The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  Look down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank.

  Was heaven where you thought? It must be there.

  It must be where you think it is, in the light

  On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate.

  It is the honey-comb of the seeing man.

  (“The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air”)

  BETWEEN GLAUCO CAMBON’S STEVENS, “un acrabata interiore che volteggiava fra bellezza e verità” and Mr. Winters’s Stevens, a brilliant but ineffectual smith of gaudy verse — these being characteristic extremes of explaining away a poet not wholly understood — there is the Stevens who is the poetic cousin of Spinoza and Santayana. It is this Stevens, the philosophical poet, or, considering the imagery that objectifies most often the philosophy in Stevens, the philosophical landscapist, that I intend to discuss. Writing after Mr. William Van O’Connor’s The Shaping Spirit, one feels free to inspect Stevens at any point without needing to explain or eulogize his entire work. To keep my argument close to a single poem I have chosen for analysis the poem that, in a sense, “makes all the difference” between Stevens and his forbears and contemporaries, “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The extreme of sensuous coloring in Stevens’s poetry, its vocabulary of intense seriousness, hilarity and wit, its brilliant but difficult and seemingly capricious ordering of sense and imagery have all been subjected to a variety of considerations. My purpose is not to elucidate his poetics but to single out his injunction to discount the poem and to look to the concrete particulars of which it is an abstract, to turn Spinozan materialist, in fact, and learn to live in a world stripped of its illusions.

  Stevens grows from a philosophical spirit rather than from any one philosophy, but that spirit can be identified and shown to be of vital worth in the understanding of him. “To define poetry as an unofficial view of being,” Stevens says in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” “places it in contrast with philosophy and at the same time establishes the relation between the two. . . . We must conceive of poetry as at least the equal of philosophy.”

  Santayana, addressing an audience at the Hague on the tercentenary of Spinoza’s birth, asked his listeners “to imagine the truth to be as unfavorable as possible to your desires and as contrary as possible to your natural presumptions; so that the spirit in each of us may be drawn away from its accidental home and subjected to an utter denudation and supreme trial.”

  Compare this, then, with the opening passages of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”:

  Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea

  Of this invention, this invented world,

  The inconceivable idea of the sun:

  You must become an ignorant man again

  And see the sun again with an ignorant eye

  And see it clearly in the idea of it.

  Without following just now what I hope will appear as a philosophical kinship among Stevens, Santayana, and Spinoza — Spinoza, too, for instance, had an experience with the sun, which in his deliberately becoming an ignorant man again seemed “about two hundred feet away” — it should be seen that the results of their three intense speculations on the nature of being are wonderfully different, no matter how close the processes of inquiry; that, briefly, the “imageless ontology of Spinoza,” as Friedrich Schlegel called it, and “Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night … my green, my fluent mundo” of Stevens are almost from separate orders of thought. Their kinship needs Santayana to illuminate it, even though The Realms of Being, which has for greenery that one passage from Wordsworth quoted to be disapproved of diligently, is almost as imageless as the De Ethica. It is when Santayana asks what “inmost allegiance, what ultimate religion, would be proper to a wholly free and disillusioned spirit?” that we see the root of the drama in “The Comedian as the Letter C” and the central idea in “Sunday Morning,” “L’Esthétique du Mal,” and “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.” And, once it is understood, as Crispin has it, that “the soil is man’s intelligence,” that Santayana’s Realm of Matter is the prose parallel of much of Stevens (note, for example, “The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air”), Stevens’s use of landscape in practically every poem can be seen as the mundus eternally feeding the mind, the vital and proper traffic between reality and the imagination.

  Wordsworth’s “one impulse from a vernal wood” is not Santayana’s complex of essences, but the reverse: the spirit outside of man “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns” is but another fiction impeding perception, an accidental predilection of the imagination positing its imagery and arbitrary vocabulary upon the dumb image of landscape. It is ironic that Wordsworth was excited by and possibly deeply interested in Spinoza and what he thought was his pantheism, for what he achieved as a poet of nature is as alien to Spinoza’s Deus siva Natura as it is to Stevens’s theme of landscape. The distinction is insisted upon in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”:

  Never suppose an inventing mind as source

  Of this idea nor for that mind compose

  A voluminous master folded in the fire.

