Authors: Nancy Milford
Would she come to New York?
She shot back, “Why, bless yuh heart, sir, I
shall
come to New York!” As for his venture, he must never call it clumsy. “Say, rather, your big, splendid venture. O, but it’s great to be a man! You made this year so … miraculous to me!”
Savoring her spunk, he wrote to her as his “
Dear Tom Boy,” admitting that “the big, central thrill of the whole affair was digging you out of oblivion.” His single note of caution fell in this letter of September 29:
I have no right to promise you a prize, as that depends mostly upon Mr. Wheeler. Aren’t you bursting to learn the November decision?—I am.
“
‘
Bursting
to learn the November decision’! My dear man, I shall
bust
long before then!” But why, she asked in all innocence, did he leave the “Saint” out of her name? “It really belongs there, and—please, sir, I need to be reminded of it!”
It was audacious of her to flirt with him this openly. She was summoning him to her, and something she’d written to him—it may have been a letter that no longer exists among her penciled drafts—caused him to realize that far more was at stake for her than he’d understood before. Their exchange wasn’t just about the contest anymore. “
I realize that you are a woman, and not the mere elf-child I let myself imagine. I am half very sorry and half very glad.… And yet, should I write to you so much? … Yes: until the fateful decision! … And then I hope to see you.”
That last phrase he put in brackets, as if the punctuation would lessen the impact of what he was telling her.
The poems had gone to the other judges that morning; he expected to know the decision in about two weeks but was honor-bound to hold his tongue. “What you read between the lines, I should not be responsible for? … Should I?” This was exactly the tone he took with her, coy and flirtatious. If it was a pity she wasn’t “an elf-child,” with whom he could tramp the city, nevertheless “you are a wonderful young woman, and a gifted poet: that is still better, even if that leaves us a little less free.” He lamely added that she was still “very welcome here by at least one member of the household, if not by the trio.” But that last phrase was a clear note of caution. She’d had two: he’d said he had no right to promise her a prize because he was only one judge among three. Now his wife had begun to read Vincent’s letters. Earle said that while he was left “glowing with wild, uncontrollable delights” by her letters, someone else “did not glow one bit!” But he couldn’t leave it at that; he wanted more.
Now, to be serious, dear Miss Millay: may I ask you, how you came to write Renascence? … How could a charming young woman of a quiet New England village write a stupendous poem, that threatens to carry away spoil from the midst of our established singers—booty they are making mighty efforts to capture?
How did you do it?
How, O how?
Millay had told him a great deal about herself, but she said remarkably little about “Renascence” itself. Only this once. And even here she said more about his effect on her:
[I]f it will make you the least bit happier to know just what your friendship has meant to me, then please understand this: the sky had to cave in on me, of course, before I could write Renascence, and I dug my man up because it wasn’t pleasant to leave him there, not because I had come up too. It was you who, in your enthusiastic “discovering,” accidentally exhumed me. Now, we won’t talk about
that
anymore.
Two days later he sent her proofs of several of the other contesting poems. But again he cautioned her, “You must promise me, dear, dear Tom Boy, never, never to write to a strange man as you have written me.” He didn’t say what she’d written that had disturbed his wife, and he admitted later in the same letter that he wasn’t really a stranger to her, that he was, even, attracted to her. He was writing to her, he said, for the sake of his own part in her future development and to protect her from herself. Couldn’t they go back to an earlier point in their correspondence, she asked, “a little bit shocked and a little bit shamed.… and—talk about the weather?” Otherwise, not only would he never meet his provocative little elf, she would never hear his Cremona.
(If you could know how—almost annihilatingly I want to hear you play that violin! Or how I would come straight back home again and be
tamed
for the rest of my life, if just for one evening I might listen to Wagner music with a man who
knew how
to love it! Savage passion! There could be no savage passion in you that would not find itself again in me! I am not big enough to love things the way I do!)
If that didn’t jar Mrs. Earle’s sense of propriety, it’s hard to imagine what would. Poor Earle. He had no idea what he was up against in trying to restrain Edna St. Vincent Millay. “But there,” she sweetly assured him,
I had not meant to say so much. It is shockingly bad form to be so unreserved. Dear me!
What will you do with me now, Mr. Ferdinand Earle,—scold me, or shake me, or—pat me on the head? (don’t
dare!
O, I
have
to giggle!)
Her letters to Earle are the most amazing mix of girlish bravado and cunning innocence. She wanted to be the wonderful young woman he’d said she was. She also wanted to be tamed, and that was something else again—something Mrs. Earle might well object to. Millay was practicing. She wanted her match in a man she could admire—a man who could dominate her and fire her imagination. But the very notion relies on the ideal of a man superior to herself, and if Ferdinand Earle was a silly, he was also, crucially, the first to try.
What he wanted, he told her on October 14, was to “
flame back into silence, leaving a trail of fire across your dreams.… I would leave you a mingled peace and unrest.” He closed this letter by asking her to remember a title, “Golden Pastoral Horn,” for “Last night it seemed to me
the
prize winner. The judges have Renascence. Would you hate me … if they snubbed you?”
Stunned, she began a letter on the fifteenth which she left unfinished in midsentence. It was wild and nearly incoherent, as she faced for the first time, after all his assurances, the fact that she could lose.
My Editor,—
I shall not hate you, no. But I shall cry. I shall cry all night long the night I get that letter, and I hope that all night long you will lie awake and know that I am crying. I wished once to make you glad in return for the gladness you had given me, and now, by the same token, I would make you wretched. I desire that you can not sleep that night for thinking of my wretchedness.
