It has been several decades since the privacy, interiority and abstraction of Wallace Stevens’s poetry have seemed to be its defining features. Ever since, readers have routinely attended to the ways in which Stevens actively engages a wide range of cultural contexts in the first half of the twentieth century, including war and politics (Longenbach), socialism and communism in the 1930s (Filreis), or the economics of the New Deal (Szalay), to name just a few.1 However, while reading Stevens’s poems as deeply coded and highly aestheticized allegories has been enormously fruitful, Stevens’s own politics have been notoriously difficult to pin down, and so too the theoretical grounding beneath any political reading of his work. Simply to say that Stevens is an economic liberal is not to say very much, given that liberalism in this period was mutating through many different classical and corporate varieties, and could be associated with widely different political positions, from pacifist progressivism to conservative populism. This essay takes for granted that Stevens is a liberal of some kind, but it also attempts to identify a peculiar strain of liberalism that appears most visibly when we read Stevens’s social poems of the 1930s in relation to the field of corporate suretyship, in which he worked as a lawyer for most of his career. I want to suggest that Stevens’s overtly private poetics are not just a stubborn retreat from social and material realities, but rather, and especially during the 1930s, a chronicle of how a changing financial system was changing the nature of privacy, interiority and individualism too.
Although it can be tempting to link Stevens’s work at a private insurance company to the public insurance programs of the New Deal, in fact his specific field, corporate suretyship, correlates more closely with the financialization of the credit economy at the start of the twentieth century. Because suretyship is, in effect, insurance against broken contract, it frequently covers the risks that a creditor faces when making a loan, and by gradual extension, came to cover many other kinds of contractual risks too. As economic historian Craig Muldrew has argued, credit has shaped western society profoundly since the early modern period, as the ‘currency of reputation’ – so central to any credit economy – became a new instrument of social organization. Indeed, the ‘social ethic of credit’, as Muldrew calls it, structured society in ‘chains of literally hundreds of thousands of intertwined and interconnected credit relationships’, whereby ‘the community was redefined as a conglomeration of competing but interdependent households which had to trust one another.’2 Muldrew’s work allows us to connect, more broadly, the trust dynamics of the sixteenth-century credit economy with the more overt role that trust plays in eighteenth-century liberalism. In turning to the early twentieth century, however, I want to suggest that if suretyship is nothing other than insurance against broken contracts, including but not limited to credit contracts, then its rapid expansion and corporatization during these years suggests that Americans were, in effect, less willing to trust in trust. That is to say, the entire strategy of trusting another person in a private contract was coming to seem untrustworthy, and under those conditions, corporate suretyship both systematized a safer mechanism of contractual guarantee, even as it depersonalized contractual relations. Stevens was thus uniquely positioned to witness the emergence of a liberal society knit together not from bonds of trust, but from a distrust so pervasive that it justified an abstract and far more impersonal conglomeration of mutually reinforcing hedges.
Stevens will call such a social order a ‘drastic community’, or so I will argue in the pages that follow.3 That phrase, from his 1936 poem Owl’s Clover, names Stevens’s vision of a dynamic and loosely organized social order that he seems to have both desired and feared. For in the end, Stevens seems unable to make up his mind whether such a system is to be preferred either to an earlier liberal economy of obligation, or even to what he regarded as the real threat of socialism or communism. Corporate suretyship may indeed erode the personal and even ethical bonds of more traditional liberal sociability in ways hard to approve, but it nonetheless may have appealed to Stevens by fostering a more dynamic and changeable society, and divesting the individual of unwanted and burdensome obligations. Though the following essay cannot hope to treat a long and complex poem like Owl’s Clover in anything like a comprehensive way, it reads key parts of the poem as Stevens’s ambivalent attempt to imagine the changing shape of a liberal society as either a richly dynamic field of changing relations, or quite literally, as a social monstrosity.
Surety bonds are among the world’s oldest financial instruments, and the first surety was simply the hostage, human collateral surrendered until the fulfillment of a contract, usually the repayment of a loan. Accordingly, Proverbs 11:15 advises, ‘He who is surety for a stranger will smart for it.’ In related forms, suretyship shows up in a number of Shakespeare’s plays, and most conspicuously in The Merchant of Venice, a sign of just how important the surety was to the complex credit economy of the early modern world.4 Private suretyship remained common in the United States through the nineteenth century, although in such arrangements the surety offered to surrender not his life or freedom, but, in most cases, the unpaid amount of a loan. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, such interpersonal arrangements, with their social intimacy and local purview, were straining both creditors and debtors alike, especially as businesses and governments increasingly required surety bonds for private contractors and sub-contractors, and in business dealings that had become increasingly national if not global in scale.5 Moreover, as corporations increasingly required the services of sureties, others corporations began to provide them, so rapidly corporatized what quickly became a large and lucrative enterprise.
