Spinster (25 page)

Running like a current beneath all those allegedly sexless
nineteenth-century marriages (if not actually propping them up) had been an intensity and freedom of expression around same-sex friendship that we postmoderns can hardly begin to imagine. Men held hands or linked arms as they walked down the street; soldiers embraced one another to give comfort or solace. Adolescent girls cultivated passionate attachments that served as trial runs for the “real” relationship they'd someday have with a husband, writing love letters sodden with endearments, snuggling and sleeping in the same bed, often engaging in heavy petting, a practice regarded as so harmless that people rarely thought to mention it, leaving historians to puzzle out who was technically a lesbian and who wasn't—which, as the century wound up, and our fixation on slotting people into categories of sexual preference took hold, became increasingly important. It's as if, rather than make a grand prison break from the myth of female sexlessness, where a woman was either an angel or a whore, we simply replaced one set of classifications with another, locking our emotional selves into two new but equally rigid categories: homosexual or heterosexual. And, of course, only one of these two categories was acceptable.

“Oh, you mean I am a homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual, too, but what's that got to do with my headache?” Edna ostensibly quipped to a doctor.

A deep regard for the ungovernable had always been central to her character. From the start she intuited that what's interesting about our day-to-day existence resides beyond the boundaries we use to hem it in; indeed, that those boundaries don't merely manage our unruly wants but can choke them off until each of us is a law-abiding, cold-blooded carapace, or a liar. As she became an adult, whether by intention or instinct, she simply neglected to put her desires on a shelf, and she kept living as she always had, which is to say fully, and without deference to convention. This embrace of possibility, and willingness to improvise rather
than “nail down” a life, discomfits and disrupts now as much as it did then.

Valorizing the very mythology that posthumously tarnished Edna Millay's literary reputation serves another kind of twenty-first-century pedagogy, one that says women should be chasing the sexual revolution's “zipless fuck,” as Erica Jong so memorably put it in 1973, and “have sex like a man” as Samantha argued twenty-five years later in the pilot episode of
Sex and the City
—i.e., selfishly, callously, without emotional investment.

For contemporary women to take from Edna the lesson that sexual liberation means manipulating people to your own advantage, and leaving your heart at home, is to miss the point entirely. Transport Edna to our own era, and she's a lot like the rest of us—a woman who wanted to enjoy her youth as long as she could, and not settle for boring married sex, not right away, at least—with one crucial difference: How many of us today are able to unlace our contemporary corsetry of received attitudes?

Edna wasn't the didactic type, but had she been, I suspect she'd have told us that if there is a point to all of this, it's to take life very, very seriously, and to love whomever you want, as abundantly as you can. Her legacy wasn't recklessness, but a fierce individualism that even now evades our grasp.

So it comes as some surprise that Edna's salad days as an unfettered urbanite were relatively short: six years in all (including the nearly two spent abroad). In January 1923, a month before her thirty-first birthday, she sailed back to America; in April she took up with Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch importer twelve years her senior who'd become part of the Greenwich Village scene; later that month her Pulitzer Prize was announced; by May the new couple was living together; on July 18 they married
in a small backyard ceremony. The following afternoon, five New York newspapers announced the news, three on the front page, one with the headline “Famous Love Lyricist Belies Her Own Philosophy by Marrying”—surely capturing the sentiments of more than a few disappointed fans.

But not this fan, or not too much, at least. I can't claim to know why she married, but by now I can hazard a very good guess. Eugen was by all accounts a wonderful, big-hearted man, a self-described feminist who was an enthusiastic helpmate to his legendary wife and contentedly took on all the domestic chores so that she could write. Their open marriage ensured that she could continue to indulge her most enduring muse, her heart, without resorting to secrecy; indeed, her acclaimed 1931 sonnet collection,
Fatal Interview
, was inspired by her long-term love affair with a much-younger poet, George Dillon, which Eugen encouraged; for a while they even lived together as a ménage à trois.

Which is to say that in marrying, Edna did what she knew to be best for herself and her work: she created a new family. As Wilson went to great pains to explain, Edna's “overmastering passion” was her poetry. The life of the mind, he wrote, ferried her away from her “rather cramped” girlhood, and throughout her life remained “the great reality that made everything else unimportant”—everything, he says, except her mother and her sisters.

For nearly the entire time she lived in Greenwich Village Edna shared an apartment with at least one of her sisters, often both, plus their mother, and when the women were apart they constantly wrote uninhibited, confessional letters full of in-jokes and pet names. She helped to support them even when she was just starting out, and she was incredibly generous the wealthier she became. The four women were not without their rivalries and grudges—what close relationships are? Later in life, Edna even grew estranged from Kathleen. But central to her sense of self
was this cocoon of unquestioned loyalty and affection; wherever she went in the world, it was her anchor and protection.

