Surreptitious Sonneteer

By Stefan Kanfer

SOUVENIRS AND PROPHECIES by HOLLY STEVENS 288 pages. Knopf. $12.50.

"He would tell me, with the deadpan rattle of a secret agent... what Wallace Stevens said ... before disappearing forever into the disguise of a Hartford Insurance executive." --John Updike, Museums and Women

Until now, John Updike's speculation was strictly fictive. No one knew what Stevens' private mind was like. All that could be concluded was that one of America's major poets showed the world a most prosaic exterior. Was the insurance man a mask? Was the poet a soul so sensitive it could only exist protected by money--that stuff which Stevens once called "a kind of poetry?"

Answers to many questions about this enigmatic bard lie in the pages of Souvenirs and Prophecies, a commingling of diaries, early writings and annotations by Stevens' daughter Holly. Here is the Harvard undergraduate, scribbling doggerel fit for a greeting card: "Long lines of coral light/ And evening star,/ One shade that leads the night/ On from afar."

Under pseudonyms the law student writes verse that gives credence to his comment 50 years later: "Some of one's early writings give one the creeps." Indeed they do, along with Stevens' revulsion for "niggers" and "little Jews." Yet these juvenile scrawls and racist stereotypes cannot long suppress the great soul that was attempting to find its voice. With lively scholarship and none of the protection normally afforded fathers by their biographical daughters, Holly Stevens traces the origins of the rhetorician. The "green, hilly, sunny-cloudy place" becomes the setting for the quatrain known to all English majors: "I placed a jar in Tennessee,/ And round it was, upon a hill./ It made the slovenly wilderness/ Surround that hill."

By 1906 the young clerk notes: "Engaged at the office all day on a sonnet -- surreptitiously." Two years later he writes his future wife: "It is such an odd thing that bright boys should be expect ed to be successful men . . . Brightness disillusions." So the bright boy becomes the plodder, then the secret craftsman who will not publish his first book of po etry until the age of 44. The material world gains in importance and the rare leisure hours are steeped in philosophy. The demise of Stevens' mother is a pre sentiment of Sunday Morning. "Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,/ With in whose burning bosom we devise/ Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly."

Holly Stevens is no Elliott Roosevelt, leaping in where Freud would fear to tread. But she does not shun legitimate speculation: Stevens' oblique, sensuous references and metaphors "bear deeply on a sexual relationship that may have some resemblance to that of my par ents, regardless of whatever literary connotations may be brought to it." Miss Stevens is at her best describing the physical and intellectual ventures of her father -- the failed newspaper reporter, the awkward courtier, the relentless reader and overheated connoisseur of painting and music. As for the public burgher, he too is shown in seedling form, as an honorable 19th century fig ure who believed that there was some thing disreputable about a poet who did not earn his own living. It is only upon examination of the spark gap of fact into idea, or material into metaphor that the author is helpless. "I cannot explain the leap from juvenile verses to Sunday Morning, " she concludes, "but we have seen many intimations of its coming." Those intimations are reward enough for the Stevens appreciator. By the final chapter the creative act alone remains, as always, unreachable: in Wallace Ste vens' memorable phrase, "the palm at the end of the mind . ' ' Stefan Kanfer

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