Authors: Nancy Milford
It is eleven o’clock in the morning. I am still in bed. At nine o’clock Anna, my personal maid—(for all I ever see her doing for anyone else) awakened me with my breakfast. She came in with the tray—silver coffee-things, & fruit, & bacon and an egg—(God forgive me if you are even now hungry!—I will send you five no,
one
dollar I wish I could send ten)—and little sticks of toast rolled up in an embroidered napkin, & a vase of hot-house flowers. This she set down on the bed. Then she closed the windows, saw that the register was open, brought me my negligee & helped me into it, propped pillows behind my back, brought two hair-pins from the bureau for me to pin back my hair with, put my cigarette-case, holder, & matches within easy reach—all this without a word from me except Good-morning—then asked if there were anything I would like, & left me, softly closing the door behind her.—I swear to you I am not inventing a word of it; & that is the way it happens every morning!
Mitchell Kennerley was going to publish her just as handsomely as he had promised. Fifteen copies of the first edition were printed on Japan vellum, a thick, creamy handmade paper whose edges had been trimmed to look as if they had been torn. The jacket copy is worth quoting: it reads like a declaration of Kennerley’s feelings about her:
Miss Millay’s poems have a remarkable freshness, sincerity, and power. They do not depend upon curious and involved artifice, upon waywardness of method and metre, upon the presence of what should be absent, or the absence of what should be present. They do not avoid rhythm and music as dangerous intrusions in modern poetry. They do not present uncouthness, or mere triteness, as strength. They are not the facile outpourings of one form of shallowness, nor the curt trivialities of another. They deal, as poetry should deal, primarily with emotion; with the sense of tears and of laughter, in mortal things; with beauty and passion; with having and losing.
He gave her, however, only $25 of the promised $500 advance. By now she was becoming desperate for funds.
Only Caroline Dow would have given Edna Millay a personal account book—“Five cents put aside every day will amount to $182.50 in ten years”—and expected her to keep it. She did, for one month. The first entries in the mud-colored book are arduously recorded in her most careful script.
At the beginning of October 1917, she had $75 on hand, the $50 from Mrs. Hooker and $25 from Mitchell Kennerley. But her expenses mounted quickly; there were roses for Mrs. Hooker, $10 for lingerie, another $10 for velvet for a skirt she intended to sew, and a few dollars for Hunk and for Kathleen. Since there was always a discrepancy between her balance and what she actually had, she added a column of her own, “Lost in the Shuffle.” She began November 1917 with $55.05 and never made another entry.
At the close of the book was a record keeping of another sort, far more crucial to her than money saved: she began to detail the long list of poems sent out again and again to the magazines she hoped would publish her:
McClure’s, Pearson’s, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Scribner’s, The Century;
she even tried
St. Nicholas
with her two plays. By the turn of the year she had sold only one poem, “Time does not bring relief,” to
The Century
, and that was a sonnet Burgess Johnson, her journalism professor at Barnard, had helped her place the summer before.
How did she manage at all? It helped that during her first two and a half months she paid no rent. She was with the Kennedys in Connecticut and then at their New York apartment until the end of September and went from there to Mrs. Thompson’s in Sparkhill for the greater part of October. Now she had no choice but to spend November under Miss Dow’s wing at the YWCA.
That autumn Vincent went to a costume ball in Greenwich Village with Miss Dow and some of her friends. “
They were great events in those days,” Charles Ellis, a young painter from Ohio, recalled. “There was a group of elderly people who were not in costume up on the stage watching
the dancers, and in their midst was this little girl. She had made herself a costume, a Turkish outfit of some sort of pajamas, and there she sat among these older people. She just seemed to sit there for hours, and she looked to me as if she wanted to dance. So I walked up to the stage and held out my arms and said, ‘Wanna dance?’ ”
Ellis had come to New York from Ohio because he wanted to paint. Soon he was designing sets and painting screens for the Provincetown Players and was acting in their productions. “We were all little boys from the Midwest,” he would recall years later, “Jimmy Light and Kenny Burke and me. And that winter of 1917–1918 was a wonderful winter.… We knew everyone … Stuart Davis, John Sloan, O’Neill, Jack Reed, and Max Eastman—we all knew each other. And the two things that drew people together were
The Masses
and the Provincetown Players.”