Being single can be, and often is, exhausting, even for those of us who aren't composing a life quite so publicly, or dramatically. Edna's romantic exploits in Europe were thrilling, but not having the actual, physical haven of her family to return to at night took its toll. A love affair with a married journalist ended badly. Toward the end of her first year abroad she was left with only fifty-three dollars, in six different currencies, and was in debt to a variety of friends. She got pregnant, forced a miscarriage, and nearly married a “pseudo-aristocrat…suave [and] oily,” as a friend described him. When Wilson visited Edna in Paris, she told him that she “wanted to settle down to a new life: she was tired of breaking hearts and spreading havoc.” When she returned to America, both her sisters were married and living with their husbands, and her mother was back living with her own sisters in New England.

All this time, Edna had been free to risk her heart, and be the impassioned single woman she was, because she was so secure in the love of her mother and siblings. Winning the Pulitzer Prize was not only a great honor, but also a lesson, if not something of a warning: in order to retain the love of her public, she had to keep on dipping and dipping into this well of passion that fueled her work.

A blueprint of Steepletop,
*
the seven-hundred-acre blueberry farm Edna and Eugen bought in Austerlitz, New York, could double as a template for their life together. Equal parts work space, sanctuary, and pleasure dome, its only concession to compromise is the location. Edna had wanted to buy property on the Maine
coast, but Eugen convinced her that her career required proximity to Manhattan, a dilemma they neatly resolved by importing to Steepletop ground cover and white pine trees from Maine to mingle with the native blueberry bushes. In the midst of this transplanted terrain they built a tiny cabin at the end of a stone path, where she wrote four to five hours a day, six days a week.

The house itself—today it's open to the public—is big, at thirteen rooms, but it exudes a homey New England modesty, tasteful but never showy, as familiar to me as my own youth. Upstairs they each had their own private wing. Edna's was a writer's dream (this writer's, at least): a bedroom with a fireplace overlooking the kitchen gardens Eugen faithfully tended; an enormous white-tiled bathroom (the first tiled bath in the county); a workroom—this is the heart of the house—with a long table for spreading out papers when it was time to ready her books for publication; a cozy library with an armchair for reading and a little nook for naps.

Just as crucial to their mutual well-being as shared solitude was the company of their friends. Downstairs, the couple entertained in a wood-paneled dining room painted burgundy and cream (their Limoges dinner service looks like Edna if she were a set of china: pale pink rosebuds on an ivory ground, edges rimmed with gold). The living room has plenty of comfortable upholstered seating (as well as two pianos—one was Edna's, the other for visitors).

And then, outside again, tennis courts and a string of “pleasure gardens” each with its own distinct personality, and divided into “fully dressed” versus “fully undressed”: the outdoor bar leads to a wall of irises shielding a spring-fed swimming pool and a hedge-rimmed square of grass—to gain entry one had to be nude. All around are a profusion of rose bushes and flowers.

Detractors complain about Edna's late work, which includes a lot of admittedly mediocre political poetry. Some go so far as to blame this decline on her marriage. The true culprit may have
been a 1936 car accident, which left her with severe nerve damage, chronic pain, and, ultimately, a morphine addiction. In spite of this, she and Eugen appear to have had a mostly satisfying twenty-six years living alone together, contentedly without children. They spent most of the year at Steepletop and eventually summers on their own tiny Ragged Island in Casco Bay, Maine, working, gardening, swimming, seeing friends, and, after the stock-market crash of 1929, becoming fascinated by racehorses, even buying and breeding several of their own, until Eugen died in 1949, and Edna the year following. Throughout, she wrote and she wrote and she wrote. In this way, she never stopped being herself.

Credit 6.1

Maeve Brennan, mid-1960s

A recent study by a life insurance company found that nearly half of all American women fear becoming bag ladies—not only never-married women, who ranked highest, at 56 percent, but the divorced (54 percent), widowed (47 percent), and even those who are still married (43 percent).

I'd never been prey to this particular fear, sampling instead from any number of other horrible ways to wind up. You could be
raped and murdered. You could
be
a murderer. You could be in a horrific plane crash and die among screaming, puking strangers (my own personal nightmare).

Yet, after only a year of trying to make it on my own as a freelance book reviewer, I became convinced that I was one misstep away from “living on the streets,” as I'd put it to myself. I'd found plenty of work—
The Boston Globe
gave me my own memoir-review column, and I was able to get assignments from other newspapers and magazines (including
Vogue
; at last, distant colleagues with Neith Boyce)—but, most of it was very low-paying, and lacking the genius, confidence, psychological stamina, and live-in family support of someone like Edna Millay, I could hardly hold myself together. My income was so erratic that most days, by late afternoon, I'd become so consumed by anxiety, I had to stop whatever I was doing and make myself lie on the sofa, as if putting a toddler down for a nap. That I added to this earned anxiety one so irrational it ranks as frivolous—unlike many people who actually are a hair's breadth from living on the streets, I am lucky to have a close relationship with my father, who would have let me move home if worse came to worst—seems proof, in retrospect, that I used the fear as a goad: if I allowed myself to think I had a cushion, I might not keep moving forward.

Socializing was difficult enough in such a state, dating out of the question. My situation with T, once a thrilling escape from normalcy, became a painful, recurrent reminder of my loneliness; I broke it off, explaining I needed to find something “more.” I began to understand the appeal of marriage: mutual support, splitting bills.

