They began writing to each other now by return mail. The guessing game continued as he told her he was not Wheeler, “nor,” he wrote on August 14, “anybody of importance. Just ‘a lover of poetry,’ and of plump babies, and of skis, blizzards, Bach, kittens and embroidery”; but he did give her his summer address, engraved on the top of his stationery, “Vindrholm, Monroe, New York,” and told her that address in care of “F.E.” would reach him. It was a remarkably coy response. He had conceived of The Lyric Year
to reach just such budding geniuses as yourself.… I am indeed proud and happy to have discovered you.… And although nearly old enough to be your grandfather … I am not ashamed to caper with delight over “Renascence.”
It was Kennerley, however, who was English and who preferred the English spelling, not he.
After receiving this letter Vincent decided her editor was Mrs. Mitchell Kennerley.
But it makes no difference who you are. You are perfectly charming, and I am crazy about you. There! Such a relief to be able at last to confess it, without indiscretion; or, if not without indiscretion—all confessions are indiscreet—at least to confess it.—This is not a crush; don’t be alarmed; I never have them. It is purely an intellectual enthusiasm.
She thought it was sensational to be anybody’s discovery. Cora, who was working in Rockland that summer, and who was privy to Vincent’s guesses, wrote:
Isn’t it dear about your poem and your Editor? I think it is real sweet that way, don’t you? She may be a great help to my girl. I must say goodnight.
Lots of luck to my other girls. Yours—
“The Mother of A Poet.”
By the end of August, though she was hot in correspondence with her editor, there was still no word of the contest itself. What she could not have guessed was that her editor was trying desperately to attract other poets into his competition. By September 5, after Ridgely Torrence, to whom he had appealed, had sent his revised poem “A Ritual for a Funeral,” the editor assured him that “Mr. Wheeler and all your friends are very anxious for you to take the Lyric Year prize.” This was far more than angling for distinguished talent.
As High Street rises away from the center of Camden, there was, and still is, a large white frame summer hotel called the Whitehall Inn. It sprawls across a broad lawn rimmed with fir trees and wild roses, its long porches sleepily watching the bay. It was there in the summer of 1912 that Norma Millay took a job as a waitress.
Since she’d never worked as a waitress before, I asked her why she had taken the job.
“Mother said I could go. And, well, I guess as always, it would be nice to make a little money. And, too, it was just as a sort of lark.… The guests got interested in me. What beautiful hands I had, when I served from the tray, or the way I spoke. Anyway, soon they asked me about myself and my family. I said I had a sister who was a poet. I said she had a poem in The Lyric Year.”
Norma remembered that at the end of August there was to be a staff party, a masquerade dance. “And they said, will your sister be there? and I said I didn’t know. But I got the feeling that they were … what? well, interested in us. I made up my mind that Vincent was going to come.
“You understand, Vincent had been out of school a long time. And we knew she was a genius. She was shy. She went with her girlfriends. So, Why should I go to a party for the help? Oh, God, yes, it just sounded ridiculous. But I decided I would go and I would bring Vincent up. I had to work to bring her. I told her it would be kind of fun. Kind of a lark. And we loved to dance well together. So, Come on! Vincent!”
But Vincent balked. From the moment Norma mentioned the party, she dug her heels in. Norma said it would be good for her to see people, to be drawn out of herself. She didn’t want to see people, she didn’t think it would be good for her. Years later Vincent would write, “Norma was … carefree, gay, gregarious and unselfconscious; I was thoughtful, intense, involved, reticent & retiring.” Vincent was also mulish. But Norma was unrelenting.
“Then Okay! It was—let’s see some of these funny people who come summers. I made her a little Pierrette costume, and in it with her long red-blond hair she looked about fifteen.”
Vincent wore a tiny black velvet mask with rosettes of red crepe paper at the sides where the tie was fastened. Her costume had a short, full skirt made of yards of white cheesecloth fitted smartly at her waist, with a low-cut sleeveless bodice with black pompoms down the front. She won the prize for best costume, and Norma got the prize for best dancer. Afterward, everyone, guests and help, went into the music room for ice cream and cake. Norma continued, “And for us to perform.… I said, ‘Ask Vincent to sing some songs, ask for “The Circus Rag!” ’ Vincent gave me a dirty look, the look that meant—you’ve been tattling! What are you up to? Then she played the piano and sang, jazzy and bright and quick.” Norma closed her eyes and began to sing Vincent’s song:
“You must have heard that circus rag
Years ago when you were a kid!
Now the same old wag gets the same old gag
Off, just as he always did.…
………
—Chorus—
Right this way, ladies and gents!
Just a quarter of a dollar, only twenty-five cents!
Step right up! Tickets here!
We make it just a quarter to a pretty girl, dear.…”
“Vincent had a deep contralto voice, you know, completely different from my own. And then she sang, ‘Who Will Go a-Maying?’ which was sweet and light. Finally, after she’d sung her songs, I said, ‘Ask her to recite “Renascence.” ’ She turned around on the piano stool and said this poem. Then it was absolutely still in that room.