  Iamblichus’s sun, as metaphor, is not uncongenial. I have shown Stevens’s attitude toward such “honeycombs of the seeing man” in my superscription. That the imaginative conception of the real — the poet’s business — is ultimately superior to the imaginative treatment of the imaginary is discussed at length in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” The mind struggles with two worlds, fictive and real. Stevens’s major theme is his philosophical propounding of this struggle. He has joined Spinoza and Santayana in their honest materialism and made a body of poetry brilliantly distinct from that of any other of the moderns. The struggle is dramatized more concisely than elsewhere in “The Come-dian as the Letter C,” concerning one Crispin, a European valet who comes to settle in the Carolinas.

  Part I, “The World without Imagination” introduces Crispin who “created, in his day, a touch of doubt” as to whether man, “the intelligence of his soil” is also “preceptor to the sea.” As with Melville, for whom the sea was an old chaos of the unabated deluge where man’s predicament in a disordered civilization and an inscrutable world can be seen in greater relief than in the confusing speciousness of land, the sea in Stevens is an elemental landscape,

  Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,

  Polyphony beyond his baton’s thrust.

  Crispin as a character comes into French literature in 1654, in Scarron’s Écolier de Salamanque, “un valet,” as the Larousse sums him up, “goguenard, peureux, fanfaron, fripon, frotte de latin et de philosophie comme ses maîtres, toujours prêt à les flatter ou à les jouer, habille presque comme eux (petit chapeau et vêtement noirs, fraise blanche, bottes molles, ceinture de buffle et longue rapiêre), apte à tous les métiers.” Behind the initial poses of Crispin, at the beginning of the poem, there are echoes of plays about him: “Preceptor to the sea” (Crispin précepteur of La Thuillérie, 1679), “musician of pears” (Crispin musicien of Hauteroche, 1674), “this nincompated pedagogue” (le Fou raisonnable of Poisson, 1664), “this same wig of things” (Crispin chevalier of Champmesle, 1671, and Crispin gentilhomme of Montfleury, 1677).

  To identify him, moreover, as another Candide is not far amiss, and if we draw attention to his likeness to Peer Gynt or indeed to any of the sophomores of satiric contes in which a clown or Harlequin — Pinocchio, for a good example — is forced by the buffeting of fortune to become a tragic or “serious” figure we will have a basis for understanding the origin if not the subsequent development of Crispin.

  Crispin as virtuoso servant, amateur savant and dilettante is meant to epitomize the ruses of the time: politic for honest behavior, la politesse for intelligence, polish for sensibility. Verities in the hands of vigorous men ran counter to such daintiness. It was as a servant of state and church that Swift came to grief; Johnson’s brusqueness registered a protest. After the eighteenth century the “wig of things, this nincompated pedagogue” could no longer function, the “eye most apt in gela
tines and jupes, / Berries of villages, a barber’s eye” with its aesthetic of Pope and Christopher Wren became a fiercer searcher of man’s rôle in nature. Crispin’s metanoia upon the sea, his change from eighteenth to nineteenth-century man can be seen in the Turner family, where the father was a lady’s barber, a specialist in gossip and the roiled coiffures of the age, the son the greatest of England’s romantic seascapists. The barber-valet imagery — touched first, as a theme, in Crispin’s name (crispus, curled) and brought to ironic fulfilment in And Daughters with Curls — affects the opening experiences of the sea-change (“silentious porpoises, whose snouts / Dibbled in waves that were mustachios, / Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.”)

  “The valet in the tempest was annulled,” and nothing remained of Crispin but “some starker, barer self.” The attendant god is Triton, or the idea of Triton, for he, too, long before, had gone the way of Crispin so that “memorial gesturings” only were left, “hallucinating horn . . . A sunken voice.” This device of mythological context is repeated in Part II, “Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan,”

  the note

  Of vulcan, that a valet seeks to own. . . .

