Posts Tagged ‘Wallace Stevens’
Quote of the Day
I choose poetry. I choose the ugly as well as the beautiful, knowing it will all be beautiful soon enough. I choose the unknown (for now), the mystery rather than the accepted solution, the cracked bowl over the flawless one, the voice that has a little spit and phlegm in it, the used shoes, imagination over analysis, Williams over Stevens, the impure every time.
Quote of the Day
[The poem] is what I wanted it to be without knowing before it was written what I wanted it to be, even though I knew before it was written what I wanted to do.
—Wallace Stevens, on the poem “The Old Woman and the Statue”
The poetry of insurance
If you know only one fact about the poet Wallace Stevens, it’s that he spent most of his career working as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut. It’s arguably the most famous literary day job of the twentieth century, and the contrast between what the critic Peter Schjeldahl recently called “Stevens’s seraphic art and his plodding life” tends to stick in our minds more than, say, T.S. Eliot’s stint at Lloyd’s Bank or Henry Miller’s years as a personnel manager at Western Union. In part, this is because Stevens simply stayed at his job for longer and rose higher in its ranks even after he had become the most acclaimed poet of his generation. (The story goes that he was offered a faculty position at Harvard after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, but he turned it down because it would have meant giving up his position at the firm.) It’s also a reflection of how we see the insurance business, which seems like an industry suited more for painstaking drudges than for the kind of visionary personalities that we associate with poetry—although every good poet also has to be a great bookkeeper. If we want to drill down even further, we could say that there’s something inherently unpoetic about the methods of insurance itself: it deals with human beings in the aggregate, as a statistical abstraction without a face, while poetry is naturally concerned with the individual, the unquantifiable, and the unexpected.
But we can also draw a clear line between Stevens’s life at the office and the development of his poetry. In his review in The New Yorker of Paul Mariani’s new biography The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens, Schjeldahl notes that the book “ignores the details of Stevens’s day job, probably as being too mundane to merit attention.” Yet Schjeldahl does his best to invest them with meaning, in an eloquent paragraph that has been rattling around in my brain ever since I read it:
Stevens’s specialties, surety and fidelity, turn profits from cautiously optimistic bets on human nature. (Surety covers defaulted loans and fidelity employee malfeasance.) Something very like such calculated risk operates in his poetry: little crises in consciousness, just perilous enough to seem meaningful. The endings are painstakingly managed victories for the poet’s equanimity.
I like this insight a lot, because there’s something to be said for a conception of poetry as an ongoing act of risk management. A rational artist wants to take on as much risk as he or she possibly can, because high risk goes with high return in art as much as it does in other kinds of investment—but only if you can live with it. If you’ve miscalculated your tolerance for volatility, as many aspiring artists do, you’re more likely to go out of business.
The insurance industry also seems like a good place for a writer to learn something about the complex ways in which institutions and impersonal systems interact with human nature. Kafka’s job at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institution, for instance, clearly played a crucial role in the development of his vision, and far more explicitly than it did with Stevens. But my favorite example comes from another singular voice in American letters: the novelist James M. Cain, who sold insurance for the General Accident Company in Washington D.C. He seems to have only worked there for a short time, but that’s interesting in itself—he repeatedly returned to the subject in his fiction, which implies that he regarded it as a great source of material. It provides a central part of the plot of both The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, which are fables, in essence, about the collision of messy emotions with the clinical, depersonalized logic of the insurance business. In the former, it leads to a surprise twist that makes nonsense of the violence that came before it; in the latter, it’s a plan for the perfect crime, conceived by a crooked insurance agent, that is quickly undermined by such basic, uncontrollable emotions as greed and lust. And Cain correctly realized that the intersection between insurance and human desire was the perfect territory for noir, which is often about the contrast between what we think we can plan and what the unfair universe really has in store for us.
