WALLACE STEVENS
93
the douanier Rousseau, who treats the "green vine angering for life"
with such bland vitality. Neither Stevens nor Rousseau can trans–
cendentalize "that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala" be–
yond an affirmation of image that is at times almost sinister. The colors
are as brutal as they are sonorous. The sensuous density is barbarous–
but ordered into austere statement.
. The cast of primitivism in the imagery is odd: in the early poems
one moved in the atmosphere of the cruise ship. There was a resort
primitivism, perhaps as if
Fortune
were reporting upon the Waste
Land. One can thus distinguish levels of the primitive in Stevens: a
"social" one and one of temperament. Gorham Munson spoke of
Stevens' "flair for bright savagery," and the voluptuousness of his
language used to be called exotic. It is more important to remark the
polarities in his imagery, swinging as it does between-the basic slate
and red weather, dilettantism and instinct. Stevens has remarked that
feeling accumulates readily "in the abnormal ranges of sensibility."
The extraordinary fierceness of Stevens' response to the cockerel's
shriek and hen's shudder, or to our bourgeois cuisine of human heads
"brought in on leaves, crowned with the first, cold buds," suggests
that his fictions course in his blood.
VI
Steven<;' vitality is not of the blood only, of the animal spirit. For
a poet living amid a "hacked-up world of tools" he carries himself
with a gaiety that will break through his soberest causeries,
in
indis–
creet language, at least, or else in a laughter of the mind. He may
have mistaken his talent. His abundance of spirit finds its pitch
within the range of high comedy, a range particularly Stevens' own.
His ideas of order amid the Waste Land may be misconceived; but
Stevens
is
endowed, as Eliot with his chill humor is not, with the
Meredithian comic spirit, a mocking awareness of our absurdities
and our pretense. He might even, with his malice against our Trimal–
chios, have become the Petronius of the Waste Land. Not by the
ironic- a metaphysical tone- but by the comic does Stevens com–
ment pertinently upon our desolation; things may not be as he says
they are on his blue guitar, but his less grave addresses to all acad–
emies of fine ideas are welcome. Within this range he moves with
entire competence; here he lives "as and where we live." Neither
by blood nor by fiction can he achieve total belief, but by transcen–
dental comedy-"a laughter, an agreement, by surprise"-he affirms
