June 18, 2014 • 32 mins
Edna St. Vincent Millay was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was one of the Guggenheim Foundation's judges for its poetry fellowships. And she managed to make a great deal of money as a poet in the middle of the Great Depression. Read the show notes here.
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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.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today we are concluding our
two part episode on the renowned poet Edna St. Vincent Malay.
(00:25):
She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize
for poetry. She was one of the Goggenheim Foundations judges
for its poetry Fellowships, and she was also wildly best selling.
She managed to sell tens of thousands of copies of
her poetry and make huge amounts of money off of
it in the middle of the Great Depression, which seems
(00:45):
like a hard thing to do. Her work was so
popular that every new book that she published sent her
on a reading tour around the country, and in nineteen
forty she was also elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Letters. In thirty one, artist Georgia O'Keeffe wrote
a letter to Edna St. Vincent Malay, and in this
letter she told a story about a hummingbird that got
(01:08):
trapped in her studio. So she caught the hummingbird, but
every time she opened her hand just a little bit
to try to get a look at the hummingbird, It
would break its way free and then go bash itself
against the window pane. She described it as being just
so full of life that it couldn't be contained no
matter how she tried. It took her four tries before
(01:28):
she was actually able to get the bird outside, because
every time it would break out of her grasp and
then just go hurl itself against the windows. Georgia told
Vincent that she was like the hummingbird, and that if
Vincent didn't get what she was saying with this description,
then surely her husband would. I think that characterizes her
(01:48):
character pretty well. And the first half of our episode today, really,
or the previous one, the one from earlier this week,
looked at her early life chronologically for her later life.
For inst I'd going to sort of organize it thematically. Uh,
going chronologically would be a little kind of a slock,
So we're instead going to kind of talk our way
(02:10):
through some common themes in her life after she got
married to her husband, whose name was Eugen Blassavan. Yes,
so we left off right after they had been married
and for a while after their honeymoon, Vincent and Eugen
rented a house in Greenwich village, but eventually Vincent wanted
to be somewhere quieter where she could still beat a
host friends, but could also really focus on her writing.
(02:33):
In March, they found a seven hundred acre farm for
sale in New York and they bought it for nine
thousand dollars. Vincent named it Steeple Top, and that was
named after a kind of flower that grew there. And
this was a steeple bush also known as hard hack.
It has these pink kind of pointy flowers. The property
was in really poor condition, so Vincent and Eugen put
(02:55):
a huge amount of time and work into actually making
it into a functioning arm. And it had an outdoor
bar where, in their words, the flowers were watered with
gin uh. Freestanding doors led to what Vincent called her
garden rooms, and they later put in a spring fed
swimming pool where bathing suits were not allowed. It was
only skinny dipping. And they also bought and built a
(03:18):
barn from a kit that they purchased from Sears. They
raised animals in addition to the food crops that they
raised there. They built a riding cabin for Vincent and
this was set back among some pine trees. When it
burned down to everything but the stove. They've built another one.
Vincent spaced out the windows so that she could see
(03:38):
who was in the pool without easily being seen herself,
because the pine trees would block the view for most
of the places people could stand in the swimming pool,
So she would look out the windows to see who
was down at the pool and at the bar, and
then she would decide whether she wanted to come down
for happy Hour or stay in the cabin riding. That
sounds sort of like a glorious life, doesn't it? Like
(04:00):
it really does the whole time we were there, because
this this whole episode comes after a visit to Steepletop,
and the whole time we were there, I was like,
you know, if this were simultaneously walkable to stuff like
stores and places to get groceries, this would be great.
But it's a little isolated, and apart from some time
(04:20):
that they spent traveling, Steepletop was really Vincent and Eugen's
home for the rest of their lives. While Vincent did
do a lot of work in the garden, she she
had almost nothing to do with most of the household
duties that would have been more typical and expected of
a wife. At the time, Eugen's whole goal in their
relationship was to make sure Vincent had whatever she needed
(04:43):
to write, so the house was fully staffed. Vincent said
that she liked to walk into her dining room as
though it were a hotel. We'll let's start contrast to
when she was a child and basically took care of
her entire home for her mother and sisters. Absolutely, Steepletop
was also a home to their friend, some of whom
came to stay for weeks at a time. Arthur Ficky
(05:04):
and Gladys Brown eventually bought property nearby, and they named
their property hard Hack. At first, Eugen's money was what
paid for their life at steeple Top, but Vincent's writing
eventually started to bring in an income of her own.
Poetry made her really rich as someone who majored in
poetry in college. This is bizarre to me. This is
(05:24):
a super unique situation. Yeah. Well, and you know, poetry
did used to be a whole lot more popular in
America and in other parts of the world than it
is right now, but maybe not to the point that
people would really be rich. But seriously, poetry made her
very rich, but They also spent their money very freely,
so they didn't always have a lot of cash on hand.
(05:45):
Some years steeple Top actually turned a profit, and other
years it was more like a tax right off to
kind of buffer this income that was coming in from
her royalties and just to kind of, you know, make
a clear pick sure of how much money she was
making as a writer. It was a lot. Uh. They
actually were able to buy an island of their own
(06:07):
off the coast of Maine at the height of the
Great Depression. Of course, it was not a terribly expensive island.
It was seven fifty dollars, but that was still seven
hundred and fifty extra dollars to buy an island with
during the Great Depression. Yeah, that's a lot at that time,
for sure. Yeah. So, if we left Vincent and Yugen's
story here, their life at Steepletop would sort of sound
(06:29):
like a happy, semi bohemian extension of what their life
had been like in Greenwich Village. So settled and happier,
but still really full of drinking and a series of
lovers for both of them. Um, But as Vincent got older,
her life got a little more difficult and a little
more nuanced Vince. Its life and work had really made
(06:50):
her a role model for women. She lived a life
of personal autonomy and sexual freedom, which were completely unique
at the time, and this is one of the reasons
why her poetry was so incredibly six sessful. Women flocked
to it and its themes of love, sexual liberation, and
living life your own way. So all of these themes
made a lot of her work implicitly feminist, but very
(07:12):
little of what she wrote in her early career was
overtly political. On occasion, she did call out the hypocrisy
of being referred to as a woman poet instead of
just a poet, or of being, for example, honored at
a university only to then be sent off to a
social that was quote for the wives, instead of being
allowed to, you know, hang out with the other honorees.
(07:35):
But for the most part, she just lived as she
wanted to live, and then other people were inspired by
doing that. She was sort of being an activist by
example rather than being an outwardly demonstrative activist for most
of her life, and two notable exceptions to this came
a little later in her life. The first was the
Sacco and Vinzetti case. Uh, there's actually a previous episode
(07:58):
in the archive that Katie and say I did about them.
