I think that readers of Wallace Stevens's lyric "The Emperor of Ice Cream" have often missed the full significance of the line: "Let be be finale of seem." And by way of glossing it I offer what is, in a sense, a "vocational" reading of the poem."Finale" belongs to the concert hall, or the theatre. The sentence in which it appears is a kind of motto for the end-game: act five, the drawing of the curtain on a play. In fact, the poem describes a funeral:
Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.In low-rent American settings like the one depicted here, "finale" (when pronounced) is almost always preceded by "grand": the metaphor is theatrical. But in "The Emperor of Ice Cream" the "finale" is not at all "grand." Among the props are flowers "in last month's newspaper" and a cheap "dresser of deal" missing a few of its knobs. Deal furniture is typically veneer, another kind of seeming, and here it registers (a little pathetically) one more plea for an end to fiction. Eleanor Cook has pointed out several Shakespearean echoes in this poem; I would tentatively add another. Behind "The Emperor" (very very faintly) is a passage from the "finale" of Macbeth, at least insofar as that tragedy marks what is surely the best known use in English poetry of the metaphor of life-as-a-play: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more." "Let be be finale of seem" is essentially Macbeth's line. Or perhaps we should think of Sir Walter Raleigh's well-known lines, whose sardonic humor sorts well with Stevens's little elegy: "Our graves that hide us from the searching Sun, / Are like drawne curtaynes when the play is done. / Thus march we playing to our latest rest, / Only we dye in earnest, that's no Jest."In any event, if not a Scottish king, then at least the "Emperor" of Ice Cream "speaks" in Stevens's poem. The locutions are recognizably imperial, and savor a little of the decree: "Call the roller of big cigars," "bid him whip," "Let the wenches dawdle" and so on--all spoken in the ingratiating imperatives of majesty. Of course, Stevens's Emperor does not take the finale as seriously as Shakespeare's King of Scotland does. The strange and by no means cheerful comedy of the poem works by way of disparity: the pomp and circumstance of the voice are absurd in connection with this funeral--wenches in everyday clothing, muscular ice- cream men, old newspapers, cheap veneer furniture.
The Emperor desires that the woman should wear something to her funeral "of mere being" (to borrow the title of another funereal poem by Stevens). So much the better if it is the sheet on which she "embroidered fan-tails once." Let there, at least, be art. Even so, her "horny feet protrude"; they "come to show how cold she is, and dumb." The sheet and its embroidery form another kind of "veneer": they "peel away" from the woman's body, exposing it, just as the deal veneer (we must imagine) has peeled away here and there from the old dresser lacking the three glass knobs. Stevens revises a familiar Elizabethan formula. As in Spenser's "I wrote her name upon the strand," the artist's work used to give his subject a voice in death, a kind of immortality; "seeming" (at least the highest order of it) thereby achieved some sort of triumph over the circuit of being and death. But the embroidery (or art) of Stevens' woman only goes to show how "cold she is, and dumb." Her "fantails" may well be from a peacock, an emblem of vanity. In his New York days, living alone, Stevens owned "a rug with the figure of a peacock woven into it--blue and scarlet, and black, and green and gold," as he described it in his journal; and there is also the cockatoo woven into the rug in "Sunday Morning." The "seeming" in "The Emperor of Ice Cream" is mostly pretension. There seems good enough reason to call for an end to it.
In a sense, "The Emperor" is a debunking poem. Quietly and experimentally, Stevens disparages his own artifice, his own "embroidery." When he calls for an end to "seeming," to fiction, he may be calling for an end to poetry: that is another way to read "let be be finale of seem." This conclusion becomes difficult to resist when we recall how often Stevens's poetry features terms like "seem" and "fiction" in settings more or less directly concerned with the making of poetry. "The Emperor of Ice Cream" is a "vocational" poem. The sham of this funeral makes a sinister complement to the "supreme fiction" with which Stevens famously rebukes another old woman in Harmonium: "Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame," he writes in "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman." So the subject of "The Emperor of Ice Cream" is, at one level, poetry itself. And discussing the poem as an example of "pure poetry," Milton J. Bates makes precisely this point in Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (1985).