They read everything that was fresh and innovative. Every one of them had read Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“I knew her name,” said Ellis. “She’d been in
The Forum
magazine, and her first book was out. Afterwards I asked her did she want to come to a party. It was at our place on Macdougal Street—Jimmy Light and Suzie and Kenny Burke and me—& we were sitting in front of our fireplace drinking mulled wine. It was an extremely cold winter, one of the coldest in the history of the city, I believe. We’d burn anything we could find, wooden street signs, anything. Then we’d put the poker in the wine to heat it. Little Vincent was sitting there with us and had a couple of glasses and we were all talking intensely.
“I suddenly looked up at her and she was green, positively green. I took her to the bathroom and told her what to do and she did it, and she was all right after that. She was such a shy little girl, right out of Vassar.”
On the twenty-fourth of November, Vincent wrote Norma and asked her to come share her life in New York:
Am sending you twenty dollars. If you can’t make that do all right, telegraph me, or, no, Hunk, I’ll just send you twenty-five instead, & let you save all you can of it. It’s going to be hard, baby,—we’ll probably want money pretty bad pretty often,—but no unworthy girl ever had so many friends as I have, & we shan’t starve, because we
can
borrow.—I’m as crazy to see you as if I were going to be married to you—no one is such good pals as we are—I want you to bum around with—to cook breakfasts with.
They were, she told her, with an optimism that was young and high, “bound to succeed—can’t keep us down—I’m all enthusiasm & good courage about it. So come on out, my dear old sweet Sister,—& we’ll open our oysters together.”
2
On Sunday morning, December 2, 1917, Vincent and Kathleen met Norma in Grand Central Terminal and had breakfast together. “
She was so pretty,” Kathleen wrote their mother, she “looked blooming.” Now, with Kay having been accepted at Vassar, they were “Three New Yorkers,” Norma scribbled on the face of their mother’s envelope. Years later Norma would describe her entrance into this new world somewhat less glowingly than Charles Ellis had:
It may have been a wonderful winter to you, Charlie Ellis, but we nearly starved to death that first winter in New York. Or froze. Vincent had this little hall bedroom on West 9th Street. Well, the gas main froze. She put a bouquet of violets on the window sill and they froze. We stayed in bed together for two days once just to keep warm.
And, then, this boy I knew from Maine came in to town and came upstairs and told us to get up. He was taking us to dinner. The first thing we asked him was how he got by our German landlady. He said, “I told her I was your brother.” “And what did she say?” Vincent asked. “She said, ‘Ya! and my Brudder, too!’ ”
But up he came and took us to Tom & Jerry’s, and it was our first good meal in I don’t know how long.
Less than two weeks after Norma’s arrival, Vincent had bound copies of
Renascence
in her hands. The book was published on December 17, 1917. She sent her first copy home, inscribed
“To my Mother,”
and quoted these stanzas from “Tavern”:
I’ll keep a little tavern
Below the high hill’s crest,
Wherein all grey-eyed people
May set them down and rest.
…
Aye, ’tis a curious fancy—
But all the good I know
Was taught me out of two grey eyes
A long time ago.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
December the fifteenth
1917
Millay received one letter that pleased her more than any of the superb reviews. It was from Edward J. Wheeler, one of the three judges who had voted against her winning the prize in
The Lyric Year
. “
It has just come, and
it is wonderful,” he wrote. “It gives me a sort of choky feeling in my throat. I had not known that there was so much beauty in the world.… I don’t know how you could do it,—you a mere school-girl. I can’t say anything, as yet, of any critical value. I don’t want to. I am just feasting.”
But Miss Dow’s note stung:
I have wondered why some of those poems I had heard most praised were omitted, probably for some good reason. Of course I am happy to have an “author’s copy,” and hope it is only the beginning of better things.… If I had not heard from several sources how bored you have been in the atmosphere of our home, I would have been glad to have you bring Norma up to dinner some time—but I hesitate to suggest a return to a place which seems to have been dull.
