Elinor Wylie: A Life Apart (review)

Reviews Stanley Olson, Elinor Wylie: A Life Apart. New York: The Dial Press, 1979. 376 pp. $12.95. In the first chapter of his admirable study, Literary Biography, Leon Edel, in defining the relation between biographer and subject, says that "surely the writing of a literary life would be nothing but a kind of indecent curiosity, and an invasion of privacy, were it not that it seeks always to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation ." In the volume at hand, we have an example ofthat catering to curiosity and the neglect of creativity—and of the developing life of the mind which is creativity's boon companion—which Professor Edel deplores. And so must the common reader, unless he or she has become hopelessly addicted to People Magazine. Dr. Olson has resurrected the stale old scandal—hardly scandalous today, so bland, in fact, that one wonders why he bothered—of Mrs. Wylie's unfortunate first marriage to a madman, and her subsequent desertion of him, and of her only child, to run off with the also married Horace Wylie. Other than some pangs of sympathy for the poor son, who was not only abandoned but virtually obliterated in the mind of his mother—who frequently referred to herself in later years as childless—one is reduced to the irritable turning of pages, searching for evidence of the intellectual and creative growth of this limited but genuine lyric talent. On the scanty evidence we have (though virtually none of it is supplied by Dr. Olson), Elinor Hoyt Hichborn was deeply attracted to Horace Wylie because he was, for her, a father-teacher REVIEWS 267 figure. A learned and intellectual man twenty years her senior, he provided this Philadelphia society girl, obsessed with self-adornment, parties, and her own beauty, with a wide-ranging and liberal education . But, one asks in vain, what did they read together? What kind of intellectual guidance or stimulation did Horace Wylie provide? Surely there must be letters extant between the two of them that would illuminate this matter? Surely there are people still alive who could have been helpful, had they been asked the right questions. "It was Horace who made a poet and scholar of me." This is the suggestive heading of "Chapter Seven: 1920." The chapter itself, which chronicles the first publication of her work at the age of 35, gives absolutely no indication of how this woman, far later than most poets, suddenly arrived, in full bloom, to almost universal praise. It reminds me of that old rhyme, "Where did you come from Baby Dear? / Out of the nowhere into the here." Unless one posits Horace as Zeus and Elinor as Athena, it is all very unsatisfactory. Not until the final chapters of the book are any of her poems printed, and then we have seven (plus a bit of doggerel), all or in part. Not a scrap of analysis, needless to say, not a word regarding sources, themes, literary influences (oh, a couple of passing remarks about Shelley, but one could hardly omit that, her other obsessive affair). Instead, and throughout, we are given detailed accounts of every house she ever stayed in, even briefly, the interior decoration of houses, not heads. And we are given a detailed account of her financial transactions with editors and publishers. The latter always contributes a needed note of sordidness to any literary biography, but must it be included to the exclusion of all literary matter of any interests? Next to the literary influence of living people, what one misses most is books. Books, for the love of Allah! I will now list every literary reference in the index: William Blake: 1) Elinor is said to have modeled her first, privately printed volume on Songs of Innocence. So much for Blake. 2) Elinor's work is compared by the reviewers to Blake, Dickinson and Donne, so I suppose she must have read them, but when, what, and how she responded, and what she learned, we are not told. 3) Blake, Donne and Keats turn up in the reviews of her second book, plus the intriguing remark that "Louis Untermeyer said that the very titles...