I suppose that if I ever go to Paris the first person I meet will be myself
since I have been there in one way or another for so long […].
— Wallace Stevens, letter of February 10, 1950

1So we’re in the final days of December 1952 and we’re paying a visit to the heart of Paris: the Sainte-Chapelle on the Île de la Cité in the middle of the Seine. It’s the most centrally located space in the city that is devoted to aesthetic sensation and spiritual introspection, a building whose stained-glass windows perfectly capture the love affair with light in la ville lumière. The 73-year-old Wallace Stevens would be entirely at home here—chez lui. Should we be at all surprised to see him sitting there along the west wall? He’s all by himself; his daughter Holly, his usual companion on trips away from Hartford, has apparently been left behind to look after her mother. But if we can’t really be surprised to see Stevens finally paying a long-delayed visit to Paris, can we therefore also predict what he will do next? Does he just sit there, passively meditating in his three-piece suit while the winter sun breaks through the clouds and covers him in the most glorious reds and blues? How does he respond to that magical burst of light and color? He’s away from the office and hasn’t told anyone of his trip, which he seems to be undertaking solely for his personal satisfaction during the Christmas holiday season. He is sure to be unknown to anybody around here, and in any case, he’s now in that favorite realm of his where his aesthetic imagination has been kindled and all outcome is unpremeditated. So he does what nobody expects of a portly tourist who looks so much like an elderly businessman: he sinks down on his knees and stretches out his arms, as if he were waiting to receive stigmata from the stained-glass windows. Then, just as laconically, he gets up again as if nothing had happened. He dusts his pants and mumbles an improvised aphorism to himself: “A little kneeling is a dangerous thing.”1

2What we’ve just witnessed, through a brief time warp, is the beginning of one of the queerest literary visits in the history of Paris.

***

3A decade earlier, in 1942, when Stevens concluded his “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” by writing a sentence repeatedly cited in this collection— “They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne” (CPP, 351)—he couldn’t have anticipated how precisely the word straight would come to signify over the years in relation to one of its antonyms, queer. Not that Stevens himself was averse to calling things queer.2 Think of “The Rock,” where it figures in the striking phrase “a queer assertion of humanity” (CPP, 445). But perhaps a more fitting teaser for my topic in this chapter is in the uncollected poem “Nuns Painting Water-Lilies,” where Stevens empathizes so strongly with the Monet-mimicking nuns that he tries to speak from “Inside [their] queer chapeaux” (CPP, 457). From this perspective, he regards the world around him as alternately “unpredictable,” “odd,” “lurching,” “swerving,” and “tilting” (CPP, 456)—all in a text that insists on mixing in bits of French as well, including a “fraicheur, inaccessible / Or accessible only in the most furtive fiction” (CPP, 457). The access to a queer fraîcheur through a furtive fiction happens to be also at the heart of the case study that follows.

4If the learned professors at the Sorbonne were destined to get his “Notes” straight, we have to conclude that Stevens thought of them as somehow queer. Yet if he couldn’t have anticipated fully our general associations with the straight/queer opposition today (despite the availability of sexual innuendo in usages of the term “queer” during his lifetime), even less could he have foreseen how such associations would help to frame a nearly thirty-page-long narrative poem composed in 1987 by a fellow American poet, Richard Howard, who recorded in it his personal encounter with Stevens in Paris at the end of 1952, starting with the scene at the Sainte-Chapelle.

5Howard’s surprising testimony, more than thirty years after the supposed facts, is itself refracted in a very queer manner. Instead of being a largely documentary recording of the encounter that tries to follow the straight lines of Baron Haussmann’s grands boulevards, it takes the form of an unpredictably roaming epistolary exchange in the early days of 1953. The exchange consists of three letters by a certain Ivo and two by the 23-year-old Richard Howard himself, who was at the time studying at—of all places—the Sorbonne. The five letters alternate (Ivo-Richard-Ivo-Richard-Ivo) and are all addressed to a mutual friend by the name of Roderick, who has just returned home to his mother in Schenectady. To complicate matters further, Richard signs off his second letter as Papageno, the bird catcher who serves as comic sidekick to the heroic Prince Tamino in Mozart’s Magic Flute—in other words, as the buffo character who occasionally leaps on stage in Stevens’ poetry as well, from “The Comedian as the Letter C” to the final canto of “The Auroras of Autumn” (CPP, 36, 362). The five letters that together compose—but also fracture and undercut—the larger narrative of the poem are written, moreover, not in the kind of metrical convention we’re used to from the history of English poetry, but in the more French tradition of syllabic verse. To be sure, the letter-writing Richard, who figures as the star-struck acolyte (or should I say ephebe?), builds his decasyllabics visually into recognizably Stevensian tercets—left-justified, separated by blank lines, with verse-lines of roughly equal length. By contrast, the arrogant and sarcastic Ivo, who is unimpressed by the unknown visitor and is more interested in debaucheries and camping it up, writes in sinuously connected stanzas of uneven length, though he, too, can’t quite resist the pull of triads. He alternates between hepta-, deca-, and hendecasyllabics, organizing them on the page so that they are stepped back like a reverse staircase.

