More than 30 years after auditing a class at Bowdoin on poet Wallace Stevens, writer and filmmaker Alison Johnson returned to campus Wednesday evening to screen her documentary film on the modernist poet.
The film explores Stevens’ life, touching upon his childhood, undergraduate experience at Harvard, marriage, family life and career in both insurance and poetry. Weaving Stevens’ poetry together with a biographical account of his life, the film showcases the ways in which Stevens’ life experiences informed his poetry.
The idea behind the film originated in the 1980s, when Johnson audited a seminar at Bowdoin. She said she was drawn to Stevens’ work and letters but failed to find a well-written biography about him, so she decided to write her own.
She conducted large amounts of research, using Stevens’ letters housed in the Huntington Library in California as a main resource. Her biography, titled “Wallace Stevens: A Dual Life as Poet and Insurance Executive” was published in 2012.
The idea for the film, however, did not arise until much later in 2014, after the Wallace Stevens house in Hartford, CT suddenly went on the market. Johnson considered how it could be dedicated as a museum to commemorate the poet. She gathered fellow Stevens enthusiasts with hopes to either buy the house or have the new owners open it up to the public as a museum. When the plans to buy the house fell through, Johnson decided to take a different approach.
“I got to thinking,” she said. “If we could film the interior of the house, that would be very interesting, and we could then film the Wallace Stevens collection of paintings and memorabilia and put together a documentary about Wallace Stevens. Having written the biography, I had all the information to start.”
Johnson and her crew got permission to film in the house just days before it closed.
“The documentary was grown out of a failure when the house museum plan fell, but I very quickly realized this is far better because by making a documentary, people all over the world can see Stevens’ house,” Johnson said.
One of Johnson’s goals is to create content for the average person to understand and enjoy.
“My feeling is that it used to be in the 1950s and 1960s, people were still writing biographies that an intelligent member of the general public that was interested in that literary feature could read and enjoy,” Johnson said. “Nowadays, everything has become so specialized that biographies are being written by PhDs for PhDs, and they are very hard to understand … I write biographies for the average reader. They are still something that people can enjoy even if they don’t have a degree in English,” Johnson said.
Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Muther invited Johnson to screen her film at Bowdoin because of Johnson’s record of meticulous and diligent research. She explained that Bowdoin students would be able to gain an interesting biographical background on Stevens as most research is done solely on his work rather than his personal life.
Johnson hopes that by screening the film, Bowdoin students are able to better understand and appreciate Stevens’ poetry, which she said is sometimes off-putting to readers because of its level of difficulty.
“[Stevens] really wanted people to get pleasure from his poems,” she said. “I think he would be upset to think too many people had been turned off by reading the ones that are too difficult.”