See What Can Be Done

by Lorrie Moore

  Cora shared with everyone else an undying infatuation with Vincent—she was at times less stage mother than president of the fan club—wondering, it seemed, how she, a mere mortal, could have given birth to such a goddess. But she was not without her own ego vis-à-vis her daughter, once writing,

  We all know the poet who shot into fame

  As Edna St. Vincent Millay,

  But who was the poet who gave her the name

  Of Edna St. Vincent Millay?

  Vincent perhaps did as much to care for Cora later on in life—bringing her to Paris, buying her a house—as Cora had ever done for her. Edmund Wilson’s recollection of Vincent’s mother included her once saying that she “had been a slut herself so why shouldn’t her girls be?” Wilson found Mrs. Millay shocking but felt that, even more than with Edna, Cora had “passed beyond good and evil…and that she had attained there a certain gaiety.”

  Perhaps it would not have been possible for her daughters to love Cora in any conventional way. Their adult protectiveness toward her was more likely a forgiving cover for her prior maternal negligence. She was at times hectoring and emotionally demanding. She had sent their father away, divorcing him, after developing a crush on a local minister. She consigned to her eldest astonishing quantities of housework. She gave her daughters a book on witchcraft, which in the absence of parental care became a kind of bible to them. She was a self-invented herbalist who made Vincent quite ill with a potion designed for homemade abortions. The daughters vied for her attention, courting her and looking after her, but when, as an older woman, she became more available to them, they plotted their little escapes from her. When Vincent writes to her, “We all love you better than anything, just as we did when we were little kids,” one hears more obligation and desperation and hollowly constructed reassurance than truth.

  * * *

  —

  No, surely the great love of Millay’s life—and the great mother—was her husband, the Dutch aristocrat Eugen Boissevain, whose former wife was the suffragist Inez Milholland (also a Vassar graduate, who died tragically at twenty-eight). Boissevain was, according to Millay’s brother-in-law, “the solution to a lot of problems” for Millay. He was “the mother type” and in terms of continuous devotion and care a more effective parent to Millay than her own parents ever were. As literary husbands go, even Leonard Woolf may pale by comparison. Boissevain loved caring for Millay and boasted of it—he called her Vince—just as Millay boasted, “I have nothing to do with my household. Eugen does all that kind of thing….I have no time for it. I want to go into my dining room as if it were a restaurant, and say, ‘What a charming dinner!’ It’s this unconcern with my household that protects me from the things that eat up a woman’s time and interest.”

  Millay and Boissevain married when she was scheduled for intestinal surgery and his official spousal status was required for visitation. They gathered together with a few witnesses at his house in Croton-on-Hudson, she threw mosquito netting over her head for a veil, and immediately afterward they drove to New York Hospital. It was an open marriage (each had affairs known to the other; hers with the poet George Dillon seems even to have been actively encouraged by Boissevain), but theirs remained nonetheless a close and rancorless union. As he had squired his first famous wife on her speaking tours, Boissevain accompanied and nursed Millay on her grand, whistle-stop readings (she read to nothing but packed houses), and generally saw her through illness, spiritual crises, and family dramas, especially with her youngest sister, Kathleen, who was by then severely alcoholic. When they hit financial difficulties, Boissevain remained characteristically buoyant. He wrote to his brother that he was down to his last dollar but needed it for magic tricks. (Millay’s wit, too, remained undeterred by money issues: she wrote of her publishers, from whom she borrowed large sums, “Although I reject their proposals, I welcome their advances.”)

  When her husband died, during surgery for lung cancer, Millay was, of course, devastated. Her own actual death—a fall down the stairs—seems a drunken suicide (she was not without such tendencies), a leap that perhaps echoes her having been “thrown” from a car in a Florida accident years before, after she lost a manuscript in a hotel fire. (“O Florida. O, cold Florida! Could any state be horrida?” she joked afterward.) When her back injury from the car accident led subsequently to morphine addiction, Eugen kept close and helped record her alarming dosages (these notebooks Milford calls “among the most troubling and pitiful documents in American literary history”); he even tried the drug himself to attempt to understand her dependence on it.

  A contemporary reader of the lives of Millay and her peers will be struck by how much alcohol and drug intake was required of these sensitive Victorians–turned–Jazz Agers in negotiating their own pain, psychic and otherwise, in a fast-changing age of loosened mores. (Millay was considered successfully detoxed when the nurses got her breakfast down to tea, toast, and claret.) It was ultimately husbandly love that was Millay’s ballast, and, on her own after her husband’s death, she died within a year, found in a bloody heap at the foot of her stairs with three lines circled in a poem she’d been writing. “I will control myself, or go inside. I will not flaw perfection with my grief. Handsome, this day: no matter who has died.”

