Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (review)

The many pleasures I derive from this book do not always have to do with its topic, which seems capacious but is in fact fairly well and even narrowly defined: Wallace Stevens in Europe. The connection is rich but in several ways it's a not-so-supreme fiction, since of course Stevens never visited Europe, never went further abroad than Cuba. Once Europe must be identified as the Europe of Stevens' imagination, anything goes. To be sure, I'm mostly glad of this. My favorite passages generally explore the terra incognita of the subject. Frank Kermode claims, doubtless a fact, that it was he who introduced Stevens to the Swiss. George Lensing elegantly rehearses the old but nonetheless accurate generalization that Stevens "survived on postcards," and offers a brief but good reading of "A Dish of Peaches in Russia," an underread poem. Robert Rehder describes "mastery of the syntax of doubt" in "Description without Place," making one doubt the relevance of "Place" beyond the many name-dropped references in that end-of-war poem, such that "without" (does it indicate dislocation or evacuation?) becomes the key term. J. Hillis Miller gives, along the way, a personal recollection of Stevens's important reading at Harvard in 1950, and, as a bonus, a quite moving evocation of the "Danes in Denmark" passage testifying to Stevens's unironic sense of the power of the indigene truly living the local life ("And knew each other well").

Yet as we read this book about Stevens's Europe, Stevens in Europe, the Europeans' Stevens, we must remember that the "Danes in Denmark" notion was never about Denmark, nor even about Europe at large. It's about fully occupying any place but one's own place, and Europe is a site chosen by way of analogy rather than a cultural or geographic context. Miller, for instance, is right to wonder why Stevens landed on Denmark to make this fabulous place-unspecific point about place.

What does it mean to speak of this particular poet "in" Europe? His actual readership there? His effect on the poetic community? His relationships with individual contacts and correspondents there? Stevens in Europe; Stevens and Europe. "In" is critically a more effective term than "and," in this regard, but it also requires higher standards of evidence and scholarship. "And" has always produced in Stevens criticism pairings suggestive at best, indulgent at worst: "Stevens and Zukofsky" (a real connection, and generative in terms of contemporary poetics); "Stevens and Heidegger" (a connection made by Stevens through a tiny bit of reading; otherwise a theoretical parallelism, and perhaps a troubling one and too dependent on the acuity of the critic). Miller's essay here is titled "Stevens in Connecticut (and Denmark)," but the locatedness of the preposition is more persuasive than the collection-befitting conjunction.

Once the subordinating, situating in of the first section of essays gives way to the parallelistic and of part two—a portion of the book titled "transatlantic conversation"—the critical essayist is untethered, for good and for ill. Here we get the delightful piece by Krzysztof Ziarek considering, once again, Stevens and Heidegger. Yes, Heidegger was definitively German, but the essay's large concept, the "foreignness of poetry," turns out to have only tangential connection to Stevens's sense of Europe, a limitation that fortunately does not thwart Ziarek's revisionist reading of an important late poem, "Of Mere Being." Again, though, "mere being" is an existential condition more fundamental, more culturally unspecific, than can be captured by the category "European."

Across the Atlantic for Stevens were Anatole and Paule Vidal, his French art dealers (father and daughter), their aesthetic-mercantile eyes on the depressed and then war-torn republics; alas, the Vidals are seen only glancingly here. Barbara Church is briefly mentioned (her postcards from a postwar driving trip are sources for several cantos in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"), but she and her husband were crucial to the development of Stevens's view of...