Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  Throughout the summer Zelda was struggling to discipline her body. After group classes in the mornings and private instruction with Madame in the afternoons, she would spend four hours a day practicing at home when she was not browsing secondhand shops poring over ballet books, paying as much as forty dollars for something special. At night she felt too tired to move.

  Convinced that living the life of Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald had delayed her dance career, Zelda went to the opposite extreme and deliberately swept out everything but her work. Living for Madame’s praise, she told herself that all it took to become a first-class dancer was practice and hard work, and she began to imagine herself dancing with a top ballet company. These ambitions were strongly opposed by Scott, who not only hated the Egorova dance school but felt exploited. The exorbitant tuition, twice the monthly rent on Ellerslie, the flowers, and the dinners were all for nothing because Zelda was no good at dancing, and never would be. She was turning into a phantom that lived at the Olympia Music Hall and only came home to wash her tights. Why was he forced to pay the bills for “this desolate ménage,” which consisted of a lousy apartment with lousy servants? Zelda paid no attention. If the apartment didn’t suit him, she replied, he should make more money. She didn’t like Mlle Delplangue either, but if the governess truly bothered him, he should send Scottie away to school.

  With Scott, who on good days managed to rise by lunchtime, the example of Zelda’s self-discipline, a freakish energy without apparent bounds, did not sit well. Neither did the loneliness of an apartment empty except for Scottie and her governess. (“Unbearable,” he said. “Literally, eternally” inebriated, she said.) Wine, he insisted, had become necessary to tolerate her monologues about ballet technique—the obsessive concern with her legs—which put him into narcoleptic trances.

  . . .

  ZELDA WAS EATING lunch with her Montgomery friend Sara May-field at Pruniers, a seafood restaurant near La Madeleine. Bolting down several martinis, she picked at her shrimp and salade niçoise. When Sara complimented her on her appearance—thin and stylish in a blue Patou frock—she brushed it aside. Lately she had been sleeping poorly and to her dismay again developed asthma, which had not bothered her for several years. “I look like hell, feel like hell, and act like hell.” Pulling a mirror out of her bag, she bent over the glass to study her face. Look at those bags under her eyes, she said, and the lines around her mouth, and she was twenty-eight.

  It had been a hideous summer, she told Sara. Most of her time had been passed at Madame’s sweating and drinking water to stave off dehydration. Practically every waking minute of Scott’s had been spent, as usual, getting plastered and landing in trouble. At the moment they were not speaking, not even to say, “Pass the butter, please.”

  Scott with a snoot full became insanely reckless. While visiting friends who lived in a sixth-floor apartment, he teetered along their balcony railing, yelling, “I’m Voltaire. I’m Rousseau.” Nobody laughed. And another evening when they were invited to the home of Sylvia Beach (a bookshop proprietor who published James Joyce’s Ulysses), he turned the dinner into a sideshow by groveling at Joyce’s feet and threatening to jump out the window. The Irish writer and his wife, Nora, impressed Zelda as superannuated at best, an old-fashioned couple who addressed everyone as Mister or Missus, but Scott’s antics were mortifying.

  Scott was twice arrested for disorderly conduct that summer, which did not prevent him from pumping out the staples of his trade, the short fiction for the Saturday Evening Post that paid thirty-five hundred dollars each. The previous year he managed to coast by on earnings that amounted to a healthy thirty thousand dollars, but he was running a bit behind that figure. Most of his income came from a series of Post stories about the misadventures of a teenage Midwestern boy name Basil Duke Lee. Apart from the seven Basil stories, and contrary to his hearty assurances to Max Perkins, and the fifty-seven hundred dollars squeezed out of Scribner’s as an advance on the new novel, he was completely blocked. He had come to think of the book as “a dream” receding slowly into the distance.

