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Overview
Originally published in 1980.
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: | 9780691643564 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1000 |
| Pages: | 386 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Wallace Stevens
A Celebration
By Frank Doggett, Robert Buttel
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1980 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06414-7
CHAPTER 1
LOUIS L. MARTZ
"FROM THE JOURNAL OF CRISPIN": AN EARLY VERSION OF "THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C"
On December 21, 1921, Wallace Stevens wrote to Harriet Monroe, describing his strenuous efforts to create a poem worthy of submitting for a new prize offered by the Poetry Society of South Carolina, which had been announced a few weeks earlier in the December issue of Poetry:
I return your greetings, most sincerely, and in these Mrs. Stevens joins, although possibly, in her case, rather gingerly, for I have made life a bore for all and several since the announcement of the Blindman prize in your last issue. To wit: I have been churning and churning, producing, however, a very rancid butter, which I intend to submit in that competition, for what it may be worth, which, at the moment, isn't much. But what's the use of offering prizes if people don't make an effort to capture them. My poem is still very incomplete and most imperfect and I have very little time to give it. But I am determined to have a fling at least and possibly to go through the damnedest doldrums of regret later on. (L, 224)
Since the announcement declared that "All poems entered in this competition must be in the hands of the Secretary of the Society not later than January 1, 1922," Stevens was writing furiously against time. He evidently sent the poem off less than ten days after his letter to Monroe. Amy Lowell, judge of the prize, awarded it to Grace Hazard Conklin, but Stevens received an honorable mention for his poem "From the Journal of Crispin." No poem by Stevens was ever published under this title, and the manuscript he submitted was thought to have disappeared.
But in 1974 a Connecticut minister, the Reverend John Curry Gay, gave a group of manuscript poems by Wallace Stevens to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, along with an account of how he came to acquire them:
The house which my Grandmother built at 735 Farmington Avenue in West Hartford was divided into three apartments by my Mother and Father. Mr. Stevens rented one of the apartments and lived there with his wife and daughter Holly for some time — exactly how long I do not know. I do remember them well especially Miss Stevens. My parents became very close friends with Mr. Stevens....
My parents were very appreciative of Mr. Stevens' talents and always looked forward to the notes which accompanied his monthly rental cheques — the only example I have is the one in the brown leather wallet enclosed. Once in a while my Mother would grab a few pages from the trash can that were obviously Mr. Stevens' work — that is the source of the enclosed material. She thought it a very unlady-like thing to do, while at the same time she thought they might some day be of value. We always liked to think that some very important work of Mr. Stevens might have been written in our house.
The collection contains a nineteen-page, double-spaced typescript of "From the Journal of Crispin," along with a carbon copy that lacks three pages but is important for two variants. Above the title of the original is typed "Submitted for Blindman Prize," and in the upper right-hand corner, in pencil, are the words "Honourable Mention." The typescript represents an early version of the first four parts of "The Comedian as the Letter C," with 128 lines that were not included in Harmonium (1923) and hundreds of lesser variants scattered throughout. (The complete text of "From the Journal of Crispin" follows; the excised lines are enclosed in brackets, while minor variations have been left for the reader to explore.)
As they stand, the four sections have a completeness of their own. As the fifteen excised lines indicate at the very close, the poem exists in a tentative present:
His colony may not arrive. The site
Exists. So much is sure. And what is sure
In our abundance is his seignory.
His journal, at the best, concerns himself....
....
As Crispin in his attic shapes the book
That will contain him, he requires this end:
The book shall discourse of himself alone,
Of what he was, and why, and of his place,
And of its fitful pomp and parentage
Thereafter he may stalk in other spheres.
The verbs throughout are usually cast in the present tense, while in the final version the whole poem has been put in the past tense, in keeping with the retrospective view of the "fatalist" comedian in the fifth and sixth sections that appeared in Harmonium. Did these added sections, with their wry "defeat" of the hero, form any part of Stevens' original plan? He told Harriet Monroe, "My poem is still very incomplete and most imperfect"; perhaps, then, a germ of something further might have been in Stevens' mind. And yet one wonders. A hundred lines have been excised from sections three and four of the "Journal," and these hundred lines create an effect quite different from that of the final version, which has been redesigned to lead toward the settling down of Crispin into the acceptance of his comfortable domesticity.
In the early version Crispin's discoveries in section three are more emphatic, more extensive, more adventurous, as a glance at some of the excised lines will show:
The poet, seeking the true poem, seeks,
As Crispin seeks, the simplifying fact,
The common truth.
Hence Crispin becomes dissatisfied with "moonlight," with "Chanson evoking vague, inaudible words."
Crispin is avid for the strenuous strokes
That clang from a directer touch, the clear
Vibration rising from a daylight bell,
Minutely traceable to the latest reach.
Imagination soon exhausts itself
In artifice too tenuous to sustain
The vaporous moth upon its fickle wings.
