HELEN WHIFFLETREE, AMERICAN POETESS
A tribute to a native artist, nurtured in Greenwich Village and Montmartre
By P. H. Dunkels, N.G.
Editor’s Note: The unexpected demise of Helen Whiffletree, the American poetess, who was accidentally shot by a gendarme while she was picking violets in the Bois de Boulogne, has saddened poetry lovers all over the world and deprived Vanity Fair of one of its most valued contributors. Wishing to give a slight token of our profound grief at Miss Whiffletree’s tragic disappearance from the field of letters, we asked the internationally known authority on literature, Professor P. H. Dunkels, of Colgate University, to write a brief biographical sketch and appreciation of his illustrious contemporary, Helen Whiffletree. It is our conviction that Professor Dunkels’ article, which we publish herewith, is fraught with comfort and happiness for the host of this poetess’s admirers, both here and in Europe. They number countless thousands.
Helen Whiffletree was born amid lowly surroundings in the unlovely town of Arlington Heights, Massachusetts, on the seventeenth day of August, 1889, of Irish-Italian parents. Her mother, Gertrude Magee, was descended from a long line of brewers. Giuseppi Paladini, her father, rose to the position of first assistant dishwasher in the local automat restaurant, but apparently failed to make good.
Confronted on every hand with hardships and privations, Helen set about at an early age to earn her own living. At the age of nine, she was supporting her indigent mother and seven sisters by selling newspapers, dressed in boy’s clothes. The natural elasticity of her spirits and the vivacity of her adolescent personality in general attracted the notice of Matthew Whiffletree, a St. Louis lumber merchant well past his dotage, who happened to buy a newspaper from Helen. After making the necessary inquiries, he adopted her as his own daughter and sent her to a number of expensive schools, including Brierley (where she distinguished herself by winning a scholarship, shortly before leaving under a cloud) and thence to Vassar.
Early in her career, in fact while still in her teens at college, Helen Whiffletree wrote verse in which naiveté is carried to a pitch of unheard-of poignancy. As an example, I can do no better than quote eight lovely lines which appeared, over the signature “H. W.,” in the literary magazine of her alma mater, and which are entitled “Conversation.”
“Quoth a busy bee
To a butterfly
‘Honey make I
And what maketh thee?’
‘Go ask a lily,’
Was the sage reply
Of the silly
Butterfly.”
To this, her collegiate period, belong also such lilting lyrics as “Sodom and Gomorrah,” “A Sparrow’s Christmas,” “Under the Mistletoe,” and the inimitable “Day-Dream”—her first experiment in the Petrarchan sonnet form; which, besides showing the influence of Keats, caused three leading New York critics to compare her to Mrs. Browning, Shakespeare and Sappho, respectively. Readers of Vanity Fair will doubtless pardon me for reminding them of the exquisite sextet:
“I ope my windows to this April eve,
Letting sweet twilight whisper o’er my soul
Its wondrous secrets without more ado.
Night from day’s sentence now doth seek reprieve,
While—from the summit of yon wooded knoll—
A final whippoorwill the ear doth woo.”
Alexander Woollcott is said to have remarked, when the last line was recited to him for the first time by a friend in the course of a camping trip in the Canadian Rockies: “It hurts, it is so fine.”
Having been dismissed from Vassar without her degree for an innocent girlish prank involving several of the best families of Cleveland, the poetess inhabited, in quick succession, Bangor, Topeka and Salt Lake City and arrived, penniless but exultant, in Greenwich Village, where she was immediately understood and vigorously acclaimed by an enthusiastic little coterie of struggling artists and models, many of whom lent her money in small quantities as a tribute to the surge of odes, triolets, rondels, rondeaux, chants royals, etc., etc., which poured from her teeming brain almost ceaselessly at this fecund time. In all these poems, the subject matter is, as might be expected, love in its multiple aspects, maternal affection and devotion to one’s fellow man (or woman) being particularly stressed. Three volumes of love songs—“Satyr,” “Chants and Reprisals,” and “Afternoon Sunlight”—saw the light of day via Boni & Liveright. Indeed, so prolific did her muse become, that these Greenwich Village poems alone outnumber the combined output of Whittier, Tennyson and Meredith. But more remarkable even than their numerosity is the technique of those creations. Note, for instance, the subtle mastery of a difficult form in this frolicsome “Triolet” from “Chants”:
Who offers bananas,
‘You make my heart bleed’—? No.
