Out of Reach of the Baby: read a hilarious short story by Edna St Vincent Millay

Nancy Boyd was one of Vanity Fair’s star writers in the 1920s, and an enigma. Nothing was known about her, aside from that no one had a sharper tongue when it came to the double standards faced by women, the pretensions of boho artists or the neo-Puritanism of Prohibition. The magazine claimed to have been flooded with letters begging to know more about the writer of those wicked, waspish short stories.

The stories were collected in hard covers as Distressing Dialogues – published in 1924, out of print ever since – with an introduction by one of the most popular writers of the age, Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950), who had recently become the first woman to win the Pulitzer for Poetry. Millay praised “these excellent small satires, from the pen of one in whose work I have a never-failing interest and delight.” For those in the know, this was one of the funniest jokes in the book: the pen was her own. Vanity Fair’s editor hinted he’d pay a higher rate if only “Nancy” would drop the mask, but she refused.

The most famous lines Millay published under her own name – “My candle burns at both ends/ It will not last the night” – became a mantra for the fast-living, free-spirited younger generation of Greenwich Village bohemians. Writing as Nancy Boyd, she could both celebrate and poke fun at that generation – including herself. In one Boyd story, the narrator spots Millay at a Paris café eating “an enormous plate of sauerkraut and sausages”.

Editing a new selection of Millay’s work for Carcanet Classics offered the chance to bring some of these “excellent small satires” back into the light for the first time in almost a century. “Out of Reach of the Baby” is one of the most interesting. Like any good allegory, it leaves room for interpretation; one critic saw it as a justification for abortion. But the broad thrust is clear. It is a defence of personal and artistic freedom, a rejection of censorship and the suffocating, paternalistic nanny-statism that reached its pinnacle with Prohibition.

The baby’s home, with 48 rooms and sea views to both east and west, is America in miniature. The more creative children flee its dull restrictions just as, in reality, the young artists and writers of the 1920s left the dry States in droves to look for liberty, inspiration and absinthe abroad.

'Out of Reach of the Baby' by Edna St Vincent Millay

I am so sick of things being put where I can’t reach them, just to get them out of reach of the baby!

Of course, I was just as sorry as anybody when the baby swallowed the buttonhook and nearly died. But just the same, it’s a disgusting spectacle – a large family of grown men and women all going about with their shoes unbuttoned; and it does seem as though there might be a compromise.

It was father’s idea. Father is crazy about the baby. Really, you’d think that weakness and helplessness were virtues, the admiration father has for them. One day after dinner he arose, placed one hand on the back of his chair and the other inside his weskit, and announced: that from that time on, whatsoever there might be in the house which could, under the most fantastic circumstances, endanger the health of a baby should be, by the aid of a derrick, hoisted to the high shelf in the storeroom, out of reach of us all.

Now when you consider how determined a baby always is to kill itself, and how little it really takes to kill a baby, and when you consider that “the house,” as father hastened to explain when he saw us all moving to the garage, comprises also the garage, the wash-house, the cook-house, the boat-house, the dog-kennel, the chapel and the ash-can – you can readily imagine how full a life we lead since the day the baby ate the buttonhook.

It’s an enormous house, ours. Some people don’t care much for the style of architecture, because it wasn’t built by the Egyptians, or the Romans, or the women of Tahiti; we built it ourselves, and nobody has quite forgiven us. But there’s no denying that it’s enormous; it has 45 rooms (or 48; I can never remember which). It has north, east, south and west exposure; and while it must be admitted that the north windows open on a court and the south on a back-yard, the fact that all the apartments in the east wing, as well as all those in the west wing, look out upon a very handsome ocean, rather more than makes up for it. Also, the plumbing is wonderful.

People used to love to come and visit us, because father is fairly well-to-do, and always gave everybody a wonderful time. There was always a queen or two dropping in to tea, and a grand duke to make a fourth at auction.

But since the day that all the rum – the only thing that made our tea bearable – and all the playing-cards, were put on the high shelf out of reach of the baby, there’s been a decided lapse in our calling-list.

In the first place, we never invite anybody any more. At least, we children don’t. We’re ashamed to. Nothing to do but walk about on tip-toe and count the rooms, and the whole place smelling to heaven of odourless talc!

Except for the milk-man, who still calls regularly, nobody ever comes near the house at all. That is, of course there are still father’s friends. But I mean, nobody interesting. And people are beginning to snicker at the very mention of our name.

“Fyodor,” said my father to me one day, when he met me in the act of carrying a step-ladder into the store-room, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

“I should worry,” I replied. “Let it fall. It’s time we had a new house.”

Whereat father flew into the most dreadful pet, and shut me in the closet without my luncheon. And that was that.

