Savage Beauty (18 page)

CHAPTER 9

S
he arrived in pigtails at seven in the morning of February 5, 1913, having forgotten her hair combs in the rush to leave Camden. “Fancy!” she wrote in her diary. “After all these years to strike New York in braids!” She wore a brown suit and hat, with shoes, ribbons, and bag to match. She looked, she hoped, elegant.

She looked, in fact, about twelve. Mary Alice Finney, an aide to Miss Dow who had come to meet her, never forgot Millay standing in the middle of Grand Central Terminal awestruck, like a little girl, and “wearing a broad-brimmed hat not at all in the fashion of the day, totally unaware of that fact.” Finney whisked her off to Huyler’s for an icecream soda before taking her to the National Training School for the YWCA on Lexington Avenue and Fifty-second Street, where she was promptly put to bed and told to rest. But how could she when from her eighth-floor window the entire island of Manhattan seemed to rise before her, sun-shot and shimmering? She wrote home at once that she could “see
everything
”:

 … buildings everywhere, seven & eight stories to million and billion stories, washing drying on the roofs.… Children on roller skates playing tag on the sidewalk, smokestacks
and
smokestacks, and windows and windows, and signs way up high on the tops of factories and cars and taxi-cabs,—and
noise
, yes, in New York you can
see
the noise.

That first afternoon, she registered at Barnard College, where she was to prepare for Vassar because her high school courses had been woefully inadequate. She took two courses in English, one in French, and another in Latin. When asked on the application what her occupation had been since leaving high school, she wrote, “Typewriting.”

Miss Dow had not been idle. There was more than $1,200 deposited in Millay’s account at Barnard, and she had persuaded Dr. Talcott Williams, the director of the new School of Journalism at Columbia University, to write to the registrar at Barnard presenting Vincent Millay as a nonmatriculating student in his school, so that her entrance exams had been waived. “
You see,” Vincent wrote home later, “thanks to the pulls I had, I am a very, very irregular
Special
.” The week before her arrival, Williams had written to the dean of Barnard, Virginia Gildersleeve, “Let us by all means have Miss Millay here and handle her gently.” Earlier he had written Miss Gildersleeve that not only had Miss Dow already raised $400 toward Millay’s education, but “my experience has been that Miss Dow uniformly completes what she undertakes.” There was no doubt at all that she had undertaken Vincent Millay.

Caroline B. Dow was stout, proper, and generous; unmarried and childless and now in her late forties, she respected order and believed in restraint and self-discipline. She cherished the arts and was deft at organizing people on behalf of the things she believed in, whether the YWCA, the Poetry Society of America, the MacDowell Club, or Vincent Millay. Having no use for disorder, extravagance, or wastefulness, she was a natural administrator.

From the beginning, Miss Dow suspected a certain instability or wildness in her young charge, which she felt was due to her environment as much as to her immaturity. It was, she said, “in a certain sense … an asset, but it must be offset by very careful plans as to her personal surroundings.” In other words, Vincent Millay was to be cautiously nourished. Miss Dow felt that to have just missed
The Lyric Year’s
prize was good medicine for her character: “She will be distinctly more on her mettle to reconstruct and polish her work.… Successes are not always the best tonic for young authors or artists.”

Within a week of Millay’s arrival, Miss Dow was writing to the registrar at Barnard with a certain proprietariness:

I appreciate keenly the kindliness which you have shown my little protegé; she needs guidance, and I am glad to have my responsibilities shared.

I am so anxious that she should not be spoiled of which I think there is some danger.

Yet she had far more than she’d bargained for in Vincent Millay, who that same week was writing gleefully, “
Well, here I am in New York! at last! I have heard a Philharmonic concert, I have ridden in the subway, I have bought a tie on Fifth Avenue.… I have been so very good that I haven’t yet been sent home.”

The only person Edna St. Vincent Millay was dependent on was Caroline Dow, and with
Miss Dow she intended to be careful. “Miss Dow,” Vincent wrote her mother, “is going to start right in getting me everything I need.” She would provide for her charge, and she would orchestrate her introduction.

Well, now I’ve come to yesterday. We bought everything at Lord & Taylor’s, and this is what we bought.… a pair of black satin pumps with eleven story heels (New York slippers you see) and big rhinestone buckles; rubbers to fit (it was sort of wet and I would have to cross the pavement to the cab, and back later), white kid gloves, sixteen button length way up ones, and a scarf, a beautiful soft big white silk one with pale yellow roses in it—didn’t I
drape
it tho!—as it wasn’t an
awful
dress affair, we decided that Non’s yellow would do if I wore the scarf all the time to cover where it’s too big in back.

Then she listed and described in detail three tailored waists, two shirts, two collars, six plain linen handkerchiefs, “a perfectly heart-smashing loose coat of dark grey chinchilla with a rolling collar of a lighter plush,” a hat of grey velour, “when I get them both on I look like pictures you see of Senator Thing-umbob’s daughter”; a black leather handbag, and, for dress, two muslin waists with “Robespierre collars,” more handkerchiefs, silver cuff links, “and a silk (or near silk) umbrella, with a little silver maple-leaf on the handle, warranted sterling.”

No wonder her mother wrote right back, “
O, it seems too wonderful to be true to have Miss Dow take such a dear interest in my girl. Still,” she added cautiously, “I hope this out-put now cannot hurt the Vassar fund; but, of course she would not allow it to do that would she?”

