Savage Beauty (27 page)

Vincent
.

But of course, it did matter. Being asked to leave is not the same thing as choosing to.

Money was always short at home, whereas at Vassar, Millay, who was spending her spring break at Miss Dow’s in New York, was exposed to people with more wealth than she’d ever known, and she moved among them as their guest. “
I came down Friday,” she wrote home just two weeks after her previous letter, “& Arlene Erlanger met me & took me to lunch at the Biltmore,—then her chauffeur picked us up & took us to several art galleries where we saw beautiful pictures & statues.” Her letter went on like that for pages, operas and theaters to go to, breakfasts in bed, meeting her hostess’s husband’s mother, “who
lives
, not just visits, but
lives
, at the
St. Regis .…
Judge if I enjoyed myself over the week-end.”

“Vassar was
not
a college for rich girls, then or now,” one of Millay’s classmates told me many years later. It was for the intellectual girl with a social conscience. “You see, we all wore middies, which were a sort of leveling uniform. Although it is true that one knew, if one were at all observant, that certain middies were from Wanamaker’s. Or they might be from Filene’s. And we were not permitted to board our horses on campus.”

Now imagine this girl—without a cent to spare—among the rich girls at Vassar, all of whom were preparing for the annual ball. Vincent weighed ninety-five pounds, stood five feet one inch, and, in her made-over yellow chiffon gown with its butterflies of gold and fur at her shoulders and her flaming hair, must have looked like a demented fairy out of Rackham. The astonishing thing is that she invited Elaine Ralli’s brother to be her date. Victor Ralli was no one’s idea of a prince—he was shy, hardworking, short, and swarthy—and he agreed immediately. He told her he had had to read her letter of invitation several times to make sure she meant him. He apologized in every note to her for being inarticulate. He said to be her “suitor” he’d be happy to bunk with a janitor. He was, in other words, modest to a fault. He could not have interested her at all. Although she gave her mother and sisters every detail of her dress and of the dance itself—who said what to whom about her and how many times she danced which dances with which men—she mentioned Victor Ralli only twice. The first time was to say with “relief” that he agreed to come, the second that he brought her orchids.

That May of 1916 she won the Intercollegiate prize for “The Suicide,” the writing of which had become a piece of drudgery, she wrote home (“I was so discouraged about what those critic friends of Aunt Calline said that I didn’t feel like trying to do anything else with it”). And Mitchell Kennerley published three of her poems in
The Forum
. When he enclosed the check, he told her that while the next issue would be his last, he hoped she would let him publish her first book of poems, with Arnold Genthe’s photograph of her standing among the magnolia blossoms on the dust jacket. “Then I think I shall publish no more books of poems by anyone else.”

The short lyric “Witch-Wife” was the most delightful of the poems she gave to Kennerley, and clearly something of a self-portrait.

She is neither pink nor pale,
  And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
  And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
  In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of coloured beads,
  Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
  And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
  And she never will be all mine.

Yet the sonnet “Bluebeard,” a grim parable about female disobedience, was far more revealing. Millay wrote in the first person, in the voice of the murderous king, but there are no murders here. Hers is an innocent, maligned Bluebeard, a melancholy man of secrets. It is the girl whose villainy is her intrusiveness and greed. In the original fairy tale Bluebeard is often a king and always a husband, who marries one after another of three or more beautiful young women who are sometimes sisters. He hands each young wife the keys to his castle, telling her that in his absence she may unlock any room except one. Incapable of overcoming her curiosity, she opens the forbidden door only to find a room full of clotted blood from the heads or corpses of her murdered sisters. The key is indelibly marked with blood, and upon his return Bluebeard discovers her disobedience and kills her. Sometimes she is saved by a passing knight, in other versions she is able to fool Bluebeard into not knowing she has opened the
door to the forbidden chamber. But in all versions Bluebeard is a murderous husband. Yet Millay’s is not:

This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed.… Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for Truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress;
But only what you see.… Look yet again:
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room tonight
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.

She has transformed the classic tale of Bluebeard into a story about intimacy and privacy. Here the wife’s greedy intrusiveness has violated Bluebeard’s necessary secret. Not only is he no murderer, all he seeks is a secrecy in which to hide, “lest any know me quite.” His penalty is swift and severe. But it isn’t death—“I must never more behold your face. / This now is yours. I seek another place”—it is withdrawal.

That summer, short of money as always, Cora was barely home. She was canvassing for hair work on the islands off the coast of Maine. It was a tough season; most of the summer people had plenty of hair of their own, so instead she washed it. Then the news came that Kathleen had not passed her entrance examinations to Vassar. Plucky in the face of such a blow, Cora said she was reconciled to what had happened; it just meant “
another year of systematic well arranged study.” While washing the hair of a girl who turned out to be from Vassar, Cora told her she had a daughter there and invited her to visit Vincent. “
She must be made an acquaintance and friend,” Cora suggested in her next letter to her daughter.

