Hal
Again their letters crossed. When Vincent read Hal’s next letter, there was no mistaking his uncertainty:
Dearest Edna:
… I didn’t know what to say.… First of all I wrote, half merry, half sad, half hoping, half doubting,—that we ought to see each other some time and talk over this possibility of our marrying. To be frank, I thought you would hoot, albeit in friendly fashion. But you said nothing. So I put far away from me the flicker of a thought and returned to my content. Presently I told Arthur, lightly. And he urged it. And he wrote you; and I, still lightly, added the postscript. You know the rest of the events.
As to what is going on inside me, it wobbles and wobbles. I have very important things to say to you, even before I can let myself be serious.…
Arthur, with no word from me except the bare news of your cable (forgive me), rapidly changes his mind, gives in, reasons, comes to N.Y. and sweetly expostulates, for your sake, for mine and, I think, for his. All I know is that for the first time in my life I am a coward. But, darling Edna, you’ll understand it all and laugh with me. We’re alike a little.… You frighten me. But you inspirit me. You also awe me—which is necessary!—was there ever such a fool as
Your friend from childhood
Hal
On January 24, 1922, in Vienna with Griffin Barry, with whom she had traveled for convenience, she received two of Arthur’s letters, forwarded from Rome. Outside the window of her hotel there was only a gray wall; she kept the lights on all day just to have the sense of light somewhere in her world. “I smoke too many cigarettes, and the German food nearly kills me,” she wrote, “hot bread and cabbage and grease, when what I want is a bowl of plain rice and an apple.” But far worse was living with Griffin Barry. She explained for the first time to Arthur the circumstances of their being together:
I am living, chastely and harshly, with a man with whom I once had a love affair, a man whom I breathlessly and ruthlessly abandoned for somebody else, and whose consciousness of the wrong I did him is always boiling in his mind. We do not want to be together; … we have almost no tastes or opinions in common; but except for each other we are entirely alone in a strange city, so that we are constantly forced back into each other’s society; he is irascible and sarcastic; I am hard and pugnacious; we spend all the day and half the night in quarreling, or in abstaining from quarreling with an effort which whitens his face and makes my back ache; then we separate, either with a make-shift amiability or with the sublime insult of the encounter, and go to bed; I lie awake until four o’clock in the morning, at times desperately getting up and turning on the light, smoking a cigarette, trying to read, then lying down and making another try of it; finally I fall from entire exhaustion into a succession of little dozes, from each of which I am slowly, chokingly awakened by a glimmering and malevolent nightmare.
She was not writing. “I might as well try to work on a ship-wrecked raft.… I think I am going to marry Hal,” she wrote. She told him that Hal was going to come over to Europe in the spring. Clearly, she had not received Hal’s last letter.
Of course we may do nothing about it. But I rather feel that we shall. Would you be sorry or glad if I did? Tell me seriously, dear, what you feel about it. Of course, there is every geometrical reason why I should. We should make such a beautiful design, don’t you see,—Hal and you and I. Three variable and incommensurate souls automatically resolved into two right angles, and no nonsense about it.
She knew it wasn’t quite so simple. Hal, she said,
is very troubled about my feeling for you.… he feels I care more for you than I do for him. I just got a note from him, in which I saw that plainly.… Well, there’s no denying that I love you, my dear. I have never denied it for a moment, since the first time I saw you, either to myself or to anybody else.… “When people ask me if I know you I say, “Yes, I know him.” Then if they ask me if I like you, I say, “I love him.” And that’s all there is to that. And they can shut up, or go on asking questions, or talk it over among themselves.…
No one can ever take your place to me. We know each other in such a terrible, certain, windless way. You and I have almost achieved that which is never achieved: we sit in each other’s souls.
But she thought that was no reason why she couldn’t marry Hal “and be happy with him. I love him, too. In a different way.”
By January 19, Arthur raced to New York to Hal. Years later, he explained exactly what he’d done: “I at once took every letter I had received from Miss Millay … and forced him to read every word of them. He saw at once that I had not been guilty of duplicity toward him, and that my relation to Miss Millay was of a very remarkable kind, which, in spite of its passional elements, had its real center quite outside of the usual realm of human love. Nothing, I think, except my frankness to him could have saved our friendship from a catastrophic wreckage.”
Millay had no idea what he’d done. She had become the exquisite link between the two men, neither of whom could afford to have her, for it would threaten their connection.
What no one mentioned, but what Edna would not have been insensitive to, was Hal’s money: he had inherited a small fortune. It may have been his homosexuality that troubled him after he proposed to Edna, and not her relationship to Arthur. Whatever it was, Arthur couldn’t let up. Wouldn’t Hal grow jealous
of the fact that you write better poetry than he does? And then there is another thing: I don’t suppose marriage would put an end to your having “affairs”; and though Hal thinks now that he wouldn’t mind, I’m not so sure of that.… You ask me, would I be glad or sorry? And all I can tell you is that I don’t know. There is a stab for me in the idea, somehow,—perhaps in the dim sense I have that this is the one sole precise way in the world by which I might really lose you.