But Sacco and Vinzetti were Italian anarchists who had been
accused of murder, and they were tried and sentenced to
die in There were layers and layers of unfairness and
injustice about the trial, and the sentence was one that
divided Americans. Intellectuals, artists, writers, and others flocked to support
(08:21):
the two men, and the effort to get their sentence
overturned went on for years. Vincent was on the side
of clemency. In nine seven, towards the end of the
battle for the two men's freedom, she and Eugen went
to Boston to march in protest, and she wrote a
poem entitled Justice Denied in Massachusetts. While they were in Boston,
(08:42):
Eugen bailed out demonstrators who had previously been arrested. Vincent
also marched herself and was, along with other protesters who
were marching with her, arrested herself. And when Vincent was freed,
she was granted an audience with the governor and she
took advantage of it to plead for the men to
be spared. In the end, though they were hanged, and
(09:02):
Vincent's own trial became news, with the media calling her
an American Joan of Arc, and she was eventually acquitted.
Vincent's writing took another political turn during World War Two.
Earlier in her career, themes of pacifism had been woven
into some of her work, but as cities in Europe
started to fall to Hitler, her views really shifted. This
(09:25):
was especially true as German troops invaded the Netherlands, which
put Eugene her husband's own family at risk. Vincent was
speaking and writing in favor of going to war long
before the United States did, and during World War Two.
Some of this work was definitely propaganda. A lot of
it resonated with the public, but reviews from literary circles
(09:45):
were pretty scathing. Her literary reputation didn't entirely recover from
this period during her lifetime. Before we moved on to
one of the most notable and also kind of ill
fated love affairs during her later life. Take a brief
moment and talk about a word from a sponsor stupendous.
So to get back to Vincent and eugen we're not
(10:08):
describing their relationship as polyamorous since that's not a term
that was coined until the late twentieth century, long after
both of them had died. But their marriage was definitely
not monogamous on either side. Their relationship was meant to
be unpossessive and welcoming of other people, and for Vincent
in particular, the excitement and passion of a new relationship
(10:30):
often seemed to make her poetry a lot better. It
really inspired what she was writing about. And as we've
said before, Eugen really wanted Vincent to have whatever she
needed so that she could write more poetry and guests
at steeple Top. It will probably be no surprise included
Vincent's past lovers, both male and female. Eugen would make
himself scarce when he felt, like, you know, it was
(10:52):
time for him to step out. One of Vincent's most
notable relationships during her marriage to Eugen was with the
poet George Allen. Like Vincent, George was a gifted poet.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also won
to Guggenheim Fellowships. He was the editor for Poetry Magazine,
which is a very prominent established poetry journal. The two
(11:14):
of them also worked together to translate Baudelaire's Flowers of
Evil into English. George and Vincent met after a poetry
reading that she gave in n and at the time
he was only twenty one and Vincent was thirty six
and Eugen at this point was forty eight. The relationship
inspired Vincent's sonnet sequence called Fatal Interview. Some of their
(11:36):
letters also survived, and they tell the story of a passionate, ecstatic,
and erotic love affair. It bordered on obsession, with Vincent
trying to figure out any way she could for them
to see one another. It was also a relationship that
really threatened to undo Vincent and Eugen's marriage at a
couple of points. It led to the one of the
longer separations of their lives, when Vincent and Eugen both
(11:59):
went to Europe, but Eugen went back home alone so
that Vincent could be alone with George. Vincent wrote to
Eugen while she was away, and her letters seemed to
try to reassure him that he was loved and that
she missed him. But he wrote her far more than
she wrote to him, and it seemed as though she
loved Eugen, but she was in love with George. This
(12:20):
sort of disparity started to weigh on Eugen and he
became increasingly worried that his wife was never coming back home.
When she finally did tell him that she was ready
to come home again, he was elated, and he went
to Europe to meet her rather than waiting for her
in New York. Vincent's relationship with George did continue off
and on for years, and it eventually became a very
(12:42):
tumultuous one. Yeah, and it did ultimately end, and that
her her sonnet sequenced fatal Interview kind of chronicles the
the rise and fall of this kind of extremely passionate
but also kind of rocky relationship. Vincent also seemed almost
beset by tragedies later on in her life. Her friend
(13:05):
and colleague Eleanor Wiley died in and Vincent received word
about it just as she was about to take the
stage for reading at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Instead
of reading her own work, Vincent recited Eleanor's from memory.
Vincent's mother, Cora, got sick in nineteen thirty one and
died that February, after Vincent had received word that she
(13:27):
wasn't doing well, but before she could get home to
see her. They brought her body home to Steepletop, and
it had to be brought by sleigh over the last
leg of the journey because the snow was too deep.
Cora's casket lay in the withdrawing room, surrounded by flowers
for four days while they literally blasted a grave into
the frozen granite on the property at Steepletop. Vincent and
(13:50):
her sisters all felt tremendously guilty over their mother's death.
Although her acute illness would seemed pretty sudden, she had
been complaining of being vaguely unwell for a couple of years,
and they all felt like they should have done more
to help her and possibly prevent her death. Uh they
wound up sort of saluting Eugen's mother at the same
(14:11):
time when they had a grade a grave side service
for Vincent's mother, because his mother had also died the
week before. Vincent actually reconnected with her father when he
reached out to her in ninety five. He was in
fact writing to ask her for money. Vincent actually sent
the money, and she ended up providing for him until
(14:31):
he died years later. The next year, Vincent and Eugen
were in Santa Belle Island, Florida. They checked into the
hotel and they went directly to the beach to look
for seashells. Vincent really loved seashells, and there's still a
huge collection of them surviving in the dining room at Steepletop.
While they were out, the hotel burned to the ground,
(14:52):
taking with it everything that they had brought with them.
This included a personal copy of a seventeenth century book,
the manuscript for an since next book, and the manuscript
for another book that she had been working on. It
took her more than a year to try to reconstruct
all of this writing from memory. Oh, that's hard to
think about. Vincent's younger sister, Kathleen, died of acute alcoholism
(15:15):
in and she was also, by the end of her
life experiencing some degree of mental illness. At this point,
a huge rift had developed between Kathleen and Vincent. Kathleen
was also a poet, and she just could not get
out from under Vincent's shadow. She had also started to
feel like her sister had stolen all of her best
(15:37):
ideas and made them famous in her own work. She
became kind of obsessed with the idea that that her
sister had done her wrong in some way. She had
also been asking Eugen and Vincent for money really often
before her death, and Eugen often felt like she was
asking for money and then squandering it, so she would
ask for money for medical bills, but then spend it
(15:57):
on something else, and then need more any for the
medical bills as long as or as well as more
money for something else, so they were really kind of
estranged by the time she died. In ninety five, Arthur Ficky,
Vincent's longtime friend and occasional lover, died of throat cancer,
and he was buried on his property at hard Hack
that was nearby to Steeple Top. On top of all
(16:20):
of these personal losses and tragedies, Vincent herself really started
to struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction later on in
her life. She really wasn't in good health for much
of her adult life. She had ongoing problems with both
her digestive and her reproductive systems. She experienced frequent headaches,
and according to one story, during the nineteen twenties, she
(16:43):
was talking to a psychologist at a cocktail party about them,
and he was a Freudian and began to ask questions
that suggested that he thought she might be a lesbian,
and she said, oh, you mean I'm a homosexual. Of
course I am, and heterosexual too, But what's that got
to do with my headache? I love that start too.
