The Underground Stream

...He was also a heavy drinker, maybe an alcoholic...

...They both came from respectable Protestant families...

...both lived bohemian Manhattan lives...

...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...

...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...

...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 psy-chopathology on anyone and everyone...

...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 drank too much...

...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...

...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...

...She and Allen Tate married because she was pregnant...

...Robert Coles husband certainly included...

...Much of Gordon's writing called upon the tensions and vicissitudes of her marriage...

...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...

...She was a novelist whose reporto-rial eyes and ears were always at work...

...She had a terrible temper, and experienced fits of depression...

...I had heard of her years ago from two people who knew her, admired her- Dorothy Day and Walker Percy...

...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...

...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...

...Dorothy Day and Caroline Gordon were, actually, very much alike in certain respects...

...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...

...and he could be smug, cold, devious, adulterous...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Neither of the Tates shared her kind of social and political passion...

...both converted to Catholicism...

...Below the surface of this cultural conservative, however, other forces and dispositions were at work (hence this book's title...

...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...

...She also worked her friend Dorothy Day into a novel, much to Day's displeasure...

...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...

...She was a passionate writer of letters, often sent to editors, reviewers, poets, and fellow novelists and short-story writers...

...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...

...both became journalists, then writers of fiction...

...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 THE UNDERGROUND STREAM The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon Nancylee Novell Jonza University of Georgia Press, $34.95,464 pp...

...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...

...This biographer, a writer of clear, evocative prose, probes that relatively unknown side of Gordon's life-especially her early years as an apprentice journalist in Chattanooga...

...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...

...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...

...There she encountered the obstacles women had to endure at a time in this nation's history when they couldn't even vote...

...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 came to the Tates for dinners, but also to stay for a day, or weeks...

...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 smalltown life, the yeomanry, as alternatives to the increasing shift toward urban experience and culture that took place all through the twentieth century...

...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.ing of her to others...

...and both thereupon became wedded to the church's conservative views on moral issues...

...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 taught classes on many college campuses, lectured at still more of them...

...No doubt both Tates were half out of their minds at times...