The trial lasted nine days, and the jury was out for forty-eight hours. When they returned they were deadlocked, and the defendants were free. But they had not yet been acquitted.
With the trial over, Edna’s interest in Dell waned. When he was suddenly drafted, she invited him to a farewell dinner, just the two of them in her backyard. The air was soft and blue at dusk, and as the wind blew up from the Hudson, she put candles in a tree to brighten their supper. The dripping wax looked like icicles, “and those blossoms of fire that dripped ice seemed to me,” Dell later wrote, “symbols of the heart of this girl poet.”
The Army, however, had blundered. Dell was still indicted under the Espionage Act and was therefore sent packing back to New York with an honorable discharge, where he found nobody had expected him back so soon. “Somebody else had my job,” he wrote forlornly, “and my girl seemed to have fallen in love with somebody else.”
Millay was not in love with Walter Adolphe Roberts, but she did like his devotion to her poetry. Roberts had just become the editor of Ainslee’s, The Magazine That Entertains, published by Street & Smith in Brooklyn, a firm that exploited the dime novel in the nineteenth century and adventure and detective stories at low prices at the beginning of the twentieth. There was always a girl on the cover of Ainslee’s, and she was inevitably sporty or flirty. When Roberts became its editor after his return from France, where he had been a war correspondent, he was given a free hand. While the publishers were indifferent to poetry—verses were used to fill up spaces left blank at the ends of stories—he was resolved “to make the poetry in Ainslee’s among the best printed in the United States.” On August 15, 1918, he wrote to Edna Millay, asking her to contribute to his magazine. He paid fifty cents a line and wanted to meet her.
“I looked up and saw a slim … girl with sea-green eyes, finespun reddish hair and remarkably small hands.” He thought she looked like a tiger lily. She agreed at once to become a contributor, and when he asked her if she’d brought anything with her, she promptly gave him a batch of poems. A week later, he wrote to tell her, “Yours is real genius, a fine and delicate gift. Your ‘Daphne’ in particular is exquisite. It is a long time since I have read so beautiful a lyric.” He bought it, and three others: “Fugitive,” “Lord Archer,—Death,” and “A Visit to the Asylum,” for twenty-eight dollars.
Within a month he told her not only that “Daphne” would be in the November issue but “I want, if possible, to have a poem by you in every number thereafter. You are a real poet. There are not many such.”
He kept his word to the letter. From November 1918 until October 1920, Roberts published twenty-three poems and eight pieces of her fiction; Ainslee’s had become the first major outlet for her work.
Having been forced to close The Masses, Max Eastman and his sister, Crystal, founded the Liberator. Fifty-one percent of the stock was theirs. This time the magazine would not be a collective as The Masses had been. They would edit it, and Dell would be managing editor. They would pay themselves a salary, and they would have final say over the material they published. Max had raised $2,000 to send John Reed to Russia in 1917 to write an eyewitness report of the revolution. Reed’s testimony from Petrograd would become Ten Days That Shook the World. His reports were at the heart of the Liberator.
A second trial was scheduled to start, with charges that were remarkably the same. The cast of defendants was too, except for Reed, who was now back in New York. The trial provided a homecoming for the radicals of Greenwich Village, with friends and contributors hailing each other in the bustling courtroom. As soon as it began, Millay returned to Dell. “I was again in danger, and her place was at my side. She was my companion all through the trial.”
Eastman spoke daringly in defense of socialism and even more eloquently in defending himself and his colleagues against the charge of willfully opposing America’s right to conscript. When the offending articles for which he and the others were held responsible were written, America had not yet begun to fight. The president had even pledged, he reminded them, not to go to war. Wasn’t freedom of speech at stake?
Max Eastman addressed the courtroom for three hours as if giving a lecture on American history. When Art Young was asked what a particularly pointed cartoon meant—in which a capitalist, an editor, a politician, and a minister were dancing a war dance while the Devil directed the orchestra—he said, “Meant? Intend? I intended to draw a picture.” When he was asked for what purpose, he slowly said, “Why, to make people think—to make them laugh—to express my feelings.” Did he intend to obstruct recruiting and enlistment with such a savagely mocking picture? the prosecuting attorney asked. “There isn’t anything in there about recruiting and enlistment, is there? I don’t believe in war, that’s all, and I said so.” Young had been drawing a caricature of the chief prosecuting attorney, Earl Barnes, and the jury had noticed. Now he slyly asked Barnes if maybe some of the jurors thought he was trying to discourage Mr. Barnes from enlisting. As the courtroom burst into laughter, Young returned to his seat, settled in, and snoozed for the remainder of the trial.
Jack Reed, whom The New York Times had labeled “the Bolshevik agitator,” hesitated and then equivocated on the stand. But by then the defense of The Masses was plain: criticism of the government didn’t amount to a desire to overthrow it. If all hostile opinion were suppressed, how could Americans believe they lived in a free country? Dissent was a safeguard to freedom, not an impediment. Max Eastman again stood to take the stand at the closing of the trial. He said that a prominent member of his own family had asked a long time ago whether or not conscription was consistent with a free government and civil liberty:
Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of Government may engage it?
