“Sailing with Wallace Stevens”

 By Massimo Bacigalupo. Reprinted from The Wallace Stevens Journal,​ Volume 44, Number 2, Fall 2020.

Beginnings

In the late sixties Nick Piombino gave me the paperback Poems by Wallace Stevens edited by Samuel French Morse.It had a dedication, perhaps from a girlfriend:“December 13, 1963 – To Nicky ‘… the search / And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.’ Forever, ***.” A quotation, perhaps not immediately identifiable without the Concordance. Really, my first encounter, though I had come across Stevens in The Faber Book of Modern Verse and other anthologies. That summer, in Rapallo, I took Nick and his then girlfriend out for a sail on the Vagabonda II. A sultry afternoon. Nick, who was to become one of the “language” set, wrote a poem about the event, aptly titled “Without Wind.” But I could have found the best account in “Sailing After Lunch,” included in Morse’s selection: “the gorgeous wheel,”“the slight transcendence.” Just a few years earlier we had taken out on the Vagabonda a convalescing Ezra Pound (above), “a blown husk,” yet for all that enjoying the summer breeze and listening intently (I have a photo) to something my father Bubi (his doctor) was explaining.

Train

Here I am much later on a train to a Hemingway conference in Venice. I am now reading Morse’s selection. I’m having some trouble parsing it, I’m used to Pound’s excitement, Williams’s straightforwardness, Eliot’s foxtrot. All those pentameters put me to sleep. “Too penty” [i.e., too much pentameter]. EP had written in the margin of The Waste Land drafts. Little do I know that I will be worming through all those lines and putting them into quasi-Italian. Morse’s anthology is still on my bookshelf, inscription and all. It is held together by an envelope that reads “Ambasciata d’Italia, London.” Anna, a favorite late cousin, had a job there, and my name and address are on the envelope in her handwriting.

Warming Up

In New York, at Columbia, in 1973, I produced a color movie called Warming Up. I prefaced the program notes with the line from Notes toward a Supreme Fiction: “Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.” The point was something like: One looks at the world with wonder, is pierced by meaning, rhythms, coincidences. Warming Up was, more or less, a 40-minute travelogue with this subtext. Jonas Mekas, who featured it at the old Anthology Film Archives in Lafayette Street, on April 20, my birthday, had nothing to say about it in his Village Voice column. Yet the date signaled one strange relation. A Joycean gift.

The Old Home

Visiting with my mother in the early 1970s the house where she grew up in Elizabeth, Pa., I had with me that compact trove, The Mentor Book of Major American Poets. At bedtime I remember reading “Sunday Morning” to mother and my aunt Enice. 

So improbable, therefore appropriate. Showing off. Had I known it, I should have read: “It is an illusion that we were ever alive, lived in the houses of mothers.” Mother had been an English major at Pitt before becoming a pediatrician. Recently, writing about Wordsworth, I discovered I was using her college edition, signed “Freda M. Natali, Elizabeth, Pa. 2/20/28.” (She later changed or corrected her name to Frieda.) Unfortunately she did not live to see my first volume of Stevens in print. One of my favorites there is “Two Letters”: “As if we were all seated together again  / And one of us spoke . . . / And the light, though little, was enough.”

 Jarrell 

I was struck with Jarrell’s enthusiasm about the “Rock” poems, so when Giovanni Raboni, a big figure in Italian poetry, asked me to translate Stevens, I suggested the late poems, 1950-1955, and collected them with the title Il mondo come meditazione (still in print).When I received the proofs, from—Palermo, I had a brain storm and made many many changes for the sake of the sound, and celebrated with laurel from the garden. I loved those poems, Santayana in Rome, “the head of the world.”

Poggioli

“‘Doing’ churches in Rome every morning, as if I were an American tourist,” wrote Renato Poggioli to Stevens. When copies of his edition, Mattino domenicale, arrived in Hartford in 1954, the “colored boy” in the office, Stevens wrote, was in “quite a flutter” about the Italian stamps. Stevens also was very pleased--his first book in another language, by a respected Harvard scholar and translator. Poggioli’s daughter Silvia, of the hoarse voice, has been an asset on NPR. (Renato died at an early age in a car accident.)

Montale

Eugenio Montale reviewed Poggioli’s Mattino domenicale for the Corriere della Sera. He spoke of “absolute pantheism” and “a cross of Picasso and Rilke,” and quoted the opening lines of “Sunday Morning.” “The reader will continue on his own,” he concluded, “if he has the courage.”

