Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  This door you might not open, and you did;

  So enter now, and see for what slight thing

  You are betrayed.… Here is no treasure hid,

  No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring

  The sought-for Truth, no heads of women slain

  For greed like yours, no writhings of distress;

  But only what you see.… Look yet again:

  An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.

  Yet this alone out of my life I kept

  Unto myself, lest any know me quite;

  And you did so profane me when you crept

  Unto the threshold of this room tonight

  That I must never more behold your face.

  This now is yours. I seek another place.

  She has transformed the classic tale of Bluebeard into a story about intimacy and privacy. Here the wife’s greedy intrusiveness has violated Bluebeard’s necessary secret. Not only is he no murderer, all he seeks is a secrecy in which to hide, “lest any know me quite.” His penalty is swift and severe. But it isn’t death—“I must never more behold your face. / This now is yours. I seek another place”—it is withdrawal.

  That summer, short of money as always, Cora was barely home. She was canvassing for hair work on the islands off the coast of Maine. It was a tough season; most of the summer people had plenty of hair of their own, so instead she washed it. Then the news came that Kathleen had not passed her entrance examinations to Vassar. Plucky in the face of such a blow, Cora said she was reconciled to what had happened; it just meant “another year of systematic well arranged study.” While washing the hair of a girl who turned out to be from Vassar, Cora told her she had a daughter there and invited her to visit Vincent. “She must be made an acquaintance and friend,” Cora suggested in her next letter to her daughter.

  But Vincent no longer saw herself as a girl who had to win the good opinion of everyone at school. When she answered her mother, the tone of her letter was almost icy. Not only did she not know the girl, but “You must not think that just because a girl goes to Vassar I want her to visit me.” Her letter was fierce:

  And it doesn’t make any difference whether you wash their heads or their floors, they have nothing on us, unless we give it to them. As long as we consider ourselves their superior & they can’t get the idea out of our heads, they have nothing on us, & can’t get anything, you see. The girl is a nonentity at Vassar,—I am not.

  You haven’t got me into any mess, dear. But you must never again invite anybody to see me unless I have said it is somebody I want to see. People can say anything they like about me & my family conditions, but they can not visit me unless I want them.

  Cora kept this letter all her life.

  3

  She had a fine time senior year. She took two courses in Spanish (and became president of the Spanish Club), took English drama with President Henry Noble MacCracken and the technique of the drama with Gertrude Buck. Her play The Princess Marries the Page was written for that class and performed on May 12, 1917; she was the princess. She even took one term of Italian, having taken every other language course Vassar offered. And, in what was a great honor at Vassar, she was asked to write the Baccalaureate Hymn for her class of 1917, which was to be sung at commencement. She did not, however, hear it sung.

  In the spring she was invited down to New York for a night at the opera and stayed overnight even though it was the end of spring break and she knew she shouldn’t. She was campused, which meant she was forbidden any additional nights away from the college. But come May, when the weather warmed up, one of her roommates, Charlotte Babcock, and some friends invited her to join them in their little red Saxon for a trip up the Hudson. She didn’t give it a second thought: she went along for the ride. It was late, and in the end they spent the night at the house of one of the girls. The next day they stopped at the Watson Hollow Inn near the new Ashokan Reservoir, where Vincent playfully signed her name in the register. One of the college wardens lunched at the same hotel and saw Vincent’s name in the register, directly below that of a man. She thought the worst and reported her. “The faculty,” according to Elizabeth Haight, “voted to suspend her indefinitely.… This meant the loss of her degree.” It wasn’t because Millay was suspected of staying overnight with a man that she was so harshly disciplined; she had broken almost every rule at Vassar, had thumbed her nose at the school’s authority or, worse, ignored it. Now the faculty was set to punish her, and they were in no mood to relent. Some felt she’d been excused once too often and dug their heels in.

  Henry Noble MacCracken had become president of Vassar in 1915. He later recorded that Millay cut classes regularly, and while some faculty members excused her, others did not. He called her in to reprimand her but was none too persuasive. “I … told her, ‘I want you to know that you couldn’t break any rule that would make me vote for your expulsion. I don’t want to have any dead Shelleys on my doorstep and I don’t care what you do.’ She went to the window and looked out and she said, ‘Well on those terms I think I can continue to live in this hellhole.’ … What could you do with a girl like that?”

  But this time she’d overdone it. Even President MacCracken sat tight.

  On June 6, Millay wrote home; as it turned out, only Norma was there to receive her letter. “Dear Mother & Sister,—In a few days now I shall write myself A.B.” She had, however, to tell them that something “unpleasant but quite unimportant” had happened:

  Because I was absent-minded & stayed away out of town with three other girls one night, forgetting until it was too late that I had no right to be there because I had already lost my privileges for staying a couple of days in New York to go to the Opera,—the Faculty has taken away from me my part in Commencement.—That doesn’t mean just what it says, because my part in Commencement will go on without me,—Baccalaureate Hymn, for instance, or the words of Tree Ceremonies, which we repeat—& all the songs & our Marching Song.…

  What I mean is this,—I can’t stay here at all for Commencement: I can’t graduate with the class,—my diploma will be shipped to me, as I told Miss Haight, “like a codfish”—& it all seems pretty shabby, of course, after all that I have done for the college, that it should turn me out at the end with scarcely enough time to pack and, as you might say, sort of “without a character.”

