Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

I guess I shall never see you in all this world. O, dear, I feel so l’l’ an’ small an’ all shrunkd up, I guess you couldn’t see me if you were here.—I’m honest ’fraid you’ have to use a big nifying glass!—I—Please, sir, I’m sorry for my badness, and will you write me a letter purpose to cry on?

  V.M.

  What she couldn’t have known was that Earle had written to Kennerley on the fifteenth, just after he’d written to her, placing “Renascence” second. But even then he had equivocated, “Renascence could easily deserve first honors.”

  On October 15, he wrote to her again:

  Feel nervous and restless, do!—Do keep me company! The poems are almost “judged”—the decision hangs in the balance.… I ache to know.

  Faithfully,

  F.E.

  On October 25, 1912, Earle delivered his final choice to Mitchell Kennerley. He championed “Renascence”:

  The most astonishingly beautiful and original poem in the Lyric Year, the poem most arresting in its vision, the poem most like a wonderful PreRaphael painting, is surely Renascence by Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. To me it is almost unthinkable that a girl of twenty could conceive such a work and execute it with such vigor and tenderness.… And it is with no small pride that I give it my first vote for the prizes.

  In second place he chose Orrick Johns’s “Second Avenue,” with Ridgely Torrence’s “A Ritual for a Funeral” third.

  Then he wrote her a peculiar letter, cut and pasted together, telling her that most “friendships, relations, acquaintance-ships are bloodless, frigid, and stark, with no becoming drapery in the form of mystery and romantic atmosphere, with no bared elbows and throats.” He did wish he could tell her “about the prizes—the question, however, is still an open one, (shut at the outside ends!)”

  She didn’t write to him for three weeks. Or, more precisely, she drafted three letters and sent none. She kept them, and she waited. Her drafts tell us how she felt as she waited:

  I am asking you to return to me a letter which I, a short time ago, wrote to a friend of mine, and which you, a complete stranger, seem to have received by mistake. The letter can mean nothing to you, as you are incapable of understanding it; but to me, who wrote it in all sincerity and candor, it means much—and it annoys me to think of its being in your possession.

  She gave him permission to read all of her letters to his wife, “unexpurgated. Yours to me I will return, if you like, and them, also, you can read to her,—at your discretion.” She had not been obscure in her letters to him; “possibly your translation has been purposely a little free.” Had he thought of that? He, with his “advantage over me that fourteen years have given,”

  Are you trying to tell me not to make a fool of myself? Believe me, such advice could only be needless or useless.

  She boiled on:

  And I did not mean to tell you anything whatever about “bloodless friendships” as opposed to the “romantic atmosphere” of “bared elbows and throats,”—tho I am sure that bared throats are not half so indecorous as bared hearts; and I shall not forget again, have no fear that I shall. I told you I always make mistakes in men. I always do. But never the same mistake twice.

  Indignantly, relentlessly, she pressed on:

  I am wild, if you like; but I stayed in my burrow a long, long time,—nibbling your straws and snapping at your fingers, but always just a little out of reach. Until at last I got to trust you so much that one day I ventured out for a minute,—and you threw rocks at me. And I will never come out again.

  Before she could send her letter, Earle wrote to her again: “I say: the Prizes have been awarded.… Can you see anything by the tone of this letter? Would you feel satisfied with a very honorable mention? Would you hate me if RENASCENCE is entirely out of it?”

  He had said she would win; he had nearly promised. They had corresponded for months now. He’d suggested very few changes in the poem—the title Anglicized, a word overused or overstressed—and she had been grateful for his attention. She’d made the changes. She’d provoked his correspondence, she’d sent him snapshots, and she wanted, she needed his attention and his support. What she had done was to seduce that support. Now she had not won first prize, or second or third. She was steeled for anything but loss.