  In Yucatan the violence of earthquake parallels the storm. at sea of Part I. Now stripped of his civilized finesse and polished manners, Crispin discovers that he is “aware of exquisite thought” and that he has become a “connoisseur of elemental fate.” The office of Vulcan has succeeded that of Triton; Crispin’s adventures are at a peak.

  Yucatan serves Crispin as a landscape a degree more human than the sea, “most inhuman of elements.” His voyage plunged him into primeval chaos; the jungle is but a little less overpowering. If Crispin’s fate is a fable, in part, of the adjustment of the European homo faber to his American wilderness, then Yucatan, the seat of an extraordinary and obscure culture that was already in ruins when the Spaniards first saw it and utterly forgotten when it was rediscovered in 1839, has been selected as a fine example of landscape in high contrast to anything Europeans had seen. Confusion, having broken up previous concepts into elemental awe, soon became a basis for renewal. The primitive Mayans, partly savage and partly westernized (there are but 200 of them living nowadays), still praying to the night-bird and running to the cathedral in time of disaster, leave Crispin with a chthonic respect for nature. The pattern is not unfamiliar: Gauguin in the South Seas, Hudson in the Amazon basin, von Humboldt, after seeing America, recognizing the sixteen basic kinds of landscape. Landscape itself became in the nineteenth century a medium of expression of considerable impact, functioning in painting as Stevens makes it function in his poetry. We have but to look at Edward Lear’s profound disturbance on first seeing India after a lifetime of doing “views” of Italian passes and Adriatic bays and promontories, or at Ruskin’s analyses of landscape in terms of moral edification to appreciate Stevens’s remarkable recovery and consummate application of an art that has become in our day moribund and symptomatically insignificant.

  “Approaching Carolina,” the third part of the poem, is a second voyage for Crispin, another “sweating change.” At first he hopes that the Northern spring (“America was always north to him”) with its “legendary moonlight” and “green palmettoes in crepuscular ice” might give him “the relentless contact he desired” and be

  The liaison, the blissful liaison,

  Between himself and his environment,

  Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight

  For him, and not for him alone. . . .

  But immediately he realizes that “the book of moonlight” will not do, that it’s “wrong as divagation to Peking,” a “passionately niggling night-ingale.” He must have a robust landscape about him, “prickly and obdu-rate. “ The spring that he comes upon on the Carolina coast is

  A time abhorrent to the nihilist

  Or searcher for the fecund minimum.

  The moonlight fiction disappeared. . . .

  He savors the “burly smells” of the docks , becomes infatuated with “the essential prose / As being . . . the one integrity” and decides that “prose shall wear a poem’s guise at last.” It is not difficult to see in the poem thus far the pattern of discovery that brought Spinoza to his initial skepticism and Santayana to his stoic materialism. The world has had few men “disillusioned” enough to accept the world stripped of all fictive ornament, “the same insoluble lump” as Crispin calls it. But such an idea is bed-rock, else the poem would end here. Santayana’s philosophy, beyond its Spinozan metaphysics, is an elaborate ethics and aesthetic: the essential prose, to be tolerable, and because it leads, with Spinoza, to man’s love for his world, and because, with Santayana, it grows from an “animal faith,” must wear a poem’s guise. It must be “chief motive, first delight.” We recognize a similar experience in Melville’s saying that a whaling ship was his Harvard and his Yale, and in much of Thoreau. One might compile a select company of such uncompromising artists who will have no illusions about them, who want for paradise nothing but their own good natures; they are not many. And in the history of ideas they must be seen as renegades from the seemingly unbreakable tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century pessimism, beside which they stand out as hearty, jovial aristocrats of the heart. If no confusion between pessimism and ill will botch the rightness of the comparison, or, for that matter, between good will and optimism, an excellent symbol would be Captain Ahab and Ishmael. Crispin belongs to the family of Ishmael, although Ishmael, agreeing that much docrine is to be concocted from the rout of things and that the flavor of the world comes in “Seraphic proclamations of the pure / Delivered with a deluging onwardness,” would emend Crispin’s final deduction to “the sea is man’s intelligence.”