But by the time she received Hal’s letter of January 19, she’d understood and fled to Budapest, from which she wrote him on her thirtieth birthday:
Poor boy,—did Edna write him solemn letters from German cities and frighten him almost to death?
Oh, Hal, you abysmal nut!
As I sit in my small but costly apartment looking out upon the Danube, the thought of you hits me on the head like a piece of lead pipe.
Oh, Lord—oh, Lord—Oh, Hal!
Apoplectically yours,
Edna
I am now going under the divan and have a fit.
The day after her birthday, she wrote home that she was happier than she’d ever been. There was no reason to believe her: the rest of her letter except for the following note was sodden with depression.
I was interviewed the other day by a reporter for a Budapest paper—they printed about two columns about me. And the Hungarian fiancé of my friend Dorothy Thompson is going to give me a lot more publicity, & try to get ’Arty de Cop translated into Magyar & presented here. Well, we shall see. I sign myself in full,—Your loving niece & nephew,
Esther St. Nonsense Millwheel
Dorothy Thompson had a prodigious talent for journalism and boundless vitality. She would soon marry the first man she’d made love to, Josef Bard. Unfortunately, he was as unfaithful as he was cosmopolitan and suave. In a diary entry Thompson made years afterward, she retained the fury she must have felt in 1922.
She was a little bitch, a genius, a cross between a gamin and an angel. In Budapest she had two lovers … both from the embassy. Keeping them apart was a kunst, an art. And we sharing a room.… She sat before the glass and combed her lovely hair, over and over. Narcissan. She really never loved anyone except herself. Very beautiful, with her little white body and her green-gold eyes. “Dotty, do you think I am a nymphomaniac?” she asked. Then she comes in a Grecian robe and reads aloud to the Ladies Club, “Such lips my lips have kissed …” And what a sonnet that one was.
I had to go back to Vienna and I left her the toast of half the town.… Handed her all I had because she was an angel. A bright angel. She might have left Josef alone, but not tha
t, either. When she came back to Vienna, she twisted a little green ring on her finger. “Josef gave it to me,” she said absolutely brutally. “But he really cares for you.” “It’s all right Edna,” I said, “I know he does.” And I was full of furious tears.
In the midst of what Edna would call being “panic-stricken, and confused,” she canceled her mother’s trip to Europe. Her letter is nowhere to be found among her papers, but Cora’s wire is. She sent it precisely on Vincent’s birthday, telling her she “understood.” Norma’s response was to tell Vincent sharply how sick their mother was, how Cora could not keep from crying with disappointment as she walked the streets of New York.
“Beloved Sister,” Millay wrote back in the next post, “if ever a girl needed a letter, I was that girl, and yours was that letter.” She said her mind had been cluttered, but now she knew
that nothing in the world is important beside getting mother over here with me.… nothing in my life, at least, is important in comparison to this thing. A possible marriage, for instance, is not important beside it. Anybody can get married. It happens all the time. But not everybody, after the life we have had, can bring her mother to Europe.
Kathleen was married, and Norma had married, whereas she had been rejected by Slocombe, and now almost certainly by Hal.
As for my getting married, I may and I may not. You know who the man is, Norma. At least you could guess. Do you remember one day in Truro, you and I were walking to the station together, and I had a letter with me which I was reading, and I said, “I think I shall marry this man some day”—do you remember? Well, if you don’t remember, you don’t deserve to know. And if you do remember, don’t breathe it to a soul. Because it very likely will never happen. But it may.
Then she cabled her mother to come. “Bon voyage, sweetheart! … I shall find out where your boat docks … and of course I shall be right there to catch you when you jump. Please wear a dandelion. I shall be wearing a corsage of small spruce-trees.”
CHAPTER 18
No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a driver to bring you to … they always take you to the Rotonde.
—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Both John Carter and George Slocombe warned Edna that the Latin Quarter had changed since she’d left. It had become “mean, monotonous, vicious,” George wrote her. “So I am glad you are out of this silly Rotonde crowd.” It was precisely that crowd to which she returned at the end of March 1922, to await her mother’s arrival. She’d been gone more than a year, but even with this complete change of scene from Vienna and Budapest, she couldn’t shake her sense of despair. Nothing seemed to be working out as she had hoped—not Hal, not even Griffin, with whom she’d never been in love. “My dear,” Slocombe wrote, “how you must have suffered at that priggish, arrogant & ignorant boy’s hands.”
John Carter, who’d been cautionary about Paris but not hurt or angry, wrote her now:
For the first time since I left you I have wanted you so badly that I almost cursed you, and myself for loving you. It started fairly innocently with a remark by Norma concerning a rumor that you had lived with Griffin in Vienna. So I wanted to slay Griffin for two days. Then I wanted you.
But it wasn’t Griffin’s hands she’d suffered at; it was her own.
PARIS APRIL 1ST, 1922
A mile of clean sand.
I will write my name here, and the trouble that is in my heart.
I will write the date & place of my birth,
What I was to be,
And what I am.
