Key West Literary Seminar

The Australian Pines at Ft. Zachary Taylor, Key West. Photo by onwatersedge.

Tennessee Williams would turn 100 this weekend, were he still with us. A happy birthday to his memory, with thanks to the good people at saveourpines.com for passing along the following from a 1953 letter to Maria St. Just née Britneva:

“A few last golden days in the Key West studio! It is so lovely! A sky-light with delicate bamboo curtain, palms, banana trees and fern-like Australian pines through the windows in all four walls, a Japanese lantern over my head with glass-pendants that tinkle in the constant trade-winds, a silver ice-bucket, gin, and oranges for pauses in occupation. Wonderful sounds, the palms and banana trees make, like ladies running barefooted in silk skirts downstairs, a constant flickering of light and shadow, a table that’s five feet long, theatrical posters stuck all over the lemon yellow walls, my own bathroom, a comfortable little bed, driftwood, a fan that belonged to Hart Crane, shells, solitude, peace!”

The 5 pm update on Tropical Depression Three shows the forecast models in agreement.
Among the little joys of life in the subtropics are the less-than-serious storm events the hurricane season can bring. Above, you see Tropical Depression Three, which may mature into Tropical Storm Bonnie as it enters the Florida Straits tomorrow. This means wind– maybe as much as 50 knots, but likely closer to 30– and at least a couple of inches of rain as the storm approaches, passes over, and leaves the Florida Keys tomorrow afternoon and night.

Here on the vulnerable and enduring Littoral, we keep Elizabeth Bishop’s early Key West poems with our survival gear. She knew how to ride out a storm:

     It is marvellous to wake up together
     At the same minute; marvellous to hear
     The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
     To feel the air suddenly clear
     As if electricity had passed through it
     From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
     All over the roof the rain hisses,
     And below, the light falling of kisses.

     And from the same simplified point of view
     Of night and lying flat on one’s back
     All things might change equally easily,
     Since always to warn us there must be these black
     Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
     The world might change to something quite different,
     As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
     Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

Untitled Elizabeth Bishop poem from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, edited by Alice Quinn, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2006.

UPDATE: 7/23/2010 4:00 p.m.: What did become Tropical Storm Bonnie turned out to be even less than less-than-serious. As the poorly-organized and fast-moving system scurried across the Florida mainland, Key West saw an ordinary summer day: 80-something, breezy, sun, and clouds.

As promised, and right on schedule: the Royal Poincianas all over the island are now in full bloom.

The Royal Poinciana trees have just begun to set out their flowers. By the end of the month, the entire canopies will be full of the bright red or orange blossoms.

Elizabeth Bishop was 26 years old when she first visited Key West in 1938. Her letters from that year, especially those to her friend and mentor Marianne Moore, are filled with descriptions of the subtropical island’s flora and fauna.

Here’s an excerpt from one of them:

May 5, 1938

It is spring here now and the Royal Poinciana trees are in bloom all along the streets– brilliant flame color or dark red. Also a large tree– Spanish lime?– that sheds in some places fine green powder all over the streets, very pretty. Jasmine makes the whole town smell sweet at night– and all the cats have kittens. There has been the ugliest mother cat I have ever seen, and two kittens, in the yard of the little house we’re buying, for five days. I don’t want them– they are crosseyed, mangy, and mixtures of white, black, orange, gray, and tiger– but they are growing so thin I couldn’t stand it, so I took over a bottle of milk, and now they obviously consider themselves mine. The mother looks just like Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker.

Though 72 years have altered Bishop’s Key West immeasurably, she’d still recognize the house she bought that year at 624 White Street, which remains miraculously untouched. And she’d know the fine green Spanish lime pollen dusting the cars and sidewalks outside our office, the red Poinciana blossoms which have just begun to open, and the jasmine and jasmine-like perfume of the 21st-century night.

