When Caroline Gordon’s finest novel, Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), was republished nine years ago, it was as part of a “Lost American Fiction Series” brought out by Southern Illinois University Press. That about captures the status of the novelist Flannery O’Connor identified in her letters as “the lady who has taught me so much about writing.” Caroline Gordon (1895-19 81) was the wife of Allen Tate, the mentor of Flannery O’Connor, and the protégée of Ford Madox Ford. Her editor at Scribner’s was Max Perkins. One of her biggest fans was William Faulkner (and she was an early and perspicacious booster of Faulkner’s). Surrounded by the famous and soon-to-be-famous, Gordon was as serious about the craft of fiction as any writer of her generation, producing nine novels, three short-story collections, two works of criticism, and, with assistance from Tate, an influential textbook/anthology entitled The House of Fiction. Yet she was relatively obscure in her lifetime, and is more so today.

A few Caroline Gordon novels sold moderately well; the rest hardly made a ripple. The one she and Scribner’s thought had the greatest chance of becoming a bestseller was a Civil War novel, None Shall Look Back, which came out in 1937 and promptly drowned in the wake of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Gone With the Wind. Scarlett O’Hara was “a Civil War Becky Sharp, and Lord how they’re gobbling it up,” Gordon wrote. “They say it took [Mitchell] ten years to write that novel. Why couldn’t it have taken her twelve ?” Oh, well. Katherine Anne Porter raved about None Shall Look Back in the pages of The New Republic and John Crowe Ransom sent Gordon a personal letter calling her “a Great Artist” for having written it.

Bad luck was one reason why an occasionally masterful fiction writer never got her due. Then, too, Gordon was often hard to read. So concerned was she with formal technique that several of her works lacked vivid characters and clear plotting. She preached the Jamesian Central Intelligence throughout her career as a writer and teacher, but experimented as well with the full range of narrative points of view (all of them diagrammed by Gordon/Tate with New Critical punctiliousness in The House of Fiction).

Gordon is not so ignored that scholars have not produced the occasional book or monograph about her work. And a boomlet of interest seems to have occurred lately, as evidenced by two new biographies, Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance by Ann Waldron and Caroline Gordon: A Biography by Veronica A. Makowsky. Waldron, a journalist, editor, and writer of children’s fiction, has produced a long, dense account that is organized diary-fashion, in strictly chronological chunks. Makowsky’s much slimmer work covers a lot of the same ground, but is a more ambitious attempt to illumine the relationship between Gordon’s works and her life.

Close Connections is less than a full-bodied biography; Waldron hazards little analysis or judgment of the facts she is reciting. Nevertheless, her book presents such a thorough catalogue of the facts that it somehow adds up to a full picture of Caroline Gordon, a fiercely assertive distaff member of the tribe of Southern writers known consecutively as the Fugitives, the Agrarians, and, from the 1940s on, the New Critics.

As Waldron explains, the Agrarian credo—that capitalism was ruining the “carefully structured world” of the South— seeped into Gordon’s early work. Ransom, Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others wanted the Old South of small, independent farms to be revived. But though they were Southerners, Tate and Gordon were also Jazz Age bohemians who spent most of the early years of their marriage in Greenwich Village and the Paris of the Lost Generation, where they befriended Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and the rest. Gordon stated the case in her characteristically unflinching way in one of her letters: “Alien and John Ransom and Don Davidson [a poet and founding member of the Fugitives] would make damn poor field workers .... They’ve formulated the doctrine. Somebody else will have to put it into practice.” The Tates did move back to Dixie after Paris, but doing so required the help of Tate’s brother Ben, a Cincinnati coal dealer, who purchased an idyllic rural estate for them in Clarksville, Tennessee (they named it Benfolly, after him). “Industrialism, which Allen fought,” writes Waldron, “had made Ben’s fortune and financed their return to lead an Agrarian life in the South.”

