Wallace Stevens: My interior paramour

Maybe when you were a teenager you got crushes on pop singers. The crush might start when you switched on your bedside Philco. You heard a song that struck you as your song, a song that sang what you felt about boys or a particular boy (or girl) or Life, but didn’t have words for. “Oh, my God!” you whispered. “Oh, my God!”

The phrase slipped out your mouth. Everyone said it. But this time, when you said, “Oh, my God!” a deep bass thump crossed your solar plexus. You didn’t call that place that felt like the Tootsie Roll Pop chocolate center of you “my solar plexus.” You called it “my heart.”

It happened to me that way. And, even though I sat on the edge of my virgin’s bed and even though I had pulled on only the panties part of my pink shortie nightie and hadn’t yet slipped into the lace-trimmed top and even though my tiny breasts, which my gay uncle said looked like “mosquito bites” were bare, and I hadn’t even started rubbing the stinky Noxzema into my face, I gripped my hands to fists and listened hard. I listened as if the message this song’s lyrics sent was borne down by a bright-winged angel. I listened as if the song’s lyrics were a message upon which my life depended. In an odd way, my life did depend upon that message.

If you were like me, this is what you did. The next day, after school, you rushed into the record store and scrabbled down into your purse and took out your allowance and bought the record into which this song was pressed. Maybe you’re old enough that you brought home a 45 rpm and slid it down over the fat spindle. You sat on the chilly floor by your record player and played this song again and again. You memorized the words. You sang along. You loved the song. You began to love the singer.

Wallace Stevens’s pale face looks up at me from his photograph on the ratty tattered cover of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. I didn’t have babies when I bought that book. I didn’t even yet have a diaphragm to keep me from having babies.

I remember why I bought The Collected Poems. Stevens’s “Anecdote of a Jar,” from his first collection, Harmonium, published in 1923, was in an anthology I owned. I read and reread “Anecdote of a Jar” in the same way I put the needle down again and again to hear Carl Perkins sing “Blue Suede Shoes” and Elvis sing “Crying in the Chapel.” I knew “Anecdote of a Jar” by heart and have said it to myself many many times. “Anecdote of a Jar” has never scratched and never worn out and has sung itself so deep in me that you could put a needle down on my soul and hear:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

I’m fickle. We all are fickle. The Wallace Stevens crush passed. Time passed. I fell in love with Yeats, with Emily Dickinson, Rilke, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, James Wright, Frank O’Hara, John Berryman, James Schuyler, Robert Lowell. I read and reread their poems. I looked at their photographs. I drove to the house in Seattle where Roethke drowned in his swimming pool and flew to Montana to hear Dick Hugo teach. I listened to tapes of their readings. I acquired the biographies, the critical studies from university presses, the letters and notebooks. I asked smarter, better-educated people questions about the poems, about the lives. Last winter, for no reason I recall, I took down Wallace Stevens and began rereading. “My God,” I said, and wasn’t taking the name of the Lord in vain. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass has said, correctly, I think, about Stevens, that he “probably thought longer and more directly about the relationship of the imagination to reality than any other American poet.”

I memorized Stevens’s poems. I said them to myself while I walked, while I washed dishes, and while I waited in lines at grocery stores and airports and banks. I felt drunk and dizzy when my mouth filled up with lines, like these, from “Imago”:

It is nothing, no great thing, nor man

Of ten brilliancies of battered gold

And fortunate stone. It moves its parade

Of motions in the mind and heart

When a crush hits, you want to know every detail about the person to whom your heart goes out. I reread Stevens’s letters that his daughter Holly edited. Since my last Stevens crush, many new books about Stevens had emerged. I bought the Library of America’s Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, edited by one of the great Stevens readers, the English critic, Frank Kermode. In addition to all the poems, some juvenilia and letters and essays, Library of America’s volume also provides a detailed chronology of Stevens’s life.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard University, Stevens early knew that he wanted to write. His lawyer father discouraged him. Stevens finally assented to his father’s bleak view and became a lawyer. He moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and worked for 30 years at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, becoming one of its vice presidents. He married Elsie Kachel Moll, a love child seven years his junior who in her girlhood was so gorgeous that she modeled for the Liberty 50-cent piece and the Liberty dime. He turned his back on his father and mother when they disapproved his choice of Elsie; after he married, he never really saw his parents again. Apparently, Elsie wasn’t all that smart, and as she grew older and entered menopause, became increasingly querulous and perhaps agoraphobic.

Stevens was 44 when his only child Holly was born. He did not write, then, for many years. And then, after almost a decade, he began to write again. In 1949 Stevens received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University Library. I read Joan Richardson’s two-volume biography — Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1928-1955 and Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879-1923. I read Helen Vendler’s Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire in which Vendler notes, about Stevens, that he “has been read too little as a poet of human misery.”

I read about the night in Key West when the drunk and timid Stevens got into a fistfight with Hemingway. The latter left Stevens with a blackened eye and fractured hand. I read Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered in which all the people who barely knew him, which was just about everybody, recalled boozy lunches at Hartford’s Canoe Club and chauffeured drives through Connecticut landscapes. (Stevens couldn’t and didn’t drive and although he described himself as a “nomad exquisite” he hardly ever went anywhere.) I learned that he fought his tendency to grow fat with diets no less terrible than those of adolescent girls. I learned that once he began to write again he came home from the insurance company, ate (depending on the status of his weight) either an abstemious or sumptuous dinner (Elsie was a superb cook), and then went upstairs to his study, where he remained until he went, alone, to bed. He arranged his bed so that when he awakened in the morning, his first sight was of treetops.

For almost all the months of last year, not a day passed that I did not think of Stevens. My “interior paramour” he was, his words whispering themselves into my ear. What I wish for you, this year, is that you open a book, any book, and find that “intensest rendezvous,” that “miraculous influence” that Stevens describes. I hope you get a crush on someone.