  Camden, Me. Nov. 5, 1912

  This, then, is what I have been waiting for, from day to day … in such an agony as I had not known I could experience. This is the answer; this is the end. I wonder why I am not crying. My mother is crying. Did you ever hear your mother cry as if her heart would break? It is a strange and terrible sound. I think I shall never forget it.

  I cannot realize what you have done. I am numb, I think. I read your letter, and read it again, and I neither cried out nor fainted. I can sit and write quite calmly. I do not understand myself. I shall not try to understand you. I will try to keep from understanding you. I will not let my mind admit you as a possibility. And I would not be in your place, with my own capability for remorse, for anything in earth or heaven that I have ever heard of.

  Her letter breaks off, incomplete and, again, apparently unsent. On the fifteenth of November, she received another letter: “What have I done to make you so silent?” Was she punishing him? he asked. He told her that there was something better than a prize: Jessie Rittenhouse, a force in American poetry, who was an officer of the Poetry Society of America and “perhaps our most distinguished critic,” had written Earle to tell him that Millay’s “Renascence” was

  “the best thing in the book … in fact one of the freshest and most original things in modern poetry. If it doesn’t get the prize, I pity your judges.” … Think of it!

  Earle added, irrepressibly, “O, what more can you hope for! You might as well retire and rest on your laurels the rest of your life.”

  Ruefully, after entering Earle’s reassurances in her “Sweet & Twenty” diary, she added, “But it didn’t get the prize! Everything but money!”

  Two weeks later, in the Holiday Book number of The New York Times, Jessie Rittenhouse—while praising Earle’s and Kennerley’s effort and commitment to modern American poetry—singled out and saved for the conclusion of her full-page review Millay’s “Renascence”:

  The “Lyric Year” has, however, a poem so distinct … that it seems to me the freshest, most distinctive note in the book. This is “Renascence,” by Edna Vincent Millay.… Miss Millay’s defects are the healthy defects of youth, time will take care of them; but that so young a poet should have so personal a vision of humanity, nature and God, such a sense of spiritual elation, of mystical rebirth, and present it to us with the freshness of first view—is certainly worthy of recognition and one could wish that the judges had seconded Mr. Earle in his choice of this poem for one of the awards.

  2

  Miss Caroline B. Dow had not forgotten Vincent. “You might easily think that I had,” she had written to her in October, “if you did not believe that I was serious when I said I wanted to help.” After hearing her recite “Renascence” at the Whitehall Inn, she had decided to marshal whatever support Vincent needed to go to Vassar. Precisely what work had Millay done in Camden High School?—What had she read, what was her standing in the class?—and while Vincent had sent her some poems that she had welcomed, she cautioned her “not to deal much with metaphysics & philosophies but keep yourself and your expressions simple & spontaneous.” It was advice Miss Dow would give often and in a variety of ways, for she assumed a far greater simplicity in this young woman than her poems, letters, or diaries suggested.

  Since mid-September Millay had also been in correspondence with a woman named Charlotte Bannon (a friend of a Mrs. Esselborn, who, with Miss Dow, had also heard Millay recite at Whitehall). On November 15, Miss Bannon had taken “Renascence” to the head of the English department at Smith College, who now asked to know exactly what Miss Dow wanted to know, and for the same reasons. Miss Bannon sent Vincent a catalog to the college, telling her that if she could get admitted, Smith C
ollege would take care of her after she was there. It was as close to an outright commitment as anything Millay had yet heard, but she didn’t feel she could enter into any sort of relationship with Smith until she knew what her chances were at Vassar.

  “I have always wanted dreadfully, and until now hopelessly, to go to college,” she wrote to Miss Dow. “I would far rather go to Vassar than anywhere else.… but even more than I want to go to Vassar,—I want to go to college! So that if anything should happen that I couldn’t go to Vassar, I wouldn’t want to have spoiled my chances at Smith.” She hoped Miss Dow understood, and even more that she wouldn’t “be obligated to say, ‘By all means, Smith.’ For I am already, at heart at least, a Vassar girl.”

