On the twenty-third of June, Vincent at last returned to Camden. She still had entrance requirements to prepare for Vassar in the fall, but she couldn’t resist playing. She and Kathleen spent an entire day on the Perrys’ yawl, The Comfort, bound for Great Spruce Head Island. There were thirty-one in the party, and they built huge fires of driftwood along the beach to make coffee and bacon sizzle, and sang until the moon was high.
George Perry, whose father’s boat it was, remembered Vincent that summer reciting “God’s World” in their living room before the fireplace: “She had just come up from swimming on my cousin’s shore and had her hair in two pigtails down her back. It gave her a childish look, an elfin look. We’d been in grammar school together, you see, and although my aunt said there was a lot of talent in that room, I wasn’t smart enough to think it. She was just Vincent Millay wearing red pigtails and reciting her verses.”
On another afternoon at the Perrys’, Vincent turned to Norma at one point when the others had left and said quietly, “Sister, don’t smile so much.” It was her first sharp reminder that she was moving into another world from the one they had shared as children.
By the end of June, it was clear that as a nonmatriculating student at Barnard who had not passed her entrance examinations, Vincent couldn’t count her courses toward a Barnard degree, and she couldn’t offer them for credit to Vassar, either. Once Barnard had made that plain, Ella McCaleb, dean of Vassar, wrote back immediately:
Thank you for the statement about Miss Millay’s work. She seems to be a problem to her friends, some of whom are very anxious that she should have a regular college course in a country college before she takes up the definite work in the School of Journalism. She is surely an interesting and promising young woman, but just what she should do next year is truly an open question and one upon which I am seeking light.
When Miss McCaleb wrote to Vincent in mid-July, she said she had a larger problem in her entrance work than most of the other girls. She had to work up Latin prose composition, mathematics, the equivalent of a third language, and some ancient history. She couldn’t possibly do it all in one summer. She suggested that Vincent focus on American history and mathematics or Latin. Vincent must have written back to her in desperation or panic, for a month later Miss McCaleb replied:
Did I fail to make clear the situation about your election of courses? I gave you a choice between Latin and mathematics for the coming year because I thought you could get ready for only one.… You see it is not because of any hatred of you that this summer work is demanded but because every Vassar girl has to take certain subjects in her first year, and there is no justice or pleasure in admitting a girl if she is not ready to go on with the required work.… If you are really so desperate and ill-prepared as your letter suggests, then perhaps you have no right to try for Vassar this year—the disappointment of those who are interested in you would be nothing compared with the possibility of your attempting too much. No one wishes you to endanger either your health or your best development, but this is only a college, with pretty much the same regulations for every body, and not a great university with all sorts of different chances for different people.
Nevertheless, she was anxious to have Millay come to Vassar and closed by asking, “What can I do to help?”
But “only a college” was hardly the way Vincent Millay considered Vassar. A lifeline would have been more accurate. Whatever she may have felt in response to Miss McCaleb’s letter, she wrote nothing in her diary. But in the course of their correspondence, she won a crucial ally in Ella McCaleb. By September 4, when Miss McCaleb wrote to her again, Vincent had become “My dear child.” Two weeks later, Vincent was dining in Main Hall at Vassar College, a member of the freshman class of 1917.
CHAPTER 10
In some ways I’m sorry you are going to Vassar. But I guess you’ve too much sense and humor to be much hurt, and it is a fine opportunity to learn a lot of things that I daresay are of value. I am so ill-educated myself that colleges are always a bit of an affront to my self-esteem.
—Sara Teasdale to Edna Millay, September 2, 1913
She lived off campus in a rooming house called Mrs. McGlynn’s Cottage. The first thing she did was to take entrance examinations in algebra, geometry, and history. She wrote home immediately afterward:
It’s all right. I belong here and I’m going to stay. I’m sending Kathleen the geometry examination. Perhaps she can pass it. I couldn’t. But Miss McCaleb says it doesn’t matter. I’m admitted anyway, if I flunk ’em all.… So you can send my snowshoes.
