History of My Reading: Seasons of Belief

"The law of chaos is the law of ideas,
Of improvisations and seasons of belief."

--Wallace Stevens: "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas"

[Dedicated to the memory of Sharon Wilson (1935-2020]

The poetry I was reading--mostly for the first time--in Mr. Spanos' course that spring of 1966 seemed overwhelmingly dark, portentous and ominous. "Between the idea/and the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the shadow..."  "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many..." (T.S. Eliot.)

  "There died a myriad,/and of the best, among them,/For an old bitch gone in the teeth,/ For a botched civilization..." (Ezra Pound)

  "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned..." (Yeats)

 It was grim, and we took it seriously. Though written decades before, it colored our present world.

But it wasn't just in this course.  Existentialism, often in its gloomier assertiveness, was everywhere on campus that spring, if memory and the Knox Student are reasonably indicative.  My notebook says I was reading Sartre's novel Nausea, so it's likely I had already purchased my paperback copy of his No Exit and Three Other Plays, where I read the immortal line, "Hell is other people."  

Existentialism was part of other campus experiences, like plays and movies, and courses in  philosophy, religion, theatre and some languages. However formed by the past, these were explanations, poetic and otherwise, of what we felt happening in the world around us, and what this said about the human condition.

 In particular, there was the ever more threatening escalation of the Vietnam War: another substantial increase in US troops had been announced in March.  But the continuing troubles on campus seemed threatening as well--the resurgent anxiety over the exodus of good teachers, the enervating politics over campus issues like women's hours and the planning committee.  These poems gave oracular context to an apocalyptic anxiety dampening and deadening our present, as it confirmed fears about a future deformed before it begins.

 Fortunately for me, I was also taking another course, and reading poetry that was quite different.  It was Douglas Wilson's American Studies course in poets Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens.

Wilson had constructed such combinations before (Henry Adams and Mark Twain in my first year) and would again.  Whitman and Stevens were admittedly kind of an odd couple (although in Poetry and the Age (1955), poet and critic Randall Jarrell followed his essay on Whitman with his essay on Stevens.)  But together with how Wilson taught this course, it was a combination that saved the spring.

Our basic Whitman text was Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose (Modern Library 1950), edited and with an introduction by John Kouwenhoven.  For Stevens we got his Collected Poems in hardback (the 1964 6th printing of the 1954 first edition, which I still have.)  We also had the paperback of his essays, The Necessary Angel. 

 There was more Stevens than made it into the Collected Poems, so late poems and other writings--I was particularly taken with his Adagia--were collected in Opus Posthumous.  We had the Prentice-Hall selection of critical writings by various authors, edited by Marie Borroff (titled simply Wallace Stevens.)  I no longer have this book but wish I did.  This series on individual writers (Twentieth Century Views) was invaluable, and these days I pick up every volume I come across.

The "Children of Adam" and "Calumus" sections early in Leaves of Grass are particularly marked up in my copy, suggesting in-class analysis, though later underlinings could be either from class or my own reading. Of my class work, two short papers survive, one on the key section 24, which includes discussion of Whitman's use of the word "kosmos" here as well as in a poem titled Kosmos.  I allude to a Leslie Fiedler interpretation, but it seems neither Fiedler nor I catch the relationship to the famous book by Alexander von Humboldt (Kosmos or Cosmos) which Whitman is known to have read.  (I know about it now mostly as a product of living next door to a university named after Humboldt.)

But I have even less surviving evidence from the Stevens half of the course.  Because I didn't want to deface the hardback, I bought a paperback of selected poems and marked that up. Unfortunately, it has quite recently disappeared.

 None of my Stevens papers survive either, including one that Mr. Wilson thought was publishable.  He assigned a major poem to each of us, but I don't even remember which one I wrote about. So partly by necessity I will be more general, though it is also appropriate, because the effect of this class then was more important than the details, and that applies as well to the lasting effects.

 In some ways, Whitman and Stevens were hard sells.  Even Whitman defenders admit he wrote a lot of bad or at least embarrassing poetry, and Stevens is either criticized for the philosophical aridity of his late work or the frivolity of his early poems.  In terms of the poetry we were learning to value, Whitman was at best an anomaly and Stevens as a modern was questionable (Mr. Spanos for example found him wanting.)

 Among Whitman's embarrassing qualities is his insistence on writing in detail about the body; despite our 1960s advanced thinking, we were made wary of such discussion by the cultural mores we had absorbed.  And until Stevens got super serious in ways we could at least analyze, he wrote poems and lines that Randall Jarrell noted in 1955 are "ordinarily considered" nonsensical, like the verse of Edward Lear.  (Actually I love Edward Lear.)

Douglas L. Wilson 

On the other hand there were currents we felt in our time that, once we were given permission and a few keys to it all, made these verses attractive.  Both writers rebelled against a staid time ("The steeples are empty and so are the people," Stevens wrote.)  Whitman was revolutionary: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!  Unscrew the doors from their jambs!"

 I can hear Wilson reading out this line.  Normally even-toned and even-tempered (though I can attest there was some wildness in him) he read them with glee.  He did not neglect the technical aspects, the historical and the textual complexities of these poems, but above all he enacted his enthusiasm, releasing the energy in the lines.

 At 31, Doug Wilson was one of the younger teachers at Knox, and he likely understood the new cultural currents that might bring new life to these poets in our time.  But he had to push we stick-in-the-mud 19 and 20 year olds, skeptical and suspicious, to hear the poems sing, and feel their exuberance.  "I sing the body electric!"  That registered: there was no more potent symbol for the mid-1960s than the electric guitar.

 Especially in the early poems in "Leaves of Grass," the ones in the original 1855 edition, Whitman is the personification of ebullience, even as he makes the physical sensations spiritual.  Wilson got us to hear these lines sing, and in the singing we heard the exuberance that becomes characteristically American--that runs through our literature from Whitman and Emerson to Thoreau and Twain, Thomas Wolfe and Faulkner, Henry Miller and Kerouac, Robert Bly and James Wright, and beyond the US to Hopkins and Garcia Marquez.

 In particular, Whitman had an heir who was reaching the height of his contemporary fame: poet and prophet Allen Ginsberg.  Wallace Stevens was also such an heir, we were to learn, as he himself acknowledged in a poem.  Wilson pointed out aspects of these poems that prompted insight and wonder.  His deep intelligence reassured us: it was academically okay to explore the visionary, the exuberant, the humanly transcendent, and maybe even the delightful. We knew poetry could be serious.  Now suddenly, poetry could be joyous.

from 1966 yearbook

Wilson's enthusiasm released a fundamental aspect of both Whitman and Stevens: the seriousness and importance of playfulness.  Looking back, I see that it was this quality that made the Beatles so deeply important to me, beginning this very school year.  It took seeing them in a comic movie (Help!) the previous summer to reveal the joy in their music to me.

 Their playfulness was subversive and at times satirical, just as Stevens' could be desperate.  But this stubborn need for playfulness--also often satirical and desperate, a defense against despair-- became a strong current in my life, especially for the next several years. At times it was perhaps too strong and overwhelming for my own good and that of my work, but seemingly essential to my survival.

 (I also note another Beatles connection: outside of class, Doug and I were talking about a song then new on the Gizmo jukebox, the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out." Doug said he admired the use of the 'long line' of the lyrics.  We were of course reading the conspicuous champion of the long line, Walt Whitman.  While I also admired that song, we differed on another--the biggest seller of 1965, "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.  Doug liked it.  I did not.)

 For Whitman, play was one of the ceremonies of innocence: "There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day Or for many years or stretching cycle of years."

It is not a big jump from this to the identification both Whitman and Stevens found in aspects of nature and even other people, or the ultimate place they both gave to the Imagination.  

  Just how committed they were to the imagination is suggested by the fact that the many places and scenes evoked in their poems were the products of two basically stay-at-home guys. Whitman wrote about many more places than he ever traveled to; he rarely strayed from New York, at least until the Civil War. Except for Florida vacations, Steven’s poems about places outside of Connecticut and Manhattan were often based on business trips as an official of an insurance company.

 But the places and scenes became the essence of themselves and more than themselves, through imagination, and the skills of the singers.  Whitman made poetic music never heard before, and Stevens' music carries even his most abstract poems.

In her study on the phenomenon titled Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison notes, "The exuberance of play is, in some respects, a joyous improvisation on the knowledge newly acquired through exploration."  That suggests the flavor, not only of Whitman and Stevens, but of this class.  I recall a sense of communal excitement unmatched in any other course I took at Knox.

 In a talk he gave in 1994, Wilson spoke of his introduction to Wallace Stevens' work in graduate school, and his particular fondness for a couple of poems in Harmonium (Stevens' first book): "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" ("Only, here and there, an old sailor,/Drunk and asleep in his boots,/Catches tigers/In red weather.") and “Anecdote of the Jar” (I placed a jar in Tennessee...)  He conveyed that to us as well.

 Wilson credited Knox student James McCurry for involving him in Stevens' later, longer philosophical poems, through McCurry's honors project in the year previous to our course.  One of these poems, "Credences of Summer," frames the rest of his talk. There's a considerable body of critical work on Stevens now, but little existed when McCurry wrote his paper, Wilson said. That suggests it still didn't exist when we took this course. We were explorers in more ways than we knew.

 Reading Whitman now I realize again that one purpose of this course I took at 19 would be that I would have motive and context to read him again in my 70s. But that impetus does not come from the poet alone—the context of enthusiasm and exuberance is as much a creation of Wilson’s teaching as it is in the long gray lines on the page. Much more than Whitman, however, I’ve been reading Stevens for more than 50 years. In all that time, the experience of his poetry has been linked directly back to Doug Wilson and that class. There isn’t one without the other.

One of Valjean's children's books

I’m not the only one who was so inspired. Classmate Ted Szostkowski told Doug that he still reads Stevens, and has interested his daughter in reading him, too.

 The class meant a lot to Valjean McLenighan, my friend over the years. She noted this on the blog she started during her terminal illness, when she had dinner with Doug and Sharon Wilson in Chicago. After she died, a friend’s eulogy mentioned that one of her favorite poems was Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” Its last lines:

  “We say God and the imagination are one...
How high the highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”

 We were there together—around a long table, we felt these discoveries as a communal experience. And with former faiths assaulted all around, with things falling apart, we heard Whitman and Stevens sing of individual experience and the imagination as the human credo. So that this spring could be a season of belief.

Douglas L. Wilson remained teaching at Knox, through the crazed 60s and the apocalyptic anger that peaked in the early 70s, through the 80s when students not studying to become lawyers were studying to become doctors, and into the 1990s.

 He also directed the Knox library for awhile, and spent four years at Monticello, where he was the founding director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies.

 But his most prominent achievements are the many books and articles he wrote, edited or co-wrote with Knox history professor Rodney Davis on the life of Abraham Lincoln, under the aegis of the Lincoln Center they co-founded.

Wilson received multiple honors for Honor's Voice (1999) and Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (2006.) Wilson's work is characterized by meticulous and judicious scholarship and clear writing with subtle structures of narrative.

 Besides being interesting and entertaining to read,  Honor's Voice for example is practically a guidebook on how to evaluate historical testimony, then how to carefully and creatively use it to adjust previous assumptions and gain new insights.  Lincoln's Sword is not only absorbing as history; as a book on writing I find it inspirational.

 In 1998 Wilson and Davis edited  Herndon's Informants, a collection of testimony about Abraham Lincoln solicited from his former friends by Lincoln's law partner, William H. Herndon.  This book so entranced novelist George Saunders that he used it extensively in his novel Lincoln in the Bardo, mentioning the book and its editors several times in the text.  This novel won a Pulitzer, a National Book Award and the Man Booker Award in the UK.  (Wilson learned of Saunder's praise from former student Barbara Cottral Bean.)

Wilson published his first book decades earlier when I was still at Knox: The Genteel Tradition,  nine essays by George Santayana that he edited, and for which he wrote a contextual introduction.  I have a generously signed copy.

Wilson was active in college matters in those years, and was a member of the Faculty Committee on Student Affairs, including the year I was a student member. He had a great deal more patience and tact than I ever could manage.

 I also note that in a 1969 essay in the student publication Catch (which seems in that year to be a substitute for both Dialogue and the literary journal that must not be named) he went after distribution requirements (which, he wrote, have lost credibility) and in particular the math and language requirements.

 "If the members of the faculty were to be judged as educated persons by such a test (say ability in one language and calculus), does anyone doubt what the result would be?  Nothing less than the 'Emperor's New Clothes' played out in academic regalia." He also notes that the advisory study titled the North Central Report had pointedly asked if these requirements aren't "mere political devices."  I believe Knox did dump these requirements, at least for awhile.  Had they done so a little earlier, I might actually be a Knox graduate.

 Doug Wilson and I have corresponded intermittently throughout the years, and we do so now. His friendship and guidance when I was a student, his calm good humor and his intelligent enthusiasm were vital to me.  His belief in me as a writer was encouraging then, and his belief in my writing now (at least, before this post) I keep as a kind of secret award from a highly credible source.

  As for my recurring exploration of Wallace Stevens, or at least enjoyment of his music, this has required a few additions to my book collection. Just this year I read Paul Mariani’s revelatory if uneven biography of Stevens, The Whole Harmonium.  A review of Mariani's book in the New Yorker had this choice quote: "And if a primary function of poetry is to expand and enrich the scope of a native language, Stevens has no equal in American English except Walt Whitman."

Some years back I lucked out by coming upon a copy of Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure by Ronald Sukenick, one of my favorite contemporary fictionists since the 70s. Published in 1967, this book was his doctoral thesis at Brandeis, and contains his interpretations (or "readings") of many poems (coincidentally or not, Mariani’s often coincide.)

 I've got Stevens’ Collected Poems in paperback now as well as the old hardback. But I usually kept at bedside and at times carried in my backpack the compact paperback called Palm at the End of the Mind, a generous selection (with chronology) edited by his daughter Holly Stevens, which I also got at Knox. Eventually I wore it out, until the binding disintegrated (the line across 'End of' in the scan above is a rubber band.)

recently I acquired a newer edition, which is a little larger but almost as handy (though the chronology of poems is left out of the table of contents, alas.)  I've also replaced my old--and now MIA--Opus Posthumous with the revised and expanded edition.

inside title page,1931 edition

I’ve got a hardback copy of Stevens' letters, and the pride and joy of my collection: a 1931 second edition of his first book, Harmonium. It’s a library discard so not quite auction-worthy, but the price certainly was right. I got it for a dime, discarded by the public library of my childhood. Tells a story right there.

 Here's another story: the first edition of Harmonium sold so poorly (about 100 copies) that it was remaindered, and priced at the original bargain basement of Filene's department store in Boston at 11 cents.