A Summer More

The frail figure in black flitted from a plain, flat-topped desk to a red velvet Victorian sofa to a wooden garden bench. Some of the words she spoke were prose, some poetry; many sounded strange and fresh, others carried a half-remembered familiarity. The most familiar, of course, were the famous lines beginning, "My candle burns at both ends . . ."

The figure in black was Actress Dorothy Stickney in a one-woman show (staged last week at Purdue University) about the life of Poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay. A Lovely Light--which Actress Stickney plans to take into an off-Broadway theater after a straw-hat tour--begins with Edna Millay's death in 1950, when the candle burned low after a night of work, and she had a heart attack as she walked upstairs to her bedroom, a glass of wine in her hand. From there, using her letters and her poetry. Narrator Stickney works back to Edna Millay's Maine childhood, her Vassar years, her flaming bohemianism in Greenwich Village, her marriage and romances:

If I had loved you less or played

you slyly, I might have held you for a summer

more.

In a scant-two-hour performance, admits Editor Stickney. "an awful lot about her life had to be left out." Missing are some of her best poems (The Cameo, Truce For a Moment) and some of the more flamboyant aspects of her character, such as her joining a protest march against the Sacco-Vanzetti verdict. But her anger flashes out when she writes to the League of American Pen Women, after they had rebuffed a famed fellow poetess: "I, too, am eligible for your disesteem. Strike me. too, from your lists and permit me, I beg you. to share with Elinor Wylie a brilliant exile from your fusty province.''

And then again her pixie charm, and a pride being whittled away by everyday cares, peeps out in a letter to Poetry Editor Harriet Monroe: "Spring is here --and I could be very happy, except that I am broke. Would you mind paying me now instead of on publication for those so stunning verses of mine which you have? I have become very, very thin, and have taken to smoking Virginia tobacco .... P.S.: I am awfully broke. Would you mind paying me a lot?"

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