  * * *

  —

  In the end, Millay’s life seems a love story of a different kind than indicated really by her poetry (“I shall forget you presently, my dear” or “My candle burns at both ends”). This is quite forcefully arrived at by Milford at the conclusion of her biography, and acknowledged to a lesser degree by Epstein, whose book, finally, is of a different sort. Epstein does many things quite well—he is more organized than Milford and more intent than she on recording what Edmund Wilson called Millay’s “dedicated and noble presence.” Milford’s sources seem more often to recall Millay’s vanities, and so in this way Epstein’s book is less catty, more adoring, more literary and generous—more what Wilson himself might have written. Epstein attends better to the poetry than Milford does, and has a good ear for Millay’s best work, even if he occasionally overstates (“Renascence,” written when Millay was only twenty, may be precocious, but is it really a “marvel of twentieth-century poetry”? Did neither Eliot, Moore, Frost, nor Stevens produce three love poems comparable to Millay’s?)

  Epstein hasn’t missed Millay’s love of the racetrack (she was an enthusiastic gambler) the way Milford has, and he is better at certain background information, such as Boissevain’s life before Millay. But his book is also stranger, as when he seems to turn the young Vincent into the precious heroine of a young adult novel, presuming her interior thoughts and motives, assembling his prose as narrative (“Her hands were small, but she stretched them strenuously each day over the piano keys, praying that they might grow”), even referring to her as “our heroine.”

  To be fair, there are parts even of Leon Edel’s brilliant biography of Henry James that verge on something similar; such intimate but fictional fashioning is a hazard of biographical obsession. Epstein, however, may not always have put obsession to good use. He is a little startling, for example, on the subject of Millay’s naked breasts, about which he exults—photographs of which he apparently pored over in the files of the Library of Congress (which could not authorize their release and reproduction at that time). When he gives us his own feverish descriptions, readers may become a little frightened, but eventually he moves on, and I do believe everyone recovers. Such an instance does not, however, prevent him from other periodic overheatings (“Her coloring, the contrast between her white skin and the red integuments, lips, tongue, and more secret circles and folds her lovers would cherish, had become spectacular after the girl turned twenty”), which if they do not actually singe and bubble the page, at least prompt a reviewer’s exclamation marks in the margins. Epstein’s index includes multiple entries for Millay’s physical appearance: “physical appearance: bo
dy”; “physical appearance: hair”; “physical appearance: mouth”; “physical beauty and charisma.” Plus, quite pointedly, “power to drive men mad.”

  Milford’s biography, on the other hand, remains poised and employs an unusual bicameral structure, which has been criticized by some reviewers, but which in fact is part of the book’s great strength and originality. Once per chapter or so she interrupts the main biographical account with ongoing conversations she as biographer had with Millay’s sister Norma (and Norma’s husband) in the 1970s and ’80s, during the book’s research at Steepletop. In these metatextual moments Norma Millay emerges as a brilliant character herself—eccentric, witchy, funny, balky—not a coauthor of the biography, but a kind of cospirit behind it. She and the stunning Eugen Boissevain almost threaten, as characters, to upstage the portrait of Edna Millay the book is trying to bring into light. As when the vivid minor characters of a Dickens novel begin to engage the reader more than the protagonist does, it is a delightful, accidental, and never wholly fatal problem for an author to have.

  (2002)

  Darryl Pinckney and Caryl Phillips

  In singling out three “mavericks of black literature” for his book Out There, Darryl Pinckney, who has written much on black literature, perceptively and with the animated brilliance of a passionate reader (he is also the gifted author of the novel High Cotton), has employed a working definition of maverick that includes the phrase “a striking eccentricity of purpose.” They are words that are as good as any and more apt than most to describe the work of the Jamaican journalist J. A. Rogers, the expatriate American memoirist Vincent O. Carter, and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the contemporary British novelist Caryl Phillips. These are, at any rate, the three writers whose literary lives inform the pages of Pinckney’s collection, and though their work and biographies are treated with Pinckney’s own eccentricity of approach (the essays were originally lectures given at Harvard and will seem, perhaps, brief for those readers seeking comprehensive details of a writer’s childhood or formative romances), they are full of great personal feeling, intellectual curiosity, and original, groundbreaking research.

  J. A. Rogers was, according to Pinckney, a kind of through-the-looking-glass Kipling, documenting those spots around the world “where the white and the nonwhite are not in their ordained places.” Born in Jamaica in 1883, and emigrating as a young man to the United States, Rogers became a kind of popular historian of black achievement and was thought of as the first black war correspondent (though one wonders why George Washington Williams, who was born almost thirty-five years before and by 1890 was reporting on the Belgian Congo, has not been given that title). Rogers’s purpose was black pride and moral restitution for the Negro, and in his three volumes of Sex and Race he became obsessed with compiling a kind of historical Believe It or Not of people of color, even going out on a limb and including the swarthy, brooding Beethoven—and if not Beethoven, well then Beethoven’s accompanist—to prove that race mixing is the reality of history. Rogers desired to serve the black community, as was the wish of many subsequent literary radicals, but he worked within white-defined categories of history and culture.