That member of his family was Daniel Webster, and those were his words. Eastman said that for himself, “I am not afraid to spend the better part of my life in a penitentiary, if my principles have brought me to it.… I am more afraid to betray my principles.” The courtroom was silent as the handsome, eloquent editor of The Masses quietly took his seat. They called him the Byron of the Left.
The second trial was even shorter than the first. After five days the jury was again unable to agree and deadlocked. Once again, the defendants were free.
Jack Reed, husky, snub-nosed, and rumpled, looked like a shaggy, massive boy. He had helped organize the Patterson Silk Strike in New Jersey and had been arrested and jailed for it. He had been a war correspondent with Pancho Villa in Mexico, and he had written the first eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution in English. At the time of the trial, he was at the height of his powers. When he told Dell he had secret news that negotiations for an armistice to end the war were under way, Floyd believed him. They celebrated with Edna Millay one night by crossing on the Staten Island ferry. The fog was thick, and as they walked along the beach, Reed told her about his adventures as a war correspondent and in Russia. She was charmed by him and lightly said, “I love you for the dangers you have passed.” And he replied, “Yes, I thought there was something Desdemonaish about this.”
“And the third person present,” Dell wrote of himself miserably, “would rather be elsewhere.… so that her new romance may go on unimpeded.” Dell was convinced that Millay and Reed had a brief affair. He also believed that her sonnet “Lord Archer,—Death” was written to Reed. Roberts had purchased the sonnet in August, by which time Reed was back from Russia, but there is no evidence that he and Millay met before the second Masses trial in October, well after the poem was written.
It’s hard to know now if Dell should be taken as a credible witness. Again and again, both before her death and after, more than thirty years after their love affair was over, he kept returning to the issue of her fidelity—or infidelity. In his unpublished memoir he i
nsisted that her sonnet “Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!” had been written during their first winter together on Waverly Place. He said she read it to him with “a mischievous air which was intended to give me liberty to believe that this was about us.”
Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless am I save to love’s self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now:
After the feet of beauty fly my own.
Were you not still my hunger’s rarest food,
And water ever to my wildest thirst,
I would desert you—think not but I would!—
And seek another as I sought you first.
But you are mobile as the veering air,
And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:
I have but to continue at your side.
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
I am most faithless when I most am true.
In a long letter written to her at the time, Dell describes standing outside her apartment on Charlton Street waiting for her to return. He says it has been a vain boast for him “to being equal to being in love with you”: it is beyond his strength to endure his changed status. He remembers things that have passed between them that she has forgotten. “The only decent thing to do,” he asks her, “is for you to bid me also to forget.… I am asking you to end a one-sided love relationship.”
At the end of his letter he sounds just like Elaine Ralli, only he asks her “again to marry me.” His hurt and his manipulativeness were intended to press her into making a decision. She did. Their relationship as lovers was over.
In their happier days together, a friend remembered seeing Millay running around the corner of Macdougal Street, her hair flying out behind her, “flushed and laughing like a nymph,” as Floyd Dell, stretching out his arms to catch her, raced after her. It was like a scene from “Daphne”:
Why do you follow me?—
Any moment I can be
Nothing but a laurel tree.
Any moment of the chase
I can leave you in my place
A pink bough for your embrace.
Yet if over hill and hollow
Still it is your will to follow,
I am off;—to heel, Apollo!
The problem with nymphs is that they are so changeable, let alone inhuman.
4
By May the sisters had moved to the top floor of 25 Charlton Street, a lovely old redbrick town house with a stoop out front and a tiny garden at the rear. On the parlor floor was a milliner’s shop run by Avril Unger, for whom Norma sometimes worked. With room enough at last, Vincent invited Cora to join them. “Dearlings,” Cora wrote on May 24, “I’ll come just when you want me.… I can stand any heat or anything else you can. I can sew, nurse, or do the heads to match those hats next fall.” They would sink or swim together. Four days later she wrote again: “I can’t believe it, and I don’t; but I’m coming.” Vincent warned her not to budge from the waiting room in Grand Central Terminal if they were late. It had been such a long time since they’d seen each other, she thought of wearing a gardenia.
Cora arrived on June 3, 1918, one week before her fifty-fifth birthday. Now Vincent had brought her entire family out of Maine, and they were all, at last, together again. Only this time they were under her wing—except for Kathleen, who was at Vassar because of Vincent’s efforts on her behalf.
While Poughkeepsie was only a couple of hours north of New York, Kathleen was feeling sharply the contrast between her life and the life her sisters were living in the city. “Edna,” she’d written that fall, at the beginning of her first year at Vassar, “I love the poems, dear.… but you don’t know how I love to have them.” Was it, she asked,
nasty to say that I was so surprised to get it that I was sad to think I should be so surprised. It just happens that you and Hunk never did write any, you know, and it made me feel funny. I wish awfully this year that I knew you two girls better than I do. I really don’t know much about you, I guess, and it makes me lonesome. I just don’t “belong” up here.