Gordon did have an innate love of the soil (Tate, for his part, couldnt stand it), and she was by all accounts as vigorous in the garden as she was in argument with the Agrarians and sundry other figures (Dorothy Day, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford) who showed up to take advantage of the Tates’ portable “Southern hospitality.” But the soil kept shifting as these gypsy-scholar intellectuals exchanged Clarksville for Princeton, Memphis, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., Bloomington (Indiana), Chicago, and a dozen other places. Waldron’s book details Gordon’s endless search for yet another house with “just the touch of ruin about it that makes a place attractive to me,” a temporary abode where she could write fiction, throw parties, cultivate a patch of earth, and raise their daughter, Nancy (though the girl was often farmed out to Gordon’s mother, which Gordon tried to justify to her friends, sounding as if she felt very guilty about it).

Literary production was possible despite this vagabond existence because, as Waldron tells us, wherever she was, Gordon travelled back in her imagination to her childhood home of Merry Mont, on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. This was the home of her mother’s family—the proud, quirky, and inbred Meriwethers. Many of Gordon’s stories and novels concern the Fayerlee clan of “Merry Point,” such as the story “The Petrified Woman,” which first appeared in Mademoiselle in 1947. In that story the Fayerlees assemble for their yearly gathering at Arthur’s Cave—a fictionalized version of real reunions at Dunbar Cave, where, writes Waldron, “Meriwethers ‘of the name and of the blood’ came back to the Old Neighborhood to breathe the sacred air.” The Meriwethers called themselves “the Connection,” which is one of the meanings of Waldron’s title, Close Connections. The other refers to the various literary coteries the Tates belonged to.

In “The Petrified Woman,” dissolute Cousin Tom Fayerlee humiliates his wife, Eleanor, in front of the impressionable young narrator, Sally Fayerlee. The story contains a cameo appearance by an important non-Fayerlee. “My father is not connected. He is Professor Aleck Maury and he had a boys school in Gloversville then,” announces the narrator. “My father being no kin to us, they always call me and my brother Sally Maury and Frank Maury, instead of plain Sally and Frank the way they would if our blood was pure.” Aleck Maury was not expected to show up at his in-laws’ reunion, Sally says, relating her father’s usual comment: “‘All those mediocre people, getting together to congratulate themselves on their mediocrity! I ain’t going a step.’ But I reckon he didn’t want to stay home by himself and, besides, he likes to watch them making fools of themselves.”

Caroline Gordon’s father—James Maury Morris Gordon—was, like Aleck Maury, a Virginian among Kentuckians, an interloper among “the Connection,” and a schoolteacher who fell into that line of work because he had had a classical education that qualified him for it and because teaching allowed him to spend most of his time pursuing his greatest pleasures: hunting and, in his less agile old age, fishing. Aleck Maury’s fox hunting, bird shooting, and fly fishing are described in loving and well-researched detail in several of the short stories, such as “Old Red” (which first appeared in The Criterion in 1933), where Maury makes a reluctant visit to stay with his daughter and son-in-law. As he reminisces about Old Red, the fox he spent his youth riding after but never catching, Aleck Maury reflects on his temporary captivity at the familial hearth, and on how well balanced he is. Maury feels fortunate not to have been afflicted with the family disease, cacoethes scribendi (the bad habit of writing), like his father who had spouted Shakespeare and original poetry at the dinner table. “He, Aleck Maury, had been lucky to be born in the generation he had. He had escaped that at least. A few translations from Heine in his courting days, a few fragments from the Greek; but no, he had kept clear of that on the whole.”

The peculiarly Southern amalgam of scholar and outdoorsman—with his simultaneous love of learning and aw-shucks depreciation of it—is on full display in the novel Aleck Maury, Sportsman. We follow Maury from his fox-chasing, Cicero-translating youth, as he sojourns out West on an engineering project, returns home to marry one of the students he tutors, a member of the stuck-up Fayerlee family, and follows his thirst for the “likeliest” fields and streams, relocating his wife and two children to places that afford good sport and a decent teaching job. Gordon’s skill in this novel is in showing how a man who is on more intimate terms with his hunting dog, Gyges (so named because he could disappear at will, like the mythical king), than with his own children could be a good family man in his fashion. Gordon’s restrained style of writing is at its most affecting when she describes the death of the Maurys’ teenaged son and its subtly devastating effect on Aleck’s wife and their marriage.

