The Whole Harmonium

The Life of Wallace Stevens

Paul Mariani

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781451624397
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

An "incandescent….redefining biography of a major poet whose reputation continues to ascend" ( Booklist, starred review)—Wallace Stevens, perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century. Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a richly imaginative life that he expressed in his poems. "A biography that is both deliciously readable and profoundly knowledgeable" ( Library Journal, starred review), The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times and as the creator of a poetry that continues to shape how we understand and define ourselves.A lawyer who rose to become an insurance-company vice president, Stevens composed brilliant poems on long walks to work and at other stolen moments. He endured an increasingly unhappy marriage, and yet he had his Dionysian side, reveling in long fishing (and drinking) trips to the sun-drenched tropics of Key West. He was at once both the Connecticut businessman and the hidalgo lover of all things Latin. His first book of poems, Harmonium, published when he was forty-four, drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. Over time he became acquainted with peers such as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, but his personal style remained unique.The complexity of Stevens's poetry rests on emotional, philosophical, and linguistic tensions that thread their way intricately through his poems, both early and late. And while he can be challenging to understand, Stevens has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding poets to read. Biographer and poet Paul Mariani's The Whole Harmonium "is an excellent, superb, thrilling story of a mind….unpacking poems in language that is nearly as eloquent as the poet's, and as clear as faithfulness allows" ( The New Yorker ).

1

---

The Heaven of an Old Home: 1879–1897

I lost a world when I left Reading.

WALLACE STEVENS, 1907

Farewell to an idea . . . The mother’s face,

The purpose of the poem, fills the room.

They are together, here, and it is warm.

WALLACE STEVENS, THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN, 1947

What strange places one wakes up in!” Wallace Stevens wrote his wife, Elsie, on September 4, 1913. He was thirty-three, had been married almost four years, and had just visited the city where he and Elsie had grown up: Reading, seat of Berks County, in Pennsylvania Dutch country. How different, how “unsympathetic,” really, Reading had become for him since he and Elsie had settled in New York City, especially now, with both his parents gone. The problem was that he kept seeing the place not as it actually was but as he remembered it, which was largely through his mother’s eyes: not an actual home but rather “the heaven of an old home.” The Sunday before, he’d attended services in the old Grace Lutheran Church where he and Elsie had been married, and he’d been moved, far more than he ever expected, finding himself among old neighbors who still sat in the same pews they had twenty-five years earlier and he peering into what felt like “a mirror full of Hapsburgs.”

Four years earlier, alone in a rented room in Greenwich Village, he’d written what he really felt about his first home in lines he’d translated from du Bellay. “Happy the man who, like Ulysses, goodly ways / Hath been,” only to finally go back home decades later, where seeing once more smoke rising from the chimneys of the old houses would be more precious to him than the marble of palaces along the Tiber and sweeter than the “the sweetness of Anjou.” A young man goes out from his native place to seek his fortune so that he might return in old age to the Eden of his first world. For an old dog like him, Reading felt then more like home than he thought New York City ever would.

He would spend the first twenty years of his life in the same mid-nineteenth-century three-story redbrick row house at 323 North Fifth Street, one of those buildings one sees in many of Edward Hopper’s city scenes. It’s still there, the place where Stevens was born and raised, and from the outside still looks much as he knew it, its façade facing west so that it catches the late afternoon sun between the shade trees lining the avenue and the drug deals on the street. West: the natural orientation for the autumnal Stevens, whether it was Reading or New York City or Hartford. That he also lived north of Penn Street, the main thoroughfare that divided Reading into its more affluent north and shabbier south districts, made sense, given the aspirations of both his parents, though he would have a hard time recognizing his native city today. With a population of forty-three thousand when he was born there, it proudly ranked as the nation’s forty-first largest city.

He was the second child (and second son) born to Margaretha Catharine (Kate) Zeller and Garrett Barcalow Stevens. Both parents hailed from early Dutch German stock, folks who had settled in Pennsylvania well over a century earlier. Kate, who was thirty-one when she gave birth to Wallace, had herself been born in Reading to Sarah Frances Kitting and John Zeller, a shoemaker who died when Kate was thirteen, forcing her to quit school and work to help support her mother, brothers, and sisters with her schoolteacher’s salary.

