IN those rare moments when Hartford leaps to mind, I’m guessing that your head does not then turn to watermelon pavilions, a man with a blue guitar, an old sailor catching tigers in red weather or an emperor of ice cream.
A lot of us think of Connecticut’s capital as a generic New England way station between Boston and New York. A decent place to stop for pancakes? Sure. A wildly lyrical geyser of the American imagination? Not so much.
And yet, as I discovered on a recent weekend trip, Hartford could probably rival the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco as a wellspring of psychedelic imagery — thanks, in large part, to one man. Hartford is the place where the poet Wallace Stevens spent a substantial portion of his life, and he composed many of his verses — bizarrely exquisite blossoms unlike anything else in the canon of American literature — while migrating back and forth on foot between his comfortable house on Westerly Terrace and his office at an insurance company.
You can, as I did on a Saturday morning, stroll along the commute that helped dislodge the man’s subconscious musings. Thanks to a few advocates from an organization that’s cheekily known as the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens, there is a marked walk that winds along for about 2.4 miles, starting at the white-columned colossus of the Hartford, the insurance giant where one of the most creative men in American letters ascended to the position of vice president, and ending at the white-clapboard house where the Pulitzer Prize winner lived.
Continue reading the main storyWho knew? Hartford is like that: full of surprises.
There are more. Just a few blocks away, on Farmington Avenue, in a 25-room mansion that looks like something from “Downton Abbey: The American Years,” two of the greatest characters in American fiction — Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn — came to life.
Contrary to mythology, Mark Twain did not conjure up his masterpieces while puffing cigars on a Southern riverboat. He wrote them, or at least parts of them, at a table in a third-floor billiard room in his house in Hartford, where he and his family lived for about 17 years. (He also cranked out his books at a summer house in Elmira, N.Y., but either way the slow churn of the Mississippi River was nowhere in sight.)
If there were moments back then when “Sam,” as Hartford locals called him, felt a yearning to procrastinate with a little literary chitchat, he could pay a call on his next-door neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had turned her into the most famous woman in America.
Twain, Stowe, Stevens — does Hartford have Sedona-like cosmic rays of genius passing through it? Are there magic pyramids of Parnassus buried beneath its landlocked streets? Scholars might know all about the city’s pivotal role in the evolution of American literature, but for most of us average readers, this all comes as news.
I called Wilson H. Faude, a Hartford historian who served as the first curator for the Mark Twain House, and told him that this highway stop in the middle of Connecticut seemed to qualify, at least from a literary standpoint, as a pretty important place.
“Bingo,” he said with a jolly tone that suggested I might also soon discover that chocolate is delicious and sunshine is nice. “Hartford is where Tom and Huck were born!”
If Hartford doesn’t crow about that, Mr. Faude attributes it to the region’s taciturn Yankee tendencies. “We don’t do enough talking,” he said. “We all know that it’s here. Why do we have to go public? This is reticent Connecticut.”
Even so, it wasn’t long before Mr. Faude was regaling me with historical morsels. “At one point, it was said that Hartford was the richest city in America,” he said. It became a vortex of American publishing, which is what originally attracted the likes of Twain in the 19th century, and its dominance in the insurance business is what provided Stevens with a well-kept bourgeois cocoon in the first part of the 1900s. Hartford also produced guns and banks, and a long, high tide of prosperity flooded the city with art and culture. The Wadsworth Atheneum, advertised as “the oldest public art museum in the United States,” was founded in 1842. It’s where Pablo Picasso had his first American retrospective.
I took a tour of the Mark Twain House on my weekend visit, and I found it unexpectedly opulent. (Our guide told us that Twain and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, the daughter of a rich coal baron, had spent thousands of dollars a year on its upkeep; they were forced to move out in 1891 after a few lousy tech investments left the author bankrupt.)
But for a poetry obsessive like me, the Stevens walk was the main attraction.
This particular perambulation, though, is, like Hartford itself, quite modest. There are no tour guides; in keeping with the private enterprise of creating poetry, you’re on your own. Along the walk there are pale slabs of Connecticut granite engraved with verses from one of Wallace Stevens’s most indelible poems, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
That’s about it.
Nevertheless, I found the walk to be deeply moving. After all, how often do we get to explore the cranial machinery of a literary titan by slipping into the groove of his daily commute?
Stevens never learned to drive. Even though many of his neighbors had no idea what he was up to, he would amble along Asylum Avenue methodically measuring the pace of his steps and murmuring phrases to himself — phrases that would become some of the most haunting lines in the English language.
“It seems as though Stevens composed poems in his head, and then wrote them down, often after he arrived at the office,” Prof. Helen Vendler, Harvard’s grande dame of poetry and the author of “Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire,” explained to me in an e-mail. “As for his commute, he enjoyed it profoundly. It was his only time out of doors, alone, thinking, receptive to the influx of nature into all the senses.”
It’s all too easy to assume that Stevens was some tortured artist forced into a life of Babbitt-y corporate drudgery. In fact, evidence suggests that he rather liked his peaceful routine in Hartford — his backyard garden, his wine cellar, even his job at the insurance company.
“Stevens enjoyed his work very much,” said James Longenbach, a poet, a professor at the University of Rochester, and the author of “Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things.” “It was crucial to his achievement. He turned down an offer to be the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard because he didn’t want to leave his work. He continued to go to the office even when he was beyond the mandatory age of retirement. He never showed that he felt any conflict or tension between what might appear to be the different aspects of his life.”
Still, the poetry that poured forth from this burgher’s daily rendezvous with his “interior paramour” — to use a phrase from a Stevens lyric — can, for the casual reader, border on opaque. “People just throw up their hands and say, ‘I can’t understand this, it doesn’t make any sense,’ ” said Jim Finnegan, the president of the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens, which has brought poets like Robert Pinsky and Mark Strand to town for events.
None of this deters the literary pilgrims. “I get e-mails from people from all over the world,” Mr. Finnegan said. “Stevens has this far-flung readership out there.”
It would be silly to suggest that a couple of hours of walking around gave me miraculous insight into a poem like “Peter Quince at the Clavier” — yet I did come to understand something simple but crucial about Stevens. What moved me about the walk, in the end, was that he had chosen to walk at all. In a car-mad country that prides itself in being perpetually in motion, the poet made a clear and conscious decision to stop, to slow down, to burrow into his imagination. And walking had opened his eyes and ears to a place that was full of surprises. As Stevens himself put it in a poem:
“It is like a region full of intonings./It is Hartford seen in a purple light.”
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