whose shadow is reflected in the water.
-- Wallace Stevens
The biography I owned about Wallace Stevens, a library discard, on first reading, was undistinguished. But so, it claimed, was most of his life. After all, the insurance company attorney traveled only on business and to Florida on vacation. This, in spite of the fact that over nine hundred of his letters and a number of journal excerpts have been published, a frightening wealth of source material. Samuel Morse is best when he is quoting Stevens, whose language is full of lively, specific detail. Morse' own voice, though he knew Stevens, is given to too much critical commentary and too little story.
To a poet who also has made a career outside of writing or teaching, it seems a little sad that his professional life gets so little attention. These professions create "desert places in a poet's career." But desert places, which sometimes cause the silences that Tillie Olsen explored, fascinate me. Tell me. What does an insurance attorney do? What is a day like in the office? What takes him out on the road? During those times when we stop writing, we don't stop living. It's not so easy to separate the two. Answering those questions would require a very different type of research of the biographer.
As a trained librarian, I felt a second reading of Samuel Morse's biography of Stevens was required. This is not the summer reading of a fifteen-year-old who swallowed one or two of her aunts' Harlequin novels a day. No one will give me a prize for being in a hurry. Time to realized that Death will not allow me to read everything I want. In fairness to the authors, better to slow down and absorb more completely what I read.
This longing for more narrative gives me an opportunity to confront (or circle endlessly) my discomfort with and hunger for personal detail. My husband's fascination with news about Paris Hilton astounds me. But I did once read all the way through the Gelb biography of Eugene O'Neill. I must confess, I searched for other biographies of Stevens and turned up a collection of his journal entries as a young man edited by his daughter and a two volume work by Joan Richardson. How much data am I entitled to? How much do I want? How much can I use? In this age of entitlement and freedom of information, what right to privacy do the living and dead have? There is a great deal available. So once a reader has all this additional information about a writer, what can be done with it?
Perhaps, Stevens preferred not to have his personal life examined in the light of his professional or poetic work. And vice versa. His journal entries are unlikely to begin "Researched litigation history of. . . ." or "Picked up milk and bread on the way back from work." For me, the strongest statement about the work is the work, the poem as read or heard. Poets offer readers a poem. The reader takes that artifact and gives in new life. Many of his poems require of the reader a contemplative rather than an inquiring mind.
Ironically, if the work itself is not complex and intriguing, if it cannot stand alone, what market will biographies and critical studies find? In the most recent Poets and Writers Magazine, Amy Shearn asks "Where are the badly behaved writers?" Badly behaved writers made more interesting material for many an M.F.A. and Ph.D. thesis. But the steadily working creative writing students she knows best, like Stevens, concentrate on hard work in a highly competitive world. It will be a pity if their biographers cannot.
It was in Wallace Stevens' "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" that I found an explanation for why I no longer have that hunger to own writers by knowing facts about them and why I get impatient when trying to write an essay about someone else's poetry. My most fulfilled moments as a writer and a reader occur when I am lost in the work, not analyzing it or explaining it, but becoming it. "[Truth] itself is summer and night, itself/Is the reader leaning late and reading there." Then my world, the work before me, and the writer's world exist without seams. A pause between breaths. I wonder if its possible for that to continue for longer than a moment.
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