The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens by Paul Mariani

Author:Paul Mariani [Mariani, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2016-04-04T21:00:00+00:00

14

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The Son Restores the Father: 1941–1945

It has a clear, a single, a solid form,

That of the son who bears upon his back

The father that he loves, and bears him from

The ruins of the past, out of nothing left,

Made noble by the honor he receives.

“TRADITION”

Who was he, really? A Pennsylvania Dutchman with roots going back to the original settlement of New Amsterdam, whose ancestors had moved to Philadelphia and then westward to Reading via farming communities like Feasterville? Having attended Harvard and written poetry with Santayana and then gone on to law school and become in time a vice president of one of the most successful insurance companies in America, how had those Pennsylvania Dutch roots shaped him? Now that the Zeller and Stevens siblings had been reduced to just two, he and Elizabeth, the pressure to find out who those figures in the old oval portraits on the walls of his house really were had become an imperative, a way of discovering what forces had shaped him before he too passed beyond the brackets of his own birth and death. In the summer of 1941 he began his genealogical research in earnest. Though he had once pooh-poohed his mother’s keen interest in becoming a Daughter of the American Revolution, he now wrote to the DAR to ascertain what had been discovered there. What also helped spur him on was Elsie’s interest in her own background, knowing that her ancestors included a number of prominent members at least as important as the Stevenses, that is, before economic hard times had quashed all that.

Only Elizabeth—whom he would lose soon enough—and Garrett’s and John’s widows remained from his own generation: ghostly reminders of an imaginary Booth Tarkington, Currier and Ives youth that loomed larger and larger in the dark solitude of his study. When he was a boy he had visited his father’s parents, Benjamin Stevens and Elizabeth Barcalow, in Feasterville. That was where his father had grown up, farming and fishing, so that his grandparents had long ago become “figures in an idyll” to him. It was their world, morphed by memory and the imagination, which now led him to exhume his long-dead ancestors and give them a living name.

How important it was for Elsie to prove her own worth. In the summer of 1931 she had attended a session at Vassar’s Institute in Euthenics (a program which strove to bring the techniques and disciplines of the arts, sciences, and social sciences to bear on the life experiences and relationships of women, especially on how to properly raise one’s children). She’d brought seven-year-old Holly with her, and Elsie—who had had to drop out of school in the ninth grade—would later tell visitors that she’d gone to Vassar, just as years later she would tell a professor from Smith that she had once won an award for composition (though that had been in the third grade).

Now, in the fall of 1941, seventeen-year-old Holly was more or less forced to enroll in Vassar.

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