Savage Beauty (20 page)

And then she did: “I’ve got it. O, my heart! The
sweetest
thing. Makes you think of summer & iced tea on the lawn & men & girls & once in a while a breeze. I am—I am languorous in it.”

On the morning of April 8, Millay received a check from Mitchell Kennerley for two of her poems, “Journey” and “God’s World,” which he had taken for
The Forum
. “$25.00!!! O, girls!!!!!” she crowed, “O,—Glory!” It was the first money she’d earned from her writing since
St. Nicholas
, and she sent the money home.

She’d initially sent the poems to William Rose Benét at
The Century
, who had returned them, telling her that although he hated to lose them, “there were several obscurities in them” that she’d have to clear away. Writing home that “some of the obscurities happened to be the best things in them, I sent them off just as they were to the
Forum
, so the
Century
has lost them for good.” The victory was delicious. She asked her mother:

Promise me, please, that with some of this you’ll do something to make something easier for yourself. Shoes, dear,—or have your glasses fixed if they’re not just right. Please, please, do something like that. And I’d like it so much if each one of you would get some little tiny silly thing that she could always keep. But that’s just a whim; the other isn’t.

Cora wrote back that she’d use that “dear money” to pay off old bills, but the last dollar was hers. “I want to be a pig; I want the ‘Lyric Year’ for my own out of it.”

But the academic load at Barnard made Millay edgy about finding any time to do her own writing. What was it going to be like at Vassar for four years if this one term was any example? “Here register I my first doubt.” By the end of the month she was even more despondent: “
I am going crazy with the poems that I simply can’t get time to write. It isn’t a joke. I can’t study now, I’m too old; I ought to be through college at my age, and I know it, and I have other things to think about, and
I can’t study
.”

Yet that spring, when Mitchell Kennerley offered to bring out a volume of her poems, she balked. To her family she wrote that she didn’t think it “a very wise thing.” In her diary, she said plainly, “I don’t think it feasible.” It was one of the canniest decisions she could have made. Other than “Renascence” and two or three lyrics, she didn’t have a strong selection of poems on hand, and she knew it.

Both “Journey” and “God’s World” were begun in Camden, and “Journey”—at least in the pencil draft that exists—lacked the final six lines that made it her own. Midpoem the voice changes abruptly; she returns to
the natural beauty of the Maine landscape to draw sustenance from it. If the poem had stopped short there, it would have lacked the conviction she brought to her published version: that only through the senses could she transform and take possession of a world rightly hers.

Ah, could I lay me down in this long grass
And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind
Blow over me—I am so tired, so tired
Of passing pleasant places! All my life,
Following Care along the dusty road,
Have I looked back at loveliness and sighed;
Yet at my hand an unrelenting hand
Tugged ever, and I passed. All my life long
Over my shoulder have I looked at peace;
And now I fain would lie in this long grass
And close my eyes.

Yet onward!

Cat-birds call

Through the long afternoon, and creeks at dusk
Are guttural. Whip-poor-wills wake and cry,
Drawing the twilight close about their throats.
Only my heart makes answer. Eager vines
Go up the rocks and wait; flushed apple-trees
Pause in their dance and break the ring for me;
Dim, shady wood-roads, redolent of fern
And bayberry, that through sweet bevies thread
Of round-faced roses, pink and petulant,
Look back and beckon ere they disappear.
Only my heart, only my heart responds.

Yet, ah, my path is sweet on either side
All through the dragging day,—sharp underfoot
And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs—
But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach,
And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling,
The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake,
Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road;
A gateless garden, and an open path;
My feet to follow, and my heart to hold.

When “Journey” appeared in the May issue of
The Forum
, she heard nothing from home about it. She wrote plaintively:

It isn’t anything great, I know. But Miss Rittenhouse says it is nothing I need be ashamed of even tho it does come after
Renascence
, that some of it is wonderful and a lot of it is lovely and it’s all good. So there now.… I’m joking. I know you read my poem before I came out here. But you might have said something. Bincent is “coldin’.”

That prompted a quick response from her mother; of course she liked it, it was “
beautifully written, but at first it hurt me as it seemed to me that it told of how very much you had always been deprived.”

She received the proofs of “God’s World” on the heels of the publication of “Journey,” and she was glad Kennerley was rushing them right along “
because this is the better poem,” she wrote her mother. “This poem, the one with the ‘burning leaf’ in it, you know, looks lovely in print.”

