WALLACE STEVENS

Literary Uves General Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English

Lancaster University

Th is series offers stimula ting accounts of the literary careers of the most admired and influential English-language authors. Volumes

follow the outline of the writers' working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which

shaped their writing.

Published titles

Morris Beja JAMES JOYCE

Cedric C. Brown JOHN MILTON

Peler Davison GEORGE ORWELL

Richard Dutton WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Ian Fergus JANE AUSTEN

James Gibson THOMAS HARDY

Kenneth Graham HENRY JAMES

Awl Hammond JOHN DRYDEN

W. David Kay BEN JONSON

Mary tago E. M. FORSTER

C/in/on Machal//! MATTHEW ARNOLD

Alasdair D. F Macrae W. B. YEATS

Joseph McMinn JONATHAN SWIFT

Kerry M cSweeney GEORGE ELIOT

John Mepham VIRGINIA WOOLF

Miclwel O'Neill PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Leonee Ormond ALFRED TENNYSON

Harold Pagliafo HENRY FlELDING

George Parfitt JOHNOONNE

Gerald Roberts GERARD MANLEY HOPKlNS

Felicity Rosslyn ALEXANDER POPE

Tony Sharpe r S. EUOT

Tony Sharpe WALLACE STEVENS

Grahame Smitil CHARLES DICKENS

Janice Farrar Thaddeus FRANCES BURNEY

Gary Waller EDMUND SPENSER

Linda Wagner-Martin SYLVIA PLATH

Cedric Watts JOSEPH CONRAD

John Williams MARY SHELLEY

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitlmm CHARLOTTE AND EMILY

BRONTE

John Worthen D. H. LAWRENCE

David Wykl.'S EVELYN WAUGH

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Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG2J 6XS, England

Wallace Stevens A Literary Life

Tony S harpe Smior Lecturer and

fIend of Department of English Lancaster U'liversily

© Tony Sharpe 2000

All rights reserved. No reproduction. copy or transmi'ision of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragruph of this publication muy be reproduced. copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988. or under the terms of any licem:e permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. 90 Tottenham Coun Road. London WI P 9HE.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has assened his right 10 be identified as the author of this work in accord,Jnce with the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills. Basingslokc. Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

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Published in the United Slates of America by ST. MARTlN'S PRESS. INC.. Scholarly imd Reference Division 175 Firth Avenue. :-.lew York . N.Y. 100 10

ISBN 978-0-312-22069-3

ISBN 978-0-333-65031-8 ISBN 978-0-230-59631-3 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/9780230596313

For Eva and Ned Two sure answerers

Here lu rks an immense homage to t he general privilege o f the a rtis t, to that constructive, that creative passion, ... the exercise of \vhich finds so many an occasion for appearing to him the highest of human fortunes, the rarest boon of the gods. He values it, all sublimely and perhaps a little fatuously, for itself ­as the extension, great beyond all others, of experience and of consciousness.

(Henry James, from his preface to Tile American)

. "Oh-ho" dit-il en P o rtuguais, ti ne la ngue qu'il pariait tres bien.' (Marcel Duchamp's remark, as repo rted b y Walter Arensberg to Wallace Stevens)

There are th ings in a man besides his rcason. Come home, wind, he kept crying and crying.

(from the poem 'Pieces' )

Contents

Prefnce

List of Abbrroiations

Ackl10wledgemellts

1 The Metier of Nothing ness

2 Starting with Nothing

3 Strict Arrangements of Emptiness

4 1914-23: Accen ts o f Deviation

5 1923-37: from the Edge to the Centre

6 1937-47: Hel ping People Live their Uves

7 1947-55: Pr iva te Man as Public Figure

Not~'S

Select Bibliography

Illdex

vu

V 111

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xi ii

1

19

52

81

111

147

177

199

207

209

Preface On holiday in Connecticut last sununer, one hot afternoon I paid a vis it to Wallace Stevens's former ho use on Westerly Te rrace, Hartford, and to Elizabeth Park nearby. The imposing residence (now owned by a local church and not open to the public) is situated on a quiet street o f similarly s tockbrokcri sh dwell ings that mu st, when Stevens moved there in 1932, have identified their occupants as Americans who had 'made it'. There is nothing to declare the house's link with the pOC't, and as I stood in the (possibly uncharacteristic) sunshin e, with my eve r- so-slightl y-be mused family and O Uf

