Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  Because of yr. gifts, Vincent, life will present some complicated problems for you—I believe you have both courage & strength & yet I see such pitfalls.… I want you always clean, sweet & pure & ready to return your talent to the world enriched by an idealism which means ennobling the lives of others. I want you different from the usual type of poet who claims a freedom bordering on licence, & who thinks she can touch pitch without being soiled. How much the world with its sordidness & selfishness and now mourning needs the word that brightens, that strengthens, that illumines a path to the great fundamentals.

  While she did not define those great fundamentals, it was clear that neither “The Suicide” nor Elaine Ralli was among them. “This may sound like a sermon,” she continued, “but it is not so intended; it only means love and interest in a great gift and its setting.”

  Millay didn’t change a word of her poem, but she was shaken. And if she wouldn’t budge about her work, she did alter her friendship with Elaine. When she picked up the letter home she’d begun on October 27, she wrote:

  You know neither you-all nor Aunt Calline nor any of my older friends were very pleased to have me with Elaine all the time, so I decided I would see if it was too late for me to make new friends or renew old ones. And I haven’t really had to do a thing, because all at once people began to come to see me & now people don’t say any more that I’m with Elaine all the time, & better still its so nicely come about that nobody says either that Elaine & I have had a row,—because people see me still with her, too.

  Then she told them exactly the way it happened.

  One day I was going over to pageant rehearsal & as I came out of Main I met Fran Garver going in. “Come on back,” she said, “& get some fudge. I’ve made some in the candy-kitchen, & I give it to the people I love.” So then I said, “Oh, do you love me?”—And Fran said, “Yes; I always have.”—Now that wasn’t wildly exciting, because Fran loves a great many people. But then, so do I,—and what I was after was particular friends, & I have always liked Fran a lot anyway—she has perfectly beautiful eyes—so that was nice. Fran’s roommate went to New York the next week-end to march in the Suffrage Parade, & I spent Saturday night with Fran,—but everybody knew I had just come back from Mohonk, where I had spent Friday night & Saturday at the hotel on the lake, with Elaine.

  Her aim seemed not so much to lose Elaine’s friendship as to loosen its grip. The problem was that these young women were apt to fall in love with her. “Beloved!” Fran Garver’s letter to her that winter term began, “if I could only see you for a second I’m sure this chronic ache would go away.

  I think no feeling, ever, has come so strongly over me as the all-gone choking sensation I have when I’m in your room,—when you’re gone. The only time I ever felt anything like that was when my mother, whose breath I had been watching for half an hour, smiled at me happily & closed her eyes. I knew she was dead.… Vincent dear, it was because you had the same beautiful expression in your eyes as my dying mother did, that I couldn’t bear to have you look at me the night you were so tired. I didn’t write to you Thurs night because I knew I’d make love to you.… Everything that was danced or sung or played had an undercurrent of you. You haunt me beloved—beloved Vincent. I love you—.… If you don’t marry when we’re out of V.C. I shall earn a million and you shall write & we’ll divide the money & when it pleases you you’ll visit me and do exactly as you wish—

  Elaine was struggling with her own feelings about Millay. In an undated and unsigned, but initialed, letter she began:

  You will excuse the paper I know—You see I must find some common way to begin altho’ why I cannot say for certainly you are the most uncommon of people.… How I want to come back to you—yes I know I have just left—but the longing in me never leaves and this is a night that seems for you and me. Do not worry—we are friends but I am still in love—that is a characteristic of you [she then slipped into French] et je suis encore un enfant—la tienne? ah! dit “oui.” If I am not careful I will be covering this paper with words that make a poor endeavor to tell you I love you—the reason I repeat so often those words is because I can really find nothing to express the hunger, the yearning and oh! the love for you—and you are so small! … You have not spoken to me for so long about your poems and I dare not ask—will you not say something—surely some day you will find time to say something to me. Have you heard the rain? It is cold to-night and I’m too restless for rain—only for the touch of you—will I ever not want that.

