June 16, 2014 • 29 mins
Known as Vincent to family and friends, Edna St. Vincent Millay grew up poor, caring for the household and her sisters while her mother worked. From an early age, she showed incredible talent and sowed the seeds of a life of passion and impressive poetry. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast
after a C. P. Wilson, And I'm Holly from Holly.
Do you know what I did this weekend? I do,
but tell me again. I went to Enda St Vincent
(00:22):
Malay's house. It's pretty awesome. Uh So a lot of
people have asked us to talk about Edna St. Vincent
Malays on the podcast. She was a poet and a
playwright and a generally fantastic character, so interesting, and she
definitely has like there's a cult of personality thing with her.
(00:43):
People just adore her, even while acknowledging her flaws well,
and when she was alive, people adored her, sometimes to
their own detriment. I know what I mentioned to you
when we were first talking about this subject that I
had a high school teacher that clearly just loved her,
and I um, he would literally showed like a slide show,
and whenever she would come up in this particular lecture,
(01:04):
they would just be a pause or he would just
sign Vincent just talk at her for a minute. We
all felt uncomfortable but also charmed. Right, So, uh, you
can go to her home which was called Steeple Top
and you can take a tour of the grounds on
a tour of the house, which is what I did.
And we're going to talk more about that part in
(01:25):
the second part of this two part episode, because as
sometimes happens, there's a lot, there's a lot, and it
it blossomed into something that required two parts to talk about.
So today's episode we're going to go from you know,
Edna St. Vincent Malay is born um until she gets married,
like that's going to be today's episode, and then the
(01:46):
next episode will cover the remainder of her life. Uh
she as I would put her into the larger than
life category for pretty much the entirety of that. For sure.
She definitely, you know it, was an extraordinary person in
many ways, in the truest sense of that word. So
(02:08):
known as Bencent to her family and friends and the St.
Vincent La was born on February in Rockland, Maine, and
while her mom was pregnant, her uncle almost died and
doctors at St. Vincent's Hospital saved his life and that
is where her middle name came from. And Vincent was
the oldest of three daughters of Cora and Henry Malay.
(02:30):
Cora and Henry actually divorced when Vincent was young. Uh.
Cora threw Henrie Ott of the house in nineteen o one,
and for years his involvement in the girl's lives was
really quite limited. It was pretty much just letters and
occasionally a little bit of money. More often it was
letters that said he would be sending them some money soon,
but the money either wasn't there yet or he didn't
have it in hand. Yeah, there was a lot of
(02:53):
I'm making money, but I haven't gotten paid yet kind
of yeah. Language. So, according to Cora's led rs and
witness testimony at the divorce proceedings, Henry was abusive and
he also gambled the family's money away. One of Vincent's biographers,
Nancy Milford, also suggests that Cora may have had an
affair that kind of prompted her to actually end the
(03:14):
marriage instead of continuing to soldier on through it. Coral
was skilled as a hair weaver, and she also studied nursing,
and to support herself and the girl, she found work
as a private nurse, but this work actually kept her
away from the family, sometimes for weeks at a time,
and at first they were dependent on relatives to look
after the girls. Walk Cora worked, but setback after setback
(03:36):
sort of kept them unable to really get on their feet.
When she was nine, Vincent and her sisters almost died
of typhoid, and they survived because Cora nursed them all
through it. Not long after she got her divorce from Henry,
Cora also herself got a flu that was so severe
that her brother arranged life insurance for her. If you're wondering,
(03:57):
it was not the Spanish flu was too early for
that um. Vincent's youngest sister, Kathleen, also got polio and
then had ongoing neurological problems afterward. Uh And no matter
where they were, for many years of Vincent's childhood, the
family was sort of constantly struggling. There were kitchen floors
that flooded and then froze over when it was both
rainy and cold. They kind of made lemonade out of
(04:20):
lemons in that situation because the girls would ice skate
on the floors. At one point, they couldn't afford coal
to heat their house, and they resorted to supplementing a
load of it that Cora's sister gave them as a gift.
With shingles that they ripped from a derelict house that
was next door. Kara would like climb up and ritty
shingles off and throw them across the fence for the
girls to go and pick up. Finally, Klara found the
(04:43):
right combination of housing and work. It was a run
down house in Camden, Maine, where they could get a
break on the rent if they helped fix it up,
and she got nursing work nearby. The house was in
pretty terrible condition and they were in debt right from
the beginning, but Vincent's life at this point finally started
to have a little little bit of stability, and it
also had a lot of work when Cora was away,
(05:04):
which of course was often, and for long periods of time,
Vincent was in charge. And this wasn't like a don't
just make sure that your sisters don't starve sort of
in charge. She was really running the household. She managed
the budget, She sawt all the cooking and the chores,
and she looked after her younger sisters from the time
she was about twelve, and she was so exhausted from
(05:24):
all of this work. Because that is a great deal
to ask of a child that she ended up getting
sick about once a month. So their existence was really frugal,
but it gradually moved towards a sort of semblance of
a middle class living. Cora sometimes seemed resentful of how
much the girls were spending on things like beans to
eat and dresses to wear to school, but they also had,
(05:45):
thanks to her, a life that was really rich in
literature and music. The family got musical instruments for the
girls to play, and Bencent learned to play the piano,
and Cora also developed an immense library. It was actually
recognized as the biggest and best one in the area.
There were volumes and volumes of books, They were full
of plays, There was verse, and Coora made sure her
(06:07):
daughters read the work of masters. Vincent learned to read
by reading poetry, and this library was as important to
her young work as a poet and a writer as
anything that she learned in school. Before we get to
her school years, let's take a minute for a word
from a sponsor, and now back to Malay. So at school,
(06:27):
Vincent was stubborn and brilliant. She was very responsible at home,
she was looking after everything, but at school she was
willful and disobedient. When she was in the eighth grade,
she talked back to her teacher, who was in the
habit of calling her any other woman's name that started
with a V instead of Vincent. And so when he
did this one day and she insisted that Vincent was
(06:49):
her name, her teacher was so fed up with her
that he threw a book at her that would probably
not fly today. There would be some police in involvement now, uh.
