Elena Read online

  By May summer is upon the city, and Elena describes the sweltering little room she occupies at Hewett Hall. “There is hardly enough room to turn around, unless one wishes to stand upon one’s bed. The windows are so small that hardly any air comes through, and since almost all the rooms are singles, there is not even a roommate with whom to share the misery. Thus we fly to the out-of-doors and sit beneath that double row of European linden trees that stretches between Brooks and Barnard halls, the kindly legacy of Dr. Griffin’s sweet regime.”

  Despite the heat, however, Elena continues to work. She submits a short piece to the Barnacle, but it is rejected as highbrow. She never sends anything to that publication again.

  In June, after classes have ended for the summer, Elena takes a job in the admissions office, which Mary had arranged for her. Entries in her journal taper off, until the final one, recorded on July 22, 1929: “Tom brought over one of his poems. I went out to sit on a bench in the commons to read it. It was an odd poem, the style rather like Tennyson, although the references were terribly modern, shot through with allusions to ‘hennaed hair’ and ‘marcel waves,’ which seems very strange since someone is always playing an octavina or a viola da gamba in the background.”

  Elena’s journal ends with this observation. Thus there is no record of that day late in August when we all gathered on Rockaway Beach to escape the heat of Manhattan.

  We lounged there under Harry’s beach umbrella, looking every bit as dissolute as young people can on such occasions. Harry wiped his brow with a plain white handkerchief. “I hear Tom’s completed a new poem,” he said to me. “Have you read it?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Neither have I,” Harry said. He glanced at Elena, and something seemed to empty out of him. By then his infatuation had become a deep romantic yearning, even though she continually broke luncheon and dinner engagements, a rudeness he could dismiss only with much difficulty, but which, as he told me much later in one of the few poetic usages I ever heard from him, “came from her abundance, William, that overflowing cup she was.” One afternoon a year later, he came to my apartment and sat massaging his hat like a dislocated shoulder while he related how deep his love was for my sister. His longing was so great it appeared almost comical. “I want you to play John Alden to my Miles Standish, William,” he said in a low, strained voice. “I trust that since Elena is your sister, history will not repeat itself.” Harry’s love became a topic of solemn conversation within our circle as the months passed. Tom even wrote a poem about it, though so well disguising its ultimate meaning that when Harry read it he thought it was about a cousin of his then living in Brazil. Of all of us, Mary was, not surprisingly, the most generous. “It’s all rather sad, William,” she once told me. “He loves her for the very things that make it impossible for her to love him.”

  As the afternoon progressed, it was obvious just what those things were. Harry tended to go off on tangents, wandering through history and art as if they formed a whirling pool beneath his feet. Only when he talked of business matters did his mind assume that analytic order which Elena required in everything. “Get to the point, Harry,” she’d insist repeatedly as Harry struggled through the jungle of his thought. Still, she bore a strange affection for him all her life, and at his funeral she leaned over to me as the coffin was wheeled out under the cavernous vault of Riverside Church and whispered, “You know, William, Harry had the great good fortune to have lived his whole life in the age of courtly love.”

  This was true enough, but it was also true that Harry remained a sort of moderator all his life, the figure who surveys the course but rarely alters it, the sort who, as Elena wrote of a rather weak man in her Depression novel, Calliope, “might have had a light to shine, had he been born upon a star.”

  But at moderating, Harry was quite adept, and after fruitlessly trying to get our group to discuss one of Tom’s poems that afternoon, he turned his attention to me.

  “How’s the Cowper thing coming?” he asked. He was referring to a graduate paper, which I would turn into a doctoral dissertation and which Sam would later publish as a favor, and which, because of that, still languishes with stubborn permanence in the half light of a thousand dusty shelves.

  “It’s coming along at its own pace,” I said.

  “A long work?” Harry asked.

  “It keeps getting longer and longer.”

  “A book,” Mary said mordantly.

  Harry looked at her. “You disapprove?”

  “I don’t care for the subject,” Mary said. She had already read the first chapter and found Cowper’s madness and religious mania wholly tedious. Of course, although I hadn’t said so, these were the very things that fascinated me. Mary claimed that I was attracted only to what she called the “Great Unstables” — Ruskin and Swift and the like. And later she gave a highly psychological interpretation of my concern for such figures, asserting that Whitman House with all its implications had finally seeped beneath the lining of my brain.

  Harry turned to Elena. “And what are you working on?” he asked.

  Elena had been looking out at the sea. Her hair was tightly wrapped in a black bathing cap, which, I noticed later, she took off before plunging into the waves.

  “Just the usual papers and things,” she said indifferently.

  Harry arched an eyebrow. “Nothing special?”

  Elena shook her head. “No.”

  But if Elena was not working on anything in particular, she was working at everything tirelessly and with enormous energy. She may not have been the brightest student at Barnard in those days, as I once told Martha, but she was certainly the hungriest. Even Sam was impressed by the ferocity with which she went at her studies. “At first I thought it was just an affectation,” he said to me many years later. “You know, just a lot of undergraduate whiz-kidding. Then she came into that little office of mine and handed me this neatly stacked manuscript she called New England Maid, and I read it that afternoon, and, William, I cannot tell you what it did to me.”

