Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  Their brown frame house was set in a large field, and just beyond it flowed the Megunticook River, into which the mills sometimes spilled their dyes. The house, on low ground, could be reached only by walking down a long, rickety wooden sidewalk from the street. When the Megunticook River overflowed and the weather turned cold with no heat in the house, the kitchen floor flooded and froze and the girls gleefully ice-skated across it. The house was close enough to their mother’s aunt Clara Buzzell, a large, easygoing person who ran a boardinghouse for the mill hands, that she could keep an eye on the girls while their mother worked. Cora wrote to her daughters often; the three little sisters felt her presence even when she was absent, which was almost all the time.

  Have the baker leave whatever you want at Aunt Clara’s.… I can pay him when I see him and it will be all right. Have your washing done every week now and have some system and regularity about your work.… You can do it and you must do it … for Mama who has her heart and hands full.

  She told them to make up a song to sing while they did dishes, “and think ‘I am doing this to please mama,’ and see how easy the dishes will get clean.”

  “We had one great advantage, I realized later,” Norma Millay wrote. “We were free to love and appreciate our mother and to enjoy her because she wasn’t always around, as most mothers are, telling us what to do and how to do it.… when mother was coming home, that was an occasion to be celebrated, and we usually celebrated by cleaning the house.”

  They invented games to make play out of work. “Dishes were handled differently,” Norma remembered. “This game was called ‘Miss Lane’ for miscellaneous: here one of us washed, another dried, and the other did miscellaneous pots and pans, milk bottles, whatever. Vincent was mostly responsible for the songs we sang as we worked.” This one was written the first year they were in Camden:

  I’m the Queen of the Dish-pan.

  My subjects abound.

  I can knock them about

  And push them around,

  And they answer with naught

  But a clattering sound;

  I’m the Queen of the Dish-pan,

  Hooray!

  Cho.

  For I’ve pots and pans

  And kettles galore.

  If I think I’m all done

  There are always some more,

  For here’s a dozen

  And there’s a score.

  I’m the Queen of the Dish-pan,

  Hooray!

  But they missed their mother and longed for her return. “At night, sometimes, we would lie in bed together, huddled against the cold, pretending to be brides, and little Kathleen would call out, ‘Goodnight, Cherest!’ in the direction we thought our mother would be.”

  Not everyone in Camden agreed with the way the Millays lived. When their neighbor Lena Dunbar came to visit, she was dismayed: “For instance, they had shades at their window and nothing else. I don’t think they cared much. Well, once they stenciled apple blossoms, painted that pattern down the sides of the window. Or, for instance, they had a couple of plum trees in their backyard and they never waited for the plums to ripen, but would pick them green, put them in vinegar, and call them ‘mock olives.’ Well, no one else did that sort of thing in Camden, don’t you see?”

  Emma Harrington, who taught eighth and ninth grades at the Elm Street grammar school, where Vincent enrolled that fall, never forgot her. “She was small and frail for a twelve-year-old.… Her mane of red hair and enormous gray-green eyes added to the impression of frailty, and her stubborn mouth and chin made her seem austere, almost to the point of grimness.” She kept her after school after reading her first composition to find out if someone had helped her with it. Tactfully, she asked if her mother had seen her excellent work. Vincent interrupted her: “Excuse me, Miss Harrington, … but I can tell that you think I didn’t write that composition. Well, I did! But the only way I can prove it will be to write the next one you assign right here, in front of you. And I promise it will be as good as this one, and maybe better.”

  It was her determination to excel that drew attention. That first winter, she clashed with the principal of the school. He was a good teacher but quick-tempered. Vincent questioned him whenever something he said puzzled her, and she was often puzzled. He felt she was challenging his authority and began to mangle her first name. He called her Violet, Veronica, Vivienne, Valerie, any name beginning with a V but her own, which he considered outlandish. Unshaken, Vincent would respond, “Yes, Mr. Wilbur. But my name is Vincent.” One day he erupted during an exchange and shouted that she’d run the school long enough. He grabbed a book from his desk and threw it at her. She picked the book up carefully, took it to his desk, and walked out of the classroom.

  That afternoon Mrs. Millay marched to the school and demanded an explanation. Trying to conclude their heated interview, Wilbur pushed her away from his door sharply enough that she nearly fell down the stairs. Dusting herself off, Mrs. Millay strode into the office of the superintendent of schools, who quickly agreed with her that Vincent should not return to the Elm Street School. He transferred her to Camden High School, midway in the first term. She was “The Newest Freshman,” the title of her first composition to be published in the school paper, The Megunticook, and the youngest. Though they misspelled her last name—Milley—they would learn to correct it, for by her senior year she was editor in chief.

  “She was supposed to be a year behind, you know,” Henry Pendleton, who was in her class, said. “But her mother had—well—she had a downright fight with the principal of the school, and she took it upon herself to put Vincent ahead. Yes, she did. Now the girls associated with her more than the boys did. Their circumstances were very poor. They were a very poor family. Oh, neatly dressed and all, but their home looked … ah, well, they didn’t have, let’s say, the things that most people in Camden enjoyed.”

