Reality is a cliché
From which we escape by metaphor
It is only au pays de la métaphore
Qu’on est poète.
— Wallace Stevens, Adagia (CPP, 920)

Avant—Propos. You must help me with this, Bowl.
My knowledge of French is not absolutely penetrating.
— Wallace Stevens, Bowl, Cat, and Broomstick (CPP, 633)

Pach Brothers Photo of Wallace Stevens, New York, c. 1940

Agrandir Original (jpeg, 25k)

I

4Unlike Eliot—and Samuel Beckett for that matter—Stevens never chose to compose entire poems in French, though he did occasionally translate poems by Du Bellay and Jean Le Roy into English. Neither did he ever set foot in France, as has too often been observed for me to dwell on again here. Rather, and most characteristically, Stevens constantly interlaced his American “twang” with snippets of French and to a lesser extent other languages that, I would argue, creolized his poetry.

5 In the above-quoted epigraph “Reality is a cliché…,” Stevens’ syntax typically oversteps the boundaries between languages (most forcibly here, by beginning a restrictive clause in English and completing it in French, “It is only… que”); “metaphor” morphs into “métaphore,” whose appended acute accent and final “e” affect the rhythm, sound, and rhyming of the quatrain, exacerbating (not erasing) the differences between the two. Meanwhile, to place the French word “métaphore” (with its stressed third syllable) on the tip of an American tongue (to paraphrase Nabokov) is to make way for “sound’s substance” (CPP, 694); to carry language not just above (meta) but to the fore (phore), taking a trip of three steps up the palate to reach, at three, for the impossibly raspy French [r], only to release “heavenly labials” into a world of gurgling “gutturals” (CPP, 6).

We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano, and in speech,
As in a page of poetry— (CPP, 476)

11“A crucial way Stevens’ French signals differently from Eliot’s and Pound’s is that it moves through what we might call the hauntology of black vernacular,” McLane reflects. Again, this is something that Whitman would hardly have disavowed: his Primer is rife with praises of the American idiom as “the most capacious vital tongue of all,” an “enormous treasure house,” a “granary”

chock full of so many contributions from the north and from the south, from Scandinavia, from Greece and Rome—from Spaniards, Italians, and the French—that its own sturdy home-dated Angles-bred words have long been outnumbered by the foreigners whom they lead—which is all good enough, and indeed must be.

• 17 Ibid., p. 119-120.

As our literary history is usually told, the nonstandard language practices of the radical modernists, and their descendants, are not linked to the dialect and vernacular practices of African American poets. But the construction of a vernacular poetry was a major project for many poets, black and white, during the modernist period, and the fact that these developments often took place without reference to each other—the fact of the color line—should not now obscure their intimate formal and sociohistorical connection.17

14 Tracking down the “ghostly demarcations” of African American voices in Stevens’ poems may yet yield many more twists. What are we to make, for instance, of “Banjo Boomer,” one of Stevens’ last poems, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in March 1955 and only posthumously collected, whose sounds are (untypically for Stevens) those of a ditty? Obviously, an African American “banjo” booms (CPP, 475) where a “blue guitar” used to twang (CPP, 138). In the postwar decade of baby (rather than banjo) boomers, the title sounds unambiguously generative, if vaguely threatening. While it would be too much to read a DuBoisian “double-consciousness” into the poem’s opening affirmation that “The mulberry is a double tree,” something of Pyramus and Thisbe’s impossible love (once upon a time “shade [d] awhile” by a mulberry tree) does make itself heard in this much-knotted family tree that branches off tragically into Ovid’s Metamorphoses and comically into Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The mulberry is a double tree. / Mulberry, shade me, shade me awhile. // A white, pink, purple berry tree, / A very dark-leaved berry tree. / Mulberry, shade me, shade me awhile” (CPP, 475). What exactly was Stevens “knotting there,” one might ask in the words of Melville’s Captain Delano? And like the old sailor on the San Dominick, I am tempted to answer, at least for now: “For someone else to undo.”