  They returned to America in October, accompanied by Scottie’s nanny and a second servant, whom Scott had acquired over the summer to be a combination chauffeur, valet, companion, and general dogs-body. Zelda was not pleased about Philippe, a taxi driver and ex-boxer who behaved like a thug. On the trip home she could not help grieving for Madame Egorova, whom she missed far more than she had expected. How deeply she loved her, how dull life in Delaware would be without her. Madame, she thought sadly, was a good woman who worked hard her whole life with nothing to show for it. Suddenly the intensity of her feelings had begun to worry her, and she asked Scott if he thought feeling attraction to Madame was abnormal.

  What did she mean by abnormal?

  She wasn’t sure.

  Abnormal like a lesbian? That was nonsense, he replied.

  VINCENT INVITED Bunny to Austerlitz for the weekend. When Bunny arrived, Gene was planting pansies but immediately lost all interest in gardening and declared it cocktail time. (“But what isn’t cocktail time?!!!” he’d say.) On this first visit to Steepletop, Bunny was enthused by the tapestry of scenic views and told Vincent of passing a dandelion-speckled lawn that made him think of “grated egg on spinach.” As Mr. Hospitality, Gene laid down the welcome mat with Cockney song and uncorked bottles of homemade vintage from their private cellar—Château Steepletop—in addition to plying Bunny with several varieties of local apple brandies and wines. Vincent, who had taken up the piano again, attempted a Beethoven sonata but became impatient with what she considered a miserable performance. Finally she dug out a batch of her newest poems, and they all settled down to an afternoon of sipping applejack. On a soggy May weekend there was little else to do but drink.

  The pedestal on which Bunny had placed her, some eight years before, remained solid. The previous year, extolling the virtues of “perhaps one of the most important of our poets,” he elevated her to a headliner in his “All-Star Literary Vaudeville,” along with T. S. Eliot, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Elinor Wylie, and Léonie Adams. Some people would pounce on his obstinate overrating of Millay (along with Parker and Fitzgerald) as hairline cracks in the literary judgment of an otherwise-shrewd critic, but Bunny never wavered in his enthusiasm for Vincent. At one of their meetings that winter, the two of them were debating some of James Joyce’s poems when she attempted to express her appreciation for his loyalty. For the first time she wished to put into words what he meant to her, but one look at his pale face warned her it was best left unsaid.

  Bunny could always be relied on for editing and admiration, but less attractive qualities were also developing. At thirty-three, he was physically a ghost of the worshipful boy she had met in 1920. His body was going to seed, and he had taken to slicking back his thinning and receding hair. Otherwise, he suffered from depression, fits of hysteria, and anger that sometimes burst into violence, and his evolution into an alcoholic was well under way. More disturbing was a growing tendency to become crotchety, even irrationally argumentative. In the winter, when she and Gene were in town celebrating her birthday, they invited him to the hotel one night. With the proofs of a new poem about to be published in The Delineator, she suddenly felt uncertain and needed his advice. To her disappointment, Bunny showed little interest in “The Bobolink,” a poem about a bedraggled little bird that derived more from its mood than from ideas. Noting his indifference, she could not help feeling annoyed. “You mean it sounds like Mary Carolyn Davies!” If she thought that were true, she’d tear it up. Certainly she was not going to give The Delineator anything that brought to mind Mary Carolyn Davies. (Davies was a third-rate poet, the poor man’s Sara Teasdale.)

  Throughout the evening Bunny continued to be grumpy. He insisted on reminding her of the pressure she had been under when she published Second April, in 1921. Had she forgotten how anxious she was? he asked pointedly. Did she recall that some critics said the collection wasn’t literature at all? She could not
deny that those poems were written in a panic, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that she was a poet, and to prove it in a hurry.

  “Yes,” she snapped. “And I still want to knock ’em cold!”

  When a young woman, in Camden and at Vassar, she had hungered for fame, not art. Right after the war A Few Figs from Thistles and Second April turned out to be exactly the raw thrills that readers, especially women, especially provincials, desired. No doubt it was partly the idea of liberation: to be an adventuress, to ride around New York Harbor all night with a lover, to buy newspapers she would never read, and to give away everything in her pocket but subway fare. All she knew was that upon these patented images of her exploits in the Village, quite unlike anything experienced by her readers in the hinterland, was her following built. (And would continue to rest.) But at thirty-six, she needed to prove other things beyond a reasonable doubt.

