The Wallace Stevens Journal The Wallace The Wallace Stevens Stevens and France Journal Vol. 32 No. 2 Fall 2008 Vol. Special Issue Stevens and France A Publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Volume 32 Number 2 Fall 2008 The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 32 Number 2 Fall 2008 Special Issue: Stevens and France Edited by Anne Luyat Contents Introduction —Anne Luyat 147 PHILOSO P HICAL AND THEORE T ICAL CONCERNS Why “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” Concludes The Auroras of Autumn —Charles Altieri 151 The Moment of a Bird’s Cry: A Note on Wallace Stevens and Simone Weil —Jacek Gutorow 171 Pure Poetry, Ideas of Order, and the Problem of Poetic Solitude —Benjamin Johnson 181 Notes Toward a Deleuzian Reading of Transport to Summer —Axel Nesme 206 THE FRENCH CONNEC T ION Two Parisians Qui Font Fi des Joliesses Banales? Wallace Stevens’ Friendship with the Vidal Family —Bart Eeckhout 223 THE MUSIC O F LANGUAGE The Whispering Troubadour and the Interior Paramour: Courtly Love in Wallace Stevens —Aurore Clavier 243 Poetics of Variation: Wallace Stevens’ and Paul Valéry’s Poems of the Sea —Lisa Goldfarb 256 “Chez moi”: Stevens at Home in the French Language —Juliette Utard 275 Aft ERWORD Wallace Stevens and France: The Twilight after the Lecture —Robert Rehder 283 Poems 291 Reviews 295 News and Comments 304 Cover Wallace Stevens in France Kathryn Jacobi The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio POE T RY EDI T OR AR T EDI T OR BOOK REVIEW EDI T OR Joseph Duemer Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing EDI TORIAL ASSIS T AN T S EDI TORIAL BOARD William H. Duryea Milton J. Bates George S. Lensing Maureen Kravec Jacqueline V. Brogan James Longenbach Faye A. Serio Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff TECHNICAL ASSIS T AN T Bart Eeckhout Joan Richardson Jeff Rhoades Alan Filreis Melita Schaum B. J. Leggett Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. PRESIDEN T ADVISORY BOARD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates Owen E. Brady Robert Buttel David M. Craig Joseph Duemer Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing Glen MacLeod The Wallace Stevens Journal is published biannually in the Spring and Fall by the Wal- lace Stevens Society, Inc. Administrative and editorial offices are located at Clarkson University, Box 5750, Potsdam, NY 13699. Phone: (315) 268-3987; Fax: (315) 268-3983; E-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.wallacestevens.com. The subscription rate for individuals, both domestic and foreign, is $30 for one year or $50 for two years and includes membership in the Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $40 per year domestic and $50 per year foreign. Back issues are available. Also available are volumes 1–25 on text-searchable CD-ROM. Manuscripts, subscriptions, and advertising should be addressed to the editor. Manu- scripts should be submitted in duplicate and in Works Cited format. Word-processed manuscripts will not be returned. Authors of accepted manuscripts should furnish an electronic file of the article as well as photocopies of all secondary quotations. The Wallace Stevens Journal is indexed or abstracted in Abstracts of English Studies, Hu- manities International Complete, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents, IBR (International Bibliography of Book Reviews), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature), MHRA Annual Bibliography, MLA International Bibliography, and Year’s Work in English Studies. This journal is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. © 2008 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 Introduction ANNE Luyat ALLACE STEVENS AND FRANCE is a collective attempt to better understand Wallace Stevens’ enigmatic statement in the Wclosing lines of “It Must Give Pleasure” at the end of “Notes To- ward a Supreme Fiction.” Composed in four months during wartime be- tween January 28 and June 1, 1942, the poem places the Sorbonne, which was then under the rule of the Nazi-controlled Vichy government, at the heart of human intellectual endeavor: They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational. .1 Closure of the poem is replaced by a prophecy that projects an indefinite future but a definite place—the Sorbonne—in which the philosophical concepts of the rational and the irrational will at last be gotten straight. The familiar American colloquialism seems caught in a jocular clash with the reputed elegance of language at the Sorbonne, but the linguistic imperti- nence brings Stevens into direct contact with the French university during its wartime crisis, when professors of foreign origin, many of whom were philosophers, had been dismissed from its faculty by the Vichy govern- ment. Stevens’ prophecy was fulfilled more rapidly than he could have