escorting American fri ends, the place's anonymity struck me as both poignant and appropriate. So it was, again, on my discovering how relatively unremarkable Elizabeth Park is: sma ller and less distinctive than 1 had supposed . The plaqueless house and the modest park in wh ich he had so regularly wal ked were eloquent, in their omission of precisely that factor of the extraord inary his poetry can evoke, even by denoting its absence. And indeed, I reflected as I sat in the rustic arbour amid the park's rose-beds, Stevens had already imagined his own absence from these places (see 'Vacancy in the Park', for example), and ha d foreseen how little of what mattered to him in them mig ht be recoverable by others (see "A Postca rd from the Volcano'): in his writing, the necessary angel is the one tha t has just vanished, and his poems indicate the osci llating threshold between plenihlde and vacancy.

[n his essay on MarvelL T.s. Eliot asserts that the grea t and peren n ial task o f criticism is to bring the poet back to li fe ; ye t imagining Stevens, that exponent of American loneliness, can seem like conducting a conti nual conversation with a silent man. It was the spirit that I sought, on my naively archaic pilgrimage to Hartford, but what perhaps I sensed was wha t he ca lled the ' literate despair' of a spirit s torming in blank walls, whose poems were rooted in a li fe unlived: which nevertheless became an exaltation of that life, both joc u lar an d uncomp rom ising. The jubilant weather and th e prosperous neighbourhood, together with my awareness of Stevens's not-being-there, were a minor enactment of the connection, in his poetry, of opu lence with abse nce: a plain se nse o f things he expressed in a contestingly extravagant language. In Noles toward a S1Ipreme Fietioll, he coi ned the phrase "sensible ecstasy' , which is an oxymoron that br ings to birt h a combina to ry third thin g : in

vm

Prefnce

microcosm of the way he felt poems served to mediate between the worlds of common sense and imaginative transfigu ration.

[ have wanted to wri te about Stevens, because his poet ry has been a significant influence on the way I think about literature, for over twenty yea rs; [ found his presence asserting itself when I was addressing the work of other writers. To some extent, then, th is is a (not uncritical) personal statement, deriving from my particu la r view of the man and his work, that is itself a consequence of what he would have called my own peculiar plot. Im plici t in m y approach is that I am a British cri tic beholding an American poet, a nd my reading both of the li fe and w riting is on occas ions adve rsa rial: for wha t wri ter of importance docs not at times in fu riate the reader? The kind of book this is has been further shaped by the requirements of the series and this subjec t. The exploration o f a writer' s 'literary li fe' need not in p rinciple involve a large a mount of literary criticism as such, since the emphasis fa lls more on biography and the shaping of a ca reer in letters; but it is obvious that our interest in the life or igina tes in a prior engagement w ith the art. Stevcns·s development as a w riter is in itself interesting; but I have supposed that, in addition to learni ng what happened, any reader will also wish to see how this Clffects our read ing o f the poetry: the morc so, as the poetry in question is generally cons idered to be di ff icu lt. Throug h out thi s st udy, therdore, I try to suggest ways in which certain poems can be read in the con text of my general exposition - w ithout in any way pretend ing tha t such a reading exhausts their interpre ta ti ve possibilities.

For a long time, Stevens remained an invisible poet, high and aloof; now we hear more about the man than the mandarin, and are encouraged to attend to the contex ts in which h is poetry ca me in to be ing. His can appear to have been an eminently sensib le ecstasy, with the insurance man safely bankro ll ing the poet; yet fo r a [1 the reassuringness o f his bourgeois ex terior, I think much of Stevens"s continuing significance lies in the inherent extremism of his belief in the 'precious scope" of poetry; a belief whose stature derives from the depth and exten t of his commitmen t to it: as he declared to Henry Church in 1943, 'The be li ef in poe try is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing' (I- 446). In part, I read his life as a dia logue between the requ irements of sense and those of ecstasy, wi th h is s uccessive books as stages in the deba te. ] read it, also, as a con tinued awareness of fathers and fatherhood, with the particular

x Preface

complication s wrought by h is A m e r ica n ness; and a s a s imu lta neous compliance with and revolt against convention, in both life and writing.