6Howard first published “Even in Paris” in a double issue of Salmagundi (Fall 1987/Winter 1988). He subsequently turned it into the opening poem of his ninth poetry collection, No Traveller, in 1989, where it is bookended by another long narrative poem, “Oracles”; a set of shorter dramatic meditations is wedged in between. Tellingly, the first of the shorter poems is called “Triangulations.” This method appears to be a favorite practice of Howard’s that is part and parcel of what I’m here calling his queer approach. Upon closer inspection, “Even in Paris” involves a dizzying mixture of at least five kinds of triangulation. First, as we saw, the poem’s narrative emerges through a triangulation between three correspondents, one of whom, Roderick, remains consistently silent, thereby assuming both a ghostly status and a mirror-like function. The concrete portrait of Stevens that is part of this narrative is similarly triangulated through Richard’s depictions, Ivo’s counter-depictions, and the poet’s own, amply quoted monologues (delivered mostly as soliloquies). Because of such triangulations, furthermore, the reader is actively drawn into the signifying process: we can’t just stand aside and watch Mr. Howard expressing his ideas and sentiments about Mr. Stevens in the classic manner of a poetic son addressing his dead father (as in Theodore Roethke’s “A Rouse for Stevens”). Whether we like it or not, we have to become dynamic participants in the act of finding a portrait that will suffice. To arrive at such a portrait, Howard invites us to work through yet another triangulation, this time at the level of poetics: allusively, he places Stevens between two of his great nineteenth-century predecessors from either side of the Atlantic, Charles Baudelaire and Walt Whitman. All this complex staging of poetic interactionism, finally, happens against a larger backdrop—one that triangulates between the past, the present, and the future of poetry as envisaged by Howard at the time of writing in the 1980s.

7With more space than I have here, it would be possible to inquire whether “Even in Paris” is Howard’s own “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” How, one might ask, does Stevens’ insistence on the will “to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else” (CPP, 903), relate to Howard’s seemingly autobiographical testimony? For good measure, one might throw in a few further questions inviting development on a larger scale. How do Howard’s self-conscious depictions of Paris and emblems of Frenchness help him define both Stevens’ and his own poetics? How much of queer history and queer aesthetics do we need to bring in to situate “Even in Paris” adequately within twentieth-century poetry? And how are notions of the body, self, language, and time queered in the course of the text?

8Because this is a tall order for a brief chapter, I will limit myself here to some preliminary explorations accompanying a walk through the poem’s most conspicuous passages.3 So let me start with the question whether Howard’s elaborate invention, stretched over nearly thirty pages, is just a brilliant gimmick or, rather, a potentially central composition in his own search for a supreme fiction. The blurb of the original Knopf edition of No Traveller is disappointingly blunt when it proclaims that Stevens’ “secret visit to the city […] of course never took place.” In a chapter devoted to Howard’s poem in his book Modern Poetry after Modernism, James Longenbach prefers to ignore this spoiler. “Since all of Howard’s poems are accurate,” he writes, “I am tempted to entertain the possibility that the story told in ‘Even in Paris’ might be true […].”4 As Howard is known to be a master of the dramatic monologue, J. D. McClatchy once asked him in a Paris Review interview how much of his material was made up and how much cribbed. Howard responded by saying, “Fortunately, my only answer must be that nothing is made up and nothing cribbed—everything is imagined and everything realized from what I know and have learned.”5 Earlier in the same interview, he explained about another dramatic monologue that writing it had given him “access to my real life, which of course was the life that other people had lived, but which I could perceive as a likely lie.”6 Much remains to be said about the paradoxical authenticity of impersonating others, and how this might be theorized as a historically queer form of identification,7 but for now, let me highlight Howard’s affirmation of “a likely lie,” which sounds like his idiomatic variant of Stevens’ insistence on the will—even the need—to believe in what we know to be a fiction.

