“THESE WERE THE THINGS THAT BOUNDED ME”: A NEW EXAMINATION OF MILLAY’S DRAMATIC WORKS

by

KATHRYN ELIZABETH ANDERSON

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Master of Arts

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May, 2008 1

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of

______Kathryn Elizabeth Anderson______

candidate for the ___Master of Arts______degree *.

(signed) ___John Orlock______(chair of the committee)

___Megan Swihart Jewell______

___Judith Oster______

______

______

______

(date) ___March 18, 2008______

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 2

I extend my gratitude to the people and places who supported me in the completion of this project:

* * *

John Orlock, Case Western Reserve University Megan Swihart Jewell, Case Western Reserve University Judith Oster, Case Western Reserve University Peter Bergman, The Millay Society Dean Rogers, Vassar College Special Collections David and Elizabeth Anderson Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University The Newberry Library, Chicago Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Illinois Bookman’s Alley, Evanston, Illinois The Armadillo’s Pillow, Chicago 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract 4

Millay Timeline 5

Part I: The Hidden Canon 6

Part II: Ostentatious and Pedantic Drivel 20

Part III: From Persiflage to Purpose 56

Part IV: Toward a New Comprehension 81

Works Cited 98 4

“These Were the Things That Bounded Me”: A New Examination of Millay’s Dramatic Works

Abstract

By

KATHRYN ELIZABETH ANDERSON

The distaste of their author and her little-known career as a playwright has inspired minimal scholarship and virtually no production of Edna St. Vincent Millay's dramatic works. Millay's dramas generally failed to extend beyond first printing, and their author is almost never listed among the names of American dramatists. This thesis examines the scholarly and public obscurity of Millay's playwriting career and explains the textual obstacles that condemned Millay to inferiority as a dramatist—namely language, form, and agenda. In her dramas, the intensity and economy of Millay's celebrated poetry gave way to irregular expansion and formal uncertainty; however,

Millay's poems and plays are built of many of the same materials and, when successful, exhibit some of the same virtues. Millay's poems have inspired a legacy of scholarship and celebration—what might her dramas, as relative "failures," contribute to Millay studies and to American theatre history? 5

Life Poetry Drama Meanwhile… Whitman dies; Archibald Born (February 22) in MacLeish and Arthur Miller 1892 Rockland, Maine also born 1900 Parents divorce Graduates from high 1909 school Stein’s Three Lives “Renascence” appears in 1912 The Lyric Year Poetry Magazine founded 1913 Enters Vassar Graduates from Vassar, moves to Greenwich Renascence and Other Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. 1917 Village Poems Alfred Prufrock” 1919 Aria da Capo premieres Two Slatterns and a O’Neill wins Pulitzer for 1920 A Few Figs From Thistles King Beyond the Horizon 1921 Leaves for Europe Second April The Lamp and the Bell Joyce’s Ulysses In Paris writing for Vanity Fair, chronic 1922 illness begins Aria da Capo Brecht’s Drums in the Night Returns from Europe, The Harp-Weaver and William Carlos Williams’ 1923 receives Pulitzer, marries Other Poems Spring and All 1924 Distressing Dialogues Forster’s A Passage to India Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, 1925 Moves to Steepletop Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Protests Sacco-Vanzetti 1927 trial The King's Henchman Kern’s Show Boat 1928 The Buck in the Snow Brecht’s Threepenny Opera 1931 Mother, Cora, dies Fatal Interview Begins regular radio broadcasts reading her The Princess Marries 1932 poetry the Page Huxley’s Brave New World Hitler becomes Fuhrer, 1934 Wine From These Grapes Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess Estranged father, Henry, Eliot’s Murder in the 1935 dies Cathedral Permanently weakened by car accident; Manuscript of morphine addiction Conversation at 1936 begins Flowers of Evil Midnight destroyed Gone With the Wind and The Conversation at Wizard of Oz on film, 1937 Midnight Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men 1939 Huntsman, What Quarry? Second World War begins Make Bright the Arrows, “There Are No Islands 1940 Any More” 1941 Collected Sonnets Citizen Kane 1942 Murder of Lidice Camus’ The Stranger 1943 Collected Lyrics Physical and mental “Poem and Prayer for an 1944 health in decline Invading Army” 1949 Eugen dies Miller’s Death of a Salesman 1950 Dies (October 19) 1954 Mine the Harvest 6

Part I. The Hidden Canon

“Nobody in the world but Edna Millay could have written these words of early love which burns with so clear a flame and yet is puzzled and appalled by its own brightness...” —Elinor Wylie reviewing The King’s Henchman

“I understand that this play is a great success on the stage, but I find that hard to believe. If I were a producer, I wouldn’t touch it…” —Eugen Boissevain, Millay’s husband, on Aria da Capo

“She has written more uneven books, but, in all the fourteen volumes, she has never been so insistently discursive and so consistently dull...” —Louis Untermeyer on Conversation at Midnight

“I don’t know. It is not really a play…” —Edna St. Vincent Millay on Conversation at Midnight

What I initially assumed to be a careless shelving mistake was the impetus of this study. Three years ago, in the drama section of a bookstore in Chicago, I ran across the name “Millay” on the spine of one of the books—The Lamp and the Bell. While I was familiar with all of Millay’s volumes of poetry, this edition was foreign to me. Upon inspection, I realized that there was no shelving mistake and I was indeed holding a play.

Never had I heard of Millay as anything other than a poet, and I immediately set about collecting information about her from a different perspective. My home library offered no clues about Millay’s second career; none of the prefatory material in any of my poetry books even mentioned Millay as a playwright. After a slow beginning, I successfully amassed a collection of Millay’s plays only by visiting rare bookstores and hunting for them across the internet. As each of them arrived in the mail, I observed a trend: they all appeared more or less to be verse plays. I was confused by the style and language of the plays because I understood Millay to have been a vanguard of modernity—one of the bohemian, sharp-witted voices of female poetry in a group of forward-looking writers in the 1920s and 1930s; yet here she had written verse plays set in the Renaissance. Not 7 knowing how to rationalize this apparent stylistic departure, I hoped to corroborate my own observations with critical responses to the works, yet they were as difficult to locate as the works themselves. Since that time, I have gathered a comprehensive collection of the extant scholarly research about the plays, positive and negative critical responses contemporaneous with their creation, and first editions of each of the plays. The discovery of a second Millay canon has perpetually intrigued me; moreover, it has revolutionized my impression and understanding of the author.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892—1950) is consistently championed as a major

American poet. In her life, she published twenty-two books including her widely respected volumes of poetry, a translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, collected prose works, five verse plays (we will get to the difficulty in classifying them as such), and a poem-play for radio. Millay was famously promiscuous, yet despite her bisexuality and open marriage, her acclaimed poetic work remained the foundation of her celebrity.

Living during a tumultuous period of American history, Millay’s voice was the vehicle for politically and philosophically serious matter; however, her most memorable poems communicate the rapturous emotions of love, catastrophe, and the glory of the world. In

1923, Millay was the first female recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and, in 1943, the second woman to win the Frost medal.1 Naturally, her less adroit works have fallen to the wayside in respect to criticism and reader accessibility— and, along with some less successful later war poems, her obsolete dramatic works comprise the bulk of these. Her series of dramatic works follows a path from the very light to the very grave, marking a steady change in theme. Her earliest dramatic works, Two Slatterns and a King and The

1 The Frost Medal celebrated her lifetime contributions to poetry, putting her in the company of fellow winners Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters, and later Wallace Stevens, Carl Sandburg, and Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Ginsberg. 8

Princess Marries the Page, both written at Vassar in the 1910’s, depict lighthearted subjects falling in and out of love. The trajectory ends with her dramatic work

Conversation at Midnight (1937). As we will see, that work is the absolute opposite of her first two attempts at drama. Not only had Millay matured by that time, but the world at large had entered into circumstances begging the artistic voice for more sincere expression. No longer staged in castle towers, Millay’s serious works Aria da Capo

(1922) and Conversation at Midnight place their characters, respectively, in a metatheatrical dimension of greed and ignorance and a liquor-filled parlor where politicized voices strain to be heard. Thus, both in her poetic career and in drama, Millay gradually assumed a more globally-relevant, less personally romantic voice.

After battling with these obscure texts and the equally obscure secondary materials regarding them, I am convinced that Millay scholarship is not sufficiently represented by poetic analysis alone. There is an unsettling circumstance inherent in the criticism of Millay’s two separate canons: on the poetic side, the general opinion is resoundingly positive, but the situation is quite the opposite when it comes to Millay’s dramatic canon. As a researcher trying to reconstruct miscellaneous commentaries and historical facts, I have attempted to catalog piecemeal critical attention, obsolete sources, and dissonant opinions. I have come to believe that Millay's endeavors as a dramatist are academically, artistically, and historically significant, but not necessarily as examples of triumph. In comparison to her more familiar poetics, this body of work portrays Edna St.

Vincent Millay as she is seldom rendered—as a sort of hidden failure. I believe that if we look closely, these plays can provide valuable insight into textual experimentation and 9 artistic growth, or at least complete a more honest profile of Millay as an artist, and a more truthful understanding of her as a literary icon.

In short, the purpose of this thesis is to re-examine Millay as a writer in a genre different from the one for which she is acclaimed. If she made any effective choices as a playwright, where are they, and what enabled them? Why did she write plays in the first place, if she seemed, all along, to recognize her superiority as a poet? If Edna St. Vincent

Millay had been a painter or a great guitarist, then the study of her “other arts” would offer valuable insight into Millay as a person interested in a variety of art forms. But this study compares two genres of writing by the same author, and studying them together is less for biographical sketching than for the completion of an unfinished authorial portrait.

To someone interested in Millay studies, a more inclusive study could be crucial for a proper authorial portrait. To a scholar of American poetry, this paper outlines the textual variation of one of its key players. The scholar of American theater history has potentially the most complex relationship with the topic of this paper, but I hope that I can offer an analytical study that attempts to define one writer’s path between the boundaries of poem and play. Showing how Millay created her own artistic policies, we might get an idea of her sense of shifting divisions between literary genres and how the reader’s attempt to rationalize these texts in terms of classification might proceed. With this study comes attention to authorial purpose and process, the reader’s expectations, and the juxtaposition of spectatorship to readership. All in all, a reader of this paper will advance in his or her comprehension of a body of dramatic works that has persistently eluded audiences, readers, critics, scholars, and even their author. 10

It has been a chore to re-rationalize my original conception of Millay's artistry; her dramatic and poetic works contain some common thematic and stylistic tendencies, but also some oppositional traits. Such caveats to unified comprehension deserve, I believe, to be granted importance in the study of Millay's work. Still, the works themselves, as unique individuals, have been difficult to understand as a group or miniature canon. And yet, their refusal to unify is still telling of the artist's mission in writing them. One finds, after all, that the only thing the plays technically share in common with their poetic counterparts is the suggestion—however slight—of the potential for performance. This is an unusual notion of performance, however, a notion unlike that which we generally use to read plays. The practical purpose of a play is generally the subsequent full execution of theatrical performance. In book form, some of

Millay’s dramatic texts are built for stasis only, and it remains to be seen whether or not theatrical production of them was or might be worth the effort.

I have felt, at times, as though I were forging, not following, a scholastic path. Indeed, in only two instances have Millay's dramatic works been critically regarded as a group. One of these occasions, Norman Brittin's chapter "Bean-Stalks is My Trade" in his collected critical essays on Millay, is superficial despite its attention to all of Millay’s dramatic works, whether published or not. Brittin ventures into analytical territory only enough to give his readers a cursory idea of each of the plays. Brittin caps the individual analyses with the following as exposition:

Writing drama appealed to Millay. She completed six plays, three in a play-writing course at Vassar, two on commission, and one—her most experimental achievement, the famous Aria da Capo—for the Provincetown Playwrights’ Theatre. Even the Vassar apprentice work is written with considerable skill. In most of the plays the themes of honor 11

and integrity predominate, and with romantic ideals of love and friendship. (65)

As an all-encompassing commentary on Millay’s dramatic canon, this barely scratches the surface. Brittin’s overview gives a description of each play’s historical background, plot outline, characters and general atmosphere, and ventures only briefly into evaluation.

By remaining objective and keeping to surface-level description, Brittin’s assessment avoids synthesizing the plays with regard to textuality.2 For example, in discussing The

Princess Marries the Page, Brittin declares, “a romantic work, the play has professional, realistic stage directions; but its atmosphere is child-like, that of a fairy-tale” (65). He nearly gets to the matter of deeper study when he says, later, “the play is in blank verse, with a good proportion of run-on lines. Yet it has a mixture of styles; the author has not attained a firm dramatic voice of her own” (67). But what Brittin’s—and, indeed, most others’—analysis fails to consider are the formal and sentimental elements of the plays which make them altogether peculiar in comparison to Millay’s poetry. Generalized commentary like this neglects the study I attempt to forge: that Millay’s dramas provide territory in which we can isolate their author’s path through experiments in voice and form, apart from her comparatively accepted and understood canon of poetry. Separating one half-canon from the other allows a greater capacity for surveying a writer’s journey.

We must consider why, in several moments of artistic decision, Millay chose the venue of drama to display her changing agenda, especially since it seems to have impeded her in her execution of politicized texts like Conversation at Midnight.

2 Throughout this study, “textuality” refers to the formal qualities of a work which, working as an aesthetic and/or technical system, categorize that work in a particular genre. 12

Although some modern scholars have wrestled with this curious body of work,3 I believe that they may have done more damage than good. They have applied clashing definitions to the works they examine, particularly Millay’s later, more avant-garde and political dramatic experiments that challenge categorization. As a result, the field of criticism in this half-canon is muddled. I would like to clear up the mess by providing textual guidelines by which I can more clearly file Millay’s dramatic works into textual types: this entails looking at publishing practices, advertising, statements made by Millay and her critics, with attention to performability and production history. I wish, additionally, to delineate the scant and scattered scholarship devoted to Millay’s dramas and to establish her as part of a group of modernist poet-playwrights (namely Eliot and

Cummings) who attempted to promote verse in drama. The opinions of Millay’s critics, modern and contemporaneous, have created an extremely inclusive portrait of Millay’s dramatics that I will expand for credence and context.

In contrast to criticism of her dramas, scholarship of Millay’s poetry is vast and generally corroborative. Interspersed throughout it is sporadic dramatic commentary and research that is by no means dismissible if we wish to understand Millay in a more complete double-disciplined light. This thesis illustrates what has already been seen and said, and then will embark on a mostly chronological study of Millay's life as a dramatist, concluding with some possible explanations for conflicting scholarship and relative obscurity. In the second chapter, I examine works in which Millay complied with dramatic conventions, and consequently produced performable texts. These works largely

3 Norman Brittin, as compiler of most of the critical coverage of Millay, is most visible in this group; also noteworthy are John J. Patton and William B. Thesing. Judith Nierman has created a bibliography of Millay criticism (largely reviews), and some of the theater-centered writers therein will be discussed in this paper: Louis Untermeyer and Carl Van Doren, to name two. 13 constitute her earlier, student endeavors at Vassar. The third chapter considers Millay’s less obvious body of dramatic work, in which she experimented with the dramatic form in works that are not officially plays. We may then discover why the works are—in respect to theatrical production—dead texts by deconstructing them into parts, to see how they are variably aligned and misaligned with dramatic convention. Millay’s straddling of genres often presents frustration for readers, spectators, and critics, past and contemporary—especially in the non-categorical works we are about to explore. This study, in an attempt to explain and justify the confusion of Millay criticism, will turn clashing definitions of texts. The discussion in the third chapter addresses Millay’s multi- genre dramatic works and the complex task endured by their readers and viewers, and how even Millay may not have been certain about her purpose or confident in her method. The verdict is clear—Millay’s skills as a playwright were inferior. By considering a set of fundamental differences between Millay’s sibling careers, I begin to explain why she failed as a dramatist, and whether or not we (as modern scholars and artists) should revisit these dead plays. The other option is to forget them entirely, as has been the fashion.

To my surprise, Millay’s self-critique might be the clearest, most definitive appraisal of her works to which we have access. In a 1947 letter that has been barely implicated in the extant scholarship on Millay’s canon of dramatic works, she bluntly expressed to her publisher her opinion of the works in question. Millay’s self-appraisal was so resoundingly negative that perhaps consideration of the letter discounts any serious investigation of the work it condemns. But I think it a document to important to discard. Interestingly, Millay’s self-judgement was most closely in line with the appraisal 14 of her enemies: the criticism written contemporaneously with the plays’ publication and production was primarily negative. However, there is a good deal of professed admiration of Millay’s dramas written by her friends. In that respect, much of it is distinctly out-of- tune with Millay’s own retrospective admonition of the plays, for she disagreed with her friends. Millay summarizes her dramas as a group of failures, but insists, strangely, on her competency as a dramatist:

As to your proposition that Harpers publish my Collected Dramatic Works, I am afraid I must disappoint you here, although I hate most dreadfully to do so. The fact is, I have too much pride and too much faith in myself as a dramatist, to permit the publication in one volume of [my plays]. (“Letter to Cass Canfield”)

That volume would have included a strange mix of pieces indeed. We would see in it two plays that are nothing more than playful romantic romps made of gaily-constructed poetry, but with little value otherwise. We would come across stylistic experiments as diverse as serious romance and the avant-garde. We would find also a dense philosophical drawing-room discussion, which would not be properly viewed in the manner of the others. There would be little technical or aesthetic correlation among the inclusions. And, as I will show it would leave out a good deal of Millay’s dramatic work—pieces that are not officially plays, but whose reliance upon dramatic form make them integral to this study.

When I discuss Millay's dramatic works, I include the "canonical" plays studied by the former two cataloguers, but I extend the boundaries of the search to include works which neither Brittin nor Millay would be right in calling "plays." My examination of

Millay's "dramatic works" includes any text that is built of performative elements. Bits of dialogue and stage directions appear liberally throughout Millay's poetry and prose, and 15 these works have not been factored into any study of Millay as a dramatist. I see such works as fascinating and potentially telling places in which we might observe Millay in a more experimental, liberated sense. Through them, we can view Millay’s dramatic works as a trajectory from immaturity to sophistication in terms of larger import, but they represent simultaneously a waning dedication to artistic unity. That decline vexes the reader as much as sophomoric storytelling does. In other words, readers have been challenged by texts from all stages of Millay’s dramatic career to either connect with trivial material, or to strain to comprehend more sophisticated texts that suffer from overly complex and uneven structure.

