One of the funny things about promoting a book is that you have to write more pieces about that book. I didn’t realize that before my first book came out, but now I’ve grown to love the opportunity for exploration and analysis that feature-writing offers.
Photo of Milly Bennett reading a book; courtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives
I wrote this essay months before it came out, so by the time it did, I had forgotten about it. But now it’s my favorite piece for Salt the Snow , because it explores Milly’s depths and the challenge of conjuring a moment in the past for contemporary readers . https://www.hastybooklist.com/home/finding-milly-by-carrie-callaghan
“In the spring of 1931, poet e.e. cummings took what was then a nearly-obligatory pilgrimage to Moscow, to examine what everyone was calling “socialism in practice.” At some time during his trip, he encountered 34-year-old American journalist Milly Bennett, who described him in a letter as “very moderne" – the extra e serving as her wink.
As she would often during her years in Moscow, Milly despaired. Cummings, like so many other westerners, fell in with the foreign correspondents, not the writers like Milly who worked for the local Soviet English-language newspaper. He became, “very thoroughly poisoned against everything … It’s pretty hopeless for me, uncertain of everything as I am (and most of all myself) to attempt to bat down the pleasant accumulations of his leisurely look around the place.”
Milly’s uncertainty about herself, her unwillingness to pass judgment on limited information, and her hope in a better world make her stand out against the boatloads of other American writers who journeyed to Moscow to proclaim on the success, or lack thereof, of Russian socialism. She was a woman who preferred buying camelia perfume over the required gas mask, whose heart broke for a dignified old Russian man selling poppies to get by, and who believed in both a better tomorrow while casting a skeptical eye on today.
Sometime during, or after, my graduate school capstone research project, Milly snuck into my life.
… Click here to read the rest, or here to buy the book.