Savage Beauty (33 page)

On the bench that spring morning in the mahogany-paneled chambers of the old Post Office building opposite City Hall sat Augustus N. Hand. He was reputed to be more conservative and less genial than his cousin, the famous Supreme Court justice Learned Hand, but his integrity was unimpeachable. The charges the government brought against the defendants were reduced to a single issue: conspiracy to obstruct recruiting or enlistment.
For the first time in American history since the eighteenth century, words as well as deeds could be treasonable. If convicted, the men could look forward to twenty years’ imprisonment.

For Dell, once war had been declared against Germany, Americans “who had just voted for peace were exhorted, clubbed, censored and when necessary lynched into acquiescence.… and the I.W.W. [Industrial Workers of the World] leaders were arrested. The respectable leaders of the pacifist movement counselled doing nothing in particular.” Business was grafting millions onto war contracts, and even labor got what he called “its slice of the boodle.” Political cartoons and drawings, poems and news articles were linked in protest and shaped by social passion. “The Masses became,” Dell wrote, “against that war background, a thing of more vivid beauty.”

But what had it done to incur the wrath of the American government?
It wasn’t only its editorials and articles that spoke out against military intervention—some of its cartoons were fiercely antiwar. Henry Glintenkamp, who drew a cartoon of a handsome young man standing naked before rows of coffins, being measured by a skeleton and called “Physically Fit,” fled to Mexico rather than stand trial. What had once been provocative was now alleged to be treasonous.

As the trial began on the third floor of the old Post Office building, a Liberty Bond band struck up the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Every time the tune floated into the courtroom, tiny, stout Merrill Rogers sprang to his feet and slapped his hand upon his heart. If the trial was to be a show, with brass bands playing patriotic tunes, the editors of
The Masses
would show their spunk.

Edna Millay swept into this pandemonium at Floyd Dell’s side. “
Don’t worry about the
Masses
trial,” she wrote reassuringly to her mother. “I cannot possibly be mixed up in it.” But the truth is she was with Floyd every day.

“
One morning,” Dell remembered,

Edna and I overslept; dressing hastily, we took the subway down to the federal court building.… The courtroom was silent as I walked down the aisle with the girl at my side. The room was filled with the Socialist, liberal, and radical intelligentsia of New York; they all looked at the girl and me, and I felt that they all knew why I was late. She, walking demurely by my side, slipped into an empty seat, and I hurried to take my place at the defendants’ table. The judge in his black gown looked stern, but he did not rebuke me. Edna afterwards said to me: “It really does not matter if everybody knew that we were in bed together.”

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 insisted 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.