Savage Beauty (34 page)

4

By May the sisters had moved to the top floor of 25 Charlton Street, a lovely old redbrick town house with a stoop out front and a tiny garden at the rear. On the parlor floor was a milliner’s shop run by Avril Unger, for whom Norma sometimes worked. With room enough at last, Vincent invited Cora to join them. “
Dearlings,” Cora wrote on May 24, “I’ll come just when you want me.… I can stand any heat or anything else you can. I can sew, nurse, or do the heads to match those hats next fall.” They would sink or swim together. Four days later she wrote again: “I can’t believe it, and I don’t; but I’m coming.” Vincent warned her not to budge from the waiting room in Grand Central Terminal if they were late. It had been such a long time since they’d seen each other, she thought of wearing a gardenia.

Cora arrived on June 3, 1918, one week before her fifty-fifth birthday. Now Vincent had brought her entire family out of Maine, and they were all, at last, together again. Only this time they were under her wing—except for Kathleen, who was at Vassar because of Vincent’s efforts on her behalf.

While Poughkeepsie was only a couple of hours north of New York, Kathleen was feeling sharply the contrast between her life and the life her sisters were living in the city. “
Edna,” she’d written that fall, at the beginning of her first year at Vassar, “I love the poems, dear.… but you
don’t
know how I love to have them.” Was it, she asked,

nasty to say that I was so surprised to get it that I was sad to think I should be so surprised. It just happens that you and Hunk never did write any, you know, and it made me feel funny. I wish awfully this year that I knew you two girls better than I do. I really don’t know much about you, I guess, and it makes me lonesome. I just don’t “belong” up here.

This letter is the first evidence in her own hand that Kathleen felt left out of her sisters’ lives.

A woman who knew Kathleen at Vassar said, “
She was really out of her depth. And one knew it, felt it. She was always striving to be more than she was.” What was particularly noticeable “was this trading on Vincent’s reputation and standing at Vassar. For Vincent was greatly regarded, as something quite special. Kathleen was not.”

Within another year Kathleen would leave Vassar and join her sisters in New York.

Malcolm Cowley, who would later write
Exiles Returned
and become a discerning critic rather than the poet he intended to be, remembered coming into New York while still an undergraduate at Harvard. He had a head of russet curls and a cherubic grin, and visiting the Millays in their rooms on Charlton Street was a delight: “
When the sisters appeared it all tripled—if there is one pretty woman, and then there are three pretty women—well, it is simply heightened beyond the belief of a very young man.

“I would go up into that room, I remember the big bed in the corner, and lie on it. Norma had undertaken to rescue us. Oh, from the cold! from the everlasting human cold! They were each lovely girls. But Edna had something more than that. She’d break your heart. There was something wild and elusive about her.

“It was something to hear the sisters singing,” he continued. “They sang easily together, in three-part harmony, and sometimes they’d sing their own songs, too. Oh, it was a treat.” Cowley threw back his head and sang lustily, “ ‘Have a little sniff, Have a little sniff on me.’ But,” he said, “of course, the great drug was alcohol.”

Everyone who knew them then remembers how gaily they sang parts together. Kathleen would take the air, Norma the tenor part, and Vincent the baritone.

SONG TO MEN

Cowley found Edna and Norma most intriguing. “Now people often describe Edna as elfin,” he recalled. “But it was Norma who had a sort of pixieish, naughty look to her face. With Edna it was something more like Titania—the Queen of the Fairies.”

Actually, not quite everyone was charmed by them when they sang. When Floyd took Edna and Norma to meet Max Eastman for the first time in the Village—Eastman was living with Eugen Boissevain, the handsome, broad-chested Dutchman whose extraordinary wife, the suffragist leader Inez Milholland, had died tragically in 1916—“
it really didn’t take at all, for any of us,” Norma remembered. “Vincent and I sang together, but somehow it just didn’t work out that night. And I think Floyd was rather disappointed. He wanted to show us off.”

Eastman called it “
skillful—their harmonies were perfect, their rhythmical sense exact—but I did not find it pleasing. They seemed a little school-girlish, almost simpering, to me.”

By this time, Walter Adolphe Roberts was taking Millay out to dinner as often as she would agree to go. He recalled the “flickering” way she talked about herself—“I had been thinking of the poet as fragile and unearthly; suddenly I perceived that she was strong.”

He knew the fifty cents a line he paid her for her poetry wasn’t going to help solve her financial problems, so when she hinted that she’d like to write fiction, “I gave her every encouragement.” “Young Love” ran in the May 1919 issue under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd, her great-grandmother’s maiden name. It tickled Roberts to be able to send her a more substantial check, and whenever possible he slyly placed one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lyrics in the space left at the bottom of a Nancy Boyd story.