One challenge is the task of classifying Millay’s “plays” as various types of documents, some far more play-like than others. If we take “play” in its practical sense to mean a script for performance, then Millay wrote five. If we wish to count any piece of writing that resembles a play in format, but may or may not be intended (or even suitable) for performance, Millay wrote six. If we extend the boundaries just a bit further to include texts designed for limited media and format, Millay wrote eight “plays” altogether. And it remains yet that any play might be considered a poem, and any poem a play. Denis Donoghue works through the terminology needed in this study in his book about verse, The Third Voice. In the introduction, he says, “poetic drama, verse drama, prose drama, dramatic verse, dramatic poetry—we have a generous supply of terms, yet we confuse our speech by blurring their outlines” (3). The very nature of this study lies in the omnipresence of outlines, which have become irrevocably “blurred” in a canon we are attempting to define and rescue from confusion. Dongohue’s terms are all relevant; however, in Millay’s canon of works, there are unclear divisions between as basic terms 16 as “poem” and “play.” Indeed, this is due to the pieces’ more accurate definition as one of the two-part terms outlines by Donoghue, which all account for some textual hybrid of a type of genre and an overall acoustic or visual character.

In this paper, the terminology is determined by Millay’s ultimate intention for any individual work. The lexicon, then, is divided into terms that denote various levels of performability. Thus, at the first end of the spectrum, we have “play,” which will encompass any of Millay’s works that physically contains all the necessary attributes of a script for performance, and has at least a minute history as such. At the other end we can place the “dramatic work,” the broadest term, which can take virtually any formal shape as long as it contains language reminiscent of dialogue. For the most part, these two terms work in opposition to one another in my study, although “dramatic work” is divided into a couple of subcategories. Millay inserted passages of dramatic dialogue into prose within a single volume; this will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. She also included shorter works made entirely of dialogue within a volume containing prose works; these will be named “playlets” after John J. Patton’s example. Finally, in one instance Millay included several short dramatic works into a volume of poems; because they mimic the metrical features of the surrounding poetry, it will be best to think of such works as “dramatic poems.” This work first explores Millay’s dramatic works that are indisputably plays, and then broadens the focus to address works that span multiple genres. 17

Although several of Millay’s plays were given runs at prominent theatres, they generally failed to extend beyond first printing,4 and (as mentioned) Millay is rarely listed in encyclopedias of American dramatists. In fact, literary scholar H. H. Anniah Gowda is quick to establish a hierarchy of artists of value in the study of poet-dramatists.

Conveniently included is Millay, who is deemed inconsequential:

Some American writers of twentieth-century verse-drama will be overlooked because, though their plays are by no means inconspicuous, they are considered here as having relatively small poetic merit. This holds true for the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay [….] Probably of highest interest to the theorist are works of major poets that are not plays but are essentially dramatic. (284)

Listed among the “major poets” that are worthwhile in Gowda’s exploration are Frost,

Stein, and Jeffers. However, the Millay canon is nonetheless doubled if her verse dramas are considered, and we might as well treat her works with the same consideration the others receive. Interestingly, in line with Gowda’s last sentence, I see some of Millay’s most compelling work surfacing from her non-play inventions. I hope to take what is, comparatively, a failed body of work, and examine it from a new angle using more technical, artistic, and historical consideration.

The preliminary condition to understand is that, for all their physical differences,

Millay’s poems and plays are built of many of the same materials. Her way of articulating the most mystifying of human emotions, her cleverness, her ability to command the audience’s attention—these virtues are present everywhere on either side of the double- canon. And just as she wrote poems from early girlhood, so did she experiment with the play form, and consequently Millay’s dramatic agenda (the themes and inherent messages

4 An exception is Millay’s opera libretto, The King’s Henchman, which experienced eighteen printings in its first year, 1927. I attribute that fact to the emphatic reception of a surprisingly well-executed American opera production: at the time, few thought that was possible. 18 of works in both canons) mirrors the motivational progression of her poetry. Millay’s agenda progresses chronologically from whimsy and innocence to propaganda marked by a mature, acute, critical voice. By studying the restrictions of language, convention, and agenda, we might begin to understand Millay as a dramatist and endeavor to rationalize her comparative insignificance in that genre. Wherever her artistic choices sacrificed favorable public and critical reception, I will attempt to explain why; conversely, I will also try to pinpoint the haphazard victories characterizing Millay’s plays and their collective history. I hope to discover where Millay’s dramatic and poetic works echo each other, co-existing as two sides of a canon, and establishing the qualities in which they are so disparate in both shape and reception that they do not or should not work together in characterizing Millay’s career. I am interested in finding what is essential in Millay’s body of theatrical work. By doing so, I may attempt to compare certain qualities to their poetic counterparts.

Finally, let us add another piece of evidence to this mystery, discussing and dismissing it before we proceed. While living in Paris from 1921 to 1923, Millay worked on a novel, a Candide-like allegory called Hardigut. Her efforts were fruitless: according to a widespread rumor at the time, Millay returned from Europe, reported to her publisher to discuss how to proceed, asked for her manuscript, and tore it to shreds. “Her admirers whisper something about “literary conscience.” The cynics add something about her

Nancy Boyd5 prose style endangering her reputation as a poet” (“Paris, the Literary

Capital of the United States”). This writer’s juxtaposition of admirers and cynics is fundamental—we will see how their co-existence has affected extant critical

5 Nancy Boyd was Millay’s pseudonym, first used in juvenalia, and most notably in her prose pieces for Vanity Fair during her years in Paris. 19 commentary. The notion of “literary conscience” suggests, too, that Millay’s faltering in her ventures outside poetry was entirely apparent to her, her agents, and to the

“whispering admirers.” That Millay prevailed in her favorable public reception despite faltering in the theatre is a testament to her poetry. That she did falter has been my invitation to further examine works that have been dismissed as though they were mistakes. Biographer Nancy Milford, who apparently saw Millay’s notes for the novel, remarks, “while she’d certainly learned in her Vanity Fair experience how to craft short prose pieces with wit and considerable skill, Hardigut was not a short take. Among the many scenes in her notebook or on odd scraps of paper, there’s no sense of an integrated story moving smartly forward. [….] She seemed unable to sustain a novel” (Savage

Beauty 248). Perhaps Edna St. Vincent Millay was so well attuned to the conceptualization and execution of a poem that she simply could not shine under unfamiliar conditions. 20

Part II. “Ostentatious and Pedantic Drivel”

The play is too slight to be printed so seriously. What I really want—and if it is too expensive just now to bring it out in this way, then I would really rather wait, I think, until everybody has more money—what I really want is a big, flat book perhaps 14 by 10 with many colored illustrations…I want the book to be a Christmas gift book and as gaudy as a Christmas tree… —Millay writing to her editor regarding the publication of The Princess Marries the Page, 1932

At Vassar from 1914 to 1917, Millay was sequestered from the world of professional theatre. In respect to the arts, she was living in a place very much skewed in comparison to the real world—as a dramatist in a microcosm, Millay’s playwriting had only to meet the requirements of her coursework and delight the college community.

Biographical material suggests that “Vincent” enjoyed writing plays, especially for her college community, and that personal enjoyment and satisfaction would have moved her to dabble in playwriting outside the classroom. Anyone who has read Millay’s childhood journals and eyewitness accounts of her family understands that Millay was always prone to dramatics—in the household, in the flamboyancy and characterization of her letters, and, as we will consider, even in her poetry. Nevertheless, the first three of Millay’s official plays were written either under the auspices of the Vassar curriculum or in its honor for the institution’s own use, and thus we can observe them with a certainty of

Millay’s authorial purpose in writing them.

Millay’s dramatic work as a student is difficult to understand in terms of distinctively academic work because we know that Millay was generally a renegade. For example, one of her papers in the Millay archives at Vassar—a history exam circa

1916—illustrates her nerve: recounting Spain’s conquests in bold cursive, Millay justified a military move facetiously, “the Spanish, being Spanish….” The archival boxes 21 are full of cheeky phrases, many of them written in apology to Vassar’s dean after some infringement. But often, even for rebellious students, the grade is the thing, and despite her insubordination, Millay still performed well academically. Millay’s conventional artistry in writing plays at Vassar must have been influenced by the threat of university reprimand. Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, one of Millay’s teachers, took a moment in her retrospective article “Vincent at Vassar” to mollify Millay’s scholarly reputation: “to be sure, Vincent was often erratic in attendance on her courses, but, when present, she could stir a teacher and electrify a class” (6). At school, Millay supplemented a lifelong self- tutelage in dramatic literature; in a letter of application to Vassar, Millay supplied her judges with a list of the canonical works with which she was familiar, citing Shakespeare,

Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and Congreve, among others (“Letter to Miss Dow”). During her years at Vassar she enrolled in Henry Noble MacCracken’s English drama class and

Gertrude Buck’s course on the technique of the drama in addition to an array of English literature and composition classes (Haight 6).

Socially, too, Millay attached herself to numerous dramatic projects and pageants, and her notoriety on campus was fuelled by a definite talent and celebrated mystique.

Haight recalls, “her first appearance on the stage, I believe, was when at a classical soiree arranged by the students she recited in Latin Catullus’ ‘Passer Mortuus est’ with a dead song-sparrow, loaned by the Museum of Natural History, held tenderly in her hands” (7).

The image is at once comical and intriguing—a vaguely odd, sublime little performance augmented by a presumably priceless bird furnished by a major institution. It seems from vignettes like this that Millay’s resources were vast and her assistance from the College enthusiastic. Evidently, her faculty patrons and classmates felt there was some worth in 22 her performances, both on page and stage. Outside Vassar’s walls, Millay would meet with quite different circumstances and far less support.

In the program for its premiere in 1917, Millay’s first dramatic work The Princess

Marries the Page is listed alongside two other plays premiering that May: the others were authored by Virginia Archibold and Ellen Lee Hoffman, two of Millay’s fellow students.

The little program is simple enough and does not seem particularly informative until one reads over the brief setting descriptions presented as captions to the play titles. “Shallows by Archibold… Time: An Afternoon in September, Scene: The living room of the

Livingstons’ House in a fashionable Long Island Summer Colony. Just Outside by

Hoffman… Time: During the resent war, Place: A hill town in Northern Italy.” Millay stands out. “The Princess Marries the Page by Millay… Time: Some other time, Place:

Somewhere else” (“Program for The Vassar Workshop,” 1917). Millay is already brave with her theatrics, exhibiting such boldness even in the play’s paratext. Even so, The

Princess Marries the Page is the most indisputably conventional and unified of Millay’s performed dramatic works.

The play’s setting is simple and unchanging, and, were it not for the power of love, so are its characters. Whereas in Millay’s other dramas the text does not immediately suggest performance, Princess certainly does—it is bare-bones enough for virtually any three or four actors to accomplish it believably and true-to-text. And although it is alarmingly plain in construction and content, the play appears to hinge itself with enough romance and humor to be passingly delightful on stage. In the Canfield letter, Millay remarked, “The Princess Marries the Page is romantic and sentimental. [It 23 is] well constructed. It is easy to act, and pretty to watch and listen to. It is a good little play, but of no importance” (“Letter to Cass Canfield”).

At the time of its publication in 1932, Princess had experienced four productions: its 1917 inauguration with an all-female cast at Vassar (starring the author), that same year at the Bennett School (again with an all-female cast), at the Provincetown Playhouse the following year with a gendered cast (directed by and starring Millay), and at the

Cosmopolitan Club in 1930 with a gendered cast. The latter was made possible by the discovery of the script at Steepletop by Mary Kennedy when she and Deems Taylor were visiting. This was a play whose actual use was not actively promoted or even enabled by its author: here is born the notion of play as reading text and nothing more. Millay wrote in the preface: “On reading over to myself The Princess Marries the Page, I found that I liked it much better than I had expected to do. It was unmistakably a youthful work, and very slight, but I thought it rather pretty. And I had a desire to see it among my published books. So here it is” (xii). The words “see” and “books” are fascinating, as they designate authorial intention as something quite different from what is usually the aim of a play—to be the blueprint of performance. But Millay uses more static terms here. She wants only to “see” it in the sense of noting its presence upon the shelf: it is just another book. So the relationship between text, its author, and the public is off kilter—it is as though Millay thought, “the play is cute, and I can ask to have it published if I feel like it.” There are no certain grounds to accuse Millay of vanity or flippancy in a situation we can never be sure of, but Millay never offers Princess to her public as a grand or special piece, and seems merely to have wanted to add it to her collection of accomplishments. 24

Regardless of its backstory or fate, The Princess Marries the Page is a decent enough play. The decency, however, comes sheerly from its compactness, unity, and spritely charm. Millay knew as we know that it offers little more than that. The staging relies on conventional comedic tricks—the Page hides outside the Princess’s window, and she speaks unnaturally loudly so that he can hear her subliminal warning when his hunters arrive in the tower where they have been flirting. The subtleties of the language provide the essence of the play’s intelligence, as the language is cleverly underlined by a firm sense of morality. For example, the Princess is protecting the Page, for whom she feels the strange pangs of first love. So she tells the search party that the Page they seek is not “in the tower,” and alas, he is not—he is clinging to the exterior. The Princess’s language embodies both honesty and trickery, a duality that gives the play its charm.

Millay’s language in Princess is easily dismissable as fluff and the play’s treatment of love is certainly among Millay’s most flippant, but we must keep in mind that she wrote it as a young girl; some pieces of a prototype were written even before her

Vassar years. So, although it is easy to condemn the lightness of the play, I suggest that we place it near the beginning of a complex scale of a career, by the end of which Millay reaches commanding, penetrating levels of dramatic language. A representative interchange from the Princess end of the scale might be,

PRINCESS Yet, surely in your pocket still remains Some certain cure for sorrow! Let me look! [She makes room for him on the window ledge; he jumps up beside her] Give all you have, and I will choose among them! Oh, what is that? PAGE That is a striped stone To keep away the fairies. PRINCESS [Examining it] But who wants To keep away the fairies? (17) 25

Mechanically, Millay attempts some of the classicized form that is developed later in The

King’s Henchman, by experimenting with contractions. For instance, we see “There’s been no page i’ the tower—you’ll come upon him/ Asleep somewhere i’ the sun, mayhap,” and later, “As ‘tis—troth’s me! I know not!” (8). Such constructions, however inauthentic and unevenly placed, serve to embed Millay’s scene in a much more specific time and place than “in a tower long ago,” and color the language in an appropriate tone for the desired atmosphere. Overall, the dialogue is versatile, punctuated by asides and monologues and employing lively banter and rhetorical twists of the truth to create an entertaining narrative. Brittin notes the undertones of influences:

The play is in blank verse, with a good proportion of run-on lines. Yet it has a mixture of styles; the author has not attained a firm dramatic voice of her own. An early passage, set off from the main body of the verse and supposed to be from the book the Princess is reading, sounds Tennysonian, or Pre-Raphaelite: “So then the maiden came/ Clothed all in delicate colours, like a garden,/ And very sweet to smell…” (66)

Brittin also mentions notes of John Webster, especially in the Princess’s ruminations on death, and king-to-daughter Shakespearean stylization (66). Even in Millay’s earliest works, she tried to establish a sense of credibility in her work by echoing the masters of classic drama. From a directing and performing point of view, this play is one of the few in which stage directions are cogent and non-decorative. Each parenthetical supplies useful staging direction and the proper subtleties necessary for accurate performance—in

Millay’s later dramatic works, stage directions and character descriptions eclipse the dialogue in terms of interest and complexity (the best example is Millay’s final dramatic work, Conversation at Midnight). Later, stage directions and character descriptions are much less for use than for show. 26

The Princess and her Page meet a happy ending, and the audience leaves having heard lovely music and having seen a light play that ends sweetly. But it is not the type of insightful material that stays with the viewer. With Millay’s eventually provocative and profound work in mind, this is not legendary: much of Millay’s virtue as a playwright comes from authorial maturity and courage, and The Princess Marries the Page has little to show of that. It is bracingly conventional in all respects. Save for some telltale lines of distinctive pluckiness, it could have been written by any number of mediocre young playwrights. There is nothing compelling about the story to compensate for the play’s faults—Millay is consistently more effective in articulating themes (like love) in poetry:

Not in a silver casket cool with pearls Or rich with red corundum or with blue, Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls Have given their loves, I give my love to you; Not in a lovers'-knot, not in a ring Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain— Semper fidelis, where a secret spring Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain: Love in the open hand, no thing but that, Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt, As one should bring you cowslips in a hat Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt, I bring you, calling out as children do: "Look what I have!—And these are all for you." (“Sonnet lxxx”)

This is representative of Millay’s best pictures of the sensation of love; coming from the inside out, the sentiment is honest. All that we get from The Princess Marries the Page is the observation of a romp, the underpinnings of which we can only presume to be there.

Two Slatterns and a King is an eleven-page quart-d’heure with four archetypal characters only: the King, Chance, Tidy, and Slut. In the “Persons” page, Chance is defined as “the Vice,” Tidy as the “false Slattern,” and Slut as the “true Slattern.”

Because of the use of archetypes and its presentation of a maxim, Two Slatterns can be 27 classified as a morality play in the traditional style. In terms of production, Two Slatterns is definitely feasible, and I imagine it could be effective as the tight, fast, slightly grotesque piece it seems to be. In fact, just by reading the play, one visualizes the characters as caricatures, not people. Slut could cut quite a figure on the stage, with her dirty face and defiant attitude. From a performer’s perspective, then, Two Slatterns could be an amusing project. There is no documented performance history of the play, however.

I assume this is due to the play’s inconsequential effect or to its brevity, although it is not a bad play (it even made it into Millay’s self-described triptych of “good plays”).