II

15The opening section of the present collection of essays, “Stevens’ Uses of French,” undertakes the task of broadening and refining longstanding assumptions about Stevens’ love affair with French. Investigating the whole gamut of what one might call the effects of Frenchness in the poems, the chapters rework the linguistic borders of Romance and Anglo-Saxon languages, exploring a kind of lexical warp in between.

16Antoine Cazé’s “‘Luminous Traversing’: Stevens’ Near French and the Vagaries of Translation” draws on Translation Theory to underline the challenges raised by translating into French the writings of a poet who insisted that “French and English constitute a single language” (CPP, 914). Cazé proposes a new reading of the aphorism as affirming the singularity (not the similarity) of French and English, and creatively devises the concept of “Near French” to underscore Stevens’ linguistic approximations and appropriations within his own American vernacular, a “luminous traversing” that “worries the distance” between the two languages.

17 Another kind of traversing takes place in Lisa Goldfarb’s essay, “Thinking through the Senses: Stevens and Valéry (with Echoes of Proust),” which provides a fresh appraisal of Stevens’ “theory / Of poetry [as] the theory of life” (CPP, 415). Building on her previous work on Stevens and Valéry, Goldfarb this time delineates the underlying affinities between the two poets’ theoretical understanding of the senses and sensuality as decisive “parameters” of knowledge. Correcting and complementing readings of Stevens as a cerebral poet, Goldfarb’s chapter culminates in a close examination of “ADish of Peaches in Russia”—a poem that echoes Proust’s soaked madeleine epiphany even as it “absorbs” Joachim Du Bellay’s nostalgic praise for native Anjou wines—thus placing the peaches on the readers’ “tingling tongues” (CPP, 44) as an experience of the “whole body” (CPP, 206).

18That Stevens’ use of French is often disruptively comedic and theatrical is the pith of Aurore Clavier’s argument. In “‘The lingua franca et jocundissima’: The Comedian as a French Speaker,” Clavier unfurls Stevens’ poetic comedy around Crispin (its central figure) before ushering in a “motley pageant” of comic personae—Scapin, Sganarelle, Scaramouche, and, by way of a typically grotesque “gasconade of drums” (CPP, 26), Edmond Rostand’s hypereloquent Cyrano de Bergerac. These enable (and dramatize) a bathetic crossing between Shakespeare’s tongue and Molière’s, ultimately providing “antidotes to the cultural authority and ‘flambeaued manner’ of French.”

19Further complicating accounts of Stevens’ Francophilia, Lisa Steinman in “Poetic Sanctions: Stevens’French as the Language of Love and Law” identifies two poles: not just the (rather expected) pole of love and sensuality, characterized by the erotically charged loanwords peppered across Stevens’ oeuvre ( “rendezvous,” “gallant,” “liaison,” and many more), but also the pole of law and government, whose English vocabulary is (historically) heavily indebted to French. While Stevens claimed he used French simply “for the pleasure that it gives” (Letters, 792), he also connected its lexical heritage with regulation and order, a residual effect perhaps of his everyday life as a lawyer that continued to bear on the poems. Stevens’French, then, bespeaks both culture and policing, love and law, typically “sanctioning” the destabilization of any preexisting categories.

20The second cluster of chapters, entitled “Stevens’ Poetic Legacy across the Atlantic,” examines how Stevens’ poetry “reverberates, productively and problematically” (Maureen McLane) in the writings of poets in Europe and the United States. Rather than attempt to get (or make) anything “straight,” all four chapters deliberately espouse the crooked, the queer, or the tangential to chart English-language poets’ ambivalent responses to Stevens’ Francophilia—a new and compelling topic.