It was not just the difference between “Renascence-Honored and Renascence-Snubbed,” she told him, or between “Vincent glad and Vincent sorry”; it was the difference between five hundred dollars and nothing: “You had not thought of that, had you? I would choose not to think of that myself if I had any choice.”
This is the most telling letter in their correspondence. With crossed-out patches and paragraphs of screed, Millay moved from a diction that was almost imperious to that of a child. She was hampered not only by the immense disparity in their roles—the young poet at twenty, competing for a national honor against a judge whose contest it was (and who had the cash to put up the prize money)—but because she had believed him. Her anger and dependence are everywhere in this letter, and by its close the child voice is the dominant one:
Then what if you wrote an indiscreet letter (partly because you … didn’t know whether you dared or not, and partly because you wanted to see just what your editor would say, and partly—oh
lots
because you were only twenty) and Your Editor wrote back an indiscreet letter that made you want to baby him—tho you really couldn’t
help
it—and at the very end of it said, “Will you hate me if you don’t get any prize?”—then, why then you wouldn’t
hate
him, of
course
but wouldn’t you want to cry on him? (Please, that isn’t wicked is it? It’s just that men are so much more comfortable to cry on,—and you’re the only man-friend I have.… I haven’t in all the world one friend who is stronger than I. I need someone to make me do things, and keep me doing things, and keep me
from
doing things.
I guess I shall never see you in all this world. O, dear, I feel so l’l’ an’ small an’ all shrunkd up, I guess you couldn’t see
me
if you were here.—I’m honest ’fraid you’ have to use a big nifying glass!—I—Please, sir, I’m sorry for my badness, and will you write me a letter purpose to cry on?
V.M.
What she couldn’t have known was that Earle had written to Kennerley on the fifteenth, just after he’d written to her, placing “Renascence” second. But even then he had equivocated, “Renascence could easily deserve first honors.”
On October 15, he wrote to her again:
Feel nervous and restless, do!—
Do
keep me company! The poems are almost “judged”—the decision hangs in the balance.… I ache to know.
Faithfully,
F.E.
On October 25, 1912, Earle delivered his final choice to Mitchell Kennerley. He championed “Renascence”:
The most astonishingly beautiful and original poem in the
Lyric Year
, the poem most arresting in its vision, the poem most like a wonderful PreRaphael painting, is surely
Renascence
by Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. To me it is almost unthinkable that a girl of twenty could conceive such a work and execute it with such vigor and tenderness.… And it is with no small pride that I give it my first vote for the prizes.
In second place he chose Orrick Johns’s “Second Avenue,” with Ridgely Torrence’s “A Ritual for a Funeral” third.
Then he wrote her a peculiar letter, cut and pasted together, telling her that most “
friendships, relations, acquaintance-ships are bloodless, frigid, and stark, with no becoming drapery in the form of mystery and romantic atmosphere, with no bared elbows and throats.” He did wish he could tell her “about the prizes—the question, however, is still an open one, (shut at the outside ends!)”
She didn’t write to him for three weeks. Or, more precisely, she drafted three letters and sent none. She kept them, and she waited. Her drafts tell us how she felt as she waited:
I am asking you to return to me a letter which I, a short time ago, wrote to a friend of mine, and which you, a complete stranger, seem to have received by mistake. The letter can mean nothing to you, as you are incapable of understanding it; but to me, who wrote it in all sincerity and candor, it means much—and it annoys me to think of its being in your possession.
She gave him permission to read all of her letters to his wife, “unexpurgated. Yours to me I will return, if you like, and them, also, you can read to her,—at your discretion.” She had not been obscure in her letters to him; “possibly your translation has been purposely a little free.” Had he thought of that? He, with his “advantage over me that fourteen years have given,”
Are you trying to tell me not to make a fool of myself? Believe me, such advice could only be
needless
or
useless
.
She boiled on:
And I did
not
mean to tell you anything whatever about “bloodless friendships” as opposed to the “romantic atmosphere” of “bared elbows and throats,”—tho I am sure that bared throats are not half so indecorous as bared hearts; and I shall not forget again, have no fear that I shall. I told you I always make mistakes in men. I always do. But never the same mistake twice.
Indignantly, relentlessly, she pressed on:
I am wild, if you like; but I stayed in my burrow a long, long time,—nibbling your straws and snapping at your fingers, but always just a little out of reach. Until at last I got to trust you so much that one day I ventured out for a minute,—and you threw rocks at me. And I will never come out again.
Before she could send her letter, Earle wrote to her again: “
I say: the Prizes have been awarded.… Can you see anything by the tone of this letter? Would you feel satisfied with a very honorable mention? Would you hate me if
RENASCENCE
is entirely out of it?”
He had said she would win; he had nearly promised. They had corresponded for months now. He’d suggested very few changes in the poem—the title Anglicized, a word overused or overstressed—and she had been grateful for his attention. She’d made the changes. She’d provoked his correspondence, she’d sent him snapshots, and she wanted, she needed his attention and his support. What she had done was to seduce that support. Now she had not won first prize, or second or third. She was steeled for anything but loss.
Camden, Me. Nov. 5, 1912
This, then, is what I have been waiting for, from day to day … in such an agony as I had not known I could experience. This is the answer; this is the end. I wonder why I am not crying. My mother is crying. Did you ever hear your mother cry as if her heart would break? It is a strange and terrible sound. I think I shall never forget it.