Broadcasting Modernism

13. Materializing Millay: The 1930s Radio Broadcasts

c h a p t e r 1 3 Materializing Millay The 1930s Radio Broadcasts Lesley Wheeler The startling newness of early radio, the speed at which it transformed American life, resonates with modern literature’s parallel investment in change, originality, even revolution. Edna St. Vincent Millay, however, while involved in both enterprises, was hardly an avatar of the new. Although she promoted and embodied women’s increasing social and sexual freedoms, she also performed the stereotypes of bohemian, femme fatale, and poetess with zeal; she was, in many ways, a conventional figure, and not only because she often wrote in forms and imagery that any Victorian would recognize as poetic. Nevertheless, Millay was, in a small way, a broadcast pioneer. In 1932 and 1933, Millay became one of the first poets to read her own work over American airwaves. In doing so, she responded to a call issued by many parties to “save” poetry by taking advantage of this innovative technology, this original way of transmitting poetry to a national audience. She also became an important example of how poets in the modern era used, and were used by, a developing medium. Millay’s broadcasts succeeded in reaching appreciative listeners, yet the survivingevidenceindicatesthatshedidnot,infact,treatradioasfundamentally new. For Millay, radio’s effects closely parallel the advantages conferred by a much older technology: print. Both broadcast and printed poetry, that is, deliver an illusion of intimacy and presence despite distance (geographical, and in the case of books and recordings, temporal). Even public recitation by the author constitutes a materialization: the poet may be physically present 238 in the lecture hall, yet the poetic self remains a performance managed much more convincingly by some writers than others. Millay regarded this illusion of presence and intimacy as the battery, the indispensable power source, for the twentieth-century lyric in any medium. Radio delighted her; she even wrote occasional verse, discussed in this essay’s conclusion, in appreciation of popular radio performer Edgar Bergen and his wooden alter ego Charlie McCarthy. Nevertheless, Millay’s broadcasts question the artistic value of novelty and register skepticism of radio’s supposedly radical, utopian possibilities . For Millay, radio is a means, like print, to overcome distance, and a forum, like public recitation, in which poetry’s tropes of sound may become briefly literal. I begin with an account of Millay’s on-air reading series, placing it in two contexts: the early history of broadcasting, and her own performance practices during enormously popular reading tours. Millay’s broadcasts occur at an important juncture in radio history in the United States; their timing strongly inflects their meaning. Her radio work also harmonizes with recent scholarship on poetry readings and recordings, in particular the relation between performed and printed poems.1 The second and third parts of the essay discuss the relationship between the audiotexts and printed versions of the poems Millay selected for one recorded broadcast. My analysis focuses on two concerns shared by these pieces and magnified by her style of delivery : tropes of sound and presence; and, more briefly, Millay’s engagement with the idea of “naturalness.” Suzanne Clark argues, “The reader of Millay is not likely to find writerly pleasures in her text, called so frequently from play back to the spectacle of personality” (Sentimental 95). In fact, Millay’s poems constantly question their own identity as writerly as well as aural texts. Further, Millay’s broadcasts magnify the potential tension between print and performance remarked by so many poetry critics: does the real poem exist on the page, the stage, or the airwaves?2 At stake are Millay’s ambivalence toward distancing technologies (including writing itself); her conception of poetry as a dialogic art; and her persistent interest in the nature of sound and poetic voice. Her implicit answer to this question is that no version, no medium, possesses ultimate priority over another. Millay also reveals intimacy as an illusion in any medium. Unlike many Modernists and postmodernists, however, she regards this fragile illusion of presence as poetry’s (and radio’s) sine qua non. Susan Smulyan writes persuasively in Selling Radio that “treating radio programs as literature . . . misses the point of broadcasting; the material sent Materializing Millay 239 over the airwaves exists primarily to gather and retain an audience for advertising ” (6). Millay’s broadcasts were, arguably, radio programs in Smulyan’s sense: they served her financial interest in self-promotion and...