulses fueling each other. Perhaps the best clue to the interwoven artistic and emotional tensions of their far from tender courtship lies in a story called “1939,” written many years later by Peter Taylor, Lowell’s Kenyon roommate and the closest mutual friend of Stafford and Lowell throughout their lives. It seems to have been inspired by Lowell’s Thanksgiving visit of the year before, but the story suggests the peculiar embattled intensity that continued to mark their relations.

Peter Taylor’s story is a fondly comic drama that is more about literary competition between its protagonists than about romantic incompatibility, though the two are not easily separated. Above all, it is about immaturity. The story is not true in any strict sense; when it came out in 1955 in
The New Yorker
, Taylor wrote to Stafford, “
It is full of lies about us all, with just the modicum of truth necessary to make the lies worth telling.” The key to its main characters is clear enough: the first-person narrator is Taylor, his Kenyon roommate Jim Prewitt is Lowell, and Prewitt’s girlfriend, Carol Crawford, is Stafford. The action roughly follows fact as the two restless Kenyon boys set off on the long drive from Gambier, Ohio, to New York to join their girlfriends.

There are, however, salient alterations of fact that make the story even more revealing about reality: when the boys arrive in the big city, Carol has just had a novel accepted, two parts of which are about to appear in
Partisan Review
, and when they leave she has jilted Jim. In fact, the Atlantic Monthly Press jilted Stafford—the success Taylor described didn’t come until five years later, with the appearance of
Boston Adventure
—and she accepted Lowell’s proposal. But Taylor’s distortions are in the service of that “modicum of truth,” for they help convey the mixture of ambition about literature and ambivalence about love that characterized that part of their lives. The story offers the male perspective on the awkward
stage, but essential to “1939” is the prevailing irony about the inadequacy of “the boys’ ” view. Taylor gleefully noted the conflicting reactions to the story. “
Those two nice boys, and those
awful
girls,” some said, but there is another possible response: those poor girls, those lucky boys.

For Taylor’s story is double-edged. On the one hand, it is about two bookish college boys who are endearingly eager to display their independence and acquire the “
mature and adult experience” essential to their literary vocation. They are rudely disenchanted when the girlfriends they admire for their “
‘critical’ and ‘objective’ ” view of life condescendingly dump them in favor of finer attractions—in Carol Crawford’s case, the blandishments of the bohemian literary set open to her once she has sold her novel. (Nancy Gibault, the narrator’s girlfriend, decides she isn’t an artist and suddenly sees the appeal of an older, richer hometown boy.) On the other hand, Taylor is tough on the self-pitying boys and subtly sympathetic to the girls. The “independents” (as the boys think of themselves), foiled in their quest for the mature experience that would mix love and literature, don’t have much cause to complain about the New York fiasco. In fact, they can be somewhat relieved: they have the comfortable haven of their college house (modeled on Douglass House, the literary enclave at Kenyon where Lowell, Taylor, and Randall Jarrell, among others, lived) to return to. There they have the camaraderie they profess to hate as well as a respite before they have to be anything more than aspiring writers—and not least, they have an escape from those unconventional, potentially competitive, creative girls they claim to admire. There is an air of slightly pampered gentility about these rebels, with their rumpled respectable clothes and horn-rimmed glasses.

The girls, as Taylor describes them, can’t afford such luxurious immaturity. They are confronted with a profoundly significant choice, which the boys completely fail to comprehend. Nancy announces her realization that she isn’t an artist, which the narrator fliply and cruelly endorses: “
When we were at lunch yesterday, you know, with Jim and his girl,” he tells her, “it came over me suddenly that you weren’t an artist. Just by looking at you I could tell.” Carol has come to the opposite realization, that she is an artist, and Taylor digresses to offer the mature, retrospective portrait of her even more difficult predicament—an understanding that eluded him as a youth:

Taylor’s version of Stafford’s youthful single-mindedness is purposely exaggerated to call attention to the truly independent, hardheaded effort she had expended. In oblique contrast, the cosseted boys are both expecting checks in the mail from home when the story opens. And Carol’s arrival at her goal entails yet more hard work of a different kind, as the story shows: now the self-made girl has to be one of the boys among the bohemian set. The task is strenuously to cultivate connections and camaraderie with more established writers. In the succession of Greenwich Village apartments to which Carol drags Jim, the ambience is male and the tone intimidatingly, judgmentally intellectual. The style is calculated knowingness; everyone goes by surname only and is adept with the sophisticated put-down (“
so
naive,
so
undergraduate”) as well as with the ingratiating bow to those better ensconced. Carol is thoroughly caught up in the scene. Suddenly the outsider has had a taste of the inside, and Taylor suggests how much more important that loomed for the girl from the provinces than for the boys from the genteel families and the Kenyon circle, who already knew the pleasures and perquisites of belonging.