And thanks to her mother's intervention, Vincent was allowed to
skip directly to high school rather than having to stay
in the class with the teacher that she had such
a contentious relationship with. Yeah, he had pretty much said,
(07:09):
you've been ruling this school for too long. She started
publishing poetry and a children's magazine called St. Nicholas in
nineteen o six when she was about fourteen, and a
year later she won the magazine's highest prize. Her prize
winning poem, called The Land of Romance, wound up being
reprinted in the Camden Harold and then an anthologized in
(07:29):
the journal Current Literature. So people were already from the
age of you know, fifteen, spotting that she was really
gifted as a poet and She also started to pursue
acting more seriously, and that was something that she took
to very naturally. And she wasn't just doing this in
school plays. She actually started acting at the Camden Opera
House starting in nineteen o seven, and that would require
(07:51):
her to rehearse every night. And that is, keep in mind,
on top of her schoolwork and all the works that
came with basically being the head of household in terms
of uh with their domestic needs and taking care of
her sisters. So kind of a packed schedule, yeah, she was.
She worked herself to the bone all the time. So
during her high school years, Vincent started writing in her
(08:12):
diary about sort of conflicted crushes. She wanted to be
loved and to be in love, but at the same
time she kind of felt like a boy would just
hold her back. She had things to do. The boy
was going to get out in the way of that.
I can't understand that. I feel you, Vincent. You and
I are of one heart. Uh. While she was popular
(08:34):
with the girls, the boys in high school not so much.
She was very smart, as we've mentioned, she was really headstrong,
and she was really hotty in that rubbed them the
wrong way. It was a bit much for teenage boys
to take in. Yeah, probably in a story that's familiar
to women still today. Eventually Vincent would grow up and
she would become famous for her love poems, and she
(08:54):
would have a whole string of lovers who felt absolutely, deeply,
passionately in with her. But in high school, even when
the boys did start to pursue her, they mostly just
tried to make her miserable. Uh. During her senior year,
she wanted to write the class poem. Poetry was already
deeply important to her, and writing the class poem was
an enormous honor, and she was clearly the best poet
(09:16):
in the class. There really would not appear to be
any question about who should uh write this, and that
the honor should go to her. But a group of
boys who had made it their business to torment her. Uh.
They interrupted her whenever she talked, They taunted her, and
they sort of ganged up on her. Uh. These boys
all banded together to nominate a classmate who was actually
a terrible writer to run against her. She was distraught
(09:40):
and so humiliated that she pulled out of the race.
Her mother suggested that she deliver her commencement essay in verse,
which she did. And this was poor consolation because it
wasn't the honor that she had wanted, but it did
kind of let her get the last word in a
way she kind of love. After graduation, she could not
afford to go to college, so she stayed home and
(10:01):
she actually took on even more work running the household
so that her mother could spend more time with her
nursing work. And she was very lonely. She still deeply
wanted to be loved, and she started conducting this sort
of ritual seance in her room every night to try
to summon a dream lover to her, a thing that
went on repeatedly for a while until she actually made
(10:25):
some changes in her life. Um In February of when
she was twenty, Vincent got word that her father was dying,
and at this point she and her sisters had not
seen him for eleven years. But she went to kingmn
Maine to look after him, and when she arrived, the
doctor told her that Henry was probably only going to
live a few days at most, but while Vincent was there,
(10:47):
he actually defied expectations and he started to get better.
Vincent stayed with the doctor who was taking care of
her father, and she started this passionate and passionately physical
relationship with Ellis Somerville, who was the daughter of the
doctor that's whose home she was staying at. This relationship
and their trips seemed to really revive Vincent, who at
that point had really gotten just exhausted and burned out
(11:10):
on everything from you know, trying to write, to running
the household, to all of the things that had gone
on in school. And when she got home, she went
right back to writing poetry, and within a few months
she finished her very long, very exuberant poem Renaissance, which
she had started before she left. At her mother's encouragements,
she submitted Renaissance to publisher Mitchell Kennerley, who was holding
(11:33):
a writing contest. On July nine, twelve, she got word
that it had been accepted to the Lyric Year, which
was the anthology that was to be published of the
best entries. So this was sort of news that she
was in the running for one of the three cash
prizes that would go to the top three in the contest.
And what followed was a flirtatious correspondence between Vincent, who
(11:55):
at first thought she was talking to Mitchell Kinnerley himself
and an editor who thought e. Vincent must have been
a man. It turned out that the person that she
was writing to was Ferdinand Earle, and their letters escalated
until his wife found one of them and it began
to undo his marriage. It turned out that he was
writing to other entrants and making them promises as well,
(12:16):
so there was definitely some shady business going on with
Ferdinand Earle. When he realized that she was a woman,
she sent a picture and it just it got really racy,
and it didn't wind up going well for anyone in
this situation. So along the way um along the way,
Ferdinand Earle had basically implied to Vincent that she was
(12:38):
going to win one of the cash prizes, and when
she didn't, she was crushed and her family really desperately
needed the money, and the fact that she came in
fourth place was no consolation to her. Nor was the
fact that when the book came out there was a
specific mention of her poem like in the editor's note
at the beginning. None of that really made up for
the fact that she needed that money and didn't get it.
(13:02):
When the lyric here was published, it made huge waves
in the literary community. Letters poured in from writers and
poets who insisted that the judges had in fact made
a huge mistake and that Renaissance was clearly the very
best thing in it. It's kind of unclear exactly why,
given this unanimous outpouring, that Vincent didn't place in the contest.
I mean it really, to the entire literary community, seemed
(13:25):
like an obvious and bone headedly stupid maneuver um. It's
possible that she was her own undoing through her flirtation
with one of the judges and his consequently his wife
finding out about it. It's also possible that her sex
played a big role. The three other winners were all men,
and the grand prize winner, Orrick Johns, called the award
(13:46):
quote unmerited and said that Vincent's poem was obviously the
best thing in the book. In the end, though it
all actually worked out for the best. Getting Renaissance published
in the lyric year brought all manner of attention to Vincent,
including from many prominent poet poets whose work was also
featured in the book, and the spotlight on her was
(14:07):
even brighter because so many people felt like she had
been wronged, so she kind of though she did not
get the cash prize, she really got all the attention right,
and before we talked about the awesome things, that attention
led her to brief moment for a word from a sponsor,
dper So, one of the most amazing things about Renaissance,
besides the fact that everyone was completely shocked that a woman,
(14:27):
and a young woman at that had written it, was
that at this point Vincent was almost entirely a self
taught poet. Her public education had been pretty poor in quality,
and she had had no college instruction at all. Not
long after the poem was published, Vincent gave a reading
of it at a hotel where her sister worked, and
in the audience was Caroline dow, an executive director of
(14:49):
the y w c A, who thought that Vincent could
go to college and she knew wealthy patrons who could
help her do it. So Vincent got a scholarship to Vassar,
but because her high school education had been so terrible,
she needed to take some sort of remedial classes to
get her knowledge up enough to pass the entrance exams.
