The Carthaginian rose?
The fabric of my faithful love
No power shall dim or ravel
Whilst I stay here,—but oh, my dear,
If I should ever travel!
This heartland city took her in; it even gave her a party for her twenty-eighth birthday. Hubertis M. Cummings, head of the Ohio Valley Poetry Society, described Millay’s theatrical appeal:
The slender red-haired, gold-eyed Vincent Millay, dressed in a black-trimmed gown of purple silk, was now reading from a tooled leather portfolio, now reciting without aid of book or print, despite her broom-splint legs and muscles twitching in her throat and in her thin arms, in a voice that enchanted.
When Aria da Capo opened in December, Millay insisted that Mitchell Kennerley come see it. Afterward he wrote telling her how much he liked it. “Aren’t you about ready for a new volume of poems? It will be a pity to let too long a time elapse between ‘Renascence’ and its successor.” He said the day she brought in a manuscript there would be a check of $150 ready for her.
She answered immediately: “You, dear, I thought, were entirely out of the publishing business forever. Everybody says so.” At the close of her letter she asked if he was going to bring out another edition of Renascence: “There’s not a copy to be had in town.”
Kennerley assured Millay that Renascence had never been out of print. “At this very minute there are 800 bound copies in this very building. I will send you six copies tomorrow. It is sweet of everybody to say I am not publishing any more and pleases me very much.”
By March 1920, reassured that Kennerley was about to publish, Millay sent him a letter full of business suggestions, including adding a preface about Aria da Capo, which was about to be produced, to the volume. Kennerley’s response was dead silence.
Norma, who played Columbine with Harrison Dowd as “a playful, graceful, disenchanted” Pierrot, opened the play. To describe Aria da Capo as a one-act antiwar play based on the commedia dell’arte in which two sweet young shepherds kill each other out of greed is to give scant hint of its power. It is a deadly little play. Norma described the first performance:
Charlie did the sets at the Provincetown Players. He had black screens on which he painted mushrooms of different sizes in white, and these were set at angles through which the actors made their entrances and exits. And he painted a proscenium border of coloured fruits & flowers, cut as though they were hanging down—very effective it was.… Vincent was very good directing her play because she knew exactly what she wanted.
The play ran for two weeks and was completely sold out. Millay did not explain the play in her preface; she gave a description of how it was to look. She was precise.
The two shepherds, Thyrsis and Corydon, were to look like happy rustics in sandals, with rough cloaks flung about their shoulders. Edna wrote, “There must be no red or blue used anywhere in the entire play excepting in the blue and red of these two cloaks.” Pierrot wears a lavender or lilac silk smock with wide trousers and a wide white tarleton ruff. Columbine’s costume is a tight black satin bodice “cut very low, with straps over the shoulders, quite like the modern evening gown; very full tarleton skirts of different shades of pink and cerise”; “Hat should be small and very smart—not a shepherdess hat.”
When Edmund Wilson saw Aria da Capo, he wrote, “I was thrilled and troubled by this little play: it was the first time I had felt Edna’s peculiar power. There was a bitter treatment of war, and we were all ironic about war; but there was also a less common sense of the incongruity and the cruelty of life, of the precariousness of love.” It began as a caprice:
COLUMBINE: Pierrot, a macaroon! I cannot live without a macaroon!
PIERROT: My only love. You are so intense! …
Is it Tuesday, Columbine?—I’ll kiss you if
it’s Tuesday.
These frivolous lines are returned to at the close of the play, after the savage deaths of the shepherds, whose corpses remain onstage, tucked beneath the long table upon which Columbine and Pierrot lean, ignoring them as they begin again at the top, Aria da Capo.
Edmund Wilson, Jr., whose mother’s nickname for him as a little boy, Bunny, had stuck, had been at Princeton with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop. When the war began, Wilson enlisted and served with a hospital unit as a stretcher bearer in France, until he couldn’t stand the carnage and asked his father, who knew Woodrow Wilson from his days as attorney general in the state of New Jersey, to intervene. He was transferred to Germany in the Intelligence Corps and returned to America in July 1919.
