Inky Pilgrimage

Mark Ford

• BuyThe Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie edited by Donald Blount
  South Carolina, 430 pp, £30.95, January 2006, ISBN 1 57003 248 3

‘I am convinced,’ wrote Henry Church to the poet who had just dedicated to him his longest poem, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, ‘that Mrs Stevens has had an important part to play in the poetry of Wallace Stevens.’ This was in 1943, by which time Mr and Mrs Stevens had been living together in marital discord for more than a third of a century. ‘Mrs Stevens and I went out for a walk yesterday afternoon,’ Stevens once quipped to a colleague at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company; ‘we walked to the end of Westerly Terrace, and she turned left and I turned right.’ The Stevens household was neither mirthful nor relaxing, according to the few who penetrated it, for visitors were not encouraged and houseguests out of the question. ‘We held off from each other,’ Holly, their only child, recalled in Souvenirs and Prophecies (1977), her edition of the young Stevens’s journals; ‘one might say that my father lived alone.’