Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  Beginning with the three poems published in Poetry in 1917 up until the end of December 1920, Edna Millay had published seventy-seven poems, thirty-nine of which were sonnets. She had published a volume of her poems and had written eight prose pieces under a pseudonym for Ainslee’s. She had also written and directed a play, Aria da Capo, and although her second book, Second April, was stalled in proofs, it was complete. A first edition of Figs from Thistles made up in pretty, brightly colored paper was brought out by Frank Shay, in the windows of whose bookshop at 4 Christopher Street in the Village they were displayed. They sold like hotcakes.

  Millay was not languishing; she was in full command of her powers. That she was able to be consistently productive during a period of such disarray in her personal life is something of an achievement. Edmund Wilson has described this period as the beginning of her “immense popularity.” She would from time to time point to her popularity and mock it, a little pleased and a little puzzled. “Also, I am becoming famous,” she wrote to Hal, who’d gone off to China with Arthur.

  The current Vanity Fair has a whole page of my poems, and a photograph of me that looks about as much like me as it does like Arnold Bennett. And there have been three reviews of something I wrote, in New York newspapers in the last week alone. I am so incorrigibly ingenuous that these things mean just as much to me as ever. Besides, I just got a prize of a hundred dollars in Poetry, for the Bean-stalk. And I’m spending it all on clothes. I’ve the sweetest new evening gown you ever saw, and shoes with straps across them, and stockings with embroidery up the front. I wish you were here. We’d all go on a swell party together.

  Yet this girlish delight in her fame wasn’t the whole story. “There was something of awful drama about everything one did with Edna,” Edmund Wilson remembered. “Her poetry, you soon found out, was her real overmastering passion.” Wilson came to believe that other than her mother and her sisters, people were in some sense unimportant to her—except as subjects for poems. She was impartial, Wilson said ruefully. And so her lovers did not quarrel with one another, or even much with her. What she was interested in was “her own emotions about them.

  In all this, she was not egotistic in any boring or ridiculous or oppressive way, because it was not the personal, but the impersonal Edna Millay—that is, the poet—that preoccupied her so incessantly. But she was sometimes rather a strain, because nothing could be casual for her; I do not think I ever saw her relaxed.

  Trying to put some distance between herself and her family had not worked. That fall, Kathleen took the room in front of hers on West Twelfth Street. And Norma stayed. Finally, just before Christmas, she made up her mind to escape:

  Dearest, beloved Mother,—

  The reason why I have not written you for so long is because I have been sick. I am all right now, but I have been quite sick, almost ever since I moved in here,—bronchitis for a while, & another small nervous breakdown after that. I didn’t want you to know, for fear you would worry.—but now that I am all right again I have decided that the thing for me to do is to have a change,—change of everything,—so I am going to travel.

  She was going to Europe. Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair, had asked her to write two articles a month for the magazine: one she’d sign her own name to, the other Nancy Boyd’s. “Technically,” she said, she would be a foreign correspondent for Vanity Fair.

  This is the thing I have always wanted to do, you know how much, dearest,—& my work, more than anything else, my poetry, needs fresh grass to feed on. I am becoming sterile here; I have known it would be, & I see it approaching if I stay here.—Also, New York life is getting too congested for me,—too many people; I get no time to work.… And I need to be alone for a while. I shall come back a fine strong woman.… Mother, dear, this is the whole thing, just as I’ve told it. It has nothing to do with any love affair, past or present. What the future may bring I don’t know, maybe something more satisfactory than I’ve had so far. But that is not even on the horizon. I’m going as a free woman, a business woman, & because I want to travel.

  She wanted very much to see Cora before she left on January 4, 1921, on the Rochambeau. She would cross with some friends. “But after I get to Paris I shall be alone. And I shall be perfectly happy, & perfectly safe, because I speak French, & because I am a very capable & sensible woman, when left to myself. You know that, dear.”