If that weren’t clear enough, she added that Vincent would always be as welcome as she was when “we were all you had.”
At an audition for the Provincetown Players in December Edna Millay met Floyd Dell, who was casting his play
The Angel Intrudes
. He needed an ingenue, someone who was fresh and quick and bright, about whom it could be said, “Annabelle is little. Annabelle’s petulant upturned lips are rosebud red. Annabelle’s round eyes are baby-blue. Annabelle is—young.”
He waited impatiently one snowy afternoon at the tiny theater on Macdougal Street to listen to the young woman who had come to read for the part.
Floyd Dell was thirty when he met Edna Millay that December and gave her the part of his ingenue. He was divorced, an apostle of the shocking new Freudian school of psychoanalysis, and he was one of the editors of
The Masses
, a radical new magazine, which had been indicted by the government the previous October under the Espionage Act. “Which was being used not against German spies,” he would write in his autobiography,
Homecoming
, “but against American Socialists, Pacifists and anti-war radicals.” He faced, along with the founding editor, Max Eastman, Art Young, John Reed, and other editors, cartoonists, and writers, a twenty-year imprisonment.
In the fall of 1916, George Cram Cook brought the Provincetown Theatre on Cape Cod to New York, where a theater was made in the parlor floor of a brownstone on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village. Floyd Dell’s play
King Arthur’s Socks
was on its first New York bill—along with Louise Bryant’s
The Game
and Eugene O’Neill’s
Bound East for Cardiff
.
Now, with
The Masses
forced to suspend publication, Dell had no job, and the novel he was writing was stymied. He decided to get involved in Cook’s production of his play.
The morning of the first rehearsal, Millay knew all her lines by heart. Dell observed her closely. “
Without demur or delay she did whatever she was asked to do. She was eager to please; and it appeared she especially wished to please me.”
In photographs Floyd Dell looks bland and milky, with lank pale hair drawn like a wing across his wide brow, eyes as pale as his skin. Norma remembered him wearing soft flannel checked shirts, “and always with his shirt-tail out. You have to understand that Floyd Dell was special to us in those first days in New York,” she continued. “Oh, he could introduce Vincent to so many things she’d missed and didn’t know about. She was impressed by all these people. She never took me to rehearsals. And I’d been in everything in high school.”
The play opened on December 28. Edna was pronounced “delightful as Annabelle” by the author and the others in the Provincetown Players. In celebration, she was invited to join the troupe.
The Provincetown Players planned to produce
Sweet & Twenty
, another one of Dell’s one-act plays, at the end of January 1918. There was a good part in it for Edna, if she wanted it, and Dell asked her to read the script and decide. She said she’d rather have him read it to her. And so, a little stiffly, for they were on somewhat formal terms with each other, Dell invited her to the basement dining room at the Brevoort Hotel. When he arrived to pick her up, her landlady stopped her and demanded the overdue rent. Dell quickly intervened and paid it. “Edna,” he remembered, “was much humiliated but unable to refuse.” But neither let that spoil their dinner, and soon they were talking eagerly. Then, rashly, Dell told her he’d dreamed of her the night before. She watched him quietly and said that she had dreamed of him, too. He’d tell his dream if she’d tell hers, he said shyly. But she refused, “coldly,” he remembered.
He had dreamed that he was sitting beside her on a sofa in her room watching her hand on her knee. He wanted to clasp it in his but was afraid to and hesitated. Then suddenly he did take her hand and kissed her. “It was,” he wrote, “a simple wish-fulfillment dream. But I hadn’t known that I had any such wish.” After supper Dell walked her home.
We went on to her room—where I had never been before. There was a big iron-framed bed, a small fireplace, and among other furniture a battered old sofa. In the fireplace blazed a cheerful fire, lit by Edna when we came in; it was chiefly of newspapers. I sat on the sofa with my play in my lap. Her hand lay on her knee, just as in my dream the night before. I wanted to take her hand, but was afraid to. However, encouraged by that dream, I did venture to take her hand—and the next moment we were in each other’s arms, kissing; and then she said, in a husky, vibrant violin-like tone that I had never heard before except in my dream, “I’m so glad you wanted to kiss me, Floyd.”