Spinster (23 page)

On this particular evening he surprised me with a most Victorian proposal: if I married him, he could offer me the financial stability I'd obviously never find as a writer, along with a brownstone in the West Village and a country house in Connecticut. He hadn't bought them yet, he explained; we could choose them together.

We were sitting at a little round café table that wobbled when I set down my drink. I was speechless. Where had this come from? Clearly I liked him, but what had made him think we had a future together?

Having no idea how to respond, I said, weakly, that I'd think about it and get back to him.

I relay this anecdote not to convince you of my desirability, or even to point to the obvious fact that, contrary to popular belief, plenty of men are looking for committed relationships, but to show how the script's omnipresence convinces otherwise very intelligent, sensitive people to ignore their own complexity. Obviously this man wasn't in love with me, but regarded me primarily as an idea, even a solution—providing me with a fascinating glimpse into the fun-house mirror of my generation's gender politics. When men complained that women were looking only for commitment or marriage, I now understood what it was like to be sitting across from someone who considered me interchangeable with anyone else willing to fulfill the job description.

It was all very confusing. Between my hamster wheel of dates and my confounding “situation,” I was elated and miserable simultaneously, laughing in the morning, crying by afternoon. Mistakes and pitfalls and longing and lust and, above all, liberty—at long last I had what I'd asked for, even if I was operating with half the grace of Edna Millay, or a quarter of it, come to think of it, which I started to do, more and more, and the more I thought about it, the more I came to suspect that she'd gotten a lot more out of this romantic adventuring than I seemed to be, and not only because it was radical in her day and clichéd by mine.

Historians know very little about what
really
went on in nineteenth-century bedrooms, but crucial to public mores was the belief that women weren't sexual creatures. When the pioneering sexologist Katharine Bement Davis, a Victorian herself, conducted America's first significant survey of women's sexual practices, she found that fully one-quarter of the one thousand
married women she polled (most born before 1890, just two years before Edna) claimed to be “repelled” by their initial sexual experience, and those who admitted enjoying it were ashamed of their “immoderate” passion—attitudes that, of course, were merely public censure turned inward.

The combined efforts of Neith and her fellow radicals, along with the tireless (and thankless) work of social reformers like Margaret Sanger and Victoria Woodhull, ensured that the bulk of the sexual repression and gender segregation they'd grown up with remained locked in the nineteenth century. By the 1910s, Freud's theories of the inner life began to percolate, men and women were mingling in public places, and even the taboo subject of prostitution had become “the chief topic of polite conversation,” according to an opinion magazine that declared 1913 to be “Sex O'Clock in America.” The following year, the term “date” (complete with quotation marks) appeared for the first time in a mainstream publication, lending this racy new pastime a veneer of social respectability. In 1916, the first birth control clinic opened for business, and in 1920 women finally got the vote. By the 1920s, culture had been flipped on its head: now experts were diagnosing women who didn't like sex as unhealthy, and arguing that a mutually satisfying sex life was vital to a good marriage.

The discourse
sounded
different, but in many ways all this talk maintained and even promoted standard ideologies and conventions. Marriage remained the default container of sex and romance, gender roles were still fixed (women may have “natural” desire, but it is latent and depends on men to take initiative), and though it was now acceptable for women to claim pleasure, this was largely a result of separating it from its associations with prostitution (or bohemia). The result was a specifically middle-class sexuality, which became the new normative; putting the sex back into marriage, so to speak, but also putting marriage back into sex—a marked contrast from Edna Millay's verses.

When Edna wrote—“And if I loved you Wednesday, / Well what is that to you? / I do not love you Thursday— / So much is true”—she wasn't playing around. She had so many lovers that she hardly took the time to differentiate them in her poems, much to the disgruntlement of her conquests, who'd hoped for at least a compensatory brush with immortality.

“I've been a wicked girl,” she confides in “The Penitent,” in which she tries to muster up guilt for some unnamed “little Sin,” fails, and finally concludes, “if I can't be sorry, why, / I might as well be glad!”

