Savage Beauty (39 page)

more accessible and exposed … to the importunities of her suitors, who really besieged her door.… She had one or two depressing illnesses. Her apartment was poorly heated, and I brought her an electric heater. I remember how miserable she seemed—though she never lost a certain liveliness—wrapped up in an old flannel bathrobe and bundled in shabby covers.

We learn from him that she’d hung Charlie’s painting “Directions for Using the Empress” above her bed. The Empress was a mechanical dress form, operated by a series of screws that used would make the form plumper or more slender, remembered clearly not only because Charlie had painted it but because one of Edna’s suitors had given it to her in the vain hope of freeing her from being Norma’s model. Edna became pregnant that winter, and, according to Norma, who did not know by whom, she suffered a “
botched abortion,” which left her bleeding and weakened.

“Don’t ask me,” Norma said warningly.

“I wasn’t going to ask, you said you didn’t know.”

“There were things we didn’t talk about.”

“Of course.”

“But I’ll never forget the name of that goddamned abortionist!”

Toward the end of December, John Bishop invited her along with Wilson to dinner, “
à deux—à trois—as you wish and then come to the apartment where I shall provide a stuffy air, cigarettes and a manuscript.” Wilson remembered the night as festive. In his notebook for the twenties he described a hilarious scene where, after their dinner, “
sitting on her day bed, John and I held Edna in our arms—according to an arrangement insisted upon herself—I her lower half and John her upper—with a polite exchange of pleasantries as to which had the better share.” He said she called them “the choir boys of Hell,” and complained, according to Wilson, that their both being in love with her hadn’t even broken up their friendship.

To consider it from her point of view, these men, who were themselves best friends, seemed to relish being in love with her at the same time. Hal and Arthur were acting out roles similar to Wilson’s and Bishop’s. It seemed to cement their relationship rather than break it. Their love for her was something they shared. It brought them even closer together. But it did not bring them closer to Edna Millay. In these jolly triangles, she was the conduit for their affection for each other.

Wilson told her that her many admirers should form an alumni association, “
to which she answered with promptness and point:
‘On en parle toujours, mais on ne le fait jamais.’
 ”

Beginning with the three poems published in
Poetry
in 1917 up until the end of December 1920, Edna Millay had published seventy-seven poems, thirty-nine of which were sonnets. She had published a volume of her poems and had written eight prose pieces under a pseudonym for
Ainslee’s
. She had also written and directed a play,
Aria da Capo
, and although her second book,
Second April
, was stalled in proofs, it was complete. A first edition of
Figs from Thistles
made up in pretty, brightly colored paper was
brought out by Frank Shay, in the windows of whose bookshop at 4 Christopher Street in the Village they were displayed. They sold like hotcakes.

Millay was not languishing; she was in full command of her powers. That she was able to be consistently productive during a period of such disarray in her personal life is something of an achievement. Edmund Wilson has described this period as the beginning of her “immense popularity.” She would from time to time point to her popularity and mock it, a little pleased and a little puzzled. “
Also, I am becoming famous,” she wrote to Hal, who’d gone off to China with Arthur.

The current Vanity Fair has a whole page of my poems, and a photograph of me that looks about as much like me as it does like Arnold Bennett. And there have been three reviews of something I wrote, in New York newspapers in the last week alone. I am so incorrigibly ingenuous that these things mean just as much to me as ever. Besides, I just got a prize of a hundred dollars in Poetry, for the Bean-stalk. And I’m spending it all on clothes. I’ve the sweetest new evening gown you ever saw, and shoes with straps across them, and stockings with embroidery up the front. I wish you were here. We’d all go on a swell party together.

Yet this girlish delight in her fame wasn’t the whole story. “
There was something of awful drama about everything one did with Edna,” Edmund Wilson remembered. “Her poetry, you soon found out, was her real overmastering passion.” Wilson came to believe that other than her mother and her sisters, people were in some sense unimportant to her—except as subjects for poems. She was impartial, Wilson said ruefully. And so her lovers did not quarrel with one another, or even much with her. What she was interested in was “
her own emotions about them.

In all this, she was not egotistic in any boring or ridiculous or oppressive way, because it was not the personal, but the impersonal Edna Millay—that is, the poet—that preoccupied her so incessantly. But she was sometimes rather a strain, because nothing could be casual for her; I do not think I ever saw her relaxed.

Trying to put some distance between herself and her family had not worked. That fall, Kathleen took the room in front of hers on West Twelfth Street. And Norma stayed. Finally, just before Christmas, she made up her mind to escape:

Dearest, beloved Mother,—

The reason why I have not written you for so long is because I have been sick. I am all right now, but I have been quite sick, almost ever since I moved in here,—bronchitis for a while, & another small nervous breakdown after that. I didn’t want you to know, for fear you would worry.—but now that I am all right again I have decided that the thing for me to do is to have a change,—change of everything,—so I am going to travel.

