Authors: Nancy Milford
When Cora had heard nothing from her daughters by the turn of the year, she was frantic. “
My dear, dear girls,” she wrote, “I am all at sea, and so far away from any knowledge of how you are faring … as if I were on some other planet.” She pictured them having a terrible time, “alone and penniless in the biggest city in the world, in the hardest year in history.” Did they have friends they could call on? They needed to find jobs and to find them at once. “For the first time in our history I feel myself pushed entirely out of things.” Her letters continued in this vein from week to week as the girls’ silence deepened and her fears increased. She’d enclose a few dollars and then ask if they’d received the cash. “
I used to be a sort of chum.… I shall think I’m an old woman pretty soon and not capable of standing real things.”
Finally Norma wrote back on January 24, 1918, the day before Floyd’s
Sweet & Twenty
opened at the Provincetown. Both of the sisters were ill, Vincent with a sore throat and Norma with a toothache, but they were hardly friendless. “Floyd Dell is at the moment sitting on the edge of the bed holding Edna’s hands and telling her funny things.… Floyd is the dearest man on earth and a wonderful friend to us.” He’d awakened them at noon with his arms full of breakfast. “He is just like a wonderful brother to me and a bit more than a brother to Vincent.” Vincent’s note, tacked on the tail end of Norma’s letter, gave her mother the only acceptable reason for her silence: “I’ve written some quite good poems lately,—a few excellent ones,—and one that you will love.”
When she wrote to Harriet Monroe, the editor of
Poetry
, a few weeks later in a letter which was really about her need for money—“
Would you mind paying me
now
instead of on publication for those so stunning verses of mine which you have”—she identified the poems
Poetry
would publish in June: “First Fig,” “Second Fig,” “The Unexplorer,” “Thursday,” and “The Penitent.” They were stunning: witty, flippant, defiant, and fun. “First Fig” would change her career utterly.
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!
If “Renascence” had suggested Saint Theresa of the Illuminations, as Wilbert Snow had called her, or the saintly girl poet treasured by Louis Untermeyer and Sara Teasdale, these lines did not. They would, however, help make her the most widely read poet of her generation. In fact, this single stanza, what Norma in her sister’s published
Letters
called “the candle one, surely the most quoted and misquoted quatrain in America,” became the anthem of her generation.
But at some cost to Millay. For while these poems would win her a larger audience, she risked alienating those who wanted their poetry serious and inspiring. It is a chancy business for a poet to straddle the licentious, but especially for a woman, when the very fact of her writing at all makes her either a figure of awe or suspect. Here was a quatrain that people, young women especially, took to heart. They took it even further; the Jazz Babies, as they would soon be called, took it as their rallying cry.
Curiously, these poems expressed an ideal as ancient as the Latin poets Millay knew and loved: Life is impermanent and in the face of that impermanence, cavort! Look death in the eye, tell him you’re as cute as a button, flash a little defiant guile his way, and tell him to go feast on somebody else’s sweet flesh. For just as there are no happy rustics in Edna Millay’s work, so in these merry verses there were no repentant women.
I had a little Sorrow,
Born of a little Sin,
I found a room all damp with gloom
And shut us all within;
And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I,
“And, Little Sin, pray God to die,
And I upon the floor will lie
And think how bad I’ve been!”
Alas for pious planning—
It mattered not a whit!
As far as gloom went in that room,
The lamp might have been lit!
My Little Sorrow would not weep,
My Little Sin would go to sleep—
To save my soul I could not keep
My graceless mind on it!
So I got up in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my hair
To please a passing lad,
And, “One thing there’s no getting by—
I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I;
“But if I can’t be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!”
She had the audacity to call this “The Penitent.” “Thursday” was even cheekier:
And if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday—
So much is true.
And why you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday,—yes—but what
Is that to me?
But there was something else in “First Fig” besides cheek. For while Millay was able to flaunt the brevity of her own life, she had written a poem that would defy the brevity of life itself.
