The next month, after a pitiful letter from Norma, Vincent said that Kathleen, at Vassar, would “probably make more out of it than I ever shall here. I get too tired,—not get too tired, but remain too tired—to have any ambition or any gratitude, or any enthusiasm for other people’s plans.”
Although Miss Dow was still sending her boxes of other people’s clothes, they weren’t in style, and Vincent quickly complained of feeling “shabby.” “Who ever is seen now in a corduroy suit,—for best?” But when Miss Dow wanted to know if they’d do, “of course all I can say is that they will do. What wouldn’t I give for a good-looking new suit and a winter dress!”
Deprivation was of course a question of perspective: no other undergraduate at Vassar was having her poems printed in The Forum. Arthur Hooley had taken two. “The Shroud” appeared in the October issue and “Sorrow” in November. Her sisters wrote a parody of the latter’s last stanza. Vincent had written:
People dress and go to town;
I sit in my chair.
All my thoughts are slow and brown:
Standing up or sitting down
Little matters, or what gown
Or what shoes I wear.
Kathleen called theirs “Hunk’s & my latest efforts in your line”:
Guess I’ll dress and go to town,
Not sit in my chair.
Shall I wear my suit of brown
Or my flimsy woolsy down?
Little matters or whose gown
Or whose shoes I wear!
By February, after almost the entire winter without a word from Vincent (except for a quick stint at home after visiting the Rallis at Christmas), Cora wrote:
Let’s have a cup of tea and talk it over.… Kathleen has had word from two of the three people about the … scholarship, asking her what she had decided, and the poor child does not know what to write them. I don’t see how it could be managed yet when the scholarship covers nothing but tuition.
When there was still no word from Vincent, she wrote again, just before Vincent’s twenty-third birthday, “Why have we not heard from you? Kathleen can have the Coe fellowship, if I could manage the rest of it. We are trying to see some way out, but she must let them know very soon.”
Then she closed her letter with a “Goodbye for the twenty-two and howdy to the twenty-three girl I love. Mother.”
Finally, Vincent wrote to her “Dear darling adored Family” on March 8, 1915. Her news was entirely about her performance as Marchbanks in Shaw’s Candida:
A great many people said I made them cry. And certainly in other places I made them laugh.—It’s a queer part, you know, of a boy of eighteen, a poet, terribly sensitive to situations and atmosphere, in love with the wife of an English clergyman.… I had a dark blue Norfolk coat and dark blue trousers that fitted me perfectly and a tan soft shirt and black tie tied in an artist bow—long ends, you know—and those old brown rubber-soled shoes I had last summer & black silk stockings. Everything fitted me perfectly and I felt perfectly at home in the clothes. People told me I reminded them of their brothers the way I walked around and slung my legs over the arms of chairs, etc. Instead of a wig I had my own hair bobbed. There’s a girl who does it wonderfully … just a little long in the back like a poet’s—and it grows beautifully like a boy’s around my face, you know.
On her birthday, Elaine had sent her a great armful of roses, “big tan-pink roses mixed with pussy-willows,” and for the play she’d filled her room with daffodils and given her a corsage of pansies so that it seemed always in bloom even in the deepest winter months. Then Vincent told them what everyone else had said about her acting:
Somebody never saw a girl before who could act so much with her mouth and neck and hands—somebody thinks I’m the best amateur actor she ever saw—somebody never knew anybody before to hold the facial expression so beautifully all the way through—(I suppose she meant I didn’t sag out of my part, or laugh when people at my side cracked jokes and the audience roared)—somebody hates me because I made her cry.
She saved the best for last: “Somebody says my voice was wonderful and has in it the quality that makes the audience pay absolute attention to what I’m saying—(I know that. I can always hold them when I speak, I find.)” That last somebody was Elaine, about whom she added, lightly, “Elaine & I have been living at the Inn lately, it seems”; she closed this letter, her first in months, by asking, “How is Mother?—Please tell me in detail.”
Norma would have none of it. She wrote sharply to Vincent on March 16, “Dear Vincent, please pay a little attention to this in spite of all your busyness. Mother is sick.… I have to wash her face & hands & comb her hair & help her up stairs to the bath-room and every little thing like that.”
She was, Norma said,
the most impatient of her illness of any one I ever saw. Talks about it all the time and really I don’t think she thinks we do anything for her.… I’m not doing this to frighten you ’cause she is lots better and has no temperature and her pulse is alright but you must write her a letter once in a while.…
When we did get a letter from you Mother made the remark “All she said about me was to ask how I was—no other special message—and the letter wasn’t even to me.” Please address your letters to her once in a while. You might as well know what she says—Wump and I get it all the time.… Mother said it seems as if you have gone right out of her life … and if Kathleen goes next fall she will probably be the death of me.… You will remember when you went back you were going to send Mother some of the money she lent you. I believe she gave you all she had but you have never even mentioned it. How easily you forget.
