The convention of leaving one unmarried sister at home to care for an aging mother was not going to become a pattern in their lives. If one got out, they all would. That was the tacit bargain struck within their family. But the burden of getting out depended entirely upon Vincent. How would she manage?
One of her plans was to try the stage. Edith Wynne Matthison, the actress and friend of Miss Haight’s whom Vincent had met at Vassar that spring, had promised to arrange an introduction to a theatrical manager in New York. She and her husband, the English playwright Charles Rann Kennedy, invited Vincent to their summerhouse in Connecticut. “I shall ultimately be able to find something for you,” Miss Matthison assured her.
Don’t be downhearted; and do keep in touch with me, and let me know where you are, and everything you are doing. I hold out my hand to you in love and fellowship. Take it in full belief of my sincerity.
Edith Wynne Matthison had a majestic beauty and an imperious style. With dark hair, full breasts, and creamy skin, she looked at forty-odd like a dark duchess. Her voice, rich and passionate, won audiences to her. Within the year Millay would write in tribute to that voice:
If I should lose my hearing, I
Two senses would have lost thereby,
There having passed beyond my reach
At once my hearing and your speech.
Little is more flattering or more seductive to an ambitious girl than the interest and help of a successful older woman.
The previous season, Edith Wynne Matthison had starred on Broadway in The Spy. She told Millay she was afraid of nothing but fire—and Vincent was as attracted to that high-handed confidence as she was to the offer of friendship. That Matthison might promise more than she could deliver, or that she might make such promises out of an expansive and theatrical disposition, did not occur to her. She wrote to her that summer as she had never written to Miss Dow or Miss Haight:
You wrote me a beautiful letter,—I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was.—I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love.… nothing that has happened to me for a long time has made me so happy as I shall be to visit you sometime.—You must not forget that you spoke of that,—because it would disappoint me cruelly.
Listen; if ever in my letters to you, or in my conversation, you see a candor that seems almost crude,—please know that it is because when I think of you I think of real things, & become honest,—and quibbling and circumvention seem very inconsiderable.
Edith Wynne Matthison took three weeks to answer Vincent’s letter. She told her to beware:
I am terribly demanding of those whom I love.… I am beautifully tolerant of the failings of those whom I do not love, but my poor friends I treat in the same way I treat myself. Do you think you can stand it? Anyway you can make a trial. If you can’t stand it, I shall not blame you, I shall only become “tolerant” and “kind.”
This letter she signed with love, and Vincent answered her by return mail. Twice within her letter she told her that she would do whatever Edith wanted her to do, whatever Edith told her to do, and then this:
Love me, please; I love you; I can bear to be your friend. So ask of me anything, and hurt me whenever you must; but never be “tolerant,” or “kind.” And never say to me again,—don’t dare to say to me again—“Anyway, you can make a trial” of being friends with you! Because I can’t do things in that way; I am not a tentative person.
Mrs. Kennedy backed off a little after that, and she was careful to mention another “rare child” she wished Vincent to meet: “It is such as you and she, that must hold the banner of the spirit up to the coming generation. I am so glad you can come to me; and more glad that you love me.” If it was to be love, it would be shared with other rare girls.
The August 1917 issue of Poetry magazine ran three of Millay’s lyrics: “Kin to Sorrow,” “A Little Tavern,” and “Afternoon on a Hill.” None of them had been written that summer; Vincent was kept too busy tutoring and typing in Camden to write. Miss Haight wrote to ask if she could help: she offered a check for twenty-five dollars, as a gift or loan, and asked if she needed more. Vincent admitted she did want the money: “I could use seventy-five quite as easily. But I don’t want it to be given me, I want to borrow it.”
By return mail Haight added something else useful: she had a fall prospect for her: “My friend at Greenwich, Mrs. Hooker, (a perfect dear), motored up last week for the night with me and she has promised to have you out there for two or three readings.” Vincent would help her daughters and do a reading of The Princess Marries the Page for their young friends, which would be followed by a reading of her own work in the evening to the adults. “So there’s a dramatic engagement for a beginning!”