Two questions present themselves. Is Stevens likening his own fictions to those depicted in the poem, obliquely expressing reservations about the powers of poetry that elsewhere he "eulogizes" in the celebratory rather than in the funereal sense? Or--and this alternative is hardly attractive--is it rather the pathetic, uneducated art of the woman and her low-class funeral that suffers in comparison with Stevens's more powerful fictions, such as "The Emperor of Ice Cream" itself (or himself)? There is another way to put it. The poem asks: What is the difference, if any, between "artifice" and "art"? The question is familiar from much of Stevens's poetry, which often tries to locate itself along a spectrum running from "lie" to "fiction" to "supreme fiction" to "truth"--a spectrum in which the last two terms are in a kind of rivalry for ultimate position. At first glance, it may seem that in "The Emperor of Ice Cream" Stevens's art--that is, the poet's art--benefits by its implied comparison to the woman's "embroidery." But we should remember that the poem affirms nothing if not the infidelity of appearances. We should not be satisfied merely with what seems to be the case. It is worth asking whether Stevens deviously wants his horny "feet" to protrude, showing how cold he is, and "dumb": both words have special meaning when a poet uses them. In "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad" he writes: "I am too dumbly in my being pent." And even with its great facility and eloquence, "The Emperor of Ice Cream" may betray the same frustrations. There is surely a mixture, here, of self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating motives.
I find the same mixture of motives--the same diffident, equivocal regard for the poet's own imaginative powers--in "Anecdote of the Jar":
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.Frank Lentricchia's reading of this poem is compelling, and in what follows I am schooled by him. The placement of the jar changes "the look of things" (to borrow a phrase from "Postcard From the Volcano"). This is to say, in Stevens's lexicon, that it acts very much as a poem acts. Repeated effects of assonance sound the poet's presence, his shaping spirit. And the sounds here echo and re-echo the word designating the jar's most notable characteristic: "round it was upon a hill." Does this suggest a figurative alliance of poet and "jar"? The argument of the poem at first seems to deny this: all of our sympathies are engaged by the "wilderness," over which the jar's shaping spirit has taken "dominion." But when we listen to the poem's sounds, something changes. As Frank Lemtricchia says: "words are like jars." Langauge orders, contains, and to a great extent "falsifies" our experience; no reader of Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" can remain unaware of this. And so "Anecdote of the Jar" may express an ambivalence, on the poet's part, about the nature of his art--of his "artifice," of his own dominating placements of "jars" in Tennessee. Bear in mind the opening cantos of "Notes," as Lentricchia advises us to do: the action of this "jar" is not compatible with the desire, there expressed, to strip away names, and other things that "take dominion," and to get down to a First Idea, a bareness, a wilderness untouched by us and our "images," unlittered by the detritus of poetry (such "trash" as Stevens consigns to the "dump" in "The Man on the Dump"). For these reasons, "Anecdote of the Jar" seems to me to move in the orbit of Stevens's "Emperor": both poems probably indirectly entertain Stevens's ambivalences about his own "fictions." And Joan Richardson helps us see in her biography of the poet that it is an ambivalence possibly associated with Stevens's "puritan" inheritance, which regarded the practice of art as idling, feminine, unprofitable and quite likely immoral. The complexity is that, especially in "Anecdote of the Jar," Stevens makes his peculiar case against poetry in a poem. As does the "The Emperor of Ice Cream," this poem seems to me to argue with itself.In any event, a letter Stevens wrote to Leonard van Geyzel suggests how "The Emperor of Ice Cream" addresses some fundamental questions about "belief" in poetry. Geyzel had asked him to analyze the poem, and Stevens replied: "You examine what you do as you go along and you examine it afterwards, yet there is a point at which you are bound to stop. If you do not stop, you soon become like anyone else who no longer has anything in which to believe. If you don't believe in poetry, you cannot write it" (500). Which is to say: if the poet ceases to believe in poetry--in fictions and appearances--he becomes "cold and dumb." And yet, the very act of composing "The Emperor of Ice Cream" safely manages any potentially troublesome possibilities of poetic self- deflation. That is, when poetry is itself the means of hashing out these problems about "seeming," the "poetic motive" as such transcends any motives of "pure being" that threaten it. I agree with Bates's remark in Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self: "Ostensibly an endorsement of `be,' [the poem] testifies still more eloquently to the power of `seem'" (144). So far as this funeral is concerned, Stevens enjoys a position of advantage: he remains both in and out of the game (dumb and eloquent), which may explain his enduring affection for "The Emperor of Ice Cream." And it is useful, here, to draw a distinction the poem itself seems to draw: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream." A context of comparison, perhaps even of rivalry, is implied. Who is the real emperor? Death himself, or the "emperor of ice cream"? The imperial voice of the poem argues for the latter; the realities it so casually describes argue for the former. I think the question remains unresolved in the poem.
