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The First Book
Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America
By Jesse Zuba PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7379-1
CHAPTER 1
Apprentices to Chance Event First Books of the 1920s
After three years at Harvard, Wallace Stevens moved to New York to find work as a newspaper reporter. He arrived in the city on June 14, 1900. Hoping to hit the ground running, he immediately called at the Commercial-Advertiser and the Evening Sun with letters of introduction. But within a few days Stevens had already begun to feel overwhelmed by the hectic getting and spending of the New York business world. "All New York, as I have seen it, is for sale," he wrote in his journal: "It is dominated by necessity. Everything has its price — from Vice to Virtue" (SP 72). How, he wanted to know, could he pursue a career in "literature" in such a place? To what extent could the work of writing be adapted to the calculating procedures of a rapidly expanding market in which a "price" could be assigned to "everything"? The daunting scale and pace of the New York economy drove Stevens to question his choice of vocation and to wonder whether a literary vocation could properly be considered a matter of choice in the first place. Two days later, in his journal he describes spending an afternoon alone in his room, beset with doubts about his calling: "Have been wondering whether I am going into the right thing after all. Is literature really a profession? Can you single it out, or must you let it decide in you for itself?" (SP 74).
The problem of whether or not literature could be deliberately "single[ d] ... out" and thus pursued professionally was to preoccupy Stevens during the years leading up to the publication of Harmonium in 1923. That he frames it as a question of "profession" reflects the rise of professionalism, which was fully underway in the United States at the turn of the century. As James Longenbach observes, "The moment of Stevens's birth, 1879, coincided with the moment when professionalism began to transform American working habits, and by the time Stevens left Harvard the entrepreneurial spirit of his youth had been swallowed by bureaucratic capitalism." Because the Civil War "dominated the attention of men, absorbing their energies and wealth," Burton J. Bledstein writes, "the first really successful efforts at the professionalization of American life often waited until the later 1860s and 1870s." Professionalism entailed an emphasis on willpower: "In a calculated manner, [the professional] actively willed his action in order to satisfy a drive for self-distinction and self-assertion." This "calculated" approach to self-fashioning is the corollary of the "rationalization and standardization" of skills and knowledge that distinguish "the modern guild-like professions from their ancien régime predecessors," as Magali Sarfatti Larson suggests. Refusing to "leave life to chance," modern professionals "aspired to schedule its development in ascending stages" that marked increasing responsibility, prestige, and authority. In Stevens's terms, pursuing a professional career would mean singling literature out: to "let it decide in you for itself" would jeopardize "the coherence of an intellectually defined and goal-oriented life" that signaled the deep vocational commitment of the true professional.
In exchange for the competitive anxiety and delayed gratification that professionalism entails, the normative career promises certain rewards. It holds out the assurance of success on the basis of talent and hard work — for merit, rather than wealth and connections, stands at the center of professionalist ideology. It also provides the psychological, social, and financial security of occupational stability. This stability "effects a particularly strong identification of the person with the role, both subjectively and for others; popular novel, films, and TV serials emphasize this permanence — you cannot really unfrock a priest, unmake a doctor, or disbar a lawyer. Occupational stability immediately evokes career," which Larson concisely calls "a pattern of organization of the self." Thus career promises control over the process of self-definition — a process just as crucial for the poet as for the priest, doctor, or lawyer, since authority is staked in each case to a particular idea of character that the career "pattern" is supposed to represent.