  Her class was behind her, sending in petitions and brewing up a splendid row. “I always said, you remember, that I had come in over the fence & would probably leave the same way.—Well, that’s what I’m doing.”

  She asked them not to tell Kathleen until after she was finished at the Hartridge School, where she was preparing. “This will make no difference about her. If she passes her exams she has next year here sure.” She closed with good news: Edith Wynne Matthison, an actress who was a friend of Miss Haight’s, had written to her that there might be a place for Vincent for eight weeks in summer stock, in Milwaukee.

  Norma was left to tell Cora. On June 10, writing from Belfast, Maine, where she’d been born fifty-four years before to the day, Cora addressed herself to the college board at Vassar, Miss McCaleb, and Dr. MacCracken:

  Dear Friends

  I am Vincent Millay’s Mother, and I am here a supplicant before you.… The last I heard from Vincent, directly, was that she should graduate next Thursday.… I have looked forward to this time as a culmination of a wonderful dream. To see my girls thru High School was a feat, thought by my family and friends an utter impossibility, as I have been alone with them seventeen years with nothing save what I have earned.

  She had always hoped to see Vincent graduate, she wrote, but the plan was not possible. However,

  she assured me, that everything would be most simple because of the war. That she should be allowed the benefits of your institution has seemed so wonderful to me. That the same field seems to be opening to Kathleen seemed almost too much to believe.…

  But now, this awful thing seems more than I can bear. It does not seem t
hat it can possibly be true that my girl will not be with her class-mates on Thursday. You cannot realize what it means to us. Such a possibility never occurred to us, and it is a terrible shock. If it must be, if your decision is final, it is a blow from which I shall never recover.

  It didn’t seem right to Cora that “the class for which she has won so many honors, for whose ceremonials she has originated so much, should sing her very songs while she is weeping outside.” Then she asked, “Must I give up the picture of my girl in her graduation exercises? … You are taking the very bloom from the best thing that ever came into my life.”

  On June 7, MacCracken sent a letter out to the faculty telling them that 108 members of the class of 1917 (somewhat less than half the class) had sent him a petition asking that “Vincent Millay be permitted to remain for Commencement, insomuch as she has contributed largely to our Commencement activities and we feel that the penalty inflicted is too great.” It was accompanied by letters from eighteen individuals urging that the penalty imposed was too severe, particularly “in view of the leniency shown to Miss Millay before the spring recess; second, that false rumors regarding her reputation” would be stopped by allowing her to take her degree with her class.

  Millay had met with him before the petition arrived. The only record of this encounter is two letters of hers, which he kept.

  You told me once that if I ever needed a friend to let you know.—I need one now. And I want to see you. May I?—If you don’t want to see me, I shall understand. But there is nobody else I want to go to.

  Mayn’t I see you this evening.—Sunday?—If not, don’t tell me that it is because you are too busy; I shall know quite well why it is.

  Her tone here was extraordinary for any undergraduate, let alone one in trouble. She told him that if she were to sleep on the letter she was about to write, she would probably destroy it.

  But I’m not sleepy.—and I remember that you chided me a bit for never telling people who are kind to me how kind to me I think they are and it occurred to me that if I should die tomorrow it would be rather shabby of me not to have blessed you just.

  I shall remember till I am very old—if I live to be old—your great gentleness with me.

  Vincent Millay

  Then she heard from her mother:

  What are they thinking of dear? Is it absolutely final? … Is there nothing that can move them so that I may not be robbed of that proudest day I have ever dreamed of seeing? I may not live to see Kathleen graduate. Tell them so, those people. Forgive me dear for turning the knife in the wound.… I’m so sorry for Vassar, for you, for the girls and Miss Dow and your class and myself.

  Ella McCaleb wired Mrs. Millay on June 12 at one o’clock that she had just seen Vincent get her diploma with the rest of her class. On the thirteenth, McCaleb wrote to Cora, apologizing at first for not having written to her the week before, when it had all begun, “but,” she said honestly, “I really did not know what to say. I was rather dumbfounded by the action of the faculty when it decided that Vincent would have to withdraw last week and not be allowed to take her degree with the class.” The petition from part of her class had helped, but “All the way through college Vincent has found it extremely difficult to live according to college regulations, and she had been forgiven possibly too often.”

