The Life and Art of Elinor Wylie

Due to recent interest in Elinor Wylie expressed by one of my favorite contemporary poets, I pulled this book off my shelves again and decided to give Wylie another think. For some, she has been the quintessential 1920s figure, her extravagant private life overshadowing her work, and for others, her work is just plain awful, phony and ornamented with coat after coat of bright "beauty" paint. Whereas her contemporary Amy Lowell idolized Keats, Wylie fell for Shelley in a big way, and seems to have believed herself a modern day, female, Alastor. He has her "guardian spirit," her "archangel." "Poets," Shelley said, "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and Wylie lived her life copiously, as though exercising her right to law at every moment. She had a glorious red haired beauty, like Nicole Kidman, and everywhere she went she made heads turn. She married three times, loving them and leaving them, and had left her third husband by the time she died, throwing herself over the windmill in pursuit of a married British acquaintance. Shockingly for her time, when she left husband #1, she left behind her young 3 year old son, Philip, who sadly enough committed suicide a few years after Wylie's death. He showed up for her funeral, aged 21, impressing all her friends with his lack of resentment and his curiosity. Cecil Beaton photographed Elinor Wylie, and Thomas Wolfe included an unkind sketch of her in THE WEB AND THE ROCK. She felt personally hurt if anyone said anything nice about a third person, for that compliment belonged to her, to herself alone. She might have been difficult to deal with at times, but her presence was undeniable. Elinor Wylie's poetry has its ups and downs, but the best of it is a remarkable reminder that the so-called "freaks" of literary history have a better chance of being appreciated today than a whole album full of well-crafted representatives. (Perhaps because of the tension that still clings, like Spanish moss, to every line.) Writing across history, Wylie wound up transcending it to a certain extent, though as I say, not everything she wrote is very good. But even the bad stuff is interesting and Judith Farr makes a spirited case for Wylie as a romantic novelist, going against the grain of the modernism of Dos Passos, Faulkner, Josephine Herbst. Like Isak Dinesen, her prose writing is studded with strange images, obsessed men and women, a sometimes treacly, sometimes trenchant vocabulary and diction. Virginia Woolf despised her, writing to Vita that Elinor was a "hatchet-minded, cadaverous, acid voiced, bare-boned, spavined, patriotic, nasal, thick legged American." Hmmm, threatened much, Virginia Woolf?