OF RAPTURES, POETS, AND STOWAWAYS

I’m heading to Washington, DC, next week for the International Biographers Conference. It’s on May 21, the same day as the Rapture. In some cities this could be dangerous. Traffic accidents, for example, as the elect, the saved, the true Christians are suddenly wafted into the blue. But near Congress? I’ll probably be pretty safe. I’ll keep you posted.

A big name for such a little girl. Note the baby pug. 

I’ve written several biographies for young people, and now I’m working on a proposal for one about poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, tentatively titled A Girl Named Vincent.


Why did such a sweet little girl get a boy's name?

Millay’s mother had an adventurous young brother named Charles Buzzell, who was making his way around the world. On January 31, 1892, he got himself accidentally locked into the hold of a cotton freighter in New Orleans. Ten days later, when the ship arrived in New York, Charles was discovered, nearly dead from lack of food and water, and rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where doctors managed to pull him through.

St. Vincent’s in 1900. The hospital closed in 2010.

According to Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty, Charles later admitted he’d been drunk, fallen asleep on some hay bales, and hadn’t heard the hatches close and lock. Accounts of his ordeal appeared in newspapers all over the country, but his nine-months-pregnant sister, who lived in Rockland, Maine, didn’t hear about the near tragedy and its happy outcome until February 15. A week later she went into labor, and, on Washington’s Birthday, February 22, to the sound of pealing bells, gave birth to the baby girl she named for the hospital that saved her brother’s life.

Charles quickly made hay of his mishap among the hay bales, appearing at the Bowery’s Globe Museum in New York to relate his “Awful Experiences.”