So after doing some coursework at Barnard College to get ready,
(15:11):
she started Vassar in the spring of n and at
Vassar she was vastly popular. She had a series of
sometimes overlapping romantic relationships with classmates, including Catherine Fileen and
Catherine Tilt, who she sometimes played against one another so
that she could make the other jealous, and she came
to be known as the Sappho of North Hall. At
(15:33):
the same time, she was carrying on an ongoing affair
with her editor Arthur Hooley, and a shorter one with
Nicaraguan poet Salomonde La Selva. In part that one was
also to try to make Hoolie jealous, and one of
his many, many beautiful love letters to her, Della Selva
described her as quote a willful princess, loved of many,
(15:56):
loving some man who wouldn't wanna have things like that
written about them, But yeah, there there is an enormous
body of letters both by her and about her and
to her and their lovely A lot of them are
by men like exceptionally gifted writers that she was involved with.
And so there's this whole beautiful body of love love
(16:16):
letters to Edness Visiblay existing in various places about the world.
And on top of writing and starring in plays, wooing
so many of her classmates, and of course actually attending
classes and studying. While in college, Vincent broke oh kinds
of rules. Had she not been such a prodigiously talented
poet and already quite famous, she probably would have been expelled.
(16:39):
She had, in the words of the Dean quote, a
culmination of disregard for college. Right. She even got suspended
the week before graduation because she was supposed to be
confined to campus for having broken previous rules, and she left.
And uh, even though she had written two of the
songs and a whole lot of other material that was
going to be used in the graduation ceremony, she was
(17:02):
going to be prohibited from walking across the stage. She
was only allowed to graduate with her class after her
mother wrote a letter in her defense. And the rest
of the student body, like hundreds of them, I mean uh,
not not not half of them, but approaching half, petitioned
and protested, And on top of her coursework and her
(17:23):
incredible love life and her social life, she managed to
keep writing this whole time, and most of what was
in her first book, Renaissance and Other Poems, was written
while she was at Vassar, and in spite of all
her hell raising while she was there, she had managed
to arrange a scholarship for her sister Kathleen to attend
the college as well. So she was out doing all
kinds of wild and crazy things and partying and having
(17:45):
life adventures, but she was also like taking care of
business the whole time. After graduating, she moved to New
York City. She was hoping to continue her work as
a writer while also making a name for herself in
the world of theater. Eventually, her sister Norm moved in
with her also, and the two of them shared an apartment,
and this was such a vastly different world from Camden
(18:05):
where they had been growing up, and you know, even
from vasser The two of them practiced swearing while doing
their their needleworks so that they could get used to it.
I love this. I mean, most people swear doing needlework
as something goes wrong and they stabbed themselves, but I
sort of loved the idea that there they were really
practicing saying things. Concurrently, Yeah, they were practicing saying bad
(18:29):
words while while doing need work. So charming. The two
young women had very little money and when their mother
heard that they were living without any sort of heat.
She decided that she would move down there herself. She
brought with her a pound of tobacco in a quart
of gin for her daughters. Cora lived in Greenwich Village
with her daughters for two years, and that was from
(18:51):
eight and nineteen twenty. She looked after them but tried
not to get in the way of their very bohemian lifestyle,
which was full of writing and drinking and parties. Instance.
Income came from writing and acting and gifts from her
many friends. At first, this was really slow going. I mean,
she had established that she was very gifted, but she
was sending poems off to journals and getting rejections back.
(19:12):
She really persevered, though, and eventually she was getting published
in Vanity Fair. Her Vanity Fair editor, Edmund Wilson, would
eventually propose to her and she would turn him down.
She had away with editors. She had a way with
getting proposed to you. While living in Grinage, Vincent finally
met poet Arthur Fickey, who she had been corresponding with
since Renaissance was published in the Lyric Here and he
(19:33):
was about to go off to war. They carried on
a relationship in letters and sonnets and leader in person
that would go on for years. It's it's hard to
say who the love of Edna st. Vincent Malay's life was.
I really feel like she had several, and and he
was one of them. In Vincent finished what's considered to
be her greatest play, Aria de Coppo, which broke box
(19:56):
office records and went on to be performed all over
the world. She continue to act in plays until the
nineteen twenties, when her writing career started to actually overtake
her acting work. So one of Vincent's most quoted bits
of verse, which if you have heard anything about her,
you probably have heard, is about burning one's candle at
both ends. And that's really how she spent her life
(20:18):
in the village. She would just drive herself too exhaustion
on work and drink and love, and then she would
have to take to her bed. She would faint or
she would collapse, and somebody would have to come look
after her. When she finally left the village bound for Europe,
she was just completely drained physically and emotionally. And while
in Europe, she traveled and she wrote, and she became
(20:39):
increasingly ill with an ongoing stomach problem. Her family tried
to convince her to seek medical care, but she refused,
and Cora finally went to Europe herself to try to
nurse her. She had seen Arthur Fickie a few times
in Europe also, and about the same time as her
mother came to look after her, she got the news
that Arthur, who she had really hoped she might get
(21:01):
married to one day, had divorced his wife. But also
part of the same news was that he had also
met someone else, Gladys Brown, who he would later marry.
Vincent headed back to the States in January of nineteen three,
and she headed back to the village. Her mother went
back to Maine, having gotten discouraged with her inability to
(21:22):
get Vincent to see a doctor for her stomach problems.
Everybody was really at the seriously go to the doctor point,
like it was alarming everyone. That year, at a house party,
she ran into Eu Jim blossa Van. So I'm gonna
just say we had a lively discussion in the visitors
center at Steepletop about whether it's blossa Van or Blassavan.
(21:44):
So uh, we sort of settled on blossa Van. Yeah, yeah,
So she she ran into Eugene blossa Van who she
met briefly at a previous house party in nineteen eighteen.