  Miss Dow hedged. She was uncertain if there was a vacancy for the year, and while she assured Vincent of her own impartiality, she said there were some very good reasons why Smith might not be as “helpful to you as Vassar.” But she gave only one: “the country life.” Her best news she saved for last: “I have about $400 promised for your first year, and feel no doubt about getting the rest.”

  Two days later, Miss Dow advised Millay to apply to both Smith and Vassar and see what happened. Vincent did just that. Meanwhile, Miss Bannon was not only working to have her admitted to Smith, she was telling her that whether she chose Vassar or Smith was “a question of what is best for you entirely—and I think you have a right to choose your own college—even if we all do want to be kind to you.” Vincent’s position was delicious. From having had no chance of going to college, she was now close to being fought over.

  On December 18, 1912, the president of Smith College offered her a full scholarship for the following year. When Miss Dow learned of Smith’s offer, she wrote immediately, “I have on hand enough money for the first year at college and it seems to remain for you to decide whether you will go to Smith or Vassar.” Vincent wrote to her mother in Rockland:

  Isn’t this fierce? … She puts in her little word about the country life at Vassar, but leaves the matter entirely in my hands.… Mother, I knew it would come to this! … My head is a howling wilderness. And every once in a while I have to shriek with laughter over the dead funny side of it!

  Two days later, Miss Dow made her condition clear: “Since three of the largest gifts for your education came from people who expected you to enter Vassar I shall have to write them and find if the gift wld. still hold if you went elsewhere.” In other words, she continued to press for Vassar, while Miss Bannon advised Vincent to take the first and best offer, from Smith. She even told her how:

  I would write and explain to your Vassar friend that President Burton of Smith has offered you a full scholarship here and … that you feel you ought to accept what is a definite certainty.… You can explain it in your own way—of course with gratitude & appreciation for all they have done for you.

  In closing she told Vincent, “I want to be your great friend and I will be, if you will let me.”

  That was a remarkable note of affection, and it would not be the last time Edna St. Vincent Millay would win to her side an older woman who was in a position to help her. They were taken with Edna Millay. They wanted to assist her in any way they could, perhaps because in the careful structure of their lives they felt diminished. Her life would be grand, sweeping, urgent. Incapable of this themselves, they would help her.

  In the end, when Vincent had chosen Vassar, the grace and generosity with which Miss Bannon took her news was a signal of the attachment she had developed for her young poet. It was ardent:

  I do not want them to conventionalize your spirit—One can learn anywhere—but I want you to learn to think and dream for yourself—Do not think everything that is told you is necessarily true—because what you want is freedom to think & freedom to range among dreams.

  This was from a woman she’d never met, who knew her only through her poems and their correspondence. “I shall always be interested in you—if anything happens that you cannot go to Vassar write to me at once and I shall be your friend again—and again.”

  Vincent told her mother she was picking Vassar because it would be great to know girls from Persia, Syria, Japan, India, and “one from Berlin, Germany”; besides, she wrote her mother, “There isn’t one ‘furriner’ in Smith.” But the real reason was “Lots of Maine girls go to Smith; very few to Vassar. I’d rather go to Vassar.”

  3

  Her copy of The Lyric Year arrived the day before Thanksgiving. The next day she received a joint note from Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner, who were also in the collection:

  This is Thanksgiving Day: we thank you. If we had a thousand dollars, we would send it to you. You should unquestionably have had the prize.

  All three prizes!

  The two young men had been friends since their days together at Harvard. Ficke, who was married and had already published four volumes of poetry, was a lawyer, practicing in his father’s law firm in Davenport, Iowa, and hating it. Bynner, who was visiting them for the holidays, had published two volumes. Arthur Ficke was tall and narrow and wore a carefully trimmed stiff black mustache to hide his tight lips, whereas Hal (Bynner’s nickname) was softer, with silky fair hair and languid airs. Arthur’s voice was high, clipped, and nasal; Hal’s was deep. Both lived in large part on trust funds established for them by their parents. Arthur had written to Earle that “Renascence” was

  a real vision, such as Coleridge might have seen.

