Wallace Stevens: “Doc, I just don’t understand women.”

Elsie Kachel Stevens (the model for the goddess Liberty on the 1916 Mercury dime) looking lonely in Connecticut’s Elizabeth Park. Click image for more.

Lilian Daugherty quoted in Peter Brazeau’s Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (1983):

My father-in-law [the late Ivan Daugherty, who worked under Stevens as a bond lawyer for twenty-five years] said once that he was not a friend of Stevens because Stevens didn’t have any friends. But he called himself an intimate: he was as close to him as Stevens was to anybody. And I think he rather enjoyed that.

Stevens would confide in my father-in-law. Stevens and his wife had a terrible row once. She was so angry that she threw something at him. Stevens came into work and said, ‘Doc, I just don’t understand women. I don’t know what to do. What do you think I should do?’ My father-in-law told him, ‘Why don’t you go home, put down your briefcase, put your arms around her, and tell her you love her? Buy her a bunch of roses and send them to her.’ ‘What the hell for?’ He was puzzled, but he said, ‘All right, I’ll do it.’ Apparently it did the trick, because he came into work afterward and said, ‘Gee, I don’t understand that, but it worked.’ That story sticks because I remember thinking at the time, Here’s this tremendously sensitive man, and the idea of showing his wife a little appreciation or affection comes as ‘Gee, how come it worked? How come she was happy about these flowers?’

American Modernist poet and insurance man Wallace Stevens (1879–1955).