NYREV - Key Persons
George Lensing's study, which makes good use of the Huntington materials, is subtitled "A Poet's Growth." After retelling the relatively familiar story of how Stevens became a poet and a modernist, Lensing moves to his central interests-Stevens's "peculiar habits of composition;…his use of notebooks, epigraphs derived from reading, and the extensive personal correspondence that brought the world to Hartford, from which Stevens only rarely strayed." Lensing has other valuable chapters (notably one on the importance to Stevens of Harriet Monroe's encouragement in his early, lonely years). But I want to emphasize here his brilliant account of the uses to Stevens of writing and receiving letters. Unsympathetic critics have seen Stevens's requests to his correspondents for Ceylon tea or French art catalogs as the dilettante amusements of a rich man. Lensing sees them for what they were-the authentic food for a starved imagination, longing to know what it would be to stand in a Paris gallery, to see elephants in Ceylon. Stevens's correspondence with a Cuban poet, with a Korean student of poetry, permitted him to experience in Hartford what Pound (or even Frost) experienced in Europe and England-the delight of the imagination in unfamiliar things, landscapes, fragrances, pictures, words. As he said in a letter quoted by Lensing:
Job Titles:
- Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor
Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Harvard. Her latest book is The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, a collection of essays. (December 2019)
Holly Stevens has written, in Souvenirs and Prophecies, "All her life, at least during the time I knew her, she suffered from a persecution complex which undoubtedly originated during her childhood." Whatever the strains of living with an artist, and they are many, the strains of living with someone unable to function socially may well be worse. To Stevens's credit, he did not abandon his unsuitable and gloomy wife. Perhaps that is all that can be said about the marriage. Richardson analyzes minutely the idealization, tenderness, didacticism, fantasies, role playing, and hopes for the future that Stevens expressed in the long letters he wrote to his wife during their courtship. These psychological attitudes seem to me ordinary (if somewhat repellently of their era), and could probably be found, although less elegantly expressed, in the love letters of many of Stevens's contemporaries. His beloved was his distant princess, his Little Bopeep, his twin "Buddy," his to-be-docile wife, his beauty on a pedestal, his Arcadian nymph. And Elsie no doubt had equally unrealistic ideas of him during their long-distance courtship, carried on while he was working in New York and she stayed at home in Reading, Pennsylvania. Richardson rightly notes that both partners were unable to compromise and work out a joint life. But surely compromise is stimulated by compatibility; and it is uncertain whether the Stevenses were incompatible in later life because they could not compromise, or whether they were unable to compromise because they were from the beginning incompatible.
One can argue that Stevens, older and better educated, should have perceived the folly of his infatuation with a girl, no matter how beautiful, nothing like himself in character, background, education, or taste; but his apparent virginity and lack of social experience made him as naive as his bride. The subtle air of injury maintained by Richardson ("Elsie must have suffered. She was deprived of both his physical presence and his spirit," etc.) is extended chiefly to the female side. We do not read, "Wallace must have suffered. He constantly encountered Elsie's discontented gloom, her poverty of resource, her lack of humor, her suspiciousness, her incomprehension of his language." The real horror, for a genius, of living with an uneducated, limited, suspicious, and provincial person, one who has no idea of the arduousness of his life project, is not evoked in this book. Stevens spoke of this suffering in indirect terms quite often, and it appears nakedly in "World without Peculiarity":
Janet Malcolm's latest book is Nobody's Looking at You, a collection of essays. (September 2020)
Job Titles:
- Associate Publisher, Marketing and Planning
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Kansas
Job Titles:
- Head of the Museum of Modern Art
Job Titles:
- Web Production Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Associate Publisher, Business Operations
Milton Bates's book is by all odds the most enjoyable of the three. It is stylish, readable, interesting, and refreshingly intelligent. It also corrects various misapprehensions about Stevens-for instance the notion that Stevens was indifferent to the social order. Bates shows, in his careful examination of Stevens's poetry of the Twenties and Thirties and early Forties, the degree of Stevens's awareness of, and changing response to, social reality. (By the time the Second World War was ending, Stevens was sixty-five, his formative period long behind him; it is not to be expected that he would be so deeply engaged then as in the Thirties, when he had to come to terms with Marxist demands on art.) In the Thirties, Stevens arrived at the position Walter Benjamin articulated in "The Author as Producer"-that ideological content is not the measure of revolution in art. Rather, Benjamin says, it is the new possibilities of technique (arrangement of content in new collocations, montages, juxtapositions, endings) that define a fresh beginning. "An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one":
Murray Kempton (1917-1997) was a columnist for Newsday, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events, and The Briar Patch, as well as Part of Our Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.
Job Titles:
- Editor at the London Sunday Times