Holly

Holly Stevens told me she visited Montale in Milano and was entertained affably by the Nobel laureate to be. I met Holly in New Haven at a dinner at the Raineys. Susan Howe and Emily Wallace were also there. Holly was good company, somewhat raucous as I remember. “I’m glad my son is into electric appliances. He comes and fixes my wiring when necessary.”

Poets’ Daughters

I told Aeronwy Thomas, “Hey, you are the third poet’s daughter I meet, after Holly and Ezra’s Mary. Let’s send Mary a postcard.” And Aeronwy wrote, perhaps in Italian, which she knew well, having been raised in a Sicilian convent school: “Dear Mary, being a famous poet’s daughter, this is something I would not wish upon my worst enemy.” 

The Sounds of the Guitar

In my translation of “The Rock” I inadvertently made Stevens sound hopeful: “I suoni della chitarra erano e non erano”—they “were and were not”. Holly, who knew some Italian, pointed out my mistake. So later editions of Il mondo read more somberly: “I suoni della chitarra non erano e non sono.” They “were not and are not.” Disconsolate, though Stevens, as he always does, turns the tables later on—and everything blooms. Believe it or not. My old Irish friend Mary Kelleher also pointed out that the Cliffs of Moher were not “rupi,” hills, but “scogliere.” I was to see those cliffs later.

Berryman

Berryman wondered why Stevens “does not wound.” But what could be more moving than his return to life in so many poems? Ah, St. Armorer’s Church, “Matisse at Vence and a great deal more than that.”

Bettina 

A fine old Belgian lady, an artist, once Gerhart Münch’s girlfriend. I read her some lines of the Parnassian “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” (which according to silly Wikipedia is all about an orgasm—how many obstacles must one cross when one tries to say a few sensible things to students?). The stillness of summer. Was the comment in my edition, that it somewhat resembles the variations in Ravel’s “Bolero,” more helpful? I hope so. Later in the afternoon, I took Bettina for a walk behind our cottage in San Lorenzo della Costa, overlooking Santa Margherita Ligure and the Mediterranean. She took off her shoes. “I like to walk barefoot, to feel the grass,” she said.

Vincentine

I have a niece called Catherine. We went sailing on the Vagabonda III, a twin of her predecessor, which was wrecked in a storm in 1976. By then I had a paperback of Holly’s The Palm at the End of the Mind. While we tacked, sprightly red-haired Catherine of Lynn read for me from that book. She is not much into poetry, so I was intrigued by her offhand comments on various obscure passages: “This is just like my husband” (a handsome scamp—they later divorced). I quoted some of her dicta in an article on Stevens for the journal Il Verri, where I changed her name to Vincentine (get it?).  Paperbacks don’t last and at one point several pages dropped out and were blown into the sea.  Catherine dove at once, and recovered them.  At least that’s what I say in my article.  Now I don’t remember if it really happened, but I have a photo of the two of us against the white sail. A vignette Stevens would have liked.

The Collected Poems Rescued

Fast forward 30 years: Catherine brings me from the US a copy of the hardback Collected Poems. “Our school librarian was discarding it!” (She teaches English as a second language.) She also rescued Tindall’s pamphlet. What a fine introduction. I remember Tindall speaking of Finnegans Wake to a student meeting at Columbia, with a big mug of lager at his side. Jolly fellow. Stevens’s own bonhomie. “Burgher”—a difficult word to translate. 

Poets on Stevens

Over the years I got several friends to write poems for The Wallace Stevens Journal, which I would translate into English and submit. One was by Carlo Vita. Called “An Old Man,” it was about the wonder of waking up in old age to another morning—and life. It appeared in Fall 2009. Vita, whom friends called Popi, died in 2019, aged 94. He had joked in another poem: “Having luckily escaped from obscure intricacies, I ask a thousand excuses of Wallace, master of the easy-difficult, if I choose Wisława, mistress of levity.”

Mary

Ah yes, there also appeared in the Journal a poem by Mary Rudge de Rachewiltz, whose 95th birthday we celebrated this year. Written originally in English, titled “And Juda becomes New Haven,” it is somewhat mysterious. I can make out references to Ötzi (you know who that is) and possibly to Harold (not Leopold) Bloom hopelessly in love with a German lady scholar. I wonder in what issue it appeared.

Elena 

Elena Salibra (1949-2014) also submitted a poem about “Reading Stevens” in my translation, but it was rejected. It appears in her last collection. A variation on “Questions and Remarks,” it’s about her granddaughter and namesake Elena who asks her about the sun, just as “Peter the voyant” asked Holly. I had enlisted Salibra as a reader of the translations I was preparing for the Italian Complete Poems which appeared in 2015, and sent her this poem with others of the same series. Stevens had mailed the series to Princess Marguerite Caetani for publication in Botteghe Oscure. 