Norma took on the role of writing to Cora, and at the end of February her news was all about Charles Ellis, “
A young artist whom I really love just now and who really loves me. He loves Vincent too but they feel more ‘sister & brother’ than we do. He
is
just like a real brother to us both though. You would love him he is so
nice
. “When Charlie got his check from Mrs. Whitney, who helped support the young artists she believed in, he would take Norma and Vincent to the National Lunch on Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street. “You could eat for forty or fifty cents,” he said, “and that was with a good cup of coffee with real cream.” Norma and
Charlie described themselves as “a silly little blond girl from Maine and a kid from Ohio.” They went everywhere together.
Greenwich Village was a little republic set apart from the rest of Manhattan, bounded on the north by Washington Square, with its gracious redbrick town houses that had seen better days, and on the south by the seedy boardinghouses in which lived young and not-so-young artists, political writers, cartoonists, playwrights, poets, and novelists of the era they were inventing. These scrappy young women and men, often living together just a few blocks shy of the Italian families to the south, came from another America, and not just for cheap rents and free love. The Provincetown Players were in a stable on Macdougal Street right off Washington Square. When John Reed moved into a dilapidated apartment at 42 Washington Square on the south side of the park, he paid a jaunty tribute to their way of life:
We are free who live in Washington Square
We dare to think as Uptown wouldn’t dare
Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious
What care we for a dull old world censorious
When each is sure he’ll fashion something glorious?
Close to the flower markets, iced-clam wagons, and fish stalls of poor Italian families, the Village was called the Ninth Ward in New York City, but it was bohemia to the young writers and artists who found their rooms and studios there. The offices of
The Masses
were at 91 Greenwich Avenue, right around the corner from Frank Shay’s bookshop on Christopher Street, where the newest books and quarterlies were in his windows, as well as the first blue-paper-wrapped copy of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. There was a spirit of carnival where no one said good-bye to the flesh, and where even the masquerade balls were called “Pagan Routs.” Uptown men wore suits with vests and high starched collars, and women wore corsets. In the Village, men wore corduroy shirts and tied their neckties around their waists as belts. Greenwich Village women smoked and didn’t wear corsets, and as Art Young, the brilliant cartoonist for
The Masses
, wrote, “Here a woman could say damn right out loud and still be respected!”
They ate together, played and drank and talked together. “I’d never seen a place like the Hell Hole in my life,” Norma said, “people leaning over and standing and drinking, and everybody talking—about what? about labor, and the theater and Rimbaud and politics and philosophy—and then a lovely hand, Charlie’s, just came through the crowd, and I just took it. A look of horror and despair on my face. Those were terrible nights at
the Hell Hole—anarchists, Wobblies, with Hippolyte saying ‘Bourgeois pigs!’ and he always took taxis!”
One of the first things Vincent explained to Norma was that there was a certain freedom of language in the Village that mustn’t shock her. It wasn’t vulgar. “
So we sat darning socks on Waverly Place and practiced the use of profanity as we stitched. Needle in, shit. Needle out, piss. Needle in, fuck. Needle out, cunt. Until we were easy with the words.”
2
On February 7, 1918, Major Arthur Davison Ficke wrote to Edna from the War Department in Washington, D.C., where he was stationed prior to carrying dispatches to General “Black Jack” Pershing in France. If she could bring herself to meet “a reformed poet who is now a soldier,” he would be in New York shortly, awaiting embarkation to France and the front. He wanted very much to see her before he left. Floyd Dell took Major Ficke to her on Waverly Place.
