Authors: Nancy Milford
When they met at McGlynn’s, Agnes remembered, “
She was one of the celebrities. And, well, I think she liked it. She had done something. She was special. She wasn’t really pretty, she had pale red hair—but there was a quality—she was luminous, as if there were a light behind her. That must sound corny. But she was magical and luminous. I felt it. Everyone did.”
When the English department arranged for her to take a sophomore course in Old English with the distinguished scholar Christabel Fiske, Fiske started right off by lending Vincent the edition of
Morte d’Arthur
she had edited. Her German teacher, Florence Jenney, never forgot the first moment she saw her that fall: “Running footsteps overtook mine on the path between Rockefeller Hall and the Quadrangle, and a slight figure paused beside me. I had noticed especially that pale, eager face and gold reddish hair in a large section of Beginning German, and remembered that she signed her papers ‘Vincent Millay.’ ‘I just wanted to say something to you,’ a rich, vibrant voice began. ‘I am going to love German. I know my work has not been very good yet, but it is going to be. By Christmas I shall be the best in the class.’
“She was, easily. And by Thanksgiving, not Christmas.”
But Miss Jenney also noticed that Millay had what she called “a startling … instinct for self-protection.” To survive at Vassar, she would have to do well. It wasn’t only that she was twenty-one years old among girls four years her junior or that she had more academic conditions to work off than anyone else. While she was rich in talent, nerve, and ambition, they were rich in everything else. That mixture of self-assertion and her need for acceptance was apparent from her first letters home.
All the girls here at McGlynn’s, about 30, like me, I know.… they all want blankets like mine, and—and, fo’ de Lawd’s sake listen——they
make fun of me because I have
so many clothes
!!!!
Shan’t you die.
What mattered was not just that she belonged at Vassar—despite flunking two exams—but that she was not being outclassed. Even her voice was shaped to distinguish her, for while she was one of only two New Englanders at McGlynn’s, Vincent said, “She talks just like everybody in Camden, you know.
And I don’t
.” It wasn’t the first time an ambitious, poor girl was careful that her accent not betray her.
One of her classmates, Lydia Babbott, whose mother had been Miss Dow’s roommate at Vassar, remembered quite clearly that Miss Dow had asked her father to help the young poet go to college: “ ‘
Frank, you’ve got to send her. She is superb and Vassar will be proud.’ Well, my father listened, and she entered college when I did.” Lydia Babbott remembered, too, that her father spoke to Charles Pratt, “but I’ve no idea if Uncle Charlie paid any of her board and tuition. It was only five hundred dollars then.” That $500 would have broken the Millays.
In a fundamental sense Millay was in disguise. The strain was apparent in her correspondence home. Lunching at the president’s house on one of Miss Dow’s early visits, Vincent again stressed, “Miss Dow doesn’t give anything away.
Miss McCaleb knows.… but you’re glad of that, aren’t you. I am. She kissed me Hello right before ’em all, to show ’em she loved me, and then she kissed me good-bye just only before me, to show
me
she loved me. She’s a perfect darling. But my mother needn’t be jealous.
When Norma asked if she was writing, she told her she had very little time, “but the fear is quite gone that college will spoil me for the desire to write. You see I am really too old to change very much in essentials.” Mostly she was too tired to write, and she admitted their letters to her
were “about all that keep me here. You see I miss you all as much as you miss me, and while you have some of us, so to speak, I haven’t any of us.… Perhaps I oughtn’t to admit that everything isn’t just perfect,—but you’re my family, and I don’t know who else I’d say it to, or could.”
The previous spring at Barnard, she’d been so uncomfortable at a luncheon, “let in by a butler & ushered & announced!,” that she could barely touch her food:
I was so nervous that I couldn’t hold anything in my fork, but I could manage a knife real skilful so I buttered my muffin & ate that … and so help me that’s all I could get, but I strategized & “toyed with my food,” and anyway its classy not to eat any-thing.
