The Interior Castle by Ann Hulbert

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’shouse 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