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Overview
Originally published in 1991.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691603766 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1156 |
| Pages: | 390 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Wallace Stevens and the Actual World
By Alan Filreis
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06864-0
CHAPTER 1
Playing Checkers under the Maginot Line
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
—William Carlos Williams
[T]he demnition news, added to the demnition grind at the office, makes me feel pretty much as a man must feel in a shelter waiting for bombing to start. We live quietly and doucement, but, for all that, the climate is changing.... It might be that it would be better to wait a little while, until there is a change of weather.
—Stevens, writing to Henry Church about Church's idea to republish Mesures (L 365)
War is the periodical failure of politics.
—Stevens (OP 191)
The foreign correspondents who would form one of Wallace Stevens's links to the world at war, and later to the world at cold war, were of little help, actually, in sorting out the confusions of the war's very first phase. In spite of that—indeed because of it—they are the unlisted dramatis personae of a number of poems Stevens wrote between the Anschluss and Pearl Harbor, work that can be characterized as presenting a form of American isolationism. To be sure, these people themselves assumed no single political position; their ideas in fact ranged from a colonial socialism (Leonard van Geyzel) to a mild form of French defeatism (Anatole Vidal). If Stevens derived from the information these contacts provided him—or, more to the point, from what they did not provide him—an affirmation of his own disengagement, it was not because this affirmation was among the motives behind these correspondences in the first place. It is characteristic, then, of a book hinging on Stevens's developing notion of politically unconscious impulses that we begin with what he was not told and could not have known about the actual world in danger—not primarily in order to establish benign or malevolent purpose for omission but rather to lay a groundwork for Stevens's construction of political fact.
Leonard C. van Geyzel. Stevens's politically astute correspondent in Ceylon, a place symbolizing dislocation, would become quite disturbed about the war. He would eventually offer Stevens a glimpse of a postwar position shaped by an intellectualized if not active leftism, entailing an evenhanded assessment of the Soviets' contribution to the Allied war effort. But such insights came later; until well into 1941, van Geyzel merely joked about his island's peripheral relation to the European crisis, a geopolitical trope Stevens took to heart, as it would confirm his own sense of Ceylon's exquisite severance from history.
Henri Amiot. This Frenchman had long since returned to Paris after a stint in the United States working with The Hartford, and at signs of war's imminence was absorbed into the French army. But only one note came to Stevens from the front, and it did not describe the agonies of attentisme, as much a diplomatic as a military stance of waiting and seeing assumed by the French nervously assembled behind and below the psychologically inviolable Maginot Line. When "phoney" war ended with the offensive war of May and June 1940 and the rapid disintegration of Reynaud's uncongenial coalition in late June, Sergeant Amiot, assigned to one of the doomed detachments, was undoubtedly among the multitudes taken prisoner; before the German invasion his unit had been stationed in Le Mans, which by June 17 was behind the lines. An eyewitness to war, to the rapid, bewildering collapse of Stevens's cherished France, was lost to him—until, that is, a postcard arrived after the liberation of Paris. "[Y]our postcard told me that you were still alive," Stevens then replied (L 480). But that was four and a half years after the Germans moved on France.
Anatole Vidal. Right up to the time Vidal, like van Geyzel and Amiot, disappeared from Stevens's foreign landscape during the worst years of the conflict, letters from this kindly French art and book dealer concerned items such as a lively Jean Marchand, an Edmund Ceria harbor vista, even a small Corot—works Stevens might purchase from Paris sight unseen. Perhaps this very procedure, Vidal's special agency, made depictions of the European scene seem visually unreal and abstract, inappropriate or unavailable to the correspondence. The extent to which the intrusions of war affected Vidal's business—we can now be certain he and it were both greatly affected—Stevens could not then have known, for his agent's verbal descriptions dwelt on how "it all went on in an orderly way," to borrow pertinently from "Connoisseur of Chaos" (1938), and were evidently designed to describe an art world advantageously for a customer who would want to read in words (and not see in pictures) how that world carried on, even as Panzer divisions gathered opposite the Maginot in unimaginable numbers and with undreamt-of force.
Walter Pach. Much closer to Stevens than was van Geyzel or Vidal—those two long-term correspondents whom Stevens would never meet in person—was the art collector and critic Pach, "an old friend of mine" (L 490). They had known each other at least since the time Pach was one of the co-organizers of the Armory Show. Having spent part of the year in Europe, periodically reporting back to Stevens about fresh young painters and writers there, Pach was now compelled to remain in New York; in fact, despite his general authority on all things French, in 1939 and 1940 he would have known only as much of the immediate troubles as Stevens knew.