The rise of corporate suretyship marks an enormous but little-studied change in the social structure of credit during the financial revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and one that began in earnest shortly before Stevens embarked on his career as a lawyer. Except for a few years at the start of his career, Stevens worked as a corporate surety lawyer, first for the American Bonding Company in New York, then for the Equitable Surety Company, and finally for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company starting in 1916, where he remained until his death. Surety bonds require so many lawyers like Stevens because they involve a fundamentally different arrangement than most other kinds of insurance. In most insurance contracts, there are only two parties, the insurer and the insuree, but with surety bonds there are three parties: the surety, who guarantees a certain kind of conduct by a second party, the principal, on behalf of a third party, the beneficiary (sometimes called the obligee). If a town hires a construction company to build a road, the bonding company (the surety) will reimburse the town (the beneficiary) if the construction company (the principal) does not complete the project, because of bankruptcy, fraud, incompetence, or certain other contingencies. Broken contracts tend to lead to litigation, and if the payment of a surety bond hangs in the balance, then the surety company frequently joins the legal fray, competing with other creditors for the right of recovery. Stevens’s career was thus spent far from anything like actuarial statistics, which have very little use in the field of suretyship, and for this reason most of all, suretyship stands rather far afield of either private life or casualty insurance, or of large-scale public insurance programs such as workers’ compensation, Federal Deposit Insurance, or Social Security.6
The other reason that suretyship needed so many lawyers was that, from the start, the field was immensely intricate and arcane, and by the 1920s already involved at least ninety different kinds and classes of surety bonds.7 Each kind of bond had further varieties and applications, and according to Edward Lunt, an early historian of the business, just one such kind of bond involves, ‘permutations that an expert solicitor can submit to a dizzying prospect from the myriads of basic forms, insuring clauses P, D, Q, and X, riders of endless variety’, along with ‘an infinity of other nebulous refinements and gratuitous mystifications’. Sounding like nothing so much as the narrator of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Lunt goes on, ‘What some of these textual bedevilments mean no man on earth knows, nor ever will know until, after years of litigation, some court of final resort unravels the mystery – and incidentally wrecks its tottering reason in the process’.8
Stevens expressed a remarkably similar view of the irreducible variety of surety cases in his one extended statement on the field, ‘Surety and Fidelity Claims’ (1938). Published in an insurance trade magazine, The Eastern Underwriter, the essay takes pains to distinguish the field of surety bonding from other kinds of insurance lines more familiar to his audience of industry professionals. For instance, unlike life insurance, which uses actuarial statistics to derive a gray average of all of the risks covered, suretyship must particularize each risk separately. ‘There is nothing cut and dried about any of these things’, Stevens wrote, ‘you adapt yourself to each case’ (OP 238). This irreducible variety, as well as Lunt’s ‘textual bedevilments’ and ‘gratuitous mystifications’, reminds one of similar features in Stevens’s own poetry, which proliferates complexities in ways that seem to me more than just superficially related. Indeed, in one of Stevens’s few comments on the relationship between poems and surety claims, he focused on precisely the irreducibility of each: ‘Poetry and surety claims aren’t as unlikely a combination as they may seem. There is nothing perfunctory about them, for each case is different’.9 We are thus on entirely the wrong track if we confuse the methods of suretyship with the actuarial aggregation of other kinds of insurance, because to Stevens, the point is precisely that no two surety claims are alike, and so must be assessed individually. To apply Stevens’s famous dictum about poems to the risks his company covered, we might say that each surety claim is ‘the cry of its occasion’ (CP 473).10
Irreducible variety is, of course, a rather conspicuous value in Stevens’s work, which despises perfect uniformity as monotonous and insipid, and which prefers, as Stevens says in the sixth section of the poem ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue’ from Owl’s Clover, ‘a moving chaos that never ends’ (OP 82). In the context of trust, however, distrust and failures of obligation may have been especially attractive to Stevens precisely because they are so ingeniously varied. Indeed, trust – when validated – stabilizes our relationships, justifies our expectations, and reassures us that the world will go on as we hope and desire. Because trust is so closely related to time, it further reconciles the present to the future, and even identifies the present as already stocked with a future not yet come to pass. In all of these ways, then, trust presupposes conditions of sameness and identity, consistency and stability, and consequently privileges those values above other competing ones, such as disruption, change or surprise. As Judith Shklar has shown, however, although John Locke’s contractarian view of constitutional government ‘requires [trust] at every juncture’, in fact trust’s normative operation is shadowed by a bewildering variety of surprising betrayals, which are impossible to reduce to any similarly self-evident kind of action.11 Shklar’s point is to justify what she calls a ‘liberalism of fear’, in which citizens’ anxiety about their contract with the state, especially, is just as important as their confident optimism about rights or the rule of law. For these purposes, however, a further implication of her argument is that distrust is simply more complex, more internally varied, and more highly adapted to particular circumstances than trust, the great virtue of which is that we trust it to work roughly the same way every time. A liberalism of distrust, to adapt Shklar’s own terms, is thus by no means a total dissolution of social and political order, but rather the reordering of social and political life around the expectation that our expectations will be routinely dashed.
For Stevens, then, a world of perfect trust would be a perfectly predictable world too, and so little different than the dull paradise that he often castigates. Accordingly, one can hear more than a little delight in Stevens’s own descriptions of various surety cases in ‘Surety and Fidelity Claims’, which involve a pilfering bank teller, a dishonest estate guardian and a contractor trying to defraud Stevens’s own company. While these cases may prove expensive for the Hartford, they also reanimate social and economic relations with the kind of variety and change that Stevens valued highly. For a claims man like Stevens, it becomes evident that the real problem these cases raise is not ethical, but epistemological, for if trust relationships allow us to count on something coming to pass in the future, failures of trust throw open the doors to new and ever more speculative futures. Stevens writes of his own perplexities in the wake of various surety claims:
You have a bond guaranteeing that an electrician will pay his bills. The bond is for $1,000. His books show that he owes $3,000 and, if his books are incorrect, he may owe twice as much. You are threatened by suits; how are you to proceed? A family is killed by fumes from a gas stove in a cabin in a tourist camp. If the husband died first, his estate goes to A, B, and C; if the wife died first the husband’s estate goes to X, Y, and Z. The estate amounts to $50,000. You are on the bond of the administrator of the husband’s estate. The $50,000 consisted of cash on deposit in a bank which failed several years after you gave your bond. A, B, and C will settle for $10,000, but X, Y, and Z want $50,000. What had you better do? You are on a very large bond for a woman as executrix of her husband’s estate. She has not accounted and you are unable to form any idea respecting her ability to account. What is more, she does not reside in the jurisdiction of the court, and you are not at all sure even that she exists. She was represented by lawyers who are willing to tell you what they know if you will first pay them the fee which she has failed to pay. They want, say, $25,000. You do not know whether what they will tell you will clear you or will disclose a liability for some hundreds of thousands of dollars. Shall you pay the $25,000? (OP 238–9)
In the midst of such contractual mayhem, Stevens at first appears to be a kind of lawyer-detective, defending his company through legal skill and native wit, in a world gone mostly to the bad. And yet, in most of these cases, he has almost nothing he can investigate, and his procedure amounts, ironically, to taking some risk that might yet prove immensely costly to him in the end.
