Stevens’s Epistolary Surrogates

FROM HIS BOYHOOD in Reading, Pennsylvania, to his college years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to his early adulthood in New York, and then through almost forty years at his more permanent home in Hartford, Connecticut, the life of Wallace Stevens was largely sedentary and increasingly solitary. Over the course of his life, his travels were few.

After completing law school he made a seven-week fishing and hunting trip to Canada, and early in his career at The Hartford he made trips to the Midwest and annual trips by train from Hartford through the American South to Florida. There was a trip by boat with his wife through the Panama Canal and up the Pacific Coast to California, and—back in Hartford—occasional day trips by train into New York. With his wife and daughter, Stevens vacationed a few times at various resorts and, later, made brief return visits to Reading. But his greater and lifelong wish to visit Europe never materialized, even though later in life there were opportunities and invitations to do so. Even at home he never owned an automobile or learned to drive one. His daily trip of two miles from his home to the office and then home again was made by foot. At the same time, and with very few exceptions, there were no guests in the Stevens home in Hartford where he lived with his wife, Elsie, and his daughter, Holly. And even within that home, husband and wife lived for the most part independently. As his daughter said of him, “one might say that my father lived alone” (H. Stevens 4).

I mention all this only because we know from the poems themselves that Stevens was a passionate man of strong desires and needs, which were especially prevalent in the various poems of spring and summer. Toward the end of his life, Stevens confessed in a letter to Barbara Church, “Yet I have never liked going to the places to which other people go or doing the things they do. . . . The truth is that one gets out of contact with people during the summer and feels the immense need . . . of people for other people, a thing that has been in my thoughts for a long time, in one form or another” (L 759). The poems themselves disclose a strong and consistent interest in and use of foreign lands, customs, and people. In Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg’s collection of essays called Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic, my own contribution is entitled “‘The Switzerland of the Mind’: Stevens’ Invention of Europe.” In spite of his largely sedentary and solitary life, one of the ways that Stevens sustained these desires for the foreign and the poems that were rooted in them was through his correspondence, perhaps the chief means.

In thinking about the importance of his letters for both Stevens the man and Stevens the poet, I found one question that kept returning. From where and what does the need, even passion, for the company of some of his correspondents derive within the poet himself? What exactly were the lacunae and absences in his own life that were filled, or at least partially filled, or even attempted to be filled, by letters and postcards? I came to the conclusion that Stevens often invented in his letters what I am calling selected surrogates, who, by his own epistolary constructions, transported and transformed the exterior world in order to satisfy his personal needs and provide him with gratifications and, in many such instances, to become the foundation for poems that followed, as I hope to demonstrate.

The letters themselves constitute a kind of surrogacy—imagined recipients in the absence of their immediate physical presence. A similar act of the imagination comes into play when the addressee constructs a personality and presence founded solely upon the content and style of the letter itself. If the recipient is an acquaintance or friend, the letter writer’s memories of that person hover in the background. Of course, a letter’s artificial monologue substitutes for the more easy exchange of live, dynamic, and immediate conversation: here the discourse is...