Wilson was short and stout; his fine red hair, neatly parted in the middle, was already, at twenty-five, beginning to thin. His speaking voice was high, “harsh and light,” Edna Millay described it. He wore brown suits that matched the color of his eyes, carried a slim Malacca cane, and performed sleight-of-hand and card tricks to calm his nerves. When Scott Fitzgerald caught sight of him in the Village one evening, he found Wilson enviably urbane, no longer the “shy little scholar of Holder Court” he’d been at Princeton. A small legacy permitted him choices that Edna Millay did not have: a Chinese manservant who cooked for him, for instance.
Wilson had fallen in love with Millay’s poetry well before he met her in the spring of 1920. The March issue of The Dial published her sonnet “To Love Impuissant,” which Wilson “got by heart,” reciting it in his shower:
Love, though for this you riddle me with darts,
And drag me at your chariot till I die,—
Oh, heavy prince! Oh, panderer of hearts!—
Yet hear me tell how in their throats they lie
Who shout you mighty: thick about my hair,
Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr,
Who still am free, unto no querulous care
A fool, and in no temple worshiper!
I, that have bared me to your quiver’s fire,
Lifted my face into its puny rain,
Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire
As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain!
(Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave,
Punish me, surely, with the shaft I crave!)
He felt himself “worthy to deal her the longed-for dart.” He had been reading her since the spring of 1916, when his cousin Carolyn Crosby Wilson, who was in Vincent’s class at Vassar, gave him a copy of The Vassar Miscellany Monthly, in which “The Suicide” had appeared. When later in the year she sent him A Book of Vassar Verse, including both that poem and “Interim,” he decided to review it in the New York Evening Sun, where, just out of Princeton, he was working as a fifteen-dollar-a-week reporter. The following year, that same cousin sent him Renascence when he was in France with the AEF, and he was even more impressed. Now he longed to meet her.
At last he did, at a party in Greenwich Village to which she came late and tired after the theater. That night her beauty overwhelmed him, but it was not only her beauty that was arresting: he found her speaking voice thrilling. Unsettled, he felt for the first time “her power of imposing herself on others through a medium that unburdened the emotions of solitude. The company hushed and listened as people do to music—her authority was always complete; but her voice, though dramatic, was lonely.
“She was dressed in some bright batik, and her face lit up with a flush that seemed to burn also in the bronze reflections of her not yet bobbed reddish hair. She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.”
Wilson decided to cultivate her favor precisely as Walter Adolphe Roberts had. He would publish her in Vanity Fair, on whose editorial staff both he and John Bishop then worked. “She had,” Wilson later wrote, “at that time no real market for her poems; she sold a lyric only now and then to the highbrow Dial … or to the trashy Ainslee’s.” This was an exaggeration that served to place Wilson far more centrally in her career than he belonged.
Wilson and Bishop took over when Roberts had been forced to withdraw. Ainslee’s would publish only one more short lyric of hers, “To Kathleen,” that summer, and two of her Nancy Boyd pieces in the fall. For by 1921, Roberts was no longer on the masthead as editor. “Walter, dear,” Edna wrote him that summer, “What in the world happened?—But never mind—so long as you are out of there—you were getting so tired of it all, I know.… bon voyage, dear friend, wherever you go & whatever you do.”
Wilson moved in to acquire her work. In July 1920, Vanity Fair published “Dead Music—An Elegy” and in the following month “Prayer to Persephone,” part of the elegies she was completing. It wasn’t only Vanity Fair that picked up the slack from Ainslee’s. William Marion Reedy of St. Louis, whose Reedy’s Mirror first published her Aria da Capo, began on April 29, 1920, to publish in batches of five her “Twenty Sonnets.” These remarkable sonnets were seized by the crusty old midwestern editor, who published only what he liked. Luckily, what he liked was absolutely firstrate.