At last she met Miss McCaleb. After the exams, all of the girls were to tell her how they thought they’d done.
I waited in line till my turn came and then I went in, and she looked at me a minute and then sort of smiled and said, “Well, my dear, what did you do?” And I answered, very solemnly, “Miss McCaleb, I did my darndest.” … She’s a darling, and I love her.
She had won Miss McCaleb to her just as surely as she had Miss Dow. But when classes began on September 22, Vincent learned that although she had passed geometry, “I flunked—just flunked” both algebra and history. She’d been certain she had passed history, “but Miss Thompson was funny & didn’t like the way I did it. She told me so. We stood on the campus an hour day before yesterday, swapping insults. We are born enemies.”
Her history exam now lies in the vaults of Vassar’s rare books library, where C. Mildred Thompson gave it a 1—, with the following comments: “No understanding of history, grand epithets.” Millay had begun by writing “I was prepared in American History at my home in Camden, Maine, in the hammock, on the roof, and behind the stove.” That was not guaranteed to win a serious young instructor of history to her side. Her examination paper was six pages long, marked by cheek and ignorance. At its close she added this note:
At precisely that point the pleasant lady in an Alice-blue coat, who I wish might be my instructor in History, requests us all to bring our papers to a close. As I know a great deal about American History which I haven’t had a chance to say, I am sorry, but obedient.
There was every reason to doubt her. Thirty-eight years later, C. Mildred Thompson, who had saved the examination and was then the dean of Vassar College, explained why she “reckoned it as a Failure. The answers were ‘at large,’ … and did not bear any particular relation to the questions asked.” That attitude, with its saucy insolence, was signal of the success and failure that would mark Vincent Millay’s entire career—with both faculty and students—at Vassar.
Among the first girls Vincent met was Agnes Rogers, “my sophomore … the most wonderful Sophomore there is, they say,” she wrote home. In August, Agnes had written to welcome a number of freshmen to Vassar in the fall, wondering “what sort of girl each one is from her name”; but in Vincent’s case, not wondering at all.
I am writing to you with real pleasure having just read your “Renascence” in “The Lyric Year.” It is yours isn’t it? … How very proud Vassar and 1917 will be, and how you will be pounced upon by “Miscellany” people—the “Miscellany” is the college Magazine you know.
When they met at McGlynn’s, Agnes remembered, “She was one of the celebrities. And, well, I think she liked it. She had done something. She was special. She wasn’t really pretty, she had pale red hair—but there was a quality—she was luminous, as if there were a light behind her. That must sound corny. But she was magical and luminous. I felt it. Everyone did.”
When the English department arranged for her to take a sophomore course in Old English with the distinguished scholar Christabel Fiske, Fiske started right off by lending Vincent the edition of Morte d’Arthur she had edited. Her German teacher, Florence Jenney, never forgot the first moment she saw her that fall: “Running footsteps overtook mine on the path between Rockefeller Hall and the Quadrangle, and a slight figure paused beside me. I had noticed especially that pale, eager face and gold reddish hair in a large section of Beginning German, and
remembered that she signed her papers ‘Vincent Millay.’ ‘I just wanted to say something to you,’ a rich, vibrant voice began. ‘I am going to love German. I know my work has not been very good yet, but it is going to be. By Christmas I shall be the best in the class.’
“She was, easily. And by Thanksgiving, not Christmas.”
But Miss Jenney also noticed that Millay had what she called “a startling … instinct for self-protection.” To survive at Vassar, she would have to do well. It wasn’t only that she was twenty-one years old among girls four years her junior or that she had more academic conditions to work off than anyone else. While she was rich in talent, nerve, and ambition, they were rich in everything else. That mixture of self-assertion and her need for acceptance was apparent from her first letters home.
All the girls here at McGlynn’s, about 30, like me, I know.… they all want blankets like mine, and—and, fo’ de Lawd’s sake listen——they make fun of me because I have so many clothes!!!!
