Edna St. Vincent Mallay, who brought us the candle burning at both ends, was born on February 22nd 1892, a woman before her time. Enchanting, bold, and brilliant, her poetry was described by Thomas Hardy as one of America’s two greatest attractions – the other was the skyscraper.
She smoked in public when it was against the law for women to do so. She lived in Greenwich Village during the halcyon days of that starry bohemia, she slept with men and women and wrote about it in lyrics and sonnets that blazed with wit and a sexual daring that captivated the nation.
Poring over thousands of papers and letters, and with the cooperation of E. Vincent’s sister, Norma, biographer Nancy Milford learns how this ‘New Woman” evolved. It was her mother, Cora, who urged Edna and her two sisters towards a fierce and unconventional independence, having asked their father to leave the family home in 1899. It was Cora who taught her daughters to love music and literature from an early age. In Edna’s scrapbooks, are preserved performance programs, photographs, and early writings of the first woman poet to win the Pulitzer. Wholly empowered by a devoted mother, Edna was performing and writing when she was just five years old.
When I think of all that I wish for my daughter and that which my mother still hopes for me, I appreciate Cora Mallay’s fierceness and imagine a little of it resides in me. Formidable and uncompromising, her mother, Norma exclaims:
. . . was not like anyone else’s mother. Yes. She was ambitious for us. Of course she was! She made us – oh, not ordinary!
We all want to be “not ordinary,” to matter while making our respective marks on the world.
As the sun resumed its predictable shimmer following a rare wintry rain in Phoenix today, I looked up and through the trees that line a downtown parking lot, and I thought of Edna St. Vincent Mallay, whose childhood pulsated with her love of nature, poetry, and music. Of those formative years, she would later recall, “it never rained in those days” . . .
City Trees
The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.
And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.
Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,—
I know what sound is there.
I’m not a compulsive list-maker by any stretch, but sometimes, if I have a new pad of paper, a new ink cartridge in the fountain pen I use maybe three times a year, and nothing else to do (in other words, my Wireless connection is acting up) I’ll start a list such as that begun on June 24, 2012. Entitled, “Things We Really Need To Do Around Here,” it has been ignored for nine months. Thirteen of fourteen things still need to be done, not the least of which is “Hang pictures & get rid of ones we HATE.” The only thing done that resulted in any demonstrable changes was “Call the Mike the Painter.”
On July 1st, I began another list. I wrote it down with To Do at the top and next to each item, I added an empty check box:
Ask mam – did granda tell her about The Battle of the Somme??
Poppies
Well-intentioned and clearly focused on an upcoming vacation that necessitated sending Atticus to kitty jail, I was off to a good start. I’m guessing Beck must have popped up on Pandora, sending me and my list off on a tangent that ended with remembering my grandfather who fought in World War I. Nonetheless, we went on vacation, the cat lives, my playlists include more Beck and Tom Waits, and I have written about my grandfather and his experiences as a young soldier lest any of us forget.
While I don’t make daily to-do lists, I am rarely without post-it notes in my handbag, or one of those little notepads reporters used to carry around in their back pockets. This is not entirely about being ready to jot down things of a pedestrian nature, although that has happened – I’ll quickly scribble some new medical term I need to look up on Google, because instead of asking my doctor what she was talking about, I just sat there, nodding sagely. Or I will remember that I need to buy shampoo. I might hastily write down the name of the store where I can find a handbag like the one hanging from the arm of the complete stranger I met in the post-office, befriending her over our mutual regard for a bag that’s just the right size. Paper and pen at hand is more aspirational, anticipation of some treasure waiting for me in the most unexpected places.
I remember a summer afternoon in 2008 on Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA when I spotted a bright yellow piece of paper stuck to the window of an American Apparel store. On it, something John F. Kennedy had said about immigration, that I have since learned was part of the Legalize LA campaign. No smartphone on hand to take a picture, I captured those achingly relevant words in my little reporter’s notepad, and for good measure added them to my signature on my work email:
Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn to the world and to our own past with clean hands and a clear conscience.
Along with John F. Kennedy’s compassionate words on immigration, I have jotted down reminders, presumably, to buy water, ice, band aids, and plane tickets to San Diego. Stuck between the plane tickets and the need for band aids, is The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow. This is the title of a book, and I am now bemused, given the theme that is developing here, by its subtitle: How Randomness Rules our Lives. I wish I could remember who told me about this book and in what context. I probably need to read it.