It is true, however, that Crispin cannot bring himself utterly to forgo the possibility that he has earlier described in this section, in lines preserved in Harmonium:
Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave
The liaison, the blissful liaison,
Between himself and his environment,
Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight,
For him, and not for him alone.
(CP, 34)
So now, in a passage retained with some significant revisions, Crispin goes on to describe what he "conceives his Odyssey to be":
An up and down in these two elements,
A fluctuating between sun and moon,
A sally into gold and scarlet forms,
As on this voyage, out of goblinry,
And then retirement like a sinking down
To sleep, among its violet feints and rest
And turning back to the indulgences
That in the moonlight have their habitude.
Nevertheless, he knows that he can never be satisfied to rest within these "backward lapses." Both the "moonlight fiction" and the "gemmy marionette" of spring are renounced (for a time) by the "searcher for the fecund minimum," the seeker after a "sinewy nakedness." This is the quality that he has earlier called "the umbelliferous fact" — that is, the fact that bears a flowery diadem.
Then begins a passage of eight lines that is retained, with some revisions, in the final version:
A river bears
The vessel inward. Crispin tilts his nose
To inhale the rancid rosin, burly smells
Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
That help him round his rude aesthetic out.
He savors rankness like a sensualist.
He notes the marshy ground around the dock,
The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence....
One thinks here of the poem "Smell!" by William Carlos Williams, which appeared in his volume of 1917, AZ Que Quiere:
Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
What tactless asses we are, you and I, boney nose,
always indiscriminate, always unashamed,
and now it is the souring flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. With what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!
....
Must you taste everything? Must you know everything?
Must you have a part in everything?
Stevens suggests in the "Journal" that he is willing, for a time at least, to follow Williams in this exploration of the local, using the kind of detail that Williams himself was constantly exploring:
The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,
That makes enclosure, a periphery
Of bales, machines and tools and tanks and men,
Directing whistles, puffing engines, cranes,
Provocative paraphernalia to his mind.
A short way off the city starts to climb,
At first in alleys which the lilacs line,
Abruptly, then, to the cobbled merchant streets,
The shops of chandlers, tailors, bakers, cooks,
The Coca Cola-bars, the barber-poles,
The Strand and Harold Lloyd, the lawyers' row,
The Citizens' Bank, two tea rooms, and a church.
Crispin is happy in this metropole.
But of course Stevens can never use these details in Williams' way, to evoke the concrete, stark presence of a living thing ("no ideas but in .the facts"). No, Crispin pauses to ponder and to question what these details may mean, allowing for the possible magical transmutation of the fact by the old "goblinry," the old "moonlight":
If the lilacs give the alleys a young air
Of sentiment, the alleys in exchange
Make gifts of no less worthy ironies.
If poems are transmutations of plain shops,
By aid of starlight, distance, wind, war, death,
Are not these doldrums poems in themselves,
These trophies of wind and war? At just what point
Do barber-poles become burlesque or cease
To be? Are bakers what the poets will,
Supernal artisans or muffin men,
Or do they have, on poets' minds, more influence
Than poets know? Are they one moment flour,
Another pearl? The Citizens' Bank becomes
Palladian and then the Citizens' Bank
Again. The flimsiest tea room fluctuates
Through crystal changes. Even Harold Lloyd
Proposes antic Harlequin.
Thus Crispin, the dismayed "short-shanks" of section one, is resurrected in an American guise. And so, in a passage significantly revised in the final version, we find that Crispin has indeed been "made new":
Crispin revitalized
Makes these researches faithfully, a wide
Curriculum for the marvelous sophomore.
They purify. They make him see how much
Of what he sees he never sees at all.
He grips more closely the essential prose....
The drastic removal of so much detail and so much pondering creates quite a different effect in the final version:
He marked the marshy ground around the dock,
The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,
Cumculum for the marvelous sophomore.
It purified. It made him see how much
Of what he saw he never saw at all.
He gripped more closely the essential prose....
(CP, 36)
"It purified. It made him see...." The word "it" refers to the general "curriculum"; but "they" in the first version refers to his "researches" into the much broader range of experiences, which include observations of machinery, Coca Cola bars, barber poles, and Harold Lloyd. The "essential prose" in the first version therefore stresses much more specifically the American place. The result is the much more "local" significance of Crispin's action at the outset of the next section, when he reverses the opening statement of his journal ("Nota: Man is the intelligence of his soil ..."), even though nothing is changed in the final version except the tense:
Nota: His soil is man's intelligence.
That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find.
Crispin in one laconic phrase lays bare
His cloudy drift and plans a colony.
Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,
Rex and principium, exit the whole
Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here is prose
More exquisite than any tumbling verse,
A still new continent in which to dwell.
What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,
Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind,
If not, when all is said, to drive away
The shadow of his fellows from the skies,
And, from their stale intelligence released,
To make a new intelligence prevail.