9Howard’s belief in a likely lie assumes an extra dimension when we recall that he didn’t write “Even in Paris” in the immediate wake of the supposed encounter in December 1952 and the early days of January 1953, but only by the time Stevens had been dead for more than thirty years. It’s worth reminding ourselves that the volume to which the poem builds the port of entrance, No Traveller, borrows its title from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, in which the Danish prince ponders “The undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.79-80).8 In his reading of the poem, Longenbach draws on a definition of the elegy by Peter Sacks, according to which the purpose of the genre is to “create a believable fiction that returns the dead to us.”9 From this point of view, the “believable fiction” Howard sets up, the “likely lie” he elaborates at length, may be understood as his elegiac attempt to let the phantom of Stevens—himself originally “no traveler”—return to him in those bleak days of the 1980s when Howard had to mourn the demise of so many friends from AIDS. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that one of Howard’s principal motivations for resuscitating Stevens appears to have been the older poet’s ability to speak to the subjects of loss and mourning in ways that might offer a measure of aesthetic consolation. To Longenbach, Howard’s Stevens becomes “the great elegist, the poet of renunciation […]. Howard has invented his Stevens,” Longenbach argues, “not because the story of ‘Even in Paris’ is true or false but because, as the poem’s final line suggests, we have no choice but to ‘make something out of ourselves.’”10 Thus, it is possible to qualify “Even in Paris” as a series of notes Howard conjured up from his admiration for Stevens—notes toward finding the supreme solace of literary companionship across time and even death. “Even in Paris” may be a poem full of wit and allusive play, but it is anything but a gimmick. It’s a singular poet’s queer assertion of Stevens’ humanity and poetic value through the realization of an intimate fiction in which we’re able, for a moment, to believe.

10Now, if we remember that Howard is also the foremost translator of French letters in contemporary American literature—the one writer to whom we may legitimately apply the dictum that “French and English constitute a single language” (CPP, 914)—then our next step, for a collection such as this, must be to study what kind of cultural and spatial web he spins to affirm his likely lies about Stevens. In what remains of this chapter, I want to retrace some of Stevens’ fictive steps through Paris and observe some of his actions, inactions, and proclamations—as well as the responses by his two observers. Another poet than Howard might have caught Stevens browsing at Paule Vidal’s little bookstore on the rue de Grenelle, a mere fifteen-minute walk from the Sorbonne, where Stevens would have tried to strike a precarious balance between warmth, playfulness, and detachment in his dealings with Ms. Vidal, who was a little in love with him.11 Or Stevens might have been spotted having tea with a plate full of mignardises in the company of Barbara Church on one of her transatlantic commutes. The elderly poet that Howard encountered, however, appeared to be adamant about undertaking a solitary trip for his private delectation only. We should understand his voyage as the culmination of, and a personal farewell to, a lifetime of mental cohabitation with a beloved place, not with local real-life people.12 The man Howard ran into was the one who noted wryly, “Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble” (CPP, 901). Except that this time he seems to have said to himself, “Trouble be damned, I will consume my love affair with Paris, just once!”

11So let’s return to the sunlit Sainte-Chapelle in the account offered by Ivo in his first letter to Roderick. Since Richard is convinced he recognizes the anonymous man’s face, he addresses him first in French,

the fat man answering as if
the language had sinned and he was assigned
to punish it, then switching (both) to English
with an evident relief […].13 

12The whole scene appears to take place on the cusp of a concert that is about to get started: the audience is getting ready to listen to the Stabat Mater by that queerest of midcentury Parisian composers, Francis Poulenc. The only words by Stevens that Ivo manages to overhear before the concert starts is another aphorism—Stevens will indeed be talking in aphorisms throughout: “an attempt to escape self / is likely to be identical with / an attempt to discover it...”14 While we immediately recognize this paradox as Stevensian in both content and style, it simultaneously speaks to the poem Howard is launching. A significant part of Howard’s fame rests on his translations of Roland Barthes, the Parisian thinker who wrote his autobiography in the third person (Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes). By setting up his autobiography like this, Barthes continued a modern literary lineage that in poetry reaches back to, among others, Stevens, whose own self-representations were so often cast in third-person or impersonal pronouns.15 Seeking to escape the pitfalls of a straightforwardly confessional poetry in the first-person singular, with its idealization of authenticity and would-be transparency of self-understanding, Howard’s queerly circuitous staging of a fictive historical encounter among several protagonists is no less an attempt to discover himself by indirect and paradoxical means.16