“All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me.…
“Well, yes. Now things were happening very fast. The next day they had her up to lunch and I waited on her. Then they began taking us out sailing. That sort of thing. And Mother, who was nursing one of the guests upstairs at the hotel, came down and did the silver for me, so I could leave to sail. You see, we were different. We were different from all the others.”
One of the guests in the audience at the Whitehall Inn that evening was Caroline B. Dow. She was stunned by Millay’s poem, but even more by this provincial girl’s assured performance. In a diary Vincent called “Sweet & Twenty,” “Being The Extraordinary Adventures Of Me In My Twenty-first Year,” she wrote, “If I had known then how much was to happen to me this year I would have started a diary that night.”
Wed. morning …
Miss Dow (Caroline B.) called;—dean of New York Y.W.C.A. Training School. Wealthy friends in New York who might send me to Vassar.
“Miss Dow wanted to come up and talk to Mother, privately,” Norma recalled. “And, of course, Vincent had to go to college. I remember Miss Dow as tall, about fifty-five maybe. As Vincent said, ‘She’s the hull ting.’ And, of course, she was.”
On September 3, Vincent’s editor sent her two snapshots, but he was still teasing her, for on the reverse of one he wrote:
(to Miss Edna Vincent Millay
from The Editor of
The Lyric Year.
with her—(his?)—best compliments!)
A tall, narrow man with thick straight black hair, sharp dark eyes, and a crooked grin is standing with his wife; in the other photo he holds their baby daughter. By the middle of the month he said that if he were a sport, “I should wager odds on Renascence for first honors”; and he returned a carbon copy of
“Renascence” with his comments in red pencil. Too much, he felt, happened “suddenly.” He left it entirely to her judgment but asked if the effects of the poem wouldn’t be stronger by “allowing some of them to dawn quietly.” He closed by saying, “What a wonderful person—to have written this poem. I envy you!”
Her responses to these letters exist only in pages of undated pencil drafts, but pieced together they are clear enough to tell us how she felt. For one thing, she paid careful attention to his advice about “Renascence” and replaced the first “suddenly.” She also seems to have reworked several lines—in other words, she was able to accept his criticism. On the twenty-first, she received proofs of her poem. It was not until September 25 that he revealed he was Ferdinand Earle and assured her she would be pleased with the results of the contest. “Several have prophesied that you have the best chance for the first prize.” Which, unbeknownst to her, was exactly what he’d suggested to Torrence three weeks before.
What was she to make of this man? What did he mean “by betting on my Pegasus?” she asked. “I know now, of course, that you meant I have a big chance to win.” But now that her hopes were high, “the disappointment, if I am disappointed, will be terrible.”
Their letters flew back and forth, and every other day Earle seemed to have some fresh delight to offer her. Would she come visit them? Would she be their friend “until you become so grand and famous that you would have no time for small fry.” He tempted her with his word pictures of New York City, of gleaming high buildings, museums, and theaters. But what he truly admitted was that
if I could believe that I have encouraged and helped you with my big clumsy venture.… And when your name is pronounced only with whispers of awe, it will be my secret pride to believe that I had the privilege of discovering your worth, before anyone else.
Would she come to New York? She shot back, “Why, bless yuh heart, sir, I shall come to New York!” As for his venture, he must never call it clumsy. “Say, rather, your big, splendid venture. O, but it’s great to be a man! You made this year so … miraculous to me!”
Savoring her spunk, he wrote to her as his “Dear Tom Boy,” admitting that “the big, central thrill of the whole affair was digging you out of oblivion.” His single note of caution fell in this letter of September 29:
I have no right to promise you a prize, as that depends mostly upon Mr. Wheeler. Aren’t you bursting to learn the November decision?—I am.
“ ‘Bursting to learn the November decision’! My dear man, I shall bust long before then!” But why, she asked in all innocence, did he leave the “Saint” out of her name? “It really belongs there, and—please, sir, I need to be reminded of it!”
It was audacious of her to flirt with him this openly. She was summoning him to her, and something she’d written to him—it may have been a letter that no longer exists among her penciled drafts—caused him to realize that far more was at stake for her than he’d understood before. Their exchange wasn’t just about the contest anymore. “I realize that you are a woman, and not the mere elf-child I let myself imagine. I am half very sorry and half very glad.… And yet, should I write to you so much? … Yes: until the fateful decision! … And then I hope to see you.”
That last phrase he put in brackets, as if the punctuation would lessen the impact of what he was telling her.
The poems had gone to the other judges that morning; he expected to know the decision in about two weeks but was honor-bound to hold his tongue. “What you read between the lines, I should not be responsible for? … Should I?” This was exactly the tone he took with her, coy and flirtatious. If it was a pity she wasn’t “an elf-child,” with whom he could tramp the city, nevertheless “you are a wonderful young woman, and a gifted poet: that is still better, even if that leaves us a little less free.” He lamely added that she was still “very welcome here by at least one member of the household, if not by the trio.” But that last phrase was a clear note of caution. She’d had two: he’d said he had no right to promise her a prize because he was only one judge among three. Now his wife had begun to read Vincent’s letters. Earle said that while he was left “glowing with wild, uncontrollable delights” by her letters, someone else “did not glow one bit!” But he couldn’t leave it at that; he wanted more.