Miss Haight asked about her sister Kathleen, advising Vincent to “see to it that she writes Miss McCaleb at once.… Tell Kathleen I should like so much to help her with the Latin Prose if she will write the exercises I send her. (Do you remember our first correspondence, Brilliant One?)”
But Vincent had prospects of her own: “Did I tell you I am probably letting Mitchell Kennerley bring out my book this fall—Renascence and Other Poems? Are you mad or glad or indifferent. I think I am indifferent.” Her nonchalance was, of course, feigned. She was delighted to find that Miss Haight was glad, for she wanted Millay to have her “heart’s desire,” and if that was sentimental, it was also generous. Vincent needed her older women—Miss Haight, Miss Dow, and Edith Matthison—for the support they gave her. And they, suspecting or guessing that her life would be larger and her talent more enduring than their own, needed her to dream upon.
Miss Dow’s response to Vincent’s decision to publish with Mitchell Kennerley was typical. She began by pointing out how worthy it was for Vincent’s developing character to work for the good of others, rather than for herself. Self-sacrifice was a tonic.
I am sorry about your decision as to your publisher—it is not wise for me to write what many wiser people than I have said to me about your being launched thro’ him. He is not working this matter for altruistic reasons; and he does not appeal to the clientele which I wish might be yours. $500 is not very much money to weigh against a long future. When you have located yourself in a certain class in the literary world, it is hard for others to feel that you have anything they want.
What, precisely, was the matter with Kennerley as a publisher? And why, since Arthur Ficke and D. H. Lawrence were being published by Kennerley, shouldn’t Millay be also? Kennerley’s publishing house was conspicuous for being one of the most dynamic in New York. But his business practices were shabby, and Lawrence had to set Amy Lowell on him before he was either paid or published. “There were good publishing houses, of course,” Alfred A. Knopf recalled, “Houghton Mifflin, Scribner’s, Harper’s, but it was Mitchell Kennerley who was setting another and more adventurous course.” The young Knopf, who would one day found what was arguably the finest publishing house in America, was employed by Kennerley, from whom he learned an important lesson.
“We worked in a large, open floor, and his office was tiny and bitterly cold, as I remember. The only thing in it besides his desk and chair was a full-length nude photograph—or perhaps it was a painting?—of Emily Grigsby, who had been the mistress of Charles Gerkes, about whom Dreiser wrote The Titan.
“Kennerley was a pink-complexioned man of medium build,” Knopf remembered. “Very English, very hauteur, and a ladies’ man.” His business life and his publishing acumen were by all accounts directly affected by the conduct of his private life.
“As he would leave of an afternoon,” Knopf said, “he would tell Bel Greene, his assistant, ‘I’m off to the Biltmore Baths,’ and I can still see him, putting on his bowler hat, rather carefully pulling on his gloves, picking up his cane, and off he’d go. But of course he was not going to the Biltmore. He was going to meet a woman!
“But, oh, the manner of his books. The way they were bound and pr
oduced. I remember them clearly, still, in their rich black cloth bindings with gold stamping. The man had extraordinary taste and certain judgment, but he was dishonorable. It was not infrequent that someone from the sheriff’s office was sitting in the front office. He never seemed to be bothered. Had Kennerley been an honest man, I don’t believe I would have become a publisher.”
Vincent dismissed Miss Dow’s advice. She was coming close to ignoring her old adviser.
At the end of August, Millay visited Edith Matthison and her husband, Charles Rann Kennedy, at “The Rafters,” their summerhouse in New Hartford, Connecticut, where they were trying to arrange readings for her later in the fall. She was charmed by the Kennedys—Edith, working in the garden in her blue linen smock and bloomers; Rann, as she now called him, writing in his hut in the field.
He is a great big gruffey man with a childlike smile & eagerness,—he wears an enormous yellow smock which reaches to his knees,—& that is all— excepting a pair of sneakers, & drawers whose cunning hems sometimes show when he puts a book on a high shelf. Imagine—bare legs—long, grey hair—& a face like a child’s! Oh, he is so sweet!—and she is beautiful—.… We have a wonderful time together.
By mid-September she was back in the city, staying at the Kennedys’ apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. It was not the bohemia she had dreamed of, but it was free. She hurled herself into life in the city. There were luncheons and teas with Edith, who arranged for her to see George C. Tyler of the New Amsterdam Theatre and Winthrop Ames, another theatrical manager. She almost got a part in the new play of “Mr. Carpenter, who wrote last season’s success, The Cinderella Man,” she told her mother, “& who says he would give me a secondary part in his play except that my hair is too near the color of the lead’s.” And she gave a reading of her poems at Mrs. Blanche Hooker’s in Greenwich, “a very wealthy woman.” Because her trunk hadn’t arrived yet from Camden, she’d had to dress in one of Mrs. Hooker’s gowns “with a train & hanging about six inches on the floor all around, made out of three rainbow colored scarfs. And, family, I discover that I have nothing to give readings in, I must have long dresses, trailing ones.” She looked best in such gowns, “very long & drapy—more like a negligee than a dress, really—very graceful & floaty.” By the end of September, Mrs. Hooker sent her fifty dollars for her reading that evening.
The Literary Digest reviewed the three poems she’d published in Poetry magazine, saying that they were “of the same charm and simplicity which struck the world in this writer’s unforgettable Renascence.… Much of Miss Millay’s strength lies in her colloquial directness.” She had seen the title page of Renascence and was delighted with it; she’d asked Mitchell if it weren’t going to be too expensive to print it on that sort of paper and he’d said, “ ‘Oh, well,—you promised me, Edna, it was to be a very small book!’—and so it is—lovely & thin—only the very best—& bound in black with gold letters.”
She thought it would sell at Jess Hosmer’s store in Camden, and of course in Poughkeepsie; it might seem peculiar to her family for her to be thinking of the business end of it, “but I want it to be read—it’s that more than the disgusting money—the dirty necessary money.”
Vincent was offered an opportunity by Mrs. Thompson, who’d helped put her through Vassar, to be her social secretary. She refused: “she believes in me as a poet & would even pamper me in order not to interfere with my writing & she would pay me a salary & her place is out in the beautiful country & everything would be lovely & Aunt Calline is exceedingly anxious to have me do it—but I just don’ wanna!”
She was very clear about why. After all, Edith Wynne Matthison had been good to her, too, and she wanted a chance at the theater. She wasn’t going to “break all my dates & say ‘I’m going up to Sparkhill to be private secretary to a beautiful woman of fashion.’ ”
By October 12, she had reversed her decision. She was at Mrs. Thompson’s, she explained to Charlotte Babcock Sills, her Vassar friend:
I came thinking I was to be a sort of unofficial secretary. But I find she just did it, bless her, to get me out into this wonderful place & rest me up & give me a chance to write. She is concerned for my future, & rather afraid, I think, of what I may do, if left indefinitely in New York alone.
She’d been at Mrs. Thompson’s for the better part of three weeks without telling her family. Finally she wrote home. Norma had mixed feelings about her sister’s prolonged silence:
You bring new life to Mother and me for we thought of you as settled at Mrs. Thompson’s forever, doing something you “donwanna” do. We talk you over so often and wonder and wonder about you and hear so seldom. I, of course, stand it a great deal better than our Mother does.… Just a postal twice a week would keep things easier here.… Mother has to know where to picture you or she is very unhappy. ’Course I don’t care where you are. I couldn’t picture you any where any way ’cause I’ve forgotten absolutely how you look! What color is your hair?