13 Here the Stabat Mater beautifully interrupts such incipient reflections (on the part of the reader more than of Ivo), turning the architecturally frozen music of the Sainte-Chapelle into liquid sound. Unexpectedly, though, Richard and Stevens continue to whisper to each other. Richard wants to know if Stevens finds Paris “wonderfully homogeneous,” but the reply is typical of Stevens’ way with non-sequiturs:

“The French conceal their virtues and flaunt all their vices on the surface;
ludicrous, I call it, their lust for dragging
everything into the light” […].17 

14Richard is so startled by this that the look on his face, in Ivo’s description, is of someone who “had just been slapped. / Or kissed.”18 Dramatically, Monsieur Soleil, whom we know from Stevens’ poetry to be a theater director trained at the Opera (CPP, 208), dims his stage light so that “the whole damned Sainte Chapelle turned to merde […].”19 Stark imagery of this sort continues when Ivo next describes the anonymous American visitor as a cross between a priest and a eunuch, while Richard is elated and muses, “So I did, in fact, see Shelley / plain, even in Paris.”20

15The allusion to Shelley is something of a smokescreen, I feel, despite the aptly ironic, once again triangulating manner in which it happens via Browning, whose “Memorabilia” mocks the paltriness of a recollected encounter with Shelley. But there is surely another poetic subtext to all of this. Just as the sun entered the Sainte-Chapelle before Stevens did, conjuring him up along the wall, its withdrawal hints at another form of literary inspiration: the sudden transformation of the sublime aesthetic heart of Paris into merde carries the unmistakable signature of Baudelaire. As a local poetic host, Baudelaire seems to be lurking everywhere behind the opening scene, from the language of “sin” in which Richard’s manhandling of French is cast, to Stevens’ protest against the French habit of concealing their virtues and flaunting their vices, to the combined imagery of priest and eunuch. In the years before composing “Even in Paris,” Howard completed his award-winning translation of Les Fleurs du mal, so it isn’t far-fetched to recall the “unreal” Paris of Baudelaire’s verse, more particularly that “Swarming city—city gorged with dreams, / Where ghosts by day accost the passer-by […].”21 [Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, / Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!] Without breathing a word about this, Howard appears to have pulled the ghost of Stevens out of Baudelaire’s local poetry, as an eighth vieillard wandering through a city of dreams. Once we notice this, we can also understand how Howard’s foreword to Les Fleurs du mal paves the way for “Even in Paris” when it proclaims that “surely the mythology of Baudelaire, like the mythology of Whitman, is as powerful as that of any poetry to be found within the modernity that these two helpless masters have—from our perspective—founded.”22 I will return to Whitman in a moment; here it’s enough to establish a cross-reference from these two ancestral mythologies to Crispin’s modern “mythology of self” in his narrative of transatlantic crossing (CPP, 22). Crispin, after all, is the name by which Richard initially refers to Stevens in his own first letter to Roderick across the Atlantic.

16That letter continues the gossip about the encounter at the Sainte-Chapelle, though in a different tonality. Questioned by Richard about his traveling plans, Stevens declares his only desire is to be an ordinary tourist, for he has “survived // too long on postcards from Paris or Toulon.”23 (Note how nonchalantly he tosses off the English-French inner rhyme on “too long” and “Toulon.”) Stevens then invites his young admirer to “steer” him the next day to the Louvre—or at least the “Orangery,” since he pretends to be uncertain whether this is part of the Louvre. He wants, in his own words, “to make ‘sense’ of the Nymphéas” and feel “embraced” by Monet’s cycloramic paintings that “curve / around one in a continuous ecstasy...”24 There is but one catch: no one is to be told of his visit and absolutely no poetry is to result from it. Stevens expressly wishes to undertake his visit as “a living man / and a posthumous artist.”25 While we might indeed imagine the artist in Stevens to prefer roaming through unknown little streets in search of serendipitous food for imaginative transformation, the figure we encounter in the poem is that of the man who as a private citizen adored the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40 and systematically wound up at the French Pavilion to play the consumerist tourist there.26