  Harry looked worried. “I hope you’re not finding it boring up on the hill,” he said to Elena.

  “Of course not, Harry,” Elena said.

  “Nothing for a woman without a college education,” he added with that strained paternal look.

  “Nor with one, either,” Mary said dryly.

  Harry turned back to me. The last thing he wanted to do was get into a discussion with Mary about the poor life chances of woman hood.

  “And how are things on your job, William?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said. I had recently taken a position with a travel agency in the Village, and for the last few months I had spent a great deal of time acquainting various portly individuals with the exotic possibilities of England, France, and the Greek Isles.

  “I don’t think you’ll be in that job very much longer,” Harry said confidently. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking, you might be interested in coming to work for one of my —”

  I shook my head immediately. “No, Harry. I have one rule. I don’t go to work for a friend.”

  “Ditto for me, by the way, Harry,” Mary said.

  Harry looked at Elena. “And of course, you have to complete your education. There’ll be nothing but school for you until then.”

  Elena stood up quickly, dusting the sand from her legs. “I think it’s time for a swim,” she said. “The water looks just right.” Then she darted away.

  “She’s like a deer,” Harry said.

  I watched as Elena pulled the cap from her head and dove into the first large wave, her long white legs disappearing into the rush of foam.

  “How’s she doing in her classes?” Harry asked. “She never talks about them.”

  “Very well, I understand,” I said.

  “But nothing extraordinary?”

  “Well, evidently Dr. Stein has taken an interest in her,” I told him.

  Harry was genuinely impressed. “That’s wonderful. H
ow did she meet him?”

  “He read a paper of hers on Sir Walter Scott,” I said. “Another professor showed it to him. Then he contacted Elena about a research position.”

  “That’s quite something,” Harry said. “Dr. Stein is a very formidable person.”

  Elena came bounding up to us a few minutes later. She toweled herself vigorously and shook her hair. Harry watched her, dazzled. But she noticed him so little that he must have thought her a cruel and exquisite temptress. Jack MacNeill would later have a similar opinion. “Elena never teases with her body,” he once told me, “just with everything else.”

  When Elena had finished drying herself off, she sat down and glanced all around. I remember thinking that in this light she looked surprisingly like her father — the set of her jaw, the depth of her eyes.

  “I understand you’re working for Dr. Stein, Elena,” Harry said.

  Elena pulled on her blouse and tied it in a knot at her waist. “Yes.”

  “Have you read any of his books?” Harry asked.

  “Only one,” Elena said. She stood up and slipped on her shorts. “It’s called The Moors. It’s about the Moors of England as they appear in literature.”

  Harry nodded. “Oh, I see. How is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Elena said. “I think there’s something very interesting about it. But I’m not sure what.”

  Later that afternoon, as we were about to leave, Harry insisted on taking a picture of Elena. He later gave the photograph to me, and it has rested for over fifty years in one of the folders in that large file I have kept almost as long and which is marked simply “On Elena.” She is very erect amid a small city of drooping beach umbrellas. She is wearing her dark shorts, and her blouse has become untied and falls loosely at her waist. Her hair is almost totally covered by a large bandeau. She is waving at the camera with her right hand, while the other casually holds a magazine. In no other picture will she ever appear quite so thoroughly happy. In subsequent photographs she will look more willful and accomplished. But she will never in her life look more free.

  I think Martha Farrell had a little trouble dealing with Dr. Stein. During one of our first interviews, before she began writing the biography, we sat on Elena’s small porch overlooking the bay. It was summer and the water was dotted with scores of brightly colored sails. Martha was peculiarly relaxed as she leaned back into her deck chair. “One of the things that really struck me in all of my research,” she said, “is how many men had an influence on Elena.”

  “People don’t sprout fully made from Zeus’s head, Martha,” I told her.

  “No, of course not. But with regard to Dr. Stein and Jack MacNeill, well, I was surprised at how important their influence was.”

  “If my sister’s life can be thought of as a Künstlerroman,” I said, “then yes, you’d have to say that Dr. Stein and Jack MacNeill and Jason Findley were central characters.”

  Martha took a pad from the small table beside her, then drew a pencil from her blouse pocket. “How would you describe Dr. Stein? Generally, I mean.”

  “I would say that he came close to realizing the medieval idea of a holy being, Martha.”

  “Which was?”

  “Pure mind.”

  Martha wrote this down in her notebook. “Sounds rather pedantic.”

  I shrugged. “He was a very intense German Jew. Such people are not known for their frivolity — only for their achievements.”

  Martha cleared her throat. “Where did you first meet him?”

  “At a little restaurant near Columbia. Elena wanted to introduce me.”

  “Did she find him attractive?” Martha asked.