  But there was neither enough money nor enough time to bring Cora to New York. “I shall bid you God Speed,” Cora wrote to her daughter,

  just the same here as if I were in New York, and our spirits will often speak to each other on the way and after you get over there. There can be no real separation for two like us, who love each other so well, and you do not have to come here to tell me so, and I don’t have to go there to hear it.

  Only in her journal, it was a different voice that cried out on the day Vincent’s ship left New York harbor: “My baby! My baby! My baby!”

  Edna Millay may not have known she had to break the relationship with her mother, but that grip was now a stranglehold, and she was prying free.

  SCRUB

  If I grow bitterly,

  Like a gnarled and stunted tree,

  Bearing harshly of my youth

  Puckered fruit that sears the mouth;

  If I make of my drawn boughs

  An inhospitable house,

  Out of which I never pry

  Towards the water and the sky,

  Under which I stand and hide

  And hear the day go by outside;

  It is that a wind too strong

  Bent my back when I was young,

  It is that I fear the rain

  Lest it blister me again.

  It was not going to be an easy separation. Cora, too, had written a poem for her daughter. It was as prophetic as it was ominous.

  HEALING, A PLAY IN TWO ACTS

  ACT I.

  Unlike as Life and Death they met.

  The younger spake: Who are you, mother?

  The older: A little, lone, old woman, gathering herbs. And you, daughter?

  The younger: I gather flowers.

  ACT II.

  Less unlike again they met.

  The younger spake: Where are your simples, mother?

  The older: What would you, daughter?

  The younger: Forgetfulness.

  The older: Gather herbs.

  C. B. Millay

  *Adams was a columnist and a humorist who had begun in Chicago before starting his famous “The Conning Tower” in 1913, which he signed with his initials, F.P.A.

  PART FOUR

  “PARIS IS WHERE THE 20TH CENTURY WAS”

  CHAPTER 15

  Vincent raced through the snowy streets of New York on January 4, 1921, just making the ship as the French porter, slapping a sticker on her trunk, “Mis à bord au dernier moment,” hurried her up the gangplank of the Rochambeau. Even her mother joked with Norma about Vincent’s “getaway,” as if she were fleeing the scene of a crime. She was fleeing. But while her stomach had roiled with excitement for a good week before she left New York, once on the wintry Atlantic she didn’t get sick and took no seasick remedies. “Whatever it might be,” she wrote Cora, “… —I wanted the whole of it.—I wanted every bit of the experience, & no dope. (Like you, when I was going to be born.)”

  Now, after nine days at sea, they were in the English Channel. She was too exhilarated to sleep, and, wrapping herself in the great white Hudson’s Bay blanket she’d brought along, she went up on deck to see the dawn break over France. A steward, pointing to a rising gray bluff off the starboard bow said, “Voilà, Mademoiselle, la terre de France!”

  By January 18, she had settled into her room at the Hôtel des Saints Pères on the Left Bank. It was a pretty, old hotel with a tiny winter garden filled with palms; it was cheap, and it had steam heat. Outside, the rain didn’t let up; Paris turned the color of grisaille. She made her first diary entry that week: “It is
so damp this afternoon … that the wall-paper of my room is dark and bubbly with it. I have given orders that my breakfast be brought me at eight o’clock after this, it being my notion to work in bed until noon.”

  Millay didn’t know that on the rue de Varenne, within hailing distance but worlds away from the Saints Pères, the elegant Mrs. Wharton was keeping the same schedule, writing in her bed—although she was propped up by goose-down pillows, her little dogs tucked in beside her.

  Each morning two American girls in the room next to Vincent’s began their French lessons. The walls were paper thin. As soon as their tutor left they would break into a torrent of American slang, “all in a rather pleasant drawl which might mean Memphis,” Edna mused. But they had only three topics of conversation: “Clothes; How many Francs does one get for a Dollar; and How Well One has done in a Week to see all One has seen.” Her diary read as if she were collecting material for Vanity Fair pieces, and of course she was.