Like Kate, Garrett was born in 1848, but on a farm eighty miles east of Reading in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, one of six children of Elizabeth Barcalow and Benjamin Stevens. At seventeen he left home to begin teaching and then, five years later, moved to Reading to apprentice himself in the law offices of John S. Richards, passing the bar exams and becoming a lawyer in the Berks County courts in August 1872. His salary as a clerk, working six days a week, came to $100 a year, about what he’d made as a teacher, but now a world of promise had opened before him. To pass those exams he’d had to work nights and Sundays, including learning enough Latin and Greek to be able to translate passages at sight. For that he had had to hire a tutor. It was then in late 1871, when he was still clerking and she was teaching in the local schools that he met Kate Zeller. That Christmas he presented her with a copy of the Poems of Alexander Pope. For the next five years he courted her, comforting her after she lost her mother in 1872, and working hard, intent as he was on succeeding in life. Finally, on November 9, 1876, he had amassed enough income to marry Kate in the First Presbyterian Church, which she and her parents had regularly attended.

Thirteen months later, in December 1877, their first child, Garrett Jr., was born, either at 307 North Fifth, where Garrett and Kate first lived, or a few row houses to the north at 323 North Fifth, where the couple would live out their lives together. It was here, over the next dozen years, that all the other Stevens children were born and where the family would live together for the next several decades. Twenty-two months later, on October 2, 1879, their second son, Wallace, was born here, and fourteen months later their third son, John.

Both Garrett and John were family names. But, as often happens with second sons, Wallace was named for someone outside the family circle, christened, apparently, in honor of one of two (or perhaps both) Wallaces prominent in Reading at the time. The first was the Reverend Wallace Rackcliff, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, where the Stevenses had been married, and whom Kate admired. The other was George Wallace Delamater, former mayor of Meadville, Pennsylvania, and a successful banker and insurance executive. Years later, when Stevens was in his late twenties and living in New York, Delamater—suffering from depression over the recent deaths of both his father and his son—would walk into his office at the Diamond Banking Building in Reading, shut the door, take out a pistol, and shoot himself.

From the birth of John in late 1880 until the summer of 1885, there were no more children, though it is possible that there was a stillborn infant. There may even have been twins who died shortly after childbirth in 1881 or 1882, both of whom may have been interred with other members of the Stevens family in the local cemetery a mile north of the Stevens home. Such deaths and burials were common in those days. The babies interred, life resumed its customary ways. Then two more children, the final two. On July 19, 1885, when Wallace was five and a half, his mother gave birth to Elizabeth, named for her father’s mother. Four years later, on April 25, 1889, at the age of forty, Kate gave birth to Mary Katherine, the last to arrive and the first to depart.

• • •

LONG AFTER HIS MOTHER was gone, Stevens would remember how she would read to him and his siblings a chapter from the Bible each night before bed, or sit in the parlor on Sunday evenings, her little ones around her, playing the piano and singing old Christian hymns. He would remember waiting at the train station with his father and brothers for his mother to return from a day of shopping in New York City, her bags filled with boxes of candy for the children, or trailing his mother on market days, as she spoke with the farmers’ wives in that strange Pennsylvania Dutch patois of theirs.

In the fall of 1884, just short of his fifth birthday, Wallace began his formal education. At first his mother walked him and Garrett to the school attached to the Presbyterian Church on South Fifth. A year later they went to the school attached to St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran, more high church and more in the Stevenses’ German Lutheran tradition, and a shorter walking distance to home. Often relatives showed up in Reading: his mother’s sister, Aunt Mary, or his father’s older bachelor brother, Uncle Jim Van Sant Stevens, who’d moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, some years before to pursue a business career selling artworks. Uncle Jim spoke French, Stevens remembered, “and had big dollars in his pockets, some of which went into mine.” There was a man to emulate.

Back then Wallace was called Pat by family and friends and spent his summer vacations at the Stevens farmstead in Feasterville, where his father’s brothers and sisters had grown up. When Pat was fourteen, his grandfather Benjamin Stevens died and the Feasterville farm was sold, so that the following summer Pat and his brothers were sent to Ephrata, to a large (180 beds) summer resort run by the von Niedas. The place was certainly no pleasure resort, young Stevens wrote his mother from there, and he found himself hanging out with either older or younger boys. Of the two boys his own age, he complained, one was a “damned ass and the other a G_ D_ one,” preoccupied with girls all deluded by their own vanity. Oh to be home again baking on the locks of the Schuylkill. In the last day alone, all the “flotsam and jetsom [sic] of the scum-bedewed cities” had arrived, so that only the full moon in all its sad isolation and splendor offered him any solace. Still, within a week he was playing cards and shooting pool and singing in his fine alto in a barbershop quartet he’d formed with some of the Reading boys. He was even enjoying the company of the girls as well.

