Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance.

Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance,

THE LITTLE of this biography implies at least three kinds of "close connections." First would be the "close connexion of bliss and bale" we know from Henry James's preface to What Maisie Knew, which phrase may be taken to stand for Caroline Gordon's relationship to her husband, Allen Tate--to her love for him and jealousy of him, and to "their torture of equilibrium," their two divorces, their lives together and apart. This is the most important close connection, the heart of the matter.

Another is "The Connection," the extended family of Meriwethers and others from whom Caroline Gordon sprang--the rural Kentucky matrix of her imagination. Caroline Gordon declared more than once that Allen Tate had taught her what she knew about writing; but it was her family that provided her with her background, her sense of language and history, her fund of lore and stories, her agrarian roots.

The third connection would be the braodest one, the literary web of friendships and influences and proteges. Here this biography supplies perhaps its most absorbing pages, as we follow the course of friends and acquaintances including Andrew Lytle, Ford Madox Ford, John Crowe Ransom, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Edmund Wilson, Herbert Read, Louise Bogan, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Day, Jacques Maritain, Maxwell Perkins, and Katherine Anne Porter. Since Caroline Gordon and her husband both taught and promoted the talent of the young, we also find connections with a later generation of writers including Robert Lowell, Flannery O'Connor, Peter Taylor, and Walker Percy. The texture of the book is dominated by this latter connection--the sometimes harrowing account of entertainments, contretemps, intrigues, and gossip. Miss Waldron is aware that Miss Gordon had her triumphs, to be sure, but her focus is more on bale than on bliss.

Her focus when there is one, that is. One of her paragraphs reads: "Gas was rationed, but they could get enough to go to Tennessee by pleading change of residence." That's about the same amount of attention she gives to each of Miss Gordon's novels as they go by. Her obtuse comments have a way of destroying any point about her subject. How fine it is to hear Miss Gordon take Edmund Wilson down a peg:

You know, Edmund, I have sat around for nearly twenty years listening to you talk, often about the novel. I don't think it ever occurred to you during that time that I might possibly have anything to say. But I think you'd do well to listen occasionally to what fiction writers have to say. It seems to me that both in conversation and in your criticism you show great interest in novelty of subject and almost no interest in technique. . . . But please, in memory of all those hours that I have listened to you talking through your hat, don't have my book reviewed in The New Yorker at all. And how dreadfully flat is Miss Waldron's cliched feminist analysis: "Caroline, defending her book with spirit, makes a point that many a married woman has wanted to make to many a man who paid attention to her husband's opinions but not to her own."

That's a really vital consideration for all those Ms. magazine subscribers out there who really care about the Southern Renaissance! They're the persons, after all, who can comprehend this biographer's contempt for her subject: "She acted like a feminist, talked like a Southern ninny." Miss Waldron's feminism keeps her from understanding her subject even when she takes her part: "Caroline's temper had gone from bad to worse, and the neighbors complained that they heard her scream at night and throw dishes against the wall. Her behavior does not seem inappropriate to one who knows that Allen had embarked on a series of love affairs . . . Wives do not have a great many choices in situations like this. They can cry. They can go mad. Caroline reacted with memorable fury." Although Miss Waldron says that Miss Gordon never stopped loving her husband even after their second divorce, she never establishes him as a presence. She admits that "Allen's charm always worked," but she cannot show it.

Miss Waldron is fond of attributing her won attitudes to others: "Most of the world saw them as an amusing couple, once a bit cracked on the Old Confederacy and now obsessed with the Catholic Church." In those days, "It was easy, even chic, to be a Catholic."

In this way, Miss Waldron portrays Miss Gordon's humanity and wisdom as eccentricity. The moving story of Miss Gordon's life asserts its own force, and the book is intermittently illuminating, but it also leaves the sense that it was rushed into print. It is not often that one sees a book that would have been better if it were half again as long. And in the end, Miss Waldron's account of Miss Gordon's literary works is smothered in her trivialization of ideas, of cultural convictions, and of religious faith. Biography today is a lost art in part because we have forgotten the truth of a woman's words:

People are always imagining that if they get hold of the writer himself and, so to speak, shake him long enough and hard enough, something exciting and illuminating will drop out of him. But it doesn't. What's due to come out has come out, in the only form in which it ever can come out. All one gets by shaking is the odd paper clip and crumpled carbons of his wastepaper basket. . . . What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession. [Dorothy L. Sayers to her son, 1937. /N

Miss Waldron quotes Louise Cowan on Caroline Gordon: "We knew we were in the presence of greatness." But in this book, I find the absence of it.