  The letter, with poems slashed in ink across the back page, ends with “If ever I can see you, will you come—mes bras vous attendent—et mon coeur ne pense qu’a toi.… oh! Why can’t I go to you—?” It was signed E.P.R.—Elaine Pandia Ralli.

  But the chill in their relationship, especially after Thanksgiving, was undeniable. Elaine saw Millay turning to other girls for friendship that seemed to her to lessen, even to supplant, her own. She didn’t know why. “Dearest little old sweetheart—miss you dear—Gee!” she began lightly but awkwardly, with none of the ease she could express when she was confident: “I want you just as much as I’ve always wanted you, with all my heart—You know that I never could feel towards anyone the way I do towards you—it is more than true—remember what we’ve said—yes and done.”

  She told her, again and again, in a tone that became increasingly desperate, not only how much she loved her but that Vincent must never doubt her, that she was the only person in the world for her. And that she was Vincent’s child.

  A friend who knew Ralli much later in her life said that after a while Elaine “knew Vincent had dropped her. She had, then or shortly thereafter, but while at Vassar … a serious crack-up. She was in the infirmary, and then she went home, and her mother cared for her. I remember her telling me stories of her mother feeding her, sitting her in the sunlight on the porch, that sort of thing. I don’t think Daisy Ralli ever knew how much Elaine cared for Vincent. She, of course, knew she cared, but how much, or how deeply, she would not have known. And she could not have guessed.

  “They were lovers. Elaine told me that they were.… Certainly Elaine did not know why Vincent had thrown her over, she just knew that little by little she became distant. Remote.… But she felt she had been loved by Vincent and surely she had loved her.

  “Millay was a seductress. Oh, I should think so! You have only to look at those poems. I see nothing wrong with that in her. She drew people to her. She liked to draw people to her.… Elaine felt there was a ruthlessness about Vincent. That her work came first.… She always thought Vincent had an eye on herself, her future.… She felt it was her first love, and perhaps her only one: her poetry.”

  While Millay had still not seen Arthur Hooley—it was nearly two years now—she began to write to him with more regularity, usually twice a month, eighteen letters in all, until the end of her junior year. She was always “Edna” in her letters to him, and perhaps she wrote to him for no other reason than what she’d admitted in her letter the summer before—that although people loved her or desired her or annoyed her, no one spoke to her. And she needed the sound of a man’s voice in her life. He had answered her desperate letter of July, wondering if she wrote such interesting letters to anyone else. Warily, perhaps stung by the memory of her correspondence with Earle, she had said, “Not anymore.”

  In early October she wrote him an extraordinary letter from Vassar, one in which she revealed what she felt not only about him but about herself.

  My dear,—

  Do not think that I am sorry for anything that I have ever said to you, or for any mood of mine that I have ever let you see. I am not sorry for anything at all that has to do with you.

  Indeed, if you love me, it is your own affair. I shall never try to make it mine, Arthur.—But if my letters sometimes hurt you, I am glad. You shall not have me vaguely with you,—but clearly.—I want to be all that I can be to you, in a letter.

  But more than that I do not wish to be.… You said
once that there are so many beautiful possibilities in me that you would be loath to leave with me any memory that I could wish to obliterate. God knows, I wish no such memory of you.—But no memory that any man could leave me could really touch me.—I am sure of this. And why I am so sure, is because none has.…—Although I have been faithful to you—in my fashion. (Not that you have desired my faithfulness; or that faithfulness is in any way a virtue,—It is oftener a stupidity, I think.) But nothing has ever hurt me. Nothing can. In that respect, surely, I shall always remain a child.

  Then she told him an anecdote with a point: a friend of the Kennerleys had once watched her and another woman together and come to the conclusion that if the other woman should marry she would stop writing, “but that under the same circumstances I would not. As far as I am concerned, that is true. No man could ever fill my life to the exclusion of other things.” She was, for someone as young as she was—twenty-three to Hooley’s forty—entirely clear about her yearnings. She was as accurate as it was rare to acknowledge.