In the later part of The King's Henchman, which was
(17:07):
an opera for which Vincent had written the libretto, was
being performed in New York. A winter storm hit Steepletop
and she didn't want to miss the show, so Uden
decided to take her to the train station in a sled.
He misjudged a gap in the hedge along the way,
and a branch hit Vincent in the eye and scratched
her cornea. As you can imagine, that is immensely painful,
(17:30):
and medical care for such an injury at the time
was focused on killing the pain rather than treating the injury,
and she wound up having trouble with her sight, unable
to read or write for weeks. And even after the
hit that I had healed, that injury really made her
chronic headache problem even worse. She had another accident in
nineteen thirty six. She was leaning against the car door
(17:53):
while Yuden was driving, and he went around a sharp curve,
which caused the door to fly open. She l from
the car and rolled downhill for a while before she
managed to grab some vegetation and stop herself. This was
another injury that prevented her for writing at all while
it healed. By the late nineteen thirties, eugen was describing
(18:14):
Vincent as too sick to leave her bed a lot
of the time. She really blamed the pain from the
accident for starting her addiction to morphine and other pain killers,
although it doesn't quite add up because in the intervening
years there aren't many references to that pain in her letters,
her diaries, and her medical records. But regardless, she was
(18:35):
eventually taking enormous, enormous doses of morphine. She was also
combining it with alcohol and other drugs. She was taking
far more morphine than Arthur Ficky was in his last
days as a cancer patient, for example. You know, usually
when someone at this point was in the in stages
of cancer and being treated with morphine, they didn't really
(18:57):
pay a lot of attention to the dosages and ways.
This is still true today. She was taking like multiple
times more than his docage. His dosage was for end
stage cancer pain um. She would also take her first
dose of morphine within minutes of getting up in the morning.
Eugen tried to get her to wean herself off of
these drugs, even taking morphine himself and reducing his own
(19:21):
dosages to see what she was going through and as
proof that it could be done. Vincent wound up an
impatient treatment for her addictions multiple times. She also had
a nervous breakdown in nine and at one point she
she and Eugen retired to Ragged Islands so she could
try to work her way through recovery there. That was
(19:42):
the island that they had purchased during the Great Depression
uh In addition to this drug addiction, Vincent was also
an alcoholic, eventually to the point of having alcohol induced
blackouts on a pretty regular basis, and even as she
slowly reduced her morphine intake, largely by replacing it with
other drugs, she continued to drink and drink heavily until
(20:03):
the end of her life. In nineteen forty nine, Eugen
was diagnosed with lung cancer. An X ray had actually
revealed a spot on one of his lungs a long
while before that, but he had ignored it. Everybody sort
of assumed that it was tuberculosis, and he really insisted
that the more important thing was for him to take
care of Vincent. He made it through surgery to remove
(20:26):
the diseased lung, but he ended up dying of a
cerebral hemorrhage on August twenty nine. In the aftermath of
Eugen's death, Vincent had to be hospitalized, and she finally
convinced her friends and family that she absolutely had to
return to Steepletop. The only way she was going to
make it through was to write her way through her
grief while she was there, so she had the phone
(20:48):
reconnected so people could check on her, and then she
went back to Steepletop to live alone. On October nineteenth
of nineteen fifty, John Penny, who worked on the property,
was bringing firewood when he of Vincent on the floor
at the foot of the steps. It is not entirely
clear what happened. There was a bottle of wine and
a wineglass on the stairs, and she had clearly broken
(21:09):
her neck when she fell. According to her obituary in
the New York Times, it was a heart attack. Vincent
was fifty eight and Eugen had been dead for a
little over a year. Her ashes are interred next to
Eugen's at the end of a trail that's now known
as the Poetry Trail at Steepletop, Cora's grave side is
they're also as well as Norma's that was Vincent's sister,
(21:31):
and Charles, who was Norma's husband. They are all sort
of collected together as as five grave sites at the
end of this trail. After Vincent's death, her sister Norma
moved into steeple Top with her husband, the artist Charles Ellis.
Norma kept her sister's things as untouched as possible. She
kept her own cosmetics and personal items in a shoe
(21:53):
box so they would never get mixed with her sisters,
and Norma chose to hang her clothes on the shower
curtain on in the bathroom. It is a very large bathroom,
there was a lot of space here, but still she
would not use the closet because she seemed to intuit
that her sister's home was going to be important and
that she should preserve everything in it. As it was
(22:15):
based on Vincent's income as a poet versus her expenses
its themes, as though she would have been in a
position to leave kind of an endowment to keep the
place running after her death. After all, she'd been seeing
huge sales of poetry in the middle of the Great Depression.
Um she was making between seventeen thousand and twenty one
thousand dollars a year during the late thirties. There's not
(22:38):
really a great way to put that into today's dollars,
but it was easily the same as having an income
in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And
she was also writing more commercial work at that time
under the pseudonym of Nancy Boyd, so she was getting
income from that as well. So even with medical bills
paying for medical care for Vincent's father insist her, and
(23:00):
they're generally free spending lifestyle, it seems as though they
should have been pretty financially stable. In reality, though, Vincent
would ask for a generous advance from her publisher for
her next book, and that would let her pay off
the debts she had incurred since publishing the previous book,
so she was always sort of living off of loans
from her publisher for work that she hadn't done yet.
(23:22):
Biographer Daniel Mark Epstein's hypothesis, which is supported by letters
and some other documents, but it is not conclusively proven.
Is that before the Great Depression, Vincent invested most of
her money in a thoroughbred farm and continued to do
show well into the nineteen thirties. She was definitely known
to love horses and horse racing, but this paper trail
(23:43):
is kind of scanty and convoluted, and it's also possible
that she really wanted to keep the thoroughbred farm, which
was being used of course to raise race horses, a
secret because her father's gambling, which we mentioned in the
previous episode, had been so detrimental to her family. And
then the war also intervened, so some of Eugen's money
(24:03):
was actually back in Holland and all of his assets
there wound up being frozen, so it wasn't like they
had access to any of that. So today Steepletop is
still standing in Oscarlitz, New York. It's run by the
Edna St. Vincent Malay Society, and it's open for tours
from the end of May to the end of October.
