Paul Mariani - The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens

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ALSO BY PAUL MARIANI

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Copyright 2016 by Paul Mariani

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2016

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Interior design by Joy OMeara

Jacket design by Tom McKeveny

Jacket photograph Bettmann/Corbis

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mariani, Paul L.

The whole harmonium : the life of Wallace Stevens / Paul Mariani.

pagescm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Stevens, Wallace, 18791955.2. Poets, American20th centuryBiography. I. Title.II. Title: Life of Wallace Stevens.

PS3537.T4753Z67832016

811'.52dc23

[B]2015020110

ISBN 978-1-4516-2437-3

ISBN 978-1-4516-2439-7 (ebook)

See , which constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

For Eileen

e l mapparve, s com elli appare
subitamente cosa che disvia
per maraviglia tutto altro pensare,

una donna soletta che si gia
e cantando e scegliendo fior da fiore
ond era pinta tutta la sua via.

PURGATORIO XXVIII

I lost a world when I left Reading.

WALLACE STEVENS, 1907

Farewell to an idea... The mothers face,

The purpose of the poem, fills the room.

They are together, here, and it is warm.

WALLACE STEVENS, THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN , 1947

W hat 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 mothers eyes: not an actual home but rather the heaven of an old home. The Sunday before, hed attended services in the old Grace Lutheran Church where he and Elsie had been married, and hed 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, hed written what he really felt about his first home in lines hed 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 Hoppers city scenes. Its still there, the place where Stevens was born and raised, and from the outside still looks much as he knew it, its faade 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 nations 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 schoolteachers 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 hed made as a teacher, but now a world of promise had opened before him. To pass those exams hed 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.