Spinster (24 page)

He recounts the time he brought her to see Bernard Shaw's newest play,
Heartbreak House
, which had just opened in New York. It was the fall of 1920, the very beginning of their friendship, and as they watched the performance, Wilson was surprised to see how immediately and completely she became absorbed by the play—perhaps this was the first time the critic had witnessed this poet's capacity to loose herself from her own subjectivity.

Toward the end of Act II he became aware that Edna had grown very tense. The characters have gathered in the drawing room of an English country house after dinner, when one of them, the callous beauty Ariadne, begins to taunt Randall, her husband's brother, who is hopelessly besotted with her and has been for a very long time.

“I get my whole life messed up with people falling in love with me,” Ariadne complains, then continues to insult and harass Randall until he's reduced to tears, at which point she stands over him and scoffs, “Crybaby!”

When the curtain went down, Edna turned to Wilson and said, “I hate women who do that, you know.” He goes on to muse:

She must have had, in the course of those crowded years, a good many Randalls on her hands, but her method of dealing with them was different from that of Bernard Shaw's aggressive
Ariadne. She was capable of being mockingly or sternly sharp with an admirer who proved a nuisance, but she did not like to torture people or to play them off against one another. With the dignity of her genius went, not, as is sometimes the case, a coldness or a hatefulness or a touchiness in intimate human relations, but an invincible magnanimity, and the effects of her transitory feminine malice would be cancelled by an impartiality which was amiably humorous or sympathetic.

Putting aside his sexist notion of “transitory feminine malice,” this reads to me as an admirably nuanced description of a ruthlessly discerning woman who could also be kind—the two qualities needn't be antithetical.

By the end of 1920, when she was twenty-eight, thanks to the high rates paid by
Vanity Fair
, Edna had enough money to move into her own apartment for the first time, two rooms and a bath on West Twelfth Street, near Washington Square Park—which had the unintended outcome of making her even more accessible to her suitors. She didn't want to marry any of them, and yet, as she told Wilson in a moment of crisis, “I'll be thirty in a minute!” (This cracked me up: thirty had been my “deadline,” as well.) As he puts it, rather grandly, “It was decided she should go abroad.”

He had reason to be grand;
Vanity Fair
would fund her travels in Europe in exchange for—I did not see this coming—satirical essays. As in, America's most famous poet, already known for her uncommon brilliance, two years shy of winning a Pulitzer, wrote silly little humor pieces for a glossy magazine. The thought would never have occurred to me.

Understandably, the publisher begged her to use her own famous byline, but Edna, as ever keenly protective of her reputation, insisted on using a pen name, Nancy Boyd (her great-grandmother's). On January 4, 1921, she sailed for Paris.

In 1924 the twenty-two pieces “Nancy Boyd” published over the span of two years were published as a book,
Distressing Dialogues
, which, though now out of print, I easily found online. The preface is written and signed by Edna St. Vincent Millay, with a dateline from Tokyo:

Miss Boyd has asked me to write a preface to these dialogues, with which, having followed them eagerly as they appeared from time to time in the pages of
Vanity Fair
, I was already familiar. I am no friend of prefaces, but if there must be one to this book, it should come from me, who was its author's earliest admirer. I take pleasure in recommending to the public these excellent small satires, from the pen of one in whose work I have a never-failing interest and delight.

The pieces veer from droll to outrageous and made me laugh out loud. One of the earliest, “The Implacable Aphrodite,” from
Vanity Fair
's March 1921 issue, reads like a thinly veiled fictionalization of yet another encounter with what Wilson called her “good many Randalls,” if not Wilson himself.

The story opens with Mr. White, “a man of parts, but badly assembled,” telling the “graceful sculptress,” Miss Black, that she is the most interesting unmarried woman of his acquaintance. They are in her studio, where she is serving him tea.

She says, “Oh, yes?” (while “languidly flicking an ash from a cigarette-holder the approximate length of a fencing-foil”).

“Oh, if you only knew what a relief you are, what a rest!—a woman who is not married, who has never been married, and who does not insist that I marry her,” he says.

“I know. But I am sorry for them,” she says, with genuine sympathy. “That I am different from these women is through no virtue of my own, but only because I am blessed with a talent which releases
my spirit into other channels. Whether that talent be great or small is of no consequence. It is sufficient to ease my need.”

While Miss Black silently muses on the topic, Mr. White notices for the first time “the clutter of statuary about the studio.” Rather than compliment the artist on her work, he asks after the identity of the model, who is clearly quite attractive. Miss Black confesses that it is herself. He adjusts his tie.

She continues their conversation. “In fact, you are the only man in my acquaintance, unmarried or married, who does not importune me with undesirable attentions.”

He starts to breathe heavily, listing her many, many charms.

Oblivious, she ingeniously concedes that she is “besieged by suitors” who ring her bell all the livelong day, dropping to their knees and giving her their hearts.

Her heart, she jokes, belongs to her tea, that “accomplice of spinsterhood.” She laughs: “If it will help me to remain a spinster, then it is my staunchest ally!”