That’s true of poetry, too. It’s traditionally the most exacting and precise of literary forms, but it puts itself in service of emotions and ideas that resist understanding and explanation, which is another form of calculated risk. The works of a poet like Shakespeare, who was a shrewd businessman in his own right, are notable for the way in which they seem to combine total specificity of detail with oracular opacity, a combination that can only arise from an artist who knows how to surrender control while retaining enough of it to bring the work to a conclusion. A career in insurance provides one way of thinking about such problems, as long as the poet can keep the core of his spirit intact. As the poet laureate Ted Kooser wrote:
This writing business you have to accustom yourself to is about failing again and again, and to not let that hold you up because if you keep at [it] day, after day, after day, after day, eventually you’ll get better. The same thing would be true if I had taken up longbow archery with the same zeal that I took up poetry writing: I could put forty arrows on a paper plate from one hundred yards away. So that is what it’s about—showing up for work.
A poet, in short, succeeds by learning how to manage many small instances of failure, which is the definition of insurance. And Kooser would know—because he worked in insurance, too.
What is poetry like?
Poetry is like mining for radium. The output an ounce, the labor a year.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.
Your teacher says that poetry is like an exquisite and towering pagoda that appears at the snap of the fingers or like the twelve towers of the five cities of the immortals that ephemerally exist at the edge of heaven. I do not agree. To use a metaphor, poetry is like building a house out of tiles, glazed bricks, wood, and stone—he must put them all together, one by one, on solid ground.
Poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude, as, for example, in earliest morning.
Poetry is like a panther: it delights the eye; but against any attempt to enslave it, it may wreak revenge.
Many a fair precept in poetry is like a seeming demonstration in the mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation.
Poetry is like math or chess or music—it requires a slightly freaky misshapen brain, and those kinds of brains don’t last.
Writing a poem is like getting a short-term contract from God. You get this one done and if you do a good job, then maybe another contract will come along.
Writing poetry is like writing history—talent, learning, and understanding in suitable proportion.
Poetry is like religion: sometimes the vision is immediate and almost frightening in its intensity; sometimes it is reached with difficulty, giving intimations only, and those confused and partial.
Writing a poem is like solving for X in an equation.
—Attributed to W.H. Auden by Robert Earl Hayden
Poetry is like being alive twice.
Quote of the Day
The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.
Quote of the Day
The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar’s art.
Agnosticism and the working writer
Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.
—Jorge Luis Borges, to the New York Times
Of all religious or philosophical convictions, agnosticism, at first glance, is the least interesting to defend. Like political moderates, agnostics get it from both sides, most of all from committed atheists, who tend to regard permanent agnosticism, in the words of Richard Dawkins, as “fence-sitting, intellectual cowardice.” And yet many of my heroes, from Montaigne to Robert Anton Wilson, have identified themselves with agnosticism as a way of life. (Wilson, in particular, called himself an agnostic mystic, which is what you get when an atheist takes a lot of psychedelic drugs.) And while a defense of the philosophical aspects of agnosticism is beyond the scope of this blog—for that, I can direct you to Thomas Huxley, or even to a recent posting by NPR’s Adam Frank, whose position is not far removed from my own—I think I can talk, very tentatively, about its pragmatic benefits, at least from a writer’s point of view.
I started thinking about this again after reading a blog post by Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin, who relates that she was recently talking about the mystical inclinations of W.B. Yeats when a self-proclaimed atheist piped up: “I always get sad for Yeats for his occult beliefs.” As Crispin discusses at length, such a statement is massively condescending, and also weirdly uninsightful. Say what you will about Yeats’s interest in occultism, but there’s no doubt that he found it spectacularly useful. It provided him with symbolic material and a means of engaging the unseen world that most poets are eventually called to explore. The result was a body of work of permanent importance, and one that wouldn’t exist, at least not in its present form, if his life had assumed a different shape. Was it irrational? Sure. But Wallace Stevens aside, strictly rational behavior rarely produces good poets.