But Vincent no longer saw herself as a girl who had to win the good opinion of everyone at school. When she answered her mother, the tone of her letter was almost icy. Not only did she not know the girl, but “
You must not think that just because a girl goes to Vassar I want her to visit me.” Her letter was fierce:

And it doesn’t make any difference whether you wash their heads or their floors, they have nothing on us, unless we give it to them. As long as we consider ourselves their superior & they can’t get the idea out of our heads, they have nothing on us, & can’t get anything, you see. The girl is a nonentity at Vassar,—
I am not
.

You haven’t got me into any mess, dear. But you must never again invite anybody to see me unless I have said it is somebody I want to see. People can say anything they like about me & my family conditions, but they can
not
visit me unless I want them.

Cora kept this letter all her life.

3

She had a fine time senior year. She took two courses in Spanish (and became president of the Spanish Club), took English drama with President Henry Noble MacCracken and the technique of the drama with Gertrude Buck. Her play
The Princess Marries the Page
was written for that class and performed on May 12, 1917; she was the princess. She even took one term of Italian, having taken every other language course Vassar offered. And, in what was a great honor at Vassar, she was asked to write the Baccalaureate Hymn for her class of 1917, which was to be sung at commencement. She did not, however, hear it sung.

In the spring she was invited down to New York for a night at the opera and stayed overnight even though it was the end of spring break and she knew she shouldn’t. She was campused, which meant she was forbidden any additional nights away from the college. But come May, when the weather warmed up, one of her roommates, Charlotte Babcock, and some friends invited her to join them in their little red Saxon for a trip up the Hudson. She didn’t give it a second thought: she went along for the ride.
It was late, and in the end they spent the night at the house of one of the girls. The next day they stopped at the Watson Hollow Inn near the new Ashokan Reservoir, where Vincent playfully signed her name in the register. One of the college wardens lunched at the same hotel and saw Vincent’s name in the register, directly below that of a man. She thought the worst and reported her. “
The faculty,” according to Elizabeth Haight, “voted to suspend her indefinitely.… This meant the loss of her degree.” It wasn’t because Millay was suspected of staying overnight with a man that she was so harshly disciplined; she had broken almost every rule at Vassar, had thumbed her nose at the school’s authority or, worse, ignored it. Now the faculty was set to punish her, and they were in no mood to relent. Some felt she’d been excused once too often and dug their heels in.

Henry Noble MacCracken had become president of Vassar in 1915. He later recorded that Millay cut classes regularly, and while some faculty
members excused her, others did not. He called her in to reprimand her but was none too persuasive. “
I … told her, ‘I want you to know that you couldn’t break any rule that would make me vote for your expulsion. I don’t want to have any dead Shelleys on my doorstep and I don’t care what you do.’ She went to the window and looked out and she said, ‘Well on those terms I think I can continue to live in this hellhole.’ … What could you do with a girl like that?”

But this time she’d overdone it. Even President MacCracken sat tight.

On June 6, Millay wrote home; as it turned out, only Norma was there to receive her letter. “
Dear Mother & Sister,—In a few days now I shall write myself A.B.” She had, however, to tell them that something “unpleasant but quite unimportant” had happened:

Because I was absent-minded & stayed away out of town with three other girls one night, forgetting until it was too late that I had no right to be there because I had already lost my privileges for staying a couple of days in New York to go to the Opera,—the Faculty has taken away from me my part in Commencement.—That doesn’t mean just what it says, because my part in Commencement will go on without me,—Baccalaureate Hymn, for instance, or the words of Tree Ceremonies, which we repeat—& all the songs & our Marching Song.…

What I mean is this,—I can’t stay here at all for Commencement: I can’t graduate with the class,—my diploma will be shipped to me, as I told Miss Haight, “like a codfish”—& it all seems pretty shabby, of course, after all that I have done for the college, that it should turn me out at the end with scarcely enough time to pack and, as you might say, sort of “without a character.”

Her class was behind her, sending in petitions and brewing up a splendid row. “I always said, you remember, that I had come in over the fence & would probably leave the same way.—Well, that’s what I’m doing.”

She asked them not to tell Kathleen until after she was finished at the Hartridge School, where she was preparing. “This will make no difference about her. If she passes her exams she has next year here sure.” She closed with good news: Edith Wynne Matthison, an actress who was a friend of Miss Haight’s, had written to her that there might be a place for Vincent for eight weeks in summer stock, in Milwaukee.

Norma was left to tell Cora. On June 10, writing from Belfast, Maine, where she’d been born fifty-four years before to the day, Cora addressed herself to the college board at Vassar, Miss McCaleb, and Dr. MacCracken:

Dear Friends

I am Vincent Millay’s Mother, and I am here a supplicant before you.… The last I heard from Vincent, directly, was that she should graduate next Thursday.… I have looked forward to this time as a culmination of a wonderful dream. To see my girls thru High School was a feat, thought by my family and friends an utter impossibility, as I have been alone with them seventeen years with nothing save what I have earned.

She had always hoped to see Vincent graduate, she wrote, but the plan was not possible. However,