As she companionably slices a lemon (with a dagger) and wields her sugar tongs (made from the hind claws of a venomous lizard), she mentions that she's soon to set sail for Europe, for her art—and all hell breaks loose.

He stutters. He groans. He shouts. He scoffs. He mocks her “putty figures.” He drops to his knees and proposes marriage. He accuses her: “You're enjoying this!”

“No, really,” she says. “I assure you—I am frightfully distressed—I had no idea you felt like this—I—”

Growling, “he yanks open the door and leaps forth, slamming it behind him.”

Left alone, she pours herself a cup of cold tea and runs her fingers through her hair.

“Oh, dear, I
wish
I were not so restless!”

I've enjoyed so many of Edna's books over the course of my
life, but not until I read these tossed-off pieces—and one gets the sense, reading them, that they came to her very easily—did I feel I was getting a glimpse of the everyday self behind the poet's persona. “The Implacable Aphrodite” sits at the midway point between the saucy, game-playing version of urban love she sold through her early poems, and the deep, soulful passion of her later sonnets, revealing a woman who took herself seriously but was always up for a lark, and whose respect for herself extended to others.

Edna Millay wasn't merely an exemplar of “free love” in her own time; the long reach of her presumed prowess extends to this new millennium. In 2009, the cultural critic Cristina Nehring published a spirited defense of reckless romance,
A Vindication of Love
, featuring Edna as an ideal we'd all be wise to live up to.

Nehring's overarching argument—that contemporary love is a gutless affair, drained of lust and transgression by an overage of political correctness—is, as I found, depressingly relevant. As is her excellent point that, after her death, Edna's literary achievement was eclipsed by a puritanical and sexist backlash to her sexual adventuring; her poetry, Nehring writes, “so recently regarded as masterful and wry—was dismissed as lightweight and frivolous—as inconsequential as its pretty, primping, sexually overactive author.” Ah—so this is why after adoring Edna in middle and high school I'd jilted her in college.

But was Edna really a “queen bee,” who, “by keeping her boys on alert…kept the decibel of her relationships at a crescendo,” as Nehring claims? And is such behavior actually something to aspire toward? She describes the poet's life as “fiery and wasteful, gorgeous, dangerous, brief,” as if her famous “First Fig,”

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!

were her actual, lifelong credo, rather than an artifact of her youth.

Obviously Edna broke hearts. As Nancy Milford recounts, her more literary-inclined victims—John Peale Bishop, Floyd Dell, Edmund Wilson—were prolific with their dismay. “They wrote to her about their desperate hurt and anger,” she writes, “they waylaid her on the street. To a man they felt that her leaving them meant far more about her inability to be faithful than it did about their need to secure her exclusively for themselves.” Milford goes on:

They talked about her chagrin, even when it was clearly their own; they talked about her promiscuity and her puzzling magnanimity. They failed to acknowledge the pull she felt between the excitement and energy of her sexual life, where she was a sort of brigand who relished the chase, and the difficult, sweet pleasures of her work.

Edna was no saint, but nor was she a “fiery and wasteful” person—she was a very scrupulous one bravely making her way, with great integrity, across an earthquake as it cracked beneath her feet.

Edna's generation came of age in a world poles apart from the one previous. As her own mother speculated in her diary in 1922, the year Edna turned thirty, “I wonder if the real difference between us is that the added generation has given her a courage I never had, to be honest, even with myself.”

But at least one habit survived this outpouring of transparency:
infidelity. Every so-called civilized culture safeguards against extramarital sex in some manner, leaving its citizens to contrive—and collude in—unspoken runarounds. In the case of Victorian America, pleasure-seekers relied on two fixes: flat-out secrecy, where only the conspiring adulterers knew the truth, which of course heightened the thrill; and an unspoken “boys will be boys” agreement to look the other way when a man stepped out on his wife, as long as he was an otherwise meticulous observer of convention. (There was also the opinion of Neith's husband, who explained at one of chatelaine Mabel Dodge's popular literary salons that “men are the victims” in the battle between the sexes, because, lacking the vitality of the working classes, and of women, they are forced to resort to infidelity. “The problem,” he said, “is how to get the heat without the lie.”) As the historian Peter Gay puts it in his masterful, multivolume study of the period, “What contemporary moralists were all too quick to call ‘hypocrisy' was actually a way of carving out space for the passions—within reason.”

Crucial to Edna's autonomy was honesty. By all accounts she didn't go in for sneaking around, preferring to focus on one lover at a time, even if just for one night. To the recipient, her refusal to pretend to feel something she didn't, or to behave the way they might have wanted or expected, surely felt coldhearted. In fact it was the opposite: remaining responsive to her own passions required an exceptional level of emotional vulnerability.

In a world that still takes for granted that “respectable” people either repress their emotions or flat-out lie about them, her insistent truthfulness was just as radical as her sexual adventuring, possibly even more so. After all, what was called “free love” then is merely a lot like the “casual sex” of our day, and, even now, at a time when marriage is optional, people continue to cheat on their partners, married or not.