Following the death of his paternal grandfather, his grandmother had moved in with her daughter and her husband at their farmstead at Ivyland, and in the summer of 1896 the three Stevens brothers began spending summer vacations there. Aunt Mariah, his father’s sister, sixteen-year-old Wallace reported in late July, was a “self-sacrificing whole-souled woman” (like his mother in this regard), both quiet and wise. Mariah’s husband, Uncle Isaac, on the other hand, was “a Puritan who revels in catechisms and creeds, a hand-to-mouth man, earnest, determined, discreet.” And Ivyland? It was a haven filled with red geraniums and quince trees. Each evening Garrett Jr. played piano tunes on the organ, while Wallace and John read whatever they could find.

In the fall of 1892 Wallace began attending Reading Boys’ High School, where Garrett was two years ahead of him and where John would join him the following year. He took Latin and Greek, the highlights of the English literary tradition, grammar and composition, as well as geography, Greek history, algebra, and arithmetic. He played left end for the school’s football team and poker with his classmates for Lucifer matches and cigarettes. He went about with the town rowdies, one of the young roughs himself.

While his older brother was more laid back and ethereal, his younger brother was as tough as Wallace and once, in a rage, nearly killed him. Just a year apart, they were constantly at it, all through their high school years. And because Wallace had to repeat his freshman year due to illness, he and John wound up in the same class for all four years, each trying to outdo the other. For Wallace this turned out to be a blessing because, up until then, he’d been content just to coast along.

Once, when he and John were behind the house chopping firewood, Wallace goaded John until he exploded and hurled an axe at Wallace. When John went to fetch it, he accidentally slashed his hand, the scar from which he kept for the rest of his life. They both had tempers, John’s daughter-in-law would recall nine decades later. “That slow boil, but when it goes—watch out! I could see John get red up the back of his neck, and his face would get stern, and his eyes were absolute steel. I’m sure Wallace did exactly the same thing.” But it was John who would keep the family together when their father had a nervous breakdown, by which time Garrett was married and practicing law in Baltimore and Wallace was walking the sidewalks of New York as a cub reporter. John, on the other hand, would remain in Reading all his life, practicing law and eventually becoming boss of the Democratic Party for Berks County. And it was John who made sure his mother and sisters were cared for after his father died, holding off getting married until he was thirty.

There were multiple reasons why Wallace did not fare well at the beginning of his time at Reading Boys’, among them the various illnesses he suffered, including a bout of malaria, which permanently impaired the hearing in his left ear, no doubt contributing to his desire to be alone to think more clearly. Because of illnesses, his worried mother hovered over her Wal, as she liked to call him. It was she, in fact, who made sure he left Reading to spend several months with her sister, Mary Louise Zeller, and her husband, the Bavarian-born Reverend Henry Baptiste Strodach, along with their son, Paul—Wallace’s own age—in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. That was where the Reverend Strodach was pastor of St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, located on the corner of South Fifth and Rodney Streets, as well as master of the school attached to the church, which Wal attended.

Later the Stevenses would welcome the Strodachs to Reading, after Strodach was forced to leave his Brooklyn congregation over a split that occurred in the church when a majority of members insisted on jettisoning the German language for services in English, this, after all, being America. When the dark, stern, handlebar-mustachioed Strodach refused to follow suit, the younger members left St. Paul’s to found their own English-speaking Lutheran congregation a few blocks away. For Wallace, St. Paul’s was as much a part of his history as the Presbyterian and Lutheran churches he’d grown up with in Reading, and Uncle Henry’s church still held hints of its rose-colored aura when he revisited the church years later, after Uncle Henry himself was gone.

Eight years later, in 1900, living now in a tenement in lower Manhattan, Stevens searched the rear of the church for the small harmonium-like organ he used to marvel at. But even that was gone now, replaced by a ghostly piano in a dusty linen-covered shroud. As he was leaving, a woman who had shown him about the churchyard told him the sad story of his uncle’s suicide. Strodach had frozen to death in a public park in Reading, near the hospital where he was being treated for severe depression. When she asked Stevens where he was from, he told her Massachusetts.