Uh because that you know, they were not really financially
(24:25):
flush at the time of Vincent's death. The society is
raising money to restore some of the rooms that aren't
currently open for public viewing. Um. There you are able
to see parts of the home if you tour it,
but not everything because there are rooms that still really
need some work. They also have a new head gardener
who's working from journals to reconstruct the properties, landscaping and gardens.
(24:46):
And it's pretty much all donations supported. Um, there's not
really you know, a fund from the author's estate that's
keeping things going at this point. But if you are
interested in going there, it's pretty awesome. It's two and
a half hours from New York City and two and
a half hours from Boston, so you can get to
it pretty easily from a couple of places. I'd say
(25:08):
it's probably safe to say this is Tracy's recommended visiting list.
Oh yeah, it was. It was lovely. We toward the house,
and we toward the gardens, and then we walked on
the Poetry Trail, which is the trail that goes out
to the grave sites, and it has uh like little
plaques along the way that have poems about what you're
seeing there in the landscape and in the vegetation that's
(25:29):
growing there. So it's really lovely. Um. It's also we
also went pretty much the first weekend of their season,
and so there was nobody there but but like me
and Patrick and a couple of docents. Nice. Yeah, it was.
It was a very lovely trip. Do you also have
a spot of listener mail for us? I do. This
is actually a very lengthy letter, so I am only
(25:50):
going to read about the first half of it. It
is from Stephanie, and Stephanie wrote to us after our
death president now episode um and she wrote to us,
and she starts off with some talk about how she
has heard the name of Galudet or Galadet or Galadet
University pronounced, which we've gotten a couple of notes about that,
(26:11):
and I keep we now have collected i think four
different pronunciations for people how people say the name of it. Yeah,
So she says, there is an interesting story that we
were told about Galudett going to Europe to learn sign language,
and that was the elder Galudette who went to try
to find out, how you know, some some information about
(26:33):
the good the best ways to teach deaf people. He
went to several places that were either based on the
oral tradition or private academies that would only teach him
sign language for a price, so he was about to
leave without accomplishing his goal when he met someone from
a deaf institution in France who invited him to come
to their school and learn French sign language free of charge.
(26:53):
He met a deaf French scholar, Laurence Clerk, who came
back with him to help set up deaf education in America.
To this day, there are many signs that are based
on French concepts in American sign language, yet British sign
language is very different from the American I heard you
say that the differences between those of the oral tradition
and the culturally death are not as much of an
(27:13):
issue now as Cochlear implants. I agree with you that
it is not much as much of a national issue
as before, but I do not think I can agree
that it is no longer an issue in the deaf community.
I'm going to pause there and clarify what I was
trying to say, which is that the thing that is
not so much of an issue is whether to teach
children who are born unable to hear now uh sign
(27:35):
language Like that's not there's not really an ongoing debate
about that. The much bigger debate is whether a child
who was born now not able to hear, should have
a cochlear implant or not. Right um, to get back
to the letter, I was an interpreter for the death
for several years, and though it has been about ten
years since I interpreted, I do not think things have
changed that drastically since I was in touch with the
(27:58):
deaf community. I had learned sign language as a child,
as I had a personal friend that was deaf. He
had about thirty five hearing in one ear and almost
none in the other. Yet he was sent away to
a boarding school for the deaf in Missouri and learned
sign language, and so even though he could hear a little,
he communicated through American Sign Language and not the PSC
or Pigeon Signed English that oral deaf students used. Bernie
(28:22):
was able to interpret for his friends, though, since he
could tell better when someone was speaking and he could
read lips very well. Even though he was so adept
in the hearing world, his communication was truly in the
syntax of a s L and not English, which is
another reason that's closed captioning does not help many of
the culturally deaf, since they do not think an English syntax.
(28:43):
Therefore the words that they are seeing don't make sense
because they're not in the right order, and many of
them don't read English very well. I've worked in the
public school system and the college system interpreting for the
death and one of the main classes the culturally deaf
must attend is E S O L or English of
Speaker English for speakers of other languages. I remember having
many conversations with deaf friends, co workers, and clients who
(29:06):
expressed passionate opinions on each side of the deaf culture issue.
There were those who absolutely did not want to look
strange and so wanted to keep the sign language interpretation
very low key, and those who did not want to
see anything but the lecture signed and nothing extra like
jokes or comments from the hearing students. The two factions
were very much at odds with each other. Like I said,
(29:27):
it has been ten years, but I really think there
is a very definite divide even now between those two communities.
And then I'm going to conclude with a story that
she shares uh before the letter goes on, and she says,
one time I was interpreting for a personal friend who
was deaf and also a co worker. She was a
guest at a women's club and the object was to
(29:47):
educate the ladies about deaf culture. One of the questions
she was asked was how do you handle your disability?
I think the lady wanted the deaf friends to explain
if she felt living in a hearing world was difficult
or if she thought she handled it well. I am
not handicapped, she's shot back. When I signed the question
to her, you are handicapped, she signed, I can communicate
(30:08):
with you, but you cannot communicate with me. Uh. That
is where I'm going to end the letter, um, partly
because that's only about half of the letters. She had
all kinds of awesome, awesome information in it. But that's
similar to a story that I King Jordan's told in
the the address that he gave it my alma moderate
(30:29):
that I saw um where he was talking about when
people who can hear come to galidet to Uh to visit,
and they go to the restaurant on campus at the school,
like a hearing person is definitely the person who's in
a position of having a handicap because the cook is
deaf and the servers are all deaf and when he
(30:50):
was there. He was not sure if they still did it,
but when he was there that the way that they
dealt with us was that they would leave pads of
notepaper on the tables for the hearing people. So it
was he was definitely talking about how disability is is
contextual and there are definitely circumstances where a person that
could be described as quote having a disability is absolutely
(31:10):
not disabled in any way. Um. So yeah, I really
appreciated having that story from Stephanie. If you would like
to write to s you can. We're at history Podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. For also on Facebook
at facebook dot com slash missed in History and on
Twitter at missed in History. Are tumbler is missed in
History dot tumbler dot com, and we are on Kinterest
(31:31):
at pinterest dot com slash missed in History. If you
would like to learn more about something that came up
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You can do all of that and a whole lot
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You can listen to archives of every episode and see
(31:53):
our show notes and all kinds of other stuff at
missed in History dot com, the moralness, and thousands of
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today we are concluding our
two part episode on the renowned poet Edna St. Vincent Malay.
