Chandler Davis*

The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Excerpted from Holden's article "Poetry and Mathematics," The Georgia Review 34 (1985), 770-783.)

Comments by Jonathan Holden 9. . And how seriously can analogies between poems and "certain pages of algebra" be drawn? Are such analogies fun but trivial? To get at answers to these questions, let us consider some of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Stevens was by far the most mathematically sophisticated of recent American poets. His poems regularly allude to mathematical ideas, affectionately imitate mathematical demonstrations, and apply language "'mathematically" to the world. The most obviously mathematical poem of Stevens is Anecdote of the Jar:

Here, the jar is the origin of a Cartesian coordinate system imposed upon the "wilderness" of a physical world u n m a p p e d in human terms. 2 Stevens is even careful to propose a vertical z-coordinate: the jar was "tall and of a port in air." And he is careful to remind us that the terms being imposed upon this "wilderness" are, like lines and points, wholly imaginary, wholly ideal, that this "jar" was "the only thing" in Tennessee which "did not give of bird or bush." Anecdote of the Jar doesn't actually set out to measure anything in particular. It is about the conditions for measurement of "wilderness." Measurement is done, Stevens tells us, by imposing u p o n the world constructions of the imagination, ideal structures, terms which can only be sustained through something akin to Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief that is poetic faith."

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

Department of English Kansas State University Manhattan, KS 66506 USA

The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air.

Advanced Calculus of Murder by Erik Rosenthal New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988, 263 pp.

Reviewed by Mary W. Gray It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. 1

If I w a n t conversation on a plane, I a n s w e r m y neighbor's inquiry of "What do you do?" with "I'm a lawyer.'" On the other hand, if I want peace and quiet

* Column editor's address: Mathematics Department, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1 Canada Copyright 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted from Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

2 IS it an accident or characteristic of Stevens' wit and attention to minutiae that the round mouth of the jar just happens to resemble the zero at the origin of a Cartesian coordinate system and the letter O of the word origin?

THEMATHEMATICALINTELLIGENCERVOL.12, NO. 1 9 1990Springer-VerlagNew York 77

Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing in

Breaking the Code

I reply, "I'm a mathematician." The union of those bored or intimidated by this response is virtually the universe. Some of us might seek a more interesting image for the mathematics professions, but we have had little in literature to which we may turn. A couple of seasons ago Breaking the Code, based on the life of Alan Turing, enjoyed London and New York stage successes surprising to many. This season Tom Stoppard followed up his m a t h e m a t i c i a n in Jumpers with a physicist in Hapgood who talks about the Koenigsberger bridge problem. Occasionally we have seen a mathematician as m u r d e r e r - - m o s t notably recently in Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent [1], although my favorite remains Michael Innes's Weight of the Evidence [2]. Usually, however, an academic setring for a thriller means that all the interesting people are in literature; similarly, film rarely brings us a mathematician, Jill Clayburgh providing an intriguing exception in It's My Turn. Now Erik Rosenthal brings us, in Advanced Calculus of Murder, a second installment of his mathematician-private investigator Dan 78

THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER VOL. 12, NO. 1, 1990

Brodsky [3]. This time author, victim, murderer, and sleuth are all mathematicians. Lest you think this unfairly reveals the solution, let me say that the murder takes place at a math conference at Oxford with several hundred mathematicians as the only suspects. Rosenthal is good at recreating the atmosphere of such meetings and more generally that of the inbred world of mathematics research. Those who were at Berkeley in the 60s will recognize some of his fictional characters, and perhaps recall nostalgically Steve Smale's "flight to Moscow" to pick up a Fields medal and the resulting fallout from the story that his work was done on the beaches of Rio under an NSF grant [4]. At least the jet-set image is in some ways an improvement over the "nerd" image. A recent occupational survey, rating jobs on the basis of such things as working conditions, stress, pay, and security, put actuary, computer programer, computer analyst, statistician, and mathematician (in that order) at the top of the list; college professor fell in the ll4th place and migrant worker was the least desirable. I wonder how we would rate on glamour and excitement. A minor quibble with the author's setting the stage: trains from Oxford come into Paddington station, not Victoria. Keeping London mainline stations straight seems to be a problem that American mystery writers often have. Martha Grimes, otherwise a superb creator of English atmosphere, has had this difficulty. On the other hand, perhaps this is a device to see whether the readers are paying attention. As a mystery Advanced Calculus of Murder is not very successful--Rosenthal telegraphs the killer's identity rather early on. As an anthropological study of mathe-

matics, it is more successful. It is said that academics battle so viciously because so little is at stake; Rosenthal captures the sense of how trivialities can come to dominate the lives of mathematicians. Moreover, he reminds us all of the cyclic nature of mathematical employment. Again today there is a shortage of mathematicians, but Brodsky is a remnant of less happy days. His gypsy academic character is still found in great numbers in fields less in demand. Unable to get a "real job," he teaches part-time at Berkeley for a pittance, but unlike many of the exploited underclass of part-timers he keeps up his research and has found a

R o s e n t h a l c a p t u r e s the sense o f h o w t r i v i a l ities can come to d o m i n a t e the lives o f m a t h ematicians.

declarations by young girls and boys that they want to grow up to be mathematicians or to delight by mathematicians" seatmates at the prospect of vicarious glamour for the duration of the flight. John yon Neumann acquired a measure of public recognition, in which he is said to have taken naive delight, but he cannot be said to have generated an aura of excitement about mathematics as a profession. Sonia Kovaleskaia was, in the view of some of her contemporaries, a romantic figure--but in roles other than as a mathematician. We need a folk hero. Law school applications are said to be way up this year due to viewer interest in L.A. Law. Would that someone could make a similar splash with M.I.T. Math! The closest that mass culture has come recently is Stand and Deliver.

References creative means of supplementing his income. His work as a private investigator is generally not exciting, process serving and such being the mainstay. The subplot in Advanced Calculus of Murder of reuniting a young woman with the mother who gave her up for adoption takes Brodsky not very convincingly to the porno underworld and to Wales. He should stick to math conferences. Is there a way to make mathematicians more exciting, short of taking up murder? Allen Paulos's Innumeracy [5] has made the New York Times best-seller list, but unfortunately Paulos's work is unlikely to lead to

1. Scott Turow, PresumedInnocent, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux (1987). 2. J. I. M. Stewart (Michael Innes), Weight of the Evidence, London: Gollancz (1943). 3. Brodsky first appeared in Rosenthal's Calculusof Murder, New York: St. Martin's Press (1986). 4. The story was retold by Smale in "On the steps of Moscow University," Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 6, no. 2 (1984), 21-27. 5. John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy, New York: Hill & Wang (1989).

Department of Mathematics and Statistics The American University Washington, DC 20016 USA

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