Sunday Pages: "Let No Charitable Hope"

A poem by Elinor Wylie

Dec 15, 2024

Dear Reader,

The attorney Henry M. Hoyt, Jr. (1856-1910) is one of countless public servants—well known and powerful in his era, now largely forgotten—who gave of their time and talent to make the United States a better place. From a well-to-do family—his father was the governor of Pennsylvania from 1879-83—Hoyt was classmates with William Howard Taft at Yale. After obtaining his law degree from Penn, he moved to Pittsburgh, then the stomping grounds of captains of industry, and made bank working for a bank.

In 1897, William McKinley appointed him Assistant Attorney General. Five years later, Teddy Roosevelt named him Solicitor General. In that capacity, Hoyt argued United States v. Shipp, in which the Supreme Court held that Sheriff Joseph Shipp and his accomplices were guilty of contempt of court for permitting a mob to enter the prison where Ed Johnson, a Black man from Tennessee wrongly accused of rape, was being held, drag him outside, and lynch him on the Walnut Street Bridge. It was the first and only time the Supreme Court presided over a criminal trial.

Later, Hoyt was chief counsel to his fellow Pennsylvania attorney Philander Knox, who was then Secretary of State. Hoyt died after suddenly falling ill on a trip to Canada, where he was negotiating for reciprocity—that is, figuring out how to get rid of stupid tariffs. He was 53 years old.

But what’s most interesting about Hoyt are the five children he had with his wife, the former Anne McMichael—daughter of a popular mayor of Philadelphia and granddaughter of a prominent newspaper and magazine editor. The youngest, Nancy (b. 1902), was a romance novelist and biographer. Morton Hoyt (b. 1899) married Eugenia Bankhead—sister of the infamous and awesome actress Tallulah Bankhead—and then divorced her; and then married her again, and divorced her; and then married her a third time, and divorced her a third time; which must have exhausted all involved. The fetching socialite Constance (b. 1889) wed Baron Ferdinand Carl von Stumm, son of an insanely rich Prussian diplomat, who had the good sense to sell off his holdings and leave Germany when Hitler came into power. Henry Hoyt III (b. 1887) was a portrait painter, who in 1920 Sylvia Plathed himself in a studio apartment on West 10th Street in New York City, after his wife left him.

With fascinating and talented families like this, I like to imagine Thanksgiving dinner, all of them sitting around a big table: the Bankhead sisters flanking Baron von Strumm in his spiky Prussian helmet, the romance novelist spilling the tea on everyone and everything, the portrait painter brooding quietly over his yams, the father smoking cigars after the meal with some visiting foreign diplomat, the mother loving every minute of it.

But there was one more Hoyt—the oldest, and the most culturally significant: Elinor (b. 1885). The woman referred to in her father’s obituary as “Mrs. Philip Hichborn” was a poet and novelist; a feminist, if not an activist; a gushing Percy Shelley fangirl who wrote a book about what might have happened had the poet survived the shipwreck and moved to the United States; a free spirit of the Tallulah Bankhead kind, who eloped at age 20, and then left her husband to live in sin in England with a married man (named Wylie) 17 years her senior, and then left that husband to run off with the poet William Rose Benét, and then fell in love with the husband of an acquaintance; and a friend to pretty much every writer and artist in New York and London in the 1920s. She was beautiful and brilliant, fashionable and fun, popular personally and commercially, and a poet of the highest order. Like her father, she died young: of a stroke, at 43.

Her poem “Let No Charitable Hope” feels especially relevant to the here and now, as we prepare ourselves, mentally and spiritually, for the second coming of Donald Trump, and the profound loss, grief, disappointment, and terror that his return signifies:

Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am by nature none of these.
I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.
In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

I read the first verse as a caution: don’t fall prey to false hope. “Charitable hope” might today be called “hopium.” Eagle and antelope are powerful spirit animals associated with America—the former with our political and military might, the latter with our “Home on the Range” thirst for freedom. But, she tells us, we shouldn’t feel obligated to be heroic, if that’s not who we are. In the second verse, Wylie takes stock of her situation: as a human being, first; as a woman, second; and, finally, as one who is spiritually hungry, but still able to get by.

Then, in the penultimate two lines, Wylie observes that some years are marked by paucity and want, and others by a preposterous WTF-ness. (There is no doubt which kind of year is 2024.) And just when we think the poem will end in despair, she instead, and quite by surprise, gives us a restorative dose of non-charitable—which is to say, actual—hope. If, in hindsight, there was nothing worth freaking out about in years past, it follows that the future will play out the same way. And no matter how austere or outrageous things get, there is always something in life that is humorous, pleasurable, maybe even joyous.

This moment in American history, a few weeks before the Rough Beast slouches towards Washington to be inaugurated, feels like the part of the horror movie where we know the monster is inside the house, but it has yet to appear. Will it be as brutal as we fear? How should we prepare for its emergence? Where are the Henry Hoyts of our age, to protect us from the angry mob, to bring the evildoers to justice? And, further: what should we personally do, come January 20th? How will we navigate this ugly new MAGA world? What mindset should we adopt?

Elinor Wylie’s poetical advice is good: We should not let fear paralyze us, even as we all feel the creeping slasher-film dread. And, come what may, we must never allow them to steal our joy.

Her poem, dark as it initially seems, literally ends with a smile.