Books: Poetess of Passion

PERIOD PIECE: ELLA WHEELER WILCOX AND HER TIMES — Jenny Ballou— Houghton. Mifflin ($3).

Ella Wheeler Wilcox* wrote the first of many pricelessly bad novels at the age of nine in the year of Grant’s Wilderness Campaign. One of the last and most notable of her countless poems was Soldiers, Come Back Clean, published by Hearst’s New York Journal in the year of the battle of Cambrai.It ran:I may lie in the mud of the trenches,I may reek with blood and mire,But I will control, by the God in my soul, The might of my man’s desire.

She died in 1919. During her lifetime she had: 1) seen her Poems of Passion, published in 1883, sell 60,000 copies in two years and take its place in plush binding with The Rubaiydt of Omar Khayyam on the nation’s parlor table; 2) purveyed sunshine and consolation to the multitude through syndicated articles in Hearst papers; 3) triumphantly covered the funeral of Queen Victoria for the New York American, by writing, on the spot, a poem called The Queen’s Last Ride; 4) been presented as a famous American at the Court of St. James’s. Says Jenny Ballou: “Considering the noise round her during her life, there was … a sodden silence thrown over her immediately upon her death.” She is not remembered.

Biographer Ballou introduces her subject with an overwritten essay, then settles down to a straightforward, less flighty account of Ella’s dreamy girlhood in an irritable and defeated Wisconsin farm family, her indefatigable poem writing (sometimes eight a day), her conquering arrival in Milwaukee, her instinctive refusal of such rare, insufficiently flattering criticism as Julia Ward Howe’s (“she thought [Ella’s ability] might be developed into real talent with study and hard work”), her fatal love of making a sensation, gratified by the tempest of propriety that erected Poems of Passion, her brief affair with James Whitcomb Riley (his levity wounded her), her marriage with solid, devoted Robert Wilcox, “a gentleman in every sense of the word” (who years later confided to a fellow club member his astonishment at having found the poetess of passion a virgin).

Ella Wheeler Wilcox soon appeared in New York salons trailing her inimitable chiffons, a light-haired poetess whose eyes “had tigerish gleams when she wore her favorite topaz.”

But Ella was not absurd, and it is the special virtue of Jenny Ballou’s book that she makes that plain. Some of Ella’s first poems were “lovely in their lilt, overbrimming with an authentic freshness of emotion.” She had great energy, great sincerity, great generosity, and on occasion great good sense. Even when she became a fixture of yellow journalism, her spontaneity remained untainted by cynicism. What was it that led her on into the self-deception that finally broke down in her last tragic years? (“I shall be forgotten,” she said, “while more careful and conscientious artists live in the memory of the world.”)

Jenny Ballou names two reasons: 1) her period’s democraticideal of “making good” got the better of her; 2) “No critic warned her. Instead of examining the poems under their noses, they accused her of having experienced personally all the thrills [she] described. . . .”

Small, bright, Russian-born Jenny Iphigenia Ballou got the idea of doing Ella Wheeler Wilcox several years ago when she and her husband were living near the Wilcox place at Short Beach, Conn. Her witty book obviously owes much to Critic Van Wyck Brooks, with whom she corresponded—though Brooks disagreed with her somewhat unguarded conclusions. There is more than morbid fascination in Period Piece, more than a stunt in Biographer Ballou’s reason for doing it: “It may be because critics have been squeamish about penetrating the subliterary world that literature is not at a generally higher level in America. . . .”

*Not to be confused with the late Jessie Willcox Smith, illustrator.