Even in his mid-50s, Wallace Stevens, standing at six-foot, two inches and weighing a solid 225 pounds, presented a formidable physical threat. But he made a mistake when — for no more reason than being a belligerent drunk who believed his opponent’s books were overrated — he took a swing at Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway enjoyed boxing and used to spar with stevedores. Stevens landed a punch or two, but he was soon on the floor with a bruised face and a broken hand, unable to get up.
A week later, afraid of his wife or his employer finding out he’d initiated a drunken brawl, Stevens apologized to Hemingway, who graciously agreed to keep the matter between them.
As the years passed, Stevens, who was not one to change a professional opinion for any personal feelings, even gratitude, came to appreciate Hemingway’s work, and he praised the novelist’s writing highly in a private letter to a friend.
That pattern — skepticism and rebellion, reflection, and finally a complete embrace — also seems to describe Stevens’ relationship with God.
Stevens, who died in 1955, is not as well-known as, say, Robert Frost — who he also regretted drunkenly insulting (but refrained from punching). Yet he is widely considered one of America’s most important modern poets.
College literature anthologies typically include some of his evocative verse, such as “Anecdote of the Jar” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” But his poem “Sunday Morning,” which begins with a woman presumably forsaking church services to linger over late morning coffee and oranges, more clearly conveys his overriding preoccupation with locating spirituality solely in the physical world and the human imagination.
Nonetheless, at the age of 75, while suffering with the stomach cancer that would soon kill him, Stevens was baptized and died a Catholic, according to Father Arthur Hanley, chaplain of Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut.
Stevens’ conversion may have been a calculated decision, a hedge against the eternal damnation he really didn’t believe in. He once said that he should “make up my mind about God … before it is too late, or at least before he makes up his mind about me.”
A staunch Republican and a lawyer, Stevens was a practical man. In his 70s, he turned down a professorship at Harvard because he wanted to keep working at his job as an insurance executive.
Only a “practical” man would, upon seeing his sister for the first time in 25 years, greet her by commenting on her weight gain: “My God, Elizabeth, you’ve put it on!”
“Unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart,” his boss once said.
It is also possible that Stevens, who repeatedly stated his belief that poetry was superior to philosophy, finally came to the same conclusion as the 11th century theologian Saint Anselm. Stevens believed that poetry and the power of human imagination could replace religion, but Anselm argued that any imaginary conception of God would necessarily prove false, leading to the conclusion that God truly exists. “God is that than which a greater cannot be conceived,” the saint wrote. To be truly great, the saint reasoned, necessarily implies existence.
For a thousand years, thinkers have debated the validity of Anselm’s thinking, but some have noted that he was less interested in philosophical argument than prayer, and that his conclusion brought him peace after a long and debilitating inner struggle.
Stevens, too, struggled. He lived not a tragic life but one often filled with longing, loneliness and melancholy. As a young man, for one example, he fell in love with a beautiful woman — she is believed to be the model for the image on the Mercury dime — and their romance resulted in both an irreparable break between Stevens and his parents, and a long but unfulfilling marriage.
Paul Mariani, Stevens’ biographer, writes that Stevens would often visit Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York just to sit quietly in a pew, and that he always seemed to dwell on theological issues after a couple of Scotches. Stevens’ mood lifted in the last weeks of his life after his baptism, Mariani wrote. He was buried with a Saint Christopher medal.
Perhaps a reason Stevens finally decided to die a Catholic, after a lifetime of struggling with religion, has less to do with philosophy or a fear of damnation than with a priest who, at a crucial time, employed an ancient and proven means of evangelization.
The poet did not need “an awful lot of urging on my part,” Father Hanley said, “except to be nice to him.”
Carl Peters is managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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