When [ completed m y docto rate on Stevens in 1978, Holly Stevens's editions of her father 's letters and journal, together with fragmen ta ry reminiscences by her and some others, represented th e sum of what was b iog r aphically ava ilable, not g reat ly augmented by S.F. Morse's 1970 s tudy. Since then the situation ha s been transformed, chiefly by the labours of Peter Bra:£cau, Milton Bates, Joan Richardson and A lan Filrei s, who in their various ways have broug ht into the open a considerable body of unknown or previously unpubl ished material rela ting to Stevens's life. My debt to thei r researches is expl ici t in what fo llows; but the exhaustiveness of detai l availab le in those studies enables me to proceed more selectively, in offering an interpretative narrative of Stevens"s literary life, w hich I hope wi ll enable a reader to assess the significance of his contribution to twentieth-century poetry, as well as to engage w ith indi vidual poems more knowledgeably and enjoyably.

I p ay attention to the formative years before he published much , and to the domestic circumstances in w hi ch h is pu~ms were produced, as we ll as to the cultura l an d hi s torica l background of hi s publ ish ing career. Although the seq uence of chapters is largely chronologica l, on occasions I refer forward to poems written outside the period under discussion, w here this mi ght be helpful; cer tain poems, s uch as 'Ea rth y A necdote', 'Anecdo te of the Jar ' , o r "The Snow Man ', I all ude to quite frequently, since they see m to me to offer useful triangulation points from which t o map Stevens"s poetic te rrain. On occasions I a llude to a phrase from a poem not di rec tly under discussion; and when I thi nk it wou ld vex a reader not to be able to locate this, 1 give a page reference; but so metimes these echoes are part of the ordinary fu n of wri t ing and reading. Similarly, I hope in my e ndnotes and bibliogra phy to prov id e the rea d e r wit h every thing necessary to establi sh m y sources and extend the contexts of my a rgumen t; but I have not g iven exact references for quotations from canonical nineteenth-century wri ters such as Emerson or Hawthome, w hi ch I assume to be easily tra ceable in a vari e ty of so urces. My bibl iog r aphy is also intende d realistically to indica te useful further read ing, and by no mea ns exha usts whall have myself read or w hat is of va lue in the fi eld.

Preface xi

Although th is book has been new-written, my manifold debts g o bac k a long way: to m y research superviso rs a t Cambridge, to undergrad uates and resea rch s tudents at Lancaster I have myself superv ised, and doctoral candidates at other universities whose di sserta tions I have examined; in th eir va riou s ways a ll ha ve st imu lated me in my own co nceptions. My ch ief d e bt is to La ncaster University, which granted me stud y leave to write the book as well as helping with the unexpectedly high US permissions fees, and to those American scholars who have done so much to raise the level of writing about Stevens in recent years. The General Editor, Richa rd Dutton, offered helpful comments, as did my wife Jane; who saw that I was moved by seeing Stevens's house, and ma y, now, see more dearly why.

Note Those unable to visit Hartford in person call pay a virtua l visi l to Stevens's haunts in the city on the website run by the Hartford Friends of Wallace Steven s (h ttp: //www .weslcyan. edu / wstevens/stevens.html ). Here there is an illustra ted 'walk ' from his office to his house (pictured in snow, and described as comfortable but modest for a senior execu ti ve), as we ll a s photographs of his grave, and links to other sites. The city of his p rOlo nged re sidence does n o t wholly neglec t h is memory, the refore. the recent appearance of a Stevens volu me (edited by Frank Kermod e and Joan Ri chardson) in the 'Library of America' series seems to indicate the permanence of h is literary sta nding.

List of Abbreviations I have used the following system of abbreviation to give references fo r Stevens's writing in the running text. Fuller details may be found in the I3ibJiography.

CP: Collected POC11lS L: Letters of Wallace Stevells NA: The Necessary Angel OP1: Op1lS POSt/lIII1101IS (first edition) OP2: Opus Posthulllolis (second edition) Palm : The Palm at tile End of tile Mind SP; SOllvel1irs al1d Prophecies

WSJ: Wallace Stevens 1011 mal

xii

Acknowledgements Material has been quoted from the fo llowing copyright sources:

From Letters of Wallace $fevCIIs by Wallace Stevens, cd. Holl y Stevens Copyright © 1966 by Holly Stevens. Repri nted by perm ission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd .

From OPIIS Posthun/olls by Wallace Stevens, ed. Samuel French Morse Copyright © 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd.

From SouVI.'llirs alld Prophecies: tile Youl1g Wallace Stevens by Holly Stevens Copyright © 1966, 1976 by Holly Stevens. Reprinted by peml ission of Alfred A. Knopf inc.

From Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens Copyright © 1954 by Wa llace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd.

xi ii