Peter Schjeldahl, one of my favorite New Yorker writers, gives us the highlights of a Wallace Stevens biography. It turns out that American poets were more lively in the old days, even those who worked as executives in the insurance industry:
At another party in Key West, in 1936, a swaggering Stevens loudly impugned the manhood of Ernest Hemingway. When Hemingway showed up, Stevens took a swing at him, and Hemingway knocked him down. Stevens got up and landed a solid punch to Hemingway’s jaw, which broke his hand in two places. Hemingway then battered him, but later cheerfully accepted his meek apology. They agreed to a cover story: Stevens had been injured falling down stairs.
I also learned that Stevens had a wife who was, by modern standards, spectacularly idle. She “left school in the ninth grade” and does not seem to have had any kind of job. She had one child but no responsibility for that child: “A full-time housekeeper tended to Holly.”
By modern standards, all upper middle class women in those days were “spectacularly idle”. The husband’s job as an insurance executive would have provided a relative standard of living (especially after taking housing costs into account) as good as a two wage earner family earns today (putting women into the workforce doubled the size of the workforce and accordingly halved the wages – this made corporations very happy). An upper middle class woman would have been expected to have household help who would cook, clean and take care of the kids. Women did volunteer work with charities, played bridge or golf, went shopping and had lunch with their friends – in other words what women who receive child support from well paid insurance executives do today, except that they no longer have to provide sexual services to their (former) husband, so it’s an even better deal.
This makes no sense:
“Both sides of the family were Pennsylvania Dutch….(He became obsessed with tracing his family genealogies…. and was “deeply disappointed,” Mariani writes, at being denied membership in the Holland Society of New York when, in the poet’s words, “some bastard from Danzig” popped up to spoil the requisite ancestral purity.)”
The Pennylvania Dutch are not Dutch at all but Deutsch (German), so an ancestor from Danzig makes perfect sense and I don’t know why someone from PA would have applied for membership in a society for descendant of NY Dutch settlers in the first place.
As for his wife, she was apparently beautiful – supposedly the model for the pre-1946 dime (before FDR). Men value beauty highly and are willing to overlook (at least at first) all sorts of flaws in those whose beauty they are smitten with. Somehow (despite all evidence to the) we are programmed to think that outer beauty somehow reflects inner beauty as well (or maybe we just want to get in outer beauty’s pants and don’t care about the rest).