336
PARTISAN REVIEW
"the exquisite errors of time," and the rest; everything that is neither
bought, sold, nor imagined on Sunset Boulevard or
in
Times Square;
everything the absence of which made Lorca think Hell a city very
like New York-these things were the necessities of Stevens' spirit. Some
of his poems set about supplying these lacks-from other times and
places, from the underlying order of things, from the imagination; other
poems look with mockery and despair at the time and place that cannot
supply them, that does not even desire to supply them; other poems
reason or seem to reason about their loss, about their nature, about their
improbable restoration. His poetry is obsessed with lack, a lack at last al–
most taken for granted, that he himself automatically supplies; if some–
times he has restored by imagination or abstraction or re-creation, at
other times he has restored by collection, almost as
J.
P. Morgan did–
Stevens likes something, buys it (at the expense of a little spirit), and
ships it home in a poem. The feeling of being a leisured, cultivated,
and sympathetic tourist (in a time-machine, sometimes) is essential to
much of his work; most of his contact with values is at the distance
of knowledge and regret-an aesthetician's or an archaeologist's contact
with a painting, not a painter's.
Many of Stevens' readers have resented his-so to speak-spending
his time collecting old porcelain : "if old things are what you want,"
they felt, "why don't you collect old Fords or Locomobiles or Stutz
Bearcats, or old Mother Bloors, right here at home?" But, for an odd
reason, people have never resented the cruel truths or half-truths he
told them about the United States. Once upon a time Richard Dehmel's
poems, accused of obscenity, were acquitted on the grounds that they
were incomprehensible-and almost exactly this happened to Stevens'
home-truths. Yet they were plain, sometimes. Looking at General Jack–
son confronting the "mockers, the mickey mockers," Stevens decided
what the "American Sublime" is : the sublime "comes down/ To the
spirit itself,/ The spirit and space,! The empty spirit/ In vacant space."
Something like this is true, perhaps, always and everywhere; yet it is
a hard truth for your world to have reduced you to: it is no wonder the
poem ends, "What wine does one drink?/ What bread does one eat?"
And in "The Common Life" the church steeple is a "black line beside a
white line," not different in any way from "the stack of the electric
plant"; in the "flat air," the "morbid light," a man is "a result, a demon–
stration"; the men "have no shadows/ And the women only one side."
We live "no longer on the ancient cake of seed,/ The almond and deep
fruit.... We feast on human heads"; the table is a mirror and the
diners eat reflections of themselves. "The steeples are empty and so