With mixed emotions—crushing failure very slightly alleviated by relief—in fall 2003 I took a job as a culture editor at a small (now defunct) daily newspaper. Housed in a nineteenth-century white-brick-and-cast-iron building on a chaotic corner of lower Manhattan, the office was like a sci-fi, all-era adaptation of
New Grub Street
, George Gissing's 1891 novel of literary London. While enduring 1880s working conditions (the cooling, heating, and plumbing systems were constantly breaking down—in winter, my office attire entailed never removing my red wool coat and black vintage fur hat) amid the 2000s soundtrack of trilling cell phones and ceaseless staccato of fingers on laptops, I played a glorified girl Friday circa 1940—editing jazz, architecture, and book reviews—while my overlords, two men my age, colluded in their own fantasy of 1900s-style cigar-and-martini meetings to which I was never invited. Rather than give up my hard-won relationships with other, more collegial editors and surrender myself entirely to this joke of an operation, I continued to write freelance book reviews in the mornings, before work, and on the weekends. Most nights kept me at the office until eight or nine o'clock.

Surrounded by newspapers, I acquired a taste for reading obituaries, which is how I learned about the life and death of the pioneering feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun, in early October of that year.

The following weekend I bought a paperback of her seminal study
Writing a Woman's Life
, first published in 1988. By the time I'd finished reading, I'd underlined nearly the entire thing, beginning with the first sentence, where she states there are four ways to write a woman's life: autobiography, fiction, biography, or, “the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process.”

Is this what I've been doing
, I tentatively, hopefully wondered—
writing my own life, unwittingly, in advance of living it?

Such is the odd fate, even now, of the feminist project: progress is so fitful, and went unrecorded for so long, that an idea doesn't have to be new to be eye-opening.

But it was her observation that we know so little about “the unmarried woman who, consciously or not, has avoided marriage with an assiduousness little remarked but no less powerful for being, often, unknown to herself,” that made me see with blazing clarity why the voices of Maeve Brennan and Neith Boyce and Edna Millay called out across the decades. Along with filling in for my mother as intimate interlocutors, they were showing me how to think beyond the marriage plot. The conversations I had with them created the pages that were my life.

The force of my revelation confused me. It was the year 2003! I shouldn't have needed help thinking beyond the idea of marriage. Besides, by now, nearly two years out of my relationship with R, I had several good women friends in New York (a breakup, I'd discovered, was new-friend catnip), and we constantly talked to each other about our intimate lives. The Internet was a pulsating archive of diaries (a.k.a. blogs).

And yet, nowhere did I hear, or take part in, serious conversations about the lives of unmarried women. Instead, whatever candor had erupted in the 1960s had been sucked into a black hole of constant chatter about dating, sex, marriage, children. The notion of not marrying was apparently so outlandish that it was consigned to fiction, whether chick-lit or television, as if the very thought of single women was so threatening we had no choice but to trivialize it.

Until that changed, we were doomed, as Heilbrun observed, to live out our lives “among the suitors, without a story to be told, wondering whether or when to marry.”

My demanding schedule abetted, rather than impeded, my romantic life. Now that I wasn't an anxious wreck, I started dating a lot—possibly too much, I decided one day, when I looked at my
faux-leather-bound calendar and realized I went on dates more often than I saw my friends, not because I wanted to particularly, but because almost everyone I knew had moved to Brooklyn, and at the end of the workday it was just easier to grab a drink with some guy I'd met at a book party than travel to Carroll Gardens and back.

My roommate and I were nearing the end of our lease, and now that I had a full-time salary, I could finally afford to live on my own. I decided I'd return to Brooklyn—though not Brooklyn Heights. Since R and I had broken up, I'd only returned to the neighborhood once, for a party, and the moment I stepped off the subway, my heart seized. It was so pretty there, and quiet. Had I been a total fool to leave the kindest man I'd ever known? Should we have discussed the option of an open marriage—a better version of Neith and Hutch's, something closer to Edna and Eugen's? From that point on I'd avoided Brooklyn Heights entirely.

For a month or two I spent my free time scrolling through the cobalt listings of Craigslist until my eyes stung; at lunch I'd subway out to the farthest reaches of Brooklyn, lured by those old real-estate canards “cozy studio” (a basement with no windows) and “THIS IS IT!! Suny [
sic
] 1BDR!! Will go fast!!” (the attic of a six-floor walk-up fifteen blocks from the subway). In July, I succumbed to hiring a realtor, an exorbitant expense I wasn't even sure I could afford (in New York, the commission fee starts at one month's rent).

On our first day, after we'd speed-viewed seven apartments, she turned her car onto a street of handsome brownstones, just around the corner from where R and I used to go for French toast on Saturday mornings.

“Um, it's in Brooklyn Heights,” I said. I'd already explained that this was the only neighborhood I wasn't interested in.

She raised her eyebrows as if to say, “What can you do?”

She parked before one of the grander specimens, fronted by an unusually wide stoop leading to a massive arched door topped with an elaborate lintel, like a mantel, as if we weren't entering a building, but a giant's fireplace. Once inside, she unlocked another enormous door, then another, until we stood at the base of a cavernous foyer dominated by a staircase leisurely winding up and up and up.