She depended on her voice to cover her uncertainty. She called it “wonderful voice control,” and she spoke, she said, “in a soft, slow way that was not the least bit hysterical.” But the strain of constant performance sometimes made her ill. When she got home, she was “weak as a kitten, had to go right to bed.” This was close to panic.
When Arthur Ficke sent her his new book,
Mr. Faust
, she told him she was kept so busy studying she couldn’t even open it until Christmas break. “
So Vassar College has won!” he teased her in verse. “It has tamed the wild spirit of Vincent Millay!”
Now uttereth she no more little songs with wings,
But trafficeth with wisdom only.
O melancholy days of Vincent Millay’s downgoing …
The mighty have fallen.
That was too much for her to bear:
Don’t worry about my little songs with wings.… I hate this pink-and-gray college. If there had been a college in
Alice in Wonderland
it would be this college. Every morning when I awake I swear, I say, “Damn this pink-and-gray college!
It
isn’t
on the Hudson. They lied to me. It isn’t anywhere near the Hudson.…
They trust us with everything but men.… a man is forbidden as if he were an apple.
But girls were not. They were there in abundance. Vassar was more like an operetta than Lewis Carroll, with plots and counterplots among girls who were rivalrous, homesick, secretive, passionate, and four years younger than she.
One of the girls was teaching Vincent to dance the newest and most fashionable steps: “
I let her lead me & do just as she wants me to & she will never know just how little I did know to begin with about the Fish-Walk & the Horse-Trot & the Figure-Eight & the Open Boston & the Heavenly Rest.” They were to have a Halloween ball at McGlynn’s. There were about twenty girls, of whom ten would have to go as men. “Lucky I’m little, and
have
to be a girl!”
Flirtation was a practiced art, and Millay was adept at handling the girls. Her room was at the head of the stairs, and as she was dressing,
I heard a masculine giggle & looking down saw
Jack …
watching me. The
best
looking boy.
“You horrid thing,” said I. “I shall close my door at once.”
“No, you don’t,” said he, “I’m coming in.”
“You can’t,” I screamed, “it’s not proper!—All right then, come in, and see if I’m all hooked up.”
“Jack,” who was Margaret, stood there gazing at Millay—who wrote home that without either her petticoat or her corset, “Honestly, you
don’t know
how cute & slim I look.”
The girls dressed like men tucked their hair in their collars and posed with chocolate cigarettes stuck jauntily in their mouths. Millay refused the chocolate, afraid she’d give herself away. “
They give themselves away, all right.… Catherine Filene, who took the flash, is in the middle of the other picture. Doesn’t she make a wonderful boy?—Had two dances with him and he wanted another. Really almost convincing. Just look at the way she’s standing. She ought to have been a boy.”
When Millay sent the snapshots home, she concentrated on Catherine Filene: she was bossy, she was domineering, she was “too executive”; “
Catherine can’t do a thing with me … because I don’t let her see that I resent her manner of Authority, I just plain do as I like and don’t notice her. She’d give a lot, I think, to have me chase her round. I don’t go near her.” But that wasn’t entirely true. She paid close enough attention to the intrigues among the girls at McGlynn’s to test her own powers, and she was becoming masterful at these skirmishes.
You see I interest her. And she’s so jealous of me really and of my friendship with Katharine Tilt that she isn’t quite smart enough to keep it to herself.
Katharine T. has a darling room on the third floor. The stairs begin right at Catherine Filene’s door so she’s pretty likely to know when I go up there. If she sees me in the hall she watches to see if I turn towards my room or towards the stairs. One night I came along in my blanket bathrobe with some books in my arms and started down the hall.
“O-ho!”
said Catherine Filene. “Where are
you
going?” “Where do you s’pose?” said I. And tramped up stairs. You see, it bothers her. Sometimes she comes up when I’m up there—knows I’m up there—and says, “O, I
beg
your pardon! Perhaps I interrupt.
You two
turtle-doves
!
