Wallace Stevens : the plain sense of things

353 Pages·1991·20.137 MB·English

by  Longenbach, James

WALLACE STEVENS
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WALLACE
STEVENS
The Plain Sense of Things
<r*o
JAMES LONGENBACH
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1991
Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1991 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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Library of Congress Cataioging-in-Publication Data
Longenbach, James.
Wallace Stevens : the plain sense of things / James Longenbach.
p. cm. Includes index.
ISBN o-19-506863-7; o-19-507022-4 (pbk.)
I. Stevens, Wallace, 1879--1955—- Criticism and interpretation.
?,. Stevens, Wallace, 1879--1955—Political and social views.
3. Political poetry, American—History and criticism.
4. War poetry, American - History and criticism.
5. Social problems in literature. I. Title.
PS3537'T47'53Z(J764 1991
81 i'.52.- dc2o 90-49690
Quotations from The Collected Poeym of 'Wallace Stevens
and Opus Posthumous by Wallace Stevens are
reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Part of Chapter 6 appeared as "The 'Fellowship of Men that Perish':
Wallace Slovens and the First World War," Wallace Stevens Journal 13
(Fall 1989); part of Chapter 11 appeared as "The Idea of Disorder
at Key West," \\uritan: A Quarterly Review 11 (Summer 1991).
Copyright© 1991 by \\aritan.
i 35798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Preface
Asked to provide a self-portrait midway through his career, Wallace Stevens
replied: "I should say very briefly that I was born in Pennsylvania in 1879,
studied at Harvard, am a lawyer, practiced in New York until 1916 and then
came to Hartford, where I am in the insurance business." Poetry was impor-
tant to Stevens, despite his reticence, but so were law and insurance. Yet
when readers of Stevens take those interests into account, it is usually to won-
der at his "double" life: for several critical generations, the Stevens who mat-
ters has existed in a world of words. But Stevens lived no double life. His was
what he liked to call an "ordinary" life, one in which the exigencies of poli-
tics, economics, poetry, and everyday distractions coexisted—sometimes
peacefully and sometimes not.
Appreciated in the context of American political and intellectual history,
Stevens emerges not only as a poet aware of events taking place around him
but as a poet whose work was often inspired by them. Stevens did not write
poetry like a lawyer or execute surety bonds like a poet; his different activities
took necessarily different shapes, and those differences kept a single life
whole. Consequently, Stevens rarely asked the poet to do the work the poli-
tician might do better, even though he knew poetry could not be isolated from
political concerns. (As Kenneth Burke once quipped: though all art is polit-
ical, "one cannot advocate art as a cure for toothache without disclosing the
superiority of dentistry.") Stevens's caution should not be confused with indif-
ference: as both poet and lawyer, he thought long and hard about the
strengths and (equally important) the limitations of literature as a historical
product and force.
vi PREFACE
Stories about Stevens's politics usually describe a more or less indifferent
poet who was jostled into unwelcome awareness by the social upheavals of
the 19305. In "The Irrational Element in Poetry" Stevens himself dated his
fall into a political world much earlier—during the First World War—but
Stevens's political awareness actually began in the final years of the nine-
teenth century. Although my reading of Stevens's career emphasizes his
poetry's relation to the three most devastating historical events of his lifetime
(the Great Depression and the two world wars), I also pay attention to the
two periods in which Stevens wrote no poetry at all. Between 1900 (when he
left Harvard) and 1908 (when he finally found gainful employment) Stevens
was harried by the most basic economic considerations; as a reporter for the
New York Tribune, he covered the McKinley-Bryan presidential race, con-
fronting the nation's rise as an imperialist power. Stevens cast his vote for the
Populist Bryan and, in many ways, retained for the rest of his life the uneasy
combination of forward- and backward-looking ideas that characterized
American Populism. During these early years, Stevens did not write poetry.
But he was "silent" only if we imagine that poetry was the only thing Stevens
worried about. An understanding of his poetic silence is essential to an under-
standing of his poetry.
In 1914 Stevens began the mature phase of his poetic career as a war
poet. The result of his obsession with the First World War was not only
explicit war poems like "Phases" and "Lettres d'un Soldat"; "Sunday Morn-
ing" and "The Comedian as the Letter C" were also the products of a war-
time consciousness, with its attendant fantasies of death and apocalypse and
its disruptions of conventional ideas of gender. After publishing Harmonium
in 1923, Stevens again wrote no poetry for almost a decade. During these
years he solidified his career as a surety lawyer. This effort, along with Stev-
ens's essays on insurance, was in no fully meaningful way poetic—just as his
poetry is in no fully meaningful way political—but it was nevertheless nec-
essary to his poetic achievement. After this second silence, Stevens's poetry
reemerged in dialogue with the economic and ideological struggles of the
19305. These struggles were not new to Stevens the poet; Stevens the lawyer
knew them well. Unlike many other American intellectuals and poets, con-
sequently, Stevens did not retreat from political concerns when the ideals of
this decade began to seem tarnished; his refusal of Utopian seductions saved
him from apocalyptic despair. And the great long poems of the early 19405
("Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" and "Esthetique du Mai") were born of
Stevens's continuing engagement with the realities of the Second World War.
In his old age, after he had lived through a depression and two world wars,