The party was a pretty awkward one for Vincent. A
lot the guests were former lovers of hers who were
in attendance with their wives, and her stomach was also
(22:05):
really bothering her eventually. I mean, she uh was one
to have many loves. I would think if you traveled
in her social circle, it would be hard for her
not to be crossing paths with a lot of people
she had been romantically linked to. So they just all
happened to be at the same party. Because a lot
of this was from the Greenwich village time and her hosts,
(22:25):
in an effort to try to cheer Vincent up, decided
to play a sort of improv game, and Vincent and
Eugen were tapped to improvise a scene about two lovers,
but it was obvious to everyone that there was some
actual real chemistry between them, and their relationships started immediately.
Eugen was a widower who was born in Amsterdam. His
first wife and as mil Holland, was another Vassar graduate
(22:48):
and an activist for women's suffrage. Vincent had actually met
Inn as well in school. Eugen's marriage to Dinas had
not lasted for very long, because only three years in
she collapsed during a speech that she was giving and
died shortly thereafter. After she died, Eugen moved to the
village and started an import business. And meeting Eugen at
(23:08):
that house party in very likely saved Vincent's life. He
got her to finally do the thing that everyone else
had been unsuccessful in attempting to get her to do,
which would see a doctor. And sort of a side
note at right as all this was going on, in
April of that year, Vincent learned that she had been
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It's so very heavy
(23:30):
time in her life, extremely And not long after UH
doctors decided Vincent's stomach problems, which are theorized today to
be Crohn's disease, we're going to require surgery, and she
wanted to marry Eugen before the procedure in case something
went wrong, So they got married on the morning of
July eighth. Outside the home of a friend Vincent's vale
(23:51):
was a huge length of mosquito netting that her sister
had found on a porch. There are pictures. There are
wedding pictures in the visitor center at Steeple Top, and
they're very striking because they're black and white pictures. Um.
And and she's wearing a dress. I don't remember what
the actual color of it is, but it's dark in
the picture because somebody's wearing dark clothing. Uh, is how
(24:12):
it comes across its black and white picture with this
just enormous volume of white veil netting um flowing down
behind her. So Arthur Ficky and Gladys Brown were both there,
and Vincent's sister Norma and her husband Eugen, borrowed the
cook's ring. Her name was Hattie when he realized that
he had accidentally misplaced Vincent's. Vincent went in for surgery
(24:36):
that evening, and during the procedures, the doctors essentially rebuilt
her intestines because membranes and adhesions had made them completely dysfunctional.
And once Vincent recovered from surgery, Eugen took her on
a honeymoon around the world. They traveled all over the
place there. Uh, there are souvenirs from China that they
(24:58):
brought back with them, and they're and the home mets
people top which seems like a very happy place to
pause until we come back to the story in the
next episode. Yeah, we'll enjoy this happy part. Yeah. Well
there's more happy parts still to come. But you know,
if you want a hundred percent, maybe not ad percent.
If you want a really happy ending for this story,
(25:20):
maybe put off listening to part two. Don't really put
off listening to part two. There's a lot of awesome
stuff that is still going to happen in her life. Um,
but there there is also some trouble to come down
the road. Uh. We will also talk a lot more
about speople top Um in the next episode because it
it became Uh, it was where she lived for the
last many years of her life, and a lot of
(25:42):
it is like an extension of her personality. Um, which
is not really surprising. We have somebody who puts a
lot into the home that they live in. Very cool.
Do you also have listener mail that I do? This
is from Anne Marie and and Marie says, I just
listened to your latest podcast and it made me think
a lot about a book I read recently from my
book club called The Child Catchers Rescue Trafficking and the
(26:05):
New Gospel of Adoption by Katherine Joyce. It's They are
Well researched, an important book that goes into many of
the problems that plague international adoption today. While many, if
not most, people who adopt internationally have only the best
of of intentions, there are people involved in the process
who use the demand for children to make money, and
there are people who adopt in order to convert children
(26:27):
rather than to help them. So uh, since I didn't
say clearly before this came following our Orphan Trains episode
to go on with the letter. One important thing the
book discusses is how certain segments of the adoption community
have rallied around claiming that there are many millions of
orphans in the world. The number they use is one
from UNI stuff that actually includes children who've only lost
(26:50):
one parent, and children who's who have lost both parents
but still have relatives who can support them, who we
would never think should be taking away from a family
in the United States, from this belief that there are
so many children in need of adoption collides with reality,
and potential adoptive parents are shocked at wait times and
demand legal reform to speed up the process, which puts
(27:11):
these children's lives even more in jeopardy of dangerous adoptions.
The author shares stories of parents who think their children
are going to be students in the US or who
shame who are shamed to thinking that they need to
do what's best by giving up their children. In many countries,
orphanages are used as temporary assistance for parents when times
are tough, and parents are shocked when they return for
(27:33):
their children and they've been adopted out abroad. One group
that is doing good work as Parents for Ethical Adoption reform.
Adoption isn't the problem in itself, it's how it's implemented
because it can easily go so wrong. All my best
and Marie, thank you and Marie for writing this letter
to us. UM. I actually my cousin and his wife
spent a year of their life in newly weeds in
(27:54):
a country I'm not gonna say what country it is
in cases is wrong. Uh. They were living and working
at an orphanage. UM. And that's the country that's shut
down international adoption, UH within the last couple of decades
because of a lot of the issues like these that
come up. UM. And they were like, we we need
to stop contributing to this as a problem we didn't
(28:16):
really go into in the Orphan Train episode. A lot
of the problems that do continue to plague the adoption
and foster care systems today, they definitely are present. Yeah,
both in the US and abroad. I mean there are
problems everywhere. It's a very difficult issue. Yeah. Yeah, Like
you hear some horror stories sometimes about um people who
(28:38):
effectively like round up children and take them to another
city to be adopted to somebody who lives abroad, which
is heartbreaking and terrible. So we were not intending to
gloss over that. It just wasn't quite part of what
we were talking about in that particular episode. Um, I
guess that's the sad part to temper the lots of
happy things that just happened to Edna St Vincent Malain,
(29:02):
whose story we will continue in our next episode. If
you would like to write to us, we have a
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(29:25):
And if you would like to learn a little more
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast
after a C. P. Wilson, And I'm Holly from Holly.