That was harsh. But since Cora wouldn’t hear of Kathleen’s working—she was to study to have her chance—that left Norma holding the fort. She’d asked her aunts to help her find work in Boston as a milliner, but they wanted her to stay closer to home. “I’d go anywhere I got the chance. Mother is over her nursing I guess—We will owe three months rent the first of April and they have been making a deuce of a fuss over it.”
She was happy to type Vincent’s poems, and she suggested very firmly that Vincent must send them out if there were any chance of having them taken. Then she told her what to do: “Write Mother once a week whether you do anything else or not. Burn this letter please and don’t hate me for writing it. Much love, Norma.”
That did the trick. Vincent wrote to her mother as soon as she got Norma’s letter, defending herself against her sister’s accusations, in a letter which is as revealing for what is withheld, as for what is not:
Beloved, beautiful, sad, sick Mother,—
I love you. I love you. Don’t be sad any more. I’ll take care of you, way from here. I remember how you used to rock me and sing to me when I was sick and sad. And now I’m going to make you better by telling you some lovely things all about yourself.
First:—Of all the songs I sing,—and I sing often now to crowds of people who love my little songs—the one they seem to love best is your beautiful “I may not dream again.”
But she did not promise to come home, or to write more frequently. The following fall would be Vassar’s fiftieth anniversary. Plans were under way for “a tremendous celebration. And your daughter has made the part of Marie de France in the pageant, a lovely part.… Give my love to my sisters, my mother. Your daughter, Vincent.”
She told her mother she was trying for a scholarship for the following year, and she thought she’d get it.
If I don’t get it I can’t come back here, very likely. But if I don’t come back I can get a good job somewhere and help at home. One reason why I’ve been doing so many plays and things here is so that the college will want to keep me. The faculty were all crazy about my Marchbanks .… So, just now, I am notorious, the best known girl in college. It all helps, too.
But if she was notorious, it was not just because of her acting or her poems.
On April 12, 1915, with only eight more weeks of school, she wrote
her mother:
Elaine is going to ask her mother if she can come to Camden in the summer and board with us!! She knows all about us. Her people don’t, but she does. And I told her like as not she wouldn’t get anything to eat. But she says she can live on grape-nuts and salad. She would hire a sail-boat and have a real time. Of course it’s a crazy idea and probably her mother wouldn’t let her anyway.
But she did. “The two of them seem to have made all arrangements without consulting the mothers about it,” Daisy Ralli wrote to Cora,
and I am wondering whether it will be convenient to you to keep Elaine for the length of time she wants to stay. I feel that it will be an imposition on you unless you will allow me to pay her way. I know that she is a spoiled child and an extravagant one, in the bargain, and every additional member of a household adds to the expense. So please let me know how much I ought to contribute.
Elaine would come as a paying guest, and while it would be a mistake to suggest that money lay at the heart of their relationship, it did enrich it. When Kathleen wrote to Vincent earlier that spring and said, “I think Elaine is a perfect dear—we’d die if it wasn’t for her, and so would you, I guess”—she’d meant money.
In June, her exams behind her, Vincent stopped by the Rallis’ in New York, waiting for Elaine to accompany her to Maine. She wanted to be sure that Elaine’s first impression of all of them in Camden would be exceptional.
Girls, I want you to be all beautiful when we get home. Not too gorgeous, you know. Just shirtwaist & skirt,—simple, you know, and your hair all simple, Non, not frizzed & false. You see at college, no one ever hears of false hair. And don’t be too powdery. Please excuse me. Wump, you see to it that Non is not too artificial, and Non, you see to it that Wump is not too much in earnest about anything. And both see that Mother is particularly beautiful. Fix her hair lovely, Non, & have everything she wears just as dainty as possible, because I want Elaine to fall in love with her, & first impressions mean so much.
She even fretted about the smell of the house: “Burn something so it will smell all homey, coffee or a cigarette, you know. And if you have anything Djer-Kiss* about the house or anything that even remotely suggests it, drown it!!! This is no joke. It makes me sick to vomiting.”
Then she asked that they not hate her for all of this. She wanted only that Elaine should love them as she did, and that required careful staging.
In a snapshot taken that summer, Elaine is sitting at the helm of her little knockabout sloop, Watch Your Step, hunched and absorbed, her left hand steady on the tiller. They’re sailing directly into the sun. Norma looks away from the camera, while Vincent gazes directly into it, smiling wanly. Elaine’s gaze is absorbed and level; her right arm is draped nonchalantly over Vincent’s shoulder, her hand just grazing her breast. Vincent tilts her head slightly, leaning into the crook of Elaine’s arm. “She’s one of the strongest girls I ever saw,” Kathleen said of Elaine, “can pick Vincent right off the floor & carry her around and can make her muscles wiggle.” She and Vincent, Kathleen entered in her “Good Times Book,” “had packs of sport—She’s dear.”
But whether or not she was dear, she was very much in love with Vincent Millay. And Vincent knew it. When Elaine left at the end of August, it was with the promise that Vincent would visit her summerhouse in Bellport, Long Island, within the week. “It won’t be long now until I see you,” Vincent wrote to her just after she left, and then she broke into the French they used when their messages were more intimate:
Mon ami, je ne t’oublie pas. Il ne faut pas avoir peur. Tu es encore mon enfant. Tu le sais bien. Et je t’aime. Tu le sais bien.*
—Vincent
In any relationship between two women there is never just one child to be loved. There are two, and their roles are shifting.
