One of the greatest loves of my life when I was a young poet
was Elinor Wylie.
And, in fact, if you didn't love her,
you were out as far as I was concerned.
I met a woman named Elinor, I believe
it was Robinson, in New York.
And during the war she was an active socialist
and a conscientious objector of Norman Thomas's newspaper.
I had a delightful evening with her.
About two or three years later, a young man
called me up and said, I met your friend Elinor Robinson
in Washington and she has a message for you.
She asked me to call you and give you this message.
She is now Elinor Wylie.
She had married Mr. Wylie, the first husband,
and she's living with all of Elinor's old hats,
velvet roses, silverware.
It seems that whenever Elinor left the man,
she left her beautiful wardrobe and the men then
loved the wardrobe all the rest of their lives.
So my friend had become Elinor Wylie.
Well, that was, again, a note of reality in the milieu.
Oh, I forgot to tell you that Miss MacIntosh is bald.
That's her secret.
She's as bald as a billiard ball or busy highway.
She says no grass grows on a busy street.
And she also loves to recite old proverbs about her baldness.
The bald head is soonest shaved, is one of them.
It was a terrible pain to her to wear that red wig
in the nursery, because she's a lost soul--
well, she's almost a transvestite.
She's not quite.
She's very abnormal.
I'll leave you to figure out just exactly how.
It's sadder than one can put into words.
She's the lost soul of the universe, really.
And she has her biblical symbolism, too,
which I won't go into.
Because the Merv--
I was on the Merv Griffin Show five times,
and they said, just don't quote the Bible ever,
because you're rating will drop.
I'm not going to quote the Bible here.
I don't want my ratings to drop.
Well, I'm afraid I'll have God in this next paragraph, though.
That'll be all right.
She's telling how she was always bald.
She was born bald, and she will die bald.
I will have to say that the Bible says that, bald we
come into the world, and on the last day of creation
when the heavens open and the hail and brimstone rain down,
we will all be bald at the end of time.
And it's man without illusions-- that's
what the baldness means-- without his dreams, his mask.
As Joseph Kamel would call it, his illusion.
So this is the part which I like about Miss MacInstosh, when
she discovered she was bald when she was a little girl in Iowa--
What Cheer, Iowa.
I was never there.
And I wrote with great happy feeling that no one in What
Cheer would ever read Miss MacIntosh, of course.
And they have a big full page first review of--
first page review of Miss MacIntosh,
My Darling because Miss MacIntosh came from What Cheer.
They liked it.
I don't know that they read the book or not, of course.
They liked, at least, the idea that they were in a book.
This is Miss MacIntosh's story of her own baldness.
"Things had been so sad and her constitution unwritten
and her days numbered.
Always this baldness, it had pursued her from place
to place, leaving her no peace but in the eyes of others.
And that had been her life from the beginning,
when bald she had come out of her mother's womb,
having no hair or feather to cover her.
Bald, she would sink into her grave,
she did believe, her old eyes smiling,
and it was ever so on the night before her marriage
to the preacher."
She showed him her baldness, that was her mistake,
and he fled, as if he had seen the end of time.
"Why, however, should she have trusted him or any preacher who
was himself the lost soul, the bald heart so much worse,
according to her way of thinking,
than the bald head whom God hath created?
Whom God hath created, let God not
put away with the brown leaves falling,
with the stars going out.
Oh, the weariness of her mother, it
was that, she believed, which had caused
this baldness, the failure of her mother to love her father,
and the bald meeting the bald, and the death meeting
the death, and the whirlwind, and the waters,
and the everlasting baldness of snowy altitudes
unshadowed by one hair or feather or wing.
Even as a little child, she had wept,
hiding her tears in the dark, carrying her head as high
as any.
When she was three years old and had first noticed
that she had no hair, she had worn
a little toupee which she had snapped from an old doll's
head.
Why, it was hard to believe now--
but bald, she had gone to school until she was seven years old,
for her little toupee would not even cover her,
and she had no wig, and perhaps no one
thought she should have one.
Each morning she had looked at herself in a mirror,
thinking that perhaps she had grown
her hair during the night, but there was not a single hair.
She had looked at herself in streams and had thought perhaps
she had seen her hair--
and sometimes there might seem one, until the waters moved,
and she knew that what she had thought
was a hair was the hair of a flower
or the hair of a moth passing over her,
or a thin hair of light coming through a cloud.
Perhaps it was the thin thread of a minnow.
Perhaps it was a minnow star.
She had looked into frozen streams,
dreaming that she might have hair if she waited long enough.
How she had envied her sisters who
had been endowed with the most beautiful hair,
hair into which they had brown corn flowers,
and even her brothers who had had fine heads of hair.
But she was this old baldy even then.
And yet it was she who had gotten
the pearl-handled penknife from the journeyman phrenologist,
who was a great designer of octagon houses
and who had visited the little one-room country school
and had sheltered her head as the most beautiful head of all
because of the structure, because
of the great common sense, because of the capacity,
he had said, for the greatest dreaming and faith in something
good, and she would go farther than all the others.
He had brought the penknife with him
because he had expected to find that a boy's head was
the finest head, was willing to concede that a little girl's
head was the finest, was greatly surprised
to find this bald head gleaming like mother-of-pearl
or like the moon when there are no clouds.
He was a peregrine and never in his wandering
had tapped such a head as this.
Usually, the thatch of the grass hair
intervened between him and his studies,
but this bald dome was beautifully
exposed like a map where a man might see himself
when there was no deceptions, no deceits, no illusions, when
the only premise or foundation stone given was
the bald head dreaming waters and clouds
and winds, hair, feathers of birds,
grass, flowers, all man's imaginings, all woman's loves.
Here was the most beautiful brain
box he had ever seen in the world of the living
and he had not visited the world of the dead.
Leaning close, he could hear a buzzing, snoring sound.
Indeed, he had grown rhapsodic--
was quite carried away by his own oratory,
Miss MacIntosh believed, her face turning of green to
rose to gold in the sweepings the swayings of life
as she remembered the old phrenologist with his penknife,
his fingers tapping upon her forehead
as if she were that melon which is hardest to know,
and remembered the astonishment of everyone else
that he had chosen her for the great prize.
Why?
Perhaps everyone else was wondering.
He predicted that she would live and lives of clouds
and live among kings of gold and castles and towers,
for she showed this great ability although her dome was
bald as earth must have been the day before God moved
over the face of the waters.
The way the mosaics of her skull-bones
fitted into the mosaics of her skull-bones
was something marvelous, and hers was that large bump which
was common sense, and hers was the bump of the dreamer who
was mirror man, and hers was that sea greater
than the Sea of Azov.
He said that her bare head would be shadowed
by the wings of birds and moths and many hurricane
and lights of stars.
He had encouraged her.
He had praised her so much that all those old nonconformist
Bible quoters had got mad.
He had praised her so much that her mother thought
that her head might be turned, that she
was vain, vain of her baldness.
Her mother had made her a black velvet
hood with which to cover her head,
to hide her baldness from the world."