Wallace Stevens: A Dual Life as Poet and Insurance Executive (review)

[Erratum]

Alison Johnson’s Wallace Stevens: A Dual Life as Poet and Insurance Executive purports to address the relationship between the two very different occupations that defined Stevens’ life: his work as a highly successful and respected insurance executive who specialized in surety bonds, and his work as an innovative and award-winning poet. Ultimately, however, this biography pays little attention to either aspect of Stevens’ “dual life.” Instead, Johnson’s book dwells primarily on what she clearly sees as the troubling “failure” of Stevens’ love life. Johnson filters most of her account of Stevens through his sad and, in her view, perplexing and disturbing relationship with Elsie Moll. Throughout her biography, Johnson returns again and again to Moll’s lack of education and sophistication, her coldness and sharpness, her insecurity and paranoia, and her incipient mental illness, all of which become the psychological triggers that inspire Stevens’ verse. As Stevens’ deluded passion for Moll fades, he turns to poetry as a means to escape the trials of romantic disappointment. His poems reflect his efforts to resolve his conflicted prudery, and cope with his sexual frustration (181). The only poems that interest Johnson are those that she can read as expressions of Stevens’ unfulfilled passions.

Cribbing from William Ford’s provocative article in the pages of this journal, “Seeking the Sibyl of Harmonium: Wallace Stevens and Sybil Gage” (WSJrnl 32.1), Johnson reads the bulk of Stevens’ Harmonium poems as expressions of his thwarted desire for his first love, Sybil Gage. Having uncovered Stevens’ secret “muse,” Johnson pushes Ford’s thesis to uncomfortable extremes. Reading every instance of a word beginning with the letter “s” as evidence of Stevens’ fascination with Sybil, Johnson charts the “saturation value” of the “s” words in Harmonium as a means of revealing Stevens’ obsession, be it conscious or unconscious, with Gage (98). At best, Johnson’s desire to read Stevens’ Harmonium poems as “a trail of clues referring to Sybil” is overstated (111). At worst, it is strangely irrelevant. Johnson never steps back to answer the deeper questions that attend her “discovery.” How, precisely, did Stevens’ obsession with Gage, if that is what it was, affect his life and his work? Johnson offers no compelling portrait of Gage, nor does she make any effort to suggest what it was about Gage’s personality that so captivated Stevens. Johnson assumes that the fact of Stevens’ sustained passion for Gage is enough to satisfy her readers, even though the fact alone reveals nothing about Stevens’ character or career. The only point Johnson seems to wish to make is that Gage emerged as an ideal as Moll failed to please.

Indeed, it is the long, tortured collapse of Stevens’ marriage that is Johnson’s only real focus, a concentration the importance of which remains oddly unstated even as it drives the whole of the book. How did Stevens’ growing marital dissatisfaction change the tenor and shape of his work? How did his poetic concerns evolve in concert with his personal tragedy? Such questions remain unexplored. In her chapter “Living with a Failed Marriage,” Johnson begins by noting that Stevens made a series of efforts in the early 1940s to rebuild his relationships with his Reading relatives. Rather than dig deep to find some explanation for Stevens’ turn back to family, however, Johnson merely states that “whatever the reason for his sudden change of attitude, during the next few years Stevens maintained frequent contact with his sister and his nieces and nephews” (197). The rest of the chapter makes clear that Johnson’s mention of Stevens’ niece, Jane MacFarland, constitutes merely a segue into MacFarland’s critique of Elsie Moll Stevens and Johnson’s hunt, once again, for poems that confirm the fact of Stevens’ unhappiness. Focusing on three poems penned between 1924 and 1932, “Red Loves Kit,” “Good Man, Bad Woman,” and “The Woman Who Blamed Life on a Spaniard,” Johnson claims that the “violently intense” tone that marks these poems, all...