Ann Waldron

Available in paperback from the University of Tennessee Press

Caroline Gordon, Kentucky born and classically educated, has until now been the most neglected figure of the southern literary renaissance. Although she excelled as a critic and wrote at least six good novels, she was overshadowed by famous colleagues. Chief among these was her husband of thirty-six years, the poet and critic Allen Tate.

Gordon and Tate, dedicated to nurturing good writing, generously supported some of the nation's finest talents, including Hart Crane, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Andrew Lytle, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Scott, Robert Lowell, and Walker Percy. Gordon had the dubious honor of cooking and cleaning for virtually every American literary figure of that time--she insisted on doing it, often at the expense of being able to revise and polish her manuscripts to her satisfaction.

Compassionate and unusually thorough, Ann Waldron's biography of Caroline Gordon portrays a complex individual, the artist and the woman, with a fierce temper, a love of gardening, and a passion for two things: fiction and Allen Tate, whom she married twice--and divorced twice. Gordon died in Mexico in 1981. Inscribed on her tombstone in San Cristobal are the words of Jacques Maritain: "It is for Adam to interpret the voices which Eve hears."

From Library Journal:
This unassuming, well-written biography of that often neglected ``Agrarian,'' Allen Tate's wife, yields unexpected dividends. Not only a distinguished fiction-writer and critic in her own right, on the basis of this engrossing portrait, she was a genuinely interesting woman. For some 30 years she was almost the nurturing center of that loose group of Southern writers and Catholic converts who figure largely in our literary history. A workaholic, superbly competent, and generous of her time and energy to a fault, she seems to have embraced wholly the ideal of submissive womanhood and mercilessly chastised herself for her failures to live up to it. Waldron has made extensive use of her letters and used them tellingly to suggest the passionate whiplash of her flawed but admirable personality. Earl Rovit, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY

From Doris Betts - The New York Times Book Review:
This biography sometimes seems to cross a crowded guest book with a busy travel itinerary. . . . Although Gordon always had a writing room in each of the many houses in which {she and her huband Allen Tate} lived and entertained,a life of her own has proved difficult for Ann Waldron to extract from the general bookish racket surrounding it. . . . One glimpses her through the frenetic crowd: an inconsistent mother; an animal lover; an enthusiastic gardener and cook; an adoring but jealous wife who throws chinaware; an overworked housewife who nonetheless takes up intense hobbies like mushroom hunting, painting, Southern history; a disciplined writer despite the multitudes underfoot. The effect is to make the biography say about Gordon's life what Ann Waldron finally says about Gordon's fiction: 'It flows along over many small climaxes; there is no big waterfall. There is no tension.'

From Choice:
Fugitive/Agrarians, from Robert Penn Warren to John Peale Bishop, ralliedat {the Tates'} doorstep; T.S. Eliot, John Berryman, Richard Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway passed through their circle; Edmund Wilson, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford, Malcom Cowley, and Mark Van Doren were frequent house-guests. . . . Though Waldron's journalistic narration at first seems bogged down in trivia, what eventually emerges is a vivid portrait not just of Caroline, but Allen, too. . . . Weaker incritical analysis than . . . Rose Ann C. Fraistat's Caroline Gordon as Novelist and Woman of Letters {BRD 1985}, Waldron nevertheless corrects numerous misconceptions and errors in previous studies and creates an interpretive contextfor the one published collection of Gordon letters (The Southern Mandarins, ed. by Sally Wood).

From Margaret R. Ellsberg - America:
In 1947, at the age of 52, Caroline {Gordon} became a Catholic. Althoughthis ought to be a turning point in the story of her life, her biographer recounts her conversion as yet another of Caroline's recurrent fanatical interests--like mushroom hunting or water colors. . . . Waldron, a former newspaper reporter, has produced a prodigy of research that includes such facts as which days the Tates had the flu . . . and what props they used for charades. . . . It is a sort of avant-garde biography, written utterly without introspection oranalysis. The character of Caroline Gordon herself, mostly through her copiously cited letters, gives the narrative all of its color. But this would suitCaroline Gordon's own ars poetica quite well. One of her characters, in The Strange Children {BRD 1951}, says 'you (can) sometimes shut off an intelligence to great effect.' Caroline shut off her own fierce and fabulous intelligence to achieve a total receptivity to life and to art and eventually to God.