The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (45 page)

But neither married life nor his position with the excise service could fully control Burns’ passions. In 1791 there was another claim, this one from Anne Park, the barmaid at a local inn. Jean was totally understanding and ended up raising the child, the third Elizabeth. Burns was a frequent guest of the area’s richer families, including the Riddells of Woodley Park. Mrs. Maria Riddell was one of his most fervent admirers, and there were rumors that their relationship
was extremely intimate. One evening near Christmas, 1793, Burns attended a party at Woodley Park. Everyone was drinking heavily, and someone suggested that they amuse themselves with a mock “Rape of the Sabine Women.” Burns went after Mrs. Riddell with more enthusiasm and realism than the other guests could accept; for the first time in his life, Robert Burns had compromised himself with a woman whose status was higher than his.

One of his letters, published posthumously, was addressed to his younger brother William. In this he advised William to “try for intimacy as soon as you feel the first symptoms of the passion,” since it was “the best preservation for one’s peace.” He considered himself “a very Poet in my enthusiasm of the Passion,” and declared that “the welfare & happiness of the beloved Object, is the first & inviolate sentiment that pervades my soul.” But toward such matters as marriage he was totally practical and unsentimental. “To have a woman to lye with when one pleases, without running any risk of the cursed expense of bastards…. These are solid views of matrimony.”

In his short lifetime Robert Burns successfully broke all of his own rules.

—C.L.W.

The Bride Of Silence

EMILY DICKINSON (Dec. 10, 1830–May 15, 1886)

HER FAME:
Dickinson was something of a

literary sphinx. Working alone, completely outside the mainstream of American life

and art, she composed some of the finest

poetry ever written by a woman. Her most

famous poems include “I Never Saw a

Moor,” “I Died for Beauty,” and “Because I

Could Not Stop for Death.” There have

been several dramatized versions of her life,

including
The Belle of Amherst
(1976).

HER PERSON:
Emily Dickinson grew up

in high-minded gentility in the remote

college town of Amherst, Mass. Her father,

whom she adored, was treasurer of

Dickinson at 17

Amherst College, a lawyer, and a U.S. con—

gressman; her mother was nervous, sickly, and retiring. The Dickinsons were a closely knit family, remaining together until Emily’s parents died. Neither Emily nor her sister, Lavinia, ever married, and when their brother, Austin, did, he simply moved next door.

Emily was plain and shy, “small, like the wren,” with little to distinguish her except her “bold” red hair and “eyes like the sherry in the glass,” as she wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson. When she returned home after a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, she apparently enjoyed the customary dancing parties and the attentions of young beaux for a time. Gradually, however—amid rumors of thwarted love—she became a recluse, communicating with dearly beloved friends by letters, poems, and gifts of posies or cookies.

Alone, she thrilled to the novels of the Brontë sisters; identified vicariously with Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetic heroine; and wrote her own poems, which she bound into precious hand-sewn booklets. It was in 1862 that she first sought the advice of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a prominent literary figure who was to become her “preceptor.” He continuously advised against publication of her poems, which he considered “strange”

and “peculiar.”

During the last 20 years of her life, Emily scarcely left her childhood home.

She began to dress exclusively in white, moving like a diaphanous ghost in a Gothic legend, all the while distilling her intense inner life into short poems which read like telegrams sent by the mind’s eye. After her death from Bright’s disease, her family found some 1,800 poems and a wealth of correspondence.

Published posthumously, her work included love poems and love letters from the 30-year-old poet to an anonymous “master.” “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!”

she had written, inviting intense speculation over spinster eccentricity; “Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our Luxury! … Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight— / In thee.”

LOVE LIFE:
A mystery of the first order, the identity of Emily Dickinson’s

“master” has given rise to volumes of biographical, literary, even psychoanalytic detective work. The mystery was deepened by Dickinson family lore that Emily

“met her fate” in the person of the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, an eloquent preacher whom she encountered on a rare visit to Philadelphia. Wadsworth was married, as were the other possible “masters,” but he had the virtue, as far as the family was concerned, of being physically removed from Amherst. The supposed lovers met only twice, briefly, but Emily continued to correspond with her “dearest earthly friend”—largely about spiritual matters.

According to another source, Emily’s star-crossed lover was a brilliant young army officer who was also the husband of her friend Helen Hunt Jackson. A somewhat more plausible candidate was Samuel Bowles, editor of the
Springfield Republican
, with whom Emily corresponded for years and to whom she sent many of her love poems. But while the poet undoubtedly displayed an exaggerated affection for the editor, she may also have had professional motives. A few of her poems were published anonymously by Bowles, who took the liberty of “correcting” them, so little did he esteem the poet’s skill or reciprocate her feelings.

Whoever the “master” was, it is known that at the age of 48 Emily enjoyed a “December romance” with 64-year-old Otis Lord, a distinguished jurist and

lifelong friend of the family, whose wife had just died. One biographer has even constructed a convincing case for Lord’s being the elusive “master,” speculating that a secret passion may have blossomed 14 years earlier when Emily was undergoing medical treatment in Cambridge and the judge was holding court nearby. If Lord was Emily’s “master,” she was his Ophelia in the Shakespearean symbolism in which they communicated. (“Exultation floods me,” Emily wrote.