17 The next day, at the Orangerie, the overwhelming dramaturgy of Monet’s Nymphéas freezes Stevens at first, awing him by “how the visual could turn / visionary.”27 He stands lost in meditation and utters but one brief sentence— “We also ascend dazzling”28—which Richard suspects of being a quote, though he can’t identify it yet; we will have to wait until his second letter before the words are echoed back and attributed. Meanwhile, Stevens dismisses Richard from the scene, casting him in the role of Orpheus, who “loses the beloved where last seen […].”29 Glancing behind him, Richard witnesses a variant of the dangerous kneeling at the Sainte-Chapelle. This time Stevens is slowly “turning, turning round the oval room, / palms out and humming harshly to himself,” as if he were engaging in “a ritual exploit / danced by the world’s most deliberate dervish—not / whirling but centripetal.”30

18And so the polyphonic invention of Stevens’ visit to Paris continues. In his second letter, Ivo gossips elaborately about a dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at the Tour d’Argent, where he suddenly recognizes the man from the Sainte-Chapelle at a neighboring table, engaged in a “solitary manducation de luxe!”31—no doubt of the canard pressé for which the restaurant is historically famous—and looking unattractively like “an apathetic mushroom / in gray flannel whom you could no more / read than you could stab a pillow to the heart! ”32 Richard’s second letter takes us through the final day of Stevens’ visit. By then, the older poet has revealed himself as someone who combines a touch of “innocence” with a “miraculous” kind of “modernity,” “as if he had already attended a party // […] / that has not yet been given.”33 The two men go to the Jardin du Luxembourg (because of Rilke) and the Palais-Royal (looking for Colette’s cornice); they discuss statues under the arcades of the Comédie française, walk to the Place des Vosges (where Stevens catches the sun painting rooftops in Poussin’s colors) and on to the Tuileries. Throughout, Stevens proves to be a visitor who is “never disappointed, though outraged / deeply enough to satisfy” Richard’s American “resentment of these people and their past […].”34 The culminating ritual, though, takes place on the quays of the Seine, where Stevens sets up a polarity between the notion of France that he claims to have cherished for so long and the reality of all things French as he has experienced them on the ground. France, Stevens says, in a way not unlike Gertrude Stein’s treatment of the notion in her memoir Paris France,35 “evokes a notion of courtesy,” of “unity and justice,” of “conscientious work, / art and organization, finished craft,” whereas French “means only a sullen concierge and disputes / in shops, alarmed pedestrians and rude / bus-drivers,” a “mystique of improvisation” in the arts, and scandal-filled newspapers about “vile things.”36

19Thus, Stevens’ conclusion after his brief immersion in Parisian life is one that upholds an idealized France of the mind and of supreme aesthetic experiences (he mentions his visits to the Louvre and Notre-Dame), but that simultaneously allows itself to be disenchanted by the daily realities of social intercourse, in which he refuses to participate. Yet if the recurring opposition between virtue and vice may seem merely to prolong the Baudelairean inspiration of his observations, Stevens’ attitude acquires a more complex transatlantic quality when the two men reach “the best of the bookstalls” along the Seine and Stevens picks up an 1897 Mercure de France copy containing Léon Bazalgette’s translation of Leaves of Grass. He opens the pages and starts to intone, “Nous autres, nous montons // éclatants et énormes, comme le soleil!”37 It’s the same 25^th canto of “Song of Myself” he had previously cited in the face of Monet: “We also ascend dazzling.”38 Strikingly, the importation of Whitman’s voice into the French scene effects a transformation in Stevens’ attitude from resistance to release. And the release brings poetic inspiration. Without realizing it, Richard (the character within the poem, not the later writer of it) witnesses the genesis of Stevens’ “The River of Rivers in Connecticut” (1953), not along the banks of the Connecticut River but by “the river of books” along the Seine.39 For this is what Stevens muses:

“The future of the past is never sure.
This must be the one place in the world
where a man can realize what he writes

is a river too. It is continuous,
no burden on the memory, but a way
— made up of all ways—of reaching the sea.”40 

20In these lines, Howard casts Stevens’ poem as an implicit commentary on the collective production of literary heritage by associating the “River of Rivers”—a phrase itself constructed on the biblical analogy of the “Song of Songs”—metonymically with the river of words composed by the poet himself and all writers before and after him.

