Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  They gave me dinner on a plain board table by the light of an oil-lamp. I had never seen anything like this household, nor have I seen anything like it since. Edna tried to reassure me by telling me that I mustn’t be overpowered by all those girls, and one of the others added, “And what girls!”

  It was as if he’d fallen into the enchanted world of a fairy tale, in which a crone and her three pretty daughters cast spells upon the innocent young traveler who has lost his bearings in the black night. Inside, in the flood of light and warmth, after he was loosened by a tot of whiskey, they began to work transformations on him, and he was bewitched:

  Edna was now very freckled. All were extremely pretty. But it was the mother who was most extraordinary. She was a little old woman with spectacles, who, although she had evidently been through a good deal, had managed to remain very brisk and bright. She sat up straight and smoked cigarettes and quizzically followed the conversation. She looked not unlike a New England schoolteacher, yet there was something almost raffish about her. She had anticipated the Bohemianism of her daughters; and she sometimes made remarks that were startling from the lips of a little old lady.

  In his first version of this memoir Wilson remembered Mrs. Millay saying that she “had been a slut herself so why shouldn’t her girls be,” a statement Norma asked him to cut. Such a word from the lips of anyone’s mother so shocked him that he remembered it all his life. “But,” he continued, “there was nothing sordid about her: you felt even more than with Edna that she had passed beyond good and evil … and that she had attained there a certain gaiety.”

  Soon the sisters were singing songs they had made up in three-part harmony to entertain him. But Wilson had come with a purpose, and he was not to be diverted.

  Since there were only two rooms on the first floor, with no partition between them, the only way for Edna and me to get away by ourselves was to sit in a swing on the porch; but the mosquitoes were so tormenting—there being then no mosquito control—that we soon had to go in again. I did, however, ask her formally to marry me, and she did not reject my proposal but said that she would think about it. I am not sure that she actually said, “That might be the solution,” but it haunts me that she conveyed that idea.

  While he said it was clear to him that proposals of marriage were not a source of great excitement for Millay, he could not acknowledge that it was his proposal from which she shied.

  The next morning Edna sat just below the stairs and recited some of her new poems. Then they walked to the sea. “Coming back from the beach, I kissed her behind a bush … her grin and summer girl-smile.” But when Wilson told her, “ ‘By the time we’re fifty years old, we’ll be two of the most interesting people in the United States’—she said, ‘You behave as if you were fifty already.’ ”

  He didn’t use these entries, which are from his diary, when he wrote his memoir, and he certainly hadn’t known about the description in Alexander McKaig’s diary for September 28, 1920. McKaig, who had been a Princeton classmate of Wilson, kept a diary in which he recorded the upheavals of their lives, and his own:

  One of the younger Millay girls told this anecdote of his [Wilson’s] visit to them last summer—Offered coffee, Bunny declared he never drank coffee, a cigarette, Bunny said he never smoked—offered a drink, Bunny said he never drank. Other guest at dinner—a stranger—said—“Ah—he must write the minor poetry.” (Bunny has never told this anecdote about himself.)

  Wilson was in love for the first time in his life. Edna Millay was the first woman he’d ever made love with. Afterward he remembered her saying, “I know just how you feel: it was here, and it was beautiful, and now it’s gone.” He couldn’t believe she wasn’t in love with him, since she had

  ignited for me both my intellectual passion and my unsatisfied desire, which went up together in a blaze of ecstasy that remains for me one of the high points of my life. I do not believe that such experiences can be common, for such women are not common. My subsequent chagrin and perplexity, when I discovered that, due to her extreme promiscuity, this could not be expected to continue, were rather amazingly soothed by an equanimity on her part which was also very uncommon.

  Their sexual relationship was over.

  That summer Millay learned to drive and to ride, and she had her hair bobbed. “I look, when I am blessed with health, approximately twelve years old,” she wrote to her mother from Lake Placid, where she was visiting Mrs. George Mixter. Then she left for Woodstock, where she began to learn Italian from a handsome Italian baritone she’d met there. “From the point of view of character and personality, he is just a sweet and friendly fellow, not so deep as a well nor so broad as a church-door, but oh, how he doth sing!” Cora asked Norma pointedly, “Who is Edna killing now? Is he almost done for?” Norma and Charlie had come to stay with Vincent in the Birdseye Cottages in Woodstock.

  Norma hooted with delight as she remembered that summer with Vincent: “Our little house was swarming with bees that August; they were there in abundance—when we bathed, when we cooked, when we ate. Finally Vincent and I decided to let them have just one sting. You know, one says to the bee, ‘There! If that’s what you want! If this will satisfy you!’ And we held out our arms, heads turned away, eyes squeezed shut. Of course they never stung us. There was this Swedish writer among the artists who were there, and he looked wonderfully at ease in country clothes. He was talking to us about the bees. It seems they had swarmed about his little house, too. He’d been in the bath, he said, when a bee alighted on the tip of his penis. He remained, shall we say, perfectly still. And quick as a wink Vincent said, ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I.’ You see,” Norma said, “she could say such things, and did say them, immediately, without a moment’s thought.