Reedy had met her at the Kennerleys’ house in the country, and he told her how much their “gab-fest” had meant to him: “I remember we didn’t even mind the ‘skeeters.’ Next morning I lost my hat, but that was the odds. I’d lost my head the night before, and, honestly, a bit o’ my heart too, in the glorious talk.”
Kennerley had shown Reedy Second April in proof, and he stayed up all night reading it. “It’s splendid work—all shot through with brightness; the air of the open world in it too. The Elegiacs, fine. The Sonnets, superb.”
But that spring Kennerley’s entire publishing process simply halted. Edna sent off the dedication, which was to Miss Dow. She pursued Kennerley with polite questions. She offered to help: “If you will send me some circulars, and envelopes and things—things meaning stamps!—I will mail them to thousands of people, about two thousands.” She tried being deferential:
Do you want me to give you some clippings?
I am very unhappy today.
I am sure that you dislike me.
But nothing worked to prod a response from Kennerley. On June 22, Millay’s tone was no longer deferential:
Mitchell, dear,—
You are behaving disgracefully to l’il’ Edna, whom you love.—all the time her mother keeps asking her questions which it is impossible for her to answer, & it is all very awkward & horrid, & you ought to be ashamed.
Write me at once, giving me some nice, plausible, mendacious-as-hell reason why you have not yet published my pretty book.
But this note, too, was met by silence. She wrote Arthur Davison Ficke, “My book isn’t out yet. It’s dreadful. I write Mitchell all the time, and he won’t answer my letters; and every time I call up the office they tell me he’s out, and I know dam well he is so near the telephone … that I hear his breathing.” She wished she’d gone to Knopf, as Witter Bynner had suggested, “Although I don’t see what he could do.” That last was a puzzling remark—what he could do was publish her—but it signaled her own uncertainty, for she had already tried to place Second April with another publisher.
The only clue that remains among her papers is a letter from Horace Liveright as early as December 1918, reminding her that she’d promised to show him her new book of poetry if Macmillan didn’t make a prompt decision. In the summer of 1919, Macmillan was promising a clear answer; by the fall it made it. It didn’t take her book because of its theme of death. The editor pointed directly to the “Memorial to D.C.,” a group of five poems written about Dorothy Coleman, a girl from Vassar who had died suddenly in the flu epidemic that swept the country in 1918. Coleman’s death was the stimulus for lyrics that were among the finest Millay was writing. And she knew it. She would cut only one poem from that group, and even this single poem, “Elegy Before Death,” with its ringing Virgilian irony and longing, she replaced in the body of the book.
There will be rose and rhododendron
When you are dead and under ground;
Still will be heard from white syringas
Heavy with bees, a sunny sound;
Still will the tamaracks be raining
After the rain has ceased, and still
Will there be robins in the stubble,
Grey sheep upon the warm green hill.
Oh, there will pass with your great passing
Little of beauty not your own,—
Only the light from common water,
Only the grace from common stone!
The publishers were right: death moved through these poems like a morbid fever. They didn’t care that Millay was echoing her beloved Latin poets in “Prayer to Persephone” and “Epitaph”:
Heap not on this mound
Roses that she loved so well;
Why bewilder her with roses,
That she cannot see or smell?
She is happy where she lies
With the dust upon her eyes.
Or the jocund fop Herrick in “Chorus”:
Give away her gowns
Give away her shoes;
She has no more use
For her fragrant gowns;
Take them all down,
Blue, green, blue,
Lilac, pink, blue,
From their padded hangers;
She will dance no more
In her narrow shoes
From the closet floor
Death scared them off, as it had neither the Elizabethans nor the Romans.
