Anyway what I got and what I am trying, in my own way, to transmit to you is a sense of a kind of strangeness in the relationship of the two. It wasn’t just a domestic household, a little down on its luck, by any means. He was trying to do something very difficult—with his poetry I presume—and she in her own way was trying to help him.
And of course, as I have no doubt you have gathered from what I have quoted of Wilson’s verse, the matter had something to do with the relationships between people—not necessarily between the particular man and woman who happened to be there in that room, but between all peoples.
The fellow had some half-mystic conception of all such things, and before he found his own woman had been going aimlessly about the world looking for a mate. Then he had found the woman in the Kansas town and—he at least thought—things had cleared, for him.
Well, he had the notion that no one in the world could think or feel anything alone, and that people only got into trouble and walled themselves in by trying it, or something of the sort. There was a discord. Things were jangled. Someone, it seems, had to strike a pitch that all voices could take up before the real song of life could begin. Mind you I’m not putting forth any notions of my own. What I am trying to do is to give you a sense of something I got from having read Wilson’s stuff, from having known him a little, and from having seen something of the effect of his personality upon others.
He felt, quite definitely, that no one in the world could feel or even think alone. And then there was the notion, that if one tried to think with the mind without taking the body into account, one got all balled-up. True conscious life built itself up like a pyramid. First the body and mind of a beloved one must come into one’s thinking and feeling and then, in some mystic way, the bodies and minds of all the other people in the world must come in, must come sweeping in like a great wind—or something of the sort.
Is all this a little tangled up to you, who read my story of Wilson? It may not be. It may be that your minds are more clear than my own and that what I take to be so difficult will be very simple to you.
However, I have to bring up to you just what I can find, after diving down into this sea of motives and impulses—I admit I don’t rightly understand.
The hunchback girl felt (or is it my own fancy coloring what she said?)—it doesn’t really matter. The thing to get at is what the man Edgar Wilson felt.
He felt, I fancy, that in the field of poetry he had something to express that could never be expressed until he had found a woman who could, in a peculiar and absolute way, give herself in the world of the flesh—and that then there was to be a marriage out of which beauty would come for all people. He had to find the woman who had that power, and the power had to be untainted by self-interest, I fancy. A profound egotist, you see—and he thought he had found what he needed in the wife of the Kansas druggist.
He had found her and had done something to her. What it was I can’t quite make out, except that she was absolutely and wholly happy with him, in a strangely inexpressive sort of way.