  Part IV, “The Idea of a Colony,” shows us Crispin acting to make his “new intelligence prevail.” Mr. O’Connor points out that “The Comedian as the Letter C” is autobiographical, that it can be read as Stevens’s poetic manifesto. It is also a microcosm of the intellectual development of that part of America which was transplanted from eighteenth century Europe, enriched by the shock of inundation by a savage terrain, and which flourished as a hive of liberalism and individuality in the milieu of Jefferson, Franklin, and their republican fellows until, like Crispin, it settled complacently into quiet mediocrity. Crispin’s “singular collation” of plans for a colony in the new world is mock-Jeffersonian:

  The melon should have apposite ritual,

  Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,

  When its black branches came to bud, belle day,

  Should have an incantation.

  But (and here we have the only hint as to why Crispin made his voyage):

  These bland excursions into time to come,

  Related in romance to backward flights,

  However prodigal, however proud,

  Contained in their afflatus the reproach

  That first drove Crispin to his wandering.

  Stevens chides gently the fervor of the colonizer, a “clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.” Left to make a world for himself, he makes, after all, a replica, as best he can, of the world he left. But he does it with his new intelligence, with a vigor for him unprecedented. Whereas before he wrote his annual poem to the spring (a proper bow to what the paideuma of his former culture held to be the nature of things), he now knows the spring for what it is, “the essential prose . . . the one discovery still possible to make / To which all poems were incident. . . .”

  Mr. Stevens himself makes the comparison with Candide, but with the difference that Cripsin has “a fig in sight.” It is worth noting that “The Comedian as the Letter C” is not only an elaboration of such contes philosophiques as Candide, where the ability to come to terms with one’s world is ultimately parochial and isolationist, but an implicit criticism of traditional pessimism: Crispin is to be seen as a better manipulator of his destiny than his literary brothers. Where Peer Gynt is lost and fit only to be recast as molten material — the parallels are perhaps n
ot accidental: it was in Carolina that Peer stripped himself of all integrity and in tropic landscapes that he realized his worthlessness — Crispin continues to struggle at reclamation. His advantage over a Peer Gynt or a Gulliver is his ability to make his heart a honeycomb, to be both disillusioned and a man of imagination. Nowhere does Stevens saddle him with being shocked at the truth; on the contrary, he’s delighted with it, but intelligently always. Stevens’s faith in his bandy-legged, comically enthusiastic hero would distress a Swift and bring a charge of levity from an Ibsen. It is on this account that one should recognize in Stevens a preëminence both in modern philosophy and poetry for his rigorous sanity and honied good nature.

  There is a proper questioning of Crispin’s achievement in the final parts of the poem. Is he a failure as innovator for returning to salad beds? Has he wasted his efforts in ending contentedly with a nice shady home and four curly-haired daughters? When he becomes a “fatalist” Stevens uses the word with irony, for what Crispin has learned is “not doctrinal/ In form though in design.” It is, after all, in a real world, “autumn’s compendium,” “perfectly revolved.” If Crispin has concluded “fadedly,” he has at least done so honestly, has illuminated — as the poet must — ”plain and common things” “from a fancy gorged / By apparition.” It is a comedy with which we are dealing; it resolves itself, unlike tragedy, only in relation to its audience. The closing line is doctrinal: “So may the relation of each man be clipped.” Crispin as persona of the poet wears a Harlequin’s mask and thus acts out but part of the drama in Stevens’s poetry. His tableau is at once a fable of our landscape and what we have made of it (or, as Spinoza and Santayana would say, what it has made of us, what it has, by its power to be congenial or hostile to the spirit, caused us to feel and to think), and of Blake’s Fool who persisted in his folly and came upon a paradise all the same.

  There is a tale that Spinoza found the onions of Amsterdam particularly tasteless and accepted their insipidity as part of the price one pays for exile, for being able to live as he pleased. But he discovered one day that all along he had been eating tulip bulbs, not onions. Crispin’s voyage is an elaboration of this moral tale; the intelligent man’s intelligence of his vegetables is prologue to intelligence of his world, “veracious page on page, exact.” One hardly needs to add that few men have attempted Crispin’s voyage or had his energy or heart, or that Wallace Stevens’s poetry is of a freshness and sanity all too scarce in contemporary writing.