Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  The minute we came in I heard from upstairs the sound of a man’s coughing, and it was then, for the first time, that I realized how long it had been since I had seen my father,—eleven years!

  His nurse met her downstairs and told her he was expecting her. The owners of the house as well as her father’s doctor, Dr. Somerville, and his daughter, Ella, stood watching her. “They kept telling me to brace up, and be calm, and things like that, which was really funny, as I was not the least bit nervous and everybody else seemed very much upset.… Perhaps I wasn’t so calm, tho, as I was numb.” As the doctor guided her up the stairs, he told her she could stay only moments and that her father had very little time to live. She entered the room.

  It didn’t seem to me that the man on the bed was my father, but I went over and stood beside him and said, “Hello, papa, dear,” just as I had planned to say only that my voice seemed higher than usual; and when he heard me he opened his eyes—the bluest eyes I ever saw—and cried out “Vincent! My little girl!” and struggled up in bed and held out his arms to me.… I put my arms around him and made him lie down again. Then I sat on the side of the bed and talked to him a little, not of anything in particular; I remember saying that I wished my eyes were blue, too, so that they’d match my hat, and that he whispered back—he couldn’t speak at all—“You can’t very well change your eyes, Vincent, but you might have got a green hat.” Then I laughed, and he smiled a little, with his eyes closed. He had difficulty, I noticed, in keeping them open and somehow that made me all the more certain he was going to die.

  That night she wrote to her mother briefly to tell her that Dr. Somerville had given her “very little hope.” Cora wrote back by return post:

  My dear little daughter:—

  Such a hard experience for my little girl to meet all alone. If mama could only help you darling and help him too.

  She urged her to tell Henry he had to get better, “to enjoy his dear girls for years yet.”

  But seeing his daughter had done him more good than any of them had counted on. On Friday, March 1, the doctor hadn’t expected him to live out the night. By Monday, March 4, Vincent wrote home excitedly, “Papa is better and they think he will get well.” By then her mother’s anxious letter had crossed with hers. Cora didn’t know Henry was improving, and while Vincent didn’t know exactly what was the matter with him, she tried to waylay her mother’s fears: “He’s had pneumonia I guess, and asthma and a bad heart,” but now he was clearly on the mend.

  Dr. Somerville, who looked, she told her mother, “exactly like Andrew Carnegie,” took her driving every day and sleighing miles upriver, where she saw a deer hanging in a tree, killed by a bobcat. “Papa says that now a bob-cat is the only thing that can legally kill deer. He seemed rather skeptical.… I have to run on like this because I’m in a hurry.” What had begun as an ordeal for Vincent was becoming an adventure. She promised her mother she’d tell more later, and she closed admiringly with this:

  I see Papa twice a day. We can’t talk very much but he loves to have me with him.… I have never in my life heard so many people inquire for one man. All festivities here are postponed until he recovers. An M.D. and an L.L.D. from somewhere around here came in on the train today just to see him a minute—great friends of his.

  I’ll write later, home,

  Love,

  Vincent

  Cora regained more than her composure with the news of Henry’s recovery. She said it was “nice” that Vincent was having a good time after all—“I am glad your papa has so many good friends. He was always very popular and made friends wherever he went.” But now she asked pointedly how much Vincent’s trip had cost and reminded her, “It is hard for those left at home sometimes and they want a letter. Write often.” Then she sent Vincent a photograph of herself in her nurse’s uniform, looking stern and competent, her face more deeply lined than it should have been for a woman just shy of her forty-ninth birthday. It was a telling gesture, and it was intended for Henry. Vincent, after all, had just left home; she knew what her mother looked like. “Give my best wishes to your papa, and tell him to get well and do the best he can for his nice big girls I’ve kept so well for him.”