” And there you are. She’s a handsome thing, very boyish, deep rough laugh, but the sweetest, most charming smile when she wants to be decent for a while. Really a fascinating type. Isn’t she
wonderful
in that picture? Couldn’t you die in her arms?—Fancy two dances with her in that rig and a third one
begged
and almost sworn about right after we’d finished the second! She actually made love to me, the devil, in her uninterested, insolent way.
But although Vincent insisted in this letter, which is to Norma, that she finds the girl completely resistible, she was intrigued—challenged, even—by her directness as well as by her insolence, which was provocative. When Millay’s friendship with Katharine Tilt began to falter, she was not above flirting with Catherine Filene to make Tilt jealous. She did it consciously, and she knew exactly how.
If in her letter to Norma there was a sort of begrudging respect, the tone in her diary, “Lest We Forget,” where the following entry was made just three weeks later, was entirely different: “People, my friends & hers, are very much interested in a seemingly new friendship which has sprung up between Catherine Filene & me. Handsome great big child! … People are very disturbed.”
The following day, her entry was even clearer: “Went down town with Katharine Tilt.… Told her about Catherine Filene purposely to make her jealous, because she’s been telling me how much she likes somebody else. It worked beautifully.”
The next day was Sunday, a “Horrible day” she wrote in her diary. And why? She and Katharine Tilt gave a tea, and Agnes Rogers, her “sophomore,” among others, came to it. Afterward, “I just came home & howled over a little thing Katharine did. However, Catherine Filene came in & consoled me beautifully.”
The following day, December 8, she said that Katharine felt “nervous” about what she’d done, and although whatever it was goes unsaid, this doesn’t: “She will feel nervouser before its over. And it will be good for her.”
When the girls at McGlynn’s put on their last dance before the Christmas break, Vincent wrote in her diary, “
Wore my tan satin with the train & not much of anything else & felt just like dancing. Danced with Catherine Filene most of the time. Katharine Tilt came upstairs with me & asked to unhook me. I let her. It’s all working wonderfully.”
The next night they danced again, this time in Catherine Filene’s
room—four of them, and no Katharine Tilt: “
Heaps of fun. Love to dance. And Catherine makes a wonderful man. She was
swell
-looking & swell
feeling
last night!”
Then it was over—a dash home for the holidays with an invitation in hand to visit the Kennerleys. There’s barely another mention of Catherine Filene. But it was a crucial test of her power to attract, and she was willing to provoke jealousy as an antidote to a crush.
Christmas break provided her with another chance to sharpen her wiles: Witter Bynner and Arthur Hooley would both be spending part of the holidays with the Kennerleys in Mamaroneck. This time, meeting Bynner’s train, she arranged herself against the door of the Kennerleys’ car—“sort of leaning out & when I caught sight of
Him
I leaned out taller & just looked at him & when he caught sight of me he—he—he just
gusp
& lunged right at me &—oh, it was wonderful—he didn’t take his eyes off me a minute,—I apologised for my decolleté”; by which she meant she hadn’t worn a petticoat.
It was nearly time to dress for dinner when they arrived, but Bynner asked her to stay and talk to him. He asked her if she didn’t have a book of her poems for him to read. When she said no, he said:
“To think that
every
thing you do is good, I wish you’d write something ordinary,” & I told him Oh no he didn’t.
I
have
got a beautiful speaking voice & somehow I knew I could really interest Witter Bynner with
that
quicker than with almost anything else. He really was fascinated listening to me. (Sounds so silly, but gosh! its [sic] dead earnest.) … Oh, girls, I have
wanted
Witter Bynner to really—
put down his paper & look at me
—& now he has.
On her last night, Arthur Hooley, who had stayed up after everyone else had gone to bed, delighted her with a compliment. “I’m not in love with him, exactly,” she wrote home. “I love him, he’s such an old dear, & half the time such an old bear … but I’m really in love with Witter Bynner, & not quite so hopelessly as I used to be.”