It Happened Here -- The Christian Sisters in Canaan and

the Greenwich Village Poet of Austerlitz

Last week's Marker of the Week, about the location of fictional events near James Fenimore Cooper's house on Lake Otsego have led me to think about two other "literary" markers in northern Columbia County. Though only a few miles apart, the world-views and lifestyles of the subjects of these markers -- a pair of 19th century women novelists, and an early 20th century feminist poet -- could hardly be any more distant from each other.

Off NY 295, Vandenberg Rd., Queechy

                                                                                                                                                           Susan Bogert Warner, writing as "Elizabeth Wetherell" in the 1850's was extremely popular in her time, writing what has been called the "first best seller," second in popularity at mid-century only to Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Wide Wide World,  published in 1850 relates the story of Ellen, a young girl who is sent to her aunt to live when her father must take her mother to Europe for medical treatment. Traveling in the company of strangers who are mean to her, she runs away. She meets a man who sees her crying. He reminds her of her mother's lessons of Christianity and giving herself over to Jesus to find strength and consolation in prayer. Ellen decides to become a "true Christian." Continuing  on to her Aunt's                                            

house she discovers her father neglected to tell her Aunt she was coming to live there!  The Aunt resents her presence and is unkind to her. Throughout the rest of the novel Ellen meets a succession of people who are unkind or adversarial,  and others (Christians) that encourage her and help her grow in her faith. One, a good friend dies, and Ellen learns a lesson of acceptance of God's will. Another, the friend's brother supports her and helps to grow in spiritual maturity. One day, while doing her chores in the household she discovers a letter to her from her mother expressing the desire to have her come live with relatives in Scotland.  Knowing this is her mother's will, she persists and eventually gets herself shipped off to Scotland. There, her Scots relatives fall in love with her, become possessive and insist she act like their own daughter, but they see her religious fervor as obsessive and they discourage her in her religious devotions. She learns to balance being a dutiful child while maintaining her religious faith.  Eventually, her friend's brother finds her, and though the family try to keep them apart, they get together. John encourages her to keep her faith, reminding her that she will soon be old enough to chose where she wants to live. Then she can return to America and they will be together forever. (There the novel ends.)

The novel struck a chord with Victorian Americans and within two years it had gone through fourteen editions.  Twentieth century critics, however, panned it, dismissing it as "didactic" and "sentimentalist", dealing mainly with Ellen's emotional reactions to events that overtake her.  (One critic counted five outbursts of tears in four pages.)   But, curiously, in recent years this and other works of Susan Warner have found a following.  Among fundamentalist  Christians, especially in the "home school movement" Warner has regained popularity and even sets of  teaching materials on Wide, Wide World have appeared for use with pre-teen, early-teen home-schoolers.

Often collaborating with her sister, Susan Warner wrote some fifty novels.  Her sister Anna wrote thirty one, but she is more remembered for her children's hymns, including "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know, (for the Bible tells me so.)" Both sisters,  living at their father's home on Constitution Island, in the Hudson River, off of West Point taught bible classes to cadets at the military academy for  some forty years. They were buried in the West Point cemetery, the only civilians (not members of military families) to be buried there.                                                    

NY22, corner of East Hill Rd., Austerlitz

"My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
    It gives a lovely light!"

This quatrain from " First Fig" (1920) would epitomize the sensual carpe diem spirit of the young poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Raised by a struggling single mother in Camden Maine, "Vincent", as she was called by her family, would write a luminous prize-winning poem at age of 20 (Rennascence) , go on to attend  Vassar College, courtesy of a wealthy patron awed by her poetic gifts, and make her way to Greenwich village, where she would write and publish, and have affairs with well over a score of lovers, male and female. In the course of her early life she would become the most widely read poet of her, (" Jazz Age") generation.  

Steepletop,  E. Hill Rd., Austerlitz

 
By 1923 she was becoming chronically ill with intestinal disorders.  At a party she met a successful Dutch coffee importer, Eugen Boissevain.  They fell in love  and "Vincent" who had rejected proposals from more than a couple other suitors accepted his. They were married and were whisked off to ... the hospital, where after a successful appendectomy and bowel re-sectioning Vincent was returned to convalesce in the care of her new husband.  The awarding of the Pulitizer Prize to Vincent later that year for a volume of her collected verses passed almost without notice. (Millay was the first woman so honored.)

Two years later the couple bought an old blueberry farm in northern Columbia County where Vincent could work, free of the distractions of the City, but still near enough the City so Vincent and Eugen could have city friends up for parties.  They named it "Steepletop" for the stalky pale pink wildflowers that grew everywhere in the un-worked fields.  Eugen sold his import business,  and took up farming and the care and nurturing of Vincent and her career full time.

Other collections of poetry and literary projects followed over the years. The Boissevains settled into an "open" marriage in which both partners from time-to-time had affairs. In 1925 Vincent's affair with  poet George Dillon inspired some of her best sonnets. Though a pacifist during World War I, Vincent recognized the evil threat fascism posed and wrote poetry to support the U.S. war effort in World War II.  Though most of this work was not critically well received, "Lidicie" a poem about the Nazi extermination of a Czech village was praised.

In 1936 a car accident left Millay with serious chronic back pain which led to a dependence on morphine. The stress of the war, Eugen's loss of his investments overseas, and the pressures to write to meet deadlines led Vincent to a nervous breakdown in 1944 that prevented her from writing for two years. In 1949 the years of smoking, heavy drinking and caring for Vincent took their toll on Eugen as well. He contracted lung cancer, underwent radical surgery and died from a stroke.

Vincent was devastated but doggedly worked on, alone, at Steepletop to write another collection of poems. She died just a year later from a heart attack.

To some extent, like the Warner sisters, the popularity and acclaim of Millay's work has ebbed and surged.  By the 1960's her lyric, romantic poetry had fallen out of fashion, replaced by the new Modernism of such poets as T. S. Elliot and W. H. Auden but a decade later with the rise of the feminist movement her work was receiving new attention.  Steepletop was opened as a museum and the Millay Colony for the Arts was established to encourage and inspire young artists.