A Paternal Interest in Bears: The Stevens Family Christmas of 1935

ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1996, an unusual package arrived at my front door. It appeared to be a frozen meat product from the Hormel Company. Beneath the printed admonition to keep its contents frozen, however, were three handwritten words in parentheses: “OLD HIBERNATING BEARS.”

I was expecting the bears, but not their packaging. Three days prior to their arrival Wallace Stevens’s grandson, Peter Hanchak, had called to confirm my mailing address. He had recently moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, and in the process had come across a pair of carved wooden bears he had been meaning to send since 1992, when his mother passed away. Holly Stevens had often reminded him, he said, to send me the bears after her death.

I had gotten to know Holly while working on my book Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self and had edited a revised edition of her father’s Opus Posthumous at her request. But she had never mentioned the bears or wanting me to have them. She kept many things to herself, including the lung cancer that took her life.

In the case of the bears, I can imagine her taking perverse pleasure in the questions they would raise, knowing she would not be there to answer them. Where had the bears come from, and when? What had they meant to her and possibly to her father? Peter tried to be helpful when I posed these questions. He thought he remembered seeing the bears on his grandfather’s desk, but could not be sure. When he was seven or eight years old, he recalled, “there seemed to be so many oddities to be charmed by at 118 Westerly Terrace. . . .”

Lifting the bears from the cardboard carton and turning them over, I noticed a cluster of peculiar markings carved into the paw of one bear. In a rubbing done with pencil and paper, these appeared to be three Chinese characters enclosed in the outline of a bear’s head. They are reversed in the manner of Chinese chops, so that the characters are readable when the paw is inked and pressed onto paper. But their significance eluded me.

Knowing how Stevens delighted in vicarious travel, cajoling friends, acquaintances, and even strangers in faraway places to send him exotic

Fig. 1.

Carved wooden bear with markings on right front paw.

Fig. 2.

Rubbing of carved wooden bear paw.

souvenirs, I reviewed his published correspondence, focusing on letters with an East Asian connection. Holly’s edition of the Letters includes two that he sent to Rosamond Bates Cary in 1935, one in May, the other in December.¹ In the first he proposes to send her money to purchase an assortment of Japanese items for Holly, who was then ten years old (L 280–81). In the second he acknowledges receipt of five parcels (L 304). Three more would arrive the following spring and summer.

So who was Stevens’s Japanese connection? After graduating from Vassar College in 1908, Rosamond Bates had married Frank Cary, a Congregationalist minister and missionary based in Otaru, a port city on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. Though Cary was a graduate of Amherst College (class of 1911), he had spent much of his life in Japan as the son of a missionary (see Nelson).

Fig. 3.

The Cary family in 1935. Seated from left to right are Rosamond, her daughter Mary Alice, and her mother-in-law. Standing are Frank Cary and one of the Carys’ sons.

The Carys’ youngest child, Mary Alice, was slightly younger than Holly. In 1931 Rosamond and Mary Alice were awarded a scholarship to the Euthenics Summer Institute at Vassar (see “Class of 1908”). There they met Elsie and Holly Stevens. This tenuous connection provided Stevens with a pretext for contacting Rosamond Cary four years later.

The two letters reproduced in Letters of Wallace Stevens make no mention of bears. But all those spaced periods in the printed...