Rebecca West on Elinor Wylie

Here is my post on haunting poet and novelist Elinor Wylie.

I am still unable to read any one thing for a long stretch of time. It is rather disturbing, and I keep NOT finishing books. I have NOT finished about 20 books this year, and it is so unlike me. But then nothing is normal now. At the moment, among other things, I am picking my way through the Selected Letters of Rebecca West. She is one of my intellectual and creative idols, and an email exchange I recently had with The Siren involved Rebecca West – I love coincidences like that. Today, I came across a lengthy letter West wrote to author Nancy Potter, who was working on a biography of Elinor Wylie. West and Wylie had been friends, and Potter had some questions for West about it. Here is her response.

One of the things I love about the letters of famous figures, is how they talk about one another. I have an entire “commonplace book” filled with quotes of “writers on writing”. Robert Louis Stevenson talking about Cervantes, e.e. cummings talking about Shakespeare – I find these insights into the creative process (from those in the same field) immensely rewarding to read.

Here, West is not talking so much about Wylie the artist – but I do find it a very wonderfully drawn portrait of another human being. The quote below about Wylie’s “egotism” reminds me of that awesome Bette Davis quote: “I was thought to be ‘stuck up’. I wasn’t. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.” Preach it. Do not let the envious comments of the unsure throw you off YOUR game.

2 November 1953
To: Nancy Potter

Dear Miss Potter,

So far as I know I have no letters from Elinor Wylie. We had a steady friendship, which was renewed every time we met at exactly the point where it had been when we had last met, and we rarely wrote except to confirm a date or give a friend’s address. My files are in great disorder, owing to the war and to post-war irregularities, and I can’t be sure. But I really don’t think I can have anything that would interest you.

During her last trip to England she made no comment to me that indicated that she was specially annoyed with anything but the fact that she had fallen downstairs, or that she was frustrated with anything but the fact that she could not get about as much as usual. You are on very sound ground when you say that “she often appeared to be playing frantically with life to make each year count.” I don’t really believe, however, that people are right when they lay stress on this as an indication of a neurosis. I am sure that her conduct was largely dictated by her appallingly high blood-pressure. She must, for years and years, have been feeling quite dreadfully ill, and was racing to get away from her own discomfort.

I know she was an egotist. But so are most people who achieve a great deal, or rather who push their achievement above a certain level. It often seemed to me that when other people called her egotistical when she was being honest – she was exceptionally beautiful, she was exceptionally gifted, and it would have been stupid of her not to have known this. Her self-knowledge was expressed often in febrile terms, but really she had enough blood-pressure to make this understandable. It seems to me that it would be dangerous to consider Elinor Wylie without taking into account the extraordinary spitefulness of the age in which she lived. Looking back at it, the world seems to me to have been overfull of people who spent their lives saying, “We went to the Smith’s party last night – it was just terrible,” or “Have you met Freda Jones, we met her last night – she is just terrible,” with a screech on the terrible that I recognized during the war in the wail of the air-raid sirens. The gentler and more civilised the Smiths or Freda Brown might be the more the screech. Elinor Wylie was the chosen victim of the screechers. I daresay she often behaved tiresomely. But twice it happened to me that I was at a party with Elinor where she was gay and funny and brilliant, and that a few nights later I went to a cocktail party where people who had not been at that party described the ludicrous remarks Elinor had made at it and what a nuisance she had been.

She had an enormous sense of duty. It hurt her tremendously that she had failed in her duties as a step-mother; and of course she had failed, she was as unsuited to be a step-mother as any romantic character would be. She seemed to me to be often arrogant in her judgment of other people, but arrogant only in the sense that she dismissed people for lacking certain qualities before she had looked round to see if they had any other qualities; when those other qualities hit her in the eye she was just and humble. Once she met a friend of mine at my room in the old Majestic and spoke of her afterwards with candid contempt, wondering why I cared for this woman. I arranged for them to meet again, under better circumstances, as the woman adored Elinor’s work and wanted to ask her permission to do something with one of her poems; and she got on to her character this time, and rang me up and admitted her error very handsomely (Not because she knew the woman wanted to do something with one of her poems – the woman hadn’t then mentioned it). And though she was arrogant I don’t remember her ever being spiteful. I should have been very much surprised indeed if she had ever repeated to me a story about anybody which was even slanted, and I could not have believed it if anybody had ever accused Elinor of inventing a story against anybody, though that was the vice of the time. As you know, she had a very uneasy relationship (this is an example of British understatement) with Kathleen Norris. She always spoke of her, even in her most confidential moments, with reserve, with a well-bred blankness.

You know, of course, the incident that touched off the explosion in her early life, when she left her first husband and her child. I haven’t any reason to disbelieve it, but I have no authority but Elinor’s own statement, which however she repeated to me several times. She always repeated it in the same form, though many other items in the context in which this story was embedded varied considerably. Apparently, after her father died, it was discovered that he had been in love with a woman who was not his wife, over a period of many years. Elinor described the scene of this discovery with deep feeling, and always expected me to take it for granted that when you found that your father had been in love with someone not your mother, why, of course, you left your own husband, you just had to, you were so upset. The thing came up as strong and clear as a Racine play. Quite beyond argument. It was something she could no more help than her blood-pressure.

The wonderful thing about Elinor, which none of you who did not know her will ever realise, was her astonishing beauty; which was as significant, as much of a bridge beyond the real and the imaginary world, as the beauty of Rosamund Lehmann. I don’t suppose she had anything to give that had a higher value than that, it was sublime; and to me it appeared not at all a sexual beauty, it made not a heterosexual or homosexual appeal, it made an imaginative appeal. About her relationships – I don’t know enough about them. But I fancy you would find that the people who knew her best liked her best, that her apparent victims would always speak of her with tenderness and affection.

I hear people speaking and writing of her in a patronising spirit. I must own that I found it delightful to know her, and thought and think that she did me considerable honour by wanting to know me.

I hope you have a happy time with your study, and I wish you could have received a letter from me saying, “Yes, indeed, I have a correspondence with Elinor Wylie rather larger in bulk than the Holmes-Laski letters.” But, alas, I have always had too many family ties to get on with my writing or my letter-writing as I would have wished.

Yours sincerely,

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1 Response to Rebecca West on Elinor Wylie

  1. The Siren says:

    How funny that West should focus on Wylie’s beauty! It can be hard to tell from ordinary photos; when I look at Wylie in Google images my thought is that she isn’t nearly as lovely as West was herself.

    I also love letters and enjoy the combination of gossip and analysis you find in the best ones. I get a weird kick out of reading letters between the crowned heads of Europe, post-Victoria when they were all closely related to one another–like Edward writing to “Nicky” and remarking about how Willie was being a pain in the neck again.

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