Authors: Nancy Milford
Reedy had met her at the Kennerleys’ house in the country, and he told her how much their “gab-fest” had meant to him: “
I remember we didn’t even mind the ‘skeeters.’ Next morning I lost my hat, but that was the odds. I’d lost my head the night before, and, honestly, a bit o’ my heart too, in the glorious talk.”
Kennerley had shown Reedy
Second April
in proof, and he stayed up all night reading it. “It’s splendid work—all shot through with brightness; the air of the open world in it too. The Elegiacs, fine. The Sonnets, superb.”
But that spring Kennerley’s entire publishing process simply halted. Edna sent off the dedication, which was to Miss Dow. She pursued Kennerley with polite questions. She offered to help: “
If you will send me some circulars, and envelopes and things—things meaning stamps!—I will mail them to thousands of people, about two thousands.” She tried being deferential:
Do you want me to give you some clippings?
I am very unhappy today.
I am sure that you dislike me.
But nothing worked to prod a response from Kennerley. On June 22, Millay’s tone was no longer deferential:
Mitchell, dear,—
You are behaving disgracefully to l’il’ Edna, whom you love.—all the time her mother keeps asking her questions which it is impossible for her to answer, & it is all very awkward & horrid, & you ought to be ashamed.
Write me at once, giving me some nice, plausible, mendacious-as-hell reason why you have not yet published my pretty book.
But this note, too, was met by silence. She wrote Arthur Davison Ficke, “My book isn’t out yet. It’s dreadful. I write Mitchell all the time, and he won’t answer my letters; and every time I call up the office they tell me he’s out, and I know dam well he is so near the telephone … that I hear his breathing.” She wished she’d gone to Knopf, as Witter Bynner had suggested, “Although I don’t see what he could do.” That last was a puzzling
remark—what he could do was publish her—but it signaled her own uncertainty, for she had already tried to place
Second April
with another publisher.
The only clue that remains among her papers is a letter from Horace Liveright as early as December 1918, reminding her that she’d promised to show him her new book of poetry if Macmillan didn’t make a prompt decision. In the summer of 1919, Macmillan was promising a clear answer; by the fall it made it. It didn’t take her book because of its theme of death. The editor pointed directly to the “Memorial to D.C.,” a group of five poems written about Dorothy Coleman, a girl from Vassar who had died suddenly in the flu epidemic that swept the country in 1918. Coleman’s death was the stimulus for lyrics that were among the finest Millay was writing. And she knew it. She would cut only one poem from that group, and even this single poem, “Elegy Before Death,” with its ringing Virgilian irony and longing, she replaced in the body of the book.
There will be rose and rhododendron
When you are dead and under ground;
Still will be heard from white syringas
Heavy with bees, a sunny sound;
Still will the tamaracks be raining
After the rain has ceased, and still
Will there be robins in the stubble,
Grey sheep upon the warm green hill.
Oh, there will pass with your great passing
Little of beauty not your own,—
Only the light from common water,
Only the grace from common stone!
The publishers were right: death moved through these poems like a morbid fever. They didn’t care that Millay was echoing her beloved Latin poets in “Prayer to Persephone” and “Epitaph”:
Heap not on this mound
Roses that she loved so well;
Why bewilder her with roses,
That she cannot see or smell?
She is happy where she lies
With the dust upon her eyes.
Or the jocund fop Herrick in “Chorus”:
Give away her gowns
Give away her shoes;
She has no more use
For her fragrant gowns;
Take them all down,
Blue, green, blue,
Lilac, pink, blue,
From their padded hangers;
She will dance no more
In her narrow shoes
From the closet floor
Death scared them off, as it had neither the Elizabethans nor the Romans.
2
As for John Bishop and me, the more we saw of her poetry, the more our admiration grew, and we both, before very long, had fallen irretrievably in love with her. This latter was so common an experience, so almost inevitable a consequence of knowing her in those days.… One cannot really write about Edna Millay without bringing into the foreground of the picture her intoxicating effect on people, because this so much created the atmosphere in which she lived and composed. [It was a] spell that she exercised on many, of all ages and both sexes.
—Edmund Wilson,
The Shores of Light
In May, when Millay learned there was a chance to rent a cottage on Cape Cod that Jig Cook and Susan Glaspell had just bought, she seized it. They warned her it was really no more than a beach shack, and Jig listed the drawbacks: “
remoteness, mosquitoes, no running water, etc., etc.,” while Susan added that the mosquitoes would bear mentioning twice. They did want her to come but fretted that she’d like Provincetown better, for “P-town is gay and Truro is in the country—So there you are.” But the little house, with a hedge of wild roses out front, set in a pine hollow just back from the dunes on the outermost reach of Cape Cod, behind the wild and lovely Longnook beach at Truro, delighted her, and she took it at once. The Millays moved out of their apartment in the Village, boxed what they needed to take, and stored the rest.
In July, Edmund Wilson was pleading with Edna to let him come to see her: “
I don’t know how to write you letters now.… I love you. E.W.” The next day he was desperate: “
Please
be decent and call me up. Otherwise you’ll leave me pretty flat.” Millay had already left for Truro, where she wrote him:
I don’t know what to write you, either,—what you would like me to write, or what you would hate me for writing.—I feel that you rather hate me, as it is.—Which is false of you, Bunny.… I don’t know just when I shall be in New York again. I am going to the Adirondacks … & after that to Woodstock.… I don’t suppose you can get away from the office during the week, & especially now that John [Peale Bishop] is away. But could you get away … do you think?
