Savage Beauty (14 page)

She thought it was sensational to be anybody’s discovery. Cora, who was working in Rockland that summer, and who was privy to Vincent’s guesses, wrote:

Isn’t it dear about your poem and your Editor? I think it is real sweet that way, don’t you? She may be a great help to my girl. I must say goodnight.

Lots of luck to my other girls. Yours—

“The Mother of A Poet.”

By the end of August, though she was hot in correspondence with her editor, there was still no word of the contest itself. What she could not have guessed was that her editor was trying desperately to attract other poets into his competition. By September 5, after Ridgely Torrence, to whom he had appealed, had sent his revised poem “A Ritual for a Funeral,” the editor assured him that “Mr. Wheeler and
all
your friends are very anxious
for you to take the Lyric Year prize.” This was far more than angling for distinguished talent.

As High Street rises away from the center of Camden, there was, and still is, a large white frame summer hotel called the Whitehall Inn. It sprawls across a broad lawn rimmed with fir trees and wild roses, its long porches sleepily watching the bay. It was there in the summer of 1912 that Norma Millay took a job as a waitress.

Since she’d never worked as a waitress before, I asked her why she had taken the job.

“
Mother said I could go. And, well, I guess as always, it would be nice to make a little money. And, too, it was just as a sort of lark.… The guests got interested in me. What beautiful hands I had, when I served from the tray, or the way I spoke. Anyway, soon they asked me about myself and my family. I said I had a sister who was a poet. I said she had a poem in
The Lyric Year
.”

Norma remembered that at the end of August there was to be a staff party, a masquerade dance. “And they said, will your sister be there? and I said I didn’t know. But I got the feeling that they were … what? well, interested in us. I made up my mind that Vincent was going to come.

“You understand, Vincent had been out of school a long time. And we
knew
she was a genius. She was shy. She went with her girlfriends. So, Why should I go to a party for the help? Oh, God, yes, it just sounded ridiculous. But I decided I would go and I would bring Vincent up. I had to work to bring her. I told her it would be kind of fun. Kind of a lark. And we loved to dance well together. So,
Come on! Vincent!
”

But Vincent balked. From the moment Norma mentioned the party, she dug her heels in. Norma said it would be good for her to see people, to be drawn out of herself. She didn’t want to see people, she didn’t think it would be good for her. Years later Vincent would write, “Norma was … carefree, gay, gregarious and unselfconscious; I was thoughtful, intense, involved, reticent & retiring.” Vincent was also mulish. But Norma was unrelenting.

“Then
Okay!
It was—let’s see some of these funny people who come summers. I made her a little Pierrette costume, and in it with her long red-blond hair she looked about fifteen.”

Vincent wore a tiny black velvet mask with rosettes of red crepe paper at the sides where the tie was fastened. Her costume had a short, full skirt made of yards of white cheesecloth fitted smartly at her waist, with a low-cut sleeveless bodice with black pompoms down the front. She won the prize for best costume, and Norma got the prize for best dancer. Afterward, everyone, guests and help, went into the music room for ice cream and cake. Norma continued, “And for us to perform.… I said, ‘Ask Vincent to sing some songs, ask for “The Circus Rag!” ’ Vincent gave me a dirty look, the look that meant—you’ve been tattling! What are you up to? Then she played the piano and sang, jazzy and bright and quick.” Norma closed her eyes and began to sing Vincent’s song:

“You must have heard that circus rag
  Years ago when you were a kid!
Now the same old wag gets the same old gag
  Off, just as he always did.…

………

—Chorus—

Right this way, ladies and gents!
Just a quarter of a dollar, only twenty-five cents!
Step right up! Tickets here!
We make it just a quarter to a pretty girl, dear.…”

“Vincent had a deep contralto voice, you know, completely different from my own. And then she sang, ‘Who Will Go a-Maying?’ which was sweet and light. Finally, after she’d sung her songs, I said, ‘Ask her to recite “Renascence.” ’ She turned around on the piano stool and said this poem. Then it was absolutely still in that room.

“All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me.…

“Well, yes. Now things were happening very fast. The next day they had her up to lunch and I waited on her. Then they began taking us out sailing. That sort of thing. And Mother, who was nursing one of the guests upstairs at the hotel, came down and did the silver for me, so I could leave to sail. You see, we were different. We were different from all the others.”

One of the guests in the audience at the Whitehall Inn that evening was Caroline B. Dow. She was stunned by Millay’s poem, but even more by this provincial girl’s assured performance. In a diary Vincent called “Sweet & Twenty,” “Being The Extraordinary Adventures Of Me In My Twenty-first Year,” she wrote, “
If I had known then how much was to happen to me this year I would have started a diary that night.”

Wed. morning …

Miss Dow (Caroline B.) called;—dean of New York Y.W.C.A. Training School. Wealthy friends in New York who might send me to
Vassar
.

“Miss Dow wanted to come up and talk to Mother, privately,” Norma recalled. “And, of course, Vincent had to go to college. I remember Miss Dow as tall, about fifty-five maybe. As Vincent said, ‘She’s the hull ting.’ And, of course, she was.”

On September 3, Vincent’s editor sent her two snapshots, but he was still teasing her, for on the reverse of one he wrote:

(to Miss Edna Vincent Millay
from The Editor of
The Lyric Year.
with her—(his?)—best compliments!)

A tall, narrow man with thick straight black hair, sharp dark eyes, and a crooked grin is standing with his wife; in the other photo he holds their baby daughter. By the middle of the month he said that if he were a sport, “
I should wager odds on Renascence for first honors”; and he returned a
carbon copy of “Renascence” with his comments in red pencil. Too much, he felt, happened
“suddenly.”
He left it entirely to her judgment but asked if the effects of the poem wouldn’t be stronger by “allowing some of them to dawn quietly.” He closed by saying, “What a wonderful person—to have written this poem. I envy you!”

Her responses to these letters exist only in pages of undated pencil drafts, but pieced together they are clear enough to tell us how she felt. For one thing, she paid careful attention to his advice about “Renascence” and replaced the first “suddenly.” She also seems to have reworked several lines—in other words, she was able to accept his criticism. On the twenty-first, she received proofs of her poem. It was not until September 25 that he revealed he was Ferdinand Earle and assured her she would be pleased with the results of the contest. “Several have prophesied that you have the best chance for the first prize.” Which, unbeknownst to her, was exactly what he’d suggested to Torrence three weeks before.

What was she to make of this man? What did he mean “
by betting on my Pegasus?” she asked. “I know now, of course, that you meant I have a big chance to win.” But now that her hopes were high, “the disappointment, if I am disappointed, will be terrible.”

Their letters flew back and forth, and every other day Earle seemed to have some fresh delight to offer her. Would she come visit them? Would she be their friend “until you become so grand and famous that you would have no time for small fry.” He tempted her with his word pictures of New York City, of gleaming high buildings, museums, and theaters. But what he truly admitted was that

if I could believe that I have encouraged and helped you with my big clumsy venture.… And when your name is pronounced only with whispers of awe, it will be my secret pride to believe that I had the privilege of discovering your worth, before anyone else.