BOO KS
635
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
LETTERS OF WALLACE STEVENS. Ed. by Holly Stevens. Knopf. $17.50.
These letters, alm.ost a th.ousand .of them, c.over sixty years
.of Stevens' life. They appear at a time when the examinati.on .of
Stevens' poetry has already become a profitable c.ottage industry while
the examination .of his life has st.opped at the hoary questi.on of how
he managed t.o
be
a businessman and a poet at the same time. The
lucid and graceful c.omments ab.out his .own w.ork which fill Stevens'
later letters set a standard which critics will be hard put
to
equal;
and
if
his comments ab.out his life d.o not solve any mystery .of divided
lcyalties, it is because Stevens himself f.ound neither mystery n.or
di–
visi.on there. He saw his insurance work as taking time and giving
.order and money in return. That was all. S.ometimes it was even a
protecti.on:
How fQrtunate I am, in such weather, tQ have the .office,
where .one lives in a sort .of vacuum, cQntaining nQthing but
the pastime .of wQrk. The great building is like a neutral
zone, invulnerable tQ the weather. The leaves .outdoors seen
through the windows, belong t.o a perishable landscape, c.ome
fr.om n.owhere.
The intense curiosity we feel about the letters .of a great poet
would seem to imply a h.ope that they could hQld the secret .of
his genius. I suspect, h.owever, that the .opposite is the case: the mind·
we want in letters is unpoetic, a c.ollecti.on .of stylized confidences that
.only a Pamela, a Clarissa .or a Viscomte de Valm.ont could actually
impart. The secret, if it is .one, can be f.ound .only in the poems them–
selves. There the m.ovement .of the poet's mind shows itself, th.ough
always heightened, visible .only when its c.ontours have already taken
on the form of poetry. The m.ost m.oving letters by poets, those .of
Hart Crane, Malc.olm Lowry and Keats in Italy, are moving because
.of their very distance from any steady creati.on; in them we read the
Shelleyan triumph of life over the artist.
Fascinati.on with a poet's letters indicates, finally, a fear .of his
imagination. This impulse tQ humanize helps protect the reader from
the "exceptional m.onster"; the poet in full regalia, the .one man
