Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955.

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JOAN RICHARDSON'S Wallace Stevens: The Later Years is a fascinating book thrown slightly askew by heroworship and idiosyncrasy. Miss Richardson earned her doctorate in 1977 with a thesis on Stevens, and has since devoted her professional life to his writings, which is just what Stevens did not do, being an insurance executive who wrote some of twentieth-century America's greatest poetry in his spare time.

But Stevens has certainly not consumed Miss Richardson's individuality. On the contrary, nothing could be more personal than her way of writing what is supposed to be a straightforward biography. She gives, for example, virtually no space at all to Stevens's years with the Hartford Livestock Insurance Company, though anecdotes about his business methods and high stature within his profession are there for the taking in books she constantly refers to.

On the other hand, the smallest incident concerning Stevens's wife, Elsie, or his daughter, Holly, galvanizes her. Miss Richardson has no particular feminist bias, but she has absolute sympathy with Elsie, who was so beautiful she was chosen to model for the Liberty-head dime and the walkingLiberty half-dollar, yet was not Stevens's intellectual equal and grew sullen, reserved, and eccentric as their life together went on. So intensely does Miss Richardson present Elsie's various griefs and Stevens's failures to make contact with her that the reader expects the marriage to collapse at any moment. It is only when Stevens, near death from cancer, is shown taking care of his wife after her stroke that we fully realize that Miss Richardson has let her empathy with Elsie warp the story she meant to tell, and made a distant husband with a difficult wife seem like a monster with his victim.

Once she has reported Stevens's death, however, she spares not a word more for wife or daughter. For it is Stevens whom Miss Richardson really loves, and whom (though she speaks in a calmer tone about him) she distorts as lovers do.

When she talks about Stevens's poetry, she is at her best. She shows how he picked up from his mother the habit of jumping chaotically from idea to idea, first in letters, and later in his poetry. She demonstrates how knowing what was happening to Stevens at the time he wrote a particular poem can almost always make the poem clearer.

At the beginning of The Later Years, she performs a brilliant exegesis of "Sea Surface Full of Clouds"-apparently a landscape poem, describing "that November off Tehuantepec" in five different ways, but really a tribute to the vacation trip on which the Stevenses' daughter was conceived. While John Crowe Ransom was celebrating "Sea Surface" as a perfect example of "pure poetry," Elsie was complaining to her husband that it revealed too much about their private life. As Miss Richardson, quoting from the poem, explains,

Spooning and crooning one night when the "slopping of the sea grew still," Wallace and Elsie, like "the sea/ And heaven rolled as one and from the two/ Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue." . . . For her, who had experienced with him what had happened "In that November off Tehuantepec," the "true subject" was blatant. She could not know that others could not see it through the bea"poetry of the subject" he had woven. No wonder she accused him of "adulteries," of betrayal.

Joan Richardson's description of Stevens's last years and her exegesis of the poetry of those years is also brilliant and compelling. But no one is always at her best. Miss Richardson has been a scholar for a long time, and she sometimes writes like this: "In 'A Golden Woman in a Silver Mirror' -a brilliant figure for the secondary perfection of the imperfection of the poems he now composed as reflected against his intention-he masterfully pointed to his weakness."

Worse, she describes Stevens's quest for the "supreme fiction"-a myth that could substitute for the old Biblical certitudes and satisfy even people who knew it was not true-without any of the humor or humility Stevens brought to his search. He titled a twenty-line poem, "How to Live. What to Do." That was a joke, of course. Miss Richardson quotes the title at least twenty times, always with the implication that Stevens was seriously on the track of a solution to these problems. In fact, he recorded in a letter that he wrote at night while tired from work and that he was "at best an erratic and inconsequential thinker." Miss Richardson summarizes his speculations with the vague reverence of a religious adept, implying at one point that if more people understood Stevens's "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," it would be impossible for another Hitler to arise. Immediately afterward, she writes, "One could spend, and many have spent, countless hours and pages explicating 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.' . . . It is a noble exercise, though it never really goes anywhere, and that is precisely the point."

The point is that sometimes Miss Richardson's emotional exaltation leads her to write nonsense. But what is done out of love occurs beyond good and bad writing. Readers who finish this book, which is crisper and more interesting than Miss Richardson's volume on Stevens's early years, will understand Wallace Stevens better than they have ever done before.