  Frank Crowninshield had tried to persuade her before she left New York to sign her own name to her prose pieces. He’d proposed a series of twelve glimpses into “the social life of our day.” Dialogues,

  apropos of divorce, and, in successive sketches, you could touch on The Debutante, The Perils of Domesticity, At a Dance, Social Climbing, The Honeymoon, Art Exhibitions, The Flirt, The Jealous Woman, First Love … Bridge, (if you play it), Golf (if you play it).

  His point was to make the series notable, not only to please Vanity Fair but—and here Crowninshield was no fool—because it would give Millay material for a book: “only, I want your name on the sketches, even if you have to elevate the moral, intellectual and literary tone of them to a height level with your lofty position as an artist.” He would pay her a hundred dollars for each, which was as high as he’d ever paid for a play or a dialogue, but, he persisted doggedly, “Your name really ought to be on them, in order to make us pay you this money willingly and gladly. If your friend Miss Boyd were to sign them, I would pay this money a little grudgingly.” Still Millay continued to refuse, and Crowninshield continued to pay.

  “Did you see The Implacable Aphrodite in the March Vanity Fair?” she wrote Norma, “—it reads rather amusingly.” After that she managed a Nancy Boyd piece, alternating sometimes with a poem, about once a month until the October issue, when the magazine published nine of her poems.

  Vanity Fair was providing her with an income, just as Ainslee’s had, and again the most substantial portion of it came from her prose. “The Implacable Aphrodite” was set in Greenwich Village. Tea is about to be served by Miss Black, a sculptress, to Mr. White, “a man of parts, but badly assembled.” As she bends down to prepare the tea, her robe falls away, clinging “to her supple limbs.” Mr. White is soon beside himself. Other men, he tells her, may importune her to marry, for they do not understand her need to be free to create her art. It is her beauty that attracts them, “ ‘your extraordinary grace, your voice, so thrillingly quiet, your ravishing gestures.’ (He is silent, breathing hard.) (She, delighted by his understanding, leans back wearily and closes her eyes, exposing a long and treacherous throat, full of memories.)” What fun Millay must have had writing this. It’s hard to tell who she is twitting the most, herself or the men drawn to her. At the end of the story, Miss Black announces she’s about to sail for Europe:

  “ ‘It will be of infinite value to me in my work.’

  “ ‘But what about me?’

  “ ‘I don’t understand you.’

  “ ‘You say you’re going because it will help your work—but think of me! What will happen to me?’ ”

  She replies that it hadn’t occurred to her to consider him.

  “He (shouting): ‘No! Of course not! Oh, you’re cold, you are—and cruel, my God! Your work!’ (He laughs scornfully.) All you think about is those damn little putty figures!’ ”

  Here he is, flesh and blood: “ ‘—and what do you care?’

  “She (icily): ‘Less and less.’ ”

  Millay was not unaware that certain men in her life, particularly the literary men who would later leave written records—Floyd Dell, Edmund Wilson, and John Peale Bishop among them—found her refusal to continue her affairs with them a stunning rejection. They wrote to her about their desperate hurt and anger; they waylaid her on the street. To a man they felt that her leaving them meant far more about her inability to be faithful than it did about their need to secure her exclusively for themselves. They talked about her chagrin, even when it was clearly their own; they talked about her promiscuity and her puzzling magnanimity. They failed to acknowledge the pull she felt between the excitement and energy of her sexual life, where she was a sort of brigand who relished the chase, and the difficult, sweet pleasures of her work. But Millay did seem irresistibly drawn to relationships that were doomed to fail. Maybe she couldn’t bear the weight of a permanent attachment, in which she had no reason to believe. The love of her life remained her mother, and until that tie was broken it held her fast.

  You know, mother, the quaintest thing. All around Paris in public places, where we have a sign up saying toilet (a word we took from the French, of course) they have signs up saying “Water Closet” or just the letters “W.C.” Isn’t that killing? Of course they think it very grand. They pronounce it, naturally, a little like this:

  “Vatair Closette”

  Well, enough of this Paris gossip, dearie!—Isn’t it racy, though? So far my note seems to be all about … public toilets.