The play opens with a prologue spoken by Chance, very much in the manner of

“Two households/Both alike in dignity/In fair Verona, where we lay our scene.” That is to say, in a neat package of twelve lines, it is revealed to the spectator exactly what lesson the play will deliver:

You shall be taught what way a King Though a sublime and awful thing And even wise, may come to be A laughing-stock—and all through me! (3)

Millay has not obscured the nature of this character Chance; Chance is the embodiment of providence, perhaps doom. He (or she) is a self-proclaimed “cunning infidel,” so the spectator braces his or her self to watch the King’s ruination. When he enters, as Chance exits from the prologue, he, too, presents himself to the spectator:

I am the King in all this land: I hold a scepter in my hand; Upon my head I wear a crown; Everybody stands when I sit down. [Sits.] (3)

Millay presumably wants the audience to stand at this request, and whether they do or not, the invocation is theatrical and confrontational. Of course, Chance declines to honor 28 the King—he or she reenters, invisible to the monarch, and tells the audience that he sits when he likes. Over the course of his next speech, the King soliloquizes about his general discontentment and, aided by the subconscious cues from Chance, decides that the obvious reason for his sadness is loneliness, but he does not want a woman in his fine house. Chance forewarns; tomorrow the King’s mind may change.

Tidy enters and gives the spectator a tour of her spotless kitchen, pointing out every detail from her “orderly pairs” of chairs to her perfectly sharpened knives. Tidy cheerily chronicles her daily ritual of washing, re-washing, and how she sings all the while. She exits and Slut appears, who proclaims that she spends her days “in slovenly ease.” Slut is the total opposite of Tidy, their difference illustrated by an account of her kitchen. She says:

My table sags beneath the weight Of stale food and unwashed plate; The cat has tipped the pitcher o’er— The greasy cream drips onto the floor; Under the table is a broken cup— I am too tired to pick it up. (6)

Both Tidy and Slut are affirmative about their individual nature; each describes herself as if she is singing her personal anthem.

By this time in the narrative, the reader or spectator has a sense of the lyric effect of Two Slatterns: the passages are neat, the lines short and predictably rhymed, and the language exudes a sing-song effect. Of course, the simplicity and charm suit the nature of the matter. Again, Millay has picked a simple tale to tell in simple terms. There is little to read into or examine beyond a superficial level. As reviewed in Booklist, Two Slatterns and a King is, “a fanciful, one-act play in verse, first produced at Vassar college, in which the jade Chance causes the King to marry a slattern instead of the tidy bride he 29 desired. Slight but amusing” (Thesing 47). The play is also referred to as “a merry, unabashed imitation of a Renaissance interlude written in four-beat couplets. It has something of the tone of John Heywood’s interludes as well as the fluency of Chaucer.

Chance, the ‘cunning infidel’ who manages the action, is more like Puck of A

Midsummer Night’s Dream than the Vice of a morality play” (Brittin 66) Here Brittin suggests that little or none of Slatterns can be fully accredited to Millay; it is merely an amalgamation of stock characters and forms. True, in considering the profundity of later works in Millay’s canon, this play stands out as glaringly trite. It must be remembered, however, that Two Slatterns was written not for some great public commission or even at the bequest of Harper’s—it was meant only as a romp at Vassar. It was never intended to stand for poetic innovation or poignancy or allegorical artistry. In the case of this play and others, chronology and intention are crucial in rationalizing Millay’s dramatic works.

The Lamp and the Bell is one of Millay’s lesser-reviewed pieces because its production history apparently never exceeded the grounds of Vassar College. Its lifespan, then, has been spent mostly as a book. It was written by commission of Vassar’s

Alumnae Association for the institution’s fiftieth anniversary festival in 1921. This is the first of Millay’s plays that I encountered, the one that alerted me to her “other” career. At the time of my discovery I boarded a train and rode for two hours straight, for no logical reason other than to be uninterrupted in my reading. I thought The Lamp and the Bell a beautiful play. I was spellbound despite its flaws and incongruities, forgiving its inadequacies because of the poignancy of its poetry. My encounters with Millay’s dramatic work since then have left me less impressed, as the inconsistency of their 30 general shape and quality have presented so many obstacles that, as a reader, I have felt more bewildered than entertained.

A previous owner of my copy of The Lamp and the Bell, who apparently attempted to direct it, omitted or combined via pencil sixteen of the thirty named characters, as well as (I presume) the infinite number of “Courtiers, Ladies-in-Waiting,

Soldiers, Pages, Musicians, Townspeople, and Children” introduced in the cast of characters. With a population of upwards of sixty to seventy people, Lamp’s stage career was perhaps properly relegated to the festival setting at Vassar, for it would be virtually impossible (in terms of both money and space) to stage it commercially in a true-to-text manner. In addition, the cohesion of the play is as damaged by time as it is by human volume. Aristotelian unity was evidently not valued, although with such diverse scenes, characters, and sub-plots, it would have helped by at least some unified elements to give the reader a sense of cohesion in the world of the story. Instead, the plot time spans approximately ten years, with a four-year jump between a brief prologue scene and the next. The prologue shows two courtiers, Anselmo and Luigi, discussing the fate of the

King’s love-life, as he has just lost his Queen. The men talk about the impossibility that the King’s child would never love a new mother as she loved the Queen, and the equal probability that the King would remarry. The prologue ends after one page with a straightforward set-up of the plot:

Luigi. If tales be true, The woman hath a daughter, near the age Of his, will be a playmate for the Princess. [CURTAIN.] (Three Plays 49)

The play is adapted from the classical story of Rose-White and Rose-Red. The prologue turns out to correctly predict the fate of the two young girls, Beatrice and 31

Bianca, who form a sisterly attachment bound by remarkably strong love. They are ever- devoted to one another, even as Beatrice falls in love with King Mario. That love is thwarted when it is Bianca whom the court selects as Mario’s bride, and Beatrice buries her broken heart for Bianca’s sake. With Bianca’s departure from the court imminent, some of the play’s most beautiful lines are uttered,

Bianca. —and I shall think of you Whenever I am most happy, whenever I am Most sad, whenever I see a beautiful thing. You are a burning lamp to me, a flame The wind cannot blow out, and I shall hold you High in my hand against whatever darkness. Beatrice. You are to me a silver bell in a tower. And when it rings I know I am near home. (Three Plays 95)

This verse is still simple, straightforward—but it lacks the showiness of the language in

Princess and Two Slatterns. Here, the solemnity of the true situation is represented accurately by characters’ speech; it is not lampooned, it is not made to be funny. It is, extraordinarily, much closer to reality in terms of emotion, and subsequently feels more sincere. This sort of even, somber, throbbing confessional speech is later mastered in The

King’s Henchman, Millay’s opera libretto. Both there and in Lamp, cleverness is not sacrificed at all, as it keeps a home with the courtiers and ladies who are removed from the unfolding love stories. There is a good balance of sharp wit and somber melancholia characterizing the play. In fact, Millay’s humor is showcased quite well in scenes that refresh the reader who feels touched by the more serious scenes:

Beatrice. Fidelio, do you make a better jest than that At once, or have the clappers cut from them. Fidelio. Alas, alas—all the good jests are made. I made them yesterday. (Three Plays 53) 32

Just as Slut in Two Slatterns kept up her end of the banter, even the laymen in this court are dazzlingly sharp. Grazia, Bianca and Beatrice’s nurse, enters the scene and engages in philosophical banter, but forgets why she has come into the garden: “What did I come here for?—I must go/back/To where I started, and think of it again!” After she exits,

Carlotta says, “Are you sure that/ you remember where you started?/—That woman hath a head like a sieve.” (Three Plays 55). Much in the manner of a Shakespearean nurse,

Grazia is a lowly person, and perhaps sieve-headed, but she retains enough to keep herself strikingly bright. Nearly every exeunt in the play is punctuated with a neat joke or bit of metaphor, and although this seems a safe gag, the jokes are consistently keenly constructed and pleasingly delivered. As the play progresses, closing jibes are replaced by earnest promises and farewells. The play’s development is so evenly gradual that a survey of scenes’ final lines nearly serves as a competent skeleton of the plot.

By allowing all of her characters to inhabit a heightened intellect, Millay gives her play(s) a unified intelligence that promotes sense of universality. In that respect, it seems as though these three plays could have happened in the same kingdom. Moreover, judging from their canonical tone, these classical plays could have been written by a certain poet we know. In this second play, Millay continues to experiment with archaisms to create speech that matches time and place. The consistency of her reversion to old- fashioned language and setting is difficult to make sense of if the reader is familiar with

Millay’s more modern poems. There are, nonetheless, many instances of archaism in

Millay’s poems, so dependant upon the sonnet form and classical themes, to canonically ground her retrograde dramas. Poet Agnes Kendrick Gray said:

Because it is tuned to the pitch of Mediaeval life, the verse of The Lamp and the Bell is of course more archaic at times than is usual with Edna St. 33

Vincent Millay, whose unhampered poetry is crisp and modern. Yet there flows through the play the same piquancy of expression, that whimsical turn of a phrase so often found in her short poems, and her blank verse is instinct with dramatic sense, a quality which is also apparent in her dramatic work. (“A Poet’s Play”)

Millay’s own opinion of Lamp was likewise divided, but less favorable, although she thought it “well constructed.” In the Canfield letter, she wrote, “it is not, like The King’s

Henchman, diffuse, crowded with detail, and verbose (verbose in Anglo-Saxon!) But whereas The King’s Henchman…is often full and rich, the blank verse of The Lamp and the Bell seldom rises above the merely competent.” From the standpoint of a reader, The

Lamp and the Bell is not as confusingly “diffuse” and “crowded with detail” as the opera libretto, but Millay goes on to say something very interesting that applies to all of her plays: “five acts of uninspired writing, with only here and there a line, or two or three lines at most, to light up the page—and by no means every page—this is not good enough” (“Letter to Cass Canfield,” 1947).

There is no mistaking the play’s primary flaw—any emotional impact the plot may evoke in the spectator is ruined by the lack of unity of time—between scenes there are lapses of years. This would be more manageable if there were not so many characters, each with individual story lines, to keep track of. In Princess and Two

Slatterns, the audience is strung along by consistently building action (however predictable it may be) and the resolution is delivered quickly enough to be entertaining.

The same compression of action and time is needed to make tragedy succeed. Prolonged doom is tedious, and good lines seem nearly patronizing along the journey. Brittin observes this, too, saying, “the tragic effect is weakened by the pageantlike succession of scenes spread out over an action covering more than a dozen years and by some 34 dependence on the spectacular and melodramatic” (77). It may have been sufficient pomp for a Vassar celebration (parents attending their children’s school performances are spellbound no matter how bad the play is), but it never could have sufficiently pleased off-campus appetites. Still, Millay is right in recognizing some excellent phrases among the mess, especially the passage cited above which gives the play its title.

The notion of greatness imbedded in badness established by Millay’s self- criticism is universally true for the plays. But giving oneself up to the drudgery of reading through mediocrity, panning for gold as it were, is something few readers are willing to do. As one of them, I have to try to imagine what it must be like for less optimistic readers. I think Millay’s objective self-appraisal is spot on, and can account for a great portion of this study’s matter. Furthermore, to read through a play in comfort and silence to discover the fantastic phrases is one thing, but to sit in a drafty theatre amid coughing fellow sufferers is another! A good line in such a setting has far less sparkle.

Thus far, we have become acquainted with Millay as a student playwright, and several trends have emerged. In all three plays, she remained faithful to classical themes and stories, and her language was accordingly crafted. Millay’s traditionalism is common between her first plays and many of her poems, creating within both canons a similarly nostalgic tone. But on stage, nostalgia is far more than a pitch among words—Millay’s dramas dictate a multi-dimensional journey into dead times and places, into a vortex of chivalry and sentimentalism quite out of the modern realm. We have seen a generally sophomoric quality in Millay’s characters and dialogue. In The Princess Marries the

Page and The Lamp and the Bell, everyone seems to be beautiful, love-sick, and devoted instantly to one another. In both of these, as well as in Two Slatterns and a King, the 35 characters are all directly tied to the monarchy, and the action happens either inside royal walls or on some kingly jaunt into town. Therefore, Millay’s drama resides in the topmost economic tier of a classical hierarchy, and their characters are thus imbued with a sense of pompous decorum. Even Slut in Two Slatterns speaks with the fluid wit of Lamp’s

Bianca or Beatrice.

All of Millay’s aforementioned works were immeasurably but surely dictated in shape and style by its collegiate purpose. In this light, the emphasis is on each piece’s certain exuberant, youthful effect and brief lifespan. Millay resurrected The Princess

Marries the Page, Two Slatterns and a King, and The Lamp and the Bell by submitting them for publication after college, but their textual lives could not have been predicted as such during their construction. Also unpredictable was Millay’s success as a playwright outside Vassar gates: when she graduated in 1917, she left the comfort of a campus and the nurturing embrace of an enthusiastic community. It was time to find acceptance in a much harsher professional realm.

What was happening in the “real world” at this time in terms of movements in

American theatre? Edna St. Vincent Millay was emerging from college in the company of countless regular college kids, but she was entering as a participant into a complex and historical decade in the arts. American theater was looking backward, still, to decades-old vaudeville-heavy bills and a sampling of foreign tastes. The real pivotal work, more definitive of the era, was being written, produced, hated, and loved in Europe. Russia, throughout the 1920’s, was under the artistic rule of the didactic theatre, the Communist

Party’s attempt to reform public minds through art. The most anti-conventional movements of all came out of the aftermath of World War I, in German expressionism 36 and its American hybrid. Here, lyricism, aesthetics, and all other conventions were released and reconsidered in order to evoke most articulately the human condition in a devastated post-war era. Abstraction was born, and a revival of the grotesque was welcomed as truthfulness. There were, assuredly, very few castle towers or lutes.

Brecht’s6 work in theatre was a kind of renovation during which theatre was established as a tool for social change: as a result of that, assembly lines and common laborers were fair game as subject matter. Considering the nature of Millay’s earliest dramatic subjects, she was, before Aria da Capo, out of line with the global trends in the field. When she grew into the more serious, socially reflexive agenda of her colleagues, Millay aligned herself with the overarching practices of modernity. As we will see, however, her works as singular specimens of that mission could not retain enough power to claim importance as masterpieces of the movement.

In America, playwrights like Eugene O’Neill took bold chances in linguistic experimentation, shaping the speech of his characters to echo the speech of the working- class demographic. Arguably the most successful playwright of Millay’s era, O’Neill has received steady critical applause since his plays’ conception and even Pulitzer Prizes (we must remember, of course, that Millay was awarded one for poetry—the first given to woman). Granted, I have not seen an O’Neill sonnet, which would surely lead me to my next hidden-canon study, but it is safe to call O’Neill a prodigious dramatist—one who has fostered—not impeded or baffled—scholarship. He is a prized icon of the American

6 Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was born six years after Millay; his death came another six years after hers. Although working in different geographical spheres, Millay was part of the American theatre when Brecht’s Marxist influence was reaching overseas. His realization of theatre as a tool for change was revolutionary, and its aesthetic effects crept onto the American stage primordially in works by O’Neill et al. Unfortunately, it is hard to be sure of the exposure Millay had to Brecht’s theatre, but it is undeniable that the American stage was during her time was re-functioning itself in some of the same ways as the extremely socio-political German theatre scene. 37 theatre, and, I believe, justly so. Among the virtues of his plays is a keen understanding of current human emotion and behavior among society’s many strata. In The Hairy Ape, his legendary character Yank emerges from the stoke-hole of his ship to have a glimpse at the clean, impersonal public buzzing along the streets:

YANK. …I’m steel and steam and smoke and de rest of it. It moves– speed– twenty-five stories up– and me at de top and bottom– movin’! Youse simps don’t move. You’re only dolls I wind up to see ‘em spin... [But as they seem neither to see nor hear him, he flies into a fury... He turns into a rage on the Men, bumping viciously into them but not jarring them the least bit. Rather it is he who recoils after each collision...] (Scene 5)

O’Neill’s vibrantly crafted character possesses dimensional language that is perfectly matched by innate fury and power—his speech is complemented by gesture, the panorama onstage a metaphorical contrast between darkness and lightness, which are inter-changeable. O’Neill suggests that a man from the world’s bottom rung is worthy of a strong speech, and worthy of carrying a play. Thus, we see a unification of artfully wrought diction and scene and socially potent artistic expression. Millay gets close to that kind of success only once—in Aria da Capo—and I will show how that quality positions it as her most notable and justifiably remembered dramatic work. Without the commission or expectation of the College, Millay produced her first autonomous work,

Aria da Capo, which earned the only praise and lasting notoriety of her playwriting career. The success of Aria came from its unified simplicity as a script, which allowed it to be produced easily while harboring deep, allegorical philosophy. It is the first of

Millay’s dramatic works that is not meant to be merely what it appears to be.

Moving into the 1920’s, American theatre transformed from tired repertoires of melodrama and timid artistic ventures into a rebellious, raw crossroads of society and art. 38

We will address her language later, but when we place her in time artistically, we find that Millay did not exactly match up with her contemporaries in terms of convention. She drank with them, she slept with them…. she even acted and produced plays with them.

Her dramatic work is advanced, like theirs, in modern wit and formal innovation, yet steadfastly allegiant in most cases to romantic lyricism. Nevertheless, Millay was born into professional theatre just on the cusp of drastic, social artistic movements at a time when American theatre was transitioning into the next episode, no longer obligated to the production of merriment.

In 1918, three years after being established by Jig Cook and Susan Glaspell,7 the

Provincetown Players of Massachusetts presented The Princess Marries the Page,

Millay’s first professional gig (albeit in a repurposed fish-shack). Sharing the bill was

O’Neill’s Where the Cross is Made (Bordman 92). The next year, the Players were bold in casting black performers in O’Neill’s The Dreamy Kid, securing the company notoriety as a progressive group (Bordman 114). The next bill featured Aria da Capo

(1919), just before a series of artistic differences caused the Players to dissipate into an offshoot group in the city, which eventually produced works by Strindberg, and, oddly enough, Moliere. Despite the theater’s transience, Millay had been noticed at her dramatic best on the wharf with Aria da Capo.