Arthur cut a dashing figure in his officer’s tunic with its high, snug collar and a Sam Browne belt strapped smartly across his chest. He was, Dell wrote forlornly, “tall, handsome, elegant, rich, a distinguished poet, intelligent, kind, gentle.” Floyd knew he was no match for Ficke. They all sat on the floor, eating sandwiches and pickles that Charlie Ellis had brought from a local delicatessen, when Norma raised a pickle to her lips and said, “This pickle is a little loving-cup.” Arthur, his eyes glittering with mischief, scrawled effortlessly across the lid of the pastry box a sonnet to her pickle:
I raise it to my lips, and where you kissed
There lurks a certain sting that I have missed
In nectars more laboriously put up.…
Soon they were all giddy with laughter and talk and planning pranks. “Oh, Arthur was witty and quick, and debonair,” Norma remembered. “He was everything Floyd was not.”
Ficke expected to be in New York for several weeks, but the following day his orders came through: he was to sail for France at noon. In a wild scramble, he wrote, “I had time only to rush to her apartment, kiss her good-bye … as I ran and barely caught the ship on which I was ordered to sail. That night, in the darkness of the muffled ship … I wrote my sonnet, ‘Sea Midnight,’ and sent it to her.” That was not the only poem he wrote to her. Although she did not hear from him until March 5, when his letter
at last arrived it was filled with poems. At sea with thousands of men in a vast fleet of troopships with no one to talk to, he wrote her sonnets. In closing he asked for her photograph and told her to write to him “like a good child.”
He signed the letter “Major Arthur D. Ficke, Ordinance Dept N.A., Headquarters, Lines of Communications, American Expeditionary Forces, France.” Stamped across the face of the envelope was “PASSED AS CENSORED.”
Ficke did not hear from Millay for eight months. When he did, he destroyed her letter. It was too ardent. He was afraid his wife would find it among his personal papers if he were to die in France.
Vincent was as shaken as he was. She had dreamed of meeting him since that Thanksgiving Day in Camden in 1912 when he and Bynner had been the first to welcome her triumph with “Renascence.” “
My time, in those awful days after you went away to France,” she later wrote, “was a mist of thinking about you & writing sonnets to you.”
She sent him two sonnets: one “about you & about myself—we were both like that—but are not anymore.” She would not reprint this in any book, for its conclusion was a little too easy, but there was this single line that rescued the entire poem: “There is no shelter in you anywhere.” The second sonnet was extraordinary. She was writing in full command of her voice and talent.
Into the golden vessel of great song
Let us pour all our passion; breast to breast
Let other lovers lie, in love and rest;
Not we,—articulate, so, but with the tongue
Of all the world: the churning blood, the long
Shuddering quiet, the desperate hot palms pressed
Sharply together upon the escaping guest,
The common soul, unguarded, and grown strong.
Longing alone is singer to the lute;
Let still on nettles in the open sigh
The minstrel, that in slumber is as mute
As any man, and love be far and high,
That else forsakes the topmost branch, a fruit
Found on the ground by every passer-by.
After Arthur had left, Vincent—who again had not been writing home—told her mother, “
You will forgive me when you read my sonnets.”
The only person who had a hard time forgiving her was Floyd Dell. “A generous-minded lover,” Dell wrote, “would perhaps not object to his girl’s having a poetical long-distance romance with another poet.” But he was possessive, “and this girl poet would always be falling in love with someone else.”
3
On the morning of April 15, 1918, the trial of Max Eastman, the editor of
The Masses;
Art Young, an artist and cartoonist; Merrill Rogers, their business manager; Josephine Bell, a poet; and Floyd Dell began. In June 1912, Congress had passed the Espionage Act, making it illegal to obstruct recruiting or to interfere with the operation of the military. Woodrow Wilson, who had won an election by promising to keep America out of the war in Europe, committed the country instead to war with Germany.
The Masses
, which Floyd said stood for “fun, truth, beauty, realism, freedom, peace, feminism, revolution,” was the first journal of any significance to be refused the U.S. mails, upon which its existence depended. It was accused of being against recruiting, and it couldn’t afford to continue publication if it couldn’t be mailed. By December 1917, four months before the trial began,
The Masses
was out of business.