  A little more than a week later she wrote to him in an entirely different vein, marked by what was her real need for him:

  Arthur—Arthur—Arthur—why am I writing to you, when I am so tired, and have so much to do before I can sleep? … My dear, do you think of me, sometimes?—What do you think?—Tell me, Arthur—just for fun.—I should really like to know.—Will you? … Why not?—What do you think of me?

  It was as if she wanted to discover who she was by her reflection in his eyes. She never gossiped with him about people they both knew—she told him only about herself, what she felt, or thought. One would barely know, from her letters, that there was a war in Europe or that women were marching for suffrage in New York. The drama she described was entirely interior.

  When she received his response she wrote, “I shall be glad until the day I die that you wanted me, and that you told me so.” It was a sort of literary snare. “Nothing has changed, in spite of all the things you said, my dear,—only that now I am more accustomed to it, and can get on quite nicely without you.” Then her lines loosened: “—except sometimes, when I cannot get on at all.”

  If it was a seduction, it was a chilly one. “Wouldn’t you just love to see me again for a minute, sometimes?—I should think you would.—I would you.” The week after her birthday she made what she called “an observation, & not a confession”:

  It really isn’t necessary that I should be a man, Arthur, in order to know what the word girl sometimes means to you.—What do you suppose the word man sometimes means to me?—In a place like this? … This is a strange place. I had known, but I had not realized, until I came here, how greatly one girl’s beauty & presence can disturb another’s peace of mind,—more still, sometimes, her beauty & absence.—There are Anactorias here for any Sappho.—And I am glad … that I have never felt moved to say harsh & foolish things about an ancient Greek philosopher or a modern English poet, whom the world has condemned & punished.… For up here, while some of us are thinking of the rest of us, the rest of us are thinking of you, & men like you.

  It was as close to a confession as Edna Millay would ever make in writing. Arthur wrote back immediately:

  Edna—Edna—

  Even if you had cared for a girl, & even if you had given yourself (so far as you could), I do not think I should care, greatly. No. I should not. For everything would have been beautiful, to you. As to Sappho. And so, to me.

  Arthur

  That note drew blood—or he may have written something more that was not saved—for on March 10 she wrote him a savage little note:

  Indeed,—I will be very careful from this day,—for of course you must not really love me. That would spoil it all,—& we have had such a beautiful game.—It is “no fair,” as we say, to love me.

  As for myself,—God forbid that I should give my heart to a dyspeptic Englishman!

  Edna.

  Three days later she withdrew her mocking words:

  Arthur, promise me that you will not go away … without seeing me.… Promise me.—

  —Sometimes as it is, with you there, & myself here, I want you very much,—want just to feel you touch me again, you know.—I am not willing to have the sea between us and not have been very near to you, just once more.

  I am glad that you have wanted me terribly. I am very glad that sometimes you think of me at night, and suffer. You have made me suffer, too.

  Last night we gave the play of which I once spoke to you, Deirdre of the Sorrows. It was very real to me, as always. In the last act I stood beside the grave of the man I loved, who had been killed in battle, and with his knife killed myself.—I did it with all my heart,—and when they picked me up from the floor after the fall of the curtain, I found that I had actually driven the knife right through my little leather jacket.

  Her self-dramatizing here is extraordinary, and it lay at the heart of her character; her fierce instinct for self-protection was the iron in her blood. She wrote these two final sentences:

  Why would it be absurd for me if you should really love me?—The absurdity would be, would it not,—for me to really love you?

  —Edna.

  2

  Vincent wrote home immediately after Deirdre but said very little about it because she’d just received the news that they would have to leave their Washington Street house. “Never mind,” she wrote Norma,

  dear old loved.… Of course I could just weep all day at the thought of leaving the house,—but I’m not going to let myself.… I can’t ever let myself think of that hedge of morning-glories, & the morning air coming in the bath-room window.—But we can’t help it, dear. So never mind. It doesn’t really matter at all,—if you just think of it that way.—Dear Sister, I love you very much,

  Vincent.

  But of course, it did matter. Being asked to leave is not the same thing as choosing to.