Ferdinand Reyher. A correspondent dating back to the mid-teens, who also spent a good deal of time in Europe, Reyher had been refused by the U.S. Army in 1917 because of his German background; now he was engaged in helping a famous German antifascist. Regaining contact with Stevens at least briefly in February 1939—it was their first exchange in well over a decade—Reyher wrote to solicit Stevens's aid in bringing Bertolt Brecht to the United States after his escape from Nazi Germany. The man whom Brecht called his "American Cicerone" urgently informed Stevens that Brecht was "in exile, about to be tossed out of the green and white haven of Denmark, but writing with the humorous bitter fever of a papal legate." Reyher hoped Stevens would read "the English translation of his Beggar's Opera novel, A Penny for the Poor, ... a sardonic exercise in plot." But Stevens did not apparently respond to Brecht's crisis or look into his antifascist writings; instead, he induced Reyher into the pattern of their old relationship, which was characterized by Stevens's requests for hard-tofind books and Reyher's energetic efforts to locate them. His reply must have seemed to Reyher a clear sign that the old self-involvement had not yet given way, for Stevens now asked the man busily assisting Brecht to locate a copy of his own Owl's Clover, and Stevens, so far as we know, never so much as mentioned Brecht again.
Henry Church. Here was a man friendly with many French and German intellectuals endangered by the rise of Nazism. He began regularly corresponding with Stevens in 1939, after the poet had given permission to have some of his works translated and published in Church's and Jean Paulhan's little magazine, Mesures. That as war became imminent, and then broke out, Church chose wisely to remain in the United States (he and his wife had come for a visit in July) only made it more difficult for him to describe the situation from the inside. To the extent, then, that Stevens can be said to have been insufficiently compelled by the magnitude of the crisis in its early phase, it may have been due to Church's propensity for sentimentalizing the political events affecting his precious adopted French home. Thus, in die war's first months, Church's second- and thirdhand news from his many literary and academic friends in Europe, passed along incidentally to Stevens in Church's scrawled or poorly typewritten letters, may have been misperceived as the lamentations of one hypersensitive, wealthy exile, weakened by a weak heart, worrying over hard-to-confirm reports of his many imperiled possessions and his fancy estate in—after June 1940—an occupied zone. Indeed, as Willard Thorp remembered the Churches at Princeton in the months before and after the decision not to return to their Ville d'Avray home, Henry seemed to take the invasion of France "as if it were a personal attack on him"—just the sort of maudlin view of international affairs Stevens would have the most difficulty accepting.
It seems certain that Stevens's first general response to these correspondents was a readiness to withdraw into the basic fact of American distance. Indeed, by the time he prepared a statement for the 1939 Partisan Review symposium, his isolationist position was clear and apparently simple. "I don't think that the United States should enter into the next world war," he wrote. This statement was composed, submitted, and printed before the late-August Nazi-Soviet agreement that allowed the Germans to carry out their plans for the invasion of Poland on the first day of September. The qualifying phrase he added to this comment ("if there is to be another" war) obviously does not indicate his otherwise fine sense of rhetorical timing. Still, his eleventh-hour statement appeared in the Summer 1939 issue—that is, before such an "if" became an anachronism of delayed publication; others who participated in the symposium, such as the fellow-traveling Horace Gregory, were given a less fortunate context, as their statements, saved for the autumn issue, might be misunderstood as straddling the meaningful date. Stevens's isolationist impulse, of course, raises problems much greater than those created by the ambiguity of a literary magazine's untimely appearance—though, to be sure, any tardiness in an era of rapid-fire events, of ever-shifting intellectual alliances both at home and abroad, is not a matter to be lightly discounted; nor is sorting out accidental from substantial bad timing wholly beyond the reconstructive effort of the literary historian. Much of this book depends on just such a reconstruction, however qualified by ideological reflection; it reveals first that Stevens was hardly alone among writers in giving expression to what we might hastily conclude was an unremarkably conservative view of the prospects for American intervention overseas. There were other American intellectuals who would only a few years later espouse a fervent "new nationalism," as it would be called, who would energetically support the American artist's involvement in the "total war" (meaning, for all but a few intellectuals of Stevens's generation, not the battle itself but the creative war "effort" on the home front). Yet these others sent the Partisan views substantially similar to Stevens's. Of the nine writers whose comments were printed in the symposium, only two, veterans of literary wars John Dos Passos and Lionel Trilling, could be said to have been prepared to support the war effort in any way. Neither actually worked from an interventionist premise; Dos Passos only said he would, if necessary, be ready to get back his "old job" driving an ambulance, and Trilling merely said more straightforwardly than other respondents that a new world war was "the great objective and subjective fact which confronts every writer." Mild as Trilling's endorsement of the war seems now, however, it was then a distinct and arguable position.
