Savage Beauty (21 page)

“I wasn’t there all the time.”

That spring, Vincent received her first invitation to visit Mitchell Kennerley in Mamaroneck. (“
They are in the
country!
—I can eat grass!”) Mrs. Kennerley formally invited her to spend Sunday, May 18, with them,

and guess who are going to be there, she thinks,—Witter Bynner & Bliss Carman!—.… I wish I had something ravishing to wear, something heart smashing, you know … But there! I wrote a poem once. Which is why they’re inviting me. How stupid I am!

Love,—Vincent.

Although she rode with Witter Bynner on the train to Mamaroneck, not a word about him surfaced in her diary. “Met another man, Mrs. Kennerley’s cousin, I think,” she wrote. “Stayed all night. Mrs. K. brought me in the machine this morning & called for me this afternoon to take me out again.… Saw the other man again.”

She returned to New York just long enough to take exams in English, French, and Latin, and the following weekend she returned to Mamaroneck. At one on Sunday morning, after dancing all night at the Kennerleys’ country club, she wrote in her diary, “I have not yet begun to regret this day & night, but I shall be sick about it in the morning. I have been intemperate in three ways, I have failed to keep, or rather to fulfil an obligation, and I have deliberately broken my word of honor.” She didn’t say what the third intemperance was.

She returned to the city for a day, but when Mrs. Kennerley called and asked her to come back to Mamaroneck, she went back to the country. “She really did insist. And I came. Fool!
Fool! Fool!
” This time she stayed for nine days.

The “other man” was Arthur Hooley. Elegant, dark, and slender, he was seventeen years older than Vincent; he was English, and he was married. He was also the editor of
The Forum
, for which he wrote under the pseudonym of Charles Vale. When they met, she realized it was he who had published “Journey” and had taken “God’s World.” And the previous January, reviewing
The Lyric Year
, he had quoted almost all of “Renascence,” calling it “a remarkable production for a girl of twenty,—remarkable for its freshness, its spirituality, its renunciation of artifice, and its unmistakable power.”

Soon she was calling him “My Englishman” in her letters home.

He’s the dearest thing. But I’m not in love with him. He says the cutest things sometimes. This morning he was late to breakfast & I stayed with him while he finished. He sits almost across from me. And all at once he began to look around for something & I said, very seriously, “Is there anything up at this end you want?”—And he answered, very gravely, “Nothing I can have.”

Then she did not write home or make an entry in her diary for three weeks. When she returned to it, it was full of him: “Borrowed a black silk bathing suit which made me glad I’m red-headed. Stretched out on the beach and talked to Him.”

They had quarreled, but “We are made up. He says I have been damned nasty. I suppose I have. I
hope
I have.” Now it was even more delicious to be together. “Tonight was lovely. I wore my white dreamy dress and walked under the trees with Him.”

This was not what Miss Dow had in mind for Vincent Millay, and on June 1 she called Mamaroneck to tell her so. “She’s heard some new cussedness about me and is about heart-broken. Damn ’em, I wish they’d keep their mouths shut.”

Still Vincent didn’t rush back to New York. She stayed another three days. “Didn’t rest much last night. Came down to breakfast looking like a ghost. Felt like dying and couldn’t do anything. He came over this afternoon. He felt like dying and couldn’t do anything. So we went off into the woods together.”

On June 4, she “Left Mamaroneck forever.… He stayed until I started. O, well!”

But it was not the end of her relationship with Arthur Hooley.
The Forum
would publish all of her poetry for the next three years, from May 1913 until May 1916—other magazines would sometimes reprint her poems, but
The Forum
would always be first.

Finally she wrote home, in a letter full of baby talk and marked by the male pronoun.

Dearest old neglected Muvver & Wump,—

Bincent he’s going to be good again once more like he used to be.… But I’ve been having such a good time that I’ve just been selfish. Besides I’ve been in love.… His name is Arthur Hooley and he’s the
Forum
’s “power behind.” So help me I
was
in love with him, for a week, and I’ve written some lovely poems which the
Forum
will never see. It’s all off and all over, since I left him wringing his hands in the station yesterday, but it was all the more acute for not being chronic (forgive it). Mother, all the people in Mamaroneck,
he
especially, think I have a beautiful voice, just talking, you know, wonder and ask if I haven’t studied voice culture, think that my voice would have been lovely on the stage,—it’s so low and yet so clear and carries so easily.… [H]e says … I’m like the English girls in a lot of ways,—my
beautiful
voice, you see, American girls don’t have ’em.

Isn’t that fun? But its all over, don’t worry.

Cora was glad to learn that “the affair with His Majesty’s subject flunked in the pram. We must keep you American, in America, even if we permit and admit the English voice is faultless.”

On the twenty-third of June, Vincent at last returned to Camden. She still had entrance requirements to prepare for Vassar in the fall, but she couldn’t resist playing. She and Kathleen spent an entire day on the Perrys’ yawl,
The Comfort
, bound for Great Spruce Head Island. There were thirty-one in the party, and they built huge fires of driftwood along the beach to make coffee and bacon sizzle, and sang until the moon was high.

George Perry, whose father’s boat it was, remembered Vincent that summer reciting “God’s World” in their living room before the fireplace: “
She had just come up from swimming on my cousin’s shore and had her hair in two pigtails down her back. It gave her a childish look, an elfin look. We’d been in grammar school together, you see, and although my aunt said there was a lot of talent in that room, I wasn’t smart enough to think it. She was just Vincent Millay wearing red pigtails and reciting her verses.”