The German social theorist Niklas Luhmann has written on trust in ways that can clarify its involvement with risks like these. Luhmann’s systems theory is too elaborate to outline in anything other than the most rudimentary form, but suffice it to say that Luhmann sees trust, like virtually all social systems, as a method of reducing the complexity of an overwhelmingly large and complex world. A system is nothing other than a complexity-reduction mechanism, which functions socially to facilitate action. Luhmann takes very little interest either in individuals or in subjectivity, but rather attends to the system-level methods by which entire societies organize themselves. For Luhmann, one problem with trust is that while it addresses a cognitive problem relating to lack of knowledge about the future, it cannot have a cognitive solution; to put it differently, the choice to trust is always a choice to risk some action without knowledge of the outcome, otherwise it would not count as trust at all. As a result, Luhmann says that we can only ‘formulate the problem of trust as a gamble, a risky investment’, and ‘Trust remains a risky undertaking’.12 For Luhmann, then, trust is in fact a subset of risk, or a kind of risk that intrudes on social relationships, and especially, we might add, on contractual ones.
Accordingly, in each of Stevens’s examples in the paragraph above, we see a situation involving the breakdown of trust, and in rapid succession, a problem that requires more trust still. The electrician’s unpaid bills, the failed bank, and the possibly non-existent widow who may have absconded with her husband’s estate involve precisely the kinds of betrayals of trust that surety bonds redress. And yet in each case, we see Stevens address these failures of trust not, as we might expect, with the insurance company’s traditional reassurance that everything lost will be restored, but rather with the articulation of a new risk that Stevens himself suddenly faces: ‘how are you to proceed’ and ‘What had you better do?’ The fact that each of these trust relationships was, in fact, a risk scenario all along is abundantly clear, but it turns out that the surety also intervenes as a gambler, piling bet upon bet, and doubling down on these losing wagers. Indeed, Stevens evidently distrusts many of the other players involved, including the other lawyers, and so the surety by no means reconstitutes interpersonal trust at a higher level, but rather implements a system of speculative hedge bets structured so that trust of a more traditional kind need not enter the equation.
Luhmann would call the trust one places in a surety bond ‘system trust’, which he associates with all of those institutions, systems and organizations in which we cannot help but place great faith if we are to act at all. When we trust that money has value, for instance, we trust a system, not a person, and all other institutions, organizations and systems function similarly as efficient ‘conveyors of reduced complexity’.13 Corporate suretyship thus represents a particularly clear case in which interpersonal trust was being transformed into system trust. The traditional private surety had signaled the presence of a certain amount of distrust too, else his presence would not have been needed, but his guarantee addressed that problem by reconstituting interpersonal trust at a higher level. In corporate suretyship, in contrast, such interpersonal trust relationships play little if any role, and instead risk itself (trust’s dark twin) comes ever more prominently to the fore. As we see from Stevens’s view from inside the industry, such a system has no real need for the warmly interpersonal language of trust at all, and instead turns openly to the practical calculus of risk. Indeed, it may be that we can sharpen Luhmann’s identification of trust with risk considerably, by simply concluding that trust is ‘social risk’, which is to say, risk that by definition implies some degree of obligation to the other.
Industry writing during corporate suretyship’s boom years in the 1910s and 20s makes the antagonism between corporate suretyship and personal sociability entirely clear. One advocate of corporate suretyship decried the unreliability of ‘personal sureties’, and went on to condemn personal suretyship as veritably criminal: ‘The man who asks another to sign his bond without adequately securing him [through a corporate bond] is on a par with him who borrows money from his friend without intending to pay it back. He is not a friend; he is a contemptible blackguard, a crook’.14 The writer means, of course, that personal bonds of trust are the least trustworthy of all, while system trust – which is really the systematic management of risk – proves far superior both practically and morally. Moreover, it is not just that personal sureties are unreliable, as the author insists, but also that the very attempt to fashion such bonds is itself already a species of betrayal. This reversal is extraordinary in its implications. If trust is not to be trusted, then attempts to cement trusting relationships, as in private rather than corporate suretyship, are the most suspect of all. The reason that corporate suretyship works so well, then, is that it makes interpersonal trust irrelevant, and in turn renders intense distrust tolerable, and even profitable, when in other circumstances it would bring all commerce to a halt. But we can say more as well, for once established, a large and efficient system of corporate suretyship actively casts doubt on interpersonal trust relationships too, for it depends largely on a general sense that personal obligations are profoundly insecure, a sense that it does not just address, but also helps foment. For Stevens, then, the question is whether these developments should be seen as salutary or lamentable. They erode some very traditional social, political and economic values, to be sure, but they also introduce precisely the kind of dynamic instability Stevens so often approved. They threaten to leave individuals isolated in an abstract environment of risk calculus, but then Stevens was not unattracted to isolation and abstraction in many different forms. As we turn to Owl’s Clover, we can see that this liberalism of distrust, which is really a liberalism of risk without interpersonal trust, increasingly seemed to Stevens to be the only available option.
