Savage Beauty (36 page)

I had found a single undated letter, a fragment of a letter really, from Jim to Vincent, apologizing for something about Kay, as Kathleen now liked to be called:

I guess my mind just snapped and “K” who is very sweet filled the place that I needed you for so very much.… I know you will all hate me now even “K,” but it isn’t quite so strange to believe that I should really be insane, when you stop to think that the terrible things we have been through.… I don’t know what is to become of me now. I love you not “K” and I have lost you.

What, I asked Norma, had happened? Norma gazed away from me for only a moment and said, “
Vincent did care about him very deeply, deeply. I don’t believe I knew that at the time. Not as far as it had gone. And then he dated Kathleen for a while, and that was terrible and I remember telling Kathleen so. It was just because he couldn’t be with Vincent.”

Within nine months Millay had published this sonnet, found in draft among Jim’s letters to her. It is one of her first great sonnets, and it was as sharp with loss as an epitaph:

Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.
This have I known always: Love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales:
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

One month after its publication, on December 17, 1920, Kathleen married Howard Young in a private ceremony at the Brevoort Hotel. Norma said that both she and Vincent were there. “I no longer remember how she met Howard, nor where. He was in the theater. And he looked like the Prince of Wales. She wanted him, and she got him. Poor, poor Kathleen.”

CHAPTER 14

M
illay had made fun of her reading in Cincinnati when she quipped that the year before they’d had Amy Lowell, “
wherefore I deduce the system as being: one year a fat girl, next year a thin girl,” but this was the beginning of a crucial aspect of her career. She was a superb performer.
She had a reputation of being sexually free, and her work was assumed to be daringly autobiographical. People wanted to see this girl poet of the new bohemia. She teased and charmed the Cincinnatians with poems like “To the Not Impossible Him”:

How shall I know, unless I go
  To Cairo and Cathay,
Whether or not this blessed spot
  Is blest in every way?

Now it may be, the flower for me
  Is this beneath my nose;
How shall I tell, unless I smell
  The Carthaginian rose?

The fabric of my faithful love
  No power shall dim or ravel
Whilst I stay here,—but oh, my dear,
  If I should ever travel!

This heartland city took her in; it even gave her a party for her twenty-eighth birthday. Hubertis M. Cummings, head of the Ohio Valley Poetry Society, described Millay’s theatrical appeal:

The slender red-haired, gold-eyed Vincent Millay, dressed in a black-trimmed gown of purple silk, was now reading from a tooled leather portfolio, now reciting without aid of book or print, despite her broom-splint legs and muscles twitching in her throat and in her thin arms, in a voice that enchanted.

When
Aria da Capo
opened in December, Millay insisted that Mitchell Kennerley come see it. Afterward he wrote telling her how much he liked it. “
Aren’t you about ready for a new volume of poems? It will be a pity to let too long a time elapse between ‘Renascence’ and its successor.” He said the day she brought in a manuscript there would be a check of $150 ready for her.

She answered immediately: “
You, dear, I thought, were entirely out of the publishing business forever. Everybody says so.” At the close of her letter she asked if he was going to bring out another edition of
Renascence:
“
There’s not a copy to be had in town.”

Kennerley assured Millay that
Renascence
had never been out of print. “At this very minute there are 800 bound copies in this very building. I will send you six copies tomorrow. It is sweet of everybody to say I am not publishing any more and pleases me very much.”

By March 1920, reassured that Kennerley was about to publish, Millay sent him a letter full of business suggestions, including adding a preface about
Aria da Capo
, which was about to be produced, to the volume. Kennerley’s response was dead silence.

Norma, who played Columbine with Harrison Dowd as “a playful, graceful, disenchanted” Pierrot, opened the play. To describe
Aria da Capo
as a one-act antiwar play based on the commedia dell’arte in which two sweet young shepherds kill each other out of greed is to give scant hint of its power. It is a deadly little play. Norma described the first performance:

Charlie did the sets at the Provincetown Players. He had black screens on which he painted mushrooms of different sizes in white, and these were set at angles through which the actors made their entrances and exits. And he painted a proscenium border of coloured fruits & flowers, cut as though they were hanging down—very effective it was.… Vincent was very good directing her play because she knew exactly what she wanted.

The play ran for two weeks and was completely sold out. Millay did not explain the play in her preface; she gave a description of how it was to look. She was precise.

The two shepherds, Thyrsis and Corydon, were to look like happy rustics in sandals, with rough cloaks flung about their shoulders. Edna wrote, “There must be no red or blue used anywhere in the entire play excepting in the blue and red of these two cloaks.” Pierrot wears a lavender or lilac silk smock with wide trousers and a wide white tarleton ruff. Columbine’s costume is a tight black satin bodice “cut very low, with straps over the shoulders, quite like the modern evening gown; very full tarleton skirts of different shades of pink and cerise”; “Hat should be small and very smart—not a
shepherdess
hat.”

