According to one of his
business colleagues at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, the poetry
Wallace Stevens wrote was a “bunch of gobbledygook.” According to critic Harold
Bloom, Stevens was the “best and most representative” American poet of his
time, who enjoyed an artistic flowering in his later years unrivaled since
Sophocles. Whichever assessment is true, Stevens led a paradoxical life—a
strait-laced insurance lawyer, with a poetic streak, during business hours,
and an angst-ridden, hard-drinking, occasional brawler after work.
Born October 2, 1879, in
Reading, Pennsylvania, the second of five children, his uneventful childhood
was punctuated by an attack of malaria that forced him to repeat the ninth
grade. He went to Harvard, where he edited the literary magazine. After moving to New York, worked as a
newspaperman, frequented Greenwich Village artistic circles, published a few
poems in literary magazines, and then went to law school. He took a job with an
insurance company and in 1916 moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he spent
the rest of his life.
Stevens married a Reading
girl, Elsie Viola Katchel, who was, in his parents’ view, from the wrong side
of the tracks. They did not attend the wedding, and Stevens never spoke to his
father for the rest of his life. The marriage was difficult. Elsie was
described by those who knew her as “a mousy little creature,” “unbalanced,”
“not very helpful to Wallace,” “off the beam,” and a “witch.” For his part,
Stevens was said to have “treated her like ash.” After the birth of their
daughter, Holly, the couple moved to separate bedrooms and rarely saw or spoke
to each other.
Elsie deplored alcoholic
beverages, and Stevens, in the view of one of his employees, “liked a good
drink-up.” Most of his carousing, accompanied by plenty of martinis or whiskey,
was done on business trips to New York or solo vacations to Key West, Florida,
where he liked to hang out—and sometimes exchange words or blows—with Ernest
Hemingway and Robert Frost. On
several occasions he got into fierce arguments with Frost, who accused him of
being drunk and “acting inappropriately.” Stevens once challenged Hemingway to
a fistfight, and wound up with a broken hand, a broken nose, and two black
eyes.
Stevens turned out lean,
surreal, Modernist verses with an idiosyncratic vocabulary, often writing them
surreptitiously between reviewing contracts at his insurance office. His poetic
output included such landmarks as “Harmonium,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,”
“Sunday Morning,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” They earned him a place of honor
among Modernist poets, including his friends William Carlos Williams and
Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. The Pulitzer Prize, for his Collected Works, came in 1955, shortly
before his death.
Stevens once referred to
himself as a “dried-up Presbyterian,” but he maintained a lifelong interest in
Roman Catholicism. On his many trips to New York, he would often stop at St.
Patrick’s Cathedral for a couple of hours of meditation. He maintained correspondence with a nun
named Sister Madeleva, the president of St. Mary’s College and also a poet, who
urged him to “join the fold.” Stevens’ deathbed conversion, attested by the
hospital chaplain, has been disputed by his daughter, Holly.
On March 28, 1955, Stevens
went to see his family physician, Dr. James Moher, about stomach pains he had
been having. Moher odered barium X-rays, which failed to disclose any
disease. On April 19, still
suffering, Stevens underwent more thorough X-rays, which showed diverticulitis,
a gallstone, and a bloated stomach. He was operated on April 26, at Hartford’s
St. Francis Hospital, by Dr. Benedict Landry, who discovered Stevens was
suffering from stomach cancer. He returned home on May 11 to recuperate, but
Elsie, who had had a stroke earlier that year, found herself unable to tend to
him, and he was sent to Avery Convalescent Hospital on May 20.
In early June Stevens was
feeling well enough to attend commencement ceremonies at the University of
Hartford, where he was given an honorary degree, and on June 13, he went to New
Haven to receive another degree from Yale. After that he returned to his job at
the Hartford Accident and Indemnity, but on July 21, he suffered a relapse and
went back into the hospital.
During this final stay, he developed a friendshsip
with the Catholic chaplain, the Rev. Arthur Hanley, with whom he had daily conversations.
“I think I’d better get in the fold now,” Stevens told him. Father Hanley gave
this account of Stevens’ conversion in a 1977 letter to Professor Janet McCann,
a poet and professor at Texas A&M University:
“The
first time he came to the hospital, he expressed a certain emptiness in his
life…We sat and talked a long time. During his visit this time, I saw him 9 or
10 times…At least 3 times, he talked about getting into the fold—meaning the
Catholic Church. The doctrine of hell was an objection which we later got thru…
alright. He often remarked about
the peace and tranquility that he experienced in going into a Catholic Church
and spending some time. He spoke
about St. Patrick's Cathedral in N.Y. I can't give you the date of his baptism.
I think it might be recorded at the hospital. He said he had never been
baptized. He was baptized absolutely. Wallace and his wife had not been on
speaking terms for several years. So we thought it better not to tell her. She
might cause a scene in the hospital…He said if he got well, we would talk a lot
more and if not—he would see me in heaven.…”
On August 1 Stevens lapsed
into a coma and died the next day at 8:30 a.m. at the age of seventy-five. He is buried in Hartford’s Cedar Hill
Cemetery.
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