(00:25):
She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize
for poetry. She was one of the Goggenheim Foundations judges
for its poetry Fellowships, and she was also wildly best selling.
She managed to sell tens of thousands of copies of
her poetry and make huge amounts of money off of
it in the middle of the Great Depression, which seems
(00:45):
like a hard thing to do. Her work was so
popular that every new book that she published sent her
on a reading tour around the country, and in nineteen
forty she was also elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Letters. In thirty one, artist Georgia O'Keeffe wrote
a letter to Edna St. Vincent Malay, and in this
letter she told a story about a hummingbird that got
(01:08):
trapped in her studio. So she caught the hummingbird, but
every time she opened her hand just a little bit
to try to get a look at the hummingbird, It
would break its way free and then go bash itself
against the window pane. She described it as being just
so full of life that it couldn't be contained no
matter how she tried. It took her four tries before
(01:28):
she was actually able to get the bird outside, because
every time it would break out of her grasp and
then just go hurl itself against the windows. Georgia told
Vincent that she was like the hummingbird, and that if
Vincent didn't get what she was saying with this description,
then surely her husband would. I think that characterizes her
(01:48):
character pretty well. And the first half of our episode today, really,
or the previous one, the one from earlier this week,
looked at her early life chronologically for her later life.
For inst I'd going to sort of organize it thematically. Uh,
going chronologically would be a little kind of a slock,
So we're instead going to kind of talk our way
(02:10):
through some common themes in her life after she got
married to her husband, whose name was Eugen Blassavan. Yes,
so we left off right after they had been married
and for a while after their honeymoon, Vincent and Eugen
rented a house in Greenwich village, but eventually Vincent wanted
to be somewhere quieter where she could still beat a
host friends, but could also really focus on her writing.
(02:33):
In March, they found a seven hundred acre farm for
sale in New York and they bought it for nine
thousand dollars. Vincent named it Steeple Top, and that was
named after a kind of flower that grew there. And
this was a steeple bush also known as hard hack.
It has these pink kind of pointy flowers. The property
was in really poor condition, so Vincent and Eugen put
(02:55):
a huge amount of time and work into actually making
it into a functioning arm. And it had an outdoor
bar where, in their words, the flowers were watered with
gin uh. Freestanding doors led to what Vincent called her
garden rooms, and they later put in a spring fed
swimming pool where bathing suits were not allowed. It was
only skinny dipping. And they also bought and built a
(03:18):
barn from a kit that they purchased from Sears. They
raised animals in addition to the food crops that they
raised there. They built a riding cabin for Vincent and
this was set back among some pine trees. When it
burned down to everything but the stove. They've built another one.
Vincent spaced out the windows so that she could see
(03:38):
who was in the pool without easily being seen herself,
because the pine trees would block the view for most
of the places people could stand in the swimming pool,
So she would look out the windows to see who
was down at the pool and at the bar, and
then she would decide whether she wanted to come down
for happy Hour or stay in the cabin riding. That
sounds sort of like a glorious life, doesn't it? Like
(04:00):
it really does the whole time we were there, because
this this whole episode comes after a visit to Steepletop,
and the whole time we were there, I was like,
you know, if this were simultaneously walkable to stuff like
stores and places to get groceries, this would be great.
But it's a little isolated, and apart from some time
(04:20):
that they spent traveling, Steepletop was really Vincent and Eugen's
home for the rest of their lives. While Vincent did
do a lot of work in the garden, she she
had almost nothing to do with most of the household
duties that would have been more typical and expected of
a wife. At the time, Eugen's whole goal in their
relationship was to make sure Vincent had whatever she needed
(04:43):
to write, so the house was fully staffed. Vincent said
that she liked to walk into her dining room as
though it were a hotel. We'll let's start contrast to
when she was a child and basically took care of
her entire home for her mother and sisters. Absolutely, Steepletop
was also a home to their friend, some of whom
came to stay for weeks at a time. Arthur Ficky
(05:04):
and Gladys Brown eventually bought property nearby, and they named
their property hard Hack. At first, Eugen's money was what
paid for their life at steeple Top, but Vincent's writing
eventually started to bring in an income of her own.
Poetry made her really rich as someone who majored in
poetry in college. This is bizarre to me. This is
(05:24):
a super unique situation. Yeah. Well, and you know, poetry
did used to be a whole lot more popular in
America and in other parts of the world than it
is right now, but maybe not to the point that
people would really be rich. But seriously, poetry made her
very rich, but They also spent their money very freely,
so they didn't always have a lot of cash on hand.
(05:45):
Some years steeple Top actually turned a profit, and other
years it was more like a tax right off to
kind of buffer this income that was coming in from
her royalties and just to kind of, you know, make
a clear pick sure of how much money she was
making as a writer. It was a lot. Uh. They
actually were able to buy an island of their own
(06:07):
off the coast of Maine at the height of the
Great Depression. Of course, it was not a terribly expensive island.
It was seven fifty dollars, but that was still seven
hundred and fifty extra dollars to buy an island with
during the Great Depression. Yeah, that's a lot at that time,
for sure. Yeah. So, if we left Vincent and Yugen's
story here, their life at Steepletop would sort of sound
(06:29):
like a happy, semi bohemian extension of what their life
had been like in Greenwich Village. So settled and happier,
but still really full of drinking and a series of
lovers for both of them. Um, But as Vincent got older,
her life got a little more difficult and a little
more nuanced Vince. Its life and work had really made
(06:50):
her a role model for women. She lived a life
of personal autonomy and sexual freedom, which were completely unique
at the time, and this is one of the reasons
why her poetry was so incredibly six sessful. Women flocked
to it and its themes of love, sexual liberation, and
living life your own way. So all of these themes
made a lot of her work implicitly feminist, but very
(07:12):
little of what she wrote in her early career was
overtly political. On occasion, she did call out the hypocrisy
of being referred to as a woman poet instead of
just a poet, or of being, for example, honored at
a university only to then be sent off to a
social that was quote for the wives, instead of being
allowed to, you know, hang out with the other honorees.
(07:35):
But for the most part, she just lived as she
wanted to live, and then other people were inspired by
doing that. She was sort of being an activist by
example rather than being an outwardly demonstrative activist for most
of her life, and two notable exceptions to this came
a little later in her life. The first was the
Sacco and Vinzetti case. Uh, there's actually a previous episode
(07:58):
in the archive that Katie and say I did about them.