She was going to Europe. Frank Crowninshield, the editor of
Vanity Fair
, had asked her to write two articles a month for the magazine: one she’d sign her own name to, the other Nancy Boyd’s. “Technically,” she said, she would be a foreign correspondent for
Vanity Fair
.

This is the thing I have always wanted to do, you know how much, dearest,—& my work, more than anything else, my poetry, needs fresh grass to feed on. I am becoming sterile here; I have known it would be, & I see it approaching if I stay here.—Also, New York life is getting too congested for me,—too many people; I get no time to work.… And I need to be alone for a while. I shall come back a fine strong woman.… Mother, dear, this is the whole thing, just as I’ve told it. It has nothing to do with any love affair, past or present. What the future may bring I don’t know, maybe something more satisfactory than I’ve had so far. But that is not even on the horizon. I’m going as a free woman, a business woman, & because I want to travel.

She wanted very much to see Cora before she left on January 4, 1921, on the
Rochambeau
. She would cross with some friends. “But after I get to Paris I shall be alone. And I shall be perfectly happy, & perfectly safe, because I speak French, & because I am a very capable & sensible woman, when left to myself. You know that, dear.”

But there was neither enough money nor enough time to bring Cora to New York. “
I shall bid you God Speed,” Cora wrote to her daughter,

just the same here as if I were in New York, and our spirits will often speak to each other on the way and after you get over there. There can be no real separation for two like us, who love each other so well, and you do not have to come here to tell me so, and I don’t have to go there to hear it.

Only in her journal, it was a different voice that cried out on the day Vincent’s ship left New York harbor: “
My baby! My baby! My baby!”

Edna Millay may not have known she had to break the relationship with her mother, but that grip was now a stranglehold, and she was prying free.

SCRUB

If I grow bitterly,
Like a gnarled and stunted tree,
Bearing harshly of my youth
Puckered fruit that sears the mouth;
If I make of my drawn boughs
An inhospitable house,
Out of which I never pry
Towards the water and the sky,

Under which I stand and hide
And hear the day go by outside;
It is that a wind too strong
Bent my back when I was young,
It is that I fear the rain
Lest it blister me again.

It was not going to be an easy separation. Cora, too, had written a poem for her daughter. It was as prophetic as it was ominous.

HEALING, A PLAY IN TWO ACTS
ACT I.

Unlike as Life and Death they met.

The younger spake: Who are you, mother?

The older: A little, lone, old woman, gathering herbs. And you, daughter?

The younger: I gather flowers.

ACT II.

Less unlike again they met.

The younger spake: Where are your simples, mother?

The older: What would you, daughter?

The younger: Forgetfulness.

The older: Gather herbs.

C. B. Millay

*Adams was a columnist and a humorist who had begun in Chicago before starting his famous “The Conning Tower” in 1913, which he signed with his initials, F.P.A.

PART FOUR
“PARIS IS WHERE THE 20TH CENTURY WAS”

CHAPTER 15

V
incent raced through the snowy streets of New York on January 4, 1921, just making the ship as the French porter, slapping a sticker on her trunk, “Mis à bord au dernier moment,” hurried her up the gangplank of the
Rochambeau
. Even her mother joked with Norma about Vincent’s “getaway,” as if she were fleeing the scene of a crime. She was fleeing. But while her stomach had roiled with excitement for a good week before she left New York, once on the wintry Atlantic she didn’t get sick and took no seasick remedies. “Whatever it might be,” she wrote Cora, “… —I wanted the whole of it.—I wanted every bit of the experience, & no dope. (Like you, when I was going to be born.)”

Now, after nine days at sea, they were in the English Channel. She was too exhilarated to sleep, and, wrapping herself in the great white Hudson’s Bay blanket she’d brought along, she went up on deck to see the dawn break over France. A steward, pointing to a rising gray bluff off the starboard bow said, “Voilà, Mademoiselle, la terre de France!”

By January 18, she had settled into her room at the Hôtel des Saints Pères on the Left Bank. It was a pretty, old hotel with a tiny winter garden filled with palms; it was cheap, and it had steam heat. Outside, the rain didn’t let up; Paris turned the color of grisaille. She made her first diary entry that week: “It is so damp this afternoon … that the wall-paper of my room is dark and bubbly with it. I have given orders that my breakfast be brought me at eight o’clock after this, it being my notion to work in bed until noon.”