That’s Ike at 4:15 local time, with the eye just north of Pinar del Rio in western Cuba. Wind speeds increased here in Key West throughout the morning and early afternoon, with sustained winds of around 40 mph and a gust of 60 mph being recorded at Key West airport between one and two o’clock. Most of the island lost power during this apparent peak of intensity, but it has returned to old town by now. There is evidence of minor flooding along the south side of the island, from the southernmost point to Louie’s Backyard to the Casa Marina, but it doesn’t appear that significant damage will result. We watched a few surfers near the pier at the western end of the Casa Marina, and got to thinking about Wallace Stevens, who used to stay at the grand hotel during his many visits to Key West in the 1920s and 1930s. Stevens had a fetish for things tropical; his relish for this sort of event could move him to delightful gibberish:

     THE SEARCH FOR SOUND FREE FROM MOTION

     The world lives as you live,
     Speaks as you speak, a creature that
     Repeats its vital words, yet balances
     The syllable of a syllable.


From Parts of a World, as printed in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, a Borzoi Book by Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

That’s Hurricane Ike about an hour ago, hopefully as close as he’ll come to Key West. Gusts woke us twice or three times in the night, but a look at the weather observations from Key West airport this morning reveals we’ve so far been spared even tropical-storm-force winds. All together, then, a preliminary sigh of relief. A cursory walk around old town this morning (it is a little windy for bicycle riding)– from the library to the waterfront– found little damage but leaves, flowers, and a few key limes littering the streets. Harpoon Harry’s is closed, but Pepe’s, dependable since the days of Hemingway, is open; we had breakfast at the open-air bar. The boats in the harbor are rocking, and the wind is humming-howling through their rigging. The gulf remains beneath the boardwalk where it belongs, although the rumor by radio and bar patrons is that the surf is up and in the streets on the ocean side of the island. Would that our friends and neighbors in Cuba, the Turks and Caicos, and Haiti had it so good.

Elizabeth Bishop knew how to react to storm-events such as this. In her letters from Key West, she writes of “fringes of hurricanes,” and “a small tornado … nothing of any consequence.” She knew to play it safe– as we should until Ike has certainly passed. In the untitled poem which follows, a twenty-something Elizabeth adumbrates the significant pleasures to be found indoors in such a storm:

     It is marvellous to wake up together
     At the same minute; marvellous to hear
     The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
     To feel the air suddenly clear
     As if electricity had passed through it
     From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
     All over the roof the rain hisses,
     And below, the light falling of kisses.

     And from the same simplified point of view
     Of night and lying flat on one’s back
     All things might change equally easily,
     Since always to warn us there must be these black
     Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
     The world might change to something quite different,
     As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
     Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.


Untitled Elizabeth Bishop poem from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, edited by Alice Quinn, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2006.

So you’re home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready
To feast . . . Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it

From Wallace Stevens’s poem “Certain Phenomena of Sound,” from Transport to Summer. The mangos are from Margaret Street.

Wallace Stevens began visiting South Florida and the Keys in the early 1920s with his good friend Judge Arthur Powell. Stevens was a director at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and these were prinicipally business trips, with a few days added on for pleasure. He was struck by what he found, so different from his New England upbringing, and his experiences here color many of the poems published in his first two books, Harmonium (1923), and Ideas of Order (1936). Stevens’s first extant mention of the place comes in a letter to his wife, the former Elsie Viola Kachel, from Long Key on the tenth of January, 1922. In part, it reads:

Dear Elsie:
…
The contract arrived this morning, but instead of taking tonight’s train for the North I am going to wait until tomorrow night’s which should get me home on Friday night or Saturday morning. … The sea is about fifty feet from the cottage in which I slept last night. This morning I just stepped out doors in my pajamas and used them as a bathing suit, taking a surf-bath. There are no ladies here so that one can do as one pleases. The place is a paradise—midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen. What a fool I should be not to come down here when I can give the results already achieved in return and still have a little fun out of it. I wish you could have come—that you could see how gorgeous it is. We must come together as soon as we can and every winter afterwards. I send you a check to enable you to keep things going until I get back.

With love,   
Wallace

It would be many years before Elsie accompanied Stevens on his annual jaunt to Florida. Stevens liked to do as he pleased, after all.

Quoted from Wallace Stevens’s letter of Tuesday, January 10, 1922, as printed in Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, University of California Press, 1966.