Blue Order: Wallace Stevens's Jazz Experiments
In 1900, a degree from Harvard in hand, Wallace Stevens lived in Lower Manhattan and worked the graveyard shift at the New York Tribune. He enrolled in New York Law School in 1901, graduated in 1903, joined the New York bar in 1904, and traded law for the insurance business in 1908 (Kermode and Richard-son 960-61). Despite his formal education and employment, Stevens lived like a bohemian during these years. He attended and wrote plays, immersed himself in politics, and drank a good deal. In the 1910s, he established friendships with modernist artists and critics including William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, and Walter Conrad Arensberg. These and other individuals first exposed Stevens to cubism and surrealism, movements which Glen MacLeod claims profoundly impacted Stevens's development as a poet (58).1 Thus began one of twentieth-century literature's double lives: Wallace Stevens -- insurance company man and inventive modernist poet. Ironically, when he was in his twenties, Stevens wrote little of anything and published no poetry. He did, however, develop an affinity for one of the early twentieth century's most popular musical styles. According to Linda DuRose, after leaving Harvard ''the young Stevens ..... was struck by the playful tempos and irregular rhythms of a new style of music played by African Americans'' (7). DuRose refers to ragtime, the immediate predecessor of jazz, which is perhaps the quintessential American (and modernist) art form. Living and working in New York City provided Stevens with several opportunities to listen to ragtime and early jazz, and to establish connections with musicians and other artists. Indeed, both ragtime and jazz would have a definite effect on Stevens's poetry.
It must be said, though, that associating Stevens and his work with ragtime, jazz, or any facet of African American culture presents certain problems. Even though his first collection, Harmonium, appeared in 1923 -- the same year as Jean Toomer's Cane unofficially initiated the Harlem Renaissance -- little evidence exists that Stevens felt any interest in or camaraderie with young African American artists. C. Barry Chabot wonders how Stevens could remain detached from authors and socio-aesthetic movements that resided in such close proximity to him (142).Rachel Blau DuPlessis echoes Chabot's sentiment, noting that in his personal and public writings Stevens rarely contemplated contemporary artistic, social, and political movements involving African Americans (195 n. 12). Nevertheless, references to race and jazz occur in Stevens's poetry. A consideration of Stevens's uses of African American music affords a unique opportunity to reassess his work.
Stevens's name does not often arise during discussions about jazz poetry. Given his personal taste in music, this seems understandable. He was not a professionally-trained musician, but Stevens sang and played piano, harmonium, and guitar. Stevens also cultivated a refined musical ear. He admired classical European com-posers, often attending recitals and symphonies and, according to Michael Hertz, sometimes altering his business itineraries to do so (231).2 He also accumulated a music library of works by notable nineteenth-century composers, supplemented by only a few twentieth-century musicians (Stegman 79 - 80). Avant-garde music and especially jazz are conspicuously absent from Stevens's record collection. We can safely assume that Stevens knew of jazz, especially if, as DuRose mentions, he listened to ragtime.
Stevens's concertgoing schedule and record collection help explain jazz's understated, yet vital, presence in his poetry. He listened to classical music, but acknowledged the import of ragtime without ever overtly saying so; indeed, it is not difficult to imagine Stevens listening to Scott Joplin or W. C. Handy in social settings, even if he owned none of their records and attended none of their concerts. His predilection for classical music aside, Stevens exhibited what Barbara Holmes calls ''an aesthetic based at once on mobility, changefulness, and apposition,'' and ''an improvisatory and generally varying attitude'' (16). Stevens's approach to poetry allowed him to incorporate elements of ragtime and jazz. By and large, in the 1920s jazz was considered a ''low'' style of music that connoted decadence and depravity; not until the advent of bebop in the middle of the twentieth century was it considered a serious (''high'') art form, as classical music once was. During the modernist era, some composers defended jazz against spurious charges, including James Weldon Johnson and Antonin Dvorak. Similarly, Igor Stravinsky and George Gershwin caused outrage when they incorporated jazz elements in their symphonic works.3 Improvisation, variation, and repetition -- all hall-marks of jazz -- occupy central positions in Stevens's musical taste and are keys to understanding his jazz experiments.
Recent criticism has emphasized the influence of African American music and culture on Stevens's work, but stops short of naming him a jazz poet. Michael Soto, for instance, counts Stevens among the modernist authors who worked in a jazz idiom, alongside contemporaries ranging from Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright (176).He also acknowledges the difficulty faced by Stevens and other modernists in treating jazz music, culture, and performers without making dubious assumptions. Jazz, Soto claims, ''provides U.S. writers with an illustration of what is assumed to be a racial connection between American identity and American cultural expression'' (167). Stevens's oblique references to and employment of jazz can be read as establishing a genuinely American type of poetic expression, as Dvorak wanted to do with slave spirituals and American music (Horowitz B18). But what of the racial implications of such an establishment?
DuPlessis explores a similar question, finding Stevens's use of black cultural forms ambivalent at best. In letters, Stevens both identified himself with and used racial epithets against African Americans; in poems such as ''Two Figures in Dense Violet Night,'' Stevens created vivid, earthy, and mystical African American characters that provide poetic inspiration, even as his poetry contains problematic instances of racial language (DuPlessis 3, 119). Stevens, like several of his con-temporaries, proved incapable of establishing a poetic jazz discourse that did not rely somewhat on primitivist, animalistic, or even racist vocabulary.4 Nevertheless, readers cannot ignore his subtle adaptations of African American music. We are thus left with a vexing situation when analyzing Stevens's jazz experiments: On the one hand, readers can hear jazz in his poetry; on the other, racial insensitivity and an ostensible favoring of classical music also crop up consistently. How, then, can we take seriously the presence of jazz in Stevens? What does this paradox do to our conception of Stevens as a ''high'' modernist poet?