Aria da Capo is the other inclusion in Harper & Brothers’ 1926 volume Three

Plays, from which I have been citing lines. I see this play as an important one in Millay’s canon of dramatic works, for although it sports the characteristic verbal whimsy, the resulting gaiety is used ironically to actually subvert merriment. It is the bridge between

7 Their maiden play, Suppressed Desires, had been “written with the Washington Square Players in mind but supposedly had been rejected for being ‘too experimental.’” So, they pioneered. 39

Millay’s plays of little consequence, bound by the walls of Vassar grounds, and her works of social significance. With the exception of The King’s Henchman (an exception we might forgive because of its collaborative nature), Millay, with Aria da Capo, turned to a pacifistic voice. She likewise began to use drama for something other than diversion.

Aria da Capo delights, but beneath its surface of slapstick comedy and metatheatrical device simmers an immediate, threatening message pertinent to a war-fearing society. In writing Aria, Millay had in mind an entirely different audience from anything she had known—the public. It earned critical acclaim and stands out even today as Millay’s strongest dramatic works, successful for its objective and subjective powers alike. To show how practicable the play has been, Epstein explains that “figures available for the decade 1950—1960, thirty years after its premiere, indicate that there were 471 licensed productions—not performances—during that time” (141).

In her letter to Canfield, Millay was heartfelt in defending Aria da Capo as her one and only play that is both good and “of any significance.” She wished she had more like it; only then would have felt justified in putting out a book of plays. As Aria is by far her most widely distributed and produced dramatic work, it is perhaps the only product that could classify Millay as a great playwright in the minds of both herself and her critics past and present. It is her only play to have been liberally anthologized and used for school production. This indicates that (unlike The Lamp and the Bell) Aria has clearly defined parameters and feasible technical expectations. It requires a manageable, small cast and a single set. However, fitting in a progression of theatrical complexity, Millay is demanding in her confusing directions staging. In the Author’s note following the 40

Baker’s Plays script version of Aria da Capo, Millay offers, as if she has been hassled to do so, some notes of direction:

Since the production of Aria da Capo by the Provincetown Players, I have received a great many letters from the directors of little theatres, asking for copies of it with a view to producing it. Very often, after I send the play, I receive a letter in reply asking for some suggestions for its presentation, and enclosing direct questions on points that have been difficult.

It is alarming that Millay did not see it fit to insure the original text with her specific expectations, for in the following instructions she is stiflingly detailed regarding costume colors (Columbine must wear a certain color, Pierrot must wear another, and so on) and stage properties. Nevertheless, her obstinacy in providing production heads with ample directions caused problems. And although, she said, “so great is my vexation always, when reading a play, to find its progress constantly being halted and its structure loosened by elaborate explanatory parentheses,” Millay did so, finally. Her stubbornness to be commanding in specific undergoes serious changes by the time of Conversation at

Midnight, in which her authorial voice in instructing her readers is almost too loud.

Now that we have reached new territory in which Millay apparently wished for her drama to say something beyond the superficial, we can examine how she chose to convey pacifist sentiment through drama. Whereas Millay’s earlier plays appear to be frivolous and are, any appearance of superficiality in Aria da Capo is but the first layer of dense, well-constructed allegory. Aria da Capo opens on a courtly scene—much in the manner of her previous dramas—but this time there lingers in the air something sinister.

Two commedia dell’ arte characters, Columbine and Pierrot, are engaged in feasting at a grand long table covered with food. They are jovial, but overly so, talking of petty things like macaroons and the day of the week. At first, the harlequinade seems an odd venue 41 for pacifist commentary. Unexpectedly, a director-type character (Cothurnus, Master of the Masque) disrupts the scene and places another scene onstage in place of the harlequinade, this one starring two shepherds, Thyrsis and Corydon. The reader/spectator is unsure of what is happening, as the harlequinade was established as the scene, and now it has been revealed to be false. Cothurnus, as a director of sorts, exposes the two of them to be ordinary people, then. Yet this is still a performance, and a consequently uncomfortable one. We wait as the shepherds belligerently take their places and start their scene, arguing that theirs is not a scene fit for the party setting spread onstage. Thyrsis complains:

Thyrsis. We cannot act A tragedy with comic properties! Cothurnus. Try it and see. I think you’ll find You can. One wall is like another. And regarding The matter of your insufficient mood, The important thing is that you speak the lines And make the gestures…. (Three Plays 25)

Thyrsis’ comment on the absurdity of tragedy in a comic setting is a metaphor of the procedure by which Millay is proving a point—in order to show the darkness of violence and war, she is increasing contrast as potently as she can by placing its metaphorical representation inside an unlikely and opposite frame—a gaudily decorated hall. The scene that unfolds between Thyrsis and Corydon uses dialogue to represent human brotherhood and deception, benevolence and greed. As symbols, Thyrsis and Corydon represent neighbors on the global scale. Aria premiered the year after the end of World

War I; in its aftermath, national stability seemed uncertain as international borders shifted, disappeared, and nations made new friends and enemies. The two shepherds read like neighboring countries, tenuously balanced between trust and peril. Remember, too, 42 that Thyrsis and Corydon are forced by the Master to act a scene for which they are unprepared. Throughout, it is suggested that desolation can drive even two friends to become mortal enemies, and both sides suffer. In the end, the shepherds die and the harlequinade resumes. Perhaps Thyrsis and Corydon are the War, the harlequinade embodying the world scene—both ignorant enough to enable and eager to ignore what has happened. The merriment glows more grotesquely than ever upon the killing-field.

Author and critic Carl Van Doren saw some merit in Millay’s metaphor, but it is not enough to impress him: “Love among the ruins! Butterflies above the battle! Such folly as had been acted by the nation, the play hints, belongs rather to the painted theatre than to the solid earth. There is not enough wisdom to understand it; there are not enough tears to bewail it. It may be better to frolic and forget” (“Youth and Wings”). But therein lies the intelligence of Millay’s metaphor—the “solid earth” is but a “painted theatre.”

Millay’s construction of place in Aria da Capo is entirely different from the shallow reconstruction of a bygone era and faraway place dictated by her previous works.

This time, Millay’s setting serves a double purpose, neither of which is straightforward realism. In the first purpose, Millay constructs the royal court out of mockery: its decadence is meant not to directly evoke, but humorously subvert. Adding another twist is Millay’s use of the stage-within-a-stage, by which one half of the scene acquires its role as image of the real world. Consequently, the scene that is first established as trivial pomp is revealed to be an extension of the audience—a daring metatheatricality never before attempted in Millay’s relatively basic stage. Such a construction puts the author of

Aria da Capo in the same league as her colleagues and their mission for the first time, for this is in line with other dramatic experiments of the early 20th century, in which 43 playwrights like O’Neill risked understanding and acceptance by thrusting the likeness of a real society onto the canvas of an unreal theatre. Doing so allowed the first generation of American playwrights to inspire a new awareness in the spectator. In that mission,

Friedrich Duerrenmatt explained the importance of the dramatist’s positioning of text within place, which depends:

….entirely on how much the author takes the stage into account, how strongly he wants to create the illusion without which no theatre can exist, and whether he wants it smeared on thickly with gobs of paint heaped upon the canvas, or transparent, diaphanous and fragile. A playwright can be deadly serious about the place: Madrid, the Ruetli, the Russian steppe, or he can think of it as just a stage, the world, his world. (Corrigan 57)

In Aria da Capo, the stage is the world in duplicate—a blind side folded over the seeing side. The frivolity of the lovers can be understood as the conscious ignorance of a society unable to deal with global turbulence; the suffering shepherds are, perhaps, those thrust fatally into understanding. Millay had created scenic illusion before: to recreate

Renaissance Italy on a quad at Vassar is as illusional as putting a banquet-table in a dilapidated fish shack balanced on a wharf in Provincetown. But the distinction here is entirely based upon depth of mission—for the first time, by writing Aria da Capo,

Millay’s drama meant to communicate something beyond caprice.

Considered alone, the shepherd scene is a direct, smartly-wrought allegory, unadorned and sincere. Then the eyes pan out, and the wreckage of Columbine and

Pierrot’s gluttony doubles the scene, creating dissonance. Carl Van Doren missed the point of Aria: “[Millay’s] one-act play… was essentially serious, but it was saved from solemnity by a harlequin-cloak of charming, irresponsible banter which she flung completely around it” (Thesing 45). That “flung” material is expertly wrought, and it is what ultimately secures the play’s soberness. The “charming” “irresponsibility” of the 44 harlequinade was not written solely to entertain, but to illustrate contemporary flippancy and blindness in the face of serious trouble. A sense of sickness rises from looking at romp and solemnity side-by-side; their proximity constitutes the play, it does not divide it. And the allegory is not merely for show: Millay’s use of a metatheatrical scenario is her way of positioning the stage as an extension of a highly performative world-scene.

Although the harlequinade is common to both The Lamp and the Bell and Aria da Capo, here it is used more as a device than an aesthetic additive to the scene. So it appears that the slapstick style is not a continuation of a practiced trick but indeed intentional, and its irony serves to highlight the commedia dell’arte characters’ superficiality in contrast with the pastoral characters’ grave circumstances.

Critically, Aria da Capo was far more approved of than most of her other theatrical ventures. It was at the vanguard of some of America’s primordial abstract works, and played so well that its strangeness was forgiven, even enjoyed. In 1925,

Genevieve Taggard, a poet known for her working-class verse, reflected:

Aria da Capo […] is, while small, perfect, of the age, and revolutionary. An hour with this play makes it apparent that Miss Millay has no difficulty in being a poet when she is writing a drama. The next notable fact is that she is exceedingly dramatic throughout even her most gossamer poetry. Always it is the gesture, never a static picture. (Equal Rights 35)

Even Van Doren, who admonished Millay for sugar-coating tragedy, had to admit

Millay’s adeptness at painting a portrait of social condition, and even appreciates her for putting it to play. Aria da Capo, he wrote, “has an allegorical sound, because it lays its finger so surely upon the mad sickness of the race during those futile years” (“Youth and

Wings”). Other readers understood and appreciated Millay’s deft depiction of wartime angst and sadness, too. Millay’s former teacher, Florence G. Jenney wrote: 45

Sympathy with pain speaks in all Vincent Millay’s poetry… from the Renascence line: ‘and every scream tore through my throat,’ and that sharp probing into the causes of war, the lovely and bitterly tragic Aria da Capo, so absurdly supposed to be a ‘pretty, light thing’ just because it has shepherds and paper chains in it… (“As I Remember Her”)

Aria da Capo is built of weighty matter, but it is delivered with lightness, comedy, and dynamism in the same way that some of Millay’s more painful emotions are expressed with levity in her poetry. In several instances, she ignores death by averting her attention to the simple, the carefree: “Butterflies are white and blue/In this field we wander through./Suffer me to take your hand./Death comes in a day or two.” (“Mariposa”) Yet another tendency finds Millay fitting sorrow to beauty, perhaps as a way to more easily digest it: “Grief of grief has drained me clean;/ Still it seems a pity/ No one saw,—it must have been/ Very pretty.” (“Three Songs of Shattering”) So, whether via escapism or replacement, beauty finds its partner in ugliness perpetually in Millay’s works.

Actually an opera libretto, Henchman (1927) marked several years of strained artistic collaboration between Millay and a team of New York producers and artists who fought with the script to make it suitable for production. When Millay was commissioned to write the libretto, she was only partially primed. Writing lyrics was old hat—she had done extensive song writing for Vassar and her plays usually boasted a song or two (The

Lamp and the Bell, for instance, is nearly one-third song). But although she had sent a play to Provincetown, Henchman was going to the Metropolitan Opera, an entirely different arena. Millay would be under closer scrutiny than ever, especially in the dubious task of crafting a good opera in English. Deems Taylor, her dear friend, composed the opera, and little is known of their collaborative process in constructing the production. It was, to the surprise of many, a relative success and enjoyed a lengthy run at the 46

Metropolitan. The opera’s success was, however, evidently owing to its excellent score and visual appeal, and not its libretto. Millay said in her letter to Canfield, twenty years after Henchman had been released in book form,

The King’s Henchman is a bad play. It was written in the first place as the libretto for an opera. Later, I tried to make it into a play. But it was hopelessly contaminated. It smells of libretto; and has other grave faults as well. This is a pity. For some of my very best poetry is to be found in The King’s Henchman,— to be found, that is, by a reader tough enough to struggle through acres of ostentatious and pedantic drivel in order to get to it. (“Letter to Cass Canfield”)

With this in mind, I set about discovering the hidden pieces of Millay’s “very best poetry” in Henchman. It is a difficult task, as Millay’s language is anything but reader- friendly in the libretto. She called it “verbose in Anglo-Saxon!” which is indeed accurate, but even verbose writing usually communicates what is essential. Discerning the intricacies of the plot of Henchman is made very treacherous by unfamiliar, archaic colloquialisms. By the time the reader decodes a line, ten minutes have passed, and having the page to hold is not a luxury afforded in the theatre. Attendees at the

Metropolitan would have had to rely solely on the music and spectacle.

Nevertheless, The King’s Henchman impressed the wealthy opera-going public and critics alike because few people expected an English opera to work. Although the music (by Deems Taylor) was highly praised, so was Millay’s libretto for its surprisingly comprehensible and palatable (though not “good”) use of Anglo-Saxon dialect. Some reviews were effusive in admiration, like one in Arts & Letters:

I find it astonishing that [Millay] could relate the story simply and directly without calling on alien derivations. […] the tale moves swiftly, abounds in beautiful imagery, and appears altogether singable. Miss Millay even manages to be quite modern, and pulls a good many cracks in her good old Saxon English” (“A Triumph for American Opera”). 47

Whereas this was the general opinion, Millay’s letter to Canfield condemns Henchman for its contrivances. She had struggled, all along, to renovate the viscera of a libretto to meet the demands of a worthy play fit for publishing and distribution. To read Henchman

(I have no knowledge of seeing it) is to feel keenly aware of the disjunction of a text built variably of sung and spoken verse and prose. If one had to guess, one could identify, years in retrospect and without knowledge of the opera, which passages were once lyrics.

Therefore, Henchman possesses the textual discord prevalent in Millay’s drama, but without the rationale of experimentalism or naiveté. Here, the variation in tone and meter is accounted for simply by original delivery on stage. Editor Charles W. Ferguson noted that, “while the dramaturgy is at times as perceptible as a figure in an evening dress, one does not object to the figure. There are comely lines and curves behind the sheen of beauty that covers the play” (“Miss Millay Goes Over the Top”). Aesthetically, Millay makes up for the awkwardness caused by her juggling of temporal and linguistic spheres, and, indeed, arbitrary convention.

Greatly to its favor, The King’s Henchman bears the type of story that befits drama. In Conversation at Midnight, which has no perceptible visual or developmental arc, its theatricality is difficult to pinpoint. But in Henchman, there are divisible scenes, each building in emotional intensity as the stage population becomes increasingly smaller, until we are left with a pair of distraught lovers set against their offstage empire.

The opera opens on the late-night court of King Eadgar. A minstrel plays, and the inebriated revelers fall asleep, wake up, drink, and fall asleep again off and on. Some of the dialogue here is quite funny, and there are some good visual gags in the script. The charm is offset by tragedy as Aelfrida falters in romantic loyalty. As we have discussed, 48 there is music to provide acoustic spectacle and appealing changes of scene, from the stately court of King Eadgar to the pastoral romps through the forest (a scenario of place much like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example). Ferguson wrote:

…were it not at all fatuous to assume that the story could be separated from the other elements in the drama, I should say that the yarn of itself suffices. I do not know how the story would sound if it appeared in the magazine section of the Denver “Post,” but manifestly it is one which yields itself most willingly to a dramatic unfolding. (“Miss Millay Goes Over the Top”)

We felt Millay inching out of retrograde settings and sensibilities in Aria da

Capo, when she subverted her courtly scene to make it alien, untrustworthy—to highlight something else entirely. The dialogue between the shepherds is not cluttered with contractions or antiquarian speech; it is forthright and honest. If we are concerned with connecting by degrees Millay’s very whimsical first play with her dramatic swan song, the somber Conversation at Midnight, The King’s Henchman is a bit of a detour in the progression of modernity. But how can an Anglo-Saxon opera be modern? Edward

Davison diagnosed Millay with “unduly” fear of “the prosaic,” citing that she feebly attempts to escape it, as in The King’s Henchman when Maccus exclaims, “My heart has a stone in its shoe.” Although this seems to me like a failed attempt at crowd-pleasing shtick, Davison groups it in a plague of overdramatic tendency in Henchman and elsewhere, which he detests. He cites her poem “Inland,” specifically the couplet

“Screaming to God for death by drowning,—/One salt taste of the sea once more.” A bit hyperbolic himself, I think, Davison says, “this is to lay passion on with a trowel” (“Edna

St. Vincent Millay”). Although Davison’s assessment is itself heavy-handed, Millay’s dialogue in Henchman, even when the dialectical jargon dissipates during more romantic scenes, is too ostentatious to be taken seriously: 49

AETHELWOLD. Aelfrida! [She looks around at him, still kneeling.] Lovest thou me? AELFRIDA. Oh, ask me not of a morning if I love thee!— When my mind is full of thimbles and churns! I tell thee, so long as we bide here in my father’s house, I am my father’s housekeeper, And thou shalt see me seldom but as a warder of cupboards and chests, And a doler-out of heal-alls! Body of me! (86-87)

It is, throughout the play’s duration, difficult to attach oneself to either the hero or heroine above, for they are so melodramatic. I imagine this script would have been very hard to handle for a performer concerned about sincere presentation, for this language seems to demand over-stylized acting to complement and communicate its meaning. “As a play,” wrote poetry critic Rica Brenner, “The King’s Henchman has but few dramatic moments. As an opera, the overuse of archaisms presents a damaging drawback. Can one imagine the difficulty of singing, ‘Sawst thou ever the moss so sea-weed sodden wet?’ or

‘Now hath his lady a bitter burthen to thole!’?” Edward Johnson, who originated the lead role of Aethelwold, was said to have sung his part “with all the vocal skill, temperamental warmth and pictorial significance needed” (“A Triumph for American

Opera,” emphasis mine). Indeed, Johnson and his colleagues must have had to virtually sign the play to make it comprehensible.

