REFLECTIONS ON WALLACE STEVENS
341
All his
tunk~a-tunks,
his
hoo-goo-boos-those
mannered, manufac–
tured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions-how typical they
are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or
odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out
from
Alice,
in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw
reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These "tootings at the wedding
of the soul" are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do
all the foreign words-a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant,
and the rest a disaster: "one cannot help deploring his too extensive
acquaintance with the foreign languages," as Henry James said, of Walt
Whitman, to Edith Wharton.
Stevens is never more philosophical, abstract, rational, than when
telling us to put our faith in nothing but immediate sensations, percep–
tions, aesthetic particulars; for this is only a generalization offered for
assent, and where in the ordinary late poem are thc real particulars of
the world-the people, the acts, the lives-for us to put our faith in?
And when Stevens makes a myth to hold together aesthetic particulars
and generalizations, it is as
if
one were revisited by the younger Saint–
Simon, Comte, and that actress who played Reason to Robespierre's
approving glare; Stevens' myths spring not from the soil but from the
clouds, the arranged, scrubbed, reasoning clouds in someone's head. He
is too rational and composedly fanciful a being to make up a myth–
one could as easily imagine his starting a cult in Los Angeles. When
one reads most eighteenth-century writing one is aware of some man
of good sense and good taste and good will at the bottom of every–
thing and everybody; but in Stevens-who is always swinging between
baroque and rococo, and reminds one of the eighteenth century in
dozens of ways-this being at the bottom of everything is cultivated and
appreciative and rational out of all reason: the Old Adam in everybody
turns out to be not Robinson Crusoe but Bernard Berenson.
Metastasio began as an improviser and ended as a poet; as one
reads the average poem in
Auroras of Autumn
one feels that the op–
posite has been happening to Stevens. A poem begins, revealingly:
"An exercise in viewing the world./ On the motive! But one looks at
the
seal
As one improvises, on the piano." And not the sea only. One
reads a book like this with odd mixed pleasure, not as if one were read–
ing poems-which are either successful or unsuccessful, which "come
shut with a click like a closing box"-but as
if
one were reading some
Travel-Diary of an Aesthetician,
who works more for pleasure than for
truth, puts in entries regularly, and gives one continual pleasure in in–
cidentals~
in good phrases, interesting ideas/ delicate perceptions/ but
