The Helene Mullins Mystery

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 Rossetti'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 beyond a  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. Nothing from one end of the book to the other. Something doesn't compute.

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

I bought a copy of Helene Mullins' "The Mirrored Walls" because it came with her signature plus several of her typed and signed notes. In one of those notes to her eye doctor, a Dr. Harris, she writes "I often find in the poets one who speaks intimately to me when I need clarification of my thoughts. Among my notes I found a quotation from T. S. Eliot's East Cocker [sic] and it gavd [sic] me a poem, which I enclose for you."

Here is the poem:

Poem to T. S. Eliot

"Home is where we start from. As we grow older/
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated." --East Coker

You do not speak of fear. Did self-esteem
preclude the chilling fear of growing old?
Or did your late conversion mercifully
rebuke the skepticism of your youth?

The intervals of suffering for mankind
being decreed with every passing hour,
you, growing old yet hopeful, might be envied
your trust in a benign, known Superpower.

[Craig Wask]

I should have mentioned that Helene Mullins was a regular contributor to one of the most respected publications of the last 100+years. The New Yorker.

[Craig Wask]

Helene Mullins was married to my grandfathers best friend “Lenny Johnson”.
My grandfather and Lenny used to come to our home on visits. This was the early 1960’s. Unfortunately Helene while not a recluse would never socialize with other people. Whenever they visited Helene would quickly disappear into another room always writing until it was the time to leave.
Because of this habit I never had the chance to really know her. But her husband was another story. He was as outgoing as possible. A story teller with a great sense of humor. Burr Moler, my grandfather, and he were similar personalities. They even wrote and were published in some of the magazines of their younger years. Lenny was undoubtably my most favorite non related adult. My last memory of him was my wife and I joining him in Greenwich Village at a Chinese restaurant in the early in the 1970’s. It was predictably hilarious and I still enjoy that memory. I am 73 years old as I write this.

[angelica]

I have a copy of the last set of poems ( the mirrored walls)