Written in the mid-1930s, Owl’s Clover is Stevens’s response both to the social and economic crisis of the Great Depression, and more immediately, to criticism leveled at Stevens from the political left. It was Stanley Burnshaw’s 1935 review of Ideas of Order in the communist magazine New Masses that famously provoked Stevens to write Owl’s Clover, a poem that mocks proletarian politics and aesthetics while attempting to imagine alternatives for both modern society and modern poetry.15 The statue at the center of the poem, which takes various forms and evokes various responses throughout, is a rather unsubtle metaphor for art in society, but rather than approaching the poem through this single, centralized reference point, we can better approach it for these purposes through a set of metaphors for the social body and variously conceived collectives. Throughout the 1930s, Stevens was thinking about social groups with new determination and interest, although frequently in highly abstract ways. The ‘million people on one string’ from ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ evacuates any meaningful social texture or detail between the ‘one’ and the ‘million’, between the individual and the largest possible collective (CP 166). In Ideas of Order we encounter more denigrated collectives still, including the ‘slime of men in crowds’ from ‘Farewell to Florida’ (CP 118), and more ominously, those ‘sudden mobs of men’ with their ‘sudden clouds of faces and arms’ from ‘Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz’ (CP 122). To think of the social as ‘slime’, ‘mob’ or even ‘cloud’ is to see it as terrifyingly amorphous and unbounded, though as we will see, these metaphors of changeable shapes can easily morph into more positive forms too.
Entirely content with neither the isolated individualism of Harmonium nor his reaction against the crowd in Ideas of Order, Stevens attempts to find better, more generous, and more optimistic models for the social in Owl’s Clover. The poem’s rejection of the communist masses as a viable option is clear enough, but Owl’s Clover also takes pains to avoid any simple endorsement of certain well-established modes of liberal individualism. As it surveys a wide range of options, Owl’s Clover dismisses two particularly American ones. The first is the ‘buckskin’, a ‘crosser of snowy divides’, who turns out to be a Western frontier character straight from central casting. He finds nothing to do in this poem, and no amount of apostrophe can save him from Stevens’s invitation to keep riding: ‘O free / O bold, that rode your horses straight away’ (OP 91). The other is equally powerful, but more complex, ‘The civil fiction, the calico idea / The Johnsonian composition, abstract man’ (OP 95). Abstract man would seem to be a thinned out Enlightenment being who is theoretically equal to anyone else, and ideally incorporated into civil society. However, if the Buckskin represents the shortcomings of nineteenth-century romantic individualism, this abstract man represents the shortcomings of eighteenth-century liberal citizenship. The Buckskin is too isolated and mutely mighty; abstract man is too remote from the particularities of lived experience. As such, abstract man’s association with Enlightenment subjectivity involves ‘evasions like a repeated phrase, / Which, by its repetition, comes to bear / A meaning without a meaning’ (OP 65). Pure slogan, abstract man is too much a creature of language – words circling back on words – which finally links his abstract and theoretical personhood to the best known Johnsonian composition of all, the dictionary.
Owl’s Clover attempts to imagine viable alternatives to both of these traditional conceptions of the liberal subject as it relates to social life, starting with its title, which has not been well understood.16 The phrase ‘owl’s clover’ literally refers to a western wildflower, a bright but scruffy annual in the same family as the snapdragon, and closely related the wild Indian paintbrush. But in a poem that spends less time on flowers than on birds, the odd reference to owl’s clover in the title forces us to search more widely for relevant contexts, of which there are two. The first involves the odd appearance of a bird in the plant’s common name, and Owl’s Clover turns out to be inhabited not just by owls, but by dozens of other birds, including the ‘Duck for Dinner’ in the title of the fourth poem of Owl’s Clover, and the ‘birds / Of chaos’ in the second poem, ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue’, both of which the rest of this essay will address (OP 82). Before turning to the birds themselves, however, the poem’s title suggests a less obvious context, by way of an issue of nomenclature familiar to botanists, and to many students of nineteenth-century American literature too. There is an evident awkwardness in talking about ‘owl’s clover’ in the singular, just as there is an awkwardness in talking about grass in the singular: both use a grammatical singular to refer to plural or collective plants. Moreover, even though grass is a rhizomic perennial and owl’s clover a seeded annual, in both cases naming an individual plant requires the addition of some other word, such as a ‘stalk’ of owl’s clover, and that syntactical awkwardness points us to the precedent of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. For Whitman, that syntactic glitch was not just an opportunity to pun on a term for the pages of his book, but also a meaningful way of referring both to a broad democratic collective and also to its particular members. For Stevens, however, no such differentiation occurs. Owl’s Clover signals its profound interest in collectivity from the very start, by refusing to qualify its botanical collective with any similar marker of individual differentiation.
The problem with Whitman’s botanical metaphor is that it is not quite dynamic enough for Stevens’s conception of a liberal society in more rapid and permanent flux, and for which the title of Owl’s Clover introduces a different metaphor: the bird in flight. Given the relentless references to birds in this poem, it becomes clear that Stevens actually has the entire flock of birds in mind, for which the owl is just an owlishly pedantic guide, though also, perhaps, a slyly self-deprecating disguise for the poet himself. The entire poem assembles a motley collection of doves, peacocks, ducks, buzzards, crows, cocks and even locusts and bees in a poetic flock that is just as conspicuous as the statue in this poem. Leaderless to human eyes, but also, seemingly, mystically well coordinated, the flock of birds is the poem’s best metaphor for a highly idealized liberal society, in which individual decisions, unguided by any central authority, lead nonetheless to a social order that is eminently fluid, and also aesthetically beautiful. Indeed, the title of the poem can be read as attempting to shift from a Whitmanian conception of democratic pluralism rooted in the ground, to a more dynamic and abstract conception of it whirling dynamically overhead. Moreover, all of these birds are modern substitutes for the ur-bird of Romantic poetry, the Keatsian nightingale, which flies alone and awakens the dreamy imagination within the dark obscurity of sleep. That, however, is no longer an option for Stevens, for some droll clerk in Owl’s Clover informs us, ‘We regret we have no nightingale’ (OP 96). Just as Stevens replaces Whitman’s rooted Romanticism with a modernist idiom permanently in flight, so too he corrects Keats’s purely private imagination with this more motley, collective and external display.