  Her mother continued to press her not only for news but for her return. Norma needed her help with French. “I can get along without you when I’m away; but home misses you awfully.” But Vincent wasn’t thinking of Norma’s French or her home duties, and she didn’t respond to her mother’s letters. The next letter came with an enclosed note from Norma that flashed with anger:

  Sister Millay:—

  I am exceedingly ashamed of you for not letting us hear something from you.… You have been up there almost three weeks and you haven’t exerted your self in writing letters to your family. What is the matter, dear? Are you sick yourself? Just because you have found your father must you forget all about your mother and us kids?

  She closed in a voice very like the one Vincent used when she was trying to reassure her mother that she loved her: “I can’t help scolding you for I am disgusted wif youse.”

  In that inevitable tug between parents, especially those who have divorced, one parent wears the mantle of the victor and the other becomes the vanquished. Henry was clearly the vanquished. But there is a peculiar susceptibility children have to the fallen, to the not victorious, particularly if it is the father and they are girls. Henry had been irresponsible. He hadn’t supported them, and Vincent knew it. But now, for the first time since she’d been very young, she was in his world, and she was thriving. She found him as charming and winning as her mother once had. However, her lengthening absence, with very little word home, made Cora excruciatingly anxious. And Norma was acting her part in a family drama long established among them. She wrote not only on her mother’s behalf, but on her own.

  Cora tried to telephone Kingman, but the line above Bangor was out. She told Vincent that if she didn’t hear immediately she would telegraph, which was costly. Still Vincent didn’t write. Her mother would write ten letters to her four.

  She wasn’t sick, she was having fun. The gloom that had engulfed her at home was lifting. She began a letter to her sisters on St. Patrick’s Day (the date of her parents’ wedding anniversary), but as she became more and more drawn into the social life of Kingman, she let it slip. She even forgot to write to her beloved on March 3, “because … I don’t care a snap about you. I don’t even think of you. No, these are lies, I adore you, but yesterday was the 3rd and I didn’t know.” In fact, she only once again turned to him on the third. The intensity of her need was over for good.

  She told her mother and sisters that there was only one thing the Kingman boys were good for, and that was dancing. “And they certainly can dance, not contras, but waltzes and schottisches, and they waltz their two steps. Whodathunkit!” She and Dr. Somerville’s daughter, Ella, spent every night that week at a show that had come to town; she called it “a Kickapoo medicine-show, an all-the-week, Kickapoo, Sagwa, vaudeville, medicine show,” where they “queened in.”

  And say,—It’s great to be the new girl in town when there’s a dance on. Everybody fell over himself to get a dance with me, and every dance I had was lovely.

  At home she had not been a girl sure of her powers; now she was a hit for the first time in her life. It did wonders for her, as did her renewed contact with her father.

  I pop in and out all the time and we just love each other. Sometimes when I’m coming upstairs I call out, “Hi papa!” like that, and sometimes I just say, “I bet a cent my dad knows what’s a-coming!” And then he’ll laugh and tell me to hurry up.

  Maybe it was inevitable that she would find him, even in illness, a charming and sunny man. Certainly it was clear from her letters home that he was enviably well liked. Then, too, he was impressed with her—he loved to hear her read Burns and Kipling, and he praised her highly. He thought her singing voice was superb.

  I will say right now that I sang the “Ave Maria,” which is
a very dramatic, operatic thing, after the manner of a dramatic, operatic star. Up here, where no one knows but that I have taken lessons for years of Madame Marchesi, I am not afraid to howl.

  And sing she did, standing by the church’s open window, just across the yard from where her father lay listening to her.

  Consequence—Papa thinks I have a voice with a future, said he thought it was Schumann-Heink a-bellering next door, had no idea I could sing like that, did I call that a little parlor voice?—etc. etc. Lud! How I do fool ’em all!

  She was old enough to know that his praise was excessive, but how welcome it made her feel. What a delight to be taken care of, to be praised, flattered, and danced with when she’d thought she’d come for death.

  But she knew her mother well, and even if it had taken her three days to finish the letter she didn’t ignore her mother’s feelings. “Tell Mother, be sure to tell mother, that I worship her cap-frill,” she wrote back to Norma. “Goodnight, you bad tids! Vincent.”

  Cora was no fool. When she summoned her daughter home this time, there was bait on the hook. “Dear Vincent,” she wrote on March 21, “I … am going to try to catch you now with something that may interest and encourage you.” She’d been sent a sample copy of The Magazine Maker in which there was an article announcing a grand contest for poets. One thousand dollars in prize money would be awarded to the three best poems submitted by June 1, to Mitchell Kennerley, the New York publisher. One could send in as many poems as one wanted. One hundred American poems would be published on November 1 in a single volume to be called The Lyric Year. The judges were Edward J. Wheeler, editor of Current Opinion; William Stanley Braithwaite, poetry editor of the Boston Transcript; and the editor of The Lyric Year itself, who was anonymous.

  “Here is your chance,” Cora scrawled across the top of the letter. “Think what Wheeler said of your Land of Romance.

  “Come home,” she wrote urgently, “and make a good try.”

  Vincent raced back to Camden. She helped Norma with her French, and she helped her mother move into their new house at 82 Washington Street, across from the high school. By May 27—in less than two months—she had finished her long poem “Renaissance” and sent it in to The Lyric Year.

  At the same time, but in separate envelopes, she sent along other poems, “La Joie de Vivre,” “The Suicide,” “Interim,” and probably three others, each of which she signed E. Vincent Millay. Into the return envelope of each she placed a note “of consolation and encouragement,” thinking that if they came back, the blow of no comment or a printed rejection slip would be softened.

  It’s hard to know exactly when she began to write “Renaissance,” the spelling she used when she wrote it. According to notes her mother made much later in life, the poem was begun in 1911, when Vincent was nineteen. It was then put aside and was not finished until the late spring of 1912. But her mother, for whom there was more at stake than she ever acknowledged, put it variously, and sometimes clearly inaccurately, this way:

  Renascence was partly written in 1911, when Miss Millay was in Kingman, Maine, on a visit to her father.… I saw the advertisement of Mitchell Kennerlys for The Lyric Year in which a hundred American poets would be represented. I at once recognized a fair chance for her to receive recognition and wrote her to come home and finish the poem and get it into the contest—This was in the spring of 1912.

  She did this with little enough time in which to accomplish so great a work, and just get it done in time.

  Nowhere did her mother mention that she, too, had sent poems in to the contest that spring, placing herself in direct competition with her daughter.

  “If I’d thought that would occur to you, I wouldn’t have told you!” Norma Millay said to me almost seventy years after the contest was over.

  “You didn’t tell me,” I said carefully.

  “Of course they were not competitors. Mother would never have competed against Vincent. She was competing. As Vincent was.” Norma paused, her head bent down, and then, softly, watching me closely through her filmy glasses, “She was competing with Vincent. Was she not?”

  CHAPTER 8

  —You inquire my Books—For Poets—I have Keats—and Mr and Mrs Browning.… I went to school—but in your manner of the phrase—had no education.… But I fear my story fatigues you—I would like to learn—Could you tell me how to grow—or is it unconveyed—like Melody—or Witchcraft? …

  Is this—Sir—what you asked me to tell you?

  —Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, April 25, 1862

  Vincent had gone into a nearby meadow to pick blueberries for supper, and when she had a pailful she came home to find her mother waiting anxiously on the doorstep with a letter in her hand. It was addressed to “E. Vincent Millay, Esq.” and it was from the editor of The Lyric Year. On July 17, 1912, he accepted “Renascence” as one of the best one hundred poems in the contest. Addressing her as “Dear Sir,” he told her just how much he liked it and asked for a biographical sketch. He signed himself, “Yours faithfully, The Editor.” He did not give his name. She waited less than a week to answer, addressing her letter to Mitchell Kennerley, the New York publisher under whose aegis the prize had been announced: “It may astonish you to learn that I am no ‘Esquire’ at all, nor even a plain ‘Mister’; in fact, that I am just an aspiring ‘Miss’ of twenty.”