Aleck Maury, Sportsman is also interesting because one section of it (published in 1945 as the short story “The Burning Eyes”) offers Gordon’s version of Huck Finn and Jim, in the form of young Aleck and Rafe. Rafe, the Negro who initiates Aleck into the mysteries of hunting, is probably the most successfully drawn black character in Gordon’s fiction. His integrity emerges naturally from his actions; it is completely unforced. The story “The Enemies” (1938), in which all of the characters are black, seems awkwardly melodramatic in this regard: a man is executed for murdering a young woman, and we see the reaction to the execution among her loved ones, one of whom is her grieving lover—he slits his own throat at the end. Other stories confine themselves to the white characters’ view of blacks, which could be described as a kind of amused condescension.

Gordon’s own view of race relations is difficult to assess. One comment included by Waldron is that of a New York City cook employed by Mark Van Doren’s wife: the cook said Gordon was the only person who treated her as an equal. At the very least, one can say that Gordon was on to the problem of Northern moralism. She got it down quite accurately in the story “The Forest of the South” (1944), in which a Union officer is forced to realize that his do-gooder instincts can make no headway in the murky “forest” of the Confederacy he has entered as a conqueror.

Veronica Makowsky, in her own biography of Caroline Gordon, is perceptive about Gordon’s choices when it came to representing black characters, maintaining that “The Enemies” is the only story in Gordon’s first collection not told by a first-person narrator or central consciousness because the author realized her own limitations. “Unlike Faulkner,” Makowsky writes, “Caroline did not attempt to imagine the black experience from the inside.” Makowsky’s book is not without its flashes of critical insight. Unfortunately, these are buried in a welter of psychologizing. One would expect some of that with an author as autobiographical as Gordon was, but Caroline Gordon just plain goes overboard.

If Waldron tends to be slavishly reporto-rial (she dutifully describes the floor plan of every house the Tates lived in, deferring, no doubt, to the wealth of such information in Gordon’s letters), Makowsky, assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University, errs in the other direction. Caroline Gordon is chock-full of impressions, hunches, and literary theorizing, but of an intellectually expedient kind. For all that she treats Gordon’s fiction as a direct psychic map, Makowsky’s capricious flitting from the life to the work and back again fails to produce a thorough job of either literary criticism or headshrinking. The items one would expect to be of interest to a psychobiographer are often treated cursorily or omitted. Having been told early on, for example, that Gordon believed her mother did not love her and that this affected Gordon’s character deeply, the reader comes across the mother’s death on page eighty-three, conveyed in a half-sentence sandwiched between Gordon getting drunk with Hart Crane and Gordon letting her housework get in the way of her vocation. And, curiously, Makowsky downplays a major feature of the marital discord between Gordon and Tate. She records only the first infidelity of Tate’s—whereas Waldron goes into all of what is known or surmised of the poet’s lifelong philandering.

Makowsky’s treatment of “The Petrified Woman” is fairly representative. “In autobiographical terms,” she begins, “a simplistic interpretation of The Petrified Woman would emphasize the {look-where-youd-be-without-me message that Caroline might be sending to Allen.” Despite the (disingenuous) note of apology, what Makowsky goes on to say is not more profound. The year before this 1947 storY was written, Gordon and Tate had divorced and remarried in the space of three months, only to separate again. (They would divorce for good in 1959, and Tate would marry another woman, Isabella McCormick, a few days later.) Therefore, continues Makowsky, Gordon’s writing “The Petrified Woman” was a way of “performing a deeper self-exploration .... Like Sally [the story’s narrator], Caroline was frightened by what she was and so demanded of Allen constant reassurances to assuage her insecurity. Like Eleanor [the wife], Caroline was seeking a way of purifying and renewing her life, and she believed she had found it at Robber Rocks during that summer of 1947.” The Robber Rocks reference is to Gordon’s decision to convert to Catholicism, a decision one is hard put to relate to the character of Eleanor in the story.