Stevens did begin to retreat from such concerns: the Stevens of the late 19405
and early 19503 is the poet most compatible with the figure constructed by
PREFACE Vii
the critical tradition. During these final years of his career, Stevens offered
several tempting aphorisms ("It is a world of words to the end of it"), imply-
ing that his entire corpus could be read as a self-enclosed and universal poem.
The strategy was consistent with a general cold war retreat from earlier social
concerns; Stevens's final drift away from a political world was politically
encased. To impose those values on his work at large is to substitute the aging
Stevens of the cold war for the young Stevens of the Gilded Age, the middle-
aged Stevens of the First World War, and the older Stevens of the Depression
and Second World War. These different Stevenses must be distinguished; his
career was not static and neither was the history of which the career was a
part. "The Idea of Order at Key West" articulated aesthetic concerns to
which Stevens would return again and again; but the world set right in that
poem included a Cuban revolution and the threat of U.S. intervention.
To show that there is an easily identifiable historical content to the poetry
(a public content that has been overlooked), I stress Stevens's actual encoun-
ters with events: presidential elections, revolutions, wars, strikes, and taxes.
Politics that may take more private or textual forms are also part of the story,
but my approach to these matters is designed to reveal them as more than
merely textual. One of Stevens's strengths as a poet (a strength for which he
is too little known) was his keen awareness of the dangers of aestheticizing
experience—his fear of becoming a "Secretary for Porcelain" who may
blithely equate "ten thousand deaths / With a single well-tempered apricot."
I have tried to remain aware of that danger as well.
In addition to historical events, ideological debates encasing the events
are part of this story of Stevens's career: the fate of American liberalism, the
rise of communism, the rights of women, the pressures of nationalism—and
the endless debate over the relationship of literature to the political actions
these debates foster. Other writers' engagement in these controversies play a
part as well, and among these other voices Kenneth Burke's becomes espe-
cially important: his writing serves as a kind of descant to Stevens's. Burke
and Stevens were in many ways like-minded thinkers, and they reacted to
many events—and thought about the relationship of literature to those
events—in similar ways. Today, Burke's work is important not only for read-
ing Stevens but for understanding his historical moment.
In narrating this contextualizing history of Stevens's career, my ultimate
focus remains on the poetry. But I have tried to remain true to the Stevens
who felt that poetry was important precisely because it is part of a world that
is always more than poetic. Wary as Stevens was of the danger of aestheticiz-
ing experience, he was also aware—painfully so—of its inevitability; the dan-
ger was consequently a matter of quality and degree. For Stevens at his best,
these intricacies became necessities: in the poem from which I borrow my
Viii PREFACE
title, the plain sense of things is not easily apprehended or recorded. The
condition Stevens alternately spoke of as the ordinary, the humdrum, or the
commonplace was an achievement—a middle ground that was not a compro-
mise between extremes. Ideally, it represented a position from which
extremes, aesthetic and political, were clearly assessed; at its worst; it teetered
on complacency. Yet that danger was often subverted because the plain sense
of things is never plain for long. Stevens once lamented that he could not
count himself among the "people [who] always know exactly what they
think." But he suspected there might be another kind of strength in uncer-
tainty: "The same thing keeps active in my mind and rarely becomes fixed.
This is true about politics as it is about poetry."
In writing this book, my thoughts have been alternately strengthened and
questioned by many friends. Milton Bates and A. Walton Lit/ not only read
the entire manuscript; their own work made it possible for me to begin think-
ing about Stevens in the first place. I am also grateful for the help of Ronald
Bush, Alan Filreis, Kenneth Gross, Gail McDonald, Richard Poirier, Kaja Sil-
verman, and Jeffrey Woodward. And if all that Joanna Scott had done was
read and reread my prose I could better express how much this book owes to
her sensibility.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided the fellowship
during which I began my research, and I acknowledge gratefully the coop-
eration of the libraries at which much of my research into Stevens's unpub-
lished work took place: the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of
Chicago, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the McKeldrin Library
at the University of Maryland, the Library of the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst, the Princeton University Library, and—most of all—the Henry
E. Huntington Library. I am grateful to Holly Stevens for permission to quote
from material in these collections. My research assistants, Stephen Myers and
John Palattella, are responsible for many details that slipped past my eyes.
Years ago, the person who first taught me the poetry of Wallace Stevens
(and much else besides) asked me a question I could not answer: I offer this
book to Hugh Ogden with the hope that in thinking about that question I
absorbed some of his own sense of what the value of reading a poet like Ste-
vens might be.
Rochester, N.Y. J. L.
November 1990
Contents
I
The First Silence
I Pecksniff and Politics 3
2 The Literary Profession 14
3 Populism and Imperialism 24
II
Thinking About War
4 The Great War and Post-Romantic Ambition 41
5 Writing War Poetry 53
6 The Fellowship of Men that Perish 65
7 Postwar Comedian 83
III
The Second Silence
8 Surety and Fidelity Claims 105
9 Paris and the Florida Land Boom 120