In the illustrated artist’s copy edition of Henchman, there is a lithograph of the stage at the moment Aelfrida enters at the play’s climax. The set is streamlined, angular, lit in an other-wordly diaphanous light. Aelfrida looms over the scene on a jagged staircase, and every point of the mise-en-scene is focused upon her. With such physical bravado as this, it seems that over-blown staging could have been a saving grace to the 50 language, echoing its pomp atmospherically. The appearance of the The King’s

Henchman seems to have been non-prosaic, and Millay’s adoption of colloquialism could be considered modern in that the characters’ speeches are not realistically Anglo-Saxon, but a caricature of Anglo-Saxon. Millay has lifted the most attractive phrases to paint a sort of portrait of long-dead linguistics. In a sense, Anglo-Saxon speech is given a modern twist for the artist’s purposes. It was claimed that “Miss Millay manages to be quite modern, and pulls a good many smart cracks in her good old Saxon English” (“A

Triumph for American Opera”). This reviewer apparently equates modernism with jaunty humor. The only other element with what could be called modern qualities is the plot of

Henchman. In the finale of the opera, Millay offers her heroine Aelfrida as a person the spectator does not expect her to be, that is, a weak, self-indulgent traitor. She sabotages her plan with Aethelwold to win the hand of the King. The spell of love is destroyed, and anyone familiar with The Princess Marries the Page wonders what has happened.

There is, at the end of the play, no sense of dramatic unity, as the resolution is uncomfortable: chivalry has failed. Throughout the play’s lyrical construction and story, one forgets the contemporaneity of the work, so long as they are forgiving of a somewhat bumpy composition. However, when the plot at last is ruined by Woman’s weakness, the play feels fatally broken. Aelfrida is nothing more than a tramp, and not someone worth all the care she has been given. The revealing of the femme fatale (which is, perhaps, the notorious Millay’s own confessional handprint upon the work) is disengaging. We might consider this subversion of romance to be “modern,” compared with the infallibility of love expressed in Millay’s first play. Then again, it is unlike Millay’s depiction of the 51 archetype in Distressing Dialogues, where female fickleness is lampooned rather than given ultimate dramatic power.

Critical esteem for both Taylor and Millay—and the opera as a system—was liberal. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, poet Elinor Wylie remarked,

I opened the galley proofs of “The King’s Henchman” in justifiable excitement [….] I trembled slightly, for I could more easily imagine Edna Millay an Elizabethan or a Greek than a Saxon of the tenth century [….] but by the strangely quiet time that I had reached the second act, and beheld Aethelwold and [Aelfrida] caught in the invisible nets of love, I saw that I had been an idiot not to trust this girl [….], even into the mists of the tenth century and Wessex west of Wiltshire. (“A Nightingale at the Court of King Eadgar”)

But Elinor Wylie was one of Millay’s dearest friends, and a pronounced bias colors this lavish praise. Other readers were less love-struck and more focused on the text itself. The result of the mixing of crowd-pleasing jokes and what appears to be an attempt at good poetry was an uneven total work. Perhaps this is what Millay alluded to when she said

Henchman “smells of libretto.” With too many edges to smooth, the text was unsalvageable in the making of a unified book. While Deems Taylor was celebrated for his music and making the libretto sing well, Millay’s hand in the production was described by some critics as a major let-down. There had been high expectation, with such a renowned poet at the helm of the book, and she had confused her audience. “Her books is the tortured work of a gifted woman seemingly unmusical,” wrote author and critic Charles Henry Meltzer, “To nine-tenths of those who hear this at the Metropolitan all that is Anglo-Saxon will be as meaningless as Italian, and less pleasing.” He grants her a little leniency in the second act, but persists, “now and then, she drops into her high school pedantry and breaks into brave Tudor and Victorian speech” (“The King’s

Henchman”). 52

This is where Millay’s acceptably conventional dramatic work ends,

“conventional” being a loose term here. We have already seen symptoms of Millay’s disregard for her readers’ ease of understanding and consumption in her daring use of allegory in Aria da Capo and the stage directions lacking a clear indication of setting in

The Lamp and the Bell. But in this study, it is important to think of the preceding works as conventional—the ones to come are far less recognizably texts for performance.

Additionally, we will examine Millay’s works that are sometimes considered to be plays, but perhaps should not be. The stage will now give way to the page, and the spectator’s role will shift palpably to readership. Moving past the challenge of evoking love stories, after The King’s Henchman, Millay abandoned the living stage in favor of an obscure, ever-shifting performance space—a much abler home for a new sentiment. In the pursuit of a definition of Millay as a dramatist, these are the “problem plays:” the works that have over and over again been interpreted and labeled in clashing manners. Previously, the disagreement has arisen in determining quality, not in establishing textual shape and function.

At this point in the study of Millay’s dramatic career, with her poetry in mind, a significant displacement is apparent in terms of theme. I would say that the most blatant thematic difference between Millay’s poems and plays is the absence of the personal reverence for the natural that so heavily colors her poetry. Although Millay grapples with life and love in the plays, there is virtually none of her tribute to Nature.8 Her poems, early and late, positively throb with reverence toward it, and the absence of nature as a driving poetic force is startling. Millay is devoted to Nature’s mystery in some of her best

8 The only direct incantations about nature in the plays are found in poems or songs embedded within the scene, most notably in The Lamp and the Bell. 53 work. Most successful is her association of the silent austerity of nature and the thoughtful person traveling through it:

Yet, ah, my path is sweet on either side All through the dragging day,—sharp underfoot And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs— But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach, And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling, The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake, Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road; A gateless garden, and an open path; My feet to follow, and my heart to hold. (“Journey”)

Here, the singularity of the narrator’s voice is faithful to the partnership she feels with a private world through which she wanders. There is none of the plurality of person and diction that a play necessitates; no cacophony, only peaceful prayer.

Conversely, Millay’s dependence upon classical setting is emblematic of her dramatic work and absent in the realm of poetry, save for allusions to Greek mythology that bear a similar reverent tone. Within her poetry, chivalry and that sense of antiquated story-telling appears strictly in her sonnets. Indeed, out of the entire dramatic canon, we see only two instances in which Millay sets contemporary diction and story to drama (The

Wall of Dominoes and Conversation at Midnight), and neither of these were particularly performance-inducing texts. Thematically, Millay’s poetry is characterized, as I see it, by three general topics with various subdivisions—nature, life, and love. In all three topics,

Millay stresses coming and going as a pattern universal and inevitable. The result is a canon of poems that looks on large concepts, but in varying emotions. Love is depicted in its achievement and in its loss, nature is characterized by the advent and passing of seasons, and of course there abounds the great diptych of life and death. 54

Between Millay’s more successful poems and her less triumphant plays there is evidently a flux in the physical space of story and thought. Regardless of technical convention, the shift in subject matter from the personal and immediate to the more universal switches Millay’s tone altogether. The winding chronicle of courtly love in The

Lamp and the Bell is a far cry from the lone girl standing on a hill in her first acclaimed poem: “All I could see from where I stood/ Was three long mountains and a wood”

(“Renascence”). When the personal shifts to the universal in Millay’s poetry, the transition is made seamlessly, as if to say that the lone girl is… everyone. When

“Renascence” ends, she says,

The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky,— No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat—the sky Will cave in on him by and by.

The singular girl and the infinite world are partners in the story, working together to conflate great and small. In Lamp, the vastness of the story (including its time and setting) has no anchor like the lone girl to give it a core or sense of emotional velocity. In

Two Slatterns, the message is not profound enough to require a core, nor is it in The

Princess Marries the Page. We might say that, after the latter plays’ synopses are spoken, the whole value of the work is summed up. The reader senses that in The Lamp and the

Bell the potential for emotional magnitude is there, but it is housed in too scattered a place to have impact. When Millay wrote Aria da Capo, she finally manipulated the 55 personal and immediate to some success. There is another commonality between play tone and poem tone, in that Millay ends “Renascence” (and other poems) with a sincere warning about the soulless tendencies of humans, very much in line with the theme of the pacifist play.

Millay’s most recent biographer, Nancy Milford, notes, “There was always a powerfully expressed notion of her own destiny above the impermanence of mortal love, which is subject to change [.…] Her theme is as ancient as the Greeks: the permanence of poetry and impermanence of love, subject to change, to loss, or to ending” (Savage

Beauty 371). Her attention to profound universal emotion accomplishes a direct, forceful correspondence between Millay behind the page and the reader holding it. As a reader or spectator, we are much more likely to feel moved by the chance articulation of our most personal sensations than the gambols and tragedies of bizarre characters removed from us by centuries and sentiments. Perhaps that accounts for the power difference between a

Millay play and a Millay poem; perhaps if the plays were more sincerely relevant (as

Aria da Capo is), they would be regarded far differently. 56

III. From Persiflage to Purpose

CARL You talk too well. And you talk too god-damned much. What about an adolescent stutter, just for a change, And a sturdy, inarticulate GOOD IDEA? —Millay in Conversation at Midnight, 1937

Although the previously discussed works are problematic in various respects, they are easily rationalized in terms of their original intention: performance. They comprise

Millay’s more successful group of dramatic works because of that fact—they are governed in shape and style by their practical purpose. As we have seen, some are more conducive to theatre in production, and some are far less so. The primary defining factors that have arisen are authorial intention and performativity: Millay has proven to be at least passable as a script-writer in instances where some other authority (whether Vassar or the Met) has been watchful over the process, or has been established as the work’s ultimate venue. Millay’s other dramatic works are far less conformist: they do not even qualify as plays, because they would not easily lead to production. Nevertheless, Millay evidently felt these works depended upon dramatic device. Because of the absence of any other motivation, Millay must have needed dialogue, stage directions, etcetera, in unconventional places in order to properly articulate ideas the way she wished. As a student, Millay felt acute pressure to exercise conformance in hopes of pleasing others and earning good reviews. In later works such as Aria da Capo and The King’s

Henchman, we get a dual sense of a commissioned author who is obligated to give her commissioners what they asked for, but below the surface we sense unmistakably the distinctive bravado of Edna St.Vincent Millay, by these times a successful, in-demand 57 writer whose flamboyant personality essentially acted as an agent for her published works.

In a major respect, this thesis is an examination of subject matter as a measure of formal conventionality. In trite, romantic situations, Millay has stuck to conceivably simple, straightforward and unified plots, characters, dialogue, and visual and verbal gags. In The King’s Henchman, she was able (more or less successfully) to accomplish the unity of a romantic work with an appropriate degree of solemnity and provide the necessary technical complement to an operatic score. And in Aria da Capo, Millay had a rare victory—she competently balanced artistic bravado in a resourceful way, to the effect that her audacious script could be performed in such a manner that both the text and the performance might retain their own purity and beauty while combining into an effective total aesthetic. All of the aforementioned texts were constructed to be reasonably amenable to a production team, director, performer, spectator… each text’s reception was relatively victorious perhaps because of their tuning toward a very specific purpose. Whether for Vassar, Provincetown, or the New York public, Millay seems to have done her job in satisfying expectation at least in terms of delivering a workable blueprint for performance.

However, the next portion of this study takes into account the textual situations in which Millay resisted settling into either the poetic or dramatic genre fully, but insisted upon hovering freely between the two. What results is an ever-shifting territory, as any poem might be infinitely dramatic, and poetry might as well be considered a building- block of a good play if language is to be valued above plot. The dramatic works of this period represent a blend of the trite and the sincere, not unlike Millay’s placement of Aria 58 da Capo after a succession of romances. Her multi-genre pieces also embody lighthearted diversion, but it is important to note that, chronologically, Millay was ascending to a more socially-aware aesthetic during these times; no longer the freehearted student at

Vassar, Millay palpably associates her work with the exigencies of global psychology throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s. Although some of her multi-genre pieces (with the exception of the first we will consider) seem trivial, they, like the harlequinade of Aria da

Capo, also incorporate aspects of somber world commentary. That Millay chose some dramatic devices to communicate changed messages will provide some insight into how she viewed the power of theatrical convention in the articulation of certain themes.

This territory of multi- or anti-genre Millay—as well as her total theatrical career—culminates in her 1937 work Conversation at Midnight. The mystery of

Conversation at Midnight and genre is symptomatic of lesser-known Millay writings that dodge and confuse their own classification. Conversation at Midnight mystifies those who encounter it even before he or she enters the world of the story, but it also exhibits some well-crafted poetry. Concession presents itself again as the necessary virtue in appreciating Millay’s dramatic work—if the reader can surrender the natural dependence upon clarity, he or she can glean some enjoyment from passages here and there, and perhaps even take delight in Millay’s textual rebellion. Conversation at Midnight, as one of Millay’s later works, is marked by patchwork form, but it more clearly indicates the deliberate testing of an established writer than a one-hundred-twenty-six page mistake.

But the anti-genre Millay extends as far back as 1917, during her senior year of college. I propose a twenty-year leap back in time to track, so to speak, all instances of Millay’s poetry mingling with drama—where Millay’s poetry and prose contain separated 59 dialogue and/or stage directions. In each case, we will examine the same qualities inspected in the previous chapter: authorial intention, performability, ease of rationalized reading, and critical reception.

Millay’s unpublished 1917 dramatic work, The Wall of Dominoes, just might be

Millay’s best dramatic work. It is not a play, I believe, because “play” as we have decided denotes a text that leads directly to production, and Dominoes was never played.

It was also never printed for public consumption.9 Chronologically, the piece belongs far back in time with the likes of The Princess Marries the Page and Two Slatterns and a

King, yet because of its life strictly on paper, it belongs to the group of anomalies rather than plays. It nevertheless has all the pieces it needs to be played. By certain traditional criteria, it could be considered a good play, because, more than any other Millay work, it steadfastly sticks to Aristotelian unities (place, time, and action) that provide a centrifugal force to bind the play. The dramatic question laid out on the eleventh page drives the action; the plot unfolds rapidly in a living-room, and the resolution is presented at play’s end after the total period of continuous time. The spectator finds his or her expectations either surprised or confirmed, and he or she is left with a new sense of stasis at the end.

Millay employed an especially effective device in the shape of a visitor who arrives at the work’s climax—the good old deus ex machina! As we have seen, such traditional technique is rare in a Millay script. Recognizing such elements from other plays, we feel more comfortable reading Dominoes as we might read any other parlor drama.

Aided by its unity, The Wall of Dominoes guides the spectator through a woman’s possible change, but eventual immovability. The protagonist is a beautiful twenty-four-

9 The Vassar archives has various prose and experimental works written by Millay for school and local publications like the Vassar Miscellany, in which I found the play. 60 year-old woman named Sydney Murray, who comes to visit her friend Doris and ends up flirting wickedly with her hostess’s brother. As the piece moves along, the reader watches

Sydney’s sophisticated layers unravel, until she confesses her fear to Doris—she is mortified by the possibility that all of her determined defenses will fall until she is ruined.

If she smokes alone, she will end up smoking with others. The same goes for drinking.

She says,

… a few of my dominoes are still left standing,— and the last one that fell didn’t quite reach, you see,— it sometimes happens,— but soon the wind will blow again,— and when the next one falls…there will be nothing left between me and destruction!… (296)

The only thing she is certain she shall never do is wear a feathered hat—it would be the end. When a married man with whom she has been conducting an affair arrives and they are preparing to escape the house late at night, he offers her a hat to wear—a feathered one, no less. The spectator waits for Sydney to decide between resignation and happiness, or fortitude and loneliness. She refuses to wear the hat, and therefore refuses to be loved.

The symbolic association of Sydney’s imminent downfall and the usually innocuous feathered hat is commendably achieved. The tension throughout the story is not broken by occasion wise-cracking and piano-playing, but rather bolstered by such diversions.

Apart from Norman Brittin’s brief summary, no Millay scholar has taken The

Wall of Dominoes into consideration to ascribe it any importance. As this study unfolds, it becomes in part an examination of departures, departures from genre and convention that make Millay’s dramatic canon so hard to nail down. The Wall of Dominoes is

Millay’s only work to entirely follow traditional dramatic convention. Under its title in the Miscellany, above the cast, is written “Vassar entry in the literary competition of the

Association of Northern College Magazines.” This confirms my suspicion that Dominoes 61 was not only never played, but never meant to be played—only printed. Despite that, all of Millay’s preliminary set-up of scene and person are thorough but not stiflingly so; there is a good balance of authorial direction and option for directorial freedom. We will see elsewhere quite the opposite in terms of paratext and its practicality. Brittin sees the piece as a precursor to both Distressing Dialogues and Conversation at Midnight, but in spite of a subject-matter dealing with emancipation and high society psychology, I see far more resemblance with the former than the latter, primarily for these technical reasons.

Millay incorporated play-like devices in her prose work, most notably in her series of pieces for Vanity Fair published under her pseudonym, Nancy Boyd. Then pieces were published by Harpers en masse as Distressing Dialogues in 1923. The first noticeable departure from Millay’s student work is an urbane modern voice and outlook.

Her characters here are spunky, martini-drinking, diamond-covered, shallow 1920’s stereotypes. In a handful of the included Dialogues, dramatic conversation and blunt, biting, humorous prose intermingle on the page. Millay’s playfulness is vibrant throughout, making it apparent that Millay was having devilish fun writing the

Dialogues. Still, there is a certain measure of depth to the pieces, whether in the shape of socio-political diatribe, or in the suggestion of autobiographical portraiture. The playlet

“Two Souls With But a Single Thought” begins, “Dear reader, by the time you receive this, I shall have left my husband…It is useless to rush to the telephone and squeak into my ear, “My dear Nancy! … Cecil is such a charming fellow!” …I know all about that.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Pardon my sardonic mirth” (63). The piece recounts a number of conversations between the author and her “fictional” husband, conversations that become increasingly strained. Both characters are humor writers, and they become (rightfully) 62 suspicious of one another stealing and publishing good jokes shared in confidence by the other over the breakfast table. The accounts of these conversations are printed in dialogue format:

I: Cecil, dear, I’ve made up my mind about one thing. If I ever have a son, I shall name him for his father. He (indulgently): And supposing you have another son, what will you name him? I: Why, for his father. He: Well, of all the—Nancy, you ought to put that down. That’s darned good. (“Two Souls With But a Single Thought”)

What at first appears to be playful competition between two writers leads, of course, to the destruction of their marriage. The tempo of the language, fuelled mostly by petty argument and shallow amends, is found throughout the playlets in Distressing Dialogues.