2
As for John Bishop and me, the more we saw of her poetry, the more our admiration grew, and we both, before very long, had fallen irretrievably in love with her. This latter was so common an experience, so almost inevitable a consequence of knowing her in those days.… One cannot really write about Edna Millay without bringing into the foreground of the picture her intoxicating effect on people, because this so much created the atmosphere in which she lived and composed. [It was a] spell that she exercised on many, of all ages and both sexes.
—Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light
In May, when Millay learned there was a chance to rent a cottage on Cape Cod that Jig Cook and Susan Glaspell had just bought, she seized it. They warned her it was really no more than a beach shack, and Jig listed the drawbacks: “remoteness, mosquitoes, no running water, etc., etc.,” while Susan added that the mosquitoes would bear mentioning twice. They did want her to come but fretted that she’d like Provincetown better, for “P-town is gay and Truro is in the country—So there you are.” But the little house, with a hedge of wild roses out front, set in a pine hollow just back from the dunes on the outermost reach of Cape Cod, behind the wild and lovely Longnook beach at Truro, delighted her, and she took it at once. The Millays moved out of their apartment in the Village, boxed what they needed to take, and stored the rest.
In July, Edmund Wilson was pleading with Edna to let him come to see her: “I don’t know how to write you letters now.… I love you. E.W.” The next day he was desperate: “Please be decent and call me up. Otherwise you’ll leave me pretty flat.” Millay had already left for Truro, where she wrote him:
I don’t know what to write you, either,—what you would like me to write, or what you would hate me for writing.—I feel that you rather hate me, as it is.—Which is false of you, Bunny.… I don’t know just when I shall be in New York again. I am going to the Adirondacks … & after that to Woodstock.… I don’t suppose you can get away from the office during the week, & especially now that John [Peale Bishop] is away. But could you get away … do you think?
It wasn’t much of an invitation, but, pressed so intensely and unhappily by him, she offered it in the best faith she could muster. “I have thought of you often, Bunny, & wondered if you think of me with bitterness.” Then she warned him, “My sister is amused & disgusted by my lewd portrait of myself. At her suggestion, which I now feel to be a wise one, I beg you not to circulate it.” One evening in the spring, Edna, Wilson, and Bishop had playfully decided to write their self-portraits. This was Edna’s:
/> E. ST. V. M.
Hair which she still devoutly trusts is red.
Colorless eyes, employing
A childish wonder
To which they have no statistic
Title.
A large mouth,
Lascivious,
Asceticized by blasphemies.
A long throat,
Which will someday
Be strangled.
Thin arms,
In the summer-time leopard
With freckles.
A small body,
Unexclamatory,
But which,
Were it the fashion to wear no clothes,
Would be as well-dressed
As any.
Wilson’s was marked by the same regret that surfaces in his letters to her. He is misunderstood, and his playfulness turns wooden:
E.W.
What devil sowed the seed of beauty
In the brain of this raisonneur.
He could have been happy in the XVIIIth century,
Before the Romantic Revival:
…
But now Byron has spoken
And the damage has been done;
…
You say that it is an Encyclopaedist
That lurks behind that respectable exterior.
I tell you: no! it is a Byron,
A Byron born amiss:
…
Later Wilson would admit that these poems were an embarrassment. “John Bishop used to say that it always made him nervous when I resorted to a high romantic vein.” But Wilson was beside himself. She hadn’t taken him into her life. He was desolated when he wrote:
I who have broken my passionate heart
For the lips of Edna Millay
And her face that burns like a flame
And her terrible chagrin.
The chagrin, of course, was his.
On a hot August night, a sweaty Edmund Wilson came trudging out to the Millays’ Cape Cod house, dragging his suitcase, cutting through fields of scrub oak and sweet fern because the old man who’d met his train had for some surly reason dropped him off some miles shy of Truro. Wilson had begged her to let him come. Now, stumbling and lost in the dark, when he at last saw a light and found the Millays, it’s hard to say whether he was more stunned by the cottage or by the women sitting inside.
Savage Beauty Page 25
