The Underground Stream: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon.

This third biography of the novelist Caroline Gordon appears in the year that would have marked her 100th birthday. She died in Mexico fourteen years ago, a writer who authored nine novels, three short-story collections, but also constructed a literary and cultural personality. She was married to Allen Tate, the well-known poet and a founding member of the so-called Agrarians, a group of writers which included Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, and other Southern intellectuals who upheld the supposed virtues of the rural and small-town life, the yeomanry, as alternatives to the increasing shift toward urban experience and culture that took place all through the twentieth century.

Gordon knew, or was a close friend of, or tried to help many important writers of her time--Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford, Katherine Anne Porter, Edmund Wilson, Robert Lowell, and later in her life, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. She was a passionate writer of letters, often sent to editors, reviewers, poets, and fellow novelists and short-story writers. She taught classes on many college campuses, lectured at still more of them. Her work earned her the admiration of critics, and she herself became an essayist very much respected for what she had to say about the writing and understanding of fiction.

Yet, as this biography makes eminently and sadly clear, all of her achievements and distinctions brought no great calm or self-confidence to a feisty, talented, fiercely determined, and exceedingly conscientious person who had every reason, at times, to feel herself overlooked, misjudged, unappreciated. Not that she didn't bend over backwards, at times (the continuing irony of the victim become self-accuser) to justify the treatment she received from an assortment of men, her husband certainly included.

In Gordon's later years she became increasingly conservative, deferred at least publicly to the authority and power of men in the intellectual world, and of course, in the world of the Catholic church, to which she was converted at the age of fifty-two. Below the surface of this cultural conservative, however, other forces and dispositions were at work (hence this book's title). This biographer, a writer of clear, evocative prose, probes that relatively unknown side of Gordon's life--specially her early years as an apprentice journalist in Chattanooga. There she encountered the obstacles women had to endure at a time in this nation's history when they couldn't even vote. There she did, as it is put in the South, "right well"--she used her bright, able mind, her persistence and ingenuity, her fluency to build a career as a newspaperwoman. Eventually, she left for the literary and political scene of Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where she would meet her future husband and so many other writers on their way up.

She and Allen Tate married because she was pregnant. They intended not to stay together after the baby (a girl, Nancy) was born, but they did end up living a life together, a hectic, unconventional, disturbed one. Much of this book chronicles in close and poignant detail the wildness, the sometime craziness of that relationship: much mutual respect and affection, no small amount of mutual suspicion, apprehension, distrust. They were married twice, divorced twice, and ultimately lived apart, but for over three decades, they tested mightily the psychological forces that kept them together and drove them apart--it was as if they couldn't live (comfortably, happily) with each other, but also couldn't live (without fear and anxiety) away from each other.

Much of Gordon's writing called upon the tensions and vicissitudes of her marriage. She was a novelist whose reportorial eyes and ears were always at work. She even sat her father down, got him telling tales, typed up what he said, and turned his remarks into the mainstay of one of her novels. She also worked her friend Dorothy Day into a novel, much to Day's displeasure. But more than anyone, Allen Tate became a subject of her fictional contemplation, sometimes quite sardonic, even as she relied heavily on him as a critic of her writing, and insisted upon a traditional role for herself as his endlessly supportive wife. In that regard, she was constantly taking care of things: a spirited, energetic housekeeper, cook, gardener, and hostess to the seemingly endless parade of guests who caine to the Tates for dinners, but also to stay for a day, or weeks. They were a couple who apparently survived together only through the constant buffering companionship of others, and if those dozens and dozens of people were to be treated well, so that they would keep returning, Caroline Gordon had to labor long and hard.

I had heard of her years ago from two people who knew her, admired her-Dorothy Day and Walker Percy. Dorothy Day and Caroline Gordon were, actually, very much alike in certain respects. They both came from respectable Protestant families; both became journalists, then writers of fiction; both were unmarried when they became pregnant (in the 1920s, when that outcome was regarded as scandalous rather than as, today's view, an unexceptional event); both lived bohemian Manhattan lives; both converted to Catholicism; and both thereupon became wedded to the church's conservative views on moral issues. On the other hand, Dorothy Day, unlike Caroline Gordon, had a strong interest in political questions, and put herself on the line all the time on behalf of the poor. Neither of the Tates shared her kind of social and political passion. Theirs were lives given over to aesthetic preoccupations, and, very important, to teaching, whereby they made a living, of course, but also gave of themselves to others--especially so, Caroline Gordon.

Walker Percy often sang her praises, told me of those "single-spaced typed comments," pages and pages of them: a teacher willing to pour her heart and soul into another's struggle to create a fictional world. "She taught me so much in those letters," he kept saying--in fact, she spotted his great talent, his great message, too, before anyone else, perhaps, certainly the editors who first saw his writing and turned it down. This generosity of hers deserves mention, because the temptation these days for many of us is to see warts everywhere (in the convenient hindsight of history), to fault Caroline Gordon for failure to stand up for this or that cause, to immerse herself in a life of, say, politics and social struggle rather than literature.

It is all too easy, as well, for some of us now, with psychoanalysis and psychiatry as a secular religion, to arraign both Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate (and many of their writer friends) before that high court of clinical judgment that slaps labels taken from the language of psychopathology on anyone and everyone. No doubt both Tates were half out of their minds at times. She had a terrible temper, and experienced fits of depression. She drank too much. He was also a heavy drinker, maybe an alcoholic; and he could be smug, cold, devious, adulterous. Still, they were two earnestly dedicated writers who had a lot to say, who lived almost all their lives in near poverty, and who had a decent concern not only for themselves, but for many others.

I was upset, reproving as I read parts of this book--particularly so when I read of the way these two took care of their daughter (gave her over, often, to others for her upbringing). Somehow, though, that daughter (and many others, too) got so very much from this idiosyncratic, gifted couple, at times wildly out of control, constantly on the move, yet morally awake and self-scrutinizing. Caroline Gordon, in particular, with her willingness at all times to teach and preach, to be the patient, devoted reader and adviser, proves herself worthy, indeed, of the warm gratitude friends such as Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy constantly offered her-directly, or when speaking of her to others.