This letter is the first evidence in her own hand that Kathleen felt left out of her sisters’ lives.
A woman who knew Kathleen at Vassar said, “She was really out of her depth. And one knew it, felt it. She was always striving to be more than she was.” What was particularly noticeable “was this trading on Vincent’s reputation and standing at Vassar. For Vincent was greatly regarded, as something quite special. Kathleen was not.”
Within another year Kathleen would leave Vassar and join her sisters in New York.
Malcolm Cowley, who would later write Exiles Returned and become a discerning critic rather than the poet he intended to be, remembered coming into New York while still an undergraduate at Harvard. He had a head of russet curls and a cherubic grin, and visiting the Millays in their rooms on Charlton Street was a delight: “When the sisters appeared it all tripled—if there is one pretty woman, and then there are three pretty women—well, it is simply heightened beyond the belief of a very young man.
“I would go up into that room, I remember the big bed in the corner, and lie on it. Norma had undertaken to rescue us. Oh, from the cold! from the everlasting human cold! They were each lovely girls. But Edna had something more than that. She’d break your heart. There was something wild and elusive about her.
“It was something to hear the sisters singing,” he continued. “They sang easily together, in three-part harmony, and sometimes they’d sing their own songs, too. Oh, it was a treat.” Cowley threw back his head and sang lustily, “ ‘Have a little sniff, Have a little sniff on me.’ But,” he said, “of course, the great drug was alcohol.”
Everyone who knew them then remembers how gaily they sang parts together. Kathleen would take the air, Norma the tenor part, and Vincent the baritone.
SONG TO MEN
Let us sing a little song
To the men we’ve loved so long—
And to those we’ve only loved
A little while
TENOR SOLO: A lit-tle while
Ti de dee and ta dee da,
We must take them as they are—
Let them spoof us
For they love so
To beguile.
BARITONE SOLO: Let them beguile.
Chorus
Oh, darling men!
BARITONE: Oh, men, men, men.
Oh, men alluring,
Waste not the hours—
TENOR: Sweet idle hours—
In vain assuring,
For love, though sweet,
TENOR: Love though tho thweet—
Is not enduring.
Ti de da! Ti da dee da!
Cowley found Edna and Norma most intriguing. “Now people often describe Edna as elfin,” he recalled. “But it was Norma who had a sort of pixieish, naughty look to her face. With Edna it was something more like Titania—the Queen of the Fairies.”
Actually, not quite everyone was charmed by them when they sang. When Floyd took Edna and Norma to meet Max Eastman for the first time in the Village—Eastman was living with Eugen Boissevain, the handsome, broad-chested Dutchman whose extraordinary wife, the suffragist leader Inez Milholland, had died tragically in 1916—“it really didn’t take at all, for any of us,” Norma remembered. “Vincent and I sang together, but somehow it just didn’t work out that night. And I think Floyd was rather disappointed. He wanted to show us off.”
Eastman called it “skillful—their harmonies were perfect, their rhythmical sense exact—but I did not find it pleasing. They seemed a little school-girlish, almost simpering, to me.”
By this time, Walter Adolphe Roberts was taking Millay out to dinner as often as she would agree to go. He recalled the “flickering” way she talked about herself—“I had been thinking of the poet as fragile and unearthly; suddenly I perceived that she was strong.”
He knew the f
ifty cents a line he paid her for her poetry wasn’t going to help solve her financial problems, so when she hinted that she’d like to write fiction, “I gave her every encouragement.” “Young Love” ran in the May 1919 issue under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd, her great-grandmother’s maiden name. It tickled Roberts to be able to send her a more substantial check, and whenever possible he slyly placed one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lyrics in the space left at the bottom of a Nancy Boyd story.
Four of Millay’s workbooks survive from this period in New York; she worked quickly and in longhand, writing poems on the right-hand side of the page and then sometimes reworking them on the left-hand side. It was a pattern she followed most of her life. Sometimes the poems are dated; most often they are not. The dates are of entry, not necessarily of composition, and never of publication. A workbook was just that. She said later in life that she might write a poem down anywhere, on the back of a telegram for instance, but usually she worked them out in her mind, and when she had something she liked, she wrote it down in these paper composition books.
The dated poems seemed to come in clusters: July 17, 1918: “Lord Archer,—Death” (not published in Ainslee’s until December). July 18: “I do but ask that you be always fair,” which waited a year and ten months before publication in a remarkable group of twenty sonnets in Reedy’s Mirror. But many of her finest poems were left undated, scrawled hastily across the page in pencil. Reading in those workbooks now, one can feel, even see in the dashes of thick lead strokes across the pages or her hesitant crossing out, a poet trying to seize and shape on paper the work that would distinguish her a half century after her death—the intensity and excitement are palpable.
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