Magic Words and of Past Centuries

Elinor Wylie

Magic of Words and of Past Centuries

Your editor has given me a list of names of authors whom he desires to be limned in this column. Some of them I have met. Some are strangers to me in the flesh ; but, willy nilly, I am determined to write a column concerning them. First, is Elinor Wylie, born in Washington, married now to William Rose Benet, living in rural Connecticut, writing vigorously on a new novel.

Mrs. Benet is tall, pale, with classical features and a detached manner. She looks very young indeed, years younger than she probably is; but she is one of those women who, when she reaches forty, will still appear to be just under or just over thirty. She should have lived in the Renaissance. She has an air of otherworld remoteness and of the color of romance as well. Her writing was started only a few years ago; but the finely spun, exquisitely phrased verses, now collected in Nets to Catch the Wind and Black Armour were immediately recognized as authentic contributions to the lists of American poets. She then turned to prose and her delicately wrought, colorful, ironical Jennifer Lorn is a book which is almost too good to be true. In style and in form she imitated in it the mannered seventeenth century and her characters emerge through a screen of rare words and colors. In her new book, to be called perhaps A Venetian Glass Nephew, she dwells partly in a realm of magic. She has made scholarly investigations so that her descriptions of the black art are accurately in tradition. She chooses as one of her characters the roguish Casanova--a background character only, I believe.

Here is a quaint imagination, a fine wit, a delicate style. One first thinks of it as fragile, then realizes that in reality Elinor Wylie's work would be robust were it only in consideration of her technical perfection. I like to think of her now in an old Connecticut house, surrounded by the demands of several children, yet creating quite calmly and steadily a manuscript fit to be traced upon vellum and illuminated by monks in cloisters, something rich, rare and only very gently indecorous.

J. F.