Stevens's father made sure that the value of such incentives was not lost on his son. As Longenbach suggests, "Stevens enrolled in a correspondence course when he went off to Harvard," and the "course," conducted by his father, had much to do with the choice of a profession that would allow Stevens to support himself financially. On November 1, 1898, Garrett Stevens wrote to Wallace to extinguish in advance any fantasies of pursuing poetry as a career by stressing the importance of knowing his place as a middle-class American:
Our young folks would of course all prefer to be born like English noblemen with Entailed estates, income guaranteed and in choosing a profession they would simply say — "How shall I amuse myself" — but young America understands that the question is — "Starting with nothing, how shall I sustain myself and perhaps a wife and family — and send my boys to College and live comfortably in my old age." Young fellows must all come to that question for unless they inherit money, marry money, find money, steal money or somebody presents it to them, they must earn it. ... How best can he earn a sufficiency! What talent does he possess which carefully nurtured will produce something which people want and therefore will pay for. This is the whole problem! and to Know Thyself! (SP 71)
The passage presents the "whole problem" of the conduct of life in the precise terms that the newly dominant culture of professionalism had set. The extent of that culture's influence is reflected in the assumption that its norms apply to many "young folks," to all "young fellows," and even to "young America" in its entirety. Garrett elaborates the importance of the career as a means of improvement, rather than amusement, and drives the point home with a hyperbolic emphasis on the prospect of "starting with nothing." The culture of professionalism thrived in conjunction with the expansion of higher education in America, so it is notable that he projects a future in which Wallace is able to bequeath to his sons the advantage of the college degree with which he will have begun his own career. Even Garrett's anxious tone (visible in his italics) is over-determined by that element of professional ideology that constructs the choice of career as a moment of personal crisis, for the "crisis of a career decision" is "in its fullest stature a crisis of identity," as Bledstein suggests.
For all its emphasis on the rational necessity of earning a "sufficiency," Garrett Stevens's letter, like Wallace Stevens's journal entry of June 16, 1900, reflects both terms of the ratio between technicality and indetermination that sociologists use to characterize professions. So it is that Garrett's letter, which focuses on choosing an adequately remunerative "profession," closes with an abrupt turn away from economic imperatives to quote a moral imperative: "Know Thyself!" In Stevens's journal entry, the contradictory impulses of professionalism appear in the division between the sort of calling that might be "single[d] ... out" and the sort that must "decide in you for itself." While Garrett combines the two simply by adding a piece of conventional wisdom to his letter, Wallace, on the evidence of the fairly strict separation between business and art he maintained throughout his life, found them more difficult to synthesize. The difference, of course, is that Garrett is describing an ideal "profession," while Wallace is considering a form of work — "literature" — that "resisted professionalization more strongly than any other field." Menand elaborates the reasons for this resistance. While "late-nineteenth-century aestheticism ... seems in some respects more compatible with the values of professionalism," he claims, "there were still certain items in the package that art could not afford." To make a profession of literature would mean "sacrificing all the advantages derived from the general perception of its essential difference from respectable kinds of work. Spontaneity, originality, inspiration — qualities viewed with increasing suspicion in the world of practical affairs — were among the very things that seemed to define the artistic," he explains, and "they are things that defy prescription."
The problem that Stevens faced was not unlike the one confronted a half century earlier by the Fireside poets — William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes — who also had to find ways to pursue non-remunerative work under circumstances demanding that money be made. Also like Stevens, they sought ways of imagining and presenting careers that would preserve a kind of authority rooted in precisely those "qualities viewed with increasing suspicion in the world of practical affairs." In fact, Garrett Stevens's letter echoes sentiments expressed by another lawyer-father to a poet-son who would soon graduate from college: "A literary life," Steven Longfellow wrote to his son Henry in 1824, "to one who has the means of support, must be very pleasant. But there is not wealth enough in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to merely literary men. And as you have not had the fortune (I will not say whether good or ill) to be born rich, you must adopt a profession which will afford you subsistence as well as reputation." Eventually the Longfellows worked out a compromise in which Henry would take up the study of law in accordance with his father's wishes, so long as he was allowed to devote a year to graduate study of language and literature at Harvard first. When Bowdoin College offered the eighteen-year-old graduate a newly created professorship in Modern Languages, plans for the year at Harvard and career in law were scrapped, and Longfellow began an academic career that carried on for nearly thirty years.