Owl’s Clover is itself a motley collection, divided as it is into five separate poems, which are in turn divided into multiple sections. The ambiguity about the relationship between these various sections is surely a formal expression of the issues it raises about the social relation of individuals. Through those five poems, Owl’s Clover engages and discards a wide range of subjects related to the Great Depression, the social unrest of the 1930s, the growing power of communism in politics and art, and even Italian imperialism in Africa, making it by far Stevens’s broadest canvas. As the poem tries to find some meaningful relation between art and these turbulent times, it circles around possible responses, opens and reopens discussions, changes its mind, and in the end, leaves readers with rather more questions than answers. It is, in that way, entirely characteristic of a poet always resistant to final answers and polemical stances. Nonetheless, in due course both communism and fascism come in for harsh critiques, the first maligned as culturally impoverishing and mechanically dehumanizing; the second exposed as a romantic rationale for violent imperialism. Between those two extremes, Owl’s Clover attempts to articulate a liberal alternative, imperfect to be sure, but oddly grounded in the impersonal and highly dynamic sociability that corporate suretyship was making possible.
Stevens attends to the social most overtly in two places in Owl’s Clover, the passages on the celestial paramours from the second poem, ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue’, and the passages by and about the Bulgar in the fourth poem, ‘A Duck for Dinner’. The second of these two poems, as we will see, tempers, modifies and even corrects the first, which contains Stevens’s most idealizing and optimistic conception of the sociable flock. In ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue’, the celestial paramours arrive as a counter-weight to Burnshaw’s caricature of communist dogmatism. Where he issues doctrinaire pronouncements, ‘bare and blunt’ (OP 80), they ‘chant sibilant requiems’ to the statue at the center of Owl’s Clover (OP 79). And yet, from the start their lush aestheticism is as suspect as Burnshaw’s cold decrees, for they ‘Bring down from nowhere nothing’s wax-like blooms’, and their ‘lullaby’ is likened to ‘porcelain’, frequently a marker of sterile beauty for Stevens (OP 79). In that way, the paramours become both the opposites and the doubles of the communist Burnshaw, for eventually they emerge as moping nostalgics, as obsessed with a utopia they locate in the past as Burnshaw is with the post-revolutionary utopia imagined in the future. The problem with both is that they cannot bear to live in the complex and richly unfolding present, and the narrator admonishes the mournful paramours that ‘the birds / Of chaos are not always sad nor lost / In melancholy distances’ (OP 82). In learning not to think of the present as a falling away from a past perfection, the paramours learn a lesson close to Stevens’s heart: ‘It is only enough / To live incessantly in change’ (OP 82). The birds of chaos, moreover, are part of a human flock as well, for in this poem two nearly identical references to ‘ploughmen, peacocks, doves alike’ associate proletarian workers specifically with birds (OP 80). ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue’ thus constitutes a homage to directionless change, conceived neither as progress toward a utopian future nor as decay from a utopian past. The speaker consequently advises the paramours that ‘change / Is constant’ (OP 80), that time is ‘a moving chaos that never ends’ (OP 82), and most importantly, that ‘change composes, too’ (OP 82).
This homage to change is a preliminary attempt to imagine human collectives as ‘spectacular flocks’ too, composed out of a ‘chaos’ that is in turn born ‘of archaic change’ (OP 82). And it is at precisely this point that Stevens, admonishing the paramours, calls the resulting assembly a ‘drastic community’, as he imagines the flock taking flight:
Shall you,
Then, fear a drastic community evolved
From the whirling, slowly and by trial; or fear
Men gathering for a mighty flight of men,
An abysmal migration into a possible blue? (OP 82)
The product of evolution, ‘slowly and by trial’, rather than revolution, the community is ‘drastic’ in the fullest sense of its Greek root, denoting activity. However, this grand and heroic adventure embodies a very traditional conception of liberal society too, from the egalitarianism of the leaderless flock, to its spontaneously generated internal order. Even before the ‘mighty flight of men’, the speaker of the fourth section of ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue’ had said:
If ploughmen, peacocks, doves alike
In vast disorder live in the ruins, free,
The charts destroyed, even disorder may,
So seen, have an order of its own, a peace
Not now to be perceived yet order’s own. (OP 80)
The ‘ruins’ are the broken forms of a past, which need not be nostalgically reconstructed, and the ‘charts destroyed’ the equally obliterated communist map toward a perfect future. The dynamic life that goes on amidst the ruins of the past, and in the absence of a map of the road to utopia, is thus a richly mixed condition of constant alteration. And yet the ‘disorder’ that is also ‘order’s own’ seems to refer precisely to that laissez-faire magic by which the disorderly interactions of otherwise self-regulating individuals generate the best possible society for all.