Tate said that what drove him to adultery was Gordon’s “going Meriwether,” retreating into a mythical Meriwether world and leaving him behind. If so—and apparently the mercurial Tate often gave different explanations for his actions to different people—it was a cruel irony that the source of Gordon’s inspiration was the same thing that drove from her the man she idolized (and a man who in fact had great respect for her writing). One could certainly believe that, as Gordon grew more and more bitter, she was tempted to rehearse the Tates’ conflicts in a roman à clef like The Malefactors (1956) and to hint therein at a reconciliation unachievable in real life. But one should always keep in mind, as Flannery OConnor reminded “A.,” her famously unnamed correspondent, that well-wrought fiction adds up to more than a demonstration of personality. As O’Connor put it: “What her [Caroline Gordon’s] books say to you about their [the Tates’] relationship may be what is most fundamental to it, but is not what you can judge it by, is not what God judges it by, is not what it is, finally.”

The Malefactors involves a Catholic lay movement modeled on the Catholic Workers of Dorothy Day, whom the Tates had known since their days in Greenwich Village and who influenced both of them in their decisions to convert to Catholicism. (Day was apparently so put off by some of the activities of “her” character, Catherine Pollard, that she prevailed upon Gordon not to dedicate The Malefactors to her, and upon Gordon’s publisher, by then Harcourt Brace, to delete certain parts about blasphemous worship rites.)

Neither Makowsky nor Waldron treats Gordon’s conversion as a terribly spiritual act. For Waldron it is but the latest of Gordon’s obsessional pastimes, after painting and mycology, and for Makowsky it happened because Gordon was on the rebound from marital strife. There may be a grain of truth in the latter assertion. But it also true that, as Makowsky mentions, Gordon believed it was natural for her to be a Catholic because she came to sense a connection between the artist as creator and God as Creator. This Gordon gleaned from the teachings of Jacques Maritain, who was also a great influence on Flannery O’Connor.

Gordon emphasized Maritain’s teaching about the subordinate place of women. This was a ratification, both biographies suggest, of what Gordon had always felt—that men were inherently more competent, more suited to action, than women. “Successful male novelists always get rid of the partner of their lean days as soon as they hit the top,” she wrote witheringly to Josephine Herbst upon the latter’s divorce. Yet if they were morally inferior cads, male novelists (and poets) were better able to make novels and poems than women were, or so Gordon believed. She called herself a “freak” for doing the “unsexing” work of fiction writing, and quoted Dr. Johnson to the effect that a woman at intellectual labor is always a dog walking on its hind legs.

It may be as Makowsky says, when she shakes her head over “this intelligent, spirited, even feisty woman [who] ultimately felt she had to accept the verdict of her male-dominated culture and religion.” Or it may be that Gordon’s “submission to patriarchal values” made her life more valiant than pitiful. Her will to press on, in defiance of her firm conviction of feminine limitations, is as admirable as it is paradoxical.

Waldron ends her book with the inscription Gordon chose for her tombstone, Jacques Maritain’s phrase, “It is for Adam to interpret the voices which Eve hears.” Again, though Gordon obviously set great store by the thought, whether she really lived it seems doubtful. Gordon did plenty of interpreting as a highly dedicated teacher of creative writing, in posts that took her, as usual, all around the country, to such schools as Columbia and the University of Dallas. She was apparently very tough on her students, and not universally liked by them. She did not retire from teaching until 1978, when she was eighty-three years old. Her novel writing— itself a form of interpreting the world—went on until her mid-seventies, driven, one supposes, by that cacoethes scribendi which was supposed to afflict every other generation. Woman or not, it was her blood right.