Savage Beauty (19 page)

Teasdale, eight years older than Millay, was tall, slender, and pale—even her eyelashes were colorless and gray was her favorite color—and suffered from ill health. But if she lacked what Jean Starr Untermeyer would, in her autobiography, later call Vincent’s “bewitchment,” she was a woman quick and generous in her enthusiasms. She had also written “I shall not care,” one of Vincent’s favorite poems in
The Lyric Year
, and Vincent was eager to meet her.

They took to each other from the first, and after tea they rode up and down Fifth Avenue on the top of a bus. Sara then gave Vincent a copy of her new book of poems,
Helen of Troy
, and they had dinner together and “talked & talked.”

They met several times that spring, and each time they shared their work with each other. By April, Vincent told her mother, “
I call her ‘Sara’ and she me ‘Vincent.’ … I love her.…
Here’s one of Sara’s little things
.

I hoped that he would love me,
  And he has kissed my mouth,
But I am like a stricken bird
  That cannot reach the south.
For tho’ I know he loves me,
  Tonight my heart is sad;
His kiss was not so wonderful
  As all the dreams I had.

Isn’t that perfect? …
All her little songs are like that. You think they’re going to be like something else you’ve read, but they never are.

Millay took tea with the Untermeyers in the library of their large, elegant apartment on upper Broadway. It was a spacious square room with sturdy, highly polished mission oak tables, the latest magazines displayed on top, and books neatly ordered behind glass bookcases. Vincent seated herself beneath a large table lamp. “The light made a nimbus around the little head with its loosely coiled mass of red-gold hair,” Mrs. Untermeyer observed. “We—or to be precise—they, she and Louis, talked eagerly.”

When they asked her to read, her voice held them spellbound. “I was terribly moved, almost in tears,” Jean Starr Untermeyer remembered; she had to excuse herself from the room. When Vincent left with Louis to be taken home, Jean felt that “some deep chord had been struck and vibrated still to the sheer enchantment of the verse I had been hearing.” She found herself at her desk, writing her first poem, which she called “Deliverance.” She said it had been “husbanded” by Edna Millay. It was not the first time the striking intensity of Millay’s voice or the force of her poetry had been felt, nor was it the last time she would make a woman feel both attracted and indebted to her.

Louis Untermeyer remembered Millay that first evening as “absolutely artless. She was not going to show off before me. She didn’t fawn, she wasn’t servile. I asked her to read and she did. Again, artlessly. I remember her reading, reciting, ‘God’s World’ and ‘Renascence.’ She recited beautifully. With nothing forced; she simply gladly read.”

His vision of her haunted him—her tawny, russet, sorrel-colored hair. “I had no sense of the fame she was going to achieve. I thought she was a poet for the elect. There was no other voice like hers in America. It was the sound of the ax on fresh wood.”

Vincent told her family that the Untermeyers had a “
lovely home,—three or four maids, I guess, perhaps not more than two.” She also noted that she didn’t much like “those black velvet suits that button up the front and are always partly unbuttoned” that Mrs. Untermeyer wore. By April, she was sure enough of her relationship with Untermeyer, or maybe just plain sure of herself, to write of an essay he had given her, “
Has it ever occurred to you that besides writing fairly credible verse you write rather good prose?”

Feb. 21.

Shall be grown-up tomorrow,—oh, dear! I
loved
being twenty! Good bye to this beautiful year. I somehow feel that twenty-one will be different.

Miss Dow left for a holiday at Atlantic City, and Vincent, broke and afraid to ask for money in her absence, passed her birthday at the Y dressed as Martha Washington.

Two days earlier, Miss Dow had arranged for her to attend
Madama Butterfly
, her first grand opera. “
Wish I could hear it again tomorrow night & the next night,” she wrote afterward, the last time, in her “Sweet & Twenty” book. “Memo. I did not weep. The lady who accompanied me and whom Miss Dow warned that I
might
weep,
did
weep! Well, well! I never cry at the theatre. It seems to me that I feel things far too deeply, too deep down in my heart, to—to splash on top!”