I will write my forty sins, my thousand follies,
My four unspeakable acts.…
I will write the names of the cities I have fled from,
The names of the men & women I have wronged.
I will write the holy name of her I serve,
And how I serve her ill.
And I will sit on the beach & let the tide come in.
I will watch with peace the great calm tongue of the tide
Licking from the sand the unclean story of my heart.
…
Allan Ross Macdougall had joined the staff of the Paris Evening Telegram, where he began a new column called “The Merry-go-Round.” On April 2, he wrote, “Late up and to the Dome to break my fast and happening in by accident to the other Tavern across the way who should I see to my great joy but fair Margaretta Schuyler whom I have not seen this year and more. Then came … Edna Millay and sat with us saying things that were witty and gay.”
Macdougall had in fact arranged for Margot (Margaretta’s nickname) to meet Edna, and it was not quite as he described it in his column. “Remember,” Margot wrote him years later,
that rainy April afternoon in the Rotonde when we had a rendez-vous with her and she came in looking like a little New England school teacher with a touch of the Candy Box.… What fun we had. What laughter and that inner throbbing of excitement that always affected everyone who met her.… Vincent with her gamin and Princess Lointaine qualities, her freckles and her romantic hair.
More than a half century later, this tiny woman, her glossy hair cropped close like a silver helmet, remembers Millay; her voice breaks as she speaks: “I did call her my Candy Box girl. Do you remember those elegant boxes of American chocolates?—Well, they always had a portrait of a pretty girl in a lace blouse on the cover.
“I was staying at the Hôtel des Saints Pères, and we were to meet at last at the Rotonde.… I was delighted. So I shined my shoes. And she was late, of course. Dougie and I sat and waited and chatted and waited, when a girl in a velvet dress with frills at the throat walked across the room and came to our table. Dougie stood up and said simply, ‘Now two of my dearest friends meet.’
“Certainly she did not look at all as I had expected her to look. We took hands. We talked. And later that afternoon we went to bed together.”
When Margot didn’t hear from Vincent that night, she sent this note up to her hotel room in the morning:
I hope this won’t wake you up.
I hope you are already awake.
Dear lady … please let me come up a moment. I want to tell you something.
Margot—
Millay didn’t reply. “I was terribly in love with Vincent from the first. Did she know? Oh, yes! There was very little she did not know. But after we were together and then I didn’t hear from her, or see her, for two or three days—I suppose I was afraid. I was afraid. I thought maybe she was just promiscuous.” She wrote to her again:
For goodness sake telephone me or send me a petite blue. I’m most awfully low.… Don’t practice your sadistic tendency on me now I need some moral support. This is a hell of a town tonight and I want to talk to you.
Margot
“I have no idea why I wrote ‘sadistic’; you must understand that there were a great many other people who rushed after Vincent. And she was exclusive. She was not promiscuous, which she easily might have been. But, oh, she could make it very clear.”
The only trace of this encounter Millay left behind besides a white lace hankie embroidered with her initials, which Margot kept all her life, is a provocative glimpse in a fragment of a poem of a woman in a café. It may not refer to Margot Schuyler, although its date suggests her. It is untitled and was never printed.
You are most like some pale, impersonal
Small flower, that has no color for the bee,
Only a potent fragrance. Quietly
Turning your eyes to none, troubling us all,
(Even the anxious waiter, even me)
You sit before the cafe in the heat,
Rendering the heavy air too deadly sweet.
Drawing your puff & powder from their case,
Dusting with pollen your small, serious face.
Paris April 26, 1922
“Then one morning she called me and said her mother was arriving,” Schuyler said. “I asked if I could go with her to meet Cora and she said, ‘No, I want to be with her alone.’ ”
“And in she walked with this old woman in a Buster Brown bob, steel-rimmed glasses, and the minute we shook hands I loved her. She was very plainspoken, Cora was. She called shit shit, and not feces. She was not an ignorant woman, not by any means. I was with her all the time, for weeks on end. And she always had an idea. It was: Let’s go!—to the Tuileries! to the Louvre! Let’s bum around these backstreets! There was very little she was not game for.”
That first night they went to the Rotonde Grill for dinner, “and then we all went to the Boeuf sur le Toit—and they danced, but it was so crowded they went to a cabaret called Zelli’s, and that was lovely,” Cora wrote home.
A young poet, Harold Lewis Cook, remembered meeting them at Zelli’s, “that wicked, wicked nightclub in Montmartre. But the striking thing was that Edna was there with her mother. And this rather elderly, to me, then, little woman had cut her hair in the short bob of those days. I danced with both of them.… [Edna] was wearing a black satin dress—I remember the feel of the silky fabric against my hand as it slipped across her back.”
Café de la Rotonde
Tues. Apr. 25, [1922]
Dearest Kids,—
Here are your mother and sister sitting with Margot Schuyler at the famous sink of corruption (see above) of the Latin Quarter.—Mother has a cold & is imbibing a Grog Américain, which is to say a hot rum with sugar & lemon.
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