Father is a politician. He has spent the best years of his life in an endeavour to make the world safe for stupidity. It has been an up-hill struggle, but at last things begin to look as if his dream were about to come true. Mother is more artistic. She is so artistic that if you strike d and c together on the piano, it sets her teeth on edge.

Of course, it’s not as if we didn’t try to reach the high shelf. You’d be astonished to see all the different kinds of step-ladders there are hidden about in those 48 rooms, all painted blue and red, or black and yellow, to make them look like rocking-horses. But it’s terribly difficult. Because, though sometimes you manage to get high enough to pull something down, you never get high enough to see what it is you’re pulling; you just take the first thing you touch, and pretend you’re satisfied.

It’s not as if it were a nice baby, jolly, sweet-tempered, bright, and all that. It’s a nasty, snivelling baby. It has weak eyes and a weak tummy, there is always a pin sticking into it somewhere, and it would rather howl than not.

And then, it’s such a stupid baby. It’s quite old, for a baby, but it can’t walk a step. It won’t try to walk, it’s so afraid of a little tumble. So it crawls. But it crawls just everywhere.

And it can’t talk, either. Of course, if you say to it, “mama”, “horsie”, “capitalist”, “communism”, “art”, it repeats the words after you; but it hasn’t the faintest notion what it’s saying.

I said to mother, once, that the baby was stupid. She did not deny it. But she said, “All the more reason, then, that we should give up our lives for the little, helpless thing.”

“I don’t see why,” I disagreed. “It will always be stupid, no matter what we do.”

“Ah, yes,” sighed my mother, piously rolling up her eyes toward the floor above, “but the highest duty of the strong is to protect the weak. And to make them happy. What nobler life could a man wish, my son, than to pick up all day long the spoons which his neighbour throws upon the floor? We must not be proud. So long as he crawls, we must crawl, too. We must confine our conversation to words of one syllable or less. And, in order that he may never know his inferiority, and have his feelings hurt, we must employ all our intelligence in an endeavour to make ourselves as stupid as he is.”

I was silent.

“What do you say!” pleaded my mother, gently and brightly, in the manner of one soliciting recruits in a holy cause.

“I say,” I retorted, turning on my heel and starting for the door, “that it’s a pity someone doesn’t drop a brick on his head.”

“For shame!” cried my parent, aghast. “Your own little baby brother!”

There are quite a number of us in our family, and some of us really have talent. Fritz, the oldest boy, was always very musical. He was getting on very well, indeed he was well on the road to becoming a world-famous violinist. But since father put his fiddle on the top shelf out of reach of the baby, he has fallen off considerably in his technique. Of course, it is a handicap.

Isadora, the oldest girl, always wanted to be a dancer. But they wouldn’t let her, because it would shake the house and wake the baby. She pleaded that there is a kind of dance where you don’t lift your feet from the floor. But they said they didn’t believe that was really dancing. And so they wouldn’t let her, anyhow. (She became, finally, an instructor of calisthenics in a girls’ school.)

Sara might have been a great actress. She had a marvellous voice. She never opened her mouth but a little chill went up and down your spine, and you wanted to laugh and cry and kiss her shoes. But of course, if people won’t let you speak above a whisper – well, she’s gone into the movies, now, and is making piles of money.

It was just the same with Enrico, only his was a singing voice. He died, not long ago, obscure, untended, and heart-broken. I couldn’t help thinking how different it might have been, if only he’d been brought up in a different family.

As for me, Fyodor, I always wanted to be a novelist. And for years I have given up all my time to writing. Lately, of course, they have put my pen and ink and typewriter on the top shelf out of reach of the baby, which is a handicap. But in spite of that, with the aid of a burnt match, the only kind of match we are permitted to have in the house, I keep on.

I have written books which, could you read them, would tear up your world from its foundations and build it again, would allay for all time the ills which now assail you, and provide you with others, books which would rend your soul, wring your heart, and stretch your mind to the point of physical pain. But you will never read them. For, as fast as I write them, they are put on the top shelf out of baby’s reach.

Of course most of us – and there are a great many more, whom I have not mentioned – have left home. As for those of us who remain, it is not so much that we remain as that we haven’t gone yet.

Only yesterday I had a post-card from Pablo, the last of us to leave. Pablo is a painter – and it was difficult for him, having his palette and all his paints on the top shelf, out of reach of the baby. He has gone to a place where the top shelf is on a level with the wainscoting. “Am having a fine time,” he writes. “Wish you were here.” And do you know, I’ve half a mind to go.

Edna St Vincent Millay: Poems and Satires ed Tristram Fane Saunders (Carcanet, ￡14.99) is out on Sept 30