Before Elaine left, Vincent turned to Arthur Hooley. He had written to her the previous fall, after he’d published both “The Shroud” and “Sorrow.” It had been a queer letter in which he told her that although he wanted to see her, he didn’t know when. “It is merely a matter of my mental condition,—which is rather rotten.” Nearly everyone he’d left in England was now “on the firing line. And I am not. It’s a funny world.” His was almost the only mention of what would be called “The Great War” to surface in her correspondence during her years at Vassar.
In the spring of 1915, Hooley had published another one of her poems, “Indifference,” so they were in contact. While his letters to her were consistent from the beginning—he pined for his return to England, for the Derby, even for her—her own letters to him did not begin in earnest until the summer. Certainly she was never unaware that he edited one of the finest literary publications in America, but while she played him just as much as he played her, that summer her equilibrium was disturbed, and she let him know. Not why; that she cloaked.
My Dear,—
I want to write to you. I have nothing to say,—except a thousand things which I may or may not have said when this letter is done. But I am sick of never speaking to you any more. Once I knew you, and loved to be with you, and I would love to be with you tonight. I shall live quite comfortably to the end of my life—after tonight—without you, without ever seeing you again; I shall marry one of the three men that I love, and have a wonderful time; but tonight I would rather write to you. Tonight, of these three men that I love, one would bore me, and one would frighten me;—and the other one is you. The last time I saw you, when I was a little girl, I told you quite simply that I loved you. And you tried to hush me. Do you remember? Why did you do that?—Didn’t you want me to love you? Don’t you now? Would it please you or grieve you or not interest you at all.…
Arthur, don’t say to me, “Child, child,” … I am not a child in love with you, to be patted and sent away, or to be scolded and shaken. I am an almost reasonable human being, who has not spoken to anyone for a long time.… People fall in love with me, and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me and—and all that sort of thing. But no one speaks to me. I sometimes think that no one can. Can you?
Edna
But the letter was a ruse. There weren’t three men she loved; there was only one girl in love with her, in Camden, Maine. The striking note here is that she reaches out to him, summoning, needing his response. That is just what she’d done with Ferdinand Earle.
CHAPTER 11
Like all truly intellectual women, these were in spirit romantic desperadoes. They despised organizational heretics of the stamp of Luther and Calvin, but the great atheists and sinners were the heroes of the costume picture they taught as a subject called history. Marlowe, Baudelaire—above all, Byron—glowed like terrible stars above their literature courses.
—Mary McCarthy, “The Blackguard,” from Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
The Pageant of Athena was held outside on October 11, 1915, in a great open-air theater built by the trustees especially for the performance celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Vassar. Vincent played Marie de France, the twelfth-century Breton poet and the first woman to write poetry in France. The Poughkeepsie Eagle called it a “Wonderful Spectacle” and concentrated on Millay’s performance:
Into a scene of courtly beauty, where stately ladies and gallant cavaliers are dancing the minuet, came a dainty little figure, slight and dainty even in a dress of white satin with a train so big that two pages were needed to carry it.… Her grace was as great as her learning. So noble ladies and great lords listened … as the girl from France told her stories of love and hate and fighting.
It was a triumphant beginning to her junior year. She sent home lots of snapshots, and when she wrote on October 27, she told her family “how sweet Aunt Calline has been to me, loving me more than ever, & how I met Inez Milholland, the great suffragist.” Then her letter broke off abruptly, and she did not pick it up again, or at least mail it, until November 1, 1915.
By this time she’d received a stern, daunting letter from Miss Dow, enclo
sing her allowance with advice. Millay was working on a draft of a poem called “The Suicide,” which Miss Dow didn’t like one bit. She linked her own—and her friends’—continued support of Millay to “high ideals not only of womanhood but of what woman produces.” She was not referring simply to the poem.
Of course you are mistress of yr. own productions and as always I do not want to … make unreasonable demands, but tho’ I am not a literary woman there are some ways in which I might be of help thro’ various friendly avenues. It seems important to me that the next year or two you should guide yr. self & yr. products pretty carefully if the future brings what I believe it should. More of my friends have seen you now and their influence is to be had—if—your trend is in the right direction.
She made herself even clearer: “It will be easier for me to finance the next two years with their sympathetic support.… their influence can radiate pretty far into the future, if it is once held.”
She then suggested that Millay was unaware “of your dangers both from physical & temperamental conditions.” She did not mean by this that she should guard herself against illness: “Absorbing attentions from individual students are a hindrance in spite of the pleasant things they bring. Those very things are not the best for yr. nature.”
Millay had missed meeting a distinguished friend of Miss Dow’s who’d come to speak during the pageant. “I was impressed by your anxiety lest you disappoint some girl who seemed to have a claim on you for the evening.” She had heard about Elaine Ralli.
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