• Epistolary Stevens
• Juliette Utard

Have you noticed that often a writer's letters are superior to the rest of his work?

—Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

IS THERE, as my title would suggest, an "epistolary Stevens"?¹ And if so, how are we to situate it within the larger body of his work? My epigraph is a quotation borrowed from a rather flamboyant character in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, called Madame d'Arpajon, the jilted lover of Monsieur de Guermantes, who exclaims, in one of the social gatherings the novel is notorious for, "Have you noticed that often a writer's letters are superior to the rest of his work?" (Proust 539). The question is, in many ways, a provocation, since letters are more often than not regarded as inferior to "the rest of [the] work."² Through her, what we have is Proust slyly addressing his readers, expecting us to test the validity of her statement and reflect on the literary value of the epistolary.

Studying poets' letters is by no means self-evident. While they are often appreciated for their critical value, their literary value remains largely overlooked. Having coedited the first volume of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Hugh Haughton notes that letters "generally fall by the wayside in the institutional study of literature" (57). And indeed, until the current double issue was set up, none of the previous issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal, not one conference on Stevens, and only a single conference panel devoted to the poet over some six decades of scholarship has focused solely on the epistolary material. This is all the more surprising as most Stevens scholars are in the habit of making use of the letters for the sake of an argument, more or less extensively, more or less explicitly, as if it were a matter of course—with the unfortunate consequence of treating the letters as a secondary source to be pillaged and plundered at will, while in fact, technically, they are fully and wholly a primary source.

From a theoretical perspective, it is generally accepted that letters belong to what Gérard Genette has brought together under the category of the epitext: along with interviews, diaries, and notebooks, correspondences remain a literary epiphenomenon, separate from the œuvre. They are widely treated as materials that stand on the outside looking in.³ Editorial practices tend to replicate the notion of the epistolary as distinct from the [End Page 7] literary: poets' letters often come in separate volumes that perpetuate the myth of their distinctness or even alienation from the main corpus, thus consigning them to a generic limbo within literary studies, a surplus, research materials in excess of "the real thing."

Yet it is odd, when you think of it, given its number of brilliant representatives—from Cicero to Rainer Maria Rilke, from Madame de Sévigné to John Keats—that epistolary writing should be so readily brushed away. Surely, Samuel Richardson's experiments with the epistolary novel, Montesquieu's and Rousseau's philosophical explorations in Persian Letters (1721) and The New Heloise (1761), and, of course, Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) on the other side of the Atlantic have in their own times demonstrated the richness of this literary terrain, as these works doted on the malleable nature of the letter as a form and genre to probe into issues of self, nation, and social change in times of deep transition.

Perhaps the time has come to challenge more directly and explicitly some of the age-old assumptions about the literary value of the epistolary. While reading poets' letters has been common practice for centuries, we have yet to recognize them as a major literary genre in and of itself, with its own history and its own canon. In his foreword to the paperback republication of Stevens's letters edited by the poet's daughter, Holly, Richard Howard bravely undertakes to redress the fault, making a case for poets' letters in general as an "indispensable genre" and for Stevens's letters in particular as a brilliant specimen to be put "with those of Keats alone"—"a readily ascended...

• 史诗史蒂文斯
• 朱丽叶·尤塔德（Juliette Utard）

您是否注意到作家的信常常优于他的其余作品？

-马塞尔·普鲁斯特（Marcel Proust），《古尔曼特斯之路》

就像我的书名所暗示的那样，那里是“史蒂文斯书信”吗？¹如果是这样，我们如何将其置于他更大的作品范围之内？我的题词是从马塞尔·普鲁斯特（Marcel Proust）的《寻找失落的时光》中一个夸张的人物中引用的名言，该诗人叫达曼德夫人（Jean Mader de Guermantes），是个被love的恋人，他在一次社交聚会中惊呼这部小说臭名昭著，“您是否注意到作家的信常常优于他的其余作品？” （Proust 539）。这个问题在许多方面是一种挑衅，因为信件通常不被认为不如“其余的工作”。^2个 通过她，普鲁斯特狡猾地向他的读者讲话，希望我们检验她的陈述的正确性，并反思书信的文学价值。

学习诗人的信件绝不是不言而喻的。尽管他们常常以其批判价值而受到赞赏，但他们的文学价值却在很大程度上仍被忽视。休·霍顿合着了《 TS艾略特的来信》第一卷，并指出，这些信“通常在文学的制度研究中落伍了”（57）。确实，在当前的两期杂志出版之前，《华莱士·史蒂文斯杂志》以前的期刊都没有，没有一个关于史蒂文斯的会议，只有一个专门针对诗人的会议小组在大约六十年的学术研究中只专注于书信材料。这更加令人惊讶，因为大多数史蒂文斯学者都习惯于为了争辩而使用字母，或多或少地，或多或少地明了，好像这是理所当然的，这带来了不幸的结果。将这些字母视为随意掠夺和掠夺的次要来源，而实际上，从技术上讲，它们是完全和完全主要的来源。

从理论的角度来看，人们普遍认为字母属于杰拉德·吉内特（GérardGenette）在情节类别下归为一类的东西：与访谈，日记和笔记本一起，书信仍然是文学现象，与书目分开。它们被广泛视为站在外面看的材料^。3编辑实践倾向于复制书信的概念，与[End Page 7]文学有所不同：诗人的信通常以不同的卷出现，以延续他们的神话。与主要语料库的区别甚至是疏远，从而使他们陷入文学研究中的一般困境，即超出“真实事物”的多余研究材料。

但是，考虑到它的杰出代表（从西塞罗到莱纳·玛丽亚·里尔克（Rainer Maria Rilke），从塞维尼夫人到约翰·济慈（John Keats）），奇怪的是，书信写作应该被如此轻易地抹掉。当然，塞缪尔·理查森（Samuel Richardson）的书信小说，孟德斯鸠（Montesquieu）和卢梭（Rousseau）的哲学探索实验在波斯字母（1721）和新太阳神（1761），当然还有克里夫韦尔的《美国农民的来信》（1782）在大西洋的彼岸在他们自己的时代证明了这种文学领域的丰富性，因为这些作品都以字母的可塑性作为一种形式和体裁来追求，以深入探讨转型时期的自我，民族和社会变革问题。

也许是时候更直接，更明确地挑战关于书信学的文学价值的一些古老假设了。几个世纪以来，阅读诗人的信件一直是一种普遍的做法，但我们至今尚未认识到它们是一种主要的文学体裁，具有其自身的历史和规范。理查德·霍华德（Richard Howard）在其诗人女儿霍莉（Holly）编辑的史蒂文斯（Stevens）信件的平装版前言中勇敢地纠正了这一错误，将诗人的信件一般视为“必不可少的体裁”，特别是史蒂文斯（Stevens）的信件为出色的标本“仅与济慈的标本一起放置” —“随手可得的...