But Sacco and Vinzetti were Italian anarchists who had been
accused of murder, and they were tried and sentenced to
die in There were layers and layers of unfairness and
injustice about the trial, and the sentence was one that
divided Americans. Intellectuals, artists, writers, and others flocked to support
(08:21):
the two men, and the effort to get their sentence
overturned went on for years. Vincent was on the side
of clemency. In nine seven, towards the end of the
battle for the two men's freedom, she and Eugen went
to Boston to march in protest, and she wrote a
poem entitled Justice Denied in Massachusetts. While they were in Boston,
(08:42):
Eugen bailed out demonstrators who had previously been arrested. Vincent
also marched herself and was, along with other protesters who
were marching with her, arrested herself. And when Vincent was freed,
she was granted an audience with the governor and she
took advantage of it to plead for the men to
be spared. In the end, though they were hanged, and
(09:02):
Vincent's own trial became news, with the media calling her
an American Joan of Arc, and she was eventually acquitted.
Vincent's writing took another political turn during World War Two.
Earlier in her career, themes of pacifism had been woven
into some of her work, but as cities in Europe
started to fall to Hitler, her views really shifted. This
(09:25):
was especially true as German troops invaded the Netherlands, which
put Eugene her husband's own family at risk. Vincent was
speaking and writing in favor of going to war long
before the United States did, and during World War Two.
Some of this work was definitely propaganda. A lot of
it resonated with the public, but reviews from literary circles
(09:45):
were pretty scathing. Her literary reputation didn't entirely recover from
this period during her lifetime. Before we moved on to
one of the most notable and also kind of ill
fated love affairs during her later life. Take a brief
moment and talk about a word from a sponsor stupendous.
So to get back to Vincent and eugen we're not
(10:08):
describing their relationship as polyamorous since that's not a term
that was coined until the late twentieth century, long after
both of them had died. But their marriage was definitely
not monogamous on either side. Their relationship was meant to
be unpossessive and welcoming of other people, and for Vincent
in particular, the excitement and passion of a new relationship
(10:30):
often seemed to make her poetry a lot better. It
really inspired what she was writing about. And as we've
said before, Eugen really wanted Vincent to have whatever she
needed so that she could write more poetry and guests
at steeple Top. It will probably be no surprise included
Vincent's past lovers, both male and female. Eugen would make
himself scarce when he felt, like, you know, it was
(10:52):
time for him to step out. One of Vincent's most
notable relationships during her marriage to Eugen was with the
poet George Allen. Like Vincent, George was a gifted poet.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also won
to Guggenheim Fellowships. He was the editor for Poetry Magazine,
which is a very prominent established poetry journal. The two
(11:14):
of them also worked together to translate Baudelaire's Flowers of
Evil into English. George and Vincent met after a poetry
reading that she gave in n and at the time
he was only twenty one and Vincent was thirty six
and Eugen at this point was forty eight. The relationship
inspired Vincent's sonnet sequence called Fatal Interview. Some of their
(11:36):
letters also survived, and they tell the story of a passionate, ecstatic,
and erotic love affair. It bordered on obsession, with Vincent
trying to figure out any way she could for them
to see one another. It was also a relationship that
really threatened to undo Vincent and Eugen's marriage at a
couple of points. It led to the one of the
longer separations of their lives, when Vincent and Eugen both
(11:59):
went to Europe, but Eugen went back home alone so
that Vincent could be alone with George. Vincent wrote to
Eugen while she was away, and her letters seemed to
try to reassure him that he was loved and that
she missed him. But he wrote her far more than
she wrote to him, and it seemed as though she
loved Eugen, but she was in love with George. This
(12:20):
sort of disparity started to weigh on Eugen and he
became increasingly worried that his wife was never coming back home.
When she finally did tell him that she was ready
to come home again, he was elated, and he went
to Europe to meet her rather than waiting for her
in New York. Vincent's relationship with George did continue off
and on for years, and it eventually became a very
(12:42):
tumultuous one. Yeah, and it did ultimately end, and that
her her sonnet sequenced fatal Interview kind of chronicles the
the rise and fall of this kind of extremely passionate
but also kind of rocky relationship. Vincent also seemed almost
beset by tragedies later on in her life. Her friend
(13:05):
and colleague Eleanor Wiley died in and Vincent received word
about it just as she was about to take the
stage for reading at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Instead
of reading her own work, Vincent recited Eleanor's from memory.
Vincent's mother, Cora, got sick in nineteen thirty one and
died that February, after Vincent had received word that she
(13:27):
wasn't doing well, but before she could get home to
see her. They brought her body home to Steepletop, and
it had to be brought by sleigh over the last
leg of the journey because the snow was too deep.
Cora's casket lay in the withdrawing room, surrounded by flowers
for four days while they literally blasted a grave into
the frozen granite on the property at Steepletop. Vincent and
(13:50):
her sisters all felt tremendously guilty over their mother's death.
Although her acute illness would seemed pretty sudden, she had
been complaining of being vaguely unwell for a couple of years,
and they all felt like they should have done more
to help her and possibly prevent her death. Uh they
wound up sort of saluting Eugen's mother at the same
(14:11):
time when they had a grade a grave side service
for Vincent's mother, because his mother had also died the
week before. Vincent actually reconnected with her father when he
reached out to her in ninety five. He was in
fact writing to ask her for money. Vincent actually sent
the money, and she ended up providing for him until
(14:31):
he died years later. The next year, Vincent and Eugen
were in Santa Belle Island, Florida. They checked into the
hotel and they went directly to the beach to look
for seashells. Vincent really loved seashells, and there's still a
huge collection of them surviving in the dining room at Steepletop.
While they were out, the hotel burned to the ground,
(14:52):
taking with it everything that they had brought with them.
This included a personal copy of a seventeenth century book,
the manuscript for an since next book, and the manuscript
for another book that she had been working on. It
took her more than a year to try to reconstruct
all of this writing from memory. Oh, that's hard to
think about. Vincent's younger sister, Kathleen, died of acute alcoholism
(15:15):
in and she was also, by the end of her
life experiencing some degree of mental illness. At this point,
a huge rift had developed between Kathleen and Vincent. Kathleen
was also a poet, and she just could not get
out from under Vincent's shadow. She had also started to
feel like her sister had stolen all of her best
(15:37):
ideas and made them famous in her own work. She
became kind of obsessed with the idea that that her
sister had done her wrong in some way. She had
also been asking Eugen and Vincent for money really often
before her death, and Eugen often felt like she was
asking for money and then squandering it, so she would
ask for money for medical bills, but then spend it
(15:57):
on something else, and then need more any for the
medical bills as long as or as well as more
money for something else, so they were really kind of
estranged by the time she died. In ninety five, Arthur Ficky,
Vincent's longtime friend and occasional lover, died of throat cancer,
and he was buried on his property at hard Hack
that was nearby to Steeple Top. On top of all
(16:20):
of these personal losses and tragedies, Vincent herself really started
to struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction later on in
her life. She really wasn't in good health for much
of her adult life. She had ongoing problems with both
her digestive and her reproductive systems. She experienced frequent headaches,
and according to one story, during the nineteen twenties, she
(16:43):
was talking to a psychologist at a cocktail party about them,
and he was a Freudian and began to ask questions
that suggested that he thought she might be a lesbian,
and she said, oh, you mean I'm a homosexual. Of
course I am, and heterosexual too, But what's that got
to do with my headache? I love that start too.