Stevens and the Princess

Some years ago I made my way into the Caetani archive and found Stevens’s letters to Marguerite. At one point he says he has read her New Yorker profile and regrets having written her earlier without knowing that she was "something of a personage," but hopes she won’t mind. "In view of what you say of Commerce and of what I can see of Botteghe Oscure with my own eyes, just to be yourself is reason enough to be happy." Several princesses Caetani created the celebrated natural park of Ninfa, south of Rome. Stevens was interested in gardens. Botteghe Oscure, the name resonates. It’s the Roman avenue where Palazzo Caetani is situated, back to back with Palazzo Mattei, said to be the Roman palace in James’s Portrait of a Lady—now full of books by and about Stevens, being the main library for American Studies in Italy.

Peter the Voyant

Speaking of coincidences, Peter was born in April 1947, six days after me. Sizzo de Rachewiltz, Ezra’s grandson, was born April 8. I’ve seen Sizzo on and off since we were children. With Peter I corresponded briefly. Not long ago apparently Peter had agreed to help buy the Stevens Hartford home to be turned into a museum. But when he was taken into the house he remembered the oppressive atmosphere created by his grandparents and changed his mind about contributing.  The difficulties of life and poetry and family. It’s a sad story, but revealing and not without its humorous side. One can’t get rid of the good and the bad—one goes with the other. Ezra’s daughter and grandchildren must also have learned this long ago. Mary likes to quote her father: “If love be not in the house, there is nothing.” We are lucky to have the benefit of so much sorrow, and not the pain.

Sudden Warmth

In the Chronology I wrote for Tutte le poesie (2015) I placed at the end a quotation from Stevens’s letters to Elsie: “I will sing for you, with the first bird you hear, and what he sings will be my song. I shall not be the mortal thing you think me, but that sudden warmth in your own heart.” This was to be the subject of “The World as Meditation.” And the early bird the old man hears as it were for the last (and first) time on the final page of The Collected Poems: “At the earliest ending of winter . . .”

An Invitation

This morning I wake up with a tune by Hugo Wolf in my ear: “Mein Liebchen hat zu Tische mich geladen.” Or, “My sweetheart has invited me to dinner.” With the naughty innuendo at the close. Actually, I have only been invited to nearby Camogli for an early swim. Then I remember a Stevens couplet: “Natives of poverty, children of malheur, / The gaiety of language is our seigneur.” However bleak our prospects in the long run, language (re)creates and celebrates experience.

Works Cited

Bacigalupo, Massimo. “’A New Girl in a New Season’: Stevens, Poggioli, and the Making of Mattino domenicale.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 25, no. 2, Fall 2001, pp. 254-70.

—. “Wallace Stevens trent’anni dopo.” Il Verri 8.8 (1988): 21-34.

Berryman, John. His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968.

de Rachewiltz, Mary. “And Juda Becomes New Haven or Else Must.” For the Wrong Reason: Poems. Edgewise, 2002, p. 17.

Montale, Eugenio. “Letture.” Il secondo mestiere. Prose 1920-1979. Ed. Giorgio Zampa. Milan, Mondadori, 1996, pp. 1647-50. 

Roberts, Michael and Donald Hall (eds.).  The Faber Book of Modern Verse. London: Faber, 1965.

Salibra, Elena. “Leggendo Stevens.” Nordiche. Azzare (VA): Stampa, 2014, p. 71.

Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 2000.

—. The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie. Ed. J. Donald Blount. Columbia. S.C.: University of South California Press, 2006.

—. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966.

—. Il mondo come meditazione. Ultime poesie 1950-1955. Palermo: Acquario; Parma: Guanda, 1986. Rev. ed. Il mondo come meditazione. Parma: Guanda,1998.

—. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.

—. The Palm at the End of the mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1971.

—. Poems by Wallace Stevens. Ed. Samuel French Morse. New York: Vintage Books, 1959.

—. Mattino domenicale ed altre poesie. Ed. Renato Poggioli. Turin: Einaudi, 1954.

—. Tutte le poesie. Ed. Massimo Bacigalupo. Milan: Mondadori, 2015.

Tindall, William York. Wallace Stevens. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961.

Vita, Carlo. “An Old Man.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vo. 33, no. 2, Fall 2009, p. 260.

—. “Parole da scegliere.” Soglie. Rivista quadrimestrale di poesia e critica letteraria 17.3 (2015): 32. https://www.carlovita.it/pubblicazioni-9/

Williams, Oscar and Edwin Honig. The Mentor Book of Major American Poets. New York: Mentor Books, 1962. 

Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems of William Wordsworth. Ed. Solomon Francis Gingerich. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923.