Do you know what I did this weekend? I do,
but tell me again. I went to Enda St Vincent
(00:22):
Malay's house. It's pretty awesome. Uh So a lot of
people have asked us to talk about Edna St. Vincent
Malays on the podcast. She was a poet and a
playwright and a generally fantastic character, so interesting, and she
definitely has like there's a cult of personality thing with her.
(00:43):
People just adore her, even while acknowledging her flaws well,
and when she was alive, people adored her, sometimes to
their own detriment. I know what I mentioned to you
when we were first talking about this subject that I
had a high school teacher that clearly just loved her,
and I um, he would literally showed like a slide show,
and whenever she would come up in this particular lecture,
(01:04):
they would just be a pause or he would just
sign Vincent just talk at her for a minute. We
all felt uncomfortable but also charmed. Right, So, uh, you
can go to her home which was called Steeple Top
and you can take a tour of the grounds on
a tour of the house, which is what I did.
And we're going to talk more about that part in
(01:25):
the second part of this two part episode, because as
sometimes happens, there's a lot, there's a lot, and it
it blossomed into something that required two parts to talk about.
So today's episode we're going to go from you know,
Edna St. Vincent Malay is born um until she gets married,
like that's going to be today's episode, and then the
(01:46):
next episode will cover the remainder of her life. Uh
she as I would put her into the larger than
life category for pretty much the entirety of that. For sure.
She definitely, you know it, was an extraordinary person in
many ways, in the truest sense of that word. So
(02:08):
known as Bencent to her family and friends and the St.
Vincent La was born on February in Rockland, Maine, and
while her mom was pregnant, her uncle almost died and
doctors at St. Vincent's Hospital saved his life and that
is where her middle name came from. And Vincent was
the oldest of three daughters of Cora and Henry Malay.
(02:30):
Cora and Henry actually divorced when Vincent was young. Uh.
Cora threw Henrie Ott of the house in nineteen o one,
and for years his involvement in the girl's lives was
really quite limited. It was pretty much just letters and
occasionally a little bit of money. More often it was
letters that said he would be sending them some money soon,
but the money either wasn't there yet or he didn't
have it in hand. Yeah, there was a lot of
(02:53):
I'm making money, but I haven't gotten paid yet kind
of yeah. Language. So, according to Cora's led rs and
witness testimony at the divorce proceedings, Henry was abusive and
he also gambled the family's money away. One of Vincent's biographers,
Nancy Milford, also suggests that Cora may have had an
affair that kind of prompted her to actually end the
(03:14):
marriage instead of continuing to soldier on through it. Coral
was skilled as a hair weaver, and she also studied nursing,
and to support herself and the girl, she found work
as a private nurse, but this work actually kept her
away from the family, sometimes for weeks at a time,
and at first they were dependent on relatives to look
after the girls. Walk Cora worked, but setback after setback
(03:36):
sort of kept them unable to really get on their feet.
When she was nine, Vincent and her sisters almost died
of typhoid, and they survived because Cora nursed them all
through it. Not long after she got her divorce from Henry,
Cora also herself got a flu that was so severe
that her brother arranged life insurance for her. If you're wondering,
(03:57):
it was not the Spanish flu was too early for
that um. Vincent's youngest sister, Kathleen, also got polio and
then had ongoing neurological problems afterward. Uh And no matter
where they were, for many years of Vincent's childhood, the
family was sort of constantly struggling. There were kitchen floors
that flooded and then froze over when it was both
rainy and cold. They kind of made lemonade out of
(04:20):
lemons in that situation because the girls would ice skate
on the floors. At one point, they couldn't afford coal
to heat their house, and they resorted to supplementing a
load of it that Cora's sister gave them as a gift.
With shingles that they ripped from a derelict house that
was next door. Kara would like climb up and ritty
shingles off and throw them across the fence for the
girls to go and pick up. Finally, Klara found the
(04:43):
right combination of housing and work. It was a run
down house in Camden, Maine, where they could get a
break on the rent if they helped fix it up,
and she got nursing work nearby. The house was in
pretty terrible condition and they were in debt right from
the beginning, but Vincent's life at this point finally started
to have a little little bit of stability, and it
also had a lot of work when Cora was away,
(05:04):
which of course was often, and for long periods of time,
Vincent was in charge. And this wasn't like a don't
just make sure that your sisters don't starve sort of
in charge. She was really running the household. She managed
the budget, She sawt all the cooking and the chores,
and she looked after her younger sisters from the time
she was about twelve, and she was so exhausted from
(05:24):
all of this work. Because that is a great deal
to ask of a child that she ended up getting
sick about once a month. So their existence was really frugal,
but it gradually moved towards a sort of semblance of
a middle class living. Cora sometimes seemed resentful of how
much the girls were spending on things like beans to
eat and dresses to wear to school, but they also had,
(05:45):
thanks to her, a life that was really rich in
literature and music. The family got musical instruments for the
girls to play, and Bencent learned to play the piano,
and Cora also developed an immense library. It was actually
recognized as the biggest and best one in the area.
There were volumes and volumes of books, They were full
of plays, There was verse, and Coora made sure her
(06:07):
daughters read the work of masters. Vincent learned to read
by reading poetry, and this library was as important to
her young work as a poet and a writer as
anything that she learned in school. Before we get to
her school years, let's take a minute for a word
from a sponsor, and now back to Malay. So at school,
(06:27):
Vincent was stubborn and brilliant. She was very responsible at home,
she was looking after everything, but at school she was
willful and disobedient. When she was in the eighth grade,
she talked back to her teacher, who was in the
habit of calling her any other woman's name that started
with a V instead of Vincent. And so when he
did this one day and she insisted that Vincent was
(06:49):
her name, her teacher was so fed up with her
that he threw a book at her that would probably
not fly today. There would be some police in involvement now, uh.
And thanks to her mother's intervention, Vincent was allowed to
skip directly to high school rather than having to stay
in the class with the teacher that she had such
a contentious relationship with. Yeah, he had pretty much said,
(07:09):
you've been ruling this school for too long. She started
publishing poetry and a children's magazine called St. Nicholas in
nineteen o six when she was about fourteen, and a
year later she won the magazine's highest prize. Her prize
winning poem, called The Land of Romance, wound up being
reprinted in the Camden Harold and then an anthologized in
(07:29):
the journal Current Literature. So people were already from the
age of you know, fifteen, spotting that she was really
gifted as a poet and She also started to pursue
acting more seriously, and that was something that she took
to very naturally. And she wasn't just doing this in
school plays. She actually started acting at the Camden Opera
House starting in nineteen o seven, and that would require
(07:51):
her to rehearse every night. And that is, keep in mind,
on top of her schoolwork and all the works that
came with basically being the head of household in terms
of uh with their domestic needs and taking care of
her sisters. So kind of a packed schedule, yeah, she was.
