Finding Milly
Finding Milly
A Guest Post 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. My memory here fails me: I had thought she was a footnote in the foundational text I relied upon to explain the Spanish Civil War, but now I can find no evidence of her. She appears in a later work on the Americans fighting in the Spanish Civil War, “a tough-talking, voluptuous American newswoman,” but I hope that wasn’t how I first met her. The author of that book manages to squeeze in both a commentary on her figure and her alleged sexual wantonness in that first sentence.
However it happened, Milly embedded herself into my imagination, where I’ve carried her for over fifteen years. She made a fiery appearance in a novel I started writing in my twenties, and ten years later, when I was casting around for something new to write about, Milly strutted to the forefront.
Born in 1897 as Mildred Bremmler, she never finished college but nonetheless had a trailblazing career in journalism. Her early articles in San Francisco’s Daily News were sympathetic to workers, including a Nellie-Bly inspired stunt where Mildred went undercover as a housemaid in a tony household so she could write exposés. Her scathing accounts of her labor for Mrs. Torrance prompted Mildred’s editor to suggest a pen name for her. Bremmler was too German for a country embroiled in war, so he quickly devised the name that Milly Bennett would largely go by for the rest of her life.
Milly’s fraught love life took her to Hawaii and then, when her marriage ended in a hail of broken plates and too many pours of Hawaiian liquor, she bought a ticket to Shanghai.
There, Milly covered the Chinese civil war of the 1920s, and her colorful account of that time was posthumously published. But Milly’s life afterward, the adventures she continued to have and the hearts (including her own) that she continued to break, were documented only in the boxes of letters and one aborted novel that she left behind.
It was to these records that I turned to write Milly’s story. Her sharp letters to her many friends and few family members kept me up past my bedtime night after night as I kept turning the pages to see what perceptive observation or heartbreaking judgment she had to offer next. She could laugh at the Russian citizens practicing their rifle target practice “to take a potshot at the imperialists,” while holding fast to her conviction that she shouldn’t exchange her dollars at the illegal conversion rate – no matter that doing so would have earned her five times as many rubles. She scrambled to find a place to live, to save money for a warmer coat, and she kept believing in a better future, even while the grinding reality of communist Moscow bore down on her. Even when the Soviet state arrested her innocent Russian husband.
Understanding Milly, as complex as she was, was a much easier task than contextualizing the world she lived in. One of the unique challenges facing a historical novelist is to convince the contemporary, wise reader of the freshness of the history the characters were living. In 1931, Milly didn’t know what horrors the Stalinist purges would unleash on Russia just a few years later. She certainly didn’t know about the eventual failure of Soviet communism, so I had to try to forget those truths too.
To place myself in Moscow in the 1930s, I read diary entries from people who lived through the time, scholarly surveys of the era, and a rich book detailing the lives of Soviet Bolshevik elite. I love trusting the providence of used bookstores for my research, and in one I found a delightfully grumpy account of an English travel writer journeying through the Soviet Union at the same time Milly lived there. He had a hard time with the bedbugs. I relied on the memoir of another journalist who worked in the same building as Milly’s newspaper offices, and I even got my husband to gift me for Christmas a children’s novel written by one of Milly’s friends.
But no matter how many outside books and articles I read, I kept returning to Milly’s own words. She was swell, proud of her snappy silk dress, low, a sad bitter wreck, and always eager to join the fray.
“You’ve got to live if you are going to write … and be hurt … and it’s a dirty world, but fun.”
So of course, I fell in love with her.
I hope you do too.
Finding Milly
A Guest Post by Carrie Callaghan
Carrie Callaghan is the author of “Salt the Snow” (Feb. 4, 2020, Amberjack Publishing), her second novel. She lives in Maryland with her family, where she drinks altogether too much tea.
Finding Milly
A Guest Post by Carrie Callaghan