As he turned to go, he caught a glimpse of the iron steps in the schoolyard from which he’d once thrown kisses to the girls who had presented him with a pocketknife for his fifteenth birthday. Where were they now, he wondered. Even their names were gone, along with their faces and the letters they’d sent him. Two decades on, in a poem he called “Piano Practice at the Academy of the Holy Angels,” he portrayed four of them in long, sad lines and christened them with new names: “Blanche, the blond, whose eyes are not wholly straight, in a room of lustres,” her heart murmuring “with the music that will be a voice for her.” Rosa, “disdaining the empty keys,” and Jocunda, letting the rose leaves “lie on the water-like lacquer” as in a painting by Poussin. Then Maris, “wearer of cheap stones, who will have grown still and restless.” And finally Wallace himself, in the guise of the young girl Crispine, whose knife blade, reddened now, would keep demanding of poems far more than they could give for one “needing so much, seeking so much in their music.”

• • •

IF IT WAS HUMBLING to have to repeat his ninth year of school, at least he’d learned what the consequences of wasted time could be. So when he returned to Reading Boys’ High in the fall of 1893, he was a changed young man. He even donned a white surplice and black cassock on Sundays and sang—first as a soprano, then as an alto—in the choir of Christ Episcopal on the corner of Court and Fifth. He was definitely more serious about his studies and—because of his intelligence and drive—soon found himself near the top of his class. In his front-facing bedroom on the third floor at 323 North Fifth, he stayed up past midnight each evening, reading as he smoked his small-bowled, long-stemmed pipe. He pored over Poe and Hawthorne and the classics, “all the things one ought to read.”

It was then that he discovered his natural penchant for writing, and soon he was editor of Dots and Dashes, the school’s newspaper. He took to heart his father’s dictum that he was going to be able to prove himself only by dint of hard work. In March 1896, at sixteen, he won an essay contest sponsored by the Reading Eagle, proudly keeping for the rest of his life the two books he won. That Christmas he delivered the school’s prize-winning oration, which he titled “The Greatest Need of the Age,” earning a gold medal for his efforts, as well as a sketch of himself printed on the front page of the Eagle on Christmas Eve, much to his parents’ delight.

When he graduated from Reading Boys’ High the following June, the school chose him to deliver the valedictory oration. He called it “The Thessalians” and composed it in his best Gilded Age fustian. Calling to mind the Golden Age of Greece, he importuned himself and his classmates to hold true to their deepest Christian values if they were ever to realize their manifest destiny. He called upon his classmates to confound those conspirators who would destroy the country by their greedy self-interest. And, if even the classical virtues that had made Greece and America great should fail, there were the noble Christian virtues to keep young men on their true and steady course. Follow the cross, he ended, and “let every arm, let every breast, let every man defend the cross forever.”

His Reading years over, that September he began a special program at Harvard which would allow him to complete his course work in three rather than the usual four years, because his father now had two young daughters at home, as well as three sons he was going to have to see through college, all at the same time. Garrett had started at Yale, then transferred to Dickinson College in Carlisle, eighty miles west of Reading. It was there that he would meet his future wife, the daughter of the college president. And John began classes at the University of Pennsylvania, even as Wallace entered Harvard.

Once, long after both his parents were dead, he went back to Reading to see the place where he’d grown up. He stayed at the six-story brownstone Mansion House on Penn Street in the center of town, in a roo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• 1. The Heaven of an Old Home: 1879–1897
• 2. Harvard: 1897–1900
• 3. Starting Out: 1900–1903
• 4. Two Versions of the American Sublime: 1903–1906
• 5. Wingèd Victory: 1907–1913
• 6. An Explosion in a Shingle Factory: 1913–1916
• 7. The Eye of the Blackbird: 1916–1918
• 8. Hartford on the Harmonium: 1919–1921
• 9. The Comedian as the Letter C: 1921–1923
• 10. A Baby among Us: 1923–1934
• 11. The Idea of Order at Key West: 1934–1936
• 12. The Man with the Blue Guitar: 1936–1937
• 13. The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words: 1938–1941
• 14. The Son Restores the Father: 1941–1945
• 15. Farewell to an Idea: 1944–1947
• 16. The Eye’s Plain Version: 1948–1949
• 17. The Obscurity of an Order: 1950–1951
• 18. A New Knowledge of Reality: 1952–1954
• 19. A Final Seriousness: 1954–1955
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Abbreviations Used in Notes
• Bibliography
• Poetry Credits
• Illustration Credits
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright