On July 20, with her mother still in Newburyport, Vincent began a journal separate from her diary. In a small brown copybook that had been her sister Kathleen’s, filled with colored pencil sketches of birds and flowers, a fishing cat, and a blind dog, she began her “Journal of a Little Girl Grown-Up.”
I’m tired of being grown up! Tired of dresses that kick around my feet; tired of high-heeled shoes; tired of conventions and proprieties; tired, tired and sick of hair-pins!
At eighteen, she constructed a protective retreat through recollection:
There is a little spicy-smelling yellow flower growing in clusters on a bush, in old-fashioned gardens—I think they call it “clove” or “flowering currant.” The smell of it never fails to take me back into a little play-house I made once under such a bush, just this side of the church-yard fence.
On a hot summer afternoon, the air is heavy with the fragrance of sweet-smelling flowers, and, except for the droning of bees, there is no sound. She is hidden.
I am pains-takingly trimming a rhubarb leaf hat with white-clover and butter cups, with which my lap is filled. Beside me are two long, slender white wands from which with primitive implements of sharp teeth and nails I have been peeling the bark for ribbons. I taste again the sweetness of the smooth round stick in my mouth. I see again the moist, delicate green of the living bark. And into my nostrils I breathe the hot spicy fragrance until my very soul is steeped in it.
What is it that propels her so fiercely into the past—if it is her past—at any rate into childhood or fantasy and away from being adult? It is as if she were in a bower, within which a romantic past might be remembered and her own youth kept, savored, a past from which she felt herself severed by having become a woman.
I am homesick for that little girl.… I like the old white house and the vivid grass around it. I loved the blackberries and the hill—And Auntie Bine! Why, I was Auntie Bine’s little girl! O, Auntie Bine, if I might just come back and be your little girl again!
If there was a real Auntie Bine in Union—or anywhere else in her childhood—no one, not even Millay’s sister Norma, remembered her. What is real is the need Millay gives voice to again in her writing for a female figure, a maternal person who will recognize her, love her, and comfort her. In piece after piece, whether it’s the poem “Rosemary,” her diary Mammy Hush-Chile, or this journal, Millay is after two things. She wants to remain a child; she wants a woman to comfort her. With the single exception of The Dear Incorrigibles, her mother is either absent or dead or has abandoned her.
Cora Millay seems to have had no idea of her daughter’s sadness. During one of her everlasting absences, Vincent made a schedule to reassure her mother that their topsy-turvy household would be run efficiently and cheaply. “Do it Now” was signed by each of the sisters, like a promissory note, but gleefully using their childhood nicknames—Sefe was Vincent, Hunk was Norma, and Wump was Kathleen.* It ended with a notation that Kathleen was to bring in wood for the breakfast fires, Norma was to feed the cat, and “Vincent kills flies.”
SCHEDULE*
Do it Now
CHAPTER 6
It began in April 1911, though no one knew, not her mother or her sisters, because she confided only in the back pages of her diary, where she recorded her “Consecration.” It would last for nearly two years. She met him on the third of every month, usually at night but only if there was no one else in the house, when she would light a candle as if casting a spell to enchant them both. She even had a tin ring to kiss. “I am,” she wrote, “as surely betrothed to you as if your ring was on my finger.” If from the first there were doubts, she intended to transcend them: “Sometimes I’m afraid that I love too much and expect too much in return. Maybe men can’t love as I want to be loved. But I mustn’t let myself think that.”
On their first night together she said she was going to put on her prettiest nightgown and braid her hair just as he liked it. But she couldn’t bear to leave him alone in the room reading, so she “parted the curtains and peeped through”; did he like her hair, she asked?
Now, I’m coming out to see you. I am wearing a fluffy lavender thing over my night-dress. It is very soft and long and trails on the rug behind me. My bare feet sink into the rug. My hair is in two wavy, red braids over my shoulders. My eyes are very sweet and serious. My mouth is wistful.
You watch me from your chair.
I come slowly to you over the rug.
I drop at your feet and lay my head on your knee. My braids touch the floor.
You lift my head in your two hands and look deep into my serious eyes.
You lift me from the floor in your two arms. You rise to your feet and hold me straight before you, flat across your arms. The lavender thing falls soft about my feet. My braids sway slightly. My eyes are closed.
You kiss my wistful mouth.
——————–
Oh, Love! I feel your arms about me. I feel—!
Good night, sweet-heart!
He was perfection, her comforter and her ballast: “You are strong, clean, and kind. I know I am weak. But I will grow strong thinking of you, never forgetting that I am not mine but yours.… I will keep myself clean. Even the smallest of my favors I will keep for you.” Just the thought of him steadied her, and when she was most in need of him she would kiss her ring and feel his strength flood through her. “I could weep with the love that does so hurt my heart. Oh, I adore you!”
There was only one thing wrong with him. Having established all the rules of their vigil, all the terms of their secret love, “Confident,” she wrote at the start of her “Consecration,” “that you are seeking for me even as I am waiting for you”: seeking for her? waiting? She had made him up! Her extravagantly adored beloved was imaginary. How could he possibly disappoint her?
Whereas a real young man was nothing but trouble. At nineteen she was unsure of herself, and her defense was to take on a superior tone with any man who crossed her path. When a man who was no more to her than a pen pal apologized for owing her a letter, she reprimanded him sharply: “Dear Delinquent,—You don’t deserve so amiable a correspondent as I. You are not worthy even to wield my pen-wiper. But you made a very nice apology. And, moreover, you groveled gracefully.” While she did scrawl on the top of her copy that she hadn’t sent it exactly as it was written, she was apt to be dismissive, coy, and prim. That summer she wrote that there wasn’t a chance that anybody was going to call her up to take her out for a spin or even an ice-cream soda:
Boys don’t like me anyway because I won’t let them kiss me. It’s just like this: let boys kiss you and they’ll like you but you won’t.… But I’d be almost willing to be engaged if I thought it would keep me from being lonesome.… if I was engaged I would be going to the play tonight instead of sitting humped up on the steps in a drizzle that keeps my pencil point sticky. I’d be going out paddling tomorrow instead of practicing the Beethoven Funeral March Sonata. And I’d like to have something to do besides write in an old book. I’d like to have something happen to give me a jolt, something that would rattle my teeth and shake my hairpins out.
When nothing did, she returned to him. But what a world of difference there was between the way she imagined a relationship should be and the way she conducted herself among the boys her own age in Camden. By July 3, 1911, she no longer wanted to tuck her entries about him into the back of her Ole Mammy Hush-Chile diary, so she began another, “Vincent Millay—Her Book.” What these different diaries were beginning to show was the increasing division within her between the unrelenting duties of her domestic life that weighed her down, which she kept for her Ole Mammy Hush-Chile diary, and the ardent life of her imagination: “Sometimes I don’t mind so much the uncertainty which envelops you, but tonight I wish we were quite, quite sure of each other, and I knew all your nicknames, and what kind of pipe you smoke. It would give me such a feeling of security and comfort.”
It is only when she begins Her Book that we grasp ho
w much she needs this idealized male. At once resolute, understanding, and silent, he is comforting and permanent as no one else in her life has been. Her book begins with a poem:
My life is but a seeking after life;
I live but in a great desire to live;
The undercurrent of my every thought:—
To seek you, find you, have you for my own
Who are my purpose and my destiny.
For me, the things that are do not exist;
The things that are for me are yet to be.…
For her, all was future, destiny, and him:
In perfect understanding I shall come
And lay my hand in yours, and at your feet
Sit, silent, with my head against your knee.
What was more conventional for a girl to think, or to dream, than that a man would come and rescue her from her lonely life? She sought him as if he were a part of her: “It is as if I had been cut in two and ached for the rest of me.” Inventing him was her effort to be whole, to regain some part of herself that was imperiled. Who knows why she thought it was love that would alter her life—and yet, for a girl in Camden, Maine, in the early years of the last century, what else could it have been?
Cora was away most of the summer, caring for four young girls in Rockland who were sick enough to all be placed in quarantine. Writing home, even her pencil had to be wiped in alcohol and the letter baked before it could be sent to her daughters. Although she was earning twenty dollars a week, very good pay for her, it was never enough. “I cannot stand it,” she told them, “and it must be different. I thought earning what I am now I might get caught up a little.” They must “plan for mama’s interest, which is nothing but your own interest as all I get is what I eat.”
When almost a week passed with no word from her girls, she pressed them more sharply: “Just a few words, as you don’t seem to have any spare time.… I thought my last letter would make it very easy for us all … but, suit yourselves.” She was out of quarantine and fumigating the household. The room she had been cloistered in with the sick children retained the strong odor of formaldehyde, and her head ached terribly. “I think these little girls would write to their mama if she were alive. Mama.”
That did the trick. Receiving the letter in the morning mail, Vincent wrote her mother and posted it by noon. This letter was different from her others; it was full of the small reassurances and affectionate baby talk that assured her mother of her devotion, as well as her continuing dependence on her:
Where’d you get the penny-royal, honey? Isn’t it sweet? Always makes me think of Aunt Marcia and Uncle Joe and the old place. It grows so abundantly on the hill above the brook, you know.
Doesn’t it seem good to be out of quarantine? I should think you’d be just hopping joyful. Unless you’re too tired even to hop, you poor dear. Binnie’s sorry!
Mother and daughter were engaged in a sort of duet of need. Cora, hurt, found fault, and Vincent, prodded, flew to respond. Everything at home was fine, she wrote: “We serve three meals a day at ‘Millay’s Cafe,’ if you please.… come home quick as you can to your ‘free bad tids.’ Lovissimusosso, Vincent.”
The baby talk was never a good sign. A poem (this one would later be titled “The Suicide”) was slashed in pencil across the back of one of her mother’s letters:
Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou has mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!
And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me
I have kissed thy crust, and eaten sparingly
That I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,—
Aye, from thy glutted lash glad crawled away,
As if spent passion were a holiday!