On another afternoon at the Perrys’, Vincent turned to Norma at one point when the others had left and said quietly, “
Sister, don’t smile so much.” It was her first sharp reminder that she was moving into another world from the one they had shared as children.

By the end of June, it was clear that as a nonmatriculating student at Barnard who had not passed her entrance examinations, Vincent couldn’t count her courses toward a Barnard degree, and she couldn’t offer them
for credit to Vassar, either. Once Barnard had made that plain, Ella McCaleb, dean of Vassar, wrote back immediately:

Thank you for the statement about Miss Millay’s work. She seems to be a problem to her friends, some of whom are very anxious that she should have a regular college course in a country college before she takes up the definite work in the School of Journalism. She is surely an interesting and promising young woman, but just what she should do next year is truly an open question and one upon which I am seeking light.

When Miss McCaleb wrote to Vincent in mid-July, she said she had a larger problem in her entrance work than most of the other girls. She had to work up Latin prose composition, mathematics, the equivalent of a third language, and some ancient history. She couldn’t possibly do it all in one summer. She suggested that Vincent focus on American history and mathematics or Latin. Vincent must have written back to her in desperation or panic, for a month later Miss McCaleb replied:

Did I fail to make clear the situation about your election of courses? I gave you a choice between Latin and mathematics for the coming year because I thought you could get ready for only one.… You see it is not because of any hatred of you that this summer work is demanded but because every Vassar girl has to take certain subjects in her first year, and there is no justice or pleasure in admitting a girl if she is not ready to go on with the required work.… If you are really so desperate and ill-prepared as your letter suggests, then perhaps you have no right to try for Vassar this year—the disappointment of those who are interested in you would be nothing compared with the possibility of your attempting too much. No one wishes you to endanger either your health or your best development, but this is only a college, with pretty much the same regulations for every body, and not a great university with all sorts of
different
chances for different people.

Nevertheless, she was anxious to have Millay come to Vassar and closed by asking, “What can I do to help?”

But “only a college” was hardly the way Vincent Millay considered Vassar. A lifeline would have been more accurate. Whatever she may have felt in response to Miss McCaleb’s letter, she wrote nothing in her diary. But in the course of their correspondence, she won a crucial ally in Ella McCaleb. By September 4, when Miss McCaleb wrote to her again, Vincent had become “My dear child.” Two weeks later, Vincent was dining in Main Hall at Vassar College, a member of the freshman class of 1917.

CHAPTER 10

In some ways I’m sorry you are going to Vassar. But I guess you’ve too much sense and humor to be much hurt, and it is a fine opportunity to learn a lot of things that I daresay are of value. I am so ill-educated myself that colleges are always a bit of an affront to my self-esteem.

—Sara Teasdale to Edna Millay, September 2, 1913

S
he lived off campus in a rooming house called Mrs. McGlynn’s Cottage. The first thing she did was to take entrance examinations in algebra, geometry, and history. She wrote home immediately afterward:

It’s all right. I belong here and I’m going to stay. I’m sending Kathleen the geometry examination. Perhaps she can pass it. I couldn’t. But Miss McCaleb says it doesn’t matter. I’m admitted
anyway
, if I flunk ’em all.… So you can send my snowshoes.

At last she met Miss McCaleb. After the exams, all of the girls were to tell her how they thought they’d done.

I waited in line till my turn came and then I went in, and she looked at me a minute and then sort of smiled and said, “Well, my dear, what did you do?” And I answered, very solemnly, “Miss McCaleb, I did my darndest.” … She’s a darling, and I love her.

She had won Miss McCaleb to her just as surely as she had Miss Dow. But when classes began on September 22, Vincent learned that although she had passed geometry, “I flunked—
just
flunked” both algebra and history. She’d been certain she had passed history, “but Miss Thompson was funny & didn’t like the way I did it. She told me so. We stood on the campus an hour day before yesterday, swapping insults. We are born enemies.”

Her history exam now lies in the vaults of Vassar’s rare books library, where C. Mildred Thompson gave it a 1—, with the following comments: “No understanding of history, grand epithets.” Millay had begun by writing “I was prepared in American History at my home in Camden, Maine, in the hammock, on the roof, and behind the stove.” That was not guaranteed to win a serious young instructor of history to her side. Her examination paper was six pages long, marked by cheek and ignorance. At its close she added this note:

At precisely that point the pleasant lady in an Alice-blue coat, who I wish might be my instructor in History, requests us all to bring our papers to a close. As I know a great deal about American History which I haven’t had a chance to say, I am sorry, but obedient.

There was every reason to doubt her. Thirty-eight years later, C. Mildred Thompson, who had saved the examination and was then the dean of Vassar College, explained why she “
reckoned it as a Failure. The answers were ‘at large,’ … and did not bear any particular relation to the questions asked.” That attitude, with its saucy insolence, was signal of the success and failure that would mark Vincent Millay’s entire career—with both faculty and students—at Vassar.

Among the first girls Vincent met was Agnes Rogers, “
my sophomore … the most wonderful Sophomore there is, they say,” she wrote home. In August, Agnes had written to welcome a number of freshmen to Vassar in the fall, wondering “what sort of girl each one is from her name”; but in Vincent’s case, not wondering at all.

I am writing to you with real pleasure having just read your “Renascence” in “The Lyric Year.” It is yours isn’t it? … How very proud Vassar and 1917 will be, and how you will be pounced upon by “Miscellany” people—the “Miscellany” is the college Magazine you know.