21 McLane’s poetic essay, “Hoobla-hoo and Hullabaloo: Divagations with Stevens,” adopts (and adapts) the moods of Baudelairean flânerie and Mallarméan divagation to sift through a string of early poems, as well as her own relation to Stevens as a poet herself and a Romanticist. Along the way, McLane draws our attention to the spectral presence of African American voices, pausing to wonder at their “bizarre encapsulation of Stevens’ negritude.” Should Stevens’ “forays into, raids on, black vernacular” be understood as instances of his Francophone ventriloquism or rather, as she suggests, as a “hypermarked ‘American’ corrective”? Contrasting “Stevens’ Negroes” with both Williams’ and Baudelaire’s, McLane blazes a new trail in the study of Stevens’ Francophone politics, and brings in the voices of young African American poets who talked back to Stevens, before delivering her own homage in the form of two poems (one of which is published here for the first time).

22Stevens returns as a ghost (not a host) haunting the cafés and museums of Paris in the late 1950s, in Bart Eeckhout’s exploratory chapter, “AQueer Visit to Paris: Richard Howard’s Encounter with Stevens on French Soil,” which provides an extended, far-reaching commentary on Richard Howard’s epistolary poem “Even in Paris” (1989). In it, Howard—an acclaimed poet, critic, and translator of Roland Barthes and Baudelaire, among many others—stages a fictional encounter between young Richard, the speaker, and an ageing Wallace Stevens who, during the visit, indulges in variously incongruous rituals as an incognito “American in Paris.” Stevens’ fictionalized visit to Paris (or should we call it a visitation?), is thus queered through the campy web of gossiping friends spun around Richard, his friend Ivo, and their mutual friend in the United States to whom the letters are addressed. Beyond the literary joke, Eeckhout suggests that the narrative poem—incidentally, a poetic variation on the emerging genre of fictional biography—might read as a testing ground for Howard’s poetics, perhaps even as his own “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.”

23In “Parents ‘in the French Sense’: Stevens and Louis Zukofsky,” Xavier Kalck digs into the relational poetics that gave Stevens a central, though belated, role in Zukofsky’s poetic family tree. Looking at Zukofsky’s 1971 lecture “For Wallace Stevens” (his last piece of critical prose), Kalck reopens the Stevens-versus-Pound debate and eschews the usual limitations of influence studies by making way for a “generational overlap” that is neither vertical nor horizontal. Fleshing out the parallels drawn by Zukofsky between Stevens’ poetry and his own, the chapter dwells first on the French parentage of “The Lack of Repose,” a poem that features prominently in the lecture, before examining Zukofsky’s selection of poems (by Stevens and himself) where genealogy and foreign idioms once again intersect.

24 In the closing chapter of this section, “Bad Boy for Good: Baudelaire in Stevens and Bishop,” Angus Cleghorn recounts how Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop both turned to Baudelaire to investigate (and eventually rekindle) the sublime in their “embodied poetics of the earth.” Stevens’ “Esthétique du Mal” and Bishop’s “Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box” provide the main groundwork for Cleghorn’s comparative study of Baudelairean echoes in the poetry and prose of these twentieth-century American poets, which concludes that Les Fleurs du mal “came to full bloom in the dynamic earthly language of Stevens and Bishop.”

25Objects and material culture weigh heavily in the following section, “Stevens’ French Connections Real and Imaginary,” which comprises forays into Stevens’ peignoirs, wines, paintings, and masks, all of which are envisioned through a historical and textual lens.

26Tony Sharpe’s “‘Bordeaux to Yucatan’: Stevens’ French Connections” offers an all-embracing, textually illuminating overview of Stevens’ French connections recast as French inflections. “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” is rediscovered as the mock-didactic counterpart to La plume de ma tante, a sample sentence coined for the benefit of FSL [French as a Second Language] students (similar to ESL students’ My tailor is rich). Moving from “Sunday Morning” to encompass countless other poems, Sharpe lays bare the stylistics, phonetics, and politics of otherness in Stevens’ French locutions. While in a number of cases Stevens reached for French derisively and antagonistically, French locutions also blissfully assisted in his encoding of (erotic) sophistication. Ultimately, Sharpe contends that the naturalization of such words as “peignoir” and “cliché” into the poem’s native idiom indicates “crossover rather than contention,” issuing forth a purposely intermixed “beau language.”