Shared also is the unbroken cast of characters; although the individuals change, the cast is always comprised of a rich young married couple who bicker. In some of the Dialogues the couple is accompanied by other superficial characters, but the couple’s relationship remains the pivotal dynamic.

That they are embedded in a book of prose suggests that these “nine” playlets were not intended to be encountered with any expectations of real production, but nonetheless they contain many of the conventions necessary for production; i.e. character descriptions as a heading and stage directions. Although they qualify as fictional experiment, many actually follow the arc of drama, although it is doubtful whether any on its own would make for compelling theatre. As a group, and as counterparts to the other bits of Boyd prose, these plays are all concerned with either the intimate chaos of married couples, or the public chaos of the upper class. They share a common language—effervescent with grotesque portraits of women who are considerably dumb 63 and the foppish men who are devoted to them. Nearly all of the playlets feature a newlywed couple, who over the course of the plot become increasingly suffocated by their clashing neuroses. The settings range from ship-decks to bedrooms, and nowhere is anyone at peace. Consider the following characteristic exchange:

SHE (considering herself in the mirror with pardonable satisfaction): Well, what’s the matter with my nose? HE: There’s too much powder on it. SHE: Bob, you’re crazy! I don’t use half so much powder as most women do. I’m frightfully careful. I never go out without first taking a mirror to the window and looking at myself by daylight, and you know it. HE (unimpressed, thrusting his hands into his pockets and sauntering moodily up and down the rug): Rum idea, anyhow, pasting up the perfectly good human face with a lot of chalk dust. (“Powder, Rouge, and Lipstick” 112)

The playlets are often sadistically funny. Much of the time, despite the lack of raw character and plot development, or even the dearth of material, one could feasibly imagine seeing the Dialogues effectively performed. But just when that seems possible,

Millay throws a curveball onto the page, and the reader is made keenly aware that these are not scripts, but simply reading material divided into lines. The nature of the stage directions is usually the factor responsible for this shift—they contain blueprints for business so dense with description that they are texts in themselves, and certainly not meant to guide directors or actors. They are for show:

SHE (without looking up): Why don’t you smoke your pipe? HE (incredulously): Wouldn’t it annoy you? SHE: Heavens, no! (He draws his pipe from his pocket and fills it, gratefully, meanwhile watching her. She is cruelly slicing a lemon, by means of a small dagger with which a Castilian man has slain three matadors; it strikes him that she looks gentle and domestic. A great peace steals over him.) HE (contentedly): What a pleasant room this is. (“The Implacable Aphrodite”) 64

What do the playlets gain by possessing theatrical features? It seems that Millay presents her characters as performers by nature; that they go about life as though it is an act. Therefore, the Dialogues set them where they wish to be, elevated, vivid, supplied with bitter lines. To the reader, a certain type of reading is encouraged by such a format: we picture the scene upon a stage, and thus further removed from reality, the characters’ petty conversations seem all the more absurd. It is as though Millay is putting the people inside their fabricated salon, saying to us, “look at these idiots!” The characters’ contrivances, apparent emotional distress, and neurotic behaviors are certainly funny; however, an aura of darkness prevails in all of the pieces, for not a trace of happy love can be found.

Make Bright the Arrows, published in 1940 as Millay’s “notebook” of that year, shows some of the first signs that Millay feels a change in her authorial calling. This is the volume that contains Millay’s poem “There Are No Islands Any More,” which potently announces Millay’s departure from fluff toward politically attentive, earnest writing. The volume’s overall tone is grave and earnest, but unlike the solemnity of her early dramas. Here, now, the tragedy is reality, and Millay cannot weave her tale for beauty’s sake. She writes,

I have gone to war, I am at war, I am at grips With that which threatens more than a cold summer; I am at war with the shadow, at war with the sun’s eclipse, Total, and not for a minute, but for all my days. Under that established twilight how could I raise Beans and corn? I am at war with the black newcomer. (“An Eclipse of the Sun is Predicted”)

She is ominous, sincere, and one barely recognizes the Millay we have previously encountered—certainly Nancy Boyd has left the theater. Still, tucked in among poems 65 dedicated to Joan of Arc, Europe, verses about seeking peace in dreams, and a prediction of a solar eclipse, Millay tucked the poem-play unassumingly on page forty-five.

Whereas Distressing Dialogues portended seriousness and actually supplied mirth, humor, and pizzazz, Millay’s one-act poem-play “The Crooked Cross” fulfills its promise of gravity. I label “The Crooked Cross” a poem-play for two reasons: first, it is formally both without sacrificing any essential component of either genre. The poem and the play co-exist, the play giving the poem vibrancy and movement, and the poem giving the play a certain music that hums gravely while a sad story unfolds. This is no trouble: in reading a poem-play, there are none of the practical expectations or reservations about production to consider. The author, her plot, and her characters are all relieved of the responsibilities demanded by a specific genre and something is gained in the reading.

This gain comes from a multi-dimensionality of place and sound. There is a live atmosphere cloaking the pages—although we do not automatically visualize a full- fledged production, the characters are made so separate (even by being technically divided, capitalized, with their lines preceded by a colon) that it is hard not to ascribe different voices—however mentally heard—to each character therein.

In “The Crooked Cross,” the scene is set in such a simple matter that the reader is free to conceptualize the shape of the place as little or as much as he or she likes, and the reading is not hindered by allegiance to that. The converse can be said for, say, Aria da

Capo, in which one wonders, “Was she wearing pink? Or was it purple? The paper was, crepe, I know that, but I’d better make sure…” And in that case the spell cast by the story is fractured. The performance is necessary, perhaps, to guide the spectator more efficiently through the duration. Thus, plays like Aria are in a sense better in performance 66 than in print. Here, in “The Crooked Cross,” we are given little instruction, and there is therefore little threat of misinterpretation. Having a cast of characters allows Millay’s poem to build in a chorus-like manner up to a peak, up to the climactic fall of the chorus- leader. Because production is not expected, the poem-play is spared any obligation to be gratuitously complex.

The only puzzling inclusion in Millay’s poem-play is a single line beneath the title, in which it is stated that “The Crooked Cross” is “a play in one act, done after the manner of the mediaeval mystery plays10” (Make Bright the Arrows 45). Here is a reversion to antiquarian formalities. But unlike The Princess Marries the Page, Two

Slatterns and a King, and The Lamp and the Bell, this poem-play uses old stylization and even meter to house full-fledged modern agenda. What the piece gains from the bizarre cross-hybridization of various traditional forms is a haunting, rhythmic vocal pattern that illuminates the building intensity as the dire situation is stripped clear. “The Crooked

Cross” shares in common with the medieval mystery play its tableaux-like effect, especially visually—movement is contained, as the young girls are at work, but a fine sense of orchestration must be maintained in order to properly build suspense. There is a distinct contrast between the physical reserve of the characters and the turmoil abroad in the world. The lines themselves are written in a chorus-like manner; layered, progressing in a crescendo, musical. Yet, once again, Millay’s comparison between the traditional genre and her own work is problematic: her “play” is meant for reading only, and the didacticism of performance is, historically, the mission of the mystery play.

10 The English mediaeval mystery play appeared first after the Norman Conquest in honor of the celebration of Corpus Christi. In terms of convention, the plays relied on spectacle to animate the lives of the saints and recreate biblical episodes. These liturgical dramas are preserved today in print in four major cycles that Millay would have had access to. 67

Threatened by impending terror within the world of the play, the adults strain to soften the blow, but the children are insistent about what they saw, what they heard, what they are feeling. By dividing the feelings among many speakers, Millay might have made it less personal, but I believe that in projecting the sentiment onto fictional beings, Millay multiplies the fear, a multiplication which more closely resembles the emotions of a world, not merely a woman. The repetition, futile reinforcement builds until Sister St.

Helene collapses in despair (the nature of the collapse is unclear—has the Sister died?)

She leaves the little girls (and the reader) with a dying testament: “dream.” The ambiguity of the word “dream” is important—it seems as though Sister St. Helene is reiterating the thing she has said all along, that the girls’ sightings of the swastika came out of their dreams. But by the end of the play, with Sister leaving the girls with a final word, perhaps, it seems that “dream” is spoken in the sense of a command, or in the sense of encouragement to rise above the terror they feel. Whereas Conversation at Midnight preaches about a vast range of human concerns in a literal way, “The Crooked Cross” embodies cohesion in the sense that its message is communicated through the simple subversion of the holy symbol of the cross. These little girls are being prepared for their service to God, led by nuns in the safety of the convent. Just outside, the cross itself, tipped slightly sideways, represents definite peril for all of them.

Not a poem, not a play, not prose (indeed, not even unanimously considered a singular work), Millay’s Conversation at Midnight (1937) has alternately baffled and impressed critical audiences. At the time of its release, reader anticipation was high. The book’s jacket extols the reader’s role in the book, explaining that, “Miss Millay’s concise and flashing statement lights familiar arguments with new and arresting meaning. For the 68 reader, it is as if he came suddenly upon a conflict, having no previous knowledge of it, and discovered himself—surprisingly—an active participant. In a way, participation is indeed made possible by Millay’s inclusion of representatives from many diverse standpoints: the cast of seven men is constituted by a stock-broker (Merton), a painter

(John), a writer (Pygmalion), a Communist poet (Carl), a Roman Catholic priest

(Anselmo), an aristocrat (Ricardo), and a businessman (Lucas). The Conversation begins late at night after seven men finish dinner at the home of their host Ricardo. They engage in speeches passionate and political, and what is physically only a drawing-room becomes a microcosm of Man’s intellect, illustrating some of the most feverish contemporary thought. A 1937 reviewer in Time even suggested a nihilistic allegory in

Anselmo’s mellow exit: “typical of Poet Millay's ingenuity is the history-in-miniature effect gained by having Father Anselmo go home early, leaving the conversation to circle through such topics as Romantic Love, the Supreme Court, the Past, toward ever more pointed conflict between Broker Merton and Communist Carl” (“Conversation by

Millay”). Perhaps she means that without the looming presence of the holy, real discourse might proceed (they end up freely discussing abortion, atheism…shifting their literary talk from the Bible to Das Kapital). This is indeed modern—a total departure from the seemingly pious writer pacing behind Millay’s poems.

In his Edna St. Vincent Millay: Revised Edition, Norman Brittin begins his section on Conversation at Midnight: “Millay counseled readers to consider [the book] in terms of a play rather than of a narrative poem. It is not, however, a play in the usual sense; it is a dialogue among seven men of differing backgrounds and beliefs who meet for an 69 evening of conversation and drinking—literally, for a symposium” (98). The counseling to which Brittin refers appears in the Foreword to Conversation, where Millay says,

It will seem at first glance to the reader that Conversation at Midnight is a narrative poem, interspersed with sections of dialogue. It would be better to consider it as dialogue throughout, to think of it in terms of a play, since there are not more than about thirty lines of descriptive narrative in the entire book… (viii)

However, in her 1947 letter to Cass Canfield, Millay has something different to say:

“Conversation at Midnight is an interesting book: I like it. […] It is not really a play. And might suffer in the reading, if the reader were tacitly instructed to consider it as a play.”

Had she not done so in the foreword? If the reader ventures outside the author’s foreword to include the book jacket in his paratextual reading, he also reads, “Into this sequence of poems is distilled the whole of modern life, with its rude but passionately honest search for new gods to replace tattered idols.” The cover of the 13th edition (1937) also boasts a headline: “A sequence of poems that gives daring and provocative expression in dialogue to the thought of our times.” So the reader, knowing that Millay is a poet, and maybe that she has dabbled in playwriting, is introduced to a “sequence of poems” that should be thought of “in terms of a play,” but it is “not really a play,” and they are about to perform a reading not intended by Millay. The only sure thing is that Conversation is a book, but it is a book with some very tricky instructions for use. Brittin cites Millay’s letter to

Canfield in his writings, but does not acknowledge this fundamental discrepancy: how was Conversation meant to be read? Brittin outlines the various cases that were made for

Conversation being more or less theatrically capable (104).

To relate the plot of Conversation at Midnight is to describe a pattern of waxing and waning dramatic energy over the course of an evening. However, the energy is not 70 fuelled by fights, seductions, disappearances, or ceremonies; quite contrarily,

Conversation consists of merely the stuff of its name. The spectator is thus twice removed from action. In an ordinary drama, action is explicitly shown, but here the spectator can only hear about events through retelling: the men talk about hunting excursions and so forth, but no engaging activities happen in front of the spectator’s eyes.

Yet there is a stage, cluttered with bodies. The stasis before plot is mobilized is identifiable as the absence of a party, then, one begins. At one point, it ends, but there is no visual appeal to the production beyond that, and virtually no aesthetic pull, in terms of spectacle. Father Anselmo leaves, and, set against its static surroundings, that action should mean something, but it is revealed to bear very little significance. Each speech has a shape, but not the narrative at large. The scene looks, sounds, and feels more or less the same from the first moment to the final. There are vestiges of Distressing Dialogues when the men repeatedly turn back to criticizing women for their petty fixations, the type of things that irk newlyweds to the point of destruction in the Dialogues:

PYGMALION And they fill the place so full of Early American furniture that there isn’t a comfortable chair in the house where you can set your ass down. MERTON And when you get your bath-towel pretty wet wiping your hair They put it back in the bath-room with a patient smile and show you the mark it made on the back of the chair. LUCAS And when you have company if you don’t act as if you had finger-bowls every day they’re simply furious. (47)

The metrics are free for the most part during the men’s discussion of meandering topics.

Other times, a couplet, whether rhymed or not, serves to encapsulate points directly relevant to both what has just been uttered, and truth at large, as in: “ We have 71 specialized ourselves out of any possible/ Acquaintance with the whole” (71). The most universal praise, certainly, is awarded to Conversation for its intrinsic poetry. I would go as far as calling it some of Millay’s best, as it combines her simplicity of delivery with the psychology of world’s havoc and man’s condition, as when Ricardo says:

Let us go mad while there is yet time, under our own direc- tion, not wait For the leisurely and outmoded spindle of an archaic Fate To spin our destiny. Now, now, under the scrubbed skin Jab neatly the unhygienic needle, thrust in The fluid, drink Like sand all proud excesses, all abandons, think To the end of thought, and leave that rutted road Abruptly where it ends, pursue The faintly visible track Until it widens and is smoothed out, and there is no road but you. (86)

In such passages, the importance of the thought is matched by decorous speech, and

Millay turns to carefully plotted rhyme schemes and metrics. Although they vary wildly, the schemes help to indicate to the reader that he or she ought to pay attention to this passage, this diagnosis of the world and us within it.

Essentially, as I have said, action exists only through the recounting of men sitting and drinking on stage. In some cases, two men get heated in debate, and this elicits a moment of interest in the spectator; however, the duet ends and another begins, stifling any real resolution and preventing meaningful contrast between one dialogue and the next. Can talking—without action—carry a play? Author Joyce Carol Oates observed,

We discover, to our astonishment, that theater is not “about” dialogue after all, but what might be called fields of dramatic tension; force-fields of human relationships beneath the level of language, and perhaps even of consciousness, at which dialogue hints in the way that a divining rod hints at a subterranean spring. If there is no mysterious, magical spring water hidden beneath the surface of the work, the most elegantly crafted, clever dialogue will not make it work. (“Plays as Literature”) 72

So clever banter is not enough. There is no external manifestation of the emotion behind the men’s speech. They only drink, stand up, sit down, lean against a mantel. The type of

“conversation” within packs all the drama there is in the world—movement, physical conflict, changes in scene are simply unneeded when the speeches themselves are talking about issues of great dramatic allure. The magnitude of the speech is the play. The vignette about the boat voyage sounds like the stuff of a play, and a snappy one at that, but it is housed in the ancillary material of the actual text. Nowhere in the play’s narrative is there an episode of traditional dramatic action, no change of scenery, and the plot has no apparent arc. So, if we can call this a play, why is it a play? The question remains as to why Millay did not see it more appropriate to arrange in a story or some other form. If nothing exists within it to make it a valid script for performance, then why does it strive so plainly to contain certain conventions, as in lines, character descriptions, “acts,” and stage directions? In terms of authorial intention, these would indicate, sure enough, that

Conversation was intended to be published in script form and subsequently performed.

Writer and critic Louis Untermeyer expressed harsh disapproval of Millay with

Conversation at Midnight. He first notes the dry, indifferent quality of the characters:

“She knows that verse can not only wing its way into the heart, but work its way into the mind, that poetry can talk as well as sing. But Miss Millay cannot make her men talk with any conviction, for she can create neither real controversy nor actual character.” This is a fair assessment, but Untermeyer goes so far as to say Millay was not fit intellectually to handle the gravity of the themes that comprise the book. He said,

She is not a thinker though she tries hard to be one; she is intuitive, not intellectual. When she relies unhappily on intellect, she falls back upon clichés of thought as well as stereotypes of expression. She has written 73

more uneven books, but, in all the fourteen volumes, she has never been so insistently discursive and so consistently dull. (“Seven Men Talking”)

Millay’s enthusiasm for the intellectual, modern voice, however, is apparent and (in keeping with literary trends of the time) commendable. In one of the few feminist observations of Millay’s dramatic work, Susan Gilmore attempts to explain Millay’s failure to attain prominence as a modern voice in Conversation. “Modern aesthetics,”

Gilmore writes, “promote a rhetoric of absence and impersonality to describe the ideal relationship between the writer and his work, yet critics demand the woman writer’s presence and produce readings of her work that are stubbornly reductive” (“Posies of

Sophistry” in Millay at 100).

Regardless of the dexterity of Millay’s feigned masculinity, the dialogue of

Conversation is strong, occasionally profound poetry. But, you see I have called it poetry: that is what it is. It is best left segmented, a succession of speech-like poems about diverse topics. A reader/spectator expecting a play is left hanging, and a reader/spectator expecting poetry is more potentially pleased. That schism is what reviews of

Conversation at Midnight have confirmed. The poetry prevails, too, when it becomes apparent that although Conversation includes stage directions, they are not practicable.

