Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life

HE WROTE poems celebrating the marriage of flesh and air. He loved the sensuousness of mere being, loved the texture of things, and he treasured the rare, the exotic, and the lush. His poems are figured with rings of men chanting in orgy on summer mornings, with girls named Bawda from places named Catwba, and with old sailors drunk in their boots, catching tigers in red weather.

But when he died, the Hartford Times eulogized him as "an outstanding attorney in the bond claim field." He was an insurance man, the vice-president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity. Only after he had won the Pulitzer Prize and the Bollingen Prize did his colleagues at the office know that he wrote poetry: he refused Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton chair in 1955 because it would "precipitate the retirement" from business he wanted "so much to put off." Clearly, here is a man who led two lives at once; clearly, here is a biography that ought to be written.

Samuel French Morse was the editor of Opus Posthumous, Wallace Stevens' uncollected works. He also edited the only paperback anthology of Stevens available in this country, and his biography of Stevens was authorized by the widow and daughter of the poet after his death in 1955. As long as ten years ago Frank Kermode was eagerly anticipating the Morse biography in the first paragraph of his book on Stevens. Now Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life has been published, and it probably rasies more questions than it answers.

THE PROBLEM of literary biography is old and unresolved. The great nineteenth-century French critic Sainte-Beuve held that a biographical method was a hermeneutic one. "Tell me who admires and loves you, and I shall tell you who you are," he said, and his literary criticism is studded with biographical detail gleaned from conversations with artists' greengrocers.

Proust denied the validity of biographical detail entirely, saying that the self with which the poet creates is sequestered in a far corner of the soul, deeply hidden from any scholar's scrutiny. "The genius of Keats," said Irving Babbitt, "is precisely that part of him that cannot be explained by the fact that he was the son of the keeper of a London livery stable." "Can any biography," said Emerson, "shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surogate, in Stratford, the genesis of the delicate creation?" And George Steiner, writing of Painter's biography of Proust, said that it was so explicit, gave so many details of Proust's life that bore directly on A la recherche du temps perdu, that no reader of the biography could possibly respond to the novel in a fresh and unprejudiced way.

Morse's own method of attack has been to arrange his book in alternating chapters devoted to periods of Stevens' life and to the poetry written during them. The chapters on the poetry trace the development of Stevens' artistic career. They are mostly interesting, competent, efficient; they provide some illuminating new readings, and the careful scholarship they display is impeccable. The biographical chapters, however, are ghastly: without color, without flair, without a wealth of detail, and worst, without passion.

The catalogue of Stevens' life reads like the driest of textbooks. One does not ask for a disquisition on the businessman versus poet problem, nor for a grand drama of suffering and vatic triumph; one only asks to know Stevens, to get the smell of his personality.

THE THEORY of evolving fictions is the basis for Stevens' poetry, and it is most explicitly dealt with in The Necessary Angel, his collection of essays. His basic contention is that "the world is ugly/and the people are sad"; we are "natives of poverty, children of malheur." In order to escape this bleak universe, we create fictions which satisfy our most basic impulses for happiness and sensual contentment. These fictions unite us with our world, make us feel our universe to be a knowable place rather than an apocalyptic misery machine.

Major man, the man of the weather, "the transparence of the place in which/he is," gives us poems in whose fictions we can believe. Fictions are necessary angels who cleanse the earth, whose subtance is the gaiety of language. The supreme fiction must be abstract, must give pleasure, and must change. This changing aspect is significant, for fictions succeed each other as men become unsatisfied with their explanations of the world; the discarded visions are tossed on the dump with the bottles and mattresses of the dead.

For it is "the nicest knowledge of belief/that what it believes is not true." One must believe and not believe desperately; it is an act of total commitment, essentially unrealizeable, but nevertheless morally obligatory. It is fiction alone that orders the wild hills of Tennessee, but the greatest fiction of all, the invention of God, is also a dead one.

This view of the univesre is a precious legacy. In some respects, it is the vision of a hedon, an atheist, an existentialist, a stoic. Its consciousness is sexual as well as poetic, political as well as phenomenological. "The politics of emotion must appear/to be an intellectual structure," he says in Esthetique du Mal. Of a prototypcial dogmatist, he says

He would be the lunatic of one idea

In a world of ideas, who would have all the people

Live, work, suffer and die in that idea

In a world of ideas. He would not be aware of the clouds,

Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire.

His extreme of logic would be ??ogical.

THE MORSE biography provides an excellent sense of Stevens' poetry. He has presented the first really competent and thorough discussion of Stevens' early work, most of which appeared in the Harvard Advocute and which Stevens later said gave him "the creeps" when re-eading them, and he is extremely helpful in tracing the formative influences on Stevens: Pater, Bergson, and especially George Santayana, who was a friend and teacher of Stevens while he was at Harvard. Morse's discussion of Stevens' three plays, with their curious chinoiserie, fanciful staging, and playfully symbolic characters is intelligent and helpful. And his account of the poems that were added, deleted, and emended in the course of the construction of Stevens' first book, Harmonium, is proficient and engaging.

Morse is good when he is making a case, and some of his writing, particularly the last chapter of the book, is stunning. And his collation of the letters, diaries, and journals with the poems provide some striking insights: the actual events which led to "The Emperor of Ice Cream" and "The Ordinary Women," when juxtaposed with the texts, makes for exciting critical handiwork. But what one asks most from the biography-the anecdotes, the psychology, the flesh, the sheer literary gossip which would go a long way toward taking Stevens out of the half-light of his insurance office-is missing. It's not that the tools are unavailable: Erikson's book on Gandhi, Walter Jackson Bate's on Keats. Nancy Milford's on Zelda Fitzgerald, and Harold Bloom's book on Yeats all point toward the enormous possiblities of life studies. Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life leaves the biographical task simply and sadly undone.

Morse tantalizes with the range of anecdotal material available, but, whether because of his particular critical biases or because of his own selfconsciousness as a scholar, he never delivers. He tells of Stevens' reading one of his poems at a Greenwich Village party in 1914, but instead of reconstructing the event, he catalogues-dryly, unwillingly, briefly-the terse reminiscences of some members of the party. He never devotes satisfactory attention to the relationship between Stevens' and William Carlos Williams. He lets slip that Sevens' wife Elsie frequently did not like his poetry, and then he never mentions her in relation to her husband's work again. Nor does he ever try to sketch in any of the psychological tensions of Stevens' married life. He lets slip that Stevens was fond of candied violets, that the director of the Louvre doubted Stevens' taste in paintings, but such details are ahnost always involuntarily offered. They are pinpoints rather than panoramas.

AND THERE seem to be weaknesses in Morse's treatment of the poetry: he never confronts the idea of the moment of poetic vision, nor Stevens' reticence to deal with love in his work; he fails occasionally to bring passion to his reading (particularly when dealing with "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction"); and his taste-shown also by the pieces which Morse picked for Selected Poems -is occasionally surprising. In fact, many of the critical passages read like chatty bibliography.

Wallace Stevens: Life as Poetry is a poor biography, but it is a fine book on the poet. In fact, with Kermode's Wallace Stevens and J. Hillis Miller's essay in Boets of Reality, it's one of the best books on Stevens around, far and away superior to Helen Vendler's On Exetnded Wings. But there still remains the task of writing the story of the man whose poetic genius is equalled in this century only by Yeals and Eliot. There still remains the man.