  Are you at liberty to name the author? The little item about her in the back of the book is a marvel of humor. No sweet young thing of twenty ever ended a poem precisely where this one ends: it takes a brawny male of forty-five to do that. Don’t, however, fear that Bynner and I are going about bud-mouthed with dark suspicions; if it’s a real secret, we respect the writer of such a poem far too much to want to plague “her.”

  Earle passed along the letter to Vincent, who told them she simply wouldn’t be a

  “brawny male.” … I cling to my femininity.

  But, gentlemen: when a woman insists that she is twenty, you must not, must not call her forty-five. That is more than wicked; it is indiscreet.… P.S. The brawny male sends his picture. I have to laugh.

  This teaser was the beginning of an exchange that would mark all of their lives in ways they never could have imagined.

  Arthur was keen to understand just how Millay’s poem had come into being, and he went about finding out just as a lawyer would—with innumerable probing and somewhat patronizing questions. Had she read Coleridge or William Blake? he asked. “How did you come by the image—‘Washing my grave away from me’? Did you see it, or was it a happy accident of composition, or did you get it from a book.” That last was nearly too much for her; she thought there were

  vastly fewer “accidents of composition” than one might think.

  As to the line you speak of—“Did you get it from a book?” indeed! I’ll slap your face. I never get anything from a book. I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I see.

  As for William Blake, she’d never heard of him. Ficke was so astonished he wrote, “O, Wonder-child!” and sent her a copy for Christmas.

  By then there was mounting controversy about the prizes; Ficke, Bynner, and Jessie Rittenhouse weren’t alone in finding “Renascence” more exceptional than the poems that had won. Louis Untermeyer wrote in the Chicago Evening Post that “Mr. Earle may be extolled to the stars” as the patron of struggling poets, but “as the editor of ‘The Lyric Year’ he should be hailed with more modified raptures.” Here was all the stir Earle and Millay could have wished. Among all that old deadwood, Untermeyer had found a poem to like, and he praised it to the skies. “Renascence” was, “without doubt, the surprise of the volume.”

  For her loss of the prize there was the balm of the publicly stated, clear injustice of the judges’ inept decision. By the winter of 1912, at twenty, Edna Millay understo
od just what it meant to become a cause célèbre.

  It was her talent that enabled her to transform the airless life she’d led into a poem that freed her from it. “Renascence” was the culminating poem of her apprenticeship, the shaped instrument of her release. It began as simply as a child’s lament, with words of mostly one syllable, moving in rhymed couplets, four ringing beats to a line. If it harked back to Whittier’s “Snowbound,” that great favorite of the nineteenth century, which her mother had read her to sleep with when she was little—she would remember all her life the shiny jet beads on her mother’s bodice as she bent over her, reciting the poem from memory, until she felt she too had it by heart—“Renascence” transcended it. She had found the three major themes in lyric poetry and made them her own: nature, love, and death.

  On February 3, 1913, with no warning at all, Millay received a telegram from Miss Dow telling her to come to New York immediately. While Millay’s work at Camden High School had been inadequate to the standards of admission to Vassar College, she could be accepted if she successfully completed one semester of preparation at Barnard College in New York City. She boarded the train the next morning with a single suitcase, her initials painted on it in gold, E.St.V.M. But before she left, she turned to Her Book and made her last entry to her Beloved:

  Some people think I’m going to be a great poet, and I’m going to be sent to college so that I may have a chance to be great,—but I don’t know—I’m afraid—afraid I’m too—too little, I guess, to be very much, after all. I’m not joking a bit. I don’t want to disappoint people, and perhaps tomorrow I won’t feel like this, but it seems to me that all I am really good for is to love you,—and that doesn’t do any good. Perhaps I could be a great poet or nearer to it—if I had you, and if you wanted me to. I have some big thoughts …