Welcome to The Third Fig Review
by Mark Raymond
In any literal sense, Maine has more thistles than figs.
Through the long slog of its winters and its vacation-length summers that seem ready to pack-up as soon as they’ve settled in, our state’s seasons don’t harbor enough Mediterranean or Levantine sunshine to warmly nurture a crop of figs. But between our muddy springs and fleetingly glorious autumns, we produce a lot of thistles, some native, some invasive, and they can be pesky things, if not downright pests.
Vincent’s “First” and “Second” Figs, the short poems that open her 1920 collection A Few Figs from Thistles, are justly famous and contain some of her most memorable lines (“My candle burns at both ends”), and we naturally hear in them sentiments that make sense when applied to her own biography, her life choices, its passions and its risks.
As great poets do, though, there’s more than just the personal in these poems. Despite what T.S. Eliot would have us believe, poetry can never escape from personality because the personal is always political, and Millay knows full well that her individual talent is challenging the tradition in these poems. The least Modernist of Modernist poets, Millay’s versification still retains much of the music of Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, which Virginia Woolf claimed she no longer heard in the new poetry written after the Great War (“one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet”). Well, we remember Vincent’s poetry, and she’s what literary critic Harold Bloom would call a strong poet, precisely because she was able to transume the tradition despite her gender: she took it on and made it her own while copying it, since she didn’t have the prerogative of a man to be a genius simply through chaos and breaking things.
From the start, Vincent knew her figs would come from thistles. How many readers today, coming to these brief lines for the first time, would hear that she’s alluding to Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount: “Beware of false prophets, …. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” Is Millay aligning herself, her poetry, with “false prophecy” here? Are these gnomic verses imparting wisdom or irony, truth or its discontents? She’s appropriating a contradiction here, inverting it. The ambiguities are the same ones that Eliot would transcribe out of Baudelaire, the ones that made the Modernists revel in a fractured world. Vincent’s interrogations of morality in these poems (her notebooks include the seed for the sequence: “Figs from Thistles/An Unmorality of the Seven Deadly Virtues”) share a precursor in the defiant contrariness of Williams Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” from his Marriage of Heaven and Hell (only we make them cozy up to Millay’s biography while Blake’s alternative universe was simply just considered inscrutable and mad). Millay’s later work adapting Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal follows the same transgressive impulse.
So, what would a “Third Fig” be in the spirit and tradition of Millay herself? As a guide, let’s look at the “Second Fig” and see where to go from there:
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
Millay pronounces a first-person proverb here. Do we want to play it safe, when ugliness is the result? These are sentiments that come right out of the Decadent and Aestheticist movements and the fin de siècle; Oscar Wilde could have penned them, and Baudelaire would have nodded between shots of laudanum. Now, as a metaphor, no one wants art to be safe as houses, but a writer still needs a room of her own.
The Millay House Rockland (MHR) isn’t exactly ugly, but through years of restoration work the modest, working-class home on Broadway in Rockland, Maine, is now on a solid footing after decades of neglect. Maine winters can be as hard on houses as they can on figs. I grew up in Rockland and know it’s more of a thistly place.
Our Writers-in-Residence program, workshops, and reading series highlight MHR’s commitment to best celebrate Vincent’s legacy by being an incubator for the literature and the arts in our picturesque but hardiness-raising coastal community. All creators have their vulnerable “crypto-proto-dream houses” (just ask Elizabeth Bishop), but, after all, Vincent was a hardy Maine girl, who wisely knew that the feel of a seaside “shanty straining/Under the turning of the tide” was a reality to fear, the way a storm last winter took away a few fishing shacks in Owls Head.
Clearly, unlike those hot-house Vassar girls, Vincent knew her Maine-bred, independent spirit left her at risk of falling upon the thorns and thistles of life (like a “dead Shelley on the doorstep,” as her old College President once feared). I’m sure many traditionalist thought her a pest. She was certainly more thistle than fig, but, as I said, she ended up mastering tradition, which always takes more risks than a traditionalist will ever dare.
In the same way that Millay wrote that the sonnet form can constrain masculine-gendered “Chaos” (she calls it “he”), the Millay House Rockland gives dreamers a room in which they can let their creativity live by metaphor while literally having a roof over their heads against the storms. Out of the solid house where Vincent was born (let’s not call it ugly) palaces still can shine.
So, to our MHR members, we introduce The Third Fig Review, forecast to appear three times a year as a showcase for the fruits of what gets accomplished, creatively and materially, as the house continues to nurture poetry and the arts in midcoast Maine. Some say New Englanders can be a prickly lot, but expect more than a few figs from thistles as the seasons progress. Old-timey societies used to call their publications “organs”—like, here’s the “mouthpiece” for our cause. “Newsletter” has more polite associations that the word organ, but in today’s digital immediacy there are more efficient and practical ways to reach audiences about MHR happenings, news and events. The Third Fig Review will focus on longer-form articles and interviews, maybe allowing MHR members to pick up some wisdom and maybe challenging them at times, but always in the spirit and tradition of Millay’s pathbreaking career. All fruit, of course, like a fig, is actually the plant’s versions of the womb, giving support and sustenance to the next generation of seeds, a perfect metaphor for what the MHR hopes to provide.
The Third Fig Review would love to hear from MHR members. Questions, comments, or thoughts on Millay, reach out and contact us.
