Of Modest Men and Cinnamon-Scented Women: Extracts from Wallace Stevens’ Genealogical Letters

Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.

—Stuart Hall

Over the Years, a great many scholars have deepened their contextual understanding of Wallace Stevens’ writings by studying the poet’s personal papers and books at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California. With a number of early exceptions (especially Milton J. Bates), such visitors have tended to ignore the voluminous holdings relating to the poet’s genealogical research. This is due partly to the unmanageable quantity of materials in these boxes, partly to its arcane and perhaps overspecialized interest. As a result, there are still unpublished letters in the genealogical part of the Huntington’s Wallace Stevens Collection that have been languishing for a long time. As is commonly known, Holly Stevens had to limit herself in many respects when she made her selection for the single-volume Letters of Wallace Stevens back in the 1960s. Since then, only two, more narrowly focused collections have complemented her wide-ranging standard edition: Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez Feo, edited by Beverly Coyle and Alan Filreis; and The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie, edited by J. Donald Blount. Besides these two collections, smaller sets of letters have appeared only piecemeal in interested periodicals, notably in The Wallace Stevens Journal. To this very day, it remains one of the explicit ambitions of this journal to feature “previously unpublished primary or archival material and photographs.” And so the time may be ripe to compose a little bouquet from the genealogical correspondence, making it available for a wider readership.

In the middle of his investigations into his family backgrounds, Stevens liked to joke that he wanted to prove he was “descended from the first white child born in New Netherland” (L 472). This is, of course, a formidable task to anyone who undertakes genealogical research seriously, and Stevens, in spite of the self-irony in his boast, became very serious about the whole enterprise. In due course, he gathered what Bates describes as

a small mountain of genealogical materials, including carbon copies of his own genealogical letters, letters from professional genealogists and interested relatives; books, pamphlets and periodicals; copies of wills, church records, gravestone inscriptions and Bible flyleaves; notebooks filled with notes on his reading; printed and hand-drawn maps; memoranda and photographs.

(“Realize” 607)

The resulting mountain, Bates quips, “may well have taken the place of many poems” (607). Travelers to the Huntington have generally deemed the mountain too forbidding to climb, and there will probably never be much interest in digitizing all of these materials in their exhausting fullness. What has seemed to us worth doing, nevertheless, is to send out one final expedition to take a number of snapshots of the most interesting vistas, in an attempt at retracing some of Stevens’ own scrambling “For the outlook that would be right, / . . . / Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea” of genealogical data, “Recognize his unique and solitary home” (CPP 435).

Without seeking to spoil the reader’s enjoyment of the following letters by too many sneak previews, we would like to preface our small corpus with a few brief reflections on its overall significance and value. The letters gathered here are not important in the first place for the facts and figures they parade; we have, in fact, repeatedly cut these when they became too technical and overwhelming. A more important motivation for making the selection has been to reproduce the moments of characteristic fun that Stevens’ letters afford—not only the humor that was second nature to him and that he used both to debunk his own hunt and to massage his correspondents into collaborating, but also the surprises of imagery and quirky association that are among this writer’s main attractions. Because such flashes of humor and formulation depend for their effectiveness on timing, this inevitably means that some of the surrounding stretches of functional prose needed...