  “One afternoon we’d gone for a walk up Mount Overlook, and on our return two boys were following us. At first we paid no attention to them. We’d always liked to walk, and there we were, two—I daresay pretty—girls striding along, enjoying ourselves. And these two callow youths, calling out to us, trailing behind, but trailing, still, if you follow me, threateningly. Suddenly Vincent turned around and, crooking her finger, beckoned them. Well, they came right up pretty quick. And she said, looking them directly in the eye, ‘It is true that we have vaginas and breasts, but we are walking alone together because it pleases us to and that is our right. We have selected to be alone, and we intend to so remain.’ The boys just stood there, bug-eyed, truly stricken. We turned on our heels and continued our walk, unimpeded. They were quite simply appalled. And that, too, was just like Vincent. She could be direct and graphic when she needed to be. They took off like rabbits.”

  Norma handed me a snapshot taken that summer in Woodstock. Vincent is standing with Norma, who looks a little dim and uncertain. Jimmy Light and Vincent’s black-haired Italian baritone stand scowling behind them. She gazes directly into the camera, self-possessed, unsmiling, one hand nonchalantly on her cocked hip. She is astonishingly full-breasted, and her lips are slightly parted, as if about to kiss. She looks ripe, voluptuous.

  “Between John Bishop and me relations were … becoming a little strained,” Wilson wrote. “Frank Crowninshield was complaining that it was difficult to have both his assistants in love with one of his most brilliant contributors.”

  Bishop was just as much in love with Millay as Wilson was. Even their letters to her were remarkably similar, except that Bishop was far more analytical even as he tried to shake her from his mind:

  My dear dear girl, …

  I am still restless with desire to feel your cool white hands against my temples. O Edna, why do you have power to torture me so? … I wonder, sometimes, if you do not hurt for sheer pleasure in hurting.… And yet I think with me, you have tried not so much to hurt as to save me from later and more desperate pain. Edna, I love you because you are passionate and wise. And if your passion had been less than your wisdom I should not have felt you so cruelly.… To come to me from someone else and to leave me
for someone else. I don’t care whom you loved last year or even last month—but now—well—what am I that I should hope to keep you.… I think really that your desire works strangely like a man’s. And that desire has few secrets from me.

  But by the fall Bishop was too much in the thick of it even to want to slake his desire for her:

  For god’s sake, Edna, don’t forbid my coming to see you this week—I can’t stand it—really. I don’t want you to spend any great amount of time with me, if you feel you can’t without hurting your work. I’m reasonable.…

  Only let me see you, and touch you for a moment sometime—very soon.…

  McKaig, their Princeton classmate, was now charting Wilson’s conversations with him about Millay:

  September 11: … Bunny W and I at dinner bewailed the misconception of his character (the omission of his Byronic trait which he claims but no one else sees except Edna Millet).

  Met Edna Millet for a minute at Bunny Wilson’s, light dim. She seemed pleasant and better looking than I had been led to believe. Bunny evidently much in love with her. Not much chance to get impression from her myself though I think from her verse she must be a genius. Modern Sappho. 18 love affairs and now Bunny is thinking of marrying her.

  Five days later he notes:

  Bunny Wilson and Edna Millet in intolerable situation. He wants her to marry him. She tempted because of her great poverty and the financial security he offers (he has private income). However, in addition to curse of Apollo she has curse of Venus. While her heart is still in the grave of one love affair she is making eyes at another man. It nearly kills her but she can’t help it.

  September 20: Bunnie has repeated to Edna … things John [Bishop] said about her.… John is very distressed. I’ve come to think he’s damn stupid—interested only in himself, poetry, & women, and loves most the sound of his own voice, & liquor, & adulation (when he can get it).

  October 7: Bunny came for evening—we discussed John’s lack of ideas & borrowing them. Bunny, being under stress & strain, did parlor magic tricks. Says he does them for hours in front of glass to quiet his nerves, instead of smoking.… Regrets lack of will power lately to work nights—since meeting Edna. She certainly has played hell with him.

  When Edna returned to the city in September, she decided she was going to live alone. It would be the first time she would live without any member of her family since she had brought Norma out of Maine in December 1917. Explaining the decision to her mother, who had remained in Truro, was going to be tough. Her mother had written to her in Woodstock telling her and Norma “to do just as you want to, and have just as good a time as you can, both of you.… I am all right and am not too lonely.”

  In an undated fragment of a letter, Vincent tried to tell her mother why she must live alone. The thrust of the letter was her need to break free from Norma:

  … we’re all going to have to put up with a lot of things this winter. Norma will have to shift for herself, & find a place for herself. It’s only right that she should. And I’m not going to worry about her.—I hope you wont be displeased or disappointed by any of our plans, dear.—Please write & tell me what you think. I am sure I am right in believing we should all have separate rooms this winter. For myself, I know it has to be, or I shall lose my reason. It is a practical matter, of common sense & efficiency & has nothing to do with my great love for you & the girls.—Your loving daughter, Vincent.