  “She found him edifying,” I said. “He was an old man, Martha. He was already dying when she met him. But he was still a great scholar and, I think, for Elena, a kind of ideal. The way he removed his spectacles and rubbed the lenses with his handkerchief — every gesture was scholarly. He embodied seriousness of mind. And Elena was so very young. How could she not see him as a towering figure?”

  Martha nodded that peremptory nod of hers. “How about politics? Was he a reactionary?”

  “I’m not sure he thought about politics in the usual sense,” I told her.

  Martha looked at me as if I were holding something back. “Well, Elena was a sophomore by then, wasn’t she? So it had to be late 1929 when you met him.”

  “It was November of 1929,” I said. “We all had dinner together.”

  “About a month or so after the crash?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t talk politics?”

  “Not everyone expected the Depression in November 1929, Martha,” I said. “But if they had, I’m not sure Dr. Stein would have discussed it, or its ramifications. He was busy writing about Ossian, this presumed Scottish poet.”

  “All right,” Martha said, “no need to pursue that aspect at this time.” She jotted down another note or two, then looked up at me. “Just tell me about that evening.”

  “Fine,” I said, “that evening.”

  We met in a small café off Broadway at around 110th Street, a sort of chophouse, which students frequented but which the faculty shunned. Still, Elena had picked it herself, and so I expected it to be suitable to Dr. Stein.

  They came in at around seven-thirty, Dr. Stein wobbling on his cane. He had white hair, thinning quite a bit, and a silvery goatee. He looked very much like a caricature of himself, an old German schoolmaster.

  It took Elena and Dr. Stein some time to maneuver themselves into the sunken dining room of the café, and Dr. Stein appeared rather wearied by the time they reached the table.

  “Good evening, William,” Dr. Stein said after Elena had introduced us.

  “Good evening, sir,” I said.

  Elena stood behind Dr. Stein’s chair until he had seated himself, then she took the chair beside him.

  “Your sister is most helpful to me, William,” Dr. Stein said. He reached over and patted Elena’s hand. “I’m so old, you see. It is difficult for me to run about the library as I once did.”

  “I’m glad she’s helpful,” I said.

  Dr. Stein wagged his finger at me. “And not just the running about. But the reading and the thinking. She does these things, too, William, not always chasing after Valentino’s cape, you understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “They think it’s easy to know and learn,” Dr. Stein went on, “these students here.” He shook his head. “They think ignorance will fall before them when their trumpets sound.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. I glanced at Elena. She was not gazing at him worshipfully, as Martha later portrayed it. She was simply listening to him intensely because she had come to believe not that he was infallibly wise but that he stood for very deep and feeling scholarship, the sort, as she would later write in Quality, “that enlightens even when it errs.”

  Dr. Stein glanced about, taking in the place for the first time.

  “I have heard of this place,” he said. “Steak and potatoes, American style.” He grinned impishly. “It’s a little dark, but not a bad place.” The grin broke into a wide smile. “For steak and potatoes, I mean.”

  “My brother is working on William Cowper,” Elena said.

  Dr. Stein nodded. “William Cowper. Very good. Then you must know his poem ‘The Task.’”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “That poem is interesting in many ways, you know, Elena,” Dr. Stein said. “For you see it has a meaning in its direction, almost a moral position. The poet begins by wanting not to tax himself, to write something on a humble theme, undemanding. But he can’t; and that is where his greatness lies. And so, this little poem about a sofa becomes a profound treatise on education and public corruption.” He smiled once again, a curiously inward, almost self-mocking smile, which seemed to warm the atmosphere. “Cowper knew, you see, that a petty theme will insure a petty work, just as Melville knew that a mighty theme will make a mighty one.”
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  “Providing the artist is mighty,” I said.

  “Which he can never know, William,” Dr. Stein said, “until he attempts a work that is larger than his ability.”

  “So the greatness is in the attempt?” I asked.

  “No, in the steady realization of it,” Dr. Stein said. “And that is made possible, William, by dissatisfaction with your own mediocrity.” He wagged his finger. “It is not made certain, you understand, only possible.” He grabbed one of the menus resting on the table and opened it. “So, do you want steak or chicken?”

  Elena laughed. “Chicken.”

  I could see his eyes crinkling just above the menu. “Fried or baked or broiled?”

  “Fried,” Elena said.

  Dr. Stein shook his head disapprovingly. “So it always is with Americans,” he said. Then he summoned the waiter and ordered fried chicken for us all. “I am a citizen of this country, so I must do as other citizens, eat what they eat, but not necessarily believe what they believe.” He leaned back and folded his hands over his stomach. “Ah, if we could get learning in the brain as easily as food in the belly,” he said, “all those subjects that drive us mad would be reduced to a sigh of forgotten urgency.” He nodded. “The glory of God and the majesty of the state, to begin with. Foolish notions, William. They beget nothing but public mischief.” He chuckled, as though he were casting a wry look at his own grandiosity. “People yearn for a community of light,” he said, becoming more serious, “but they search for it in the darkness. Take this notion with you into Cowper. Use it as a torch.”