Savage Beauty (26 page)

“They were lovers. Elaine told me that they were.… Certainly Elaine did not know why Vincent had thrown her over, she just knew that little by little she became distant. Remote.… But she felt she had been loved by Vincent and surely she had loved her.

“Millay was a seductress. Oh, I should think so! You have only to look at those poems. I see nothing wrong with that in her. She drew people to her. She liked to draw people to her.… Elaine felt there was a ruthlessness about Vincent. That her work came first.… She always thought Vincent had an eye on herself, her future.… She felt it was her first love, and perhaps her only one: her poetry.”

While Millay had still not seen Arthur Hooley—it was nearly two years now—she began to write to him with more regularity, usually twice a month, eighteen letters in all, until the end of her junior year. She was always “Edna” in her letters to him, and perhaps she wrote to him for no other reason than what she’d admitted in her letter the summer before—that although people loved her or desired her or annoyed her, no one
spoke to her. And she needed the sound of a man’s voice in her life. He had answered her desperate letter of July, wondering if she wrote such interesting letters to anyone else. Warily, perhaps stung by the memory of her correspondence with Earle, she had said, “Not anymore.”

In early October she wrote him an extraordinary letter from Vassar, one in which she revealed what she felt not only about him but about herself.

My dear,—

Do not think that I am sorry for anything that I have ever said to you, or for any mood of mine that I have ever let you see. I am not sorry for anything at all that has to do with you.

Indeed, if you love me, it is your own affair. I shall never try to make it mine, Arthur.—But if my letters sometimes hurt you, I am glad. You shall not have me vaguely with you,—but clearly.—I want to be all that I can be to you, in a letter.

But more than that I do not wish to be.… You said once that there are so many beautiful possibilities in me that you would be loath to leave with me any memory that I could wish to obliterate. God knows, I wish no such memory of you.—But no memory that any man could leave me could really touch me.—I am sure of this. And why I am so sure, is because none has.…—Although I have been faithful to you—in my fashion. (Not that you have desired my faithfulness; or that faithfulness is in any way a virtue,—It is oftener a stupidity, I think.) But nothing has ever hurt
me
. Nothing can. In that respect, surely, I shall always remain a child.

Then she told him an anecdote with a point: a friend of the Kennerleys had once watched her and another woman together and come to the conclusion that if the other woman should marry she would stop writing, “but that under the same circumstances I would not. As far as I am concerned, that is true. No man could ever fill my life to the exclusion of other things.” She was, for someone as young as she was—twenty-three to Hooley’s forty—entirely clear about her yearnings. She was as accurate as it was rare to acknowledge.

A little more than a week later she wrote to him in an entirely different vein, marked by what was her real need for him:

Arthur—Arthur—Arthur—why am I writing to you, when I am so tired, and have so much to do before I can sleep? … My dear, do you think of me, sometimes?—What do you think?—Tell me, Arthur—just for fun.—I should really like to know.—Will you? … Why not?—
What do you think of me?

It was as if she wanted to discover who she was by her reflection in his eyes. She never gossiped with him about people they both knew—she told
him only about herself, what she felt, or thought. One would barely know, from her letters, that there was a war in Europe or that women were marching for suffrage in New York. The drama she described was entirely interior.

When she received his response she wrote, “
I shall be glad until the day I die that you wanted me, and that you told me so.” It was a sort of literary snare. “Nothing has changed, in spite of all the things you said, my dear,—only that now I am more accustomed to it, and can get on quite nicely without you.” Then her lines loosened: “—except sometimes, when I cannot get on at all.”

If it was a seduction, it was a chilly one. “
Wouldn’t you just
love
to see me again for a minute, sometimes?—I should think you would.—I would you.” The week after her birthday she made what she called “an observation, & not a confession”:

It really isn’t necessary that I should be a man, Arthur, in order to know what the word
girl
sometimes means to you.—What do you suppose the word
man
sometimes means to me?—In a place like this? … This is a strange place. I had known, but I had not realized, until I came here, how greatly one girl’s beauty & presence can disturb another’s peace of mind,—more still, sometimes, her beauty & absence.—There are Anactorias here for any Sappho.—And I am glad … that I have never felt moved to say harsh & foolish things about an ancient Greek philosopher or a modern English poet, whom the world has condemned & punished.… For up here, while some of us are thinking of the rest of us, the rest of us are thinking of you, & men like you.

It was as close to a confession as Edna Millay would ever make in writing. Arthur wrote back immediately:

Edna—Edna—

Even if you
had
cared for a girl, & even if you had given yourself (so far as you could), I do not think I should care, greatly. No. I should not. For everything would have been beautiful, to you. As to Sappho. And so, to me.

Arthur

That note drew blood—or he may have written something more that was not saved—for on March 10 she wrote him a savage little note:

Indeed,—I will be very careful from this day,—for of course you must not really love me. That would spoil it all,—& we have had such a beautiful game.—It is “no fair,” as we say, to love me.

As for myself,—God forbid that I should give my heart to a dyspeptic Englishman!

Edna
.

Three days later she withdrew her mocking words:

Arthur, promise me that you will not go away … without seeing me.… Promise me.—

—Sometimes as it is, with you there, & myself here, I want you very much,—want just to feel you touch me again, you know.—I am not willing to have the sea between us and not have been very near to you, just once more.

I am glad that you have wanted me terribly. I am very glad that sometimes you think of me at night, and suffer. You have made me suffer, too.

Last night we gave the play of which I once spoke to you,
Deirdre of the Sorrows
. It was very real to me, as always. In the last act I stood beside the grave of the man I loved, who had been killed in battle, and with his knife killed myself.—I did it with all my heart,—and when they picked me up from the floor after the fall of the curtain, I found that I had actually driven the knife right through my little leather jacket.

Her self-dramatizing here is extraordinary, and it lay at the heart of her character; her fierce instinct for self-protection was the iron in her blood. She wrote these two final sentences:

Why would it be absurd for me if you should really love me?—The absurdity would be, would it not,—for me to really love you?

—Edna
.

2

Vincent wrote home immediately after
Deirdre
but said very little about it because she’d just received the news that they would have to leave their Washington Street house. “
Never mind,” she wrote Norma,

dear old loved.… Of course I could just weep all day at the thought of leaving the house,—but I’m not going to let myself.… I can’t ever let myself
think
of that hedge of morning-glories, & the morning air coming in the bath-room window.—But we can’t help it, dear. So never mind. It doesn’t really matter at all,—if you just think of it that way.—Dear Sister, I love you very much,