Savage Beauty (38 page)

ignited for me both my intellectual passion and my unsatisfied desire, which went up together in a blaze of ecstasy that remains for me one of the high points of my life. I do not believe that such experiences can be common, for such women are not common. My subsequent chagrin and perplexity, when I discovered that, due to her extreme promiscuity, this could not be expected to continue, were rather amazingly soothed by an equanimity on her part which was also very uncommon.

Their sexual relationship was over.

That summer Millay learned to drive and to ride, and she had her hair bobbed. “I look, when I am blessed with health, approximately twelve years old,” she wrote to her mother from Lake Placid, where she was visiting Mrs. George Mixter. Then she left for Woodstock, where she began to learn Italian from a handsome Italian baritone she’d met there. “
From the point of view of character and personality, he is just a sweet and friendly fellow, not so deep as a well nor so broad as a church-door, but oh, how he doth sing!” Cora asked Norma pointedly, “
Who is Edna killing now? Is he almost done for?” Norma and Charlie had come to stay with Vincent in the Birdseye Cottages in Woodstock.

Norma hooted with delight as she remembered that summer with Vincent: “
Our little house was swarming with bees that August; they were there in abundance—when we bathed, when we cooked, when we ate. Finally Vincent and I decided to let them have just one sting. You know, one says to the bee, ‘There! If that’s what you want! If this will satisfy you!’ And we held out our arms, heads turned away, eyes squeezed shut. Of course they never stung us. There was this Swedish writer among the artists who were there, and he looked wonderfully at ease in country clothes. He was talking to us about the bees. It seems they had swarmed about his little house, too. He’d been in the bath, he said, when a bee alighted on the tip of his penis. He remained, shall we say, perfectly still. And quick as a wink Vincent said, ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I.’ You see,” Norma said, “she could say such things, and did say them, immediately, without a moment’s thought.

“One afternoon we’d gone for a walk up Mount Overlook, and on our return two boys were following us. At first we paid no attention to them. We’d always liked to walk, and there we were, two—I daresay pretty—girls striding along, enjoying ourselves. And these two callow youths, calling out to us, trailing behind, but trailing, still, if you follow me, threateningly. Suddenly Vincent turned around and, crooking her finger, beckoned them. Well, they came right up pretty quick. And she said, looking them directly in the eye, ‘It is true that we have vaginas and breasts, but we are walking alone together because it pleases us to and that is our right. We have selected to be alone, and we intend to so remain.’ The boys just stood there, bug-eyed, truly stricken. We turned on our heels and continued our walk, unimpeded. They were quite simply appalled. And that, too, was just like Vincent. She could be direct and graphic when she needed to be. They took off like rabbits.”

Norma handed me a snapshot taken that summer in Woodstock. Vincent is standing with Norma, who looks a little dim and uncertain. Jimmy Light and Vincent’s black-haired Italian baritone stand scowling behind them. She gazes directly into the camera, self-possessed, unsmiling, one hand nonchalantly on her cocked hip. She is astonishingly full-breasted, and her lips are slightly parted, as if about to kiss. She looks ripe, voluptuous.

“
Between John Bishop and me relations were … becoming a little strained,” Wilson wrote. “Frank Crowninshield was complaining that it was difficult to have both his assistants in love with one of his most brilliant contributors.”

Bishop was just as much in love with Millay as Wilson was. Even their letters to her were remarkably similar, except that Bishop was far more analytical even as he tried to shake her from his mind:

My dear dear girl, …

I am still restless with desire to feel your cool white hands against my temples. O Edna, why do you have power to torture me so? … I wonder, sometimes, if you do not hurt for sheer pleasure in hurting.… And yet I think with me, you have tried not so much to hurt as to save me from later and more desperate pain. Edna, I love you because you are passionate and wise. And if your passion had been less than your wisdom I should not have felt you so cruelly.… To come to me from someone else and to leave me for someone else. I don’t care whom you loved last year or even last month—but now—well—what am I that I should hope to keep you.… I think really that your desire works strangely like a man’s. And that desire has few secrets from me.

But by the fall Bishop was too much in the thick of it even to want to slake his desire for her:

For god’s sake, Edna, don’t forbid my coming to see you this week—I can’t stand it—really. I don’t want you to spend any great amount of time with me, if you feel you can’t without hurting your work. I’m reasonable.…

Only let me see you, and touch you for a moment sometime—very soon.…

McKaig, their Princeton classmate, was now charting Wilson’s conversations with him about Millay:

September 11: … Bunny W and I at dinner bewailed the misconception of his character (the omission of his Byronic trait which he claims but no one else sees except Edna Millet).

Met Edna Millet for a minute at Bunny Wilson’s, light dim. She seemed pleasant and better looking than I had been led to believe. Bunny evidently much in love with her. Not much chance to get impression from her myself though I think from her verse she must be a genius. Modern Sappho. 18 love affairs and now Bunny is thinking of marrying her.