She worked herself to the bone all the time. So
during her high school years, Vincent started writing in her
(08:12):
diary about sort of conflicted crushes. She wanted to be
loved and to be in love, but at the same
time she kind of felt like a boy would just
hold her back. She had things to do. The boy
was going to get out in the way of that.
I can't understand that. I feel you, Vincent. You and
I are of one heart. Uh. While she was popular
(08:34):
with the girls, the boys in high school not so much.
She was very smart, as we've mentioned, she was really headstrong,
and she was really hotty in that rubbed them the
wrong way. It was a bit much for teenage boys
to take in. Yeah, probably in a story that's familiar
to women still today. Eventually Vincent would grow up and
she would become famous for her love poems, and she
(08:54):
would have a whole string of lovers who felt absolutely, deeply,
passionately in with her. But in high school, even when
the boys did start to pursue her, they mostly just
tried to make her miserable. Uh. During her senior year,
she wanted to write the class poem. Poetry was already
deeply important to her, and writing the class poem was
an enormous honor, and she was clearly the best poet
(09:16):
in the class. There really would not appear to be
any question about who should uh write this, and that
the honor should go to her. But a group of
boys who had made it their business to torment her. Uh.
They interrupted her whenever she talked, They taunted her, and
they sort of ganged up on her. Uh. These boys
all banded together to nominate a classmate who was actually
a terrible writer to run against her. She was distraught
(09:40):
and so humiliated that she pulled out of the race.
Her mother suggested that she deliver her commencement essay in verse,
which she did. And this was poor consolation because it
wasn't the honor that she had wanted, but it did
kind of let her get the last word in a
way she kind of love. After graduation, she could not
afford to go to college, so she stayed home and
(10:01):
she actually took on even more work running the household
so that her mother could spend more time with her
nursing work. And she was very lonely. She still deeply
wanted to be loved, and she started conducting this sort
of ritual seance in her room every night to try
to summon a dream lover to her, a thing that
went on repeatedly for a while until she actually made
(10:25):
some changes in her life. Um In February of when
she was twenty, Vincent got word that her father was dying,
and at this point she and her sisters had not
seen him for eleven years. But she went to kingmn
Maine to look after him, and when she arrived, the
doctor told her that Henry was probably only going to
live a few days at most, but while Vincent was there,
(10:47):
he actually defied expectations and he started to get better.
Vincent stayed with the doctor who was taking care of
her father, and she started this passionate and passionately physical
relationship with Ellis Somerville, who was the daughter of the
doctor that's whose home she was staying at. This relationship
and their trips seemed to really revive Vincent, who at
that point had really gotten just exhausted and burned out
(11:10):
on everything from you know, trying to write, to running
the household, to all of the things that had gone
on in school. And when she got home, she went
right back to writing poetry, and within a few months
she finished her very long, very exuberant poem Renaissance, which
she had started before she left. At her mother's encouragements,
she submitted Renaissance to publisher Mitchell Kennerley, who was holding
(11:33):
a writing contest. On July nine, twelve, she got word
that it had been accepted to the Lyric Year, which
was the anthology that was to be published of the
best entries. So this was sort of news that she
was in the running for one of the three cash
prizes that would go to the top three in the contest.
And what followed was a flirtatious correspondence between Vincent, who
(11:55):
at first thought she was talking to Mitchell Kinnerley himself
and an editor who thought e. Vincent must have been
a man. It turned out that the person that she
was writing to was Ferdinand Earle, and their letters escalated
until his wife found one of them and it began
to undo his marriage. It turned out that he was
writing to other entrants and making them promises as well,
(12:16):
so there was definitely some shady business going on with
Ferdinand Earle. When he realized that she was a woman,
she sent a picture and it just it got really racy,
and it didn't wind up going well for anyone in
this situation. So along the way um along the way,
Ferdinand Earle had basically implied to Vincent that she was
(12:38):
going to win one of the cash prizes, and when
she didn't, she was crushed and her family really desperately
needed the money, and the fact that she came in
fourth place was no consolation to her. Nor was the
fact that when the book came out there was a
specific mention of her poem like in the editor's note
at the beginning. None of that really made up for
the fact that she needed that money and didn't get it.
(13:02):
When the lyric here was published, it made huge waves
in the literary community. Letters poured in from writers and
poets who insisted that the judges had in fact made
a huge mistake and that Renaissance was clearly the very
best thing in it. It's kind of unclear exactly why,
given this unanimous outpouring, that Vincent didn't place in the contest.
I mean it really, to the entire literary community, seemed
(13:25):
like an obvious and bone headedly stupid maneuver um. It's
possible that she was her own undoing through her flirtation
with one of the judges and his consequently his wife
finding out about it. It's also possible that her sex
played a big role. The three other winners were all men,
and the grand prize winner, Orrick Johns, called the award
(13:46):
quote unmerited and said that Vincent's poem was obviously the
best thing in the book. In the end, though it
all actually worked out for the best. Getting Renaissance published
in the lyric year brought all manner of attention to Vincent,
including from many prominent poet poets whose work was also
featured in the book, and the spotlight on her was
(14:07):
even brighter because so many people felt like she had
been wronged, so she kind of though she did not
get the cash prize, she really got all the attention right,
and before we talked about the awesome things, that attention
led her to brief moment for a word from a sponsor,
dper So, one of the most amazing things about Renaissance,
besides the fact that everyone was completely shocked that a woman,
(14:27):
and a young woman at that had written it, was
that at this point Vincent was almost entirely a self
taught poet. Her public education had been pretty poor in quality,
and she had had no college instruction at all. Not
long after the poem was published, Vincent gave a reading
of it at a hotel where her sister worked, and
in the audience was Caroline dow, an executive director of
(14:49):
the y w c A, who thought that Vincent could
go to college and she knew wealthy patrons who could
help her do it. So Vincent got a scholarship to Vassar,
but because her high school education had been so terrible,
she needed to take some sort of remedial classes to
get her knowledge up enough to pass the entrance exams.
