POETS Day! Elinor Wylie

I didn’t expect to be as impressed by her work or that I’d enjoy the voyeur’s “tut-tut” as I have. She charmed me.

Illustration by Rene Sears

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

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Elinor Waylie, née Hoyt, was born in Sommerville, New Jersey. My experience with New Jersey folks tells me that she would have described herself as “From off Exit 17.” It’s possible she was closer to Exit 13 or, if you use I-78 instead of I-287, maybe Exit 29. Michigan folks do the hand thing and New Jersey-ites (Jersians?) have Exits.

She was born to a well-to-do and prominent family that was likely to look down on other prominent families when it came down to it because one of theirs, Elinor’s grandfather, was governor of Pennsylvania. Still more prominent families probably looked down on them in turn as politicians are vulgar and real wealth sees clear to control, rather than be, elected officials. Political success requires propriety. Her family had a history of courting public perception.

Her father moved the family to Washington, DC in 1897 when Elinor was twelve or thirteen. In 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt would appoint him to the position of Solicitor General of the United States. He was an impressive figure and sent his oldest daughter, Elinor, to Holton Arms, a Bethesda, MD girls school where she studied and mingled with the daughters of other impressive people. Holton Arms counts Jaquiline Kennedy Onassis and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as alumnae. Elinor Wylie was, per the excellent unnamed biographers at Poetry Foundation, “trained for the life of a debutante and a society wife…”

Back in the early 1960s, my mother went to Georgetown Visitation; a Catholic girls school not terribly far from Holton Arms. Mom didn’t have much patience for Holton Arms girls. She and her friends dated Landon and Gonzaga high school boys. Some of their dates’ friends asked girls from Holton Arms out and they would all end up at the same dance. She thought Holton girls should stick to dating St. Albans guys and keep all the smugness contained. There was one particular Holton Arms student she referred to as a “hussy.”

If I may continue the elipsed quote about Elinor from above by the excellent Poetry Foundation biographers, “…but she rebelled against that destiny and became notorious, in her time, for her multiple marriages and affairs.”

Mom’s time in high school came sixty years after Wylie’s and to my knowledge she never heard of the poet, but I feel confidence in the ways of tribal prejudice. I suspect Mom would nod knowingly about a rival school graduate. Elinor was a hussy.

This is a series about poetry, so I’m going to tear away from scandal for a moment to discuss some of Wylie’s work. Between 1921 and her death in 1928, she published four books of poetry and four novels and sold well in both genres. She’s an obscure figure in poetry now—there are nods to a recent rediscovery of her work among feminist critics so maybe a resurgence is underway, but I’ve noticed a habit of biographers to claim [X] is all the rage among [ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE Y] to build up a forgotten personal favorite—but was celebrated in her time. She hung out with Sinclair Lewis and Jon Dos Passos. If there was a Studio 54 in her time, she would pass right by the doorman.

My opinion is that she has some remarkable poetry, but there’s a lot that’s off. She hit early. Her first published collection, 1921’s Nets to Catch the Wind, was and is widely hailed as her best (all of this week’s selections are from that book, full text at Project Gutenberg.) I’ll start with one I don’t like because the poems I think fail all fail for the same reasons while those that succeed pull differing dazzling tricks from all manner of hats.

Village Mystery
Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)

The woman in the pointed hood
And cloak blue-gray like a pigeon’s wing,
Whose orchard climbs to the balsam-wood,
Has done a cruel thing.

To her back door-step came a ghost,
A girl who had been ten years dead,
She stood by the granite hitching-post
And begged for a piece of bread.

Now why should I, who walk alone,
Who am ironical and proud,
Turn, when a woman casts a stone
At a beggar in a shroud?

I saw the dead girl cringe and whine,
And cower in the weeping air–
But, oh, she was no kin of mine,
And so I did not care!

There’s nothing wrong with the craftsmanship. Her stresses hit predictably. My problem is that this poem feels perfunctory. The capricious turn at the end is unearned. It’s a story removed from the poet’s life, which is not uncommon with her work. Swaths are fantastical or semi-so. This one dresses up as allegory but doesn’t deliver. It leaves me thinking the poem serves no purpose other than satisfying the author’s apparent want to seem mysterious.

