The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (46 page)

Theirs was an “open marriage,” Boissevain insisted, but Millay was so fiercely protective of her privacy that the identity of the extramarital lover described in the sonnets in
Fatal Interview
(1931) remains unknown. In a sense, the identity of her lovers was subordinate to the feelings they engendered within her. As Edmund Wilson observed, “She did not … give the impression that personality much mattered for her or that, aside from her mother and sisters, her personal relations were important except as subjects for poems….” In the end she always returned to her deepest love—what she called her “soul’s chastity”—poetry.

HER THOUGHTS:

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!

—from Millay’s “A Few Figs from Thistles”

—C.D.

The Mad Poet

EZRA POUND (Oct. 30, 1885–Nov. 1, 1972)

HIS FAME:
Pound was a master of poetic style and form. His most famous work is
Cantos
, an autobiographical multivolume epic 40 years in the making.

HIS PERSON:
An eccentric figure with a billowing cape, a “fox’s muzzle” beard, and one long, dangling earring, Pound affected a personal style as distinctive as his verse. After abandoning his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he worked briefly as a professor of Romance languages at Wabash College in Craw-fordsville, Ind., then left for Europe in 1908. While teaching at London’s Regent
Street Polytechnic Institute, he developed a nonacademic interest in one of

his pupils, Dorothy Shakespear. They

married in 1914. After WWI they

moved to France, and later to Italy.

Meanwhile, Pound was working on
Cantos
and lending invaluable support to

Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, James

Joyce, and other struggling writers. He

was also developing a reactionary philosophy which eventually led to his conviction

that “usury is the cancer of the world” and

that the Jews were the prime perpetrators

of this evil. By the time the first rumblings

of WWII were heard, he was acclaiming

Pound just before his 28th birthday

Mussolini as a genius and Hitler as “a

Jeanne d’Arc, a saint.” Pound’s vehement denouncements of the American war efforts over Rome Radio resulted in his being indicted by the U.S. on 19 counts of treason. Arrested outside his home at Sant’ Ambrogio, Italy, in April, 1945, he spent six months in an American army stockade before being shipped back to the U.S. At his trial in Washington, D.C., in February of 1946, he was judged of “unsound mind” and was confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane. Finally released in 1958, he returned to Italy, worked sporadically for a few years, then lapsed into silence for the last decade of his life. At the end he lamented, “Everything that I touch, I spoil. I have blundered always.”

LOVE LIFE:
Getting engaged was one of Pound’s favorite pastimes as a young man. When he was 19 he established a liaison with 34-year-old concert pianist Katherine Ruth Heyman, who gave him an heirloom diamond ring. At about the same time, he became engaged to poet Hilda Doolittle (pen name H. D.), who recorded in her journal that Pound’s “fiery kisses” were “electric, magnetic.”

Another young poet to fall under Pound’s sway was Hilda’s friend Frances Gregg. After his relationships with Frances and Hilda cooled, he became engaged to Mary Moore and gave her the diamond ring entrusted to him by Miss Heyman. Complications with the opposite sex continued to dog his steps.

His landlady found a woman in his bed one morning after he had left for his teaching duties at Wabash College, and as a result of the incident Pound lost his job. Although he claimed that the girl was merely a destitute actress on whom he had taken pity, members of the community were outraged.

Leaving the tangled skein of his romances behind him, Pound sailed for Europe, where he served as Katherine Heyman’s concert manager before meeting Dorothy Shakespear, whose mother was a close friend of the poet William Butler Yeats. Dorothy had all the requisites for a wife. She was “beautiful and well-off ” and had “the most charming manners.” But Pound was not destined to settle into a conventional marriage for long. In 1922, eight years after he had wed Dorothy, he was introduced to fellow American expatriate Olga Rudge, a pretty, dark-haired concert violinist in her mid-20s. She thought him “the hand-somest man she had ever seen” and he considered her “a great goddess.” When the goddess became his mistress, Pound began leading a double life, spending winters with Dorothy and summers with Olga. In 1925 Olga gave birth to his daughter, Mary, and the following year Dorothy bore his son, Omar. In 1944, when the Germans forced Pound and his wife out of their home in the Italian seaport of Rapallo, they moved in with Olga in Sant’Ambrogio for the remainder of the war. Although no angry words were ever spoken in the household, Pound’s daughter recounts that the air was always heavy with tension because Dorothy and Olga despised each other. During the final stages of his life, as his health declined and he became increasingly reclusive, Dorothy proved physically unable to care for him. Consequently, his last years were spent with Olga, who would accompany him to the Montin trattoria in Venice. According to one restaurant employee, “he never said a word and always sat with his chin on his chest, sometimes muttering.” After his death at 87, Olga Rudge stayed on in Italy, and today, according to one Venetian, “she listens all day, at the loudest volume, to tapes of Ezra Pound reading his poetry; perhaps not having heard his voice much when he was alive, she wants to do so now.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
“It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve…. There are traces of it in the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos…. Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.”

—The Eds.