The first few pages of the “book” are controlled by dense and lengthy character descriptions. Here, Millay feels it necessary to record the men’s medical histories, athletic feats, passions and pursuits, and romantic quirks. These are altogether impractical descriptions, but lively expositional material. Character descriptions are generally kept broad and neat, so as to allow some directorial freedom in choosing and leading performers; to be useful, but not impossibly demanding. Millay apparently thought little of the practical benefit of these passages, and only of their value as show. While reading 74 the extensive character descriptions, one feels as though one is meant to decide which of the characters one should fall in love with, an activity encouraged by the personal-ad nature of Millay’s descriptions. The men are increasingly appealing, most of them described as well-dressed, to a certain degree handsome, and as having a series of formidable talents and accomplishments. The descriptions include extraneous information that could not be useful in the process of casting, or even for understanding the necessary aspects of each man. Consider, for instance, the passage describing Carl:

CARL is forty-three, somewhat under medium height, physically agile and graceful, plays an excellent game of tennis; sometimes plays with Lucas, but is too fast for Lucas. Carl is a communist. He is a poet, and has published three volumes of poetry, two written before he was thirty-five, which both Merton and Ricardo greatly admired, one written recently, which Merton finds incomprehensible and infuriating, but which amuses and rather fascinates Ricardo. Carl and Ricardo first met several years ago on board the Cabo Tortosa, a cargo-boat bound from New York to Barcelona. They were the only passengers, and avoided each other for ten days. On the eleventh the got into an argument as to the difference between dolphins and porpoises, and for the remainder of the voyage talked unintermittently…(CAM xiii)

No director could be expected to shape a performer to convey all that backstory—why is it there? For pleasure? Additionally, the dialogue fades in and out of traditional “line” format. In fact, it begins in paragraph form like any novel, with lines enjambed only because the page must end, and not for any artful separation: “That was the year I killed five hundred quail,” said Merton. “Davis was down there, and he wasn’t getting a bird.”

On the second page, after the speaker changes, still as in a novel, there is finally a character name, PYGMALION, in capital letters at the helm of a speech. Nothing else has changed; the men are still going on about their hunting dogs, but the textual shape has drastically been altered. One subconsciously feels that a fictional character has just become real—he was in a novel, and now he’s talking to us! The dialogue continues in 75 play line format form then on, but not without baffling deviations. On the very next page, we see a mixture of the two styles:

MERTON Still young. […] I’ll train her myself in two weeks, and you can have Caddis- Fly’s Bee-Balm for a plagiarized song. “It would seem,” said Carl, “that the aristocracy is doomed…

After transient passages, the text generally gets into some sort of exterior rhythm, wherein the spectator is passed from conventional bits of dialogue to pieces that more resemble poems or novels. Then, Millay mixes more than just versions of dialogue—she blurs the boundaries between dialogue and the play’s paratext. There is sudden narration, not by character: who says this? Are these stage directions?

Anselmo closed the piano. “I’m afraid I must go, Ricardo,” he said; “I have some work to do. Good-night to you all.” Ricardo went with him into the hall. At the door Anselmo turned and said gently, in his fine voice Free from unction and warm, “Dominus vobiscum;” then looked at Ricardo with a look both quizzical and sad… (41-42)

Here, Millay makes what would be stage directions, and a cue for the staging to move outside the parlor and into the hall, less about technical moves and more about a move that happens distinctly within the world of the story. As a result, then, we have either stage directions that aren’t conventionally formatted, or a novel whose majority is not.

And what of the rhyme scheme? Passages are invariably metrical and free, rhymed and not, structured poetically, or allowed to roam the page:

Anselmo said, “There are those to whom the key of C is red; And the key of F the colour of dried blood; and the key of E Clear blue. I do not mean that the ivories themselves assume these col- 76

ours, but that the quality of the key Is red, or blue, or yellow, as the case may be (Yellow is the key of D); It may not be so for you; It is so for me… (12)

Pygmalion’s speech thereafter assumes a momentarily dependable pattern of ABAB

CDDC, then Ricardo’s with AA, then John’s in ABCB DED. Some schemes are recognizable standard models, other seem makeshift, and nearly not rhymes at all.

It is clearly fruitless to expect any conventional plot devices from a play that has none, but how is the spectator supposed to approach it? Millay plays teach a lesson in spectatorship: before you judge a play as “bad,” first, make sure it is a play. Is it? The quality that might account for Conversation’s relative failure as a piece of theatre is that it was never meant to be theater. Authorial intention is, it seems, a topic injuriously neglected among Millay scholarship. If we take into consideration Millay’s expectations for her works, whether in terms of public consumption or private reading, we might be able to more accurately place each work at a specific degree of success. For some works, like Two Slatterns and a King, authorial intention is as clear and pronounced as the work’s aesthetic; Slatterns contains no roadblocks to production, it looks and sounds like a play, and it is framed as one. In private reading, the spectator, now a reader, understands what is meant to come of the text, and can visualize a performance as he or she reads. This system of certainty ensures a proper reading—one closer to an authorial reading. But in many of Millay’s works, as a reader/spectator, we are at a loss.

If Conversation was, in Millay’s retrospect, never “really” a play, then it was meant to be reading material from the moment of its conception—and the notion of a play meant only to be read is fascinating. Conventions for performability are naturally 77 excused, in this case. We might ascribe some of the text’s confusing attributes to be a set of new conventions, meant to direct the reader who is not sure of what he holds in his hands. For instance, the format of play may serve simply to help the reader keep track of who is making what speech. The lengthy expositional material gives the reader a mental picture of each man, which carries through the reading. This prevents the movement of the language from getting murky, and allows variation to come from characters’ motivations and not by happenchance.

In terms of non-poetry, this is an obvious reversion back to poetic form; home base, as it were. It may well be that Millay, wanting to give the impression of newness and dynamism in form, found a way to make Conversation function very much like a poem while still not quite being one. She was a poet, and was clever in her use of the non-play. In comparison to Millay’s definite plays, the subject matter in Conversation is extremely grave and quite unlike the message of Millay’s previous plays. The

“characters” are not playing lutes and flirting: they are embodying the uncertainty and angst of a dehumanized, politically charged society. Perhaps she felt it unfit to force this more serious agenda into the contrived shape of her earlier, lighter pieces. She was in command of new meaning, and thus a new shape was demanded to call attention to a shift in her authorial goal.

Despite its confusing ambition and succession of performance-preventing qualities, Conversation at Midnight seems to have inspired a handful of theater practitioners to take up the challenge. That they would do so, at public and financial risk, suggests that at least a few individuals have viewed Conversation as potentially good theater. In a 1985-1986 issue of Tamarack, the obsolete journal of the Edna St. Vincent 78

Millay Society, Millay’s sister, estate guardian, and literary executor Norma details her dealings with two theaters in Los Angeles and New York in the early 1960’s who attempted to stage the work. She writes that a man named Malcolm (she cannot remember more) “had come to ask my help in trying to figure out how my sister’s play

[…] could be fitted to a stage production. [Edna] had given him permission to produce the play, and how to extract the directions that appear within the body of the work was baffling” (“The Saga of Conversation at Midnight in the Living Theatre”). Prior to this first formal request, Norma Millay thought that perhaps “there had been a little theatre production or reading of the play, and there was talk of a radio performance…” (“Saga”); however, she does not seem certain. Norma’s nonchalance about the use of Millay’s texts is in line with her sister’s general aloofness about business matters.

Nevertheless, Norma was helpful in getting two productions underway, the second of which ran for four nights on Broadway at New York’s Billy Rose Theatre in

1964. Theatre critic, director, and writer Walter Kerr hated the play; there is no ameliorating that opinion. Reviewing the production, he wrote, “the main thing that is wrong with [the play] is that it has been produced. That is not intended as a facetious remark. I am going to assume, I hope rightly, that the piece was never meant to be produced” and calls the work Millay’s “elongated panel-discussion”

(“Kerr—Conversation at Midnight”). He scorns the play for its diffuseness, its bad attempts at humor, and summarizes that it is mere “rumination and it won’t play.” Kerr seems baffled by the audacity of theatre-makers to take up a useless task. He actually sides with the departed author, whom he says denied offers of production during her life

(yet this is untrue according to Norma’s recollection of “Malcolm”). Although he 79 recognizes fleeting and scattered merit to the play’s poetics, he cites egregious shortcomings that prevent Conversation at Midnight from ever triggering good drama.

Norma Millay would not have it: she wrote in retaliation, “it may be that Walter

Kerr is ill: he certainly contrived a sick review of a work by a distinguished tried-and- proven poet and playwright. But, of course, it is not a review at all—it is a diagnosis of the malady of Kerr—now starring in his latest pronouncement” (“Norma Millay—

Criticism at Midnight”). She says that if Kerr is going to disparage Millay for her characters’ characteristically flawed speeches, so Shakespeare can be disparaged for

Polonius’s long-windedness. She essentially labels Kerr too pedestrian in his viewpoints—the only speech he likes in Conversation at Midnight is one of the few optimistic passages. Every line he has attacked, she attacks back with a succession of poetic and historical trivia to try to substantiate his ignorance. Norma’s unbiased credibility is scant, but totally overhauled when she calls Kerr the “little man with the big tweezers and a pocket full of prejudices.” The critical portrait is at stalemate once more: who is to win in a battle between artistic objectivity and biological passion? This is all to say that if anyone dared to stage a Millay play, they would have done themselves a favor by not asking the family’s input; evidently, any authorial negligence on the part of Millay was posthumously eclipsed by her sister’s overbearing control. As in the case of The

King’s Henchman, Millay’s best reviewers are her love-struck friends and (in this case) surviving kin grasping to retain the sanctity of the name “Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

The only other attempt Millay made at the dramatic came in 1942 with the long poem/radio play Murder of Lidice, broadcast in 1942 in response to the complete destruction and razing of the Czech village of Lidice. Here, Millay had her one 80 opportunity to articulate a “national attitude,” an agenda perhaps the farthest from that of her Vassar days. The murder of the village of Lidice was ordered by Hitler in retaliation against the Czechs for killing Reinhardt Heydrich; over the course of one day, every man in the village was killed, every woman sent to concentration camps, and every child either sent with the women or away for Germanization. After every citizen had been

“dealt with,” the village was absolutely erased from the landscape, every bit burned and leveled. In this work, dramatization allowed Millay to treat her subject in a manner she saw more befitting the subject than straight poetry. But a full-fledged theatrical production would not have been appropriate, either. To force political, ethical, and philosophical diatribe into the technical needs of a play might obfuscate the message.

Moreover, Millay was aware of her illustrious profile—she was a celebrated author charged with a task that should not be compromised. Still, the task of classification is difficult, although Millay’s mission seems clear. In a series of correspondence among

NBC executives in the weeks leading up to Lidice’s broadcast, the work is variably referred to as a poem, epic poem, ballad, and play. In a telegraph dated October 3, 1942,

Alexander Woolcott said, “the fact that the poets of the country might care to use the radio as an instru[m]ent is the best reason for not throwing it into the scrap heap along with the rest of t[h]e junk of our time.” In spite of textual confusion, audiences appreciated the work, and Lidice gave world broadcasting a rare moment of excitement. 81

IV. Toward a New Comprehension

When it comes to the present age, we are not going to be deterred by a fatalistic philosophy of history from wanting a poetic drama, and from believing that there must be some way of getting it. Besides, the craving for poetic drama is permanent in human nature. –T. S. Eliot

Writing about Distressing Dialogues, Henry B. Fuller said:

The present collection permits the unsympathetic to view her as an impish vulgarian. And the loyal to regret the capricious and irresponsible exercise of a high talent on a lower plane. Everything is cleverly done—even here and there with spurts of the inexplicable thing which must be called genius; yet one would be as well pleased if it hadn’t been done at all. (Thesing 51)

This critique is in reaction to Millay as Nancy Boyd in her collection of Vanity Fair pieces, but Fuller’s words speak more broadly. The dichotomy between the

“unsympathetic” and the “loyal” characterizes the full scope of Millay criticism, especially in the case of the plays. A devoted admirer allows the author missteps and experimentation, and thus criticism is weighted in the author’s favor; the unsympathetic reader, far more objective in his or her view, can perhaps be more qualified in judging

Millay’s dramas. Being more “loyal” than “unsympathetic,” I have had to swear myself against emotion, to resign myself to blunt judgment of a woman whose poems I generally respect and whose plays I generally do not understand. Thus, a fundamental discord was established in my relationship with Millay’s work, a discord primarily fuelled by the relative ease of the classification of her poetry. I know that Millay’s poems are respected, because they are indisputably poems, and they are liberally anthologized and taught. But how is one meant to approach texts that seem to defy easy characterization of either form or content? My method of investigation has been aided by my belief that in attempting 82 drama Millay only aimed to broaden her scope as a writer, but was met with various challenges that she could not conquer.

One might place Millay’s theatrics in the context of a time of metamorphosis on the American stage, but she has been consistently overshadowed by O’Neill’s superiority.

Out of Millay’s fellow poet-playwrights, the dramatic work of E.E. Cummings seems to share the most congruencies. His is another career so overwhelmingly represented by the virtuosity of poetry that his few ventures into the theatre are as buried as Millay’s, in terms of both availability and criticism. He, too, attempted a variety of dramatic sub- categories, like the morality play (Santa Claus) and a music-based work (Tom). Like

Millay’s plays, these works can barely be thought of as scripts for performance; instead, they exist on a handful of library shelves as printed anomalies next to well-worn volumes of poetry. Did Cummings suffer some of the same textual drawbacks? His plays, especially Him, retain many Cummings-esque quirks, particularly his tendency to conjoin words. To the contemporary reader, his style seems archaic and other times courageously avant-garde. He was evidently every bit as audacious as Millay in the shaping of dialogue and inclusion of decorative, not necessarily practical, directions:

FIRST (Rolling up his eyes and clasping his hands, murmurs rapturously): What a b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l death! (Trumpets without: enter majestically the onorevole BENITO MUSSOLINI, more or less in the costume of Napoleon and with the traditional pose of that hero—“hands locked behind, As if to balance the prone brow Oppressive with his mind” (Browning)—but also wearing, at the end of a lightningrod, a halo, probably in token of his Christlike role in raising Italia from the dead…) (Him, II.VIII)

To include such esoteric description, to quote Browning—in a stage direction—is in line with Millay’s own exercising of artistic liberty and consequent dismissal of practicality.

Him is barely recognizable as a play: it is so decorated with brazen poetics that any solid 83 plot is held captive below the language’s surface. This play and Cummings’ others are enjoyable as additional venues for his poetry just as Millay’s plays are for hers, if one is inclined to endure the difficult reading. Millay, however, had always been more allegiant to traditional verse than Cummings, an allegiance especially apparent in the comparison of their sonnets; likewise, she tried to keep to the path of verse so obediently in her early dramatic works, that we have seen them suffer from a total dearth of modernity.

In 1950, the year of Millay’s death, T. S. Eliot stood before an assembly at

Harvard to deliver “Poetry & Drama,” the Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture.

Potentially the greatest defender of the virtues of verse, Eliot had famously surmised, “it is a function of art to give us some perception of an order in life by imposing an order on it” (Donoghue 245). In a way, this is not unlike the battle-cry of artists even more abstract. Virginia Woolf in her novel The Waves, for example, used liberal distortion and harsh imagery to reveal the human image; thus, what seemed forced and impersonal became organic and evocative. Perhaps setting natural emotion within an unnatural frame highlights its delicacy; perhaps Millay and company saw the potential for exposed meaning when they conflated two unlike things. In a handful of situations (Conversation at Midnight), this is so. In others (The Lamp and the Bell, Two Slatterns and a King, The

Princess Marries the Page), both an antiquated subject matter and an antiquarian language system make the result seem incongruous in the history of the theatre. Unless it can be proven that there was a burning social relevancy in the latter sort of play, or that this sort was produced out of some authorial urgency, one wonders why a play like The

Lamp and the Bell was written in the first place. The answer could have to do with nostalgia (Millay grew up very fond of classical drama and verse in all forms), or it may 84 well be that Millay’s sort of sentiment was best housed in an Italian nobleman’s 17th century moonlit courtyard. If that is the case, it becomes increasingly difficult to rationalize anti-war pieces like Conversation as partners in the Millay drama canon.

The dramatist who has started as a poet or a novelist is often loathe to concede that words alone are not enough. His natural impulse is to trust the words to carry all his burdens: action, plot, agency, gesture, and more than these. Alternatively he refuses to acknowledge that the composition of a play requires new skills which he, however expert in words, may not command. His hope [...] is to deduce a play from a poem. (Donoghue 249)

Millay’s plays feel, at times, as though they might be reduced to decent poetry if language had been given priority over plot and convention. The expansion of artistic elements native to the play form—space, time, movement—delays the arrival and mellows the effect of the moment of personal impact upon the viewer. The examiner begins to wonder: would this play be better off condensed into a poem? Millay’s manipulation of convention in her later dramas at least provided interest by suggesting allegory and a potential for impact in the spectator’s social and personal spheres. If all

Millay had to say in her earlier works was, “love is grand,” perhaps she should have kept it short.

In his introduction to his study of Eliot’s dramatic works, scholar Randy

Malamud calls Eliot’s drama “staunchly English,” meaning it is in terms of style and substance derived directly from traditional English play form. Millay’s plays, on the other hand, are not “staunchly” anything: part of their disparity is the result of textual shape and intention. In examining Millay’s plays, we have essentially plotted them along a scale of theatricality. At one end of the scale, we have seen instances in which Millay obeyed the rules and expectations of theatre patrons, producers, publishers—anyone involved in her career as a dramatist. These plays, however few, are relatively easy to 85 accept as plays, for all their resident parts are present in relatively unified form. It subsequently becomes clear that this is a small phenomenon; Millay’s dramatic works are rarely so easily defined and understood. More vast is a collection of works with uncertain boundaries: plays that are undeniably plays in terms of their looks, but which are not so conducive to production, whether because of impossible staging or lack of action. The less conventional works meet neither Aristotelian unity nor, demonstrably, contemporaneous or modern critical approval. In my belief, it is only this slightly renegade Millay that accomplished anything close to good theatre.