In fiction, Taylor simplified the asymmetry and sent the boys and girls on their separate ways after that fateful weekend, Crawford forging ahead to the greatest fame of them all. In fact, at the end of 1939 Stafford’s literary career was uncertain, and far from spurning Lowell, she had declared that she needed his dominating influence. In a sense she was straddling the choices that Taylor had divided between Carol and
Nancy, which turned out to be perhaps the most difficult course of all. Stafford had discovered that she was a writer—had been told by editors and teachers that she was a writer—but she hadn’t yet proved that identity with literary accomplishment. As important, she wasn’t altogether sure just what price she was willing, or dared, to pay for that proof. Her letters to Hightower testified to the tension she felt between the poles she labeled love and literature. On the one hand, she energetically pursued her writing career and literary connections; on the other, she proclaimed her need to be a dominated woman. In Lowell there was a possible resolution. She could have her assertive hometown boy—from the home she wanted to claim as her own, literary Boston, not Colorado—and be a writer, too. With the independent but pedigreed Lowell, she could be a rebellious author but also an established wife, an insider.

In a letter to Merrill Moore, a peripheral member of the Fugitives and a friend of Lowell’s parents (they had appointed him Cal’s guardian that summer while they went to Europe to escape the scandal of the car accident and the lawsuit), Lowell outlined his intentions in terms that suggest the ambition and sense of embattlement that played an important part in his match with Stafford. “
I am confident that given anything like an even break, I shall in the future achieve things of considerable value,” Lowell announced to Moore, and went on to describe his new, mature strategy, which sounds as though it might well have been conceived in the course of his forbidden summer meetings with Stafford:

By an entirely different route, Stafford had arrived at a comparable aspiration. For Lowell, the subversive challenge was to stake a claim to originality without overtly abandoning tradition, which was for him incarnate in his family; he aimed to play unruly genius off against gentility. Stafford’s urgent need, as the ordeals of her autobiographical character Gretchen suggested, was to lose her sense of queerness in submission to some form of convention, preferably a stern and alien one. (It is not hard
to see a disturbing parallel between Gretchen’s infatuation with the domineering Nazis and Stafford’s desire to cast Lowell in the role of dominating lover.) Aristocratic Boston would make a fine proving ground for Stafford the “hick,” as the Lowell’s had made clear they considered her. Not that she aimed to submit docilely by any means; motivated by an uneasy mixture of self-hatred and self-interest, Stafford was evidently attracted by the idea of belonging, but not of simply obeying.

The match answered the upstart inclinations of both of them, and
Lowell also had guilt about the accident to contend with. Yet mutual fascination probably shouldn’t be underestimated as the motive that clouded all others. In retrospect Stafford claimed that they had had a “
glorious affair” before they were married, a curious characterization, given the peripatetic year between the accident and their wedding, but one that suggests perhaps the dizzying intensity of that time together. “Glorious” certainly hadn’t meant serene. On the contrary, struggle seemed to increase their interest in each other, and once marriage plans were announced, opposition served to bolster their resolve—opposition from the right, benighted places. Boston was aghast, Lowell’s parents informed the couple, and they did their best to rouse condemnation elsewhere as well, insinuating none too subtly that their son had been trapped by the injured Stafford. Their displeasure was made known at Kenyon, and though
Ransom obliged by making it clear that Stafford would not be welcome on campus for Lowell’s last semester, he didn’t disapprove. In fact, he promptly started pulling strings to help set up the couple after Kenyon. “
Lowell is more than a student, he’s more like a son to me,” read the recommendation Ransom wrote for his protégé. Allen Tate, Lowell’s other surrogate father, thoroughly flouted parental wishes by giving Stafford away on April 2, 1940, at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in the Bowery, where the small wedding took place. There was no immediate family present.

It was not a marriage launched in happy peace. At least that was how Stafford portrayed it to Hightower, who lived around the corner from her in Cambridge and who had been restored to the position of confidant. The version of events she presented to her rejected suitor is obviously not the most reliable record. Still, several letters convey a sense of confused dread about the course that she was embarking on and about the self-doubt that was driving her. The first, written on March 31, 1940, from the Hotel Albert in New York, where the couple was staying two
days before the wedding, was the most explicit, though not altogether articulate, expression of anxiety: Stafford was drunk when she wrote it. It had been an awful day, and she was sitting with a solacing bottle of rum, she explained. “[Cal]
should not have left me tonight and yet at this moment we are so irritated we hate each other,” she scrawled in far looser script than usual (on hotel stationery adorned with the motto “Where Courtesy Dwells”). A sense of duplicity and insecurity evidently overwhelmed her, prompted by a relatively minor confession: she had admitted to Lowell that she didn’t really know German well at all. Unnerved, she proceeded to a desperate and somewhat cryptic postscript: