As If in a Book: Everyday Reading in Stevens

Abstract

As If in a Book: Everyday Reading in Stevens Nora Pehrson When I complain of the “bareness”—I have in mind, very often, the effect of order and regularity, the effect of moving in a groove. . . . But books make up. They shatter the groove, as far as the mind is concerned. They are like so many fantastic lights filling plain darkness with strange colors. —Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie Moll, January 17, 1909 “OFTEN WHEN I am writing poetry,” Wallace Stevens explained in a 1949 letter to Barbara Church, “I have in mind an image of reading a page of a large book” (L 642). Unsurprisingly, therefore, meta-readerly scenes occur from first to last in Stevens’s verse, and they illustrate his changing ideas not just about the lyric but about creativity itself. “[W]hat one ought to find” in poetry, Stevens insisted in the same letter, “is normal life, insight into the commonplace, reconciliation with every-day reality” (L 643). His own solitary reading practice afforded him the simultaneous grounding and revelatory moments of insight necessary to sustain a generative relationship to “every-day reality,” or to the outward, communal world inhabited by his readers. Like a flash of brilliance, or a sudden illumination of strange and fantastic colored lights, his immersion in a text, as he saw it, could constitute “a momentary existence on an exquisite plane” (CPP 786). It could bring about a state of heightened receptivity and attentiveness—one that would ultimately wane but that left his sense of himself and of the environment beyond the text invigorated and transformed. For Stevens, the ordinary habit of reading was a means of opening up to the extraordinary value and artistic potential latent in the everyday—an accessible and reliable way of prompting creative discovery, but also, secondarily, of connecting with his actual readership. In the pages that follow, I first consider, briefly, Stevens’s private reading habits by way of his journal entries and personal correspondence. Then, I turn my attention to a group of six poems that focus specifically on the activity of reading: “The Reader,” “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light,” “The Lack of Repose,” “The House Was Quiet and the World [End Page 48] Was Calm,” “Large Red Man Reading,” and “The Novel.” Arising out of Stevens’s own reading practice, these poems, which depict and enact the experience of reading an absorbing and challenging text, elicit a parallel response in us, Stevens’s real-life readers, drawing us in as active collaborators in the textual process. This may seem contradictory, given that the poems, with one exception, evoke solitary figures reading in private spaces. Unobserved, unaccompanied, apparently indifferent to company, if these readers speak, it’s to themselves. Yet the solitary reading experiences in question are figured through various grammatical and rhetorical strategies—shifting pronouns, direct address, wordplay, and open-ended syntax—that are more suggestive of an interpersonal exchange. Stevens took his readers increasingly into account with each published volume—not by lessening the difficulty of his work, but by invoking the reading experience itself as a subject, thereby projecting his poetry outward to share his own habits and include his readers in the process. Using theories of the everyday, I will explore how Stevens’s collaborative stance—a result of his self-referential, open-ended, experimental lyricism—corresponds to his efforts to achieve an ongoing creative relationship to what he called the “normal”—that is, the shared, social, collective—experience of daily life. As a group, the reading poems remain an underappreciated part of Stevens’s work, one that has perhaps been overshadowed by the seemingly more ambitious aims of long poems such as “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Yet to focus on these particular poems about reading is to deepen our sense of Stevens as an artist, to see him afresh as a poet chiefly and principally devoted to connecting with his readership.1 Furthermore, isolating the reading poems as a unit helps us see Stevens—as Susan Howe and other contemporary poets do—as a forerunner of postmodern experimentalism and a precursor to the avant-garde interest in capturing and...