  P.S. I cant rid myself of the feeling that you will be displeased. And it makes me feel dreadful. You know that I love you, sweetheart, dont you? And dont you understand?—You see, I am a poet, & not quite right in my head, darling.

  It’s only that.—Vincent.

  Millay included with her next letter a batch of clippings about her from her friend Franklin Pierce Adams’s* popular column “The Conning Tower,” which was running in the New York Tribune. There were more than a score of couplets and quatrains written about her, in which the trick was to use her name in the final line, rather like a limerick. “It is certainly wonderful publicity for me,” she told her mother.

  Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;

  But love grows bitter with treason and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  Cora wrote back quickly, thrilled “with the Tribune craze.” She didn’t sound at all distressed, but written in pencil and dated October 15, 1920, on the back of the envelope in which Vincent’s letter and clippings had been sent to her, she wrote:

  Put this in your collection:—

  We all know the poet who shot into fame

  As Edna St. Vincent Millay,

  But who was the poet who gave her the name

  Of Edna St. Vincent Millay?

  Then, perhaps dissatisfied with those four lines, she wrote:

  A POET TO A POEM:—

  I am a poet, I have had my day

  For I have written one immortal line;

  Nor Greek nor Latin ever wrote more fine—

  The Poem: Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  With love to the Poem,

  from

  The Author.

  By October 20, the intensity of guilt in Vincent’s letter to her mother had reached a new pitch. It was peculiar: they had been apart at most seven weeks.

  Dearest beloved Mother,—

  I am so worried about you that I don’t know what to do. I think about you all the time in the daytime, and lately I dream about you at night, I am so worried. I am afraid you are sick or something, out there in that cold old shack all alone. And I miss you so it’s terrible.

  After all her brave words about Norma fending for herself, she describes the two of them having a tea party “to which you were the only guest.” They placed her snapshot on the table and pretended to give her tea, and “talked to you and everything, and then we both cried, we were so homesick for you.” If either one of them could afford a telephone, they would call her every night, “just to say goodnight to you, no matter how much it cost.” Vincent would even return to the Cape, except for the prohibitive cost. “I want to go terribly. But both the girls think it’s silly to think of it, because you have much more need of a warm winter coat and to have the grocery bill paid … and to have your fare out to Aunt Clem’s.” But her questions to her mother follow hotly: Is she sick, is she cold, is she stinting on ordering kerosene at the expense of her own comfort?

  Please don’t do that, sweetheart. Are you lonely, my own darling? Oh, please, dearest mother, let us know how you are! We are about crazy. There is nothing in all the world I love so much as you. We all love you better than anything, just as we did when we were little kids, you know. Tell us exactly what you are feeling about being out there all alone, please, oh, please!

  Vincent.

  What is going on here? Did Millay feel she had abandoned her mother to exactly what she and her sisters felt when they were young and defenseless: isolation, coldness, and a desperate thrift?

  Wilson remembered her on West Twelfth Street saying to him suddenly, “I’ll be thirty in a minute!” He felt she was even

  more accessible and exposed … to the importunities of her suitors, who really besieged her door.… She had one or two depressing illnesses. Her apartment was poorly heated, and I brought her an electric heater. I remember how miserable she seemed—though she never lost a certain liveliness—wrapped up in an old flannel bathrobe and bundled in shabby covers.

  We learn from him that she’d hung Charlie’s painting “Directions for Using the Empress” above her bed. The Empress was a mechanical dress form, operated by a series of screws that used would make the form plumper or more slender, remembered clearly not only because Charlie had painted it but because one of Edna’s suitors had given it to her in the vain hope of freeing her from being Norma’s model. Edna became pregnant that winter, and, according to Norma, who did not know by whom, she suffered a “botched abortion,” which left her bleeding and weakened.

  “Don’t ask me,” Norma said warningly.

&n
bsp; “I wasn’t going to ask, you said you didn’t know.”

  “There were things we didn’t talk about.”

  “Of course.”

  “But I’ll never forget the name of that goddamned abortionist!”

  Toward the end of December, John Bishop invited her along with Wilson to dinner, “à deux—à trois—as you wish and then come to the apartment where I shall provide a stuffy air, cigarettes and a manuscript.” Wilson remembered the night as festive. In his notebook for the twenties he described a hilarious scene where, after their dinner, “sitting on her day bed, John and I held Edna in our arms—according to an arrangement insisted upon herself—I her lower half and John her upper—with a polite exchange of pleasantries as to which had the better share.” He said she called them “the choir boys of Hell,” and complained, according to Wilson, that their both being in love with her hadn’t even broken up their friendship.

  To consider it from her point of view, these men, who were themselves best friends, seemed to relish being in love with her at the same time. Hal and Arthur were acting out roles similar to Wilson’s and Bishop’s. It seemed to cement their relationship rather than break it. Their love for her was something they shared. It brought them even closer together. But it did not bring them closer to Edna Millay. In these jolly triangles, she was the conduit for their affection for each other.

  Wilson told her that her many admirers should form an alumni association, “to which she answered with promptness and point: ‘On en parle toujours, mais on ne le fait jamais.’ ”