Conversation by Millay

CONVERSATION AT MIDNIGHT--Edna St. Vincent Millay--Harper ($2).

Poets have rarely felt so compelled to take account of public interest for good or ill as in the fourth decade of the 20th Century. Putting foot to spade in Europe they have turned over so many clodfuls of dead cultural matter that their most vivid talents. Joyce, Auden, MacDiarmid. Aragon, seem hell-bitten to innocent readers. Among affirmatory fledglings, Revolution or at least the advance of the masses has easily displaced Love and Death as

Solution No. i. In the U. S. this movement has produced, amid much Marxian sentimentality, such eloquent mutations as Archibald MacLeish's Panic, Public Speech, Fall of the City (TIME, April 19). Meanwhile Edna St. Vincent Millay, the best contralto of them all, has kept her verse dainty and her emotions uppermost in her mind. Last week for the first time

Poet Millay published a book with explicitly social subject matter.

Conversation at Midnight brings together a priest, an artist, a writer of advertising copy, a Communist poet, a rich broker, a Liberal dilettant and a slick magazine writer for after-dinner dialog in verse. Poet Millay, who once acted at Vassar and Provincetown, asks her readers to think of her Conversation in terms of the theatre, but she appends an index of first lines so that segments may be read as single poems. Readers will immediately observe 1) that the most feminine living poet has attempted not one but several distinct masculine idioms, with considerable charm but only here and there with success; 2) that the Millay talent for epigrammatic verse, which endeared her long ago to a liberated generation, has profited by colloquial language and a brisk long line carrying echoes of Ogden Nash more often than Shakespeare. Critics will agree that while many of the speeches Poet Millay has put in the mouths of her characters are lucid because naive, artful but not meaningful, she has succeeded in dramatizing the rich confusions of U. S. gentlemen and in adding a few of her own. Of the pure cutting edge and organization of first-rate poetry they will find little evidence.

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. Finally the latter says:

The reason why there are three times as many men as there are jobs

Is because--and you know it as well as

I do--one man is working the hours of three;

And the reason for that is that for a lot of smug and over stuffed slobs

It's a hell of a sight more profitable that way, but it's a reason that doesn't appeal to me.

Merton replies:

Your violence offends me. Your sneering, supercilious bravado

Offends me. . . .

You stand for the death of everything I care for.

God, we've spent years proving that the world is round!--

And you'd make it flat again!

While Miss Millay's Liberal character despairs of reviving liberalism as a political force, she gives the lines which seem to ring most with her own conviction to the artist, John:

The liberal, the deliberate, the low of voice

Might well adopt by choice

And charter what is their fitting and historic role:

These are the whisperers-together, these from all time

Have been the angelic spies in the loud councils of the confident lost. . . .

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