Is my answer to Pedro,
‘One dozen’—? Indeed no!
—‘Retro me, Satanas!’
Is my answer to Pedro
Who offers bananas.”
From New York, where she divorced a banker and several noted theatrical producers, it was but a step to Paris and the Quartier Latin; where, in a modest little hotel off the Boulevard Montparnasse, our poetess finally found the perfect spiritual environment which she had ceaselessly craved and where her art attained to its full maturity. Although the singing syllables of Helen Whiffletree were already on the lips of more than ten thousand poetry lovers in America, it was in Paris that her real fame came to her. Eighteen months after leaving New York, this magnetic Sappho was the idol of the Rotonde and darling of the Dôme, to which latter café she dedicated several of her best-known sonnets.
Meanwhile, in proportion as her reputation increased—while critics on both sides of the Atlantic were awarding her latest eight books a place beside the immortal works of Goethe, Anatole France and Donald Ogden Stewart—her personality assumed truly hypnotic proportions. From the very beginning, she had exercised a mysterious and compelling power over whomsoever she came in contact with; but Paris accentuated this power to an incredible degree. It is no exaggeration to say that the psychic influence of Helen Whiffletree is unsurpassed in the history of letters.
My first experience with this emanation is unforgettable. It is all bound up with the tiptop of Montmartre—the famous Place du Tertre, overlooking Paris. Here, as is well known, all the Americans in the city (except those who are too involved in the delights of the grape to budge) wend their ubiquitous way, to dine and drink out-of-doors and be entertained by a motley crew of acrobats, musicians and prestidigitators. On the particular evening in question, the scene was of a more-than-typical picturesqueness. Anton Cul, the blind gipsy violinist, was weaving iridescent harmonies in one corner, despite the unbridled enthusiasm of the neighbouring spectators, who showered him with hundred franc notes, which were cleverly collected by a cocker spaniel furnished by the management, and deposited in the musician’s by-no-means-microscopic hat. On another part of the hilltop, a group of diners were applauding the prowess of Zizz, the Fire-Bird, who—having climbed on a somewhat rickety table—proceeded to balance upside-down on an ordinary champagne glass and at the same time to swallow lighted cannon crackers, pinwheels and even (to the horror of Marianne Moore, whom I particularly remarked) a roman candle. In yet another portion of the Place, Hermaphrodites, strong man of Constantinople, was throwing his three-hundred-pound wife slowly and rhythmically up into the April evening, only to catch her in one hand as she descended.
All at once the violinist sank for support against the slight form of the cocker spaniel, which collapsed with a sharp whine, regurgitating two thousand francs—the Fire-Bird uttered a moan and rolled upon the ground, exuding rockets, mines and similar pyrotechnical monstrosities in every conceivable direction, to the vast embarrassment of the spectators—the strong man clasped his almost nonexistent occiput in both mammoth hands, uttering a terrible cry and paying no attention to his wife—who descended with her usual velocity and completely demolished eleven bottles of champagne, a United States Senator, and Mrs. Cholmondley P. Biddle of Philadelphia and Newport.
In the midst of the consternation caused by these unprecedented accidents, I lifted my eyes and beheld the incarnation of American patriotism stepping from a two-cylinder taxi: at the same moment, a hundred throats exclaimed “Helen Whiffletree!” The poetess (for it was indeed she) was attired in a red tamoshanter, a white cache-nez and sky-blue pyjamas. True to her ancestry, she carried under one arm the Decameron and under the other a nearly empty quart bottle labelled Hennessy Three Star. The striking beauty of her getup, as—“without more ado”—she produced a large harmonica and proceeded to sound the opening chords of the Star Spangled Banner, was accentuated by an exhilarating negligence of poise which, in another, might have been attributed to artificial stimuli rather than “divine fire.” But, while the sacred strains of O Say Can You burst upon the electrified assembly, along with memories of heroic self-sacrifice, unparalleled devotion and unstinting camaraderie, only one thing occurred to me; which was, that I owed it to posterity to preserve, at any cost, my first, virginal impression of this authentic genius. Accordingly I tore down the hill and into the Moulin Rouge, where my favourite waiter brought me the usual pen and ink.
“The rest is silence.”
From Vanity Fair, November 1925.