After graduating from Harvard, Wallace Stevens moved to New York City to begin his writing career as a journalist before attending New York Law School, from which he graduated in 1903. He married Elsie Viola Kachel in 1909, and they lived in New York sporadically over the course of the subsequent two decades. The letter is written in Stevens’ characteristically naturalistic, lush, and mystical style. His interest, here, in the sacrosanct and the sublime prefigures the themes that much of his poetry would later explore. His notion of the “Supreme Fiction”—a narrative, or set of narratives, which would fictively replace God in the modern imagination—is reflected in this letter’s obsession with the spiritual: “Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame./ Take the moral law and make a nave of it / And from the nave build haunted heaven” (from “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”).
August 26. 1912.
New York
My dear Bo-Bo,
I walked from Van Cortlandt Park (the Broadway end of the Subway) to Greenwich, Connecticut—say, by my route, and judging from the time it took, roughly, thirty miles. It makes me feel proud of myself. This morning I am a little stiff here and there, because I am not in the best possible condition, but, on the whole, I came through it very well. I got to Greenwich at about half-past seven, with the rising of the moon. Walking through the dark, to a strange place, with that mystical lantern in the trees, I could hear the early bells, calling for vesper-services. All day long, I had been reading scrawls on rocks in red paint: “Jesus Saves”; “Prepare to meet thy God”….All told, you see, it was a devil of a solemn hour. And just then, there came along two creaking stages full of men, returning from a pic-nic, with their arms etc. all intertwined. It was a chorus of barber-shop harmonies, horses’ hoofs on the road, beating harness, crunching wheels, creaking stages…I flitted along-side unseen, for a long time, like a moth…I had my shirt turned back and my chemisette flung back, precisely like that corsair of hearts, le grand Byron, and I breathed! Of course, when I reached town, and its sorrows, and civilities, I hid my exhilaration, put a noose around my neck, put on my coat and pattered, as neatly as anyone, along the route to the station. —In New-York, I bought a piece of meat (wow-ow-oo-oo-ruh-r-r-r!) and a Belinda perfecto and limped down the Avenue, looking like a Spanish gentleman, and blowing great rings of smoke, lighted home—still by that heavenly flame.
With love,
Wallace
From Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Print. pp. 177-178.
FURTHER READING
Read an article at The New Republic about Stevens’ “Supreme Fiction.”
Explore Stevens’ religious convictions.
Read about Stevens’ relationship with religion and New York at the NYRB.