  Cora was overjoyed at Vincent’s simply being in Paris; any news was part of their triumph: “How we used to think and dream and plan and work and give up one thing and reach out for another. Hasn’t it been a big wonderful, terrible, triumphant, old haul up the hill? And if it had been smooth and less steep, we would not have gotten so much out of it.” She cautioned Vincent against making it too hard for herself now:

  The other night after I went to bed I lay for a long time thinking of the terrible winter you had last year—one thing piling upon another to the breaking point, and the getting away last spring, and all the demands upon my little girl. I hope you will be able to recover from it all during your stay abroad, and come back when you get ready to come all saddled and bridled and fit for the fight again; but not the same fight, ever again. Other burdens may come, and will, of course, but never the same ones … again.

  Some of those burdens lay at home. A man in New York told her he was keeping in touch with Norma and Kathleen “so that through them the memory of you … shall keep fresh. Our few weeks intimacy was & is one of the bright spots in my life.” He told her how blooming Kathleen looked, and he confided about Norma that although she was playing in Matinata, the curtain-raiser to Emperor Jones,

  I don’t think she’s overly satisfied or contented. She’s a queer child & not satisfied with what she can do well.… I think she misses you a lot; but that’s natural, so do I. She one time said she was going to Europe, & I said & live how? & she said Oh Edna always looked after me. Well, I said, she’s a fool if she does again.

  The week before her twenty-ninth birthday, stricken with homesickness, Vincent wrote her mother:

  February 13—

  Two o’clock in de mo’nin’

  In bed

  Dearest Muddy,—

  Jus’ a lil’ note to say goodnight to my muddy afore I goes to sleep. I’ve written a lot today—just got through—& am tired.

  Then she lapsed into excessive guilt: Had she forgotten to return the five dollars she’d borrowed from her mother just before she’d left for France? “Oh darling, if I did, I shall never get over it! … It makes me cry when I think I didn’t send it—& I’m crying right this minute, all of a sudden, like a nut, just for thinking I forgot, simply forgot, something my dearest wanted.”

  She circled a tiny spot on the paper: “Tear-drop, see? I had to do something ridiculous, to shake me out of it, darling.… I’ll send you some money soon, dear.… Goodnight, my dearest thing in the world. Vincent. ”


  This was a pattern in their correspondence now that mirrored a new pattern in real life: Millay fled, embarking on something of her own rather than staying with her mother. Then she felt guilty. Her guilt was almost always linked to having abandoned Cora, but she assuaged it only with money, not by returning.

  Up until then, Cora had been spending the winter and early spring in Newburyport with her sister Clem, where she had been deeply unsettled by a visit from her youngest sister, Georgia. Swanning about in her splendid black Packard, with her boys wrapped in bearskin next to her, Georgia asked Clem why Cora didn’t work, as she was able. “Clem told her she supposed it was because the girls didn’t want me to,” Cora wrote to her daughter. “I’m tired of Georgia and her ways and talk and coarsenesses and selfishnesses and do not think I shall trouble her very much more or let her trouble me.” But for all the grief and jockeying for position among those sisters, Clem and Susie, Georgia and Cora could not do without one another.

  The Lamp and the Bell was a play that Millay was commissioned to write while she was in Paris, for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Vassar College. It was in five acts with a cast of forty-eight, not counting musicians, cupids, pages, and children. Freighted with the heavy cargo and paraphernalia of mock Elizabethan drama, it listed but stayed afloat because it was centered in the remarkable love between two young women who become stepsisters. Nothing could have been cannier for Vassar. It was lavishly produced outdoors on the greensward, where Vincent had often performed, and it was a ringing success.

  What was disturbing, almost chilling, was the letter Edna Millay wrote to her mother from Paris after the play was finished: “I have a curious feeling that someday I shall marry, and have a son; and that my husband will die; and that you and I and my little boy will all live together on a farm.” This is nearly a reprise of the central theme of the play: that the enduring love between women is the only bond that lasts.