Then she returned to him. She lit her candle and kissed her ring, but the flame guttered out and she now called her ring “a ghost ring.”
We have been betrothed just half a year tonight. I have been very faithful to you. I have loved you more and better every day. Six months is quite a long engagement, I think.… I do so ache to be taken care of. How I shall glory in your strength—I who am not strong.… With you I shall be complete and wonderful, but without you I am nothing.
But she did not set foot outside her home. She didn’t seek a permanent job. She didn’t venture forth with any of the young men who came to call. Mostly they came to call on Norma, anyway. Vincent stayed put. She wrote.
In the working draft of a poem she called “Interim,” the death of a wife is personified by language:
Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;
All else were contrast;—save that contrast’s wall
Is down … where night
And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,
Are synonyms.
It was a fine piece of writing, but if she sent it out, no one took it. She had not been able to publish anything since St. Nicholas. She’d begun to work on a long poem that was entirely different from anything she had tried before. A dramatic monologue written in the first person, it began as simply as a child’s counting-out rhyme. But there was nothing childish about the poem itself; it was luminous and wild and—so far—incomplete. Only her mother knew she was working on it.
Only once did she come to her love without need of his comfort. She linked her giving to what she called “The mother-heart: there is no strength like it”:
I want not to be comforted, but to comfort;—to hold your head on my lap, and love you, and fuss with your hair, and cry over you; not stormily, not hysterically, but tenderly; and quietly, lest you see and be grieved. I want to find things for you, to pick up things after you, to straighten your tie and brush your coat, to fill your pipe,—all the little things so many women have done and that I long to do.
Domestic, devotional, almost, the pull for her was always back to being good at home.
That fall and winter she came to him more than she ever had before. Soon she didn’t want a boy anymore, she was too tired. “Two girls,” she wrote, “are enough for me.” She wanted a man. But why didn’t he come? What was all this hard work for, if not for him?
I looked out of the window a minute ago and saw the mountains.… They are so beautiful they almost kill me. The color—oh—there is never anything like their color in the fall! And I want to climb Megunticook before the leaves are all gone.
But she couldn’t; she had to work, “Sweep the floor, and sweep it again tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that and every day of your life;—if not that floor, why then—some other floor.” Very few young women have ever put it more clearly—or more fiercely—than Millay did when she was nineteen:
I’m getting old and ugly. My hands are stiff and rough and stained and blistered. I can feel my face dragging down. I can feel the lines coming underneath my skin. They don’t show yet but I can feel a hundred of them underneath. I love beauty more than anything else in the world and I can’t take time to be pretty.… Crawl into bed at night too tired to brush my hair—my beautiful hair—all autumn-colored like Megunticook.
Then she stopped. She’d promised him she “would never let go again.” But she hadn’t really broken her promise. “No one else knows how I feel. I am keeping up before everybody else.” Now she imagines him as her husband. “My husband,” she writes again and again and again, “I am ashamed to think I didn’t know why Megunticook is there! It is to look at! … to lift your eyes to!” Beauty was the only thing that sustained her. Except him.
On January 3, 1912, snow and ice covered everything in Camden; even the bay was icebound. No matter where she was, she couldn’t get warm.
Honey, I don’t feel good a bit. I’ve a tooth-ache and I think I’m going to have a cold. I’ve been freezing all day and now my nose feels all squizzled up. Does your nose squizzle up when you’re about to have a cold? Mine does, and my conscience with it.… I’m dissatisfied with everything,—myself first of all. I’m e
goistical and self-analytical. I suffer from inflammation of the imagination and a bad attack of ingrowing temperament. I don’t believe in anything. I am morbid and miserable. My mind must be rotten, I think. I need a man who has been somewhere and done things to graft his healthy ideas into my silly brain. Truly my head is in dreadful condition. I don’t know what to do.
It didn’t let up, and her writing became more frenzied, more desperate. On February 3, when she returned to him again, she simply wrote, “This is another death—this night.” A week later it was darker. She felt she was suffocating, as if she were being buried alive. She would be twenty in less than two weeks, and still he had not come for her.
I do not know what will become of me.… I know that I am in a dreadful condition. I know that the thoughts that fill my mind are fearful thoughts.… I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me.
CHAPTER 7
She was alone in the house when the telephone rang—a long-distance call from Kingman, Maine. The voice of the operator was scratchy and faint, but at last Vincent made out “Mr. Millay, your father, is very ill, and may not recover.” Stunned into silence, she just stood there. “After a minute she asked me if there was any message … I managed to stutter something and to say that I would send a telegram. Then she said, ‘Is that all?’ And I said, ‘Yes’ and hung up the receiver.” Quickly, Vincent called her mother in Rockland, and they decided Vincent would start for Kingman in the morning, for she’d just missed the noon boat. She borrowed a suitcase and threw some clothes together. On March 1, she caught the boat to Bucksport, traveling from there by train to Bangor, where she took another train and arrived in Kingman at 6 A.M. Dashing down a cup of coffee, she hurried to the house where her father boarded.
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