“I cannot find my channel, the creek turns sea at thought of thee.”) The two never married, whether because their love was frowned upon by both families, or possibly because they had become too set in their separate ways.

But Emily was in any case probably incapable of consummating her sexual passion, according to one psychoanalytic biographer. Suffering from an unresolved Oedipal conflict, an abnormally prolonged period of “sexual latency,” and an uncertain self-image as a woman due to her estrangement from her mother, she is said to have compensated by working out an elaborate love fantasy in her writings.

Finally, it has even been argued that Emily’s “master” was really a “mistress.”

Citing her ardent correspondence with her female friends and the occasional use of feminine pronouns and bisexual symbolism in her love poetry (“Ourselves were wed one summer, dear” was addressed to her friend Kate Scott Turner), proponents of this view hold that Emily was a lesbian and that her life was ruined by the restrictions of a heterosexual society.

—C.D.

The Snow Princess

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (Feb. 22, 1892–Oct. 19, 1950)
HER FAME:
At the age of 20 Millay

became an overnight literary sensation

with the publication of her poem

“Renascence.” She went on to produce

some of the greatest love poetry in the

English language. Writing from a

uniquely feminine point of view, she

enjoyed popular as well as critical

acclaim. In 1923 she received a Pulitzer

Prize, the first ever awarded to a woman.

HER PERSON:
The eldest daughter of

a divorcée, Millay grew up in a remote

town on the Maine seacoast as “Vincent,” the surrogate man of the family.

Her mother was a free-spirited woman

Millay, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933

who worked as a nurse to raise her three daughters as a tight little band of creative women. Thanks to a benefactress, the young poet was able to enter Vassar College—belatedly—when she was 21. Rebelling against this “pink and gray college” where men were excluded, she smoked secretly, disregarded campus rules, and escaped after graduation to the uninhibited freedom of New York’s Greenwich Village. There she worked intermittently as an actress while writing poetry and the pseudonymous magazine articles which paid the rent. “My candle burns at both ends,” Millay wrote in
A Few Figs from Thistles
(1920), and it became the epigraph of the dawning decade. The petite red-haired poet, half Irish and half Yankee, was, at her best, an enchantingly beautiful fairy-tale princess. But she was also intense, high-strung, and prone to mental and physical breakdown. In 1923 she married Eugen Boissevain, an importer of Dutch-Irish ancestry, who waited on her hand and foot during the 25 years of their marriage. “Anybody can buy and sell coffee,” Boissevain explained. “It seemed advisable to arrange our lives to suit Vincent.”

SEX LIFE:
Millay had an intoxicating effect on both men and women. Her sexual ambivalence revealed itself when she was young in attachments to older women. “Anybody reading this would think I was writing to my sweetheart,”

she wrote to her mother. “And he would be quite right.” A young doctor once suggested that her recurrent headaches might stem from “an occasional erotic impulse towards a person of [her] own sex.” Millay replied, “Oh, you mean I’m homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what’s that got to do with my headache?”

Her first serious lover, the playwright and radical Floyd Dell, described her as a “Snow Princess, whose kiss left splinters of ice in the hearts of the mortal men who loved her.” Equally fearful of desertion and of the confines of traditional femininity, incapable of emotional surrender, she rejected Dell and a rapid succession of other lovers. At one point Dell unsuccessfully tried to persuade her to enter therapy to deal with what he called her “sapphic tendencies,” which to him meant her compulsive plunging into one love affair after another.

An exception to her usual pattern was poet Arthur Davison Ficke, who was already married and hence safely unattainable. They consummated their passion during a whirlwind 36 hours in the midst of WWI and then remained lifelong admirers. However, to Millay it seemed only proper that Ficke would always be unattainable. When he proceeded to fall in love with another woman after divorcing his first wife, she accepted it complacently and even became friendly with his new sweetheart.

Another lover was author and literary critic Edmund Wilson, who became infatuated with the poet at first encounter. “Edna ignited for me both my intellectual passion and my unsatisfied desire, which went up together in a blaze of ecstasy that remains for me one of the high points of my life,” Wilson wrote in his memoirs. He was able to joke about her many lovers (the “alumni association,” he called them), and on one occasion Wilson and his friend John Bishop playfully divided her in half for the evening, Wilson embracing the lower part of her body and Bishop the upper half. But Millay’s extreme promiscuity wounded Wilson deeply. “What my lips have kissed, and where, and why,” she wrote in one poem, “I have forgotten….”

Eugen Boissevain, whom she finally married, represented to her a safe harbor, the supremely indulgent parent figure. (The tall, handsome, spirited Boissevain had played the same subordinate role with his first wife, feminist Inez Mulholland, before her premature death.) He nursed Millay back to health, bought her a farm in the Berkshires and an island off the Maine coast, and managed every domestic detail down to washing his wife’s hair. “To be in love is a terrific and continuous excitement,” Boissevain once confided to Alan Ross Mac-dougall. “I want to keep that excitement, never being quite sure, never knowing, so that I can ask myself: Does she love me? And have the answer: I don’t know.”