  It wasn’t unusual, she told him, for people to be “deceived” by her masculine name, “and it was in the hope that you, too, would think me a man, that I signed my name as I did, with its feminine Edna just initialed.”

  What would any seasoned editor make of that sally? Rapid-fire she told him when she’d been born, quoted her first poem, told him, even, how she’d felt when she’d seen that Edward J. Wheeler, who’d reprinted and commented on her gold medal poem from St. Nicholas, was one of the judges: “ ‘Mitchell Kennerley’ and ‘William Stanley Braithwaite’ were formidable enough … but ‘Edward J. Wheeler’ was the name of an old friend. It was the fact that he had once been pleased with my work which gave me courage to enter the competition.”

  But if she was stumped when he asked her for “characteristics,” she soon rallied; she told him how she looked:

  If I were a noted author you would perhaps be interested to know that I have red hair, am five feet-four inches in height, and weigh just one hundred pounds; that I can climb fences in snowshoes, am a good walker, and make excellent rarebits. And if I were a noted author I should not hesitate to tell you … that I play the piano;—Grieg with more expression than is aesthetic, Bach with more enjoyment than is consistent, and rag-time with more frequency than is desired.

  She was crazy about Ibsen, knew The Rubaiyat by heart, paddled stern in a canoe. “But, since I am not a noted author,——and since, without telling you these things, I have so skilfully acquainted you with them——I will be silent lest I bore you.”

  Her style in this opening letter is playful, even cheeky. She’s clearly having fun, beckoning her editor. She even sent along a photograph, which she asked that he return, but that snapshot as well as this letter were bound to provoke a response, and two weeks later, on August 6, the editor replied. He asked to keep her photograph. But he kept her guessing as to his identity.

  Dear and true Poetess!

  You have indeed astonished me through and through—a lassie o’ twenty—is it possible?

  He said he hadn’t been alone in finding her poem “very fine, original, strong, impressive.” But he’d had certain reservations about it. He’d come upon other poems by “Mr.” E. Vincent Millay, and they had been so unequal to “Renascence” that he’d suspected “some sort of forgery was being palmed off on ‘The Lyric Year.’ ” He hadn’t liked the other poems, so he’d taken “Renascence” to a friend of his, “author, critic and attorney, to see if he could detect a clue.… The next day I came across a strong short piece—‘Then why the appetite—Why the fruit.’ ”

  The strong, short piece he was re
ferring to was her mother, Cora Millay’s, not Vincent’s, but he didn’t know that—and no one was about to tell him.

  Furthermore, RENASCENCE itself is at the same time very finished and very crude. What am I to think!

  Certainly I did not suspect that a fence-vaulting, Bach-mad, ninety-nine-pound mite of a girl was causing all the hubbub!

  Sometimes I think that Renascence is the most interesting poem in the selected Hundred of The Lyric Year.

  Signing himself “The Editor,” he told her that it might add “zest” to her anticipation to know he was not Mitchell Kennerley.

  She answered him by return mail. She said nothing about her mother’s poem. Instead she told him more about herself: “I am to some extent self-educated, having read ever since I could read at all everything I could find.… I could almost say with Simple Simon, ‘Please, sir, I haven’t any.’ I want, and have always wanted—dreadfully—to go to college.”

  She turned the last sentence in her letter in such a way as to flatter him:

  When, in my old age, I compile my real autobiography, entitled “Wild Editors I Have Met,” you, a rare type, and strangely tame, will have a chapter all to yourself; and the frontispiece will be your photograph,—if I can get it.

  Rare or wild, she said, he must tell her who he was. “You aren’t a girl, too, are you? You can’t be Edward J. Wheeler, can you? Please tell me.” And she wanted to know why she couldn’t call her poem “Renaissance” “in the French way? I see you used the Anglicized Renascence.”