Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life PDF
Preview Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life
Wallace Stevens A Literary Life Tony Sharpe WALLACE STEVENS Literary Uves General Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English Lancaster University This series offers stimulating 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 Mary tago JAMES JOYCE E. M. FORSTER Cedric C. Brown C/in/on Machal//! JOHN MILTON MATTHEW ARNOLD Peler Davison Alasdair D. F Macrae GEORGE ORWELL W. B. YEATS Richard Dutton Joseph McMinn WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE JONATHAN SWIFT Ian Fergus Kerry McSweeney JANE AUSTEN GEORGE ELIOT James Gibson John Mepham THOMAS HARDY VIRGINIA WOOLF Kenneth Graham Miclwel O'Neill HENRY JAMES PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Awl Hammond Leonee Ormond JOHN DRYDEN ALFRED TENNYSON W. David Kay Harold Pagliafo BEN JONSON HENRY FlELDING George Parfitt Linda Wagner-Martin JOHNOONNE SYLVIA PLATH Gerald Roberts Cedric Watts GERARD MANLEY HOPKlNS JOSEPH CONRAD Felicity Rosslyn John Williams ALEXANDER POPE MARY SHELLEY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Tony Sharpe r S. EUOT Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitlmm CHARLOTTE AND EMILY Tony Sharpe BRONTE WALLACE STEVENS John Worthen Grahame Smitil D. H. LAWRENCE CHARLES DICKENS David Wykl.'S Janice Farrar Thaddeus EVELYN WAUGH FRANCES BURNEY Gary Waller EDMUND SPENSER Literary Lives Series Standing Order ISBN 97B-O-333-71486-7 (ou/side North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. I'h::ase contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your MOll' and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. 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 ISBN 978-0-333-65031-8 ISBN 978-0-230-59631-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230596313 A c(lI<llogue record for this book is aV;lilable from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and ~ustained f,or est sources. 10 9 R 7 6 5 4 3 1 09 OR 07 06 OS 04 OJ 02 01 00 Published in the United Slates of America by ST. MARTlN'S PRESS. INC.. Scholarly imd Reference Division 175 Firth Avenue. :-.lew York. N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-22069-3 For Eva and Ned Two sure answerers Here lurks an immense homage to the general privilege of the artist, 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 Portuguais, tine langue qu'il pariait tres bien.' (Marcel Duchamp's remark, as reported b y Walter Arensberg to Wallace Stevens) There are things in a man besides his rcason. Come home, wind, he kept crying and crying. (from the poem 'Pieces') Contents Prefnce V111 List of Abbrroiations xii Ackl10wledgemellts xiii 1 The Metier of Nothingness 1 2 Starting with Nothing 19 3 Strict Arrangements of Emptiness 52 4 1914-23: Accents o f Deviation 81 5 1923-37: from the Edge to the Centre 111 6 1937-47: Helping People Live their Uves 147 7 1947-55: Private Man as Public Figure 177 Not~'S 199 Select Bibliography 207 Illdex 209 vu Preface On holiday in Connecticut last sununer, one hot afternoon I paid a visit to Wallace Stevens's former house on Westerly Terrace, Hartford, and to Elizabeth Park nearby. The imposing residence (now owned by a olcal church and not open to the public) is situated on a quiet street of similarly s tockbrokcrish dwellings that must, 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) sunshine, with my ever-so-slightly-bemused family and OUf escorting American friends, the place's anonymity struck me as both poignant and appropriate. So it was, again, on my discovering how relatively unremarkable Elizabeth Park is: smaller and less distinctive than 1 had supposed. The plaqueless house and the modest park in which he had so regularly walked were eloquent, in their omission of precisely that factor of the extraordinary 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 had foreseen how little of what mattered to him in them might be recoverable by others (see "A Postcard from the Volcano'): in his writing, the necessary angel is the one that has just vanished, and his poems indicate the oscillating threshold between plenihlde and vacancy. [n his essay on MarvelL T.s. Eliot asserts that the great and perennial task of criticism is to bring the poet back to life; yet imagining Stevens, that exponent of American olneliness, can seem like conducting a continual 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 what he called the 'literate despair' of a spirit storming in blank walls, whose poems were rooted in a life unlived: which nevertheless became an exaltation of that life, both jocular and uncompromising. The jubilant weather and the prosperous neighbourhood, together with my awareness of Stevens's not-being-there, were a minor enactment of the connection, in his poetry, of opulence with absence: a plain sense of things he expressed in a contestingly extravagant language. In Noles toward a S1Ipreme Fietioll, he coined the phrase "sensible ecstasy', which is an oxymoron that brings to birth a combinatory third thing: in vm Prefnce microcosm of the way he felt poems served to mediate between the worlds of common sense and imaginative transfiguration. [ have wanted to write about Stevens, because his poetry has been a sginificant influence on the way I think about literature, for over twenty years; [ found his presence asserting itself when I was addressing the work of other writers. To some extent, then, this is a (not uncritical) personal statement, deriving from my particular view of the man and his work, that is itself a consequence of what he would have called my own peculiar plot. Implicit in my approach is that I am a British critic beholding an American poet, and my reading both of the life and writing is on occasions adversarial: for what writer of importance docs not at times infuriate the reader? The kind of book this is has been further shaped by the requirements of the series and this subject. The exploration of a writer's 'literary life' need not in principle involve a large amount of literary criticism as such, since the emphasis falls more on biography and the shaping of a career in letters; but it is obvious that our interest in the life originates in a prior engagement with the art. Stevcns·s development as a w riter is in itself interesting; but I have supposed that, in addition to elarning what happened, any reader will also wish to see how this Clffects our reading of the poetry: the morc so, as the poetry in question is generally considered to be difficult. Throughout this study, therdore, I try to suggest ways in which certain poems can be read in the context of my general exposition - without in any way pretending that such a reading exhausts their interpretative 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 contexts in which his poetry came into being. His can appear to have been an eminently sensible ecstasy, with the insurance man safely bankrolling the poet; yet for a[1 the reassuringness of his bourgeois exterior, 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 extent of his commitment to it: as he declared to Henry Church in 1943, 'The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing' (I- 446). In part, I read his life as a dialogue between the requirements of sense and those of ecstasy, with his s uccessive books as stages in the debate. ] read it, also, as a continued awareness of fathers and fatherhood, with the particular
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