Her untouchability wasn't a pose. She kept a close watch on her heart, tracking its every surge and plunge, until her deeply felt subjectivity was her most powerful creative instrument. She was fearless with it, tripping up and down the tonal scales to reflect the slightest fluctuation in her mood—defiant, wistful, exuberant, indifferent. And, as I was coming to learn myself, spending a significant stretch of time in and out of relationships is a moody business.

In 1923, when she was thirty-one, Edna won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and started traveling around the country giving readings to packed auditoriums. Nancy Milford recounts how, for her audiences, whatever line may have existed between her life and her art was completely obscured by these performances. Onstage she appeared an astonishing creature, a real live New Yorker and honest-to-God poetess who looked and played the part: loose velvet robes dwarfed her diminutive frame, making her resonant voice with its clipped consonants and plummy vowels seem all the more dramatic in comparison. By then she'd adopted the Flapper look and was bobbing her hair; after her visit to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the campus newspaper noted that the percentage of bobbed hairstyles among students shot up from 9 percent to 63 percent.

When we “invented” adolescence as a sociological and developmental category in the 1950s, we robbed it of dignity, turning teenagers
into a faceless mob of deranged hormones. In fact, it's a noble and brave and terrible time, and to be able to speak to that angst is what makes rock stars our heroes—and that's the other line on Edna, of course, that she was her era's version of a rock star; before there was Beyoncé to compare her to, contemporary critics called on Courtney Love. But when people talk that way, they're talking about her popularity. I'd like it to be said that she was a rock star in the truest sense: she went to the barricades for teenagers.

The rising generation of women just beginning to flex their own personal agency needed exactly such a voice, and her use of familiar, traditional forms—she was partial to rhyming couplets and the sonnet—helped deliver her radical version of female independence to a readership newly ready to receive it.

But was I? By the early 2000s, the audacity Edna pioneered had calcified into convention; the city was home to a yoga-toned army skilled in the arts of indifference and blow jobs—neo-flappers, or so they seemed to me—and already I doubted my ability to cultivate the insouciance casual sex seemed to require. Maybe I was drawn to noncommittal types because maintaining a fulfilling sexual relationship that didn't consume my existence was so inconceivable, there was no point in my even trying, so I made do with half measures.

And so I wondered: What was Edna's secret? Did her mastery over her heart mean she could slam it shut whenever she felt like it? Was the self-help phenomenon du jour,
Why Men Love Bitches
, actually onto something? Did a woman need to be manipulative and demanding to pilot the shoals of sex and love?

If she could do it, so can I
.

Now the question became: How
had
she done it?

Were it not for Edmund Wilson, I might never have found the answer.

It's often said that the best piece of writing about Edna Millay is the essay Wilson wrote about her in 1952, two years after her death. As with Neith Boyce's novels, though, I kept putting off reading it, thinking the reminiscences of a spurned suitor (she'd rejected his marriage proposal when they were in their twenties) would lack objectivity. Too, men from that period can sound so plummy and fatuous when they talk about women, so I was preemptively annoyed. But when I finally sat down and read the essay, I realized I'd underestimated him, which was rather shortsighted of me, given his stature in American letters.

The essay appears in his collection about the 1920s and '30s,
The Shores of Light
. He borrowed the book's title from the last line of an unpublished poem he'd written about Edna in 1922, when he'd been reading Virgil's
Georgics
and had become entranced with the phrase, which sounds even lovelier in its original Latin:
In luminis oras
.

He'd first laid eyes on her in 1920, at a party in New York, when someone persuaded her to recite her poems (the art of recitation was clearly hers). As Wilson remembers:

She was dressed in some bright batik, and her face lit up with a flush that seemed to burn also in the bronze reflections of her not yet bobbed reddish hair. She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful. She was small, but her figure was full, though she did not appear plump. She had a lovely and very long throat that gave her the look of a muse, and her reading of her poetry was thrilling.

What had I been thinking? It's hard not to like a man who sees a woman's beauty in her spirit, not the perfection of her face.

At this point she was living with her sisters and mother at the rather down-at-heels end of West Nineteenth Street, very close to the Hudson River. Wilson, who was an editor at
Vanity Fair
, had the very good idea to cultivate her friendship by publishing her poems in the magazine. In the doing, he fell “irretrievably in love,” which, he says, was “inevitable, a consequence of knowing her in those days.”