The chief effect of the early version of section three, then, is to stress Stevens' alliance with the other writers who had stayed home in America, and who had, as Williams reports, sought to create American art and literature through cultivation of the "local." Williams is speaking of the era, in 1922, just before the publication of Eliot's The Waste Land: "There was heat in us, a core and a drive that was gathering headway upon the theme of a rediscovery of a primary impetus, the elementary principle of all art, in the local conditions. ... I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself — rooted in the locality which should give it fruit."
The "Journal of Crispin" shows Stevens as wholly aware of this movement, which was represented by Alfred Stieglitz and his famous 291 (Fifth Avenue) Gallery. This movement was well described in a remarkable essay by Paul Rosenfeld that appeared in The Dial for December 1921, the very month in which Stevens was pondering his entry for the Blindman Prize. Indeed, the "Journal of Crispin" seems to follow the voyage of the American artist, as described by Rosenfeld, not because Stevens necessarily read the essay (though he was a steady reader of The Dial), but because Rosenfeld sums up the movement toward contact with the local that had been the "slowly shaping drive" of letters and art in America from the outset of the century. Rosenfeld begins his essay with a long discussion of the effort to discover what Williams calls "the essence of a new art form," as represented in the paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, where "the fanfares of romance breathe through the tender mysterious tones, the sensitive foaming forms" (p. 649). Here, says Rosenfeld, "For the first time, paintings speak to the American of what lies between him and his native soil. In them, for the first time since the pictorial art began to be practised among the European colonists of America ... a painter has succeeded in digging down through sand to the sea."
Three generations of sober craftsmen had sought to spade their way through Reynolds and Constable, through Munich and Barbizon, had painted the valley of the Hudson and the hill walls of Lake George, the Rockies and Niagara Falls, chintz and girl graduates and candied Monets, quite vainly. Their little ponds float nothing save paper boats. But, in the Ryders, the ocean moves: we are set afloat beyond our depth, without intellectual compass and chart, and challenged to find our way across the tide to the unknown other shore, (pp. 649-50)
Just so, Crispin, in the opening section of both versions of this poem, makes his way from European "salad-beds" and "jupes" to his devastating vision of the sea:
Crispin,
The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,
The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak
Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw
Of hum, inquisitorial botanist,
And general lexicographer of mute
And maidenly greenhorns, now beholds himself,
A skinny sailor peering in sea-glass.
What word split up in dickering syllables
And storming under multitudinous tones
Is name for this short-shanks in all this brunt?
Crispin is washed away by magnitude.
Crispin in his European guise evokes the courtly elegance and cleverness of his archetype in seventeenth-century French comedy: the valet whose descendant is Figaro. Costumed in cape, tall boots, knee breeches, ruff and cuffs of delicate lace, and a round hat, wittily given to fanfaronade, essentially timid but capable of appropriating heroic passages from Corneille's he Cid, valet in command of every devious device, playing the roles of scholar, teacher, musician, poet, or doctor, judging and classifying all the terms and conditions of the greenhorns whom he plans to dupe — such a figure, Stevens implies, is the outmoded representative of an age when man conceived himself to be "the intelligence of his soil." Such is the point of view that lies between the modern artist and his native soil — a point of view that Stevens, with his affection for modern French poetry, may have seen as continuing into the modern era in the writings of Verlaine and his contemporaries.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wallace Stevens by Frank Doggett, Robert Buttel. Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. ix
- Preface, pg. xi
- Chronology, pg. xix
- Abbreviations, pg. xxi
- "From the Journal of Crispin": An Early Version of "The Comedian as the Letter C", pg. 1
- From the Journal of Crispin, pg. 30
- "A Collect of Philosophy": The Difficulty of Finding What Would Suffice, pg. 46
- Three Manuscript Endings for "A Collect of Philosophy", pg. 50
- Particles of Order: The Unpublished Adagia, pg. 57
- A Selection of Stevens' Letters to Wilson E. Taylor, pg. 78
- Of a Remembered Time, pg. 91
- Holidays in Reality, pg. 105
- A Trip in a Balloon: A Sketch of Stevens' Later Years in New York, pg. 114
- Wallace Stevens in England, pg. 130
- How Wallace Stevens Saw Himself, pg. 149
- Stevens and Keats' "To Autumn", pg. 171
- The Ways of Truth in "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", pg. 196
- Strange Relation: Stevens' Nonsense, pg. 219
- The Sound of the Music of Music and Sound, pg. 235
- Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut, pg. 256
- Theoretical and Atheoretical in Stevens, pg. 274
- Toward Decreation: Stevens and the "Theory of Poetry", pg. 286
- Metaphoric Staging: Stevens' Beginning Again of the "End of the Book", pg. 308
- Notes, pg. 339
- Notes on Contributors, pg. 359