27The following chapter, Glen MacLeod’s “‘ATouch of Paris’: Stevens, Walter Pach, and Matisse,” provides readers with the first extensive portrayal of Stevens’ relation to Matisse through their mutual friendship with Walter Pach. Pach was an art dealer and Francophile who, MacLeod argues, was pivotal to the development of Stevens’ artistic tastes. While “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside” is the only poem by the American poet that records Matisse’s name, there is evidence that his interest spanned his entire career, from the Armory Show in 1913 to the first major Matisse retrospective in the US almost forty years later. Observing that the poem appeared only one year after the Museum of Modern Art mounted a major exhibition in New York covering Matisse’s entire career, MacLeod fastidiously builds a new reading of it as a long-deferred homage to the French painter, rather than a taunt aimed at Matisse’s reputation as “merely decorative.”

28 Taste is paramount in Edward Ragg’s chapter, “The Hartford Bourguignon: French Wines in Stevens’ Writings,” which embarks readers on a fascinating chronicle of wartime France through the lens of French gastronomy and the predicament of Burgundy vineyards. Wine and food exerted a strong pull on Stevens’ imagination; Ragg expertly demonstrates how the grands crus and place-names of Burgundy became materia poetica in Stevens’ poetry of the early 1940s, especially “Montrachet-le-Jardin” and “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” both of which appeared when most of Burgundy was under Nazi Occupation. In other words, wine became “the quasi-barometer through which Stevens measured the places, politics, and culture (s) of his time.”

29In “French Masks and the Life of the Mind in Stevens’ Poetry,” Anne Luyat provides an account of Stevens’ recourse to theatrical characters and comic masks made (or circulated) in France, noting how they were appropriated, and gradually transformed, in Stevens’ poetry. Two poems from Stevens’ collection Transport to Summer, “The Pastor Caballero” and “Repetitions of a Young Captain,” particularly unmask the transformations of the boastful captain archetype inherited from the commedia dell’arte as remediated in poems by Paul Verlaine, illustrations by George Rouault, and a film by Marcel Carné. The changing contours of these masks and personae, some of them derived from France’s African colonies like Gabon, enabled Stevens a playful exuberance that often triggered a reflective meditation on war and the human condition.

30The volume’s last section, “Stevens and French Thought,” is organized around three readings of Stevens’ poetry that are deeply informed by French theory and continental philosophy. Gül Bilge Han, in her chapter “Jacques Rancière and the Political Dimensions of Aesthetic Autonomy in Stevens’ Depression-Era Poetry,” suggests ways in which Rancière’s recent remapping of the relationship between politics and aesthetics might yet shed light on Stevens’ poetry of the 1930s. Drawing on his unsettling of the opposition between the aesthetic and political functions of art, Han reexamines Stevens’ “Mozart, 1935” as articulating a socially engaged position that redefines aesthetic autonomy as an enabling condition, rather than a threat, for this engagement.

31Thomas Gould in “‘Of patches and of pitches’: Stevens, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the Sense of a World” builds his argument on a relatively recent work by Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Plaisir au dessin (2007), that reflects on the proximity between drawing and thinking and envisages drawing as a paradigm for all the other arts. Gould traces the parallel between the graphic line and the poetic line in Stevens, locating both the art of drawing and the art of poetry in a temporality of the preliminary. Like Han, Gould is interested in pursuing the relational quality of Stevens’ poetry; he uses Nancy’s concepts of being with and transimmanence, however, to look at a number of poems, such as “Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” and “July Mountain.”

32In “Stevens’ Reality and Imagination through a Lacanian Lens,” Axel Nesme expounds on the Lacanian categories of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary to evince how they come into play in The Necessary Angel and particularly “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” providing a conceptual framework that helps unravel some of the essay’s complexities and incongruities. The “variously noble” riders summoned by Stevens in the essay, most notably Verrocchio’s statue of Colleoni, Cervantes’Don Quixote, Mills’s statue of Andrew Jackson, and Marsh’s painting Wooden Horses, seem to achieve “an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals” (CPP, 659) even as they point to a third way where desire features prominently as a “violence from within that protects us from a violence without” (CPP, 665).