So after doing some coursework at Barnard College to get ready,
(15:11):
she started Vassar in the spring of n and at
Vassar she was vastly popular. She had a series of
sometimes overlapping romantic relationships with classmates, including Catherine Fileen and
Catherine Tilt, who she sometimes played against one another so
that she could make the other jealous, and she came
to be known as the Sappho of North Hall. At
(15:33):
the same time, she was carrying on an ongoing affair
with her editor Arthur Hooley, and a shorter one with
Nicaraguan poet Salomonde La Selva. In part that one was
also to try to make Hoolie jealous, and one of
his many, many beautiful love letters to her, Della Selva
described her as quote a willful princess, loved of many,
(15:56):
loving some man who wouldn't wanna have things like that
written about them, But yeah, there there is an enormous
body of letters both by her and about her and
to her and their lovely A lot of them are
by men like exceptionally gifted writers that she was involved with.
And so there's this whole beautiful body of love love
(16:16):
letters to Edness Visiblay existing in various places about the world.
And on top of writing and starring in plays, wooing
so many of her classmates, and of course actually attending
classes and studying. While in college, Vincent broke oh kinds
of rules. Had she not been such a prodigiously talented
poet and already quite famous, she probably would have been expelled.
(16:39):
She had, in the words of the Dean quote, a
culmination of disregard for college. Right. She even got suspended
the week before graduation because she was supposed to be
confined to campus for having broken previous rules, and she left.
And uh, even though she had written two of the
songs and a whole lot of other material that was
going to be used in the graduation ceremony, she was
(17:02):
going to be prohibited from walking across the stage. She
was only allowed to graduate with her class after her
mother wrote a letter in her defense. And the rest
of the student body, like hundreds of them, I mean uh,
not not not half of them, but approaching half, petitioned
and protested, And on top of her coursework and her
(17:23):
incredible love life and her social life, she managed to
keep writing this whole time, and most of what was
in her first book, Renaissance and Other Poems, was written
while she was at Vassar, and in spite of all
her hell raising while she was there, she had managed
to arrange a scholarship for her sister Kathleen to attend
the college as well. So she was out doing all
kinds of wild and crazy things and partying and having
(17:45):
life adventures, but she was also like taking care of
business the whole time. After graduating, she moved to New
York City. She was hoping to continue her work as
a writer while also making a name for herself in
the world of theater. Eventually, her sister Norm moved in
with her also, and the two of them shared an apartment,
and this was such a vastly different world from Camden
(18:05):
where they had been growing up, and you know, even
from vasser The two of them practiced swearing while doing
their their needleworks so that they could get used to it.
I love this. I mean, most people swear doing needlework
as something goes wrong and they stabbed themselves, but I
sort of loved the idea that there they were really
practicing saying things. Concurrently, Yeah, they were practicing saying bad
(18:29):
words while while doing need work. So charming. The two
young women had very little money and when their mother
heard that they were living without any sort of heat.
She decided that she would move down there herself. She
brought with her a pound of tobacco in a quart
of gin for her daughters. Cora lived in Greenwich Village
with her daughters for two years, and that was from
(18:51):
eight and nineteen twenty. She looked after them but tried
not to get in the way of their very bohemian lifestyle,
which was full of writing and drinking and parties. Instance.
Income came from writing and acting and gifts from her
many friends. At first, this was really slow going. I mean,
she had established that she was very gifted, but she
was sending poems off to journals and getting rejections back.
(19:12):
She really persevered, though, and eventually she was getting published
in Vanity Fair. Her Vanity Fair editor, Edmund Wilson, would
eventually propose to her and she would turn him down.
She had away with editors. She had a way with
getting proposed to you. While living in Grinage, Vincent finally
met poet Arthur Fickey, who she had been corresponding with
since Renaissance was published in the Lyric Here and he
(19:33):
was about to go off to war. They carried on
a relationship in letters and sonnets and leader in person
that would go on for years. It's it's hard to
say who the love of Edna st. Vincent Malay's life was.
I really feel like she had several, and and he
was one of them. In Vincent finished what's considered to
be her greatest play, Aria de Coppo, which broke box
(19:56):
office records and went on to be performed all over
the world. She continue to act in plays until the
nineteen twenties, when her writing career started to actually overtake
her acting work. So one of Vincent's most quoted bits
of verse, which if you have heard anything about her,
you probably have heard, is about burning one's candle at
both ends. And that's really how she spent her life
(20:18):
in the village. She would just drive herself too exhaustion
on work and drink and love, and then she would
have to take to her bed. She would faint or
she would collapse, and somebody would have to come look
after her. When she finally left the village bound for Europe,
she was just completely drained physically and emotionally. And while
in Europe, she traveled and she wrote, and she became
(20:39):
increasingly ill with an ongoing stomach problem. Her family tried
to convince her to seek medical care, but she refused,
and Cora finally went to Europe herself to try to
nurse her. She had seen Arthur Fickie a few times
in Europe also, and about the same time as her
mother came to look after her, she got the news
that Arthur, who she had really hoped she might get
(21:01):
married to one day, had divorced his wife. But also
part of the same news was that he had also
met someone else, Gladys Brown, who he would later marry.
Vincent headed back to the States in January of nineteen three,
and she headed back to the village. Her mother went
back to Maine, having gotten discouraged with her inability to
(21:22):
get Vincent to see a doctor for her stomach problems.
Everybody was really at the seriously go to the doctor point,
like it was alarming everyone. That year, at a house party,
she ran into Eu Jim blossa Van. So I'm gonna
just say we had a lively discussion in the visitors
center at Steepletop about whether it's blossa Van or Blassavan.
(21:44):
So uh, we sort of settled on blossa Van. Yeah, yeah,
So she she ran into Eugene blossa Van who she
met briefly at a previous house party in nineteen eighteen.
The party was a pretty awkward one for Vincent. A
lot the guests were former lovers of hers who were
in attendance with their wives, and her stomach was also
(22:05):
really bothering her eventually. I mean, she uh was one
to have many loves. I would think if you traveled
in her social circle, it would be hard for her
not to be crossing paths with a lot of people
she had been romantically linked to. So they just all
happened to be at the same party. Because a lot
of this was from the Greenwich village time and her hosts,
(22:25):
in an effort to try to cheer Vincent up, decided
to play a sort of improv game, and Vincent and
Eugen were tapped to improvise a scene about two lovers,
but it was obvious to everyone that there was some
actual real chemistry between them, and their relationships started immediately.