Miss Dow understood clearly the importance of introducing Vincent to people who could help her. She was supposed to impress them, and she did. She wrote in her diary after one such event, “I think Miss Dow may have been pleased with what they may have said of me after we had talked a little while,—for, later, she let me have two cups of tea, Russian tea, lemon tea, Samovar tea.” In her letter home she was even clearer:

I met two of
the
Vassar people, a Mr. Babbott and his daughter, Miss Babbott.… They of course were not introduced as
the
Vassar people, but from the way Miss Dow carried me off to meet them I knew they were important. I made a
decided
impression on them both, I flatter myself, but more especially on Mr. Babbott, who just simply fell in love with me.… I guess you needn’t worry about the money giving out. And anyway Miss Dow knows what she’s about.

Norma could hardly believe Vincent’s luck:

Isn’t it perfectly dear and just-what-I-hoped-for the way Miss Dow is taking you around with her. She is certainly wonderful alright. Perhaps she had some little pride, don’t you know, when she was the one to present you to Monsieurs Class, Society, and Brains.… More Notes on the volume

Early Life in the City

Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Only Norma asked the one question that struck home: “Does Miss Dow like you for yourself yet? Better all the time?”

On the evening of February 11, Vincent was taken to the MacDowell Club by Miss Dow, who was its treasurer. “
Only you, my family,” she wrote conspiratorially, “must ever know the whole truth” of what had happened that night. She’d nearly fainted and had to be helped out. “Some people think today that it was the too-warm room, Miss Dow thinks it was the excitement of New York, the maid who spread me out on the window-ledge in the (I think) smoking-room, thought that perhaps my corsets were too tight,—but it was none of these causes.” Her shoes pinched.

Don’t try to imagine it, you never
could imagine
your slippers hurting you so that right in the middle of a speech all at once your head flopped right over and the sweat started out on your upper lip and the dear grey-haired lady in black who sat next you put her arm about you and led you out of the room.

After a swallow of whiskey to revive her, she lay on a sofa near the entrance to the room, where she could hear what was being said. “I sat on my right foot and stuck my left foot down on the floor where it would look cunning if anybody should happen in.” Just then Miss Dow asked if she felt well enough to meet Edward Wheeler,

A tall, rather slim, dark man of about forty-five, with hair slightly greyed and perfectly beautiful eyes—one of the handsomest men I ever saw in my life, simply glorious in evening dress, came trotting up with Miss Dow. O, dear, he didn’t trot! He—he appeared!

Miss Dow said, “Mr. Wheeler, Miss Millay.” I didn’t get up—I was an invalid, so I just
leaned
up and held out a long arm—
you
know the way, and he held out a lovely warm hand and looked down at me and said, “Is this Edna St. Vincent?” And I said, “It is. Is this Edward J.?” Of course that’s what I said.

And after a minute or two of more-or-less talk, he said——and mother dear, don’t let this make you regret anything, much—just be glad of the glad part—

“Miss Millay, my conscience has troubled me not a little since the
Lyric Year
came out. I fear that if the awarding was to be done again I should have to include
Renascence
among the first three. I’m afraid I wasn’t in just the right mood the first time I read it,—or the second time. It grows on me. It’s a wonderful thing.”

Mother dear, I know just what you can’t help thinking, and especially if you’re not having nice things to eat—I
worry
awfully about you all sometimes—but you
do
want me to tell you just what Edward J. Wheeler said to me the first time I met him, don’t you?

Then she wished them all good night, “Brer Bear, Brer Tenapin, ad Brer Fox,——Brer Rabbit sen his lub.”

Cora felt only pleasure at Vincent’s triumph, “
only rejoiced that our own Edward J. at last sees the light. A little ready money would have vanished like dew; but this outcry for justice for Renascence is the dearest thing that could be and means much for your future.… Regret nothing dear.” For, as they all knew, “Brer Rabbit always did get the best of it.”

The day after Millay’s arrival in the city, she had written to Louis Untermeyer, who had reviewed “Renascence” as a triumph, “Here I am! … If you sent me a note some morning, would I get it in the afternoon?” By return mail she heard not only from both Mr. and Mrs. Untermeyer but also from the poet Sara Teasdale, whom they had alerted of her arrival. “Whaddayouknowaboutthat!” Vincent wrote Arthur Ficke sassily. “The news of my arrival has
sprud clean
from here to East 29th Street! … I have been here since Wednesday and I am become a hardened citizen of a heartless metropolis.”

Ficke answered her by return mail: “
Loose in New York! How did your mother come to let you do it?” He said he could see her now, “your hair disheveled, your face slightly grimy, your eyes heavy, but your soul burning—as you recite over and over again your complete works,” and then he asked her if she had a dollar to spare, not for himself but to subscribe
to the
Chicago Evening Post’s Literary Supplement
. He called it “the most brilliant literary sheet published in America,” and Louis Untermeyer was its literary editor. In closing he warned her against the perils of becoming a bohemian.

When she replied, she assured him that she was “not so Bohemian by half as I was when I came. You see, here one has to be one thing or the other, whereas at home one could be a little of both.” She was now

prudent to the point of Jane Austen. I left all my bad habits at home,—bridge-pad, cigarette-case, and cocktail-shaker. I brought with me all my good habits,—diary, rubbers, and darning-cotton.… I run in my rut now like a well-directed wheel. Sometimes, it is true, I feel that I am exceeding the speed-limit. But I seldom skid, and when I do there is very little splash.

Sara Teasdale invited her for tea, asking that Vincent meet her at the Martha Washington, a hotel for women, where she stayed when visiting from her home in St. Louis. “
And in order that I may know you in all the crowd of women in this unlovely place, sit as near as possible to the desk.… As for me, I wear glasses and have red brown hair.”