In this study, I have noted Millay’s relative incompetence as a playwright as having been caused by two major authorial obstacles: the fitting of her particular aesthetic and shifting messages into effective drama, and adjusting her tried-and-proven verse into character dialogue. The difficulty in accepting Millay’s competition with authorial obstacles comes partly from Millay’s notoriety as a poet; a poet whose “other career” is widely and uniformly understood. When she ventured into playwriting, her readers became spectators, who faced a new challenge of rationalizing their own conception of Millay’s poetry in terms of three-dimensionality. This must have been difficult—in the accounts of critics, we know that it was. From my own point of view,

Millay’s poetry is exponentially more sound and successful because of a variety of textual factors. Her themes require, for their best execution, a sense of clarity and connection that Millay’s theatre could not provide. I have used her early poem

“Renascence” to illustrate the dexterity of the personal connectivity between one human being and the world, painted in that poem to communicate a profound, visceral relationship. Elsewhere in Millay’s poetry, the narrator (which we always identify as 86

Millay herself) speaks directly to another person—a lover, an enemy, her mother—and in each case, we are the eavesdroppers witnessing an earnest conversation. In transferring these sincere, personal human moments from that close connection to a large public room, surrounded by patrons, the thread breaks. The poetic voice’s singularity gives way to the voices of a cast, the privacy of observation yields to a public arena.

These setbacks would not have been as problematic had Millay’s dramatic works more consistently given voice to topics of social immediacy, or had her lighter trivial stories possessed more dramatic verve. Instead, her light pieces stopped at lightness, and her two more universally meaningful ones were too few in number and too individually dissonant to establish Millay as a prolific or worthwhile dramatic artist. Millay disengaged her audience by bringing to life an unfamiliar geographical, temporal, and sentimental place in plays like The Lamp and the Bell, but she doubled that disengagement by writing in verse. There was, consequently, nothing for the spectator to directly relate to, to palpably connect with. Deep inside the plays lurks emotion, but the spectator is vitally alienated from a direct connection with the play’s central message (i.e. the struggle between sisterly love and romantic love). It is difficult, still, to attribute that unfortunate quality to an author whose poetry speaks so directly and with such equality to the listener of the poem.

And yet, even in her poetic canon, there is often observed a duality among

Millay’s lines, as Edward Davison observes:

In one character, until recently the dominating one, she appears as a disillusioned modern woman, independent, a little self-suspicious, cynical, yet not without a distinct sense for life [….] But the other Miss Millay is a poet who has known the genuine ecstasy, one who has been swept away on the full tide of a fine impulse more than once since she was a girl of eighteen. (“Edna St. Vincent Millay”) 87

Conceptualizing Millay’s career as a writer motivated by widely varying inspirations helps to establish a multiplicity in authorial style and tone: writing for reasons as diverse as college celebrations and pending war certainly bred equally diverse forms. For our purposes, the notion of stark variation extends beyond the feel of its work and its purpose—Millay, sometimes for no apparent reason determined by mission, adopted a puzzling method in her work, blurring (whether intentionally or not) the boundaries of genre or, at least, shape. And yet, she seemed to be unable to take bold command of either the “disillusioned modern woman” or the one rapt with “genuine ecstasy” in order to create a formidable dramatic voice in a given situation.

For her resignation to the less mature of her two voices, criticism turns relentlessly back to attack Millay for the triviality of the majority of her dramatic work.

Distressing Dialogues, said Fuller, was “lively and entertaining enough. But the country is suffering from a surfeit of youthful spirits, facetiousness and facile chatter. The skittish and the jaunty do well enough on occasion, but ought not to be depended upon much longer in our formation of a national attitude” (Thesing 52). In “The Crooked Cross,”

Aria da Capo, and Conversation at Midnight, Millay was positioned to act as interpreter for what Fuller calls a “national attitude.” She had the exposure as an artist, and she had the poetic skill. It is a shame that, in these high-profile projects, Millay relied on the lesser of her strengths. Fortunately, she succeeded in articulating the psychology of the masses well enough in The Murder of Lidice that she did not disgrace herself or the task.

Her casting of multiple voices gave the writing a liveliness that multiplied and projected a sentiment of global breadth. As a text, however, Lidice failed to maintain greatness past its novelty. Of the work Millay said, “It has some good lines, but not many, and not very 88 good. This piece should be allowed to die along the war which provoked it." Millay herself echoed Fuller’s critique in retrospect, qualifying much of her work as inferior attempts. Conversation at Midnight and The Murder of Lidice may have been “bad” for varying reasons—but if they were anything virtuous, they were serious and cautionary pieces. Since she was a poet first and foremost, Millay cultivated a certain type of language and a certain type of form, both of which she had arguably mastered by a young age. Because she is known for that distinctive form, it is difficult not to compare her dramas to their poetic counterparts, to see how she faltered in the execution of language and form in a second genre. As was the case with other themes, Millay’s wartime poems are resoundingly better than these dramatic works; they, too, benefited from an earnest sense of sincerity befitting the situation.

It is important to track how language and convention either enable or inhibit

Millay’s dramatic effect. Since verse as a language system is virtually the only element common to all of the works in question (its alternative being prose in a few instances), it provides a lens through which to view Millay’s various agendas, for instance. Millay’s adaptation of her unique verse from page to stage seems competent in some instances and clumsy in others. For example, in writing about modern philosophy and politics, Millay’s use of verse as a vehicle for 20th century themes inhibits modernization and casts an archaic veil over work that strives to reject the out-of-date. Secondly, by adjusting to the play form, Millay was confronted with several new arbitrary conventions. A play, being necessarily extended across a certain amount of time, range of places, and number of voices, seems in some instances to have handicapped Millay. By writing plays, she lost the right to be succinct, the virtue she had employed so well in poetry. The intensity, 89 clarity, and economy of a Millay poem gave way to irregular expansion and formal uncertainty. In an early dramatic endeavor like The Princess Marries the Page, verse takes control in an expectable, appropriate, uncontestable fashion. Yet when Millay’s later plays shift from gaiety to a discussion of national—even global—humanitarian or political cause, Millay’s allegiance to verse seems ill-fitted to the new subject-matter. Her plays become, consequently, less “performable” and rather more like “non-plays” than the earlier, more cohesive pieces. Ultimately, verse variably imposes limitations and gives freedom to Millay’s articulation of stories and messages.

I do not mean to say that Millay failed at an easy artistic task—quite the opposite.

By attempting to excel at verse drama, Millay attempted to put herself in league with only a few successful fellow poets. In The Third Voice, Donoghue says bluntly: “Most good poets write plays, bad plays” and names Stevens, Williams, and Auden as examples.

According to Donoghue, only Yeats did it well (10). Millay’s defeat by the genre is due to its conventional differences from those of poetry: it entails crafting language to feel real and clear, and matching its artistry with that of complementary plot and action. The poet naturally has fewer people and practical expectations to appease, as he or she keeps poetry safely inside pages. Artistic ownership breeds safety; the poem is less likely to be misinterpreted through amateurish or faulty performance. Even Walter Kerr, who so unabashedly reprimanded Conversation at Midnight, recognized the piteous dynamic under which the poet-playwright works:

The stupefaction begins long before the play finds its way to an unwary stage. It is a mental climate, a blanketing fog, a soft and padded and boneless unction that settles over the dramatist from the moment he decides that he is actually going to work in verse. [It] does mean walking into a new world; so far as the contemporary heater is concerned, it means walking into a somnambulist’s world. (“Verse in Rehearsal”) 90

Without making an apology for Millay’s dramatic work, we must consider formal opposition, which accounts somewhat for Millay’s limited success and might even explain the general mediocre quality of modernist poet-playwrights (with the exception of Yeats, to honor Donoghue’s claim). Due to the poet’s inclination to the subjective, perhaps, readers expect less active, direct language from them than is required by the stage. Millay was not alone in the challenge; theatre scholar Ruby Cohn observes that, despite their natural orientation toward the metaphoric, poet-playwrights have been “most concrete when most pointed—through satire and parody” (313). Perhaps out of fear of the prosaic, Millay and other poets sought refuge in the concrete in order to be concrete: hence the relative success of Aria da Capo and the sharp wit of Distressing Dialogues.

As Eliot illustrated, the championing of realistic, commonplace prose as opposed to verse was the modus operandi of the early modernist era. After decades of styles as varied as symbolism, naturalism, and expressionism, a demand for psychological truth in dialogue and scene had transformed the theatre into a far closer resemblance of Man than it had been in American melodrama and on German stages, for instance. It seemed as though a certain universal movement away from abstraction and toward truth had momentum, cultural immediacy, and public approval. So why and how, in the midst of a revolution away from it, did some of the United States’ leading contemporary poets make deliberate allegiances to classicized verse? Why was verse the best possible medium for the newest wave of the English language? Why was the universal truth of Man, which should be easily identified and consumed by the spectator, delivered in a foreign language, so to speak? In the decades leading up to Millay’s limelight, verse had fallen out of fashion. Some of the most noted traditional playwrights, after all, had decided at 91 some point to succumb to the growing interest in psychologically true dialogue. In Brand and Peer Gynt, Ibsen employed verse to esteemed reception, but later produced anthems of realism, like Hedda Gabler. In addition, the positivists and naturalists had emphasized the importance of the scientific method’s influence on the arts and promoted the superiority of organic movement and speech over the stylized and declamatory practices that had so long held reign. As the modernization of the theatre carried into the 20th century, more sub-schools of modernism made changes to the building-blocks provided by Realism, but there remained an allegiance to psychological honesty on stage.

Eliot insists in The Sacred Wood that “a speech in a play should never appear to be intended to move us as it might conceivably move other characters in the play, for it is essential that we should preserve our position of spectators, and observe always from the outside though with complete understanding” (4). Here is a fundamental possibility in explaining Millay’s dramatic shortcomings: her best stage speeches are not powerful within the world of the play, but they resonate within the page or, potentially, the auditorium. When Aethelwold or Bianca or Father Anselmo makes a euphoric speech, it is not to his or her benefit, but to Millay’s. Perhaps nowhere is this more keenly apparent than in Conversation at Midnight, where there is no event for the kinetic energy of speech to spark, no revelation to enable, no devastating confession to stir the atmosphere. It is structurally episodic—cyclical—in the sense that, for all its elocution, the characters at the play’s end arrive back at their original emotional and intellectual state. The speeches they deliver are inter-related, but all that one great line inspires is another, then another. It feels, in the end, more like a platform for recitation than a nimbly constructed semblance 92 of a place or time. Although we might not be justified in calling this a selfish version of theatre, it is far more declarative than dimensionally powerful.

There are some basic problems with fitting familiar ideas into unfamiliar form, especially from the standpoint of the reader. Naturally, there were many critical tirades written against the practice of verse, warning of the dangers of this formal regression.

“One of the problems involved in verse drama is the relation between the verse (in particular, its syntax, diction, and rhythm) and the characteristic speech of the audience to which it is addressed” (Donoghue 14). It is undeniable that the audience members of the

Provincetown Players were more prone to speak in the mode of the men in O’Neill’s The

Hairy Ape, toiling in a ship’s stoke-hole, than in the manner of Millay’s courtly ladies.

But in the case of unfamiliar characters speaking unfamiliar language, there is nothing for the spectator to personally identify with. It is when we travel into the realm of Millay’s

Conversation at Midnight that the discord is clear, yet that “play” comes closest to satisfying the modernization of prose. In Conversation we have characters that look and live like the audience on the other side of the footlights, and, although they speak in a more formally structured manner, they swear, they make current allusions, and they interject terse, short phrases into longer, lilting, more majestic passages. The performer, like the playwright, strains to attach familiar meaning to unfamiliar form to communicate clearly with the audience. The conundrum is partially solved if the actor can dismiss the ornamental nature of the dialogue and behave naturally. What the audience sees then helps to clarify and substantiate what is heard. Speech and gesture, simultaneously clarification and alienation, becomes an interesting theatrical juxtaposition. 93

While Millay’s language construction limits her thematic strength, dramatic conventions prevent Millay’s passages from possessing the entrancing, persistent completeness that poetic space allows. Part of the success of a Millay poem is its entirety, its unbroken movement from the point of invocation through the rise, to a plateau of imagery, down to a firm and witty resolution that neatly ends a brief, and therefore intense, voyage down the page. With its brevity and unity, a Millay poem affects the reader because it encapsulates such emotional volume and compacts such magnitude of thought into as little as three lines. This is the quality that makes some haiku immortal.

But a play cannot be as small as three lines, and it cannot be read as such. Kerr suggested that this separation lies in the concept of passivity and activity, when he wrote, “we might call attention…to the natural brevity of the lyric impulse and contrast it with the sustained intensity that is required of the dramatic; […] that a lyric poem […] tends to become a ballad or an epic the moment it tackles a complex narrative” (231). Millay was challenged to create complication—the construction of which only muddled her otherwise clear, focused poetic style.

As a reader, one of the delights of experiencing a Millay poem is holding it in its entirety, free to study it slowly, line-by-line, looking again over favorite passages after it has ended. There is no such ability, sitting in an auditorium watching a play. Unless the spectator has the text at home to refer to later, a play forces him or her to give up each line in turn and commit full attention to the next. Brilliant lines, therefore, are half- digested and reluctantly dismissed— misheard, even. They may exist only for a fleeting second. That is why, sometimes, the success of a play comes from visual cohesion, with dynamic layers of action and artistic elements to supplement and clarify meaning. 94

Millay’s plays are rather physically barren, either because their settings are too far- fetched for production and are therefore sparsely produced, or minimalistically set in a single, claustrophobic, unchanging parlor.

Furthermore, because a play is governed by a set of physical principles—such as length—in writing them Millay lost the right to exercise her fine skill of compression. By conforming to dramatic convention, Millay lost the specific constraints that showcased her wit and fancy best. The preliminary situation to understand is that, for all their physical differences, Millay’s poems and plays are built of many of the same materials.

Her magnificent way of articulating the most mystifying of human emotions, her cleverness, her way of commanding he audience’s attention—these virtues are present everywhere on either side of the double-canon. Only by studying the restrictions of convention and the challenge of honoring a distinct purpose have we been able to judge

Millay’s competency as a playwright compared to her adroitness as a poet. Just as she wrote poems from early girlhood, so did she experiment with play form, and consequently the themes and inherent messages of works in both canons progress chronologically from whimsy and innocence to the acute, critical voice of her later propagandic works. The two half-canons are inter-related in that way only, in matching progressions of theme. Her poems, from career start to end, are consistently more evocative and memorable.

Bombastic when political and dulcet when sentimental, Millay, both as poet and dramatist, sought out specific articulations for every human situation. As a result, her choices were as diverse as they were artistically successful. Today, it feels strange to engage with a libretto built of Anglo-Saxon colloquialisms, or a mediaeval mystery play, 95 or a harlequinade. Likewise, knowing of the theatre’s capacity for social awareness and change, being fed trivial love stories seems absurd. All we might truly identify with is

Millay’s courage in seeking out-dated forms to articulate forward thought, as in Aria da

Capo and Conversation at Midnight. Among her dramatic works, these two “plays” offer the most in terms of both aesthetic accomplishment and real human value. The virtue of their expression of philosophy and emotion, however, is not nearly as adept as Millay’s poems. For Conversation at Midnight, especially, power can be attributed only to its parts, not its entirety—and Aria da Capo, however triumphant above its fellow plays, does not possess enough constant substance and engagement to secure Millay the title of superior playwright. Her process as a dramatist might have been aided by an artistic mentor—some force other than Harper’s. Her publishers were indulgent in what was essentially parenting Millay as she aged; there was no objective professional supervision of her work. After she left Vassar’s classrooms, Millay had no real theatrical guidance.

This thesis might have told a different story had Millay’s dramatic career been governed by a discerning director—familiar with the demands of the stage—whose presence might have helped Millay exercise her imagination while ensuring a workable text as the ultimate product.

As an admirer of Millay’s poetry, I have had to resolve myself to thinking of her in entirely new terms. As a scholar of the theater, I have had to look at some dumbfounding texts in novel ways. What can I declare about Millay the Dramatist that might be useful in either discipline? We as a literary culture honor writers posthumously by celebrating their immortal masterpieces: is it our duty, likewise, to ascribe significance to their failures? In a word—yes. Focusing on the failures of an artist whose successes 96 have been cause for consistent celebration helps the critic to reframe his or her investigation; by casting aside common opinion, I have been able to judge Millay’s works as someone approaching them for the very first time. The stark difference between

Millay’s two half-canons has indeed caused a sense of a double author, and it has been more of a challenge to associate the two than separate them. For any scholar of any literary figure, I suggest this kind of approach as beneficial for gaining an objective eye.

The scholar of “failures,” as I have found, assumes a role apart from previous scholars—a role that carries a new voice and reveals new discoveries. Furthermore, searching for

Millay’s “lost” works has ushered me into hidden places—both textual and biographical—to seek out information and material. Looking forward, I wonder now about what hidden “failures” I might find buried beneath the masterpieces of other eminent writers.

Millay was devoted to her words—the night she died, overcome with grief for her husband’s death three weeks earlier, sleep-deprived, addicted, she had written these lines in her notebook and circled them: “I will control myself, or go inside/ I will not flaw perfection with my grief/ Handsome, this day: no matter who has died” (Savage Beauty

508). To live for words, to die by their prophecy—Millay was a born poet. Whatever attempts she made at other arts, she remained ever disposed to it. Kerr remarked,

The dramatic poet will rarely think of himself as a poet. His first thought will not be for the evocative power of his words; it will be for the excitement of a scene, the tingling reality of a situation, the push and shove of characters shouldering their ways through a narrative. […] Language will be the last thing he turns to; it will be tremendously important in measuring his final effect, but he will come to it belatedly. (“Verse in Rehearsal”) 97

Not Millay. It is clear that she valued language first and foremost, to the blatant sacrifice of dramatic effect. The words autonomously possessed dramatic effect, but the total works lacked the sensation expected by critics and audiences. They were (as we are) vaguely impressed by words, and numbly agitated by fruitless theatre. Ultimately, what we have is a body of negligible works that have consistently confounded theatregoers, critics, and scholars, and only one (Aria da Capo) of which is worthy of any solid, notable merit. As a scholar who values truth at the expense of idolatry, this examination of a hidden group of work has led me to re-consider their author, who after all is more truthfully represented not by a succession of uncontested greatness, but by a series of co- existing victories and failures. 98

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