It wasn’t much of an invitation, but, pressed so intensely and unhappily by him, she offered it in the best faith she could muster. “
I have thought of you often, Bunny, & wondered if you think of me with bitterness.” Then she warned him, “My sister is amused & disgusted by my lewd portrait of myself. At her suggestion, which I now feel to be a wise one, I beg you not to circulate it.” One evening in the spring, Edna, Wilson, and Bishop had playfully decided to write their self-portraits. This was Edna’s:
E. ST. V. M.
Hair which she still devoutly trusts is red.
Colorless eyes, employing
A childish wonder
To which they have no statistic
Title.
A large mouth,
Lascivious,
Asceticized by blasphemies.
A long throat,
Which will someday
Be strangled.
Thin arms,
In the summer-time leopard
With freckles.
A small body,
Unexclamatory,
But which,
Were it the fashion to wear no clothes,
Would be as well-dressed
As any.
Wilson’s was marked by the same regret that surfaces in his letters to her. He is misunderstood, and his playfulness turns wooden:
E.W.
What devil sowed the seed of beauty
In the brain of this
raisonneur
.
He could have been happy in the XVIIIth century,
Before the Romantic Revival:
…
But now Byron has spoken
And the damage has been done;
…
You say that it is an Encyclopaedist
That lurks behind that respectable exterior.
I tell you: no! it is a Byron,
A Byron born amiss:
…
Later Wilson would admit that these poems were an embarrassment. “
John Bishop used to say that it always made him nervous when I resorted to a high romantic vein.” But Wilson was beside himself. She hadn’t taken him into her life. He was desolated when he wrote:
I who have broken my passionate heart
For the lips of Edna Millay
And her face that burns like a flame
And her terrible chagrin.
The chagrin, of course, was his.
On a hot August night, a sweaty Edmund Wilson came trudging out to the Millays’ Cape Cod house, dragging his suitcase, cutting through fields of scrub oak and sweet fern because the old man who’d met his train had for some surly reason dropped him off some miles shy of Truro. Wilson had begged her to let him come. Now, stumbling and lost in the dark, when he at last saw a light and found the Millays, it’s hard to say whether he was more stunned by the cottage or by the women sitting inside.
They gave me dinner on a plain board table by the light of an oil-lamp. I had never seen anything like this household, nor have I seen anything like it since. Edna tried to reassure me by telling me that I mustn’t be overpowered by all those girls, and one of the others added, “And
what
girls!”
It was as if he’d fallen into the enchanted world of a fairy tale, in which a crone and her three pretty daughters cast spells upon the innocent young traveler who has lost his bearings in the black night. Inside, in the flood of light and warmth, after he was loosened by a tot of whiskey, they began to work transformations on him, and he was bewitched:
Edna was now very freckled. All were extremely pretty. But it was the mother who was most extraordinary. She was a little old woman with spectacles, who, although she had evidently been through a good deal, had managed to remain very brisk and bright. She sat up straight and smoked cigarettes and quizzically followed the conversation. She looked not unlike a New England schoolteacher, yet there was something almost raffish about her. She had anticipated the Bohemianism of her daughters; and she sometimes made remarks that were startling from the lips of a little old lady.
In his first version of this memoir Wilson remembered Mrs. Millay saying that she “had been a slut herself so why shouldn’t her girls be,” a statement Norma asked him to cut. Such a word from the lips of anyone’s mother so shocked him that he remembered it all his life. “
But,” he continued, “there was nothing sordid about her: you felt even more than with Edna that she had passed beyond good and evil … and that she had attained there a certain gaiety.”
Soon the sisters were singing songs they had made up in three-part harmony to entertain him. But Wilson had come with a purpose, and he was not to be diverted.
Since there were only two rooms on the first floor, with no partition between them, the only way for Edna and me to get away by ourselves was to sit in a swing on the porch; but the mosquitoes were so tormenting—there being then no mosquito control—that we soon had to go in again. I did, however, ask her formally to marry me, and she did not reject my proposal but said that she would think about it. I am not sure that she actually said, “That might be the solution,” but it haunts me that she conveyed that idea.
While he said it was clear to him that proposals of marriage were not a source of great excitement for Millay, he could not acknowledge that it was
his
proposal from which she shied.
The next morning Edna sat just below the stairs and recited some of her new poems. Then they walked to the sea. “Coming back from the beach, I kissed her behind a bush … her grin and summer girl-smile.” But when Wilson told her, “ ‘By the time we’re fifty years old, we’ll be two of the
most interesting people in the United States’—she said, ‘You behave as if you were fifty already.’ ”
He didn’t use these entries, which are from his diary, when he wrote his memoir, and he certainly hadn’t known about the description in Alexander McKaig’s diary for September 28, 1920. McKaig, who had been a Princeton classmate of Wilson, kept a diary in which he recorded the upheavals of their lives, and his own:
One of the younger Millay girls told this anecdote of his [Wilson’s] visit to them last summer—Offered coffee, Bunny declared he never drank coffee, a cigarette, Bunny said he never smoked—offered a drink, Bunny said he never drank. Other guest at dinner—a stranger—said—“Ah—he must write the minor poetry.” (Bunny has never told this anecdote about himself.)
Wilson was in love for the first time in his life. Edna Millay was the first woman he’d ever made love with. Afterward he remembered her saying, “I know just how you feel: it was here, and it was beautiful, and now it’s gone.” He couldn’t believe she wasn’t in love with him, since she had