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
  Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
  Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
  But never knew I this:
  Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

2

William Tenney Brewster’s composition classes were a legend at Barnard, where he was professor of English and provost of the college. Tall and lean, he would sit with his feet coiled about the wastepaper basket, his fingers toying with a rubber band as he read his students’ papers in a flat, dry voice. His comments about Millay’s work, which were written in a cramped hand on the back page of her themes, were guarded and almost always on mark. He’d given “Laddie,” about the death of the family dog, a B and said it verged on sentimentality. When she trotted out one of her old
St. Nicholas
poems, “Friends,” he wrote “Browningesque” and gave her a B. And in one of her less inspired themes, when she wrote, “Why
should
it be imperative for me to write a theme? System is a fine thing.… But even if I were a literary genius (which Heaven forbid)
would
I be able to—er—give, as it were, whenever System might choose to wiggle her finger at
me? Decidedly not,” he marked “coy” and added to his B, “Pretty good for the sort; but capable of improvement.” But he continued to encourage her, and when he admired her short-story writing, she was “elated.”

Yesterday I got an A on an English theme … [he] says there’s no reason why I can’t make a living writing short stories, if I keep at it.—I have imagination, humor & a
wonderful
command of language (which he doesn’t see where I ever
got
, if you please.…)

She was thus all the more disappointed on May 13 to get a B for a long story called “Arline,” which she had written immediately after he had praised her so highly. Strangely, he made no critical remarks on her paper at all. The story was laden with autobiographical detail, direct and without the coyness or sentimentality he sometimes found in her work.

It opens with a young girl falling asleep in her room when she overhears the voices of her mother and a male friend talking about her. Her mother calls out, asking if she’s asleep; she’s not, and the man enters her room to give her a good-night kiss. It’s clear that she does not like him, but she lies on her back obediently, pursing

her soft child-mouth into the pout which had always seemed to bring satisfactory results. She did not wish this man to speak of her afterwards as a little girl who did not know how to be kissed.

A groping hand fell on the pillow, then on her hair, but Arline did not move. The bed creaked as the man sat down, and the clothes, dragged down by his weight, tightened across her body. Still she did not stir. Hot lips touched her cheek, the corner of her mouth, then—

In fury, Arline forces his face from hers. She screams for him to get out of her room, slaps him twice, and, slamming the door behind him, locks it. Then she hears her mother talking to him. “ ‘You know Arline
isn’t
just your style,’ she heard her say in a soft, ironical drawl.”

After he leaves the house, her mother tries her door and, finding it locked, calls to her to open it. Arline refuses. Her mother says she’s sorry. She warns her mother, “If you ever let another man into my bed-room I’ll kill him. And after this anybody who wants to get in will have to knock. You too.”

The second chapter begins with the arrival of Arline’s father, Jim, whom she adores. He calls her “Nuisance,” and she tells him she loves him, but she will not kiss him.

In fact, she never kissed anybody. Sometimes, rather than hurt or embarrass a visitor whose osculatory intent was unmistakable, she would lift her face and submit passively. But this had never been and would never be her form of greeting.

Her mother calls her cold-blooded because of her reserve, but she isn’t. “Her seeming coldness was always either one or the other of two things,—intense repression, or passionate reserve. Never, in anything, for one instant, would she be indifferent.”

The father in the story has been away for some time, and Arline wants him to tell her what he’s been doing.

To her mind he was composite of all manly virtues and graces. Because he was a little inclined to be stout and had light hair, she disliked thin, dark men. His broad, good-natured laugh prejudiced her invariably against a man who cackled. And because he was “in the insurance business” the insurance business was the only business in which to be. He was a good-looking man, with a boyish fairness of skin and clearness of brow which gave him the appearance of being younger than his wife, though he was in reality a little older.… Also, he was possessed of an unusually keen brain and a disinclination to exert himself. Men who knew him well spoke of him as “a man who might be most anywhere if only he were not so damned lazy.”

It is hard to imagine a clearer assessment, or a more affectionate description, of Henry Millay. Later, Arline would grow “to deplore” her father’s lack of energy, but she never ceased to adore him. Whereas the mother, who compromises her daughter, is judged far more sharply:

Her mother was not lazy. She was indeed, in her own way, exceedingly energetic. True, she never rose before ten, often not before noon, and always had her first cup of coffee in bed, prepared and served by Arline, who was always up by seven, and whose coffee was excellent.

This was a story Vincent never sent home. But what was really going on here? Did any of this actually happen to Edna Millay when she was a girl?

Gingerly, I mentioned the story to Norma Millay. Had she read it?

“
Mother should have been more careful.”

“Is it true, then?”

“Oh, my dear, it’s one of Vincent’s stories.”

“But you just said—”

“What I said and what I know are two very different things. I read the story up there in the study just as you did.”

“It would make a world of difference if she—”

“If she what? Vincent was a little prig, you’ve seen that by now.”

“This isn’t about being a little prig.”

“No, it most certainly is not.”

There was a long pause. Norma asked me to put another log on the fire.

“Of course Mother must have had visitors, she was still a young woman.” The wood caught fire. “I don’t know. How would I know?”

“You were there.”