Archival Voyeur: Searching for Secrets in Amelia Earhart's Lost Poems

Abstract

Archival Voyeur:Searching for Secrets in Amelia Earhart's Lost Poems Traci Brimhall (bio) The chain of marriage is so heavy that it takes two to bear it; sometimes three. —Alexandre Dumas Life is merciless / The vulture is kind —Amelia Earhart Marriage is a privacy with many secrets. The union of famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart to her business manager and author-adventurer George Palmer Putnam in 1931 had many carefully constructed privacies. Putnam preserved some of those confidences after her disappearance, most notably drafts of her poems. Although Earhart wrote three books about her flights, was the aviation editor for Cosmopolitan, and wrote numerous other pieces of journalism about everything from her experiences flying an autogiro to her musings on clouds, her love of poetry only shows up on rare occasions in her prose. Despite poetry's absence in much of her published writing, Putnam said in his memoir, Soaring Wings, that "AE wrote many fragments of verse, for she found a deep pleasure in building little images with words. That aspect was very private—almost secret." While acknowledging that private pleasure, Putnam also published two fragments of poems from among her papers in his memoir, but the other splintered lines weren't discovered until his granddaughter donated Putnam and Earhart's papers to Purdue University in 2002. Among the secrets he helped keep were her lyric fragments on death and desire, and her rejected submission to Poetry magazine. Exploring the archives, the only final drafts of any poems I found among the old scrapbooks and scribbled notes on envelopes were those in that rejected submission. Somehow it enamored me even more— this famous and unknowable aviatrix and writer left only these unfinished drafts as clues I could puzzle over, watching her mind revise, redact, question, leaving no answer to the mystery of where her final poems may be. Searching the archives for Amelia Earhart's lost poems is a study in fragments—every tucked-away line on the back of a receipt hidden in a notebook an invitation to speculate on her thoughts. Even when her widower published pieces of her verse in his memoir, he had an independent source verify the authenticity of one of them, unsure if the private voice on the page was indeed hers. This fragment, titled "A Child's Trilogy," contains short sections of pleasures, of beloved yellows like "clean scrubbed lemons in the market stall, [End Page 105] our black cat's eyes at night." The piece is written in the voice of a child, asking questions while lying in bed: How is all the fragrance that narcissus havepacked in one small green bud?What kind of scissors do the angels usewhen they cut the snowflakes from the soft white clouds?And is my lost jack-knife really on the moon? The poem goes on to wonder if the speaker and the birds envy each other. There is no date or context to say when this may have been written, though Amelia's sister Muriel wrote in her memoir Courage Is the Price that she believed the poem was inspired by the children Amelia met when she was a social worker. Amelia was a child with a reputation for adventure and experiment, as well as a child who loved language. She and Muriel loved stories and created their own private vocabulary. They called vacated cicada shells "Hannibals" and conducted a ritual called "Hannibal Fate," in which they sang made-up songs and lit the cicada husks on fire, saying if they weren't careful to extinguish all the flames there would be grave trouble "for many honeymoons to come." Whether the poem fragment George published was written when she was young or when she was a social worker is unknown, though I see both a child's innocent wondering and an adult's wisdom, and feel I understand something of the young woman Earhart once was in these lines, some of the few to survive the fire in 1934 that destroyed her and Putnam's home. Of all the people in Earhart's life, the one who devoted the most pages to Amelia's relationship with poetry was her...