33While Charles Altieri’s “Afterword” bears on the circumstances of the 2015 conference, it also provides stimulating afterthoughts on how the papers delivered in Paris affected his own take on the topic. “My ‘Stevens in France’” both recapitulates “what it might mean to attend to the material presence of the French language within Stevens’ English” and broaches the topic of “eloquence,” defined here by Altieri as creating “a kind of space that establishes a civilized mode of pleasure.” Coming after the section on Stevens and French theory, Altieri’s essay offers a smooth transition to the previous contributors’ ideas, by bringing in Spinoza’s Ethics to discuss, and commend, pleasure as inseparable from an expressive activity that is, after all, “the province of the humanities.”

III

34The essays gathered here originated in a conference that took place over four days during the first week of June 2015 at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, a decidedly ironic backdrop to discussions of a poet who mischievously wrote, “They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne” (CPP, 351). Expanding on a 2010 special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal guest-edited by Anne Luyat and entitled “Stevens and France,” the conference, under the slightly different heading “Stevens in France,” aimed to shift the focus toward Stevens’ French legacy, while at the same time following in the footsteps of the special issue’s contributors, with a view to charting Stevens’ (metaphorical, never physical) excursions into “le pays de la métaphore.” As it happened, the conference’s animated discussions gave birth to a number of new, unanticipated debates, yet the question of Stevens’ academic and artistic legacy in France never quite arose: however promising a topic, his status among poets today (Michel Deguy, Martin Rueff, and Jean-Christophe Bailly, for instance), including among poets and writers who went so far as to translate some of his works (Claire Malroux, Claude Mouchard, Bernard Noël, and Leslie Kaplan), his early recovery as a dramatist by as prominent a stage director as Claude Régy (who staged Trois voyageurs regardent un lever de soleil [Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise] at La Bastille theater in 1988), his resurgence in the writings of French philosophers (most recently, Alain Badiou)—not to mention painters and composers—was never addressed as such by any of the speakers or, in some cases, never made its way into the final version of their essays. More than regret, let this be heard as an invitation to scholars to come, and the sign that there is still ample room to study the unexhausted complexities of Stevens’ French-American interchanges.

35My heartfelt thanks go to all those who brought their personal and institutional support to this project: to Claire Malroux and Massimo Bacigalupo, Stevens’ translators into (respectively) French and Italian, who were kind enough to attend the conference and share their invaluable insight during the roundtable on “Stevens in translation”; to the French poet Bernard Noël, whose translations of Stevens, published in 1989 under the title Description sans domicile, played a key role in Stevens’ rediscovery in France, for his epistolary reflections on the topic of Stevens and French poets; to my colleague Julie Vatain-Corfdir, who directed an irresistibly comic performance of Stevens’ play Bowl, Cat, and Broomstick (1917), and to the actors who accompanied her on stage, Charles Brasart, Lucille Hagège, Anne-Florence Quaireau, Michaël Roy, and Kerry-Jane Wallart; to Elisabeth Angel-Perez, for her unflinching support for this and many other projects through the VALE EA4085 research center; to Hélène Aji, Clément Oudart, and Anne-Laure Tissut, who helped organize the event and ensure its smooth unfolding; to Agnès Derail, whose role was pivotal to the publication of this volume, and to Lucie Marignac and Marie-Hélène Ravenel, at the Éditions rue d’Ulm, who helped shape the book and bring it to the finish line; finally, and most importantly, to Lisa Goldfarb and Bart Eeckhout, co-organizers, co-editors, “and a great deal more than that,” who entrusted me with the rather daunting task of organizing the first Wallace Stevens Society conference in France, and relentlessly taught me the tricks of the editorial trade, with their characteristically companionable expertise.