  Gene had taken no part in the acrimonious exchange between Vincent and Bunny. Invigorating intellectual conversations were healthy for her, he believed, but he didn’t care for the way this one was going and slammed on the brakes at last. Certainly Vincent’s recent work, he reminded Bunny, was more objective than Second April. Then he changed the subject to Kathleen’s first volume of poetry, which some reviewers had called glib. What did Bunny think of The Evergreen Tree? Maybe Kay wasn’t cut out to be a poet?

  Vincent was able to relax around Bunny more than with most people. It was to him she confided that settling at Steepletop had probably been a mistake, because the woods and mountains walled her in like a cage. Still, their intimacy had limits. She somehow managed to conceal her plans to publish a new collection of verses, the first in five years; he hid from her the news that he was writing a novel, in which a central character was coincidentally an impoverished Village poet. Nor did he mention the California woman he had decided to marry. And of course he did not tell Vincent, or anyone else, about his secret mistress, a waitress from the Seventy-second and Broadway Childs.

  It had been five years since Vincent left Mitchell Kennerley for a distinguished mainstream publisher, Harper & Brothers, which had brought out the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems. Her editor was Eugene Saxton, a quiet man in his mid-forties clad in checked vests and sporting a gold watch chain, leaving the impression of being a refined Edwardian gentleman. Cut from the same cloth as Max Perkins at Scribner’s, Saxton was a first-rate editor with a knack for working with temperamental woman poets. (He had been Elinor Wylie’s editor at George Doran.) In Vincent’s case, where no editing was permitted, not even so much as moving a comma, he stood aside and oversaw production details. Saxton, a clubbable fellow who owned a country home in the Berkshires, and his wife, Martha, enjoyed dropping in for cocktails with the Boissevains.

  Saxton understood instinctively how to handle royalty, but some of his colleagues resisted conferring special treatment. Interoffice memos referred to Vincent as “the one and only Edna.” One editor loved taunting Vincent by addressing letters to “Madame Vincent” and referring to Gene as “Prince Eugen.” This was only partly in jest, because the highhanded Edna tended to treat the staff as her subjects.

  Vincent’s main nemesis was Arthur Rushmore, head of book production. Ever since The Harp-Weaver, when Vincent made Harper’s reset the entire book (with each poem on a separate page), the two of them had butted heads. As a result, Gene Saxton received any number of complaints about “your Mr. Rushmore,” who pretended to listen but did as he pleased. Evidently in love with his printing presses, he was so busy fussing about Lutetia italics and mold-made papers that he forgot they were making a book of poetry, not widgets. Vincent was aghast to see Rushmore slapping dedications on copyright pages and omitting “The End” in favor of a note describing the typeface. As practically the house’s poet laureate, she could not believe that anybody at Harper & Brothers would disregard her wishes. But Rushmore did not consider coddling authors part of his job.

  All personal contact between Vincent and her publisher was filtered through Gene. In his management of her business, he operated under a simple rule: If Edna St. Vincent Millay was not entitled to the best seat in the house, who was? Which was why his letters could get a bit growly. Miss Millay has asked me to inform you … Miss Millay is unable to attend to her correspondence … Miss Millay is extremely dissatisfied with Harper’s behavior …

  After The Harp-Weaver she did not release another book but went on publishing in various literary periodicals. Her habit was to hold back a poem, sometimes for as long as two years, working on it “again and again, whenever I get a new point of view,” she said, and she also liked to store verse until it was “cold, as if it weren’t mine at all.” In April, finally, having accumulated an adequate number that pleased her, she signed a contract for a collection to be titled The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems. Harper’s agreed to pay five hundred dollars on delivery of a completed manuscript and five hundred dollars on publication, against a royalty of 15 percent.