I’ve probably said this before, but I’ll say it again: the life of any writer—and certainly that of a poet—is so difficult, so impractical on a cosmic scale, that there’s often a perverse kind of pragmatism in the details. A writer’s existence may look messy from the outside, but that mess is usually the result of an attempt to pick out what is useful from life and reject the rest, governed by one urgent question: Can I use this? If a writer didn’t take his tools wherever he found them, he wouldn’t survive, at least not as an artist. Which is why any kind of ideology, religious or otherwise, can be hard for a writer to maintain. Writers, especially novelists, tend to be dabblers, not so much out of dilettantism—although that can be a factor as well—as from an endless, obsessive gleaning, a rummaging in the world’s attic for useful material, in both art and life. And this process of feathering one’s nest tends to inform a writer’s work as well. What Christopher Hitchens says of Ian McEwan is true of many novelists:
I think that he did, at one stage in his life, dabble a bit in what’s loosely called “New Age,” but in the end it was the rigorous side that won out, and his novels are almost always patrolling some difficult frontier between the speculative and the unseen and the ways in which material reality reimposes itself.
Agnosticism is also useful for another reason, as Borges points out above: tolerance. A novelist needs to write with empathy about people very different from himself, and to vicariously live all kinds of lives, which is harder to do through the lens of an intractable philosophy. We read Dante and Tolstoy despite, not because of, their ideological convictions, and much of the fire of great art comes from the tension between those convictions and the artist’s reluctant understanding of the world. For a writer, dogma is, or should be, the enemy—including dogma about agnosticism itself. In the abstract, it can seem clinical, but in practice, it’s untidy and makeshift, like the rest of a writer’s life. It’s useful only when it exposes itself to a lot of influences and generates a lot of ideas, most unworkable, but some worthy of being pursued. Like democracy, it’s a compromise solution, the best of a bad lot. It doesn’t work all that well, but for a writer, at least for me, it comes closer to working than anything else.
Some day jobs of famous writers
Q. Do you consider a novelist’s life the best possible form of existence?
A. I should say yes if I did not know of a form of existence to be even better.
Q. And what is that?
A. Inheriting a fortune, putting your hands in your pockets, and for the rest of your life doing nothing.—Punch, December 1, 1894
As my quote of the day reminds us, nearly every writer needs a day job. Even if you aren’t a poet, where the chances of making a living solely through writing are pretty much zero, the number of novelists in the United States who can support themselves with prose fiction alone is very small—probably something like less than a thousand. The rest teach, apply for grants, write reviews, or, most often, do something else entirely. And there’s no shame in that. Abraham Cohen, author of Everyman’s Talmud, points out that even the great rabbis worked for a living:
The story of Hillel’s poverty has already been told. Of other Rabbis we learn that Akiba used to collect a bundle of wood daily and exist on the price he received for it; Joshua was a charcoal-burner and lived in a room the walls of which were begrimed by his manner of work; Meïr was a scribe; José b. Chalaptha was a worker in leather; Jochanan was a maker of sandals; Judah was a baker; and Abba Saul held a menial position as a kneader of dough, while he mentions that he had also been a grave-digger.
And you can make a similar list for contemporary writers very easily, even if you restrict it to jobs that were held after the authors in question were published and, in some cases, famous. T.S. Eliot, as I’ve noted before, was a banker. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Douglas Adams worked as a hotel security guard. Kurt Vonnegut managed a Saab dealership. Henry Miller was a personnel manager at a telegraph company. Isaac Asimov was a professor of biochemistry. And if you extend the list to what writers did before their first big break—Stephen King folded sheets in an industrial laundry, Joshua Ferris worked for an ad agency, Harlson Ellison did just about everything—it becomes nearly endless.
As for me, among various other things, I’ve written movie reviews, corporate training manuals, and online encyclopedia entries, some of which are still floating around on the Web, and spent several years occupying a desk at a New York investment firm, the less said about which the better. It’s been almost five years since I decided to go it alone, a choice I made because I saw no other way. (I have enormous respect for anyone who can write a novel while working a full-time job, because I know exactly how hard it is.) Whether I can continue to write for a living—whether, in short, I can become one of those thousand—remains to be seen. There’s certainly no guarantee. But, for lack of a better word, it’s definitely going to be interesting.
Alec Nevala-Lee 