Although the metaphor of self-organizing animal collectives seems not to have been favored by classical liberal theorists (likely because animal intelligence involves too little rational choice) flocks and swarms have enjoyed a recent resurgence in a wide range of disciplines, from emergence theory, to information technology and media studies, to Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s political theory of a globalized ‘multitude’.17 Across the political spectrum, from Marxist anarchists, to neoliberals, to techno-utopianists, the metaphor of the flock promises that the conduct of a very large number of people might be ideally coordinated in a de-centralized, egalitarian and, perhaps even democratic fashion. Stevens, one suspects, would have been enthusiastic about all of these ideas. But missing from most of them are precisely the warm, personal bonds of trust that prove far too inefficient to structure anything as fast-moving as a flock of birds. In fact, Stevens seems to make a trade-off that many contemporary thinkers continue to approve, by exchanging the dense and complex networks of interpersonal trust for a far simpler set of rules that might nonetheless mobilize extremely active groups. Corporate suretyship allowed a society to work more like a flock, because it permitted its members to dispense with the slow and burdensome work of fashioning and maintaining bonds of trust, while actually gaining speed, efficiency and mobility. So, while the flock of birds holds together with what seems to be magical coordination, no bird is much obligated to any other, except in the matter of staying out of the other’s way.18
What Stevens seems to imagine, then, is something like the ecstatic absorption of the individual into a collective that becomes all the more appealing because its members are so little obligated to one another. The whirling flock generates incredible dynamism of action by sacrificing the ponderously personal, and so necessarily limited, network of intimate trust relationships. At his most optimistic in Owl’s Clover, then, Stevens seems to celebrate this as an eminently worthy trade, for through it, a community can grow ever more drastic the slighter it renders its bonds of trust. For a poet who genuinely did prize privacy, interiority and solitude, trading social intimacy for collective action promised the best of both worlds: social cohesion, but with an enormous yield of privacy as well. This is, indeed, what corporate suretyship promises too, for by structuring a large system of hedge-bets against betrayal, companies like Stevens’s facilitated the flow of capital to those who suffered losses, but without entangling them in personal relationships defined by trust. As we will see shortly, however, Stevens also imagines a darker side to this vivid fantasy, for if the individual could be absorbed ecstatically into the collective without having to sacrifice his privacy, the collective might also be compressed into something like a monstrously corporate body. As we turn to ‘A Duck for Dinner’, the fourth poem of Owl’s Clover, in which the bird has come down from the sky and is cooked and dressed for the table, we can see that Stevens also recognizes the limitations of his drastic community, and even the horror of having to be one of its members.
In ‘Surety and Fidelity Claims’, published one year after Owl’s Clover, Stevens provides a very different metaphor for a collective made up expressly of the claimants in surety cases. We can hear echoes of the ‘slime of men’ or the ‘sudden clouds of faces and arms’ from Ideas of Order behind it, but it becomes more fleshy too. In a revision of the metaphor of the flock, Stevens says of his profession, ‘You see surprisingly few people’ and as a result, ‘After twenty-five years or more of that sort of thing’, the claims man ‘finds it difficult sometimes to distinguish himself from the papers he handles, and comes almost to believe that he and his papers constitute a single creature, consisting principally of hands and eyes: lots of hands and lots of eyes’ (OP 239). Like a flock, this ‘single creature’, which is also a ‘singular creature’, is a seemingly autonomous being, but in ‘Surety and Fidelity Claims’ it no longer exhibits the flock’s ideal combination of individual autonomy and collective grace. Instead, Stevens imagines a collective collapsed horribly into a monstrous and bureaucratic singularity.
The ‘papers’ that make up this paper monster surely consist of surety contracts, composed as it is principally of ‘eyes’ that appraise the agreement’s terms, and ‘hands’ that sign on the dotted line. To see this paper monster as made out of contracts is really to see the classical liberal conception of self-organizing interpersonal agreements radically altered by the provisions of corporate suretyship. The impersonality of the flock, which had seemed to be its cardinal virtue, here registers as rather lonely for a claims man who sees ‘very few people’ at all, and appears as a caricature of the dull and plodding bureaucrat. Isolating and abstracting, the ‘singular creature’ thus has very little in common with the rapturous flocks from Owl’s Clover, which had seemed to idealize a certain conception of liberal affiliation. Here, in contrast, Stevens actually seems to lament the legalized and financialized relationships that subsume the claims man entirely, but without involving him meaningfully with anyone else.
Crucially, a similar corporeal monster appears in Owl’s Clover, and functions as a counter-metaphor that balances out the idealized flocks from earlier in the poem. In the fourth poem of Owl’s Clover, ‘A Duck for Dinner’, Stevens more directly addresses the precise shape of the social body, as another character, the Bulgar, imagines an entire social body patched together from immigrant parts. He says of the masses:
At least conceive what these hands from Sweden mean,
These English noses and edged, Italian eyes,
Massed for a head they mean to make for themselves,
From which their grizzled voice will speak and be heard. (OP 91)
Later, those same people appear dressed together in equally motley garb: ‘watch-chains aus Wien’, ‘Balkan shoes’, ‘bonnets from Moldau’, and ‘beards / From the steppes’ (OP 92–3). First, the workers of the world unite physiognomically in a creature that is both monstrous and possibly miscegenous, and then that social body takes on the motley fashions of Europe, as it tries to fashion a single, serviceable head. ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue’ had referred to Percy Shelley twice in the context of ‘poets’ politics’ – presumably to mark their role as unacknowledged legislators of the world – but here it is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that informs Stevens’s conception of the social body (OP 80). For the Bulgar, the question that arises is the question of this assembly’s more than bodily unity: ‘Is each man thinking his separate thoughts or, for once, / Are all men thinking together as one, thinking / Each other’s thoughts, thinking a single thought’? (OP 93). Like the ‘singular creature’ of ‘Surety and Fidelity Claims’, this conglomeration of immigrants is a composite body, crudely stitched together out of component parts. The point, then, is that these two metaphors for society are, in fact, versions of one another. The monster is an inverted flock, with the ideal dynamism of the whirling masses now transformed into a crude corporeal assemblage. If the flock was a highly idealized version of American liberal society at large, then these composite monsters indicate a much less optimistic view of what American society was in the process of becoming.