Five days later he notes:

Bunny Wilson and Edna Millet in intolerable situation. He wants her to marry him. She tempted because of her great poverty and the financial security he offers (he has private income). However, in addition to curse of Apollo she has curse of Venus. While her heart is still in the grave of one love affair she is making eyes at another man. It nearly kills her but she can’t help it.

September 20: Bunnie has repeated to Edna … things John [Bishop] said about her.… John is very distressed. I’ve come to think he’s damn stupid—interested only in himself, poetry, & women, and loves most the sound of his own voice, & liquor, & adulation (when he can get it).

October 7: Bunny came for evening—we discussed John’s lack of ideas & borrowing them. Bunny, being under stress & strain, did parlor magic tricks. Says he does them for hours in front of glass to quiet his nerves, instead of smoking.… Regrets lack of will power lately to work nights—since meeting Edna. She certainly has played hell with him.

When Edna returned to the city in September, she decided she was going to live alone. It would be the first time she would live without any member of her family since she had brought Norma out of Maine in December 1917. Explaining the decision to her mother, who had remained in Truro, was going to be tough. Her mother had written to her in Woodstock telling her and Norma “to do just as you want to, and have just as good a time as you can, both of you.… I am all right and am not too lonely.”

In an undated fragment of a letter, Vincent tried to tell her mother why she must live alone. The thrust of the letter was her need to break free from Norma:

 … we’re all going to have to put up with a lot of things this winter. Norma will have to shift for herself, & find a place for herself. It’s only right that she should. And I’m not going to worry about her.—I hope you wont be displeased or disappointed by any of our plans, dear.—Please write & tell me what you think. I am sure I am right in believing we should all have separate rooms this winter. For myself, I know it has to be, or I shall lose my reason. It is a practical matter, of common sense & efficiency & has nothing to do with my great love for you & the girls.—Your loving daughter, Vincent.

P.S. I cant rid myself of the feeling that you will be displeased. And it makes me feel dreadful. You know that I love you, sweetheart, dont you? And dont you understand?—You see, I am a poet, & not quite right in my head, darling.

It’s only that.—Vincent.

Millay included with her next letter a batch of clippings about her from her friend Franklin Pierce Adams’s
^*
popular column “The Conning
Tower,” which was running in the New York
Tribune
. There were more than a score of couplets and quatrains written about her, in which the trick was to use her name in the final line, rather like a limerick. “It is certainly wonderful publicity for me,” she told her mother.

Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Cora wrote back quickly, thrilled “with the Tribune craze.” She didn’t sound at all distressed, but written in pencil and dated October 15, 1920, on the back of the envelope in which Vincent’s letter and clippings had been sent to her, she wrote:

Put this in your collection:—

We all know the poet who shot into fame
As Edna St. Vincent Millay,
But who was the poet who gave her the name
Of Edna St. Vincent Millay?

Then, perhaps dissatisfied with those four lines, she wrote:

A POET TO A POEM:—

I am a poet, I have had my day
For I have written one immortal line;
Nor Greek nor Latin ever wrote more fine—
The Poem: Edna St. Vincent Millay.
  With love to the Poem,
   from
  The Author.

By October 20, the intensity of guilt in Vincent’s letter to her mother had reached a new pitch. It was peculiar: they had been apart at most seven weeks.

Dearest beloved Mother,—

I am so worried about you that I don’t know what to do. I think about you all the time in the daytime, and lately I dream about you at night, I am so worried. I am afraid you are sick or something, out there in that cold old shack all alone. And I miss you so it’s terrible.

After all her brave words about Norma fending for herself, she describes the two of them having a tea party “to which you were the only
guest.” They placed her snapshot on the table and pretended to give her tea, and “talked to you and everything, and then we both cried, we were so homesick for you.” If either one of them could afford a telephone, they would call her every night, “just to say goodnight to you, no matter how much it cost.” Vincent would even return to the Cape, except for the prohibitive cost. “I want to go terribly. But both the girls think it’s silly to think of it, because you have much more need of a warm winter coat and to have the grocery bill paid … and to have your fare out to Aunt Clem’s.” But her questions to her mother follow hotly: Is she sick, is she cold, is she stinting on ordering kerosene at the expense of her own comfort?

Please don’t do that, sweetheart. Are you lonely, my own darling? Oh, please, dearest mother, let us know how you are! We are about crazy. There is nothing in all the world I love so much as you. We all love you better than anything, just as we did when we were little kids, you know. Tell us exactly what you are feeling about being out there all alone, please, oh, please!

Vincent
.

What is going on here? Did Millay feel she had abandoned her mother to exactly what she and her sisters felt when they were young and defenseless: isolation, coldness, and a desperate thrift?

Wilson remembered her on West Twelfth Street saying to him suddenly, “
I’ll be thirty in a minute!” He felt she was even