We're still cleaning out and throwing away (as I reported a couple of days ago). Today I discovered, in amongst a small cache of books that I inherited from my father, a volume of poems called Earthbound. I'd never heard of the poet, Helene Mullins, but I traced her via a 2001 The New York Times obituary. "Helene Mullins Johnson, a poet, died on Oct. 26 at her home in Manhattan. She was 92 years old. She died of congestive heart failure. Mrs. Johnson first had her poems published in The Pagan, a Greenwich Village magazine, in the 1920s. After Thornton Wilder introduced her to his publisher, Harper's published her first novel, Convent Girl, and her first volume of poems, Earthbound, in 1929. Her final collection of poems, Mirrored Walls, was published in 1970. There are no survivors." Google provided me with another couple of facts. Helene Mullins was born in 1899 in New Rochelle, New York, and educated in "convent boarding schools." In 1935, she was so severely injured in an automobile accident that she lay unconscious for three weeks.
And also: the library nearest to me that owns a copy of Earthbound is the Dakota State University, in Madison, South Dakota, which is precisely 502 miles from where I sit.
The poems are, in my view, brimming with pre-Raphaelite fervor. The precursoress whom Mullins most resembles is Christina Rossetti, though there's an occasional dash of Ernest Dowson, and every once in a while, a gesture borrowed from the early Yeats. The poems are as intense and agonized and spiritual as Rosetti's, and were, even in their own time, composed in an extremely old-fashioned style.
What does the world offer a hard-working but not brilliant poet who was clearly ambitious and tense, and who poured all her strength and feeling into her writing. There she was, a young woman fleeing the convent and shocking her family by taking up residence in Greenwich Village, where she lived near Thornton Wilder and other 1920s gentlemen of literature and where she frequented the irreligious offices of The Pagan. I mourn for the struggle and yearning and effort that went into those long-forgotten poems. And which, all said and done, earned her little behond a most perfunctory obituary in the Times.
But what in the ever-living universe was this volume doing in my staid father's library? It's implausible that he could have found anything empathetic in such poems as "St. Theresa" and "The Boy Christ." Especially since Earthbound was the only volume of "contemporary" poetry that he seems to have possessed. In 1929, when Earthbound hit the streets, my father would have been a buoyant, studious young fellow of twenty-five -- a diligent bachelor law clerk with still a year or so to go before he would find Lilly. Helen Mullins herself was just thirty years old. Is there a story here? Am I missing something?
There are no clues; not even a single pencil mark. Not from one end of the book to the other. Something doesn't compute.
I have a copy of the last set of poems ( the mirrored walls)
Posted by: angelica | March 29, 2015 at 02:42 PM