Spinster (21 page)

Picture the poet, long, loosened tendrils of hair forming a bronze halo. The room is packed with friends and neighbors, everyone in high spirits, pressing cool glasses of punch against their brows or pulling up a chair to rest for a spell. As Edna's voice rises above the crowd, the excited chatter and clinking glasses hush into a long, unbroken silence, until nothing but her words can be heard in the still, warm night:

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide;

Above the world is stretched the sky,—

No higher than the soul is high.

Among the spellbound onlookers was an erstwhile fairy godmother in the shape of a middle-aged woman named Caroline B. Dow. She was so impressed with Edna's talent and presence that she visited her and her mother the following day. As Edna recorded it in her diary: “Miss Dow (Caroline B.) called;—dean of New York Y.W.C.A. Training School. Wealthy friends in New York who might send me to Vassar.” All Edna had to do was apply. In September 1913 she was enrolled in the freshman class—still wearing the glitter of a cause célèbre, thanks to the
Lyric Year
fracas.

Four years at an elite, all-women's college fostered Edna's formidable intellectual capacities and provided a testing ground for the romantic swashbuckling to come. She threw herself into campus cultural life, starring in plays, publishing poems, and cultivating her already magnetic personality into a persona that proved irresistible to a captive pool of young women ripe for seduction. (She was a notorious heartbreaker even then.)

In 1917 Edna's first book,
Renascence and Other Poems
, made
her the muse and celebrity of Greenwich Village bohemia, and as contemporary fans of her poetry are well aware, she took so effortlessly to the neighborhood's sexual politics, she fast became its emissary. She didn't merely sleep with whomever she wanted, male or female, whenever she wanted, and on her own terms; she also recorded the twists and turns of this avid romanticizing in poems so pleasurable and fun to read that they revolutionized the poetic landscape itself.

In a sense, I'd known Edna nearly my entire life. The first book I ever hid beneath my mattress was her second poetry collection,
A Few Figs from Thistles
. That I swapped it out several years later for the iconic 1950s S&M novel,
Story of O
, and then Anaïs Nin's volume of 1940s erotica,
Little Birds
, doesn't mean what you might think.

I discovered Edna long before I discovered sex, on my parents' bookshelves, during that excruciating phase after I'd finally outgrown temper tantrums and the torture of being forcibly sent to my bedroom, and had instead taken to willingly stomping up there myself, slamming the door, and erupting into storms of tears over how I loved the boy who sat behind me in homeroom so unbearably much that I was going to die and nobody understood and never would and, etc.

When I was four, my father had taught me to read with a volume of classic English children's verse. Our favorite was Christina Rossetti's “Who Has Seen the Wind?” a simple rhyming poem that's almost onomatopoetic in how, with just a few light strokes, it conjures the power of an invisible force:

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

Once I'd committed that to memory, the poetry I was taught at school seemed as suffocating as a too-tight turtleneck.

Enter the shock of Edna Millay, circa seventh grade. Her lilting rhythms picked up where Rossetti's left off, catching in my mind like a pop song. It was the passion that grabbed me, or me it—moth to flame, mutually magnetic. Her eroticism lay not in any frank sexual imagery—there is none—but an unabashed intensity of feeling. It was as if, by some astounding witchcraft, she'd taken all the torments of my preteen self—inscrutable lusts and hungers and yearnings—pounded them into iron ribbons, and forged them into cunning little shapes, sparking with em dashes and exclamation points, that I could stand apart from and regard from all angles, gorgeous and manageable, like a smoldering sculpture.

It was this potency, combined with the novelty of seeing exposed the incipient currents of my internal life, that gave me such a fugitive thrill, and made the mere act of holding her book feel deliciously taboo. It wouldn't be long before,

The first rose on my rose-tree

Budded, bloomed, and shattered,

as she put it in an early poem. I had no idea what that meant when I first read it, and I can't even be sure now. But it calls to my mind the moment when, alone in her bedroom, or maybe the bathtub,
a girl deciphers her own physical pleasure, and her emotional storms are given another outlet, at which point reading romantic poetry doesn't quite cut it anymore.

And yet somewhere between my actual adolescence and the new developmental category sociologists call “extended adolescence”—which is to say, starting in college—I succumbed to the critical fashion of dismissing her work as second-rate and left her behind.

By the time I moved to New York, eighty-three years after she had, the collegiate idea of what one should and should not read had completely taken hold, and I'd forgotten all about her.

And then sometime that year, 75½ Bedford Street, known as the narrowest house in the city, as well as where Edna Millay had lived in the 1920s, went on the market, inciting a flurry of news interest. One afternoon before class I walked over to see. It's an impossibly tiny brick building, 9 and a half feet wide and 3 stories tall, 999 square feet in all, a wisp of the brownstones it's squeezed between, with two wide casement windows dominating the façade.

If Edna were a building, she would be this one: compact, ingenious, charming, unabashedly baring its interior self. Even the red bricks recall her red hair. (In 2013 it was sold again, for $3.25 million, $3,253 per square foot.)

My delight in her house returned me to her work, and once there I was surprised to find the barnacled hulls and ribbons of eelgrass and thick blankets of fog of my youth. At eleven and twelve, I'd had no idea she'd lived in Newburyport and Camden, Maine, and wouldn't have cared if I did. Our shared New England—“dazzling mud and dingy snow,” the unmistakable thunder of “water striking the shore”—were the boring details I'd skimmed across to get to the juicy parts.

But over the next few years, as I acclimated to life sans R and with the addition of a roommate, it comforted me to know she'd come from the same place I had. The only landscape to make
my heart both lift and ache is the ocean, and realizing that it had been this way for Edna, too, and that we had both grown up perched on the rocky edge of the continent, gazing out at a vast, choppy vista with sounds and scents as distinct as any animal's, uncomprehendingly deep and cold and wide, yet there to be waded through, swum in, boated across—surely this instilled in us a taste for possibility. To think we'd left our small seaside towns for the same big city!

Even in the boho-friendly Manhattan of the 1910s and '20s, writing was a profession most easily undertaken by those with means. In a 1924 essay,
Poetry
's editor, Harriet Monroe, ventured “that a certain living lady may perhaps be the greatest woman poet since Sappho.” She was kidding, sort of. After narrowing history's roster of important woman poets to Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson, Monroe argues that Edna stands apart for the way “she has courted life and shunned none of its adventures.” The danger, she writes, “has been that life might lure her away from art,” and continues:

The complications of a hunted human soul in these stirring days—the struggle for breath, for food and lodging, the pot-boilers, the flirtations, the teasing petty trials and interruptions—how could the poet in her survive all these, and put out fresh flowers of beauty?

What Monroe understood about the importance of Edna Millay's influence is something that's easily dwarfed by the poet's reputation for sexual promiscuity: she was a self-made woman with an extraordinary work ethic who managed to live by her wits—a rare achievement for either gender.

And so I buoyed myself with her example:
If she could do it, so can I
.

In the spring of 2002 I finished my graduate program and started working from my bedroom/living room/office as a freelance writer. Because I'd started contributing to magazines and newspapers as a graduate student, the transition was seamless enough, save for the fact that reviewing books makes it very easy to never go outside.

Rising rents had pulverized Greenwich Village's communal promises long before I came around; it was a given that those with creative aspirations lived anywhere but downtown Manhattan, whether in Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey, or at any number of MFA programs scattered across the country, if not in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, where the new breed of so-called creatives were wearing flip-flops and playing Frisbee in boardrooms. (Indeed, the phrase “Greenwich Village isn't what it used to be” was used as early as 1916.)

The challenge my generation of writers faced was more abstract than real estate. By the start of this century, the booming magazine and newspaper industries that brought Neith and Edna into the public sphere had peaked as high as they ever would; those of us who finished college in the mid- to late 1990s spell-checked our résumés just as the mountain began to crumble, when there were still jobs to be had and careers to be made—even if each staff position was the very last.

I picture us en masse, straddling two cliffs—one the trembling pinnacle of “print,” the other the pinnacle-shaped fantasia of “digital”—and in between a bottomless pit of insecurity. Petty rivalries and jealousies are elementary to ego-based endeavors; add the higher cost of living, the unchecked professionalization of late-stage capitalism, and you get a Tuesday night “happy hour”
of desperate careerists in pressed button-down shirts and blazers, sipping sponsored cocktails from little plastic cups and breaking you off mid-sentence because there's someone with a bigger byline, or an editor he's trying to impress, just over your shoulder, across the room. You don't mind, exactly. It's ten o'clock already, and you've got to wake up early the next morning to meet a deadline for an online magazine that barely pays, but at least it's something.