The Santa Claus Of Loneliness

RAINER MARIA RILKE (Dec. 4, 1875–Dec. 29, 1926)

HIS FAME:
Rilke was a German poet whose lyric and finely crafted verses gained him international acclaim. His most famous works are the
Duino Elegies
and
Sonnets to Orpheus
.

HIS PERSON:
Born in Prague, Rilke was raised by his unbalanced mother as a girl for his first six years. Later his father sent him to a military school, but he dropped out because of poor health. He also quit a commercial school in Linz, Austria, and the University of Prague. Rilke published his first volume of poems at 19, then went to Munich to devote himself to writing. All his life Rilke traveled constantly in Europe, producing a steady stream of poetry. He also visited North
Africa and Egypt, and he called Russia— where he met Tolstoi—his spiritual

home. But actually he preferred Paris.

For a time he was Auguste Rodin’s secretary. Then members of the European

aristocracy took Rilke under their wing,

putting him up in a series of villas and

castles. Princess Marie von Thurn und

Taxis-Hohenlohe became his lifelong

patroness in 1909. Rilke found in her

the mother figure he had longed for, and

to her he opened his heart. During WWI

he briefly served as a clerk in the Austrian

army. Intellectual and artistic women

were always drawn to the graceful Rilke,

although he was no Adonis. With his

long head, large nose, receding cleft chin, and droopy mustache, he seemed

“ugly, small, puny” even to Princess Marie. Rilke preferred the company of women, yet he would bolt as soon as he felt his solitude and work threatened.

He practiced nudism, flirted with the occult, and believed in nature cures.

Images of virgin girlhood, death, and roses run through much of his poetry.

“The Santa Claus of loneliness,” as poet W. H. Auden called him, died near Montreux, Switzerland.

LOVE-LIFE:
“I am no good at love, because I did not love my mother,” Rilke once confessed. At other times he complained about the suffering and despair that his erotic relationships had brought. Because he found very little pleasure in sex, with many women he preferred the role of a good friend. But there certainly were exceptions.

At 16, while at the commercial school in Linz, he had a love affair with an instructor several years his senior, and they eventually ran away together. The next year he fell in love with and became engaged to Valerie von David-Rhonfeld, an aspiring artist a year older than he. Three years and 130 love letters later, Rilke broke off the engagement.

In 1897 Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salomé, a well-known author and the daughter of a Russian general. Although she was married and 13 years his senior, they quickly became lovers. Rilke’s diary suggests that she may even have borne his child. Rilke, Lou, and her husband made a trip to Russia, and a short time later the two lovers returned to Russia, this time passing themselves off as cousins. This was Rilke’s most enduring relationship with a woman, not counting Princess Marie’s purely nonsexual friendship. Even after Rilke and Lou officially parted, they continued to see each other and corresponded for the rest of Rilke’s life. Lou, an amateur psychoanalyst, wrote years later that of the “many fears” in Rilke, his biggest was the girlish fear of his penis. She alluded to Rilke’s sexual infantilism and revealed that a physical difficulty with his genitals made erections painful for him. She also interpreted his fears as a “displaced, converted guilt over masturbation.”

Rilke married German sculptor Clara Westhoff in 1901. Their daughter, Ruth, was born the same year. But the Rilkes soon went their separate ways without bothering to get divorced.

In 1914 pianist Magda von Hattingberg considered living with Rilke forever, but then decided that she did not love him as woman loves man. “For me he is the voice of God, the immortal soul,” she said. The following year the flamboyant painter Loulou Albert-Lazard became his mistress in Munich. In the winter of 1918 Rilke wrote impassioned letters to poet Clair Studer, with whom he had a “short ecstatic flowering of physical love.” Then there was 17-year-old Marthe Hennebert, a pathetic Parisian waif with whom Rilke carried on a lover-father affair from 1911 to 1919. And in Switzerland in 1921 he had an erotic liaison with the Russian painter Baladine Klossowska.

Rilke also was linked romantically, but not necessarily sexually, with many other women, including poet Regina Ullmann and Countess Francesca von Reventlow. His last love was a young Egyptian beauty, Mrs. Nimet Eloui Bey, whom Rilke met shortly before his death. It is said that while picking roses for her, Rilke pricked his finger. An infection developed, and while treating it doctors discovered by chance that Rilke had leukemia. He was dead within weeks.

HIS THOUGHTS:
Rilke once confided to Princess Marie, “All love is an effort for me, a difficult task….” Among the manuscripts unpublished at his death were seven poems glorifying the human phallus; in these the sexual act is extolled in religious metaphors. The essence of earthly splendor is our “lovely”

sex, which Christianity has always sought to suppress. “Why did they make our sex homeless for us?” Rilke asked.

FROM THE PHALLIC POEMS:
The fourth in the series of seven poems was written in October, 1915.

You don’t know towers, with your diffidence.

Yet now you’ll become aware

of a tower in that wonderful rare

space in you. Hide your countenance.

You’ve erected it unsuspectingly,

by turn and glance and indirection,

and I, blissful one, am allowed entry.