Eugen was a widower who was born in Amsterdam. His
first wife and as mil Holland, was another Vassar graduate
(22:48):
and an activist for women's suffrage. Vincent had actually met
Inn as well in school. Eugen's marriage to Dinas had
not lasted for very long, because only three years in
she collapsed during a speech that she was giving and
died shortly thereafter. After she died, Eugen moved to the
village and started an import business. And meeting Eugen at
(23:08):
that house party in very likely saved Vincent's life. He
got her to finally do the thing that everyone else
had been unsuccessful in attempting to get her to do,
which would see a doctor. And sort of a side
note at right as all this was going on, in
April of that year, Vincent learned that she had been
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It's so very heavy
(23:30):
time in her life, extremely And not long after UH
doctors decided Vincent's stomach problems, which are theorized today to
be Crohn's disease, we're going to require surgery, and she
wanted to marry Eugen before the procedure in case something
went wrong, So they got married on the morning of
July eighth. Outside the home of a friend Vincent's vale
(23:51):
was a huge length of mosquito netting that her sister
had found on a porch. There are pictures. There are
wedding pictures in the visitor center at Steeple Top, and
they're very striking because they're black and white pictures. Um.
And and she's wearing a dress. I don't remember what
the actual color of it is, but it's dark in
the picture because somebody's wearing dark clothing. Uh, is how
(24:12):
it comes across its black and white picture with this
just enormous volume of white veil netting um flowing down
behind her. So Arthur Ficky and Gladys Brown were both there,
and Vincent's sister Norma and her husband Eugen, borrowed the
cook's ring. Her name was Hattie when he realized that
he had accidentally misplaced Vincent's. Vincent went in for surgery
(24:36):
that evening, and during the procedures, the doctors essentially rebuilt
her intestines because membranes and adhesions had made them completely dysfunctional.
And once Vincent recovered from surgery, Eugen took her on
a honeymoon around the world. They traveled all over the
place there. Uh, there are souvenirs from China that they
(24:58):
brought back with them, and they're and the home mets
people top which seems like a very happy place to
pause until we come back to the story in the
next episode. Yeah, we'll enjoy this happy part. Yeah. Well
there's more happy parts still to come. But you know,
if you want a hundred percent, maybe not ad percent.
If you want a really happy ending for this story,
(25:20):
maybe put off listening to part two. Don't really put
off listening to part two. There's a lot of awesome
stuff that is still going to happen in her life. Um,
but there there is also some trouble to come down
the road. Uh. We will also talk a lot more
about speople top Um in the next episode because it
it became Uh, it was where she lived for the
last many years of her life, and a lot of
(25:42):
it is like an extension of her personality. Um, which
is not really surprising. We have somebody who puts a
lot into the home that they live in. Very cool.
Do you also have listener mail that I do? This
is from Anne Marie and and Marie says, I just
listened to your latest podcast and it made me think
a lot about a book I read recently from my
book club called The Child Catchers Rescue Trafficking and the
(26:05):
New Gospel of Adoption by Katherine Joyce. It's They are
Well researched, an important book that goes into many of
the problems that plague international adoption today. While many, if
not most, people who adopt internationally have only the best
of of intentions, there are people involved in the process
who use the demand for children to make money, and
there are people who adopt in order to convert children
(26:27):
rather than to help them. So uh, since I didn't
say clearly before this came following our Orphan Trains episode
to go on with the letter. One important thing the
book discusses is how certain segments of the adoption community
have rallied around claiming that there are many millions of
orphans in the world. The number they use is one
from UNI stuff that actually includes children who've only lost
(26:50):
one parent, and children who's who have lost both parents
but still have relatives who can support them, who we
would never think should be taking away from a family
in the United States, from this belief that there are
so many children in need of adoption collides with reality,
and potential adoptive parents are shocked at wait times and
demand legal reform to speed up the process, which puts
(27:11):
these children's lives even more in jeopardy of dangerous adoptions.
The author shares stories of parents who think their children
are going to be students in the US or who
shame who are shamed to thinking that they need to
do what's best by giving up their children. In many countries,
orphanages are used as temporary assistance for parents when times
are tough, and parents are shocked when they return for
(27:33):
their children and they've been adopted out abroad. One group
that is doing good work as Parents for Ethical Adoption reform.
Adoption isn't the problem in itself, it's how it's implemented
because it can easily go so wrong. All my best
and Marie, thank you and Marie for writing this letter
to us. UM. I actually my cousin and his wife
spent a year of their life in newly weeds in
(27:54):
a country I'm not gonna say what country it is
in cases is wrong. Uh. They were living and working
at an orphanage. UM. And that's the country that's shut
down international adoption, UH within the last couple of decades
because of a lot of the issues like these that
come up. UM. And they were like, we we need
to stop contributing to this as a problem we didn't
(28:16):
really go into in the Orphan Train episode. A lot
of the problems that do continue to plague the adoption
and foster care systems today, they definitely are present. Yeah,
both in the US and abroad. I mean there are
problems everywhere. It's a very difficult issue. Yeah. Yeah, Like
you hear some horror stories sometimes about um people who
(28:38):
effectively like round up children and take them to another
city to be adopted to somebody who lives abroad, which
is heartbreaking and terrible. So we were not intending to
gloss over that. It just wasn't quite part of what
we were talking about in that particular episode. Um, I
guess that's the sad part to temper the lots of
happy things that just happened to Edna St Vincent Malain,
(29:02):
whose story we will continue in our next episode. If
you would like to write to us, we have a
slightly new email address. It is History Podcast at how
Stuff Works dot com. Our Facebook is Facebook dot com
slash miss in History, and our Twitter is missed in
History or tumbler is missed in History dot tumble dot com.
And we're also on Pinterest at pinterest dot com, slash
missed in History. Our website is missed in History dot com.
(29:25):
And if you would like to learn a little more
about what we talked about today, you can go to
our parent website, which is how stuff works dot com
and put the word poetry in the search bar and
you will find how poetry Works. You can do all
of that and a whole lot more at how stuff
works dot com. Go more on this and thousands of
other topics because it has stuff works dot com
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