Escape

When foxes eat the last gold grape,
And the last white antelope is killed,
I shall stop fighting and escape
Into a little house I’ll build.

But first I’ll shrink to fairy size,
With a whisper no one understands,
Making blind moons of all your eyes,
And muddy roads of all your hands.

And you may grope for me in vain
In hollows under the mangrove root,
Or where, in apple-scented rain,
The silver wasp-nests hang like fruit.

I could say a lot of the same about “Escape” as I did about “Village Mystery,” but I think this one works. The truth is I like and dislike it on alternate readings. As of the last, I was positive. Simple rhymes and portentious animals set a fairy-tale tone and the idea of running away is adolescent. It’s a wish from a teenager’s diary until the charmingly malicious last line.

And then, from nowhere comes “Wild Peaches.” It’s a bit long for this space so I’ll give the first and last of four parts.

from Wild Peaches

1

When the world turns completely upside down
You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town.
You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.

In researching Wylie, I’ve read that she is an inheritor of Donne and the metaphysical poets. I’ve read her devotion to Shelley and Keats shines through. There’s none of that in “Wild Peaches.” Here she has the sharp economy of language you’d expect from a modern devotee of Imagism and an earnest adherance to Victorian form. Who does that? Maybe Thomas Hardy, but he wrote as Victoriana faded and Modernism emerged. Who does that anachronistically? It’s wonderful.

The sections I left out follow in tone with the first. Autumn frosts lie upon the grass and April pours the colours of the shell upon the hills. The fourth section takes a turn that should be dark but for the pleasure her persona takes in what unfolds.

There’s a great deal of her work I haven’t read, but I feel confident in calling this her triumph.

4

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There’s something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meager sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

Wylie’s sister Constance married well and became Constance, Baroness von Stumm, wife of Baron Ferdinand Carl von Stumm. Her parents should have relished the social coup, but there were four other children. Brother Henry became an artist: not so bad. Sister Nancy became a romance novelist which isn’t scandalous per se, but an awful lot of those folks use pen names for a reason. Brother Morton married Eustace Bankead, sister of the famous actress Tallulah Bankhead. He later divorced her. Then he married her again. Then he divorced her. Then they remarried. Finally, a third divorce.

Elinor, as the oldest, made it clear from the get go that all would not be as her parents hoped for their family. At twenty years old, she eloped with a poet, or wanna-be poet son of a rear-admiral, named Philip Simmons Hichborn. She was miserable. Wikipedia says that during her marriage to Philip, “She also found herself being stalked by Horace Wylie, ‘a Washington lawyer with a wife and three children’, who ‘was 17 years older than Elinor. He stalked her for years, appearing wherever she was.’” That doesn’t sound like a promising beginning to a love story, but after four unhappy years with her first husband, she left him and their son to run off with the still married Horace. The press went wild and the families would have nothing to do with the two adulterers so Elinor and Horace ran off to England and hid out under the name “Waring.” Philip killed himself two years later.

Horace was able to secure a divorce and, with Philip dead, the couple married in 1916, six years after running off together. By then, the thrill was gone. Elinor was hanging out with the artsy set—Dos Passos, et al. One of her new friends took an interest in her amateur poetry. That man, William Rose Benét, became husband number three. That marraige didn’t work either so they separated and she moved back to England to live with another guy. At some point she started writing love letters to poor long-since cast off Horace.

On a 1928 Christmas visit to Benét, say the Poetry FOundation folk, “she asked Benet for a glass of water; when he returned with it, as Karen Stein recounted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ‘she walked toward him, murmured, “Is that all it is?,” and fell to the floor, dead of a stroke.’”

I didn’t expect to be as impressed by her work or that I’d enjoy the voyeur’s “tut-tut” as I have. She charmed me.

This last is her most anthologized, so probably best-known, work. Here you see Shelley.

Velvet Shoes

Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.

I shall go shod in silk,
And you in wool,
White as a white cow’s milk,
More beautiful
Than the breast of a gull.

We shall walk through the still town
In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
Upon silver fleece,
Upon softer than these.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:
Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
On white silence below.
We shall walk in the snow.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]