The next night, she went to the dining room wearing her hair down in a long curl. “I
won’t
be grown-up even if I am twenty-one,” she wrote in her diary. “I
love
my little black satin slippers with the rhinestone buckles. Wonder if Witter Bynner will be at the Poetry Society meeting Tuesday night.”

She was not wondering if Ferdinand Earle would be there; she knew he would be. Millay had not given him her address in New York, but his letters were forwarded to her from Camden, and she knew he was living in New York with his mother. As early as December he had written her, “Such a heap o’ trouble.… Someday you may know. But not now. Please tell nobody—I’m losing my beautiful home.” He told her nothing more, but his hints were pretty heavy, and by now she had good reason to be wary of him.

She met him for the first and only time in her life on the afternoon of February 25 at the Poetry Society, and although she recorded in her diary that she met “Miss Rittenhouse, Miss Anna Branch, Mrs. Edwin Markham, and some others,” there was not a word about Earle.

He wrote her that night at eleven o’clock:

I felt that it was hateful!—I could not exchange a few sober words with you. Did they fear I might eat you? You are truly charming and lovely enough to eat—slowly and cautiously, lest one atom escape.

Hip, hurrah, I’m off. And so you are safe.… What dull and soggy folk
“poets”
are! They need ginger and dynamite.… I wanted awfully to say goodbye, but felt I had already damaged your reputation quite enough.

Your Editor.

She said nothing to anyone about meeting him, until her mother wrote across the face of a letter to her,

What about Mr. Earle!
What about Mr. Earle!
What about Mr. Earle!

Then Vincent explained their meeting clearly:

Mr. Earle I saw and talked with only once and then only for a few minutes, at the February meeting of the P.S. of A. He sailed for Europe a day or two later. For reasons which I am sure you can understand I preferred to meet him for the first time at the Society meeting. I preferred saying “I am
very
glad to meet you, Mr. Earle” to saying “O,
we
know one another!” That is why I let him keep writing to Camden instead of giving him my address here. But in the last letter he sent me before the meeting he told me how anxious he had been to see me, so I sent him a note telling him I would be at the P.S. of A. meeting. He doesn’t know now where I am in New York.… Don’t you think I managed that rather skilfully?

I am getting a great deal more sense than I ever had before. A year ago I would have called him up in some desperately lonely fit while Miss Dow was away and had him come down. Which wouldn’t have been so very dreadful, but which isn’t the way I’m running things now.

Mama,
pat
me!

“
Witter Bynner is tall and rather thin and dark with lovely eyes and a comical whimsical mouth and a nice voice, and—whisper! a wee bit o’ a bald spot!” she wrote in her letter home. She met him at a Poetry Society luncheon and then at a party given for her by Jessie Rittenhouse. “Sunday—
My
party at Miss Rittenhouse’s”; “just a small party,” she wrote, and listed fourteen people.

Yes, I have seen and talked with Witter Bynner. He has said to me “Do you mind if I smoke?” and I have said to him, “Not in the least.” He has proffered me his cigarette case and I have said, “No, thank you.” He has raised his eyebrows and said, “O, you don’t smoke?” And I have replied, “Not here, certainly.”

The day after her party, sitting in the library at Barnard, she wrote two poems, “
If I should die tomorrow,” which, she noted in her diary, “is not as bad as it sounds” and “I’ll keep a little tavern below the high hill’s crest, Wherein all gray-eyed people may sit them down and rest.” She sent only the first one home with a note to her mother that she was not to “take it too seriously.”

If I should die tomorrow
  Perhaps I should not care
Whether today had brought me beads
  Or bells or a kiss to share.
It may be that the twilight
  Has never a tale to tell,

And I shall love the silence
  That have loved song so well.
Yet, since I may remember,
  —And how could I forget!—
This day will I keep watch for Love
  Until the moon has set.