  In other words, it wasn’t only that she’d calmly stayed in New York to go to the opera instead of returning at the end of spring recess; it was that “when the impulse came to go off for a lark, she yielded as any little child might have done, hoping that she would not be found out.” The entire experience had been both “bitter and trying for her friends as well as for herself,” and McCaleb hoped that Kathleen would take a different attitude from that of Vincent. “If I did not believe this I could not work to have her come here.” A full scholarship for her first year was promised, but beyond that nothing was assured.

  After commencement, Vincent fled to Miss Haight’s apartment in New York, from which she wrote to Norma:

  Tell Mother it is all right,—the class made such a fuss that they let me come back, & I graduated in my cap & gown along with the rest. Tell her it had nothing to do with money;—all my bills have been settled for some time.—Commencement went off beautifully & I had a wonderful time. Tell her this at once if you can.

  After graduation Vincent went straight to New York to look for work. Maybe she could return home with Kathleen after her graduation from the Hartridge School.

  You see I have to start right in working as soon as I can get a job,—& I may not be able to come home at all. We mustn’t be foolish about these things.… But I can’t come home unless I have something sure here to come back to,—you understand.

  —I sent Wump a pair of silk pajamas & a neck-tie & a large white silk handkerchief & a pair of arm-elastics for a Commencement present,—“To my dear brother, Kalloch.”—! … Please write me, darling, darling, darling, sister.

  Vincent.

  (Edna St. Vincent Millay A.B.!)

  But Norma did not understand. She did not understand why Vincent could not be home with her and their mother. She grasped only that she had begun to lose her—and she held on fiercely. She wrote her a letter, which she didn’t send:

  Highly Esteemed Edna St. Vincent Millay, A.B.

  Oh—My baby, cute thing—How things are changing—I realize now that you don’t really belong here any more. You belong in New York. It hadn’t been that way through college but it begins right now to be so. It’s lovely and it’s dreadful. How childish minds like mine hate to admit a change, things were always so nice “as they used to be.”

  At six in the evening, sitting in an old red string hammock on the front lawn “(unmowed because I have no lawn mower and no way or means of procuring same) I don’t in the least care whether or not it is ever mowed,” she had exactly nine cents in the house.

  The next morning she wrote to Vincent again, trying to explain why she felt such despair, coupled with such longing: “I have really no interest outside—concerning myself I mean. You are interested in your affairs—Kathleen in hers … Mother has her interest—her work.”

  Norma was the only one of her sisters who was exempt from her mother’s expectations. She remained alone, at home. Yet of all the family she was perhaps the sharpest about Vincent. “Mother—listen—” she wrote to her,

  I think it would have been one mighty good thing for Edna St. Vincent Millay if this thing had gone thru.… They have been wonderful—Simply wonderful to her all thru her College career and she has done exactly as she did so please.… She thinks it rather cute to stay out to go to the Opera just because she dares and wants to. She has done things like that all her life. It is not part of the genius which prompts these things in her; it is because of the genius that she dares do everything she pleases.

  I found a small green leather case upstairs in Norma’s bedroom which I brought to her, sunk into the long sofa in front of the fireplace. We opened the box. There was a thin gold chain with a baroque pearl in the center. “Mother gave each of us one, because the other girls in Camden had jewelry and we had none.” She also had three identical rings made for the little sisters, with real scarabs—ancient fat bugs—set in the center. We found the one Norma had once urgently sent to Vincent. “Hunk” is engraved inside the band, but the scarab is missing. Lying next to it, wrapped in chamois, is Vincent’s gold Vassar class ring of 1917. It’s as tiny as a kitten’s eye. Norma slips it on her little finger. “Vincent was free now, while I was the one at home, you see. Looking back at my life, I felt … I might have done something else. Oh, something with my life. I was keeping house, that’s all. But I had nothing. Having no way, no control of yourself, of your life. I was just a girl in a lonely house.”

  *Djer-Kiss was a heavily perfumed bath powder.

  *My friend, I do not forget you. Don’t be frightened. You are always my child. You know that well. And I love you. You know that well.

  PART THREE

&nb
sp; GREENWICH VILLAGE: BOHEMIA

  CHAPTER 12

  Millay had been in New York only a week when she decided to go home, “in time for baked beans” on Saturday night, she wrote Norma. “I am enclosing $2. to make sure of the baked beans.” It was the wrong time to find a job in the city: it was expensive, and it was hot. She would go home with Kathleen, do a big wash, get to her writing, “and then come back in the fall, whether I have a job or not.… I wish you could come back with me. But that would leave mother alone.

  We could have such a good time if we had some tiny dirty uncomfortable room somewhere down in the disreputable district … that’s where I’m staying now,—way down on West 4th Street.… Darling, I wish we could arrange it so that you could be here with me next winter. Don’t you suppose we can? There’s nothing for you there at all, and I’ve always wanted to bring you out here with me.… Don’t you suppose mother could get a job editing some dum page in some newspaper?—she might. She writes such beautiful English and she’s so funny. She could try. At least there’s no reason for sticking in Camden.