  What began to disturb, even offend, the local worthies, was the way Millay’s mother treated Vincent. “You see,” Henry Pendleton recalled, “sometimes people felt a little … oh, well, for instance Father—my father was a farmer—and Mrs. Millay would be bragging about her daughter, Vincent, and my father couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He had a daughter, too, you see, and he’d come home fuming. He said to Mother more than once, ‘I would say my daughter is outranked!’ And people didn’t like that.”

  Vincent’s birthday that year was noted by her mother as “an unpleasant day.” As Cora totted up its costs, she said she’d paid $30.00 for a set of books for Vincent and $3.00 for a subscription to St. Nicholas, a children’s magazine. She said there were

  1 cross little girl

  1 grieved little girl

  1 satisfied little girl

  1 tired and discouraged mama.

  The satisfied little girl was Vincent. She wrote to St. Nicholas and asked to join its League:

  We have just been reading your interesting stories and poems and Norma, Kathleen, and myself wish to join your League. We think you are very kind to devote so much valuable time and space to your readers. Norma was ten years old last December. Kathleen, seven last May, and I shall be twelve Washington’s birthday. Please send three badges of membership to three very interested little sisters.

  —Vincent, Norma and Kathleen Millay

  What Millay called her first “conscious writing of poetry” was done that year. “Mother sent it to the St. Nicholas League and it received honorable mention.” Published in New York, St. Nicholas was a monthly illustrated magazine for children. It was begun in the 1870s by Mary Mapes Dodge, the author of a children’s classic, Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates, who was able to bring authors such as Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Christina Rossetti, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Lucy Larcom, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Jack London—writers of distinction who might not ordinarily have written for children—to young readers throughout the country. But what truly distinguished the magazine was the St. Nicholas League, which each month gave out not on
ly prizes—badges in silver and gold, and cash—but the gift of publication. St. Nicholas confirmed and gave voice to a generation of young writers: Ringold W. Lardner, the Benét children—Laura, William Rose, and Stephen Vincent—even the young Scott Fitzgerald, who won a prize for a photograph.

  “When I was fourteen,” Millay wrote, “I won the League’s gold medal for a poem, and there was an editorial commenting most flatteringly on my work.” The poem was called “The Land of Romance,” signed E. Vincent Millay. The League addressed her as Master Millay until she was eighteen, when she bothered to correct them. While the title and length of the poem were assigned by the editor for its March 1907 competition, Millay made it the story of a child’s quest to find romance. The child (who always speaks as “I” and is never identified as either a boy or a girl) first asks a man to show the way. The man, described as thin, trembling, and uncertain, says he does not know the way, then that he can’t remember it. Next the child turns to a woman, who does not respond at first but continues to work at her spinning wheel, until impatiently:

  “Oh! Why do you seek for Romance? And why do you trouble me?

  “Little care I for your fancies. They will bring you no good,” she said,

  “Take the wheel that stands in the corner, and get you to work, instead.”

  What is most interesting about the poem now is the difference between the man’s inability to give any direction or help at all and the woman’s fiercely practical advice: get to work.

  On the same page as the poem, the editor of the League cautioned young writers, “Very sad, very tragic, very romantic and very abstruse work cannot often be used, no matter how good it may be from the literary point of view, and while the League editor certainly does not advocate the sacrifice of artistic impulse to market suitability, he does advocate … the study of the market’s needs.” It is hard to know how seriously E. Vincent Millay took any of this, but she did correctly judge what was and was not suitable to the needs of St. Nicholas, for by the time she was eighteen and too old to enter their competitions anymore, she had won every prize they gave.

  “The Land of Romance” was considered good enough for Edward J. Wheeler, the editor of Current Literature in New York, to select it to reprint in his April issue. He said that although he couldn’t tell from the signature whether the author was a boy or a girl, “the poem seems to us to be phenomenal.”

  Norma remembered that publication in Current Literature confirmed their belief that “Vincent was a genius.” Although each of the sisters had sent things in to St. Nicholas, “we never got a bite. Vincent got everything.”

  Vincent began her first diary in the spring of 1907, when the snow was so deep it drifted over her knees. She was fifteen. She was walking home in the evening from a Glee Club rehearsal when a man called to her and, turning, she saw a sleigh drawing close to her house. “The sleigh was coming to take mama to Rockport on a consumption case. How I hate to have her go! Have to keep house all through vacation.” Five days later, her mood had lifted considerably:

  I am going to play Susie in Tris .… I have the stage all to myself for a while and I have a love scene with the villain. The villain is great.

  Triss; or Beyond the Rockies was a melodrama in four acts, and Vincent Millay was cast as Susie Smith, “all learning and books.”

  My part is going to be great,—at least they all told me how well I did. I am awfully glad for this will be my first appearance. I want to make it a dazzling one. I get rather sick of having Ed Wells forever hugging me while he is showing Mr. Keep how to do it. Mr. Wells seems to understand the performance all right. He has evidently had experience in that line.

  The play went off without a hitch, or nearly. Everyone said that it was the best home talent performance ever given in Camden, and some even considered it better than the productions of the traveling companies.

  My part isn’t very large, but it is important and rather hard. I hope we will get as good a house in Rockland as we did here. The Opera House was crowded full and everything went off finely except when Allie Eldredge lost his wig. Of course something had to happen. But what of it?

  Four years later she stuck the following note in the margin of her diary: “I have just read through to this part and I wish to remark that I consider myself at this point of my life an insufferable mutt and a conceited slush head.” By then she was nineteen and hard on herself.

  She pasted the flyer from Triss in her memory book, which she called Rosemary, and within it is one sort of record of her Camden girlhood: the three postcards from the St. Nicholas League announcing her prizes and the newspaper clippings reprinting her poems. There are pressed wild-flowers and snapshots, a thick copper Indian-head penny kept from a canoeing trip upriver to Lake Megunticook, and the programs of the girls’ clubs to which she belonged, the Genethod and the Huckleberry Finners.

  What is most striking about her scrapbook is the record it provides of the amateur theatricals, concerts, and readings in which she and her sisters took part. The first program she kept was from the Town Hall in Union, Maine, February 3, 1897. Her mother sang with a quartet and E. Vincent Millay had a solo: “The little maid milking her Cow.” She was not quite five years old.

  She began to perform at the same age she began to write, and her early involvement was prompted and sustained by her mother’s passionate interest. That encouragement and its purpose cannot be stated any more clearly than by Norma Millay.

  “She was not like anyone else’s mother. She made us—well, into her performers. I remember Vincent and I doing the cakewalk down between aisles of people. I don’t remember where it was or even when it was anymore. But I’d bend down—all of this in rhythm to the music Mother was playing on the piano, or the organ maybe—one! two! I’d tie Vincent’s shoe. Then we’d throw back our heads, take arms, and strut and cakewalk down.

  “Yes, she was ambitious for us. Of course she was! She made us—oh, not ordinary.”

  But who was Cora Millay that she dared to instill such ambition in her daughters? She gave one sort of answer in this interview printed under the title “Mother of the Millays”:

  The hardships that bound the children together made them stronger, and banded them together in self-defense against the world. If you touched one you touched the whole of us. That was our safety. It strengthened anything in me. I had a chip on my shoulder for them. It is a vicarious thing to live on the edge of everything, but with the parent against the world it is stronger yet.… They always had a line out to the beautiful and the tragic realities of life.… Their mother’s battle increased their nervous tension. Anything mother said was their criterion of all life.

  We did keep our appearances, and it made the struggle inside themselves all the keener.… I let the girls realize their poverty. I let them realize what every advantage cost me in the effort to live.

  Isn’t there something hazardous at play here? For hardship can as easily crush a child as fire her ambition. What was Cora that, penniless, without formal education, with three little girls to support alone, she could sustain such fierceness? I asked her surviving daughter, who was offended by the question.

  “How do you dare to question us—my mother, or Vincent Millay? You! What do you know of the love between sisters? Or of hardship?”

  In an undated poem that exists only in draft in a workbook, Edna Millay gave another answer, which Norma chose not to include in Mine the Harvest, the collection of poems she published after her sister’s death.

  THOUGHTS OF ANY POET AT A FAMILY REUNION

  Would I achieve my stature,

  I must eschew the you within my nature,

  The loving notes that cry

  “Our mother!” and the “I, I, I

  Name you, claim you, tame you beyond doubt my creature!”

  Cool on a migrant wing, if I sing at all,

  Down-gliding, up-carried,

  Free must be over mountain and sea my call,

  Unsistered, unmarried.
<
br />   Unsistered, unmarried. But what she did not say—what she never said—was unmothered. For locked in the stories of her mother’s life and her grandmother’s past lay clues to her own future.

  CHAPTER 2

  If Cora looked more like her father than her mother—her hair was a deep brown like his, and her eyes were gray—she was very like her mother in temperament. She was impulsive and possessed what one of her sisters, in an unpublished memoir, would one day call “a driving force that carried all before it.” Even as a child, she flamed. From the first mother and daughter were more like sisters, united by a special bond of intimacy that only strengthened during Cora’s adolescence.

  Cora’s mother, Helen Clementine Emery, was the baby of her family of twelve. Spoilt and pretty, she was a redheaded scamp with a sweet, clear voice and a wealth of bright auburn curls piled high on top of her head in the puffs and lovelocks of the Civil War era. When Eben Lincoln Buzzell, a handsome giant of a man, came to Belfast, Maine, to hire out as a field hand at haying time, she fell in love with him. He was fifteen years her senior, and her parents did not approve of the match. But although she was only seventeen, Clementine (that is what she was called) married him anyway. When Cora was born seven months later, the sharp-eyed neighbors slyly checked the baby’s fingers and toes to see if the nails were fully formed.