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Book Reviews91 Works Reviewed Montherlant, Henry de. Thrasylle. Paris: Robert Laffont; Lausanne: J.-P. Laubscher, 1984. 171 p. Peyrefitte, Roger, and Pierre Sipriot, eds. Correspondance: Henry de Montherlant-Roger Peyrefitte. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1983. 321 p. Raimond, Michel. Les Romans de Montherlant. Paris: C.D.U. et SEDES Réunis, 1982. 220 p. Sipriot, Pierre. Montherlant sans masque, Tome I, L'Enfant prodigue (18951932 ). Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982. 500 p. MILTON J. BATES. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1985. 319 p. In his preface, Bates states that his intended audience is not necessarily the Stevens specialist, but rather the student who has been "balked" by the difficulties of Stevens' poetry. His goal is not to write biography but to show how Stevens transcended biography through the masks he created in his poetry. The title comes from a line in "From the Journal of Crispin": "What counts is the mythology of self." In tracing these "fables of identity," Bates uses a primarily historical approach to reveal how Stevens' inner life was shaped by his outer life, particularly by his relationships with other people. Bates traces Stevens' mythology of self back to his father, a lawyer and sometime poet, and to George Santayana, Stevens' mentor at Harvard. Stevens regarded his father as the active and involved man of the world, in contrast to the detached and contemplative Santayana, Bates argues, and Stevens "spent a lifetime trying to restore these halves to their first integrity," what James Russell Lowell called "mystic-practicalism" (35). But there is insufficient evidence to support such an assertion, and Bates' contention appears to be mere speculation. The appearance of such sweeping statements without adequate support is one of the major weaknesses of the book. Too often, Bates resorts to hedge words such as "may," "probably," or "perhaps" without providing the necessary support. Another problem is a tendency to ramble and a lack of focus. In some chapters, particularly the last one, explications of individual poems appear without any apparent relationship to each other or to the chapter as a whole. Occasionally, the analyses do not elucidate the supposed topic of the chapter. But I do not wish to detract from the virtues of the book, which are many. Bates quite admirably achieves what he set out to do — to provide an interesting study of the life and works of a very complex poet, who is often unintelligible to the novitiate. It is a fine introduction to a difficult poet. Bates' biographical interpretations of the poems seem quite valid and interesting when he has the necessary evidence to support them. He traces Stevens' use of comic personae to love letters written to his future wife, Elsie Kachel, in which he created a cast of characters such as ' 'Tom Folio" and ' Old Prune" to hide his self-consciousness. These masks anticipate his later "aesthetic dandyism" (100) 92Rocky Mountain Review and his "fops of fancy" such as Bantam, Berserk, Carlos, Peter Quince, and Crispin (117). In "The Comedian as the Letter C," Crispin imagines himself as "A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown." These masks give way to medium man during Stevens' middle phase and to the paysan in the late poetry. Bates points out that the latter is marked by traditional images of stability and authority such as God and family. The book is also useful in that it places Stevens in a historical continuum with particular references to the English decadent movement, Stevens' literary predecessors, and to the leftist critics who regarded Stevens as an "ivory tower" poet (166). The leftists were not his only critics, however: Frost accused Stevens of writing "bric-a-brac," and others such as Louis Untermeyer charged that his verse was merely "decorative" or decadent (147). In presenting Stevens' poetic theory as well as the reaction of his contemporaries, Bates provides the reader with a solid introduction to the poems and their intellectual milieu. Also helpful is Bates' discussion of key terms intrinsic to any consideration of the works. The Interior Paramour is Stevens' term for the muse, his creative anima (60). Pure poetry, according to Stevens, consists of "images and images alone, or images and the music...

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