  Money was always short at home, whereas at Vassar, Millay, who was spending her spring break at Miss Dow’s in New York, was exposed to people with more wealth than she’d ever known, and she moved among them as their guest. “I came down Friday,” she wrote home just two weeks after her previous letter, “& Arlene Erlanger met me & took me to lunch at the Biltmore,—then her chauffeur picked us up & took us to several art galleries where we saw beautiful pictures & statues.” Her letter went on like that for pages, operas and theaters to go to, breakfasts in bed, meeting her hostess’s husband’s mother, “who lives, not just visits, but lives, at the St. Regis .… Judge if I enjoyed myself over the week-end.”

  “Vassar was not a college for rich girls, then or now,” one of Millay’s classmates told me many years later. It was for the intellectual girl with a social conscience. “You see, we all wore middies, which were a sort of leveling uniform. Although it is true that one knew, if one were at all observant, that certain middies were from Wanamaker’s. Or they might be from Filene’s. And we were not permitted to board our horses on campus.”

  Now imagine this girl—without a cent to spare—among the rich girls at Vassar, all of whom were preparing for the annual ball. Vincent weighed ninety-five pounds, stood five feet one inch, and, in her made-over yellow chiffon gown with its butterflies of gold and fur at her shoulders and her flaming hair, must have looked like a demented fairy out of Rackham. The astonishing thing is that she invited Elaine Ralli’s brother to be her date. Victor Ralli was no one’s idea of a prince—he was shy, hardworking, short, and swarthy—and he agreed immediately. He told her he had had to read her letter of invitation several times to make sure she meant him. He apologized in every note to her for being inarticulate. He said to be her “suitor” he’d be happy to bunk with a janitor. He was, in other words, modest to a fault. He could not have interested her at all. Although she gave her mother and sisters every detail of her dress and of the dance itself—who said what to whom about her and how many times she danced which dances with which men—she mentioned Victor Ralli only twice. The first time was to say wit
h “relief” that he agreed to come, the second that he brought her orchids.

  That May of 1916 she won the Intercollegiate prize for “The Suicide,” the writing of which had become a piece of drudgery, she wrote home (“I was so discouraged about what those critic friends of Aunt Calline said that I didn’t feel like trying to do anything else with it”). And Mitchell Kennerley published three of her poems in The Forum. When he enclosed the check, he told her that while the next issue would be his last, he hoped she would let him publish her first book of poems, with Arnold Genthe’s photograph of her standing among the magnolia blossoms on the dust jacket. “Then I think I shall publish no more books of poems by anyone else.”

  The short lyric “Witch-Wife” was the most delightful of the poems she gave to Kennerley, and clearly something of a self-portrait.

  She is neither pink nor pale,

  And she never will be all mine;

  She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,

  And her mouth on a valentine.

  She has more hair than she needs;

  In the sun ’tis a woe to me!

  And her voice is a string of coloured beads,

  Or steps leading into the sea.

  She loves me all that she can,

  And her ways to my ways resign;

  But she was not made for any man,

  And she never will be all mine.

  Yet the sonnet “Bluebeard,” a grim parable about female disobedience, was far more revealing. Millay wrote in the first person, in the voice of the murderous king, but there are no murders here. Hers is an innocent, maligned Bluebeard, a melancholy man of secrets. It is the girl whose villainy is her intrusiveness and greed. In the original fairy tale Bluebeard is often a king and always a husband, who marries one after another of three or more beautiful young women who are sometimes sisters. He hands each young wife the keys to his castle, telling her that in his absence she may unlock any room except one. Incapable of overcoming her curiosity, she opens the forbidden door only to find a room full of clotted blood from the heads or corpses of her murdered sisters. The key is indelibly marked with blood, and upon his return Bluebeard discovers her disobedience and kills her. Sometimes she is saved by a passing knight, in other versions she is able to fool Bluebeard into not knowing she has opened the door to the forbidden chamber. But in all versions Bluebeard is a murderous husband. Yet Millay’s is not: