Selling Lemonade to a Crowd of Drunks

I TAKE MY TITLE from a letter Wallace Stevens wrote to Ronald Lane Latimer, one of a series of exchanges about an edition of Ideas of Order from Latimer’s Alcestis Press, an edition about which Stevens expressed excitement even as he tried to make certain its appearance would not violate his contract giving Knopf first refusal rights (see L 271). Stevens paid particular attention to how Latimer should be allowed time to market—Stevens’s letter says “to dispose of”—the Alcestis Press fine print limited edition. The letter ends by saying that “selling poetry now-a-days must be very much like selling lemonade to a crowd of drunks” (L 284).

The letter has been mentioned by other critics, mostly in passing (see, especially, Beyers). At first reading, it is typical: a little formal, but also witty and even a bit self-deprecating, much like the tone in a letter to Latimer written three days later, which opens with Stevens writing “Sorry to be so communicative, but it will die down” (L 285). The more I read the sentence featured in my title, however, the more I realized how puzzling I found the tone of that remark to be. So, what I want to do here is to reread with some care that apparently light comment about selling lemonade to a crowd of drunks and to suggest that there are at least three contexts or sets of assumptions in light of which one might hear Stevens’s letter.¹ The first (and perhaps least important) such context is Stevens’s attitude toward drunkenness or at least toward drunken crowds insofar as his views are related to how, by the mid-thirties when the letter on which I am concentrating was written, poetry’s appeal—or lack thereof—was a cause for anxiety. Second, the comment resonates with the contested treatment of certain aspects of modern American culture—especially its advertising (that is, its commercialism)—viewed variously in terms of either aesthetics or politics, especially in the 1920s and the 1930s. Finally, I want to consider how Stevens’s comment to Latimer casts light on the poet’s shifting views of consumerism and commercial culture—which are not the same thing, but do overlap—over two or three decades.

I am not going to propose a tidy answer to my question about what Stevens implied when he spoke of selling lemonade to a crowd of drunks, although I do want to suggest that there are implications of Stevens’s comment that are “now-a-days” (to use his phrase) less audible than they were in the summer of 1935 when the letter was written, because I want to underline that hearing tone of voice matters and that then-contemporary contexts help us to hear Stevens’s somewhat puzzling tone of voice. I also want to flesh out some implications of what Stevens wrote later the same year in another letter to Latimer, namely that “Everything is complicated” (L 303).² In other words, as I hope will become clear, I think some of the puzzlement that arises when considering Stevens’s tone of voice in the letter about selling lemonade to a crowd of drunks has to do not simply with when the letter was written but with the fact that Stevens was not always of one mind—that he was in his letters, as in his essays and poems, often trying to work through what he thought and felt (and to highlight the importance of acknowledging mixed thoughts and feelings) about complicated issues. Finally, I want to try to model how one might trace what Richard Deming calls Stevens’s “active negotiation[s]” with complicated issues in different, that is, changing, contexts (107). Although much of the story I piece together here is not new, not even a new kind of story, it does seem to me useful “now-a-days” to insist on nuance, complexity, and a renewed sense of how historical or cultural context matters.

Let me start by turning to the most autobiographically local and perhaps best-known context of the letter...