Savage Beauty (2 page)
Authors: Nancy Milford
There was always some young person, most often a woman, sailing into her orbit and sometimes being flung out again. She called them her myrmidons. These relationships were never casual: some people stayed for years. If they’d come because of their love of Edna Millay’s poetry, they stayed because of Norma. Norma was seductive. She exercised her considerable powers not primarily for sexual attraction, although that was certainly still a part of her charm—that she flirted with being sexual—but to ply her will and to get others to do her bidding. She could be merciless.
There were hilarious scenes when guests from distinguished universities and others hoping to secure her papers were brought to their knees by Norma’s sly willfulness. She told one such gentleman he would look adorable without his glasses. No one had told him he looked adorable for a long time, and he seemed to swell with his new handsomeness. Norma suddenly leaned over, took his glasses from his face, and said, “There! Don’t you look splendid?” He laughed winsomely. Then she brought out the nude photographs of her sister she’d used as bait to lure him to Steepletop. He couldn’t see of course without his glasses. Might he have them back? “Oh, la!” Norma said prettily. “Did you think I was going to let a stranger gaze upon the naked body of my sister?”
There were only three things she said she’d destroyed. One was a letter returned to her by a no-longer-young man to whom Edna had written. Norma said it was indiscreet. Edna described his physical beauty in detail and made what she wanted clear. He was homosexual. Norma said, “Maybe she didn’t care. Anyway, he turned her down. We can’t have that.” There was an ivory dildo, which Norma admitted was difficult to burn, but she’d managed. And there was a set of pornographic photographs, taken, she thought, about the same time as the nude photographs from Santa Fe in 1926 or 1927, when Millay was writing her libretto,
The King’s Henchman
, for the Metropolitan Opera. These were of Eugen and Edna, she said. Some were taken down at the pool, perhaps shot by Eugen using a timing device on his camera. Norma guessed that Arthur Davison Ficke
had a hand in shooting them. “Vincent was already a famous poet, how could she have let these photographs of her be taken? Well, she did. Naughty Vincent Millay! I found them, and I destroyed them. For her own good! You can put that down!”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose very name her mother said was song, was shy and small and intense, almost prim. Her hair was her glory—it was the color of fire. Thick and curling, it fell to her waist. Her skin was as pale as milk. She was the firstborn, the eldest of three sisters who were as unalike and yet as close as the fingers on a hand. They had to be, for there was nothing and no one behind them but their mother. Their parents had separated in 1900 in Maine.
I remember a swamp … that made a short-cut to the railroad station when I was seven. It was down across that swamp my father went, when my mother told him to go & not to come back.
(Or maybe she said he might come back if he would do better—but who ever does better?)
This book begins at home, where all family romances start. There were in the Millay family certain stories that rose out of the past with a power and thrust that was felt through three generations of women. These were tales of romance and hardship, but, even more crucially, of female infidelity and freedom won at high cost. They were as much of a shared legacy as their red hair. Bargains were struck between mother and daughter, and acts were committed with no knowledge of the consequences that would befall them.
What I had not counted on was that creature for whom there is no name, the American Eve, dead at fifty-eight.
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
THE LYRIC YEARS: 1892–1923
THREE
Greenwich Village: Bohemia
FOUR
“Paris Is Where the 20th Century Was”
BOOK ONE
THE LYRIC
YEARS
1892–1923
One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life.… One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters … there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives.
—Willa Cather,
Not Under Forty
PART ONE
THIS DOUBLE LIFE
CHAPTER 1
C
amden, with its ring of mountains rising behind the white clapboard houses facing Penobscot Bay, made the most of its view. Nowhere else on the coast of Maine was there such dramatic natural beauty. The houses were like weathered faces turned to watch the sea. The upland meadows of ox-eyed daisies, timothy, and sweet fern, the dark green woods of balsam and fir swept to the gentle summit of Mount Megunticook, and the rock face of Mount Battie rose from the edge of the sea as if to hold it. But it was a far less generous time than the early days of shipbuilding, upon which the town’s wealth had been founded. Now even the great woodsheds along the wharves were mostly abandoned, permanent reminders of the long death of shipbuilding. The wool mills looming behind the town offered scant wages and long hours. Later in her life Edna St. Vincent Millay would say she was “
a girl who had lived all her life at the very tide-line of the sea,” but in the fall of 1904, she moved with her family into 100 Washington Street on the far edge of town, in a section called Millville because it was near the mills. It was the smallest house in the poorest part of town, but it was one their mother could afford when she brought her girls to Camden after her divorce.