Randomness continues on the next page with apples, strawberries, bananas and a toothbrush. I need to call Kathleen, perhaps about a pair of shoes from Sandalworld online, where, as it happens, I will also find Jack Rogers. Realizing eventually that Mr. Rogers is not someone I need to call, but is the name attached to pricy sandals which the website screams, are the summertime staple. There is another quotation: “Culture is a social control system. If you don’t manage it, it can undermine innovation and creativity and hinder your ability to execute your strategy. This is why a leader should care about culture.” Indeed a leader should. I have no idea where I was or who said this, but obviously it was someone who said something I had also been thinking about, except better than I could and at just the right time.
A man of few written words, my husband loves his post-it notes where his abbreviations of grocery items often render them cryptic as ancient hieroglyphics or personalized license plates.Yesterday morning, I spotted on top of a small pitcher of water his note to himself to feed our family of humming birds and water the petunias in the front yard. He added a flourish. “Hum-bird. Water the Front.”
The stories we could weave from our discarded lists and post-it notes – resolutions, reminders, instructions, and bucket lists. Our favorite things. The very worst things, too, the things we fear the most – a message received too late, a fence never mended, undeniable evidence of a loved one’s harrowing descent into memory loss. Intimate. Relatable. Human.
Whatever is posted on those notes stuck to themselves at the bottom of my handbag is unlikely to see the light of day, unlike the array of yellow post-its, lists, and miniature drawings that meander around, above, and on top of a desk belonging to the aunt of a friend:
An artist, she has pressed tightly over the edge an intriguing “Simplicity. Complexity.” I am curious about the story contained in those words but it’s likely to remain elusive, as it does for artist Adriane Herman who for almost a decade rummaged through trashcans and grocery carts, culling evidence of the way we spend our time – or the way we aspire to.
In her review of Herman’s word-based art, Annie Larmon describes this reconstruction of “our most ephemeral and disposable documents as relevant cultural artifacts,”
From grocery and to-do lists to notes scrawled on Post-its, Herman slips between humor and scrutiny while unpacking the social narratives and psychological patterns loaded into the uncensored scribbles
Here, in Art of the List, Herman presents and discusses these marks we make, our sometimes desperate attempts to contain the lives we are living in small and sticky spaces:
Many relationships in my life I conduct almost entirely by telephone, including those with the people dearest to me. With too much ocean or freeway stretching between our houses, it is easier to continue our conversations from the comfort of our own homes. Always, there is something to talk about even when there is nothing to talk about. Before Skype, I treasured long-distance phone calls with my mother, usually during the weekend when we could be less circumspect with the time difference and the cost per minute. Before Facebook, there were sporadic phone calls from childhood friends, the rhythm of home so achingly familiar, we fell softly into conversation, picking up where we left off years ago.
By telephone, we have delivered and received the most important news of our lives, from that which cannot be shared quickly enough: “I got the job!” “We’re getting married!” “I’m going to have a baby!” “It’s a girl!” to the kind that startles the silence too early in the morning or too late at night to be anything good. From my best friend, Audrey, so far away in Wales, calling to tell me her husband was killed outright in a car accident: “My darling is gone! My darling Kev is gone! Gone!”; To my best friend in America, Amanda, who, waiting for “benign,” answers before the end of the first ring, only to hear, “I have cancer.” Thus, two people are connected in an ephemeral silence that leaves each with nothing to hold on to:
Writing a letter is different, with more time to shape our tidings with the very best words we have. I am sad that the letter-writing of my youth has fallen out of favor, snuffed out by e-mails that, regardless of font and typeface, are not the same. How I miss opening a mailbox made of bricks, to find the red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail, par avion. And how glad I am to have saved so many to read and reread, these objets d’art, immortal reminders of the people I treasure and who treasure me.
In part, it is this sentiment that is behind the exquisite Letters of Note website, a veritable homage to the craft of letter-writing. Editor, Shaun Usher, has painstakingly collected and transcribed letters, memos, and telegrams that deserve a wider audience. Already, I have pre-ordered the book that has grown from the website, and you should too. Because I am of a time when telegrams came from America and other places, to be read by the Best Man at wedding receptions, I opted for the collectible first edition which is accompanied by an old-fashioned telegram.
Considering telegrams and old letters, and the heart laid bare on stationery this Valentine’s Day, I am reading again the letter of marriage advice from then future President Ronald Reagan to his son, Michael. Published in Reagan – A Life in Letters, there is both heart and craft in it:
Michael Reagan
Manhattan Beach, California June 1971
Dear Mike:
Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won’t.
You’ve heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the ‘unhappy marrieds’ and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.
Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it.
The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back to an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.
Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.
Love,
Dad
P.S. You’ll never get in trouble if you say ‘I love you’ at least once a day.
Edna St. Vincent Mallay, who brought us the candle burning at both ends, was born on February 22nd 1892, a woman before her time. Enchanting, bold, and brilliant, her poetry was described by Thomas Hardy as one of America’s two greatest attractions – the other was the skyscraper.