Shan’t you die.
What mattered was not just that she belonged at Vassar—despite flunking two exams—but that she was not being outclassed. Even her voice was shaped to distinguish her, for while she was one of only two New Englanders at McGlynn’s, Vincent said, “She talks just like everybody in Camden, you know. And I don’t.” It wasn’t the first time an ambitious, poor girl was careful that her accent not betray her.
One of her classmates, Lydia Babbott, whose mother had been Miss Dow’s roommate at Vassar, remembered quite clearly that Miss Dow had asked her father to help the young poet go to college: “ ‘Frank, you’ve got to send her. She is superb and Vassar will be proud.’ Well, my father listened, and she entered college when I did.” Lydia Babbott remembered, too, that her father spoke to Charles Pratt, “but I’ve no idea if Uncle Charlie paid any of her board and tuition. It was only five hundred dollars then.” That $500 would have broken the Millays.
In a fundamental sense Millay was in disguise. The strain was apparent in her correspondence home. Lunching at the president’s house on one of Miss Dow’s early visits, Vincent again stressed, “Miss Dow doesn’t give anything away.
Miss McCaleb knows.… but you’re glad of that, aren’t you. I am. She kissed me Hello right before ’em all, to show ’em she loved me, and then she kissed me good-bye just only before me, to show me she loved me. She’s a perfect darling. But my mother needn’t be jealous.
When Norma asked if she was writing, she told her she had very little time, “but the fear is quite gone that college will spoil me for the desire to write. You see I am really too old to change very much in essentials.” Mostly she was too tired to write, and she admitted their letters to her were “about all that keep me here. You see I miss you all as much as you miss me, and while you have some of us, so to speak, I haven’t any of us.… Perhaps I oughtn’t to admit that everything isn’t just perfect,—but you’re my family, and I don’t know who else I’d say it to, or could.”
The previous spring at Barnard, she’d been so uncomfortable at a luncheon, “let in by a butler & ushered & announced!,” that she could barely touch her food:
I was so nervous that I couldn’t hold anything in my fork, but I could manage a knife real skilful so I buttered my muffin & ate that … and so help me that’s all I could get, but I strategized & “toyed with my food,” and anyway its classy not to eat any-thing.
She depended on her voice to cover her uncertainty. She called it “wonderful voice control,” and she spoke, she said, “in a soft, slow way that was not the least bit hysterical.” But the strain of constant performance sometimes made her ill. When she got home, she was “weak as a kitten, had to go right to bed.” This was close to panic.
When Arthur Ficke sent her his new book, Mr. Faust, she told him she was kept so busy studying she couldn’t even open it until Christmas break. “So Vassar College has won!” he teased her in verse. “It has tamed the wild spirit of Vincent Millay!”
Now uttereth she no more little songs with wings,
But trafficeth with wisdom only.
O melancholy days of Vincent Millay’s downgoing …
The mighty have fallen.
That was too much for her to bear:
Don’t worry about my little songs with wings.… I hate this pink-and-gray college. If there had been a college in Alice in Wonderland it would be this college. Every morning when I awake I swear, I say, “Damn this pink-and-gray college!
It isn’t on the Hudson. They lied to me. It isn’t anywhere near the Hudson.…
They trust us with everything but men.… a man is forbidden as if he were an apple.
But girls were not. They were there in abundance. Vassar was more like an operetta than Lewis Carroll, with plots and counterplots among girls who were rivalrous, homesick, secretive, passionate, and four years younger than she.
One of the girls was teaching Vincent to dance the newest and most fashionable steps: “I let her lead me & do just as she wants me to & she will never know just how little I did know to begin with about the Fish-Walk & the Horse-Trot & the Figure-Eight & the Open Boston & the Heavenly Rest.” They were to have a Halloween ball at McGlynn’s. There were about twenty girls, of whom ten would have to go as men. “Lucky I’m little, and have to be a girl!”