When Edmund Wilson saw
Aria da Capo
, he wrote, “
I was thrilled and troubled by this little play: it was the first time I had felt Edna’s peculiar power. There was a bitter treatment of war, and we were all ironic about war; but there was also a less common sense of the incongruity and the cruelty of life, of the precariousness of love.” It began as a caprice:

COLUMBINE: Pierrot, a macaroon! I cannot live without a macaroon!

PIERROT: My only love. You are
so
intense! …
Is it Tuesday, Columbine?—I’ll kiss you if
it’s Tuesday.

These frivolous lines are returned to at the close of the play, after the savage deaths of the shepherds, whose corpses remain onstage, tucked beneath the long table upon which Columbine and Pierrot lean, ignoring them as they begin again at the top,
Aria da Capo
.

Edmund Wilson, Jr., whose mother’s nickname for him as a little boy, Bunny, had stuck, had been at Princeton with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop.
When the war began, Wilson enlisted and served with a hospital unit as a stretcher bearer in France, until he couldn’t stand the carnage and asked his father, who knew Woodrow Wilson from his days as attorney general in the state of New Jersey, to intervene. He was transferred to Germany in the Intelligence Corps and returned to America in July 1919.

Wilson was short and stout; his fine red hair, neatly parted in the middle, was already, at twenty-five, beginning to thin. His speaking voice was high, “harsh and light,” Edna Millay described it. He wore brown suits that matched the color of his eyes, carried a slim Malacca cane, and performed sleight-of-hand and card tricks to calm his nerves. When Scott Fitzgerald caught sight of him in the Village one evening, he found Wilson enviably urbane, no longer the “shy little scholar of Holder Court” he’d been at Princeton. A small legacy permitted him choices that Edna Millay did not have: a Chinese manservant who cooked for him, for instance.

Wilson had fallen in love with Millay’s poetry well before he met her in the spring of 1920. The March issue of
The Dial
published her sonnet “To Love Impuissant,” which Wilson “got by heart,” reciting it in his shower:

Love, though for this you riddle me with darts,
And drag me at your chariot till I die,—
Oh, heavy prince! Oh, panderer of hearts!—
Yet hear me tell how in their throats they lie
Who shout you mighty: thick about my hair,
Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr,
Who still am free, unto no querulous care
A fool, and in no temple worshiper!
I, that have bared me to your quiver’s fire,
Lifted my face into its puny rain,
Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire
As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain!
(Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave,
Punish me, surely, with the shaft I crave!)

He felt himself “worthy to deal her the longed-for dart.” He had been reading her since the spring of 1916, when his cousin Carolyn Crosby Wilson, who was in Vincent’s class at Vassar, gave him a copy of
The Vassar Miscellany Monthly
, in which “The Suicide” had appeared. When later in the year she sent him
A Book of Vassar Verse
, including both that poem and “Interim,” he decided to review it in the New York
Evening Sun
, where, just out of Princeton, he was working as a fifteen-dollar-a-week reporter. The following year, that same cousin sent him
Renascence
when he was in France with the AEF, and he was even more impressed. Now he longed to meet her.

At last he did, at a party in Greenwich Village to which she came late and tired after the theater. That night her beauty overwhelmed him, but it was not only her beauty that was arresting: he found her speaking voice thrilling. Unsettled, he felt for the first time “her power of imposing herself on others through a medium that unburdened the emotions of solitude. The company hushed and listened as people do to music—her authority was always complete; but her voice, though dramatic, was lonely.

“She was dressed in some bright batik, and her face lit up with a flush that seemed to burn also in the bronze reflections of her not yet bobbed reddish hair. She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.”

Wilson decided to cultivate her favor precisely as Walter Adolphe Roberts had. He would publish her in
Vanity Fair
, on whose editorial staff both he and John Bishop then worked. “She had,” Wilson later wrote, “at that time no real market for her poems; she sold a lyric only now and then to the highbrow
Dial …
or to the trashy
Ainslee’s
.” This was an exaggeration that served to place Wilson far more centrally in her career than he belonged. Wilson and Bishop took over when Roberts had been forced to withdraw.
Ainslee’s
would publish only one more short lyric of hers, “To Kathleen,” that summer, and two of her Nancy Boyd pieces in the fall. For by 1921, Roberts was no longer on the masthead as editor. “
Walter, dear,” Edna wrote him that summer, “What in the world happened?—But never mind—so long as you are out of there—you were getting so tired of it all, I know.…
bon voyage
, dear friend, wherever you go & whatever you do.”

Wilson moved in to acquire her work. In July 1920,
Vanity Fair
published “Dead Music—An Elegy” and in the following month “Prayer to Persephone,” part of the elegies she was completing. It wasn’t only
Vanity
Fair
that picked up the slack from
Ainslee’s
. William Marion Reedy of St. Louis, whose
Reedy’s Mirror
first published her
Aria da Capo
, began on April 29, 1920, to publish in batches of five her “Twenty Sonnets.” These remarkable sonnets were seized by the crusty old midwestern editor, who published only what he liked. Luckily, what he liked was absolutely firstrate.