But there is another way to talk about "seeming" and "play-acting." In concluding his preface to King Jasper, Robert Frost builds on the lines of Hamlet and Touchstone, not (as Stevens may have) of Macbeth: "The play's the thing. Play's the thing. All virtue in `as if.'" If Frost was finally more comfortable with his self-investment in fictions (his poetry and "play"), the reason may be that he had integrated his "avocation" and "vocation" (his play and his work) in ways that Stevens never quite could in his capacity as Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He had successfully "socialized" his "difference" as a poet, thereby solving the problem that sent Pound into permanent exile, and caused Stevens (as Randall Jarrell persuasively argues) consistently to imagine in his poems a world altogether foreign to his own. As if confirming the disintegration of his writerly self from his social and public self, Stevens writes to his then-fiance Elsie Moll: "It seems insincere, like playing a part, to be one person on paper and another in reality. But I know that it is only because I command myself there" (80). He "commands" himself there: the page is this Emperor's dominion. Fictions of a world utterly unlike the world in which one lives and works are more likely to seem fraudulent or unreal, at least in certain moods, than those that somehow marry the two; perhaps this is why Stevens speaks of his writerly persona as "insincere," or as the "playing of a part." By contrast, when poetry, as an art and as a vocation, successfully marries "ideals" to "actualities," questions about "seeming" and "being" become considerably less anxious; the world of actuality and the world of imagination become one. In any event, that is the claim Frost's poetry makes.
In a lecture at the Bread Loaf School of English, Frost asks, echoing Plato's denunciation of poetry in The Republic: "Why is it that people are so ready to blame poetry for idealism? It is because they think that poetry is all permissible lies." He might well have believed that the kind of poetry Stevens was writing abetted this sort of attitude. The author of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, among all the moderns, most thoroughly investigated the sense in which poetry may be "permissible lies." Stevens writes in an adage: "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly" (Opus Posthumous 163). Stevens considered it the responsibility of poets to provide such fictions. We should always distinguish his position, here, from Frost's contention in "Education By Poetry" that we "believe the future into existence." Milton Bates's useful remarks about Stevens's adage help us maintain the distinction: "In this repsect, the supreme fiction belongs to a tradition of literary illusions that includes some of Poe's poems, Huysmans' `A Rebours,' Villiers de L'Ils-Adam's `Axel,' Tennyson's `The Lady of Shallot,' and Mallarme's prose poem `Le Nenuphar blanc.' In these and other nineteenth-century works, an exquisite illusion is deliberately contrived and sustained in the face of a sordid or humdrum reality" (201). My point is that, in Frost, one never encounters the feeling that "reality" is "humdrum," let alone "sordid"; he is not, as he points out in a letter to R.P.T. Coffin, a "Platonist." (See "To Earthward," for example.) John Bartlett remembers how, in 1935, Frost laid great stress on the fact that Stevens kept his "two lives" as a businessman and as a poet utterly distinct; this seemed quite significant to the author of "Two Tramps in Mud Time," and given his own vocational struggles we can readily see why. Stevens does seem almost manic-depressive, at times, in his alternating exaltations and deflations of the powers of poetic fictions, which may be symptomatic of his own ordeal (other examples of this are to be found in "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad" and "The Man on the Dump"). In this alternation, as in other things, Stevens resembles Nietzsche in "On Truth and Lies in a Moral Sense." That essay, perhaps because it is unfinished, perhaps because Nietzsche could not or (like Stevens) would not resolve its ambiguities, remains perfectly equivocal in its attitude toward fiction.
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