Flirtation was a practiced art, and Millay was adept at handling the girls. Her room was at the head of the stairs, and as she was dressing,
I heard a masculine giggle & looking down saw Jack … watching me. The best looking boy.
“You horrid thing,” said I. “I shall close my door at once.”
“No, you don’t,” said he, “I’m coming in.”
“You can’t,” I screamed, “it’s not proper!—All right then, come in, and see if I’m all hooked up.”
“Jack,” who was Margaret, stood there gazing at Millay—who wrote home that without either her petticoat or her corset, “Honestly, you don’t know how cute & slim I look.”
The girls dressed like men tucked their hair in their collars and posed with chocolate cigarettes stuck jauntily in their mouths. Millay refused the chocolate, afraid she’d give herself away. “They give themselves away, all right.… Catherine Filene, who took the flash, is in the middle of the other picture. Doesn’t she make a wonderful boy?—Had two dances with him and he wanted another. Really almost convincing. Just look at the way she’s standing. She ought to have been a boy.”
When Millay sent the snapshots home, she concentrated on Catherine Filene: she was bossy, she was domineering, she was “too executive”; “Catherine can’t do a thing with me … because I don’t let her see that I resent her manner of Authority, I just plain do as I like and don’t notice her. She’d give a lot, I think, to have me chase her round. I don’t go near her.” But that wasn’t entirely true. She paid close enough attention to the intrigues among the girls at McGlynn’s to test her own powers, and she was becoming masterful at these skirmishes.
You see I interest her. And she’s so jealous of me really and of my friendship with Katharine Tilt that she isn’t quite smart enough to keep it to herself.
Katharine T. has a darling room on the third floor. The stairs begin right at Catherine Filene’s door so she’s pretty likely to know when I go up there. If she sees me in the hall she watches to see if I turn towards my room or towards the stairs. One night I came along in my blanket bathrobe with some books in my arms and started down the hall.
“O-ho!” said Catherine Filene. “Where are you going?” “Where do you s’pose?” said I. And tramped up stairs. You see, it bothers her. Sometimes she comes up when I’m up there—knows I’m up there—and says, “O, I beg your pardon! Perhaps I interrupt. You two turtle-doves!” And there you are. She’s a handsome thing, very boyish, deep rough laugh, but the sweetest, most charming smile when she wants to be decent for a while. Really a fascinating type. Isn’t she wonderful in that picture? Couldn’t you die in her arms?—Fancy two dances with her in that rig and a third one
begged and almost sworn about right after we’d finished the second! She actually made love to me, the devil, in her uninterested, insolent way.
But although Vincent insisted in this letter, which is to Norma, that she finds the girl completely resistible, she was intrigued—challenged, even—by her directness as well as by her insolence, which was provocative. When Millay’s friendship with Katharine Tilt began to falter, she was not above flirting with Catherine Filene to make Tilt jealous. She did it consciously, and she knew exactly how.
If in her letter to Norma there was a sort of begrudging respect, the tone in her diary, “Lest We Forget,” where the following entry was made just three weeks later, was entirely different: “People, my friends & hers, are very much interested in a seemingly new friendship which has sprung up between Catherine Filene & me. Handsome great big child! … People are very disturbed.”
The following day, her entry was even clearer: “Went down town with Katharine Tilt.… Told her about Catherine Filene purposely to make her jealous, because she’s been telling me how much she likes somebody else. It worked beautifully.”
The next day was Sunday, a “Horrible day” she wrote in her diary. And why? She and Katharine Tilt gave a tea, and Agnes Rogers, her “sophomore,” among others, came to it. Afterward, “I just came home & howled over a little thing Katharine did. However, Catherine Filene came in & consoled me beautifully.”
The following day, December 8, she said that Katharine felt “nervous” about what she’d done, and although whatever it was goes unsaid, this doesn’t: “She will feel nervouser before its over. And it will be good for her.”
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