In the later part of The King's Henchman, which was
(17:07):
an opera for which Vincent had written the libretto, was
being performed in New York. A winter storm hit Steepletop
and she didn't want to miss the show, so Uden
decided to take her to the train station in a sled.
He misjudged a gap in the hedge along the way,
and a branch hit Vincent in the eye and scratched
her cornea. As you can imagine, that is immensely painful,
(17:30):
and medical care for such an injury at the time
was focused on killing the pain rather than treating the injury,
and she wound up having trouble with her sight, unable
to read or write for weeks. And even after the
hit that I had healed, that injury really made her
chronic headache problem even worse. She had another accident in
nineteen thirty six. She was leaning against the car door
(17:53):
while Yuden was driving, and he went around a sharp curve,
which caused the door to fly open. She l from
the car and rolled downhill for a while before she
managed to grab some vegetation and stop herself. This was
another injury that prevented her for writing at all while
it healed. By the late nineteen thirties, eugen was describing
(18:14):
Vincent as too sick to leave her bed a lot
of the time. She really blamed the pain from the
accident for starting her addiction to morphine and other pain killers,
although it doesn't quite add up because in the intervening
years there aren't many references to that pain in her letters,
her diaries, and her medical records. But regardless, she was
(18:35):
eventually taking enormous, enormous doses of morphine. She was also
combining it with alcohol and other drugs. She was taking
far more morphine than Arthur Ficky was in his last
days as a cancer patient, for example. You know, usually
when someone at this point was in the in stages
of cancer and being treated with morphine, they didn't really
(18:57):
pay a lot of attention to the dosages and ways.
This is still true today. She was taking like multiple
times more than his docage. His dosage was for end
stage cancer pain um. She would also take her first
dose of morphine within minutes of getting up in the morning.
Eugen tried to get her to wean herself off of
these drugs, even taking morphine himself and reducing his own
(19:21):
dosages to see what she was going through and as
proof that it could be done. Vincent wound up an
impatient treatment for her addictions multiple times. She also had
a nervous breakdown in nine and at one point she
she and Eugen retired to Ragged Islands so she could
try to work her way through recovery there. That was
(19:42):
the island that they had purchased during the Great Depression
uh In addition to this drug addiction, Vincent was also
an alcoholic, eventually to the point of having alcohol induced
blackouts on a pretty regular basis, and even as she
slowly reduced her morphine intake, largely by replacing it with
other drugs, she continued to drink and drink heavily until
(20:03):
the end of her life. In nineteen forty nine, Eugen
was diagnosed with lung cancer. An X ray had actually
revealed a spot on one of his lungs a long
while before that, but he had ignored it. Everybody sort
of assumed that it was tuberculosis, and he really insisted
that the more important thing was for him to take
care of Vincent. He made it through surgery to remove
(20:26):
the diseased lung, but he ended up dying of a
cerebral hemorrhage on August twenty nine. In the aftermath of
Eugen's death, Vincent had to be hospitalized, and she finally
convinced her friends and family that she absolutely had to
return to Steepletop. The only way she was going to
make it through was to write her way through her
grief while she was there, so she had the phone
(20:48):
reconnected so people could check on her, and then she
went back to Steepletop to live alone. On October nineteenth
of nineteen fifty, John Penny, who worked on the property,
was bringing firewood when he of Vincent on the floor
at the foot of the steps. It is not entirely
clear what happened. There was a bottle of wine and
a wineglass on the stairs, and she had clearly broken
(21:09):
her neck when she fell. According to her obituary in
the New York Times, it was a heart attack. Vincent
was fifty eight and Eugen had been dead for a
little over a year. Her ashes are interred next to
Eugen's at the end of a trail that's now known
as the Poetry Trail at Steepletop, Cora's grave side is
they're also as well as Norma's that was Vincent's sister,
(21:31):
and Charles, who was Norma's husband. They are all sort
of collected together as as five grave sites at the
end of this trail. After Vincent's death, her sister Norma
moved into steeple Top with her husband, the artist Charles Ellis.
Norma kept her sister's things as untouched as possible. She
kept her own cosmetics and personal items in a shoe
(21:53):
box so they would never get mixed with her sisters,
and Norma chose to hang her clothes on the shower
curtain on in the bathroom. It is a very large bathroom,
there was a lot of space here, but still she
would not use the closet because she seemed to intuit
that her sister's home was going to be important and
that she should preserve everything in it. As it was
(22:15):
based on Vincent's income as a poet versus her expenses
its themes, as though she would have been in a
position to leave kind of an endowment to keep the
place running after her death. After all, she'd been seeing
huge sales of poetry in the middle of the Great Depression.
Um she was making between seventeen thousand and twenty one
thousand dollars a year during the late thirties. There's not
(22:38):
really a great way to put that into today's dollars,
but it was easily the same as having an income
in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And
she was also writing more commercial work at that time
under the pseudonym of Nancy Boyd, so she was getting
income from that as well. So even with medical bills
paying for medical care for Vincent's father insist her, and
(23:00):
they're generally free spending lifestyle, it seems as though they
should have been pretty financially stable. In reality, though, Vincent
would ask for a generous advance from her publisher for
her next book, and that would let her pay off
the debts she had incurred since publishing the previous book,
so she was always sort of living off of loans
from her publisher for work that she hadn't done yet.
(23:22):
Biographer Daniel Mark Epstein's hypothesis, which is supported by letters
and some other documents, but it is not conclusively proven.
Is that before the Great Depression, Vincent invested most of
her money in a thoroughbred farm and continued to do
show well into the nineteen thirties. She was definitely known
to love horses and horse racing, but this paper trail
(23:43):
is kind of scanty and convoluted, and it's also possible
that she really wanted to keep the thoroughbred farm, which
was being used of course to raise race horses, a
secret because her father's gambling, which we mentioned in the
previous episode, had been so detrimental to her family. And
then the war also intervened, so some of Eugen's money
(24:03):
was actually back in Holland and all of his assets
there wound up being frozen, so it wasn't like they
had access to any of that. So today Steepletop is
still standing in Oscarlitz, New York. It's run by the
Edna St. Vincent Malay Society, and it's open for tours
from the end of May to the end of October.