A great deal hinges on how we read the Bulgar in this section. He may be a figure for immigrant optimism about gradual class mobility and assimilation, but he also may be ‘a kind of avuncular and practical tradesman socialist’, as Robert Emmett Monroe has argued.19 He certainly seems to prefer evolution to revolution, though it is not quite clear whether his willingness to let the people rise ‘an inch at a time’ represents commitment or quietism, sound strategy or blithe disengagement (OP 91). We might note that the political orientation of an inter-war Bulgarian would be anything but obvious, as that nation lurched from agrarian socialism, to moderate republicanism, and finally to alliances with fascist neighbors during a decade of rapid and unstable change. However, the obscurity of the Bulgar’s politics, in contrast to Burnshaw’s or Basilewsky’s, suggests that Stevens might not despise him as much as Monroe thinks, and indeed, the Bulgar might not be closely associated with communism at all. In fact, there is some evidence that the Bulgar is a version of Stevens himself. The Bulgar shares Stevens’s well known gourmandism, and when he says that ‘After pineapple with fresh mint / We went to walk in the park’, he sounds like nothing so much as one of Wallace Stevens’s letters (OP 91). Moreover, the Bulgar is the only figure in all of Owl’s Clover who speaks inside quotation marks. The other voices blend with a speaker loosely identifiable with Stevens, though constantly shifting between various ironized positions. However, if we are tempted to read the Bulgar’s quoted speech as indicating special distance from Stevens, it can just as plausibly be read as a sign that he is the only figure trusted to speak entirely for himself. His quoted speech is thus better seen as a marker of privilege, and is distancing only in the sense that it demarcates the other side of a conversation that Stevens is having with himself.
In fact, by the end of ‘A Duck for Dinner’, the monstrous combination of the immigrant masses turns out to be a preliminary version of the more subtle combination of the Bulgar with Stevens. In the closing lines of that poem, the voice shifts suddenly into the first person plural: ‘We walk / In the park’ (OP 96), which echoes the Bulgar’s opening quoted phrase, ‘We went to walk in the park’ (OP 91). Thus does the voice that nominally belongs to Stevens learn to talk like the Bulgar, and vice versa, so that the speech inside and outside of the quotation marks comes to say approximately the same thing. More importantly, both learn to talk in the first person plural, from a position of no longer purely individual authority: ‘We walk’, ‘We regret’, ‘We must’, ‘we find’ (OP 96). In these closing lines, then, Stevens and the Bulgar really are ‘thinking / Each other’s thoughts, thinking a single thought’, as the poem works out a grammatical compounding of separate individuals into a newly plural whole. Having split some of his sensibilities into a character he could quote at one remove, Stevens finally stages their recombination back into a plural self. Evidently, then, the combination of Stevens and the Bulgar replays the formation of that monstrous social body whose final accomplishment, as the Bulgar described it, was the articulation of a single ‘grizzled voice’ that can ‘speak and be heard’, and which the poem literalizes by its final embrace of the first person plural (OP 91).
Both ‘Surety and Fidelity Claims’ and ‘A Duck For Dinner’ thus imagine Stevens’s own absorption into a monstrous collective, rather than distantly observing that experience by others. The singular subjectivity that dominates so many of Stevens’s poems can seem hermetically isolated from social experience, but by the mind 1930s, Stevens appears to recognize that self as compounded from other and different selves as well. Stevens may have had trouble distinguishing himself from the ‘singular creature’ of ‘Surety and Fidelity Claims’, but when he says that it has ‘lots of hands and lots of eyes’, he surely refers not only to its organs of visual perception, but also to its constitution from first-person singular pronouns: not lots of ‘eyes’ but lots of ‘I’s. If Stevens’s flock idealizes sociability as a minimally obligating individualism, his monsters suggest the opposite, the saturation of the individual by a sociability that never can be entirely escaped.
In moving from the ‘drastic community’ to the ‘singular creature’, from the flock to the monster, we can see that the conditions of corporate suretyship produce not just new kinds of highly individualistic societies, but also new kinds of plural selves. The entire sophisticated financial system, of which suretyship was just one part, thus should not be seen simply as degrading or reifying inter-personal trust relations, as Stevens’s Marxist critics might argue; instead, the financial system also gave rise to a new kind of self that can in no way be reconciled with earlier versions of liberal individualism. Ironically, the thinning out of the social bonds of trust and obligation actually expose selfhood as all the more socially constituted, such that every singular creature now betrays a plural self smuggled within. This leads to a rather jarring conclusion, at least for Stevens. The most extreme versions of turn-of-the-century liberal individualism, with their most isolating and privatizing conceptions of selfhood, turn out to have been fashioned from sophisticated social technologies like those of corporate suretyship. In Stevens’s formulation, then, individuals are made out of other people, stitched together like so many Frankenstein monsters. As a result, the significance of the title of this poem in Owl’s Clover becomes clearer. The ‘Duck for Dinner’ is the flock internalized, literally ingested and turned into the flesh of a body that easily forgets the sources of its constitution. Indeed, the ‘Duck for Dinner’ cleverly reverses the ‘mighty flight of men’ from earlier in the poem, for in the second of these phrases, individuals make up a group in the most familiar way, but in the first, a representative of the flock literally fills up the individual. Against those who have seen Stevens fleeing the social by retreating to interiority and aestheticism, it would seem that in the most profound way possible, he returns to the social in the end, and even grounds a revised and socially embedded individualism upon it.