Do you like?

Are there parts you don’t like? Do you know what I mean by “beads,” and “bells?”

Here’s another
.

I brought my little song
  And laid it on his knee;
He smiled and shook his head,—
  “What has this to do with me?”

I took my little song
  And laid it on my breast;
It stirred and ‘gan to cry,
But I hushed it back to rest.

Do you see anything in that?

She wanted her mother to like her poems, but even more than that, she wanted them to be clear, not puzzling or obscure.

There wasn’t much time for her own work; there were themes to be written, translations of Horace’s Odes to be worked out, and what she called “a merciless amount of Milton & Marvel”; her diary entries on March 20 were typical:

Did a lot of easy mending & read about 120 pages of
Paradise Lost .…
Wrote Dean of Vassar. Letters from home; wrote Norma.… Conference here today. A great many conventional people. (Don’t anybody laugh) Finished reading
Paradise Lost
. Somehow
Paradise Lost
at three gulps makes one long to spring hysterical puns. I say “one.” The one is I.

Overloaded with schoolwork, she sometimes cut classes, stayed in her room, and slept.

If, within the family, Norma was the most likely to tease her, to use baby talk to express her love for her, she was also capable of striking back if she felt Vincent was getting too high-handed. As she did when she got Vincent’s postcard about a certain tan dress. Considering the ample lists of clothing Vincent had been writing home about, it seemed to Norma “Sort of funny” that she should demand it back, “but guess if you need it you
can have it.” The dress was being made over for Norma now because Cora had thought “that you were perfectly well provided for and I really needed it. What have you done with the $10 your dad sent for your birthday? Not all squandered I hope. Think you might have bought some little dress with it. Why didn’t or don’t you? Things are supposed to be cheaper in New York than here.” Then, too, Norma was “Sick of staying in Camden Burg
all
the time meself. Bah. (graceful gesture here.) … Do you ever feel like you wanted to see Muvver, Wump & Hunkus? Don’t believe you have half time enough to get lonesome do you? Gorry I do & don’t care one dam who knows it.”

At exactly the same time, Vincent was writing to her, “
I am
dying
to come home for Easter.… This is the first time I’ve been the least bit homesick, except for scattering minutes, and I’m
dying
to come home. For one thing, I haven’t heard a word from you for a solid week (minus a few hours) and I think you might write.” For another thing, she’d had a quiz in French and her professor hadn’t asked anything she knew. “Why don’t you write, old top? You don’t like me any more now you’ve got Wump to live wid, do youse?” Their letters must have crossed.

“
I wish I hadn’t said a word about coming home,” Vincent wrote in her next letter home. “I didn’t know you’d think I really could. I wouldn’t ask to for anything. It isn’t as if the Vanderbilts were sending me to college, you know. There’s quite a lot of money, but it’s not unlimited. My opera
cloke
isn’t new. It was somebody else’s I don’t know and was fixed over for me. But it is lovely, just the same.” Then she told her sister exactly which dresses she had, which had been fixed over, and which had fallen apart. “Kathleen’s pink I’m going to send back to her. It is really too babyish & too short for me.… The tan dress, tho, dear, I really don’t need at all. I was piggish about that. I didn’t think.”

When she signed her letter “Love,” Norma came around in a rush:

Po’ ole Sephus—

Hunk didn’t mean to ’buse him. Please make up—Squeeze & make up? Yes?

At the same time as she was telling Norma about her scrupulous economy, she was writing in her diary that she’d gone to look at dresses with one of her chaperones:

Everything that is pretty is too expensive. I am
cursed
, and I know it, with a love for beautiful things. I can’t
bear
anything that looks cheap or feels cheap or is over-trimmed or coarse. I hate myself all the time because I’m all the time wearing things I don’t like. It’s wicked & it’s ungrateful, but I can’t help it. I wish I had
one
graceful
dress
.