This stroke of good fortune immediately gave Longfellow the security that, for Stevens, would take years to develop, and it provided for a closer fit between vocation and avocation — Longfellow's debut, Voices of the Night (1839), featured more translations than original poems — than Stevens's notoriously bifurcated life as a lawyer and poet did. Still, the evocations of career in Longfellow's first book are marked by signs of vocational crisis similar in kind to the more extreme forms of indetermination that pervade the work of Stevens and his contemporaries. These poets all grapple with not only the perennial problem of supporting themselves while writing poetry, but also the interrelated challenges bound up with poetry's ambiguous relation to the literary market: maintaining an aura of disinterestedness while profiting from book and poem sales; casting poetry as a properly masculine activity without turning it into a species of merely mechanical production; and presenting a privileged vision without losing touch with the common reader. Voices of the Night is shot through with evidence of the various balancing acts required to negotiate the double binds implicit in pursuing a poetic career even under relatively favorable circumstances. The similarities between Longfellow's and Stevens's representations of career in their first books illuminate the extent to which crisis is a defining feature of the discourse of vocation. The differences accentuate the embeddedness of that discourse in particular historical situations that renew the sense of crisis by introducing it in distinctive contexts, while also saddling the belated poet with the burden of responding to it in new ways.
Matthew Gartner explains how "Prelude," the opening poem in Voices of the Night, "takes as its subject the poet's quest for themes congruous with the social obligations of manhood": "Pleasant it was," the poem begins (one notes that "pleasant" is also Steven Longfellow's word for describing a "literary life" enabled by inherited wealth), to "lay upon the ground" in pastoral retreat from the world and indulge in youthful fancies. But "distant voices" direct the poet toward other, more serious subjects, for he is "no more a child!" And yet, as Gartner suggests, the "final injunction of the stern paternal voice obscures what Longfellow's themes should be, even as it purports to define them," urging the poet not to discipline his perspective in accordance with the imperatives of his newly achieved manhood, but instead to "Look, then, into thine heart, and write!" about "All forms of sorrow and delight." This representation of career evokes maturation and masculinity in conjunction with realism and responsibility, but it ultimately promotes a model of poetic production in which the poet, schooled in the literary tradition (as the allusion to Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella suggests), is held accountable to a standard of sincerity that puts even those childish "forms" of "delight" so recently renounced back on the table as potential topics.
The same contradictory strategies of self-representation animate "The Psalm of Life," which had already caused a sensation upon appearing in the Knickerbocker prior to the publication of Voices of the Night. As Gartner observes, the poem "alternates between inclusive first-person plural pronouncements ('Not enjoyment and not sorrow / Is our destined end or way' [1:21]) and lofty imperatives ('Be not like dumb, driven cattle! / Be a hero in the strife!' [1:21]). The alternation suggests the poet is both one of 'us' and not one of 'us,'" at once the privileged possessor of special authority and also a relatable everyman figure with plenty still to learn. In a related discussion, Jill Anderson shows how the poem's evocation of a Puritan work ethic, in which work is pursued for its own sake rather than as a means of achieving specific goals, serves to diffuse the motive of self-interest while also assigning the poet a place in a conventionally masculine arena of utility and production. "The imperatives stack up: Act! Be up and doing! Live! Labor! Toil! But Longfellow rarely offered a direct object for these imperative verbs, an absence which lends a hysterical note" to his representation of poetic labor in "The Psalm of Life" and elsewhere. Such contradictions, as Anderson rightly observes, inhere in the poet's contradictory relation to the literary market, a relation that renders the poetic calling acutely problematic: "For Longfellow, the title 'poet' was a kind of dream identity, something to be wished for and worked toward, but also to be disclaimed even as he began to achieve it in the late 1830s and 1840s."
In Stevens's debut, the "hysterical note" that arises from Longfellow's attempt to reconcile masculine agency with a romantic "wise passiveness" in his imagining of vocation recurs in the impression of aberration that haunts the representation of career in Harmonium. For Stevens, the "apprenticeship to chance event" is "grotesque" in proportion to its divergence from the rationalized norms for the conduct of life derived from the ideology of professionalism. "Poet" functions as "a kind of dream identity" for Stevens also, and for similar reasons. But as we will see, the different social and historical circumstances under which Stevens pursued that identity a century after Longfellow required that it be "disclaimed" in much different and more forceful terms.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The First Book by Jesse Zuba. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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