Millay grasped that Mrs. Thompson didn’t want her to lift a finger except to write, so she stayed three weeks; her pleasure in the delicious care that was being taken of her is evident in every line of a letter home:
It is eleven o’clock in the morning. I am still in bed. At nine o’clock Anna, my personal maid—(for all I ever see her doing for anyone else) awakened me with my breakfast. She came in with the tray—silver coffee-things, & fruit, & bacon and an egg—(God forgive me if you are even now hungry!—I will send you five no, one dollar I wish I could send ten)—and little sticks of toast rolled up in an embroidered napkin, & a vase of hot-house flowers. This she set down on the bed. Then she closed the windows, saw that the register was open, brought me my negligee & helped me into it, propped pillows behind my back, brought two hair-pins from the bureau for me to pin back my hair with, put my cigarette-case, holder, & matches within easy reach—all this without a word from me except Good-morning—then asked if there were anything I would like, & left me, softly closing the door behind her.—I swear to you I am not inventing a word of it; & that is the way it happens every morning!
Mitchell Kennerley was going to publish her just as handsomely as he had promised. Fifteen copies of the first edition were printed on Japan vellum, a thick, creamy handmade paper whose edges had been trimmed to look as if they had been torn. The jacket copy is worth quoting: it reads like a declaration of Kennerley’s feelings about her:
Miss Millay’s poems have a remarkable freshness, sincerity, and power. They do not depend upon curious and involved artifice, upon waywardness of method and metre, upon the presence of what should be absent, or the absence of what should be present. They do not avoid rhythm and music as dangerous intrusions in modern poetry. They do not present uncouthness, or mere triteness, as strength. They are not the facile outpourings of one form of shallowness, nor the curt trivialities of another. They deal, as poetry should deal, primarily with emotion; with the sense of tears and of laughter, in mortal things; with beauty and passion; with having and losing.
He gave her, however, only $25 of the promised $500 advance. By now she was becoming desperate for funds.
Only Caroline Dow would have given Edna Millay a personal account book—“Five cents put aside every day will amount to $182.50 in ten years”—and expected her to keep it. She did, for one month. The first entries in the mud-colored book are arduously recorded in her most careful script.
At the beginning of October 1917, she had $75 on hand, the $50 from Mrs. Hooker and $25 from Mitchell Kennerley. But her expenses mounted quickly; there were roses for Mrs. Hooker, $10 for lingerie, another $10 for velvet for a skirt she intended to sew, and a few dollars for Hunk and for Kathleen. Since there was always a discrepancy between her balance and what she actually had, she added a column of her own, “Lost in the Shuffle.” She began November 1917 with $55.05 and never made another entry.
At the close of the book was a record keeping of another sort, far more crucial to her than money saved: she began to de
tail the long list of poems sent out again and again to the magazines she hoped would publish her: McClure’s, Pearson’s, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Scribner’s, The Century; she even tried St. Nicholas with her two plays. By the turn of the year she had sold only one poem, “Time does not bring relief,” to The Century, and that was a sonnet Burgess Johnson, her journalism professor at Barnard, had helped her place the summer before.
How did she manage at all? It helped that during her first two and a half months she paid no rent. She was with the Kennedys in Connecticut and then at their New York apartment until the end of September and went from there to Mrs. Thompson’s in Sparkhill for the greater part of October. Now she had no choice but to spend November under Miss Dow’s wing at the YWCA.
That autumn Vincent went to a costume ball in Greenwich Village with Miss Dow and some of her friends. “They were great events in those days,” Charles Ellis, a young painter from Ohio, recalled. “There was a group of elderly people who were not in costume up on the stage watching the dancers, and in their midst was this little girl. She had made herself a costume, a Turkish outfit of some sort of pajamas, and there she sat among these older people. She just seemed to sit there for hours, and she looked to me as if she wanted to dance. So I walked up to the stage and held out my arms and said, ‘Wanna dance?’ ”
Ellis had come to New York from Ohio because he wanted to paint. Soon he was designing sets and painting screens for the Provincetown Players and was acting in their productions. “We were all little boys from the Midwest,” he would recall years later, “Jimmy Light and Kenny Burke and me. And that winter of 1917–1918 was a wonderful winter.… We knew everyone … Stuart Davis, John Sloan, O’Neill, Jack Reed, and Max Eastman—we all knew each other. And the two things that drew people together were The Masses and the Provincetown Players.”
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