Now, to be serious, dear Miss Millay: may I ask you, how you came to write Renascence? … How could a charming young woman of a quiet New England village write a stupendous poem, that threatens to carry away spoil from the midst of our established singers—booty they are making mighty efforts to capture?
How did you do it?
How, O how?
Millay had told him a great deal about herself, but she said remarkably little about “Renascence” itself. Only this once. And even here she said more about his effect on her:
[I]f it will make you the least bit happier to know just what your friendship has meant to me, then please understand this: the sky had to cave in on me, of course, before I could write Renascence, and I dug my man up because it wasn’t pleasant to leave him there, not because I had come up too. It was you who, in your enthusiastic “discovering,” accidentally exhumed me. Now, we won’t talk about that anymore.
Two days later he sent her proofs of several of the other contesting poems. But again he cautioned her, “You must promise me, dear, dear Tom Boy, never, never to write to a strange man as you have written me.” He didn’t say what she’d written that had disturbed his wife, and he admitted later in the same letter that he wasn’t really a stranger to her, that he was, even, attracted to her. He was writing to her, he said, for the sake of his own part in her future development and to protect her from herself. Couldn’t they go back to an earlier point in their correspondence, she asked, “a little bit shocked and a little bit shamed.… and—talk about the weather?” Otherwise, not only would he never meet his provocative little elf, she would never hear his Cremona.
(If you could know how—almost annihilatingly I want to hear you play that violin! Or how I would come straight back home again and be tamed for the rest of my life, if just for one evening I might listen to Wagner music with a man who knew how to love it! Savage passion! There could be no savage passion in you that would not find itself again in me! I am not big enough to love things the way I do!)
If that didn’t jar Mrs. Earle’s sense of propriety, it’s hard to imagine what would. Poor Earle. He had no idea what he was up against in trying to restrain Edna St. Vincent Millay. “But there,” she sweetly assured him,
I had not meant to say so much. It is shockingly bad form to be so unreserved. Dear me!
What will you do with me now, Mr. Ferdinand Earle,—scold me, or shake me, or—pat me on the head? (don’t dare! O, I have to giggle!)
Her letters to Earle are the most amazing mix of girlish bravado and cunning innocence. She wanted to be the wonderful young woman he’d said she was. She also wanted to be tamed, and that was something else again—something Mrs. Earle might well object to. Millay was practicing. She wanted her match in a man she could admire—a man who could dominate her and fire her imagination. But the very notion relies on the ideal of a man superior to herself, and if Ferdinand Earle was a silly, he was also, crucially, the first to try.
What he wanted, he told her on October 14, was to “flame back into silence, leaving a trail of fire across your dreams.… I would leave you a mingled peace and unrest.” He closed this letter by asking her to remember a title, “Golden Pastoral Horn,” for “Last night it seemed to me the prize winner. The judges have Renascence. Would you hate me … if they snubbed you?”
Stunned, she began a letter on the fifteenth which she left unfinished in midsentence. It was wild and nearly incoherent, as she faced for the first time, after all his assurances, the fact that she could lose.
My Editor,—
I shall not hate you, no. But I shall cry. I shall cry all night long the night I get that letter, and I hope that all night long you will lie awake and know
that I am crying. I wished once to make you glad in return for the gladness you had given me, and now, by the same token, I would make you wretched. I desire that you can not sleep that night for thinking of my wretchedness.
It was not just the difference between “Renascence-Honored and Renascence-Snubbed,” she told him, or between “Vincent glad and Vincent sorry”; it was the difference between five hundred dollars and nothing: “You had not thought of that, had you? I would choose not to think of that myself if I had any choice.”
This is the most telling letter in their correspondence. With crossed-out patches and paragraphs of screed, Millay moved from a diction that was almost imperious to that of a child. She was hampered not only by the immense disparity in their roles—the young poet at twenty, competing for a national honor against a judge whose contest it was (and who had the cash to put up the prize money)—but because she had believed him. Her anger and dependence are everywhere in this letter, and by its close the child voice is the dominant one:
Then what if you wrote an indiscreet letter (partly because you … didn’t know whether you dared or not, and partly because you wanted to see just what your editor would say, and partly—oh lots because you were only twenty) and Your Editor wrote back an indiscreet letter that made you want to baby him—tho you really couldn’t help it—and at the very end of it said, “Will you hate me if you don’t get any prize?”—then, why then you wouldn’t hate him, of course but wouldn’t you want to cry on him? (Please, that isn’t wicked is it? It’s just that men are so much more comfortable to cry on,—and you’re the only man-friend I have.… I haven’t in all the world one friend who is stronger than I. I need someone to make me do things, and keep me doing things, and keep me from doing things.
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