21Stevens’ insistence that the flow of poetry, so conceived, is “no burden on the memory” suggests that the historically imagined encounter with a poetic father figure is no source of anxiety for Howard either. To the contrary, it is a deeply fulfilling and sustaining experience. In Richard’s recollection, Stevens goes on to explain that, since “the body forgets nothing,” he personally

reveres
things that do not return—for him no moment
is wholly lost: all past experience

is potentially present for him […].41 

22To Richard’s astonishment, the older poet then improvises his third and final ritual ceremony (after sinking to his knees at the Sainte-Chapelle and rotating/ humming to take in Monet’s Nymphéas): he buys the Mercure edition of Bazalgette’s Leaves of Grass, takes out “a fistful of hundred-franc notes,” and offers the book and money “to every passer-by, muttering his phrase, / ‘lancer ce livre comme un bateau’ […].”42 A Parisian street kid snatches the money and rushes down the steps to the edge of the river. He sets the book afloat on the Seine, where the waves open the pages for a moment before swallowing them up forever.43 Having thus surrendered a French version of Whitman’s all-American poetry as an almost literal roman-fleuve to the river of rivers flowing through Paris, Stevens returns to ordinary life and retreats with Richard along the rue des Saints-Pères to have a final café-crème. Ruminating in his letter, Richard ponders how it must have been “the play / of surfaces” that paralyzed Stevens when first confronted with the “infinite, // centerless, unstructured” quality of the Nymphéas, and how Stevens must have needed to summon a Whitmanian inner force to meet the paintings with

that same strength
he has survived by at home, where certainly
he differs from all poets since Eden who

in search of the invisible have obscured
the visible.44 

23As a champion of the visible and physical, Stevens still has a final request for Richard, which is that they drop by at “the bird-market behind the Hôtel-Dieu,” where he hopes to see toucans, tanagers, birds-of-paradise, and blue macaws.45 Wistfully, he adds how splendid he finds the nightingale and how much he misses it in Hartford—a theme we recognize from “Autumn Refrain.” This sets off a string of equally wistful meditations on the part of Richard, which then segues into Ivo’s concluding recollections of the American visitor upon his return from the bird market. By now, Ivo has warmed a little to the man so that his verdict is milder, if still ambivalent:

Only shyness made him seem
a touch insolent. Intrinsically
his voice was elegiac, and I can’t say
that he had the vanity
of the true artist: a serious reason
against his being one.46 

24 The gossipy correspondence is brought to an abrupt halt, however, when, after drinking too much, Stevens’ bawdy side erupts in the form of a monologue on the different bird-sounds women supposedly make during sexual intercourse—a subject that is merely tasteless to Ivo, perhaps because he’s unable to hear in it what Howard may intend as Stevens’ commentary on the sublimated meanings of doves and other birds in his poetry. However this may be, Ivo is entirely through with the man, as well as with his own friend’s “adulation”: “Richard, of course, with his love of poets / second only to his love of vulgarity / would revel in the humbug […].”47

***

25We’ve arrived at the end of the five-part correspondence but, except for a few pointers in footnotes, I haven’t been able to say much about the poem’s susceptibility to a queer-theoretical interpretation. Still, I hope my brief discussion has at least suggested that, even though Howard’s poem precedes the arrival of “queer theory” by a few years, it is well served by a reader willing to cast doubt on circumscribable identities, on monophonic and monolingual voices, and on linear history-writing, preferring instead an attention to forms of literary otherness, culturally heteronomous thinking, and performative speech acts. These are all standard fare in queer studies.

26For my final words, though, I’d like to take my cue from Michael Sheringham’s analysis of a “persistent literary fantasy” among writers that involves the staging of a disappearance in the middle of “everyday familiarity” in Paris.48 Sheringham ascribes this to a recurrent “desire to embrace the city’s incessant movement and to lose oneself by becoming attuned to its endless transformations.”49 This desire in turn combines, paradoxically, the wish “to be someone else, to be anybody,” and the “ambition […] of remaining oneself.”50 From this perspective, we might conclude that Richard Howard’s complex staging of his half-remembered, half-fabricated younger self interacting with a ghostly poet who appears and disappears as a modern master of poetic transformation and who embraces the city’s (as well as poetry’s) incessant transitivity across languages and continents manages to be at once preeminently Parisian and unmistakably Franco-American—the perfect poetic meditation, in other words, for a collection of essays such as this.