We make a mistake, then, if we see Stevens’s admittedly hermetic poetry as an affirmation of classical liberalism, entirely retrograde and thoroughly committed to earlier and more romantic conceptions of the self. On the contrary, having dismissed the universalized ‘abstract man’ of the eighteenth-century, and the rugged and self-reliant ‘Buckskin’ of the nineteenth-century, Owl’s Clover attempts to describe the liberal self anew as it was emerging in the twentieth century. To be sure, there are other sources of similar thinking, especially in the social liberalism of John Dewey, the social pragmatism of George Herbert Mead, or even the pluralism of William James, who once described ‘the collection of our several inner lives’, as ‘the nearest approach to an absolute “many” that we can conceive’.20 No matter how influenced Stevens was by pragmatist philosophy, however, he seems to have derived his own related views of social selfhood from his experience with corporate suretyship, and thereby made James’s rather abstract theory of the self into a more culturally and economically specific critique.
He also made that theory more ominous, for none of the pragmatists share Stevens’s sense that the social self is as monstrous as this. That monstrosity, however, does not result merely from the individual’s contamination by the social, as if it simply registered the loss of some pure and irreducible individuality. On the contrary, the monstrosity seems specifically related to a lack of meaningful relation between constituent parts. Owl’s Clover finally recognizes that people are not made out of people after all, but out of entire societies, in which case it matters a great deal what kind of sociability is in there. And the kind of sociability in these monsters is precisely the highly abstract sociability of the flock, on which they are nourished, and from which they are produced. The problem with Stevens’s plural selves, and so the source of their evident monstrosity, is thus not their fundamentally social constitution, but the fact that their society is an impoverished one, crudely combining individual parts that relate poorly to one another. What activates the flock, deforms the monster. The ideal sociability of the avian collective is, in the long run, also the source of the individual’s crude constitution.
The implications for society at large are clear. Social technologies like corporate suretyship can foster exciting new social dynamics that leave ever greater room for individual action, but in due course they give rise to more damaged and deformed individuals too. This is a problem that Stevens – ever unwilling to hazard final answers or permanent solutions – identifies without solving. Surely he recognized what is even more apparent today, which is that there can be no going back to a society structured entirely by personal bonds of trust without serious political and economic changes, sacrifices in speed and efficiency, and the scaling down of an increasingly globalized society. In characterizing the self as a grotesque congeries, however, Stevens was being remarkably candid in diagnosing new pathologies of liberal selfhood still emerging in the early twentieth century, and in presaging the arrival of others still lying ahead.
1 James Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
2 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 1998), 2–3. I am grateful to my colleague Mark Netzloff for bringing Muldrew’s work to my attention, and for clarifying the early modern culture of suretyship. On the credit economy’s relation to literature more generally, see Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
3 Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York: Vintage, 1989), 82. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as OP.
4 In The Merchant of Venice Antonio agrees to serve as surety in a credit contract between Bassanio and Shylock. Portia informs him, ‘Then you shall be [Bassanio’s] surety’ (V 1.254).
5 On the expansion of corporate suretyship that occurred as Stevens’s career matured, see Filreis, Modernism, 80–88.
6 This has occasionally been a source of confusion for Stevens critics interested in his insurance career. For instance, Joseph Harrington has argued, ‘From the point of view of the insurance business, each instance can be abstracted into an actuarial table and a uniform premium affixed’, and so ‘we are all equivalent and abstract individuals in both liberal theory and in Stevens’s poetic’ (108). See Harrington, ‘Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of National Insurance’, American Literature 67, no. 1 (March 1995), 95–114.
7 See Edward C. Lunt, Surety Bonds: Nature, Functions, Underwriting Requirements (New York: Ronald Press, 1922), iv.
8 Edward C. Lunt, ‘Fidelity Insurance and Suretyship’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 161 (May 1932), 108. Lunt is referring to a ‘blanket bond’ in this discussion.
9 Lewis Nichols, ‘Talk with Mr. Stevens’, The New York Times Book Review, 3 October 1954, 3.
10 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1982), 473. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CP.
11 Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1984), 190.
12 Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1982), 26 and 28. For Luhmann’s later and more complex account of risk, see also Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory, trans. Rhodes Barrett (Berlin; New York: de Gruyter, 1993).
13 Luhmann, Trust and Power, 55.
14 Collins Graham, ‘Danger of Personal Sureties’, Live Articles on Suretyship: A Series of Articles Reprinted from the Monthly Suretyship Supplement of The Weekly Underwriter (New York: Underwriter, 1918), 22. Four of the first five articles in this collection address the dangers of personal suretyship and the superiority of corporate suretyship in one form or another.
15 Stanley Burnshaw, ‘Turmoil in the Middle Ground’, Collected Poems and Selected Prose (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 354–7; originally published in New Masses 17, no. 1 (October 1, 1935): 41–2.
16 Joseph Riddell has said that the poem’s title ‘appears to be a metaphor for the reality [Stevens] found in the depression years—violence and poverty and anger, ugly but nevertheless real’. See Riddell, ‘“Poets’ Politics”: Wallace Stevens’s “Owl’s Clover”’, Modern Philology 56, no. 2 (Nov. 1958): 121.
17 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005). For related views from very different political sectors, see also Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008); Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: the New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
18 Craig Reynolds’s computerized flock simulator, ‘Boids’, was an early and especially influential demonstration of how complexly mobile particle systems can be organized through just a few simple principles internalized by each operating member. See C.W. Reynolds, ‘Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model’, Computer Graphics 21, no. 4 (1987): 25–34.
19 Robert Emmett Monroe, ‘Figuration and Society in “Owl’s Clover”’, Wallace Stevens Journal 13, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 138.
20 William James, Pragmatism, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 72.