Their brown frame house was set in a large field, and just beyond it flowed the Megunticook River, into which the mills sometimes spilled their dyes. The house, on low ground, could be reached only by walking down a long, rickety wooden sidewalk from the street. When the Megunticook River overflowed and the weather turned cold with no heat in the
house, the kitchen floor flooded and froze and the girls gleefully ice-skated across it. The house was close enough to their mother’s aunt Clara Buzzell, a large, easygoing person who ran a boardinghouse for the mill hands, that she could keep an eye on the girls while their mother worked. Cora wrote to her daughters often; the three little sisters felt her presence even when she was absent, which was almost all the time.
Have the baker leave whatever you want at Aunt Clara’s.… I can pay him when I see him and it will be all right. Have your washing done every week now and have some system and regularity about your work.… You can do it and you must do it … for Mama who has her heart and hands full.
She told them to make up a song to sing while they did dishes, “and think ‘I am doing this to please mama,’ and see how easy the dishes will get clean.”
“
We had one great advantage, I realized later,” Norma Millay wrote. “We were free to love and appreciate our mother and to enjoy her because she wasn’t always around, as most mothers are, telling us what to do and how to do it.… when mother was coming home, that was an occasion to be celebrated, and we usually celebrated by cleaning the house.”
They invented games to make play out of work. “Dishes were handled differently,” Norma remembered. “This game was called ‘Miss Lane’ for miscellaneous: here one of us washed, another dried, and the other did miscellaneous pots and pans, milk bottles, whatever. Vincent was mostly responsible for the songs we sang as we worked.” This one was written the first year they were in Camden:
I’m the Queen of the Dish-pan.
My subjects abound.
I can knock them about
And push them around,
And they answer with naught
But a clattering sound;
I’m the Queen of the Dish-pan,
Hooray!
Cho.
For I’ve pots and pans
And kettles galore.
If I think I’m all done
There are always some more,
For here’s a dozen
And there’s a score.
I’m the Queen of the Dish-pan,
Hooray!
But they missed their mother and longed for her return. “
At night, sometimes, we would lie in bed together, huddled against the cold, pretending to be brides, and little Kathleen would call out, ‘Goodnight, Cherest!’ in the direction we thought our mother would be.”
Not everyone in Camden agreed with the way the Millays lived. When their neighbor Lena Dunbar came to visit, she was dismayed: “For instance, they had shades at their window and nothing else. I don’t think they cared much. Well, once they stenciled apple blossoms, painted that pattern down the sides of the window. Or, for instance, they had a couple of plum trees in their backyard and they never waited for the plums to ripen, but would pick them green, put them in vinegar, and call them ‘mock olives.’ Well, no one else did that sort of thing in Camden, don’t you see?”
Emma Harrington, who taught eighth and ninth grades at the Elm Street grammar school, where Vincent enrolled that fall, never forgot her. “She was small and frail for a twelve-year-old.… Her mane of red hair and enormous gray-green eyes added to the impression of frailty, and her stubborn mouth and chin made her seem austere, almost to the point of grimness.” She kept her after school after reading her first composition to find out if someone had helped her with it. Tactfully, she asked if her mother had seen her excellent work. Vincent interrupted her: “Excuse me, Miss Harrington, … but I can tell that you think I didn’t write that composition. Well, I did! But the only way I can prove it will be to write the next one you assign right here, in front of you. And I promise it will be as good as this one, and maybe better.”
It was her determination to excel that drew attention. That first winter, she clashed with the principal of the school. He was a good teacher but quick-tempered. Vincent questioned him whenever something he said puzzled her, and she was often puzzled. He felt she was challenging his authority and began to mangle her first name. He called her Violet, Veronica, Vivienne, Valerie, any name beginning with a V but her own, which he considered outlandish. Unshaken, Vincent would respond, “Yes, Mr. Wilbur. But my name is Vincent.” One day he erupted during an exchange and shouted that she’d run the school long enough. He grabbed a book from his desk and threw it at her. She picked the book up carefully, took it to his desk, and walked out of the classroom.
That afternoon Mrs. Millay marched to the school and demanded an explanation. Trying to conclude their heated interview, Wilbur pushed her away from his door sharply enough that she nearly fell down the stairs. Dusting herself off, Mrs. Millay strode into the office of the superintendent of schools, who quickly agreed with her that Vincent should not return to the Elm Street School. He transferred her to Camden High
School, midway in the first term. She was “The Newest Freshman,” the title of her first composition to be published in the school paper,
The Megunticook
, and the youngest. Though they misspelled her last name—Milley—they would learn to correct it, for by her senior year she was editor in chief.
“
She was supposed to be a year behind, you know,” Henry Pendleton, who was in her class, said. “But her mother had—well—she had a downright fight with the principal of the school, and she took it upon herself to put Vincent ahead. Yes, she did. Now the girls associated with her more than the boys did. Their circumstances were very poor. They were a very poor family. Oh, neatly dressed and all, but their home looked … ah, well, they didn’t have, let’s say, the things that most people in Camden enjoyed.”