Uh because that you know, they were not really financially
(24:25):
flush at the time of Vincent's death. The society is
raising money to restore some of the rooms that aren't
currently open for public viewing. Um. There you are able
to see parts of the home if you tour it,
but not everything because there are rooms that still really
need some work. They also have a new head gardener
who's working from journals to reconstruct the properties, landscaping and gardens.
(24:46):
And it's pretty much all donations supported. Um, there's not
really you know, a fund from the author's estate that's
keeping things going at this point. But if you are
interested in going there, it's pretty awesome. It's two and
a half hours from New York City and two and
a half hours from Boston, so you can get to
it pretty easily from a couple of places. I'd say
(25:08):
it's probably safe to say this is Tracy's recommended visiting list.
Oh yeah, it was. It was lovely. We toward the house,
and we toward the gardens, and then we walked on
the Poetry Trail, which is the trail that goes out
to the grave sites, and it has uh like little
plaques along the way that have poems about what you're
seeing there in the landscape and in the vegetation that's
(25:29):
growing there. So it's really lovely. Um. It's also we
also went pretty much the first weekend of their season,
and so there was nobody there but but like me
and Patrick and a couple of docents. Nice. Yeah, it was.
It was a very lovely trip. Do you also have
a spot of listener mail for us? I do. This
is actually a very lengthy letter, so I am only
(25:50):
going to read about the first half of it. It
is from Stephanie, and Stephanie wrote to us after our
death president now episode um and she wrote to us,
and she starts off with some talk about how she
has heard the name of Galudet or Galadet or Galadet
University pronounced, which we've gotten a couple of notes about that,
(26:11):
and I keep we now have collected i think four
different pronunciations for people how people say the name of it. Yeah,
So she says, there is an interesting story that we
were told about Galudett going to Europe to learn sign language,
and that was the elder Galudette who went to try
to find out, how you know, some some information about
(26:33):
the good the best ways to teach deaf people. He
went to several places that were either based on the
oral tradition or private academies that would only teach him
sign language for a price, so he was about to
leave without accomplishing his goal when he met someone from
a deaf institution in France who invited him to come
to their school and learn French sign language free of charge.
(26:53):
He met a deaf French scholar, Laurence Clerk, who came
back with him to help set up deaf education in America.
To this day, there are many signs that are based
on French concepts in American sign language, yet British sign
language is very different from the American I heard you
say that the differences between those of the oral tradition
and the culturally death are not as much of an
(27:13):
issue now as Cochlear implants. I agree with you that
it is not much as much of a national issue
as before, but I do not think I can agree
that it is no longer an issue in the deaf community.
I'm going to pause there and clarify what I was
trying to say, which is that the thing that is
not so much of an issue is whether to teach
children who are born unable to hear now uh sign
(27:35):
language Like that's not there's not really an ongoing debate
about that. The much bigger debate is whether a child
who was born now not able to hear, should have
a cochlear implant or not. Right um, to get back
to the letter, I was an interpreter for the death
for several years, and though it has been about ten
years since I interpreted, I do not think things have
changed that drastically since I was in touch with the
(27:58):
deaf community. I had learned sign language as a child,
as I had a personal friend that was deaf. He
had about thirty five hearing in one ear and almost
none in the other. Yet he was sent away to
a boarding school for the deaf in Missouri and learned
sign language, and so even though he could hear a little,
he communicated through American Sign Language and not the PSC
or Pigeon Signed English that oral deaf students used. Bernie
(28:22):
was able to interpret for his friends, though, since he
could tell better when someone was speaking and he could
read lips very well. Even though he was so adept
in the hearing world, his communication was truly in the
syntax of a s L and not English, which is
another reason that's closed captioning does not help many of
the culturally deaf, since they do not think an English syntax.
(28:43):
Therefore the words that they are seeing don't make sense
because they're not in the right order, and many of
them don't read English very well. I've worked in the
public school system and the college system interpreting for the
death and one of the main classes the culturally deaf
must attend is E S O L or English of
Speaker English for speakers of other languages. I remember having
many conversations with deaf friends, co workers, and clients who
(29:06):
expressed passionate opinions on each side of the deaf culture issue.
There were those who absolutely did not want to look
strange and so wanted to keep the sign language interpretation
very low key, and those who did not want to
see anything but the lecture signed and nothing extra like
jokes or comments from the hearing students. The two factions
were very much at odds with each other. Like I said,
(29:27):
it has been ten years, but I really think there
is a very definite divide even now between those two communities.
And then I'm going to conclude with a story that
she shares uh before the letter goes on, and she says,
one time I was interpreting for a personal friend who
was deaf and also a co worker. She was a
guest at a women's club and the object was to
(29:47):
educate the ladies about deaf culture. One of the questions
she was asked was how do you handle your disability?
I think the lady wanted the deaf friends to explain
if she felt living in a hearing world was difficult
or if she thought she handled it well. I am
not handicapped, she's shot back. When I signed the question
to her, you are handicapped, she signed, I can communicate
(30:08):
with you, but you cannot communicate with me. Uh. That
is where I'm going to end the letter, um, partly
because that's only about half of the letters. She had
all kinds of awesome, awesome information in it. But that's
similar to a story that I King Jordan's told in
the the address that he gave it my alma moderate
(30:29):
that I saw um where he was talking about when
people who can hear come to galidet to Uh to visit,
and they go to the restaurant on campus at the school,
like a hearing person is definitely the person who's in
a position of having a handicap because the cook is
deaf and the servers are all deaf and when he
(30:50):
was there. He was not sure if they still did it,
but when he was there that the way that they
dealt with us was that they would leave pads of
notepaper on the tables for the hearing people. So it
was he was definitely talking about how disability is is
contextual and there are definitely circumstances where a person that
could be described as quote having a disability is absolutely
(31:10):
not disabled in any way. Um. So yeah, I really
appreciated having that story from Stephanie. If you would like
to write to s you can. We're at history Podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. For also on Facebook
at facebook dot com slash missed in History and on
Twitter at missed in History. Are tumbler is missed in
History dot tumbler dot com, and we are on Kinterest
(31:31):
at pinterest dot com slash missed in History. If you
would like to learn more about something that came up
in the episode today, you can come to how Stuff
Works and you can put the word addiction into the
search bar. You will find the article how Addiction Works.
You can do all of that and a whole lot
more at our website, which is how stuff Works dot com.
You can listen to archives of every episode and see
(31:53):
our show notes and all kinds of other stuff at
missed in History dot com, the moralness, and thousands of
other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com
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Holly Frey
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