`Passionate Men'

That one man has been the subject of the two finest biographies in the language is evidence of his excellence as a writer and human being. It also suggests he inspires excellence in others. I suppose worthless biographies of Samuel Johnson have been written, but they remain unknown and unread by me. James Boswell and W. Jackson Bate give the lie to the notion that biography is a strictly parasitic art. Readers with little knowledge of Johnson or his work can enjoy and learn from The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and Samuel Johnson (1977) as works of literary art. Bate (1918-1999) also wrote indispensable lives of Keats and Coleridge. Like Johnson, he possessed a finely calibrated moral compass, which is why the following story is so disappointing. Peter Breslau, in Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, relates an anecdote told by Harry Levin, the Harvard professor, pioneering Joyce scholar and author of The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (1958):

"Stevens was very conscientious about coming up for the Visiting Committee meeting [at Harvard] though in the questioning of the department he never said anything. He was one of the appointed members; we always had some writers and scholars. On one occasion, after dinner and after the speeches and questions at the Harvard Club, we adjourned to the rathskeller. A relatively small group, two or three people in the department and Stevens. He was really very glad to have a stiff drink or two. I have the impression that because of his shyness, he sometimes relied on this to break the ice. At any rate, he then began to talk, and he told us one or two smoking-car stories. They wouldn’t be considered anything today, but in those days they might have been considered slightly risqué. My colleague Walter Jackson Bate was there. He’d always had a very good sense of humor, but with each joke he grew grimmer. Stevens finally said, `I’m afraid I’m not amusing you, Mr Bate.’ And Bate, who was then very much the enfant terrible of the department, said, `You’ll have to be funnier than that to make me laugh, Stevens!’ Poor Stevens was quite humiliated, got very red, and stopped talking."

Context here is minimal. Was Bate under the influence? Was this typically priggish behavior or an aberration? Did he and Stevens have a history of antagonism? I once worked with a reporter who had studied under Bate at Harvard, more than 30 years after the unpleasantness Levin describes, and the scholar he knew was always a gentleman and a gentle person. I wonder: Had Bate, at the time of the Stevens contretemps, read this passage from The Rambler #11, published April 24, 1750:

"There is in the world a certain class of mortals, known, and contentedly known, by the appellation of passionate men, who imagine themselves entitled by that distinction to be provoked on every slight occasion, and to vent their rage in vehement and fierce vociferations, in furious menaces and licentious reproaches. Their rage, indeed, for the most part, fumes away in outcries of injury and protestations of vengeance, and seldom proceeds to actual violence, unless a drawer or linkboy falls in their way; but they interrupt the quiet of those that happen to be within the reach of their clamours, obstruct the course of conversation, and disturb the enjoyment of society."

The story, of course, doesn’t detract from my admiration for Bate and his work, though it does boost my fondness for Stevens. It’s nice to know the inscrutable poet/insurance executive could unbutton his vest, enjoy drinks with the boys and tell off-color stories. In other words, when not writing poetry he was almost like the rest of us.