  As Pinckney writes, “We don’t need to claim Beethoven.” Rogers was considered half-nuts by some, including his fellow countryman Claude McKay, who came to doubt very much Rogers’s stubborn accumulation of “Amazing Facts.” Rogers was especially interested in such things as Warren Harding’s reputed African-American blood (Bill Clinton may imagine he was the first African-American president, but he may be simply the first to boast of it). The part-disparaging, part-prideful parlor game of ethnic naming (the Polish genius—Conrad, Chopin; or the Jewish sex symbol—Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas) engages in any minority some group feeling of unjustified insecurity and a suspicion of cover-up in the mainstream culture. But in such a game of self-esteem, which is the project Rogers was interested in, one must walk through the room of bias and prejudice, noting the insulting stereotypes, before attempting to demolish them. The well-intentioned racial archaeology that seeks (for purposes of celebration and accuracy) any hidden drop of African blood sometimes seems a weird inversion of the racist’s similar preoccupation. “Africa is everywhere, both the nightmare and the dream proclaim,” writes Pinckney.

  Rogers’s restless cataloging led to overstepping and guessing and digressive blind alleys. Pinckney says, “The experience of reading Sex and Race is one of embrace and recoil as Rogers indiscriminately loads us down with the provable and the forever dodgy, the serious and the frivolous.”

  Rogers even fudged slightly his own entry in Who’s Who in Negro America?, apparently dissatisfied with his own many achievements and listing a book he never actually completed. Perhaps the only writer who made his living entirely within what was then known as the Negro press, Rogers remained virtually unknown in the white world, but his sheer energy (he toured and lectured tirelessly, selling his books as he went) seems an amazement now. He died leaving many of his own questions (most hinging on Europe’s proximity to Africa) unanswered: “What images were removed from churches and museums in Italy following the declaration of the purification laws of 1938? Are all the images of the Black Madonna in Eastern Europe the result of centuries of smoke?”

  Rogers claimed that a painting by the Belgian artist Charles Verlat “depicts the blackest, most Negroid Christ he’d ever seen.” That Rogers felt he needed not just Cleopatra but Jesus and Mary as well for his encyclopedia shows the persistent allure of these questions. It also shows the odd fierceness of Rogers’s character, the idiosyncrasy of his intellect, and the poignant grandiosity of his life’s work.

  * * *

  —

  It is with Out There’s last two writers, Vincent Carter and Caryl Phillips, that Pinckney offers a closer examination of place and home as it affects black artists—especially those who have broken away and become exiles or migrants—and in so doing he begins a conversation with Phillips himself, whose new collection of essays, A New World Order, is largely concerned with these themes. Pinckney’s discovery of Vincent Carter, who lived in Switzerland for most of the fifties, came about, he says, when he received Carter’s The Bern Book as a present from Susan Sontag and Robert and Peg Boyers. Part novel, part autobiography, “The Anatomy of Melancholy for this century,” it consists of such Tristram Shandy–style chapter titles as “A Little Sham History of Switzerland, Which Is Very Much to the Point, and Which the Incredulous or the Pedantic May Verify by Reading a Formal History of Switzerland, Which I Have Certainly Never Done, and Will Probably Never Do.” Though he desired the “romance of Europe in the era of the GI Bill Negro,” he perversely settled not in France, as Richard Wright and James Baldwin did, but in Bern, Switzerland, Pinckney surmises, paraphrasing Baldwin, because he did not want to spoil “another black man’s hustle in a room of white people.”

  In this, his only published book, Carter—who later became a physical fitness fanatic—seems bemused if not stunned by his own choices. He is called Wince by the locals, and even though he is the first black man they have ever met, the Swiss regale and irritate him with their racial presumptions and faux expertise on all things Negro, especially jazz. Despite Carter’s unwillingness to let paying work get in the way of his writing, which gathers dozens of rejection slips, he humbly—“with much mock heroism,” Pinckney suggests—gives English lessons. Carter refers to himself as “a hypersensitive nigger” who sends himself out into the streets for experiments in “lacerating subjective sociology”: in The Bern Book, Carter’s helpless wit has extended even to the pun of his title.

  Pinckney writes with sorrowful, almost exasperated eloquence of Carter’s experience in Bern:

  The Bern Book isn’t a work of memory. It is a work about ambivalence, escape, evasion, and the expatriate’s creed of noble procrastination, noble withdrawal. Carter is that familiar, defensive figure in the café, the man who refuses to be practical, the artist
with impossibly high standards, the stranger who is difficult to help, the black man who attacks the white friends who have just fed him or from whom he has just borrowed money.

  The social type to which Pinckney is referring is not a racial one, and so it seems at first disconcerting to see the words black and white toward the end of his description. But Pinckney wants to find out what happens to the defensive expatriate when race is involved, and he is simultaneously sympathetic, skeptical, and analytical.

  * * *

  —

  These qualities are engaged, too, in Pinckney’s view of the British writer Caryl Phillips, who was born on Saint Kitts in 1958, raised in Leeds, and who has published his own essay collection, A New World Order, which deals with many of the same issues explored by Pinckney—issues of place and home for the artist of color. Pinckney and Phillips are roughly contemporaries, their first names are near rhymes, and their books are often shelved side by side alphabetically in bookstores. One can imagine—and not only fancifully—that the books of these two men have been in conversation with one another for some time.