Stevens and the Publishers: What the Huntington Correspondence Reveals

THIS ESSAY IS CONCERNED with Wallace Stevens’s epistolary relationships not only with his own publishers but also with those small presses with which he corresponded throughout his career. Undoubtedly, the Wallace Stevens Archive at The Huntington would be amply and richly detailed enough if one were confined to the letters involving his trade book publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, those to do with the Cummington Press, and the sometimes uneasy exchanges among and in relation to Stevens, Knopf, and the Cummington Press. Consider, for example, the fascinating correspondence surrounding the debacle of the Fortune Press edition of Stevens’s Selected Poems, featuring Nicholas Moore, Tambimuttu (of Editions Poetry London), and the shady Mr. Pollinger (agent to Knopf in the UK), not to mention Knopf’s frequent and palpable irritation at Stevens’s dealings with the Cummington Press as the latter published Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Esthétique du Mal, and Three Academic Pieces.

However, as Holly Stevens observes in her Letters of Wallace Stevens, during the 1930s and after, what she terms “private” printers “rank high in the list of major correspondents” with whom Stevens clearly had frequent written contact. Referring to “Katharine Frazier and Harry Duncan, at the Cummington Press, and Victor Hammer, of the Anvil Press,” Holly adds, “But there were also letters to James Guthrie, of the Pear Tree Press, Sussex, England; to Elizabeth Yeats, at the well-known Cuala Press; and to others” (L 257). The latter recipients do not feature extensively in the selected Letters—hence Holly’s highlighting them in her commentary—but do represent a further rich seam in the Stevens archive.

Thus, although for any scholar consulting the archive Knopf’s resistance to Stevens’s involvement with the Cummington Press along with Stevens’s handling of his relations with Knopf, the Cummington, and other presses make for remarkable reading, my interest here is more in those even smaller presses and those less well-charted correspondents who served to stimulate the poet. These not only inspired Stevens’s passions as a book and art collector but also reveal the extent to which he deliberately cultivated an international network of sources of information and channels of exchange. Moreover, Stevens’s dealings with publishers and various correspondents—some of whom effectively became his personal buyers of books and other artifacts outside the US—provide an epistolary window into how the poet conceived of himself, his own literary career, and even how he came to think of poetry as literary modernism evolved.

Indeed, Stevens’s relationships with publishers over the years can be seen to have informed his documenting of his own poetic career, both in his letters and the publications he produced. Much of the correspondence with other small presses predates the more critically documented letters with Ronald Lane Latimer of the Alcestis Press (in the 1930s) and Stevens’s Cummington years (during the 1940s). Read together, therefore, this overall correspondence helps contextualize what it was that Stevens saw in the opportunities to publish with artisanal, less mainstream publishers, and what inspired him in his bindings of his own books (even asking the Cummington Press to help prepare the binding or folder for his Stevens family portraits). For, as his relatives died or lost touch—not least once Holly had also left home—Stevens clearly took solace in this larger family of books. My point is that, in addition to considering the Alcestis and Cummington presses, there is a treasure trove of correspondence with further small presses, bibliophiles, and others that is essential to appreciating the overall progress of Stevens’s life and career—both as these developed and as the poet conceived and perceived them.

In Stevens’s earlier correspondence, his letters with John Rodker of the short-lived Ovid Press represent a revealing instance of the exchanges— both physical and verbal—the young Stevens relished, especially as he painstakingly built his network of contacts enabling this Connecticut-based poet to track some of the writers, artists, and publishers who would shape early modernism. Revealingly, Stevens wrote to Harriet Monroe in March 1920, “Since you were here, I...