Wallace Stevens, New York, 1913–1916: An Explosion in a Shingle Factory

Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too . . .

He was not quite at the point yet where he could write these lines—that moment still lay two years in the future. But he was approaching it as he listened to Elsie playing on the new baby grand Steinway in their apartment on West 21^st Street on winter evenings, with him sitting contentedly across from her, reading or composing new poems. He kept in touch with his sisters, Elizabeth (27), a schoolteacher now, and living in Philadelphia, and Mary Catharine (23), living with their brother John back in Reading. When Elizabeth was hospitalized in late 1912, Wallace wrote her, trying to comfort her with his wry sense of humor, and promising to send money if she needed it (though, being who he was, he added that he was pretty much strapped for cash himself at the moment). Elsie, his wife of three years, he told Elizabeth, had turned out to be a “stunning cook,” the best he knew, and had roasted a big chicken for the two of them for Thanksgiving. They’d also been to a string of plays, all light musicals like “The Lady & the Slipper,” “Oh, Oh, Dauphine,” and “The Merry Countess,” all three “in less than a week,” because in a “colossal town” like New York theaters were “an easy mode of amusement.”

Insurance-wise, things were looking up once more, and by February 1914 he’d been made resident vice president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis. Even better, his new offices were in the stunning new Beaux Arts skyscraper dubbed the Liberty Tower down on Liberty Street, half a mile west of the Brooklyn Bridge. And, being the young capitalist that he was, he was looking for even greater opportunities for getting ahead. On August 11^th, with war about to break out in Europe, he wrote Elsie, who was back in Reading with her mother, from their third-floor New York apartment at 441 West 21^st Street that he’d taken the train up to Hartford to see his friends, the Heber Strykers, again. It had been a pleasant enough trip, except that Stryker had been extremely nervous and unable to sleep, full of a war he wanted to forget. There had been three nieces—sixteen, nine, and six—staying with the Strykers, but he’d seen little of them. Instead he and Stryker had spent most of one Sunday walking about Hartford, including Cedar Hill, “an uninteresting cemetery in which lie the bones of J.P. Morgan” (and where eventually his and Elsie’s bones would also come to rest).

He wondered if Elsie wouldn’t mind staying somewhere for a few more weeks—perhaps at Galen Hall in Wernersville, eight miles west of Reading—or someplace else with reasonable lodgings, “home cooking, pure drinking water, invigorating mountain air and summer recreation.” Of course she’d have to wait a few days before he could send her any more money, especially as he’d just paid off the rest of what he owed for the baby grand, so that his bank account looked like “an airship or balloon” that had been hit by anti-aircraft fire and was now on its way down. No doubt, the war was on his mind as much as everyone else’s.

Two days later he wrote again. One of his friends, Bill Kavanaugh, an insurance executive for the New England Casualty Company who was in the process of moving over to the New York Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, had stopped by his office to bewail him with how “bum” business was just now. At least, Stevens quietly crowed, he’d done more business than his boss, Ed Southworth, with whom he’d worked at the American Bonding Company since 1909 and whom he’d followed over to the Equitable when their boss and old friend, Jim Kearney, had left for greener pastures up...