Answers to these questions may be found through a cursory examination of Stevens's conception of a ''modern'' poet. When he won the 1951 National Book Award for The Auroras of Autumn (1950), Stevens announced that Sir Walter Scott was no longer relevant to the mid-twentieth century. Scott's work resembles ''the scenery of a play that has come to an end. ..... In short, the world of Sir Walter Scott no longer exists. It means nothing to compare a modern poet with the poet of a century ago. It is not a question of comparative goodness'' (Collected Poetry and Prose 835).5 While the speech seemingly endorses modernism, Stevens deflates modernism's importance shortly thereafter. He defines a ''modern poet'' as ''nothing more than a poet of the present time,'' and argues that a modern poet must ''find, by means of his own thought and feeling, what seems to be to him the poetry of his time as differentiated from the poetry of the time of Sir Walter Scott, or the poetry of any other time, and to state it in a manner that effectively discloses it to his readers'' (CPP 835). Stevens acknowledges modern poets, and yet delineates their function in a simple manner. He also succinctly defines the task of modern poets in ''Mozart,1935'':''Poet,be seated at the piano. / Play the present'' (CPP 107). He does so again in ''Of Modern Poetry,'' referring to the poet as ''A metaphysician in the dark, twanging / An instrument, twanging a wiry string'' (CPP 219). Both of these passages contain musical references that allude to both classical and jazz, and perhaps even the blues (''the piano,'' ''twanging a wiry string'').
The exclusions from Stevens's definition of ''modern poetry'' -- fragmentation, disillusionment, and jazz, among other things -- prove just as telling as his inclusions. Stevens's comments and elisions demonstrate his distance from traditional modernist devices, and that he fashioned himself peripheral to modernism as an overall movement. Stevens remained content to write and publish poetry without joining political parties or aesthetic movements (Chabot 193). He conferred in person with and wrote letters to radical modernists, he knew of and employed modernist artistic practices, but Lee Margaret Jenkins points out that Stevens himself was never an avant-garde in terms of politics or art (18). He borrowed, too, from jazz musicians, just as he did from the painters he met through the Arensberg Circle. Stevens's simultaneous engagement with and distance from modernist practices helps explain why African American music in his work remains largely unnoticed. Hence the phrase ''jazz experiments,'' as if Stevens were unsure of how to approach jazz poetically.
The aloof Stevens produced poetry without an obvious larger context. Generally, when his poems utilize jazz techniques, they do so surreptitiously; when his poems tackle larger issues, they do so abstractly. As such, he cultivated an indirect relationship with African Americans and with the poetic use of African American materials. The presence of jazz techniques in Stevens's work also speaks to the matter of cultural ownership. Stevens was not the first or only white author to employ African American music, or to rely on primitivist discourse. Critical interpretations of Stevens's references to race run from DuRose's claim that his poems show him ''applying blackface'' in the guise of a minstrel (8), to Michael North's assessment that Stevens performed ''rebellion through racial ventriloquism'' (9). These terms and their connotations are borne out in several poems. Moreover, poems in which Stevens uses racial slurs could be criticized in much harsher terms. It is too simple, though, to dismiss Stevens as a minstrel, a puppeteer, or a racist. Racial ambiguities and poor word choice should not be ignored, but more often than not, Stevens pays homage to black music when he rags or jazzes his lines.6
Stevens's partial alignment with modernism allowed him to adopt an improvisatory stance, commingling contradictory musical elements in his poetry to create something new and different. Throughout his poetic career, Stevens relied on linguistic repetitions, thematic variations, improvisational flourishes, allusions, and wording that indicate jazz's presence, even if it is not explicitly named. Furthermore, Stevens's jazz experiments suggest -- in modernist fashion -- an alternative ordering principle, a means by which people can make sense of the tumultuous world. I call Stevens's principle a ''blue order,'' with a nod to the African American musical techniques with which he experiments. Jazz, concurrently flaunted and obscured, functions as a philosophical (rather than a social or a political) ordering principle, meaning that music can fundamentally change how people engage with ''reality.'' When Stevens employs repetition, variation, and other techniques, he indicates jazz's ability to provide listeners with a means to understand their existence. In the following discussion, I will explore seven poems that demonstrate Stevens's unique jazz poetry. Two are taken from Harmonium, three come from Ideas of Order, and the two final examples are little-known poems, ''Banjo Boomer'' and ''The Sick Man.'' While these are not the only jazz poems in Stevens's canon, I choose to discuss them because they seem to best demonstrate jazz's pervasiveness in his poetry as a whole.
In Harmonium, Stevens plays with musical ideas and themes that would recur in his work. His musical poetry, which includes poems that sound musical and poems that concern music, constitute a series of variations on a theme, lending his poetic output a jazz shape. The expanded editions of Harmonium (1931 and 1936) underscore the prevalence of repetition and variation, as do his rejected suggestions that Harmonium be called The Grand Poem: Preliminary Minutiae and that his Collected Poems be called The Whole of ''Harmonium'' (Blessing 3). Even the title suggests his overarching poetic and musical intentions. As Anca Rosu writes, Stevens's title carries a dual meaning, ''through its reference, on the one hand, and through its sound, on the other, and the difficulty is that the two are inextricable'' (ix).