Stevens, clearly on the other side of the argument, was yet in safe liberal company in opposing American involvement. But what side was that exactly? The coalition was broad and not easily defined even then, let alone now. Sherwood Anderson ("I do not believe in any war") and Katherine Anne Porter ("[D]on't be betrayed into all the old outdated mistakes") were isolationists primarily because they were pacifists; Porter had seen the Nazis—in the person of Göring—close up. Louise Bogan and Richard Blackmur were ready to oppose American involvement actively; so they said. James T. Farrell and Horace Gregory, like Porter, still felt the sting of the Great War; Gregory wondered satirically if the symposium question meant that the last war had now "actually ceased," and Farrell mocked the idea that he, as an American, would ever have any "economic interests" in places like Danzig, Teschen, or Tunisia—standard isolationist logic from an ex-communist, soon-to-be ex-radical, who was moving so surely rightward that he might be said even here to be meeting the communist line coming round the other way. Allen Tate's remarks were certainly the strongest of the ten offered. Tate and Stevens appeared to share much the same ideological ground, in fact, each assuming, as Tate put it, "The writer, as writer, has no responsibility when war comes." In a later phase of the war, the evident alliance between Tate and Stevens would cause the latter great discomfort. Still, the 1939 Partisan symposium helped set out the controversial literary-political terms in which the Tate-Stevens relationship, the most important poetic interaction of Stevens's war years, must be told.
That ten American writers in the summer of 1939 were unready or unwilling to support U.S. involvement in another world war cannot be at all surprising, even given the fact that American communists, who still held sway over many noncommunist writers, strongly supported all forms of war against fascism—this preceding, crucially, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, after which, and until June 22, 1941, intervention was opposed as supporting another "imperialist war." While the basic agreement between Stevens and his fellow writers does accurately suggest a consensus among American intellectuals, it hardly presented the sort of association, or camp, one might have expected a major political issue to have produced only a few years earlier. To restore Stevens's symposium statement to the context provided by nine other American writers, then—to show his fitting in so neatly—only partly satisfies a justifiable curiosity about the literary-political meaning of his isolationism as (to most of us today) an inevitably unattractive position. There is a far more revealing qualification to it, which will emerge as the main theme not only of this chapter but of this study: insofar as Stevens's statement that the United States should not enter another world war is unique among the others'—especially unlike the pacifists'—it is so in speculating, prematurely it might seem, on the particular burdens to befall the postwar American imagination. The United States should not enter the war, Stevens was suggesting before it had begun, "unless it does so with the idea of dominating the world that comes out of it." If his wartime poems give any expression whatever to such an acutely critical prediction of the world to come in the late forties and early fifties, they are for that reason alone worth studying as unique anticipations of cultural cold war—odd as Stevens's association with the cold war may initially seem to readers of the later chapters here. Thus Stevens's early opposition to World War IT—it was brief, an attitude that would diminish and then disappear in 1941—was not intended, as Bogan's was, to stimulate an "active opposition" to it, nor, as Blackmur's was, to demonstrate how a new worldwide war, just like the last one, would be a "very complete debauching devil," the ugly issuance of a greedy munitions-making class, but was something wholly different—a source of great fear that American writers, if they are eventually coerced to support a total war uncritically, will not at the same time be sufficiently prepared for the responsibilities that will come with unqualified victory and the ascendency of American culture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wallace Stevens and the Actual World by Alan Filreis. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. ix
- List of Illustrations, pg. xi
- Abbreviations and Cue Titles, pg. xiii
- Preface, pg. xv
- Acknowledgments, pg. xxi
- Chapter 1. Playing Checkers under the Maginot Line, pg. 3
- Chapter 2. Formalists under Fire, pg. 29
- Chapter 3. Description without a Sense of Place, pg. 151
- Chapter 4. Cuba Should Be Full of Cuban Things, pg. 187
- Chapter 5. The Postcard Imagination, pg. 207
- Chapter 6. Last American Occasions, pg. 242
- Notes, pg. 279
- Index, pg. 351