Volume 30, Number 18 · November 24, 1983
The Ghost of Westerly Terrace
By Richard Ellmann
Parts of a World, Wallace Stevens Remembered: An Oral Biography
by Peter Brazeau
Random House, 330 pp., $19.95
Instead of relieving the mystery of Wallace Stevens, Peter Brazeau's book deepens it. We see Stevens shuffling insurance papers from his big desk to the floor in Hartford, refusing to ride or walk with colleagues to the office, stirring genealogical ashes, fighting with Ernest Hemingway, disliking poets such as Eliot, Frost, and MacLeish while tolerating Jarrell, Schwartz, and even Sandburg. If these are all 'parts of a world,' the emphasis must come on parts. They are fragments out of which 'the substance in us that endures,' as Stevens called it, must be sifted out. Mr. Brazeau, it must be said, does no sifting.
Review, 3758 words
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