  IT HAD RAINED steadily all summer, almost every day since the beginning of April. The sunless Berkshires weather was exasperating, depressing, and finally cruel. With so few dry days Gene could only spray the potatoes twice, and his twelve acres of oats threatened to rot. Inside the house, conditions were hardly better. Servants were sneaking off without giving notice. And in the city Harper’s was nagging Vincent in the most unpleasant way. Dissatisfied with her speed in returning proofs, they claimed she was wrecking their production schedule. Sax-ton, bristly, postponed her publication date by a week. The last straw was his announcement of a publication party (nothing too “fussy,” he said). Would she please supply a guest list? Miss Millay, Gene informed him, was not in a party mood, maybe another time.

  The Buck in the Snow, published on September 27, was not what Vincent’s fans had been expecting. Gone was her usual urban landscape, the ferries and narrow streets, the pretty lads and sex-addled maidens. Reflecting her new pastoral life was the title poem about the death of a deer in her woods (a common sight during hunting season), while others celebrated nature and wildlife outside her door. Bucks and bobolinks apart, there was a group of five poems that recalled the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, including “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” and “Hangman’s Oak;” a handful whose exotic locales seemed memories of her travels in Europe and the Far East; and tributes to Art Ficke and Bunny. Perhaps the most eloquent is the opening lyric, “Moriturus,” which could almost have been “Renascence: The Sequel,” the same subjects of claustrophobia and death seen by a grown-up who wishes to bolt her door against death “with a bureau and a table.” Ending the volume was “On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven,” an exceptional sonnet that undertakes the difficult task of exploring in words the power of music, “the tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.”

  Ever since the publication of “Renascence,” one of her trademark themes had been the affirmation of life over death. Her other frequent theme was sex, but the erotic Edna St. Vincent Millay with her burning candle was absent from the new book. There were no love poems, not a one in fact that might have been a tribute to her husband. Had her marriage not inspired a single passionate poem? Or was theirs, as tittle-tattle claimed, a marriage of convenience? In The Buck in the Snow she seemed to be more a forest ranger than the sultry vamp of the West Village.

  Prepared to “knock ’em cold,” Vincent sat back to receive accolades for her long-awaited book. Gene’s former housemate Max Eastman detected new maturity in her work and called the title poem “one of the most perfect lyrics in our language, a painting of life and death unexcelled, indeed, anywhere.” But Max’s review was not typical. The difficulty, said The New Republic, was that “the poet has already said so perfectly all that she had to say,” so the collection could not help sounding redundant. Words used by other critics were “not good enough,” “no retrogression and no advance,” “the frontier of sentimentality,” and “lack of intellectual force.”

  As a romanticist who
relied on traditional forms, Vincent made no effort to sound like modern American English. Her poems, she said proudly, were written “in old-fashioned form, in the very musical tradition that people have always known and loved.” That’s why people appreciated her work. They could understand it, memorize it, quote it.

  The painful fact was that just as she was establishing herself, a new generation of poets had come along: first the so-called imagism movement of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, William Carlos Williams, and other unromantic outlaws whose experimental work used concrete images and spare language. And it was followed shortly by the razzle-dazzle innovations of T. S. Eliot with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land,” the latter a poem complete with seven pages of scholarly notes, published in The Dial the year before Vincent won her Pulitzer. According to the modernists, poetry ought to be realistic and sound like conversation, the colloquial speech of real people talking to each other, and anything else was phony. One of those disparaging Vincent was Archibald MacLeish, who said that the English language she used wasn’t even speech. “It is poems,” he said, work that he scorned as “prettiness conscious of its own prettiness.” When Louis Untermeyer defended Vincent as a poet who “touched greatness,” MacLeish wisecracked back, “With what does she?” Because if she did, that made him “a cracked thermometer.”

  Defiantly skeptical of the new poetry, Vincent could not admit that a generation of excellent poets might be passing her by. The writer whose photograph she kept in her study—“a fine poet and a great man,” she said—was the nature poet Robinson Jeffers. T. S. Eliot to her was ridiculous.