ex- pected. The first person to indicate that “Notes Toward a Supreme Fic- tion” had given him pleasure—in a letter sent to Stevens’ friend Henry Church that Church had forwarded to Stevens in December 1942—was the exiled French philosopher and poet from the Sorbonne, Jean Wahl. Al- though Stevens could not have foreseen that Wahl would experience the hoped-for sense of pleasure in reading the poem, he was delighted. When he returned Jean Wahl’s letter to Henry Church, Stevens expressed his gratitude by using a French word that includes the notions of joy, happi- ness, and satisfaction to assure Church that Wahl’s understanding meant a great deal to him: “Jean Wahl’s letter (which I enclose) says one thing that I like more than anything else, and that is that it gave him pleasure to read the NOTES. Now, to give pleasure to an intelligent man, by this sort of THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 32.2 (FALL 2008): 147–149. 147 © 2008 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. thing, is as much as one can expect; and certainly I am most content, in the French sense of that word, to have pleased Jean Wahl” (L 429–30). Jean Wahl was not the only French academic in exile. When the Vi- chy government dismissed “persons of foreign origin” from French uni- versities in May 1941, more than a thousand French academics lost their teaching positions; among their number, one hundred twenty-seven were full professors. The Rockefeller Foundation, counseled by special advisor George Santayana, was able to help fifty of the French professors obtain immigration visas for the United States and to fund teaching positions for them in American universities. The Rockefeller Foundation also spon- sored the “New School,” also known as the “University in Exile” or the “University of Free France,” in New York, which opened its doors on Oc- tober 8, 1941, and where Jean Wahl gave courses in 1942. Stevens may have wished to pay a tribute in his poem to the exiled French academics, many of whom, like Alexandre Koyré and Jacques Maritain, were philoso- phers (Zolberg 925–29). When Stevens wrote “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” he expressed a long-held conviction that the primary purpose of creative art was to give pleasure. As early as February 28, 1909, in a letter that discussed poetry and painting, he proclaimed to his fiancée, Elsie Moll, his feelings about the aim of artistic endeavor: “A good painting should give pleasure, like any other work of art. I used to think that I was putting on airs to pre- tend to like a picture. But I am satisfied now that if it gives me pleasure, I am right in not caring about ‘scale,’ or ‘balance of tones’ or anything of the kind” (L 135). Stevens’ continuing ambition, which may seem strange in the somber wartime context, to write poetry that gives pleasure, may have been ex- plained, at least indirectly, by Stevens himself. He underlined in his copy of Henri Focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art a passage that explains that an artist often chooses, in a crucial historical context, to follow his own direction: “The spiritual instant which is our life does not necessarily co- incide with historical urgency. It may indeed contradict it” (79).2 The art historian Henri Focillon was the founding president of the University of Free France. The enigma of what Stevens felt to be the relationship among the Sor- bonne, France, philosophy, and the concept of pleasure as an element of the supreme fiction has not so far been fully explicated. Did he really feel more at home in the French language, as he sometimes suggested in let- ters? Did he believe that in France, the philosophic, aesthetic, and linguis- tic aspects of his poetry would produce a critical recognition of a deeper and more far reaching kind than he had so far received? For five decades, although he never set foot on French soil, he continued to engage himself in French culture and to perfect the bright edges of the poems he created by interlacing the French language with his own. Quite simply, as Stevens explained, he used French “for the pleasure that it gives” (L 792). The con- 148 THE wallace STEVENS JOURNAL tributors to “Wallace Stevens and France” recreate the spiritual instants that were inspired in Stevens’ poetry by the French language, painters, philosophers, and poets. The result is a many faceted mosaic that resem- bles Stevens’ constantly spinning leaf in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fic- tion,” “So that we look at it with pleasure, look. .” (350). University of Avignon France Notes 1 Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, 351. Further references to this source will be cited in the text with page number only in parentheses. 2 Stevens’ marked copy is in the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Mas- sachusetts.