Four of Millay’s workbooks survive from this period in New York; she worked quickly and in longhand, writing poems on the right-hand side of the page and then sometimes reworking them on the left-hand side. It was a pattern she followed most of her life. Sometimes the poems are dated; most often they are not. The dates are of entry, not necessarily of composition, and never of publication. A workbook was just that. She said later in life that she might write a poem down anywhere, on the back of a telegram for instance, but usually she worked them out in her mind, and
when she had something she liked, she wrote it down in these paper composition books.

The dated poems seemed to come in clusters: July 17, 1918: “Lord Archer,—Death” (not published in
Ainslee’s
until December). July 18: “I do but ask that you be always fair,” which waited a year and ten months before publication in a remarkable group of twenty sonnets in
Reedy’s Mirror
. But many of her finest poems were left undated, scrawled hastily across the page in pencil. Reading in those workbooks now, one can feel, even see in the dashes of thick lead strokes across the pages or her hesitant crossing out, a poet trying to seize and shape on paper the work that would distinguish her a half century after her death—the intensity and excitement are palpable.

While she was spending her time with the Provincetown Players, Roberts kept his distance. He knew the Provincetowners provided her with what he called an “effervescent social life,” but he wouldn’t join in “because I was jealous of its influence over Edna.… I was enamored of such communion as she gave me, and more deeply than she guessed or probably cared, I wanted it to be an exchange between us only.” What he treasured were their times alone together when they talked about poetry, and love.

She told him “
it was impossible for a poet not to be influenced by the work of those he venerated as artistic ancestors—that this was in fact desirable, for it assured a continuity and development of the general stream of poetry.” When he asked whose influences she recognized in her own work, she acknowledged Housman and Tennyson. “The former for his emotional attitude and spare poignancy of expression; the latter for narrative power and technical innovations.” He thought it “singular” that she credited Housman, for he ranked her a far better poet. And while he admired Tennyson, he was puzzled that she regarded him as a technical innovator. He insisted that Swinburne was far superior. Edna looked at him quizzically and asked him to read favorite stanzas. When he began to quote

I hid my heart in a nest of roses,
  Out of the sun’s way, hidden apart;
In a softer bed than the soft white snow’s is,
  Under the roses I hid my heart,

she said he could have his Swinburne; the passages he quoted were “ ‘but sound’; the debt she recognized was to Tennyson.” Her true generosity was toward contemporary American poets, praising them, in Roberts’s estimation, beyond their worth.

By March 1919, Roberts was under her spell. He had taken to writing to her in French, because, he told her, he could think of nothing but her, her marvelous poetry, her splendid sensibility, her tragic and beautiful mouth, her arms, her breasts, her throat, all that was her, whether or not she loved him. It was a play on one of her own lines in this sonnet, which he did not publish:

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature had contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,—
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

Edna, who had begun just one year before as an actress with the Province-town Players in Floyd’s one-act plays, now had her own play,
The Princess Marries the Page
, on the bill to open their third season in New York. She wrote it, directed it, and played the role of the princess. She had moved from being an ingenue to one of the Players’ major creative forces.

The Players had outgrown the old front parlor in 139 Macdougal Street and moved a few doors down into 133, a four-story house that had been used as a stable. They left the hitching ring attached to the wall of the auditorium, inscribing above it “Here Pegasus was Hitched.” It was their playfulness as much as their spirit of adventure and innovation that kept them a lively force in New York. They took risks with the plays they chose. They didn’t court the press. Tickets to their performances could be obtained only by subscription. The roster of names of those who wrote plays for them was sensational. They were the new figures in American writing: besides Dell and Millay, John Reed, Eugene O’Neill, and Susan Glaspell, there were William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes, Alfred Kreymborg, Michael Gold, Harry Kemp, Maxwell Bodenheim, James Oppenheim, Wilbur Daniel Steele, and Sherwood Anderson. Those who came to act, design sets, or do odd jobs included Marsden Hartley, Alexander Berkman, Lawrence Vail, Lawrence
Langner, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Art Young, Rollo Peters, Harrison Dowd, Mina Loy, and Boardman Robinson. Some even brought their mothers into the theater: Cora Millay was about to enter the fray; also George Cram Cook’s mother, Ellen Cook, who sewed costumes; and Christine Ell’s mother, who helped her cook sixty-cent dinners in the tiny kitchen on the second floor of the theater, where everyone gathered to talk and to celebrate. Cora became an active part of Eugene O’Neill’s
The Moon of the Caribbees
, in which she sang and in which Charlie Ellis was cast as Smitty, one of the seamen on the S.S.
Glencairn
.

“Edna and all of the Millays were involved in this extraordinary production,” said Susan Jenkins Brown, who was then the wife of James Light, one of the Playhouse’s founders. “It was a mood play, and the Millay family provided the background music, which set the mood. The Millays, with Ma Millay, too, had this special musical ability—it was their own, the first of its kind really—a crooning group. As I remember, they stood behind the scenery—it was all swooping vocal harmonies—they weren’t seen, and … well, it was unearthly.”