Letters’ Other Side: The Archive as a Fate of Rereading

1. Creative Reading

FROM THE EARLY 1980s through the mid-1990s, I visited the Huntington Library a number of times.¹ Two visits were extended residencies (for one of which I was a “Huntington Fellow” and worked daily in the manuscripts room for several months), and there were at least two other substantial stints, and several shorter ones. I also worked closely by mail and phone with Sara “Sue” Hodson, Virginia “Ginger” Renner, and other special collections librarians and archivists through those years. During this time I managed to call up nearly all the boxes in the Stevens papers. I pulled almost every folder in every box I called, and read all the letters and other materials in those folders. The result of this work was three books and, arguably, as I’ll note here by way of conclusion, a fundamental influence upon a fourth, although that book makes just one passing mention of Stevens in 422 pages.

My first visit was in 1982. The Modern Language Association convention was in Los Angeles that year. Although I was a graduate student, a scholarly novice residing on the other coast, and certainly not yet looking for jobs, I traveled to southern California, attended the conference, stayed with my teacher and friend David Wyatt at his father’s far-out home in Laguna Beach, and on December 28, 1982, made the long drive from Laguna Beach to San Marino.

Although he was not a Stevens critic per se (Frost, Yeats, Williams, Moore, Eliot, Jeffers, and Ashbery were—and are—more congenial to his ideas about modern poetry), David Wyatt was supportive of my unfashionable interest in reading Stevens’s poems through whatever biography, through literary and personal relationships, one could construct from the correspondence. We had read and discussed Holly’s 1966 selection of letters together and were fascinated by what could be deduced about the other side of all that letter writing. Who was this person, “J. Ronald Lane Latimer”? We imagined several exciting scenarios for Latimer, whose stance and very name hinted at unexplained pseudonymity. Why did Stevens give over so much time to Hi Simons, the Chicago-based amateur bibliophile-critic whose approach seemed plodding and average? How did the remarkable literary and curatorial Irish figure Thomas McGreevy feel about Stevens’s response and, at times, nonresponse to McGreevy’s mix of avid Catholicism and devout modernism? And Leonard van Geyzel, his procurer of Sri Lankan tea in Colombo: why exactly did their correspondence evolve into so much more—a discussion, for instance, of the obsession among the Ceylonese academic and civil service elite with I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism? My point was and is that van Geyzel and McGreevy, for their part, significantly drove the relationship. The social structure of this was perhaps obvious, but what in fact were the particular circumstances? And which poems bear traces of those specific contexts? Before arriving at the archive, I might have posed the problem as follows: what actually did we know about José Rodríguez Feo only from Stevens’s letters to him? Would knowledge of the Cuban editor’s situation help us identify the “queen of ignorance” beyond the maternal symbolic moon in that open-ended poem “A Word with José Rodríguez-Feo,” included in Transport to Summer (CPP 292)? It shouldn’t have been a goal to close up such openness, but to offer additional readings to support the poem’s inventiveness.

Yes, it had been David Wyatt’s idea that I come to The Huntington and systematically read both sides of the correspondences. During the long drive, as I recall it, he told a meandering academic’s story, which began with some details of his and his fellow students’ intellectual encounter with the presence of Geoffrey Hartman at Yale. I didn’t follow what this had to do with the experience I was about to have. But David is always teaching, so I listened and sought to discern the relevance. He spoke about the influence of Hartman’s book The Fate of Reading (1975). And David—by...