Authors: Nancy Milford
Millay didn’t know that on the rue de Varenne, within hailing distance but worlds away from the Saints Pères, the elegant Mrs. Wharton was keeping the same schedule, writing in her bed—although she was propped up by goose-down pillows, her little dogs tucked in beside her.
Each morning two American girls in the room next to Vincent’s began their French lessons. The walls were paper thin. As soon as their tutor left they would break into a torrent of American slang, “all in a rather pleasant drawl which might mean Memphis,” Edna mused. But they had only three topics of conversation: “Clothes; How many Francs does one get for a Dollar; and How Well One has done in a Week to see all One has seen.” Her diary read as if she were collecting material for
Vanity Fair
pieces, and of course she was.
Frank Crowninshield had tried to persuade her before she left New York to sign her own name to her prose pieces. He’d proposed a series of twelve glimpses into “the social life of our day.” Dialogues,
apropos of divorce, and, in successive sketches, you could touch on The Debutante, The Perils of Domesticity, At a Dance, Social Climbing, The Honeymoon, Art Exhibitions, The Flirt, The Jealous Woman, First Love … Bridge, (if you play it), Golf (if you play it).
His point was to make the series notable, not only to please
Vanity Fair
but—and here Crowninshield was no fool—because it would give Millay material for a book: “only, I want your name on the sketches, even if you have to elevate the moral, intellectual and literary tone of them to a height level with your lofty position as an artist.” He would pay her a hundred dollars for each, which was as high as he’d ever paid for a play or a dialogue, but, he persisted doggedly, “Your name really ought to be on them, in order to make us pay you this money willingly and gladly. If your friend Miss Boyd were to sign them, I would pay this money a little grudgingly.” Still Millay continued to refuse, and Crowninshield continued to pay.
“
Did you see
The Implacable Aphrodite
in the March
Vanity Fair?
” she wrote Norma, “—it reads rather amusingly.” After that she managed a Nancy Boyd piece, alternating sometimes with a poem, about once a month until the October issue, when the magazine published nine of her poems.
Vanity Fair
was providing her with an income, just as
Ainslee’s
had, and again the most substantial portion of it came from her prose. “The Implacable Aphrodite” was set in Greenwich Village. Tea is about to be served by Miss Black, a sculptress, to Mr. White, “a man of parts, but badly assembled.” As she bends down to prepare the tea, her robe falls away, clinging “to her supple limbs.” Mr. White is soon beside himself. Other
men, he tells her, may importune her to marry, for they do not understand her need to be free to create her art. It is her beauty that attracts them, “ ‘your extraordinary grace, your voice, so thrillingly quiet, your ravishing gestures.’
(He is silent, breathing hard.) (She, delighted by his understanding, leans back wearily and closes her eyes, exposing a long and treacherous throat, full of memories.)
” What fun Millay must have had writing this. It’s hard to tell who she is twitting the most, herself or the men drawn to her. At the end of the story, Miss Black announces she’s about to sail for Europe:
“ ‘It will be of infinite value to me in my work.’
“ ‘But what about me?’
“ ‘I don’t understand you.’
“ ‘You say you’re going because it will help your work—but think of me! What will happen to me?’ ”
She replies that it hadn’t occurred to her to consider him.
“He (
shouting
): ‘No! Of course not! Oh, you’re cold, you are—and cruel, my God! Your work!’ (
He laughs scornfully
.) All you think about is those damn little putty figures!’ ”
Here
he
is, flesh and blood: “ ‘—and what do you care?’
“She (
icily
)
:
‘Less and less.’ ”
Millay was not unaware that certain men in her life, particularly the literary men who would later leave written records—Floyd Dell, Edmund Wilson, and John Peale Bishop among them—found her refusal to continue her affairs with them a stunning rejection. They wrote to her about their desperate hurt and anger; they waylaid her on the street. To a man they felt that her leaving them meant far more about her inability to be faithful than it did about their need to secure her exclusively for themselves. They talked about her chagrin, even when it was clearly their own; they talked about her promiscuity and her puzzling magnanimity. They failed to acknowledge the pull she felt between the excitement and energy of her sexual life, where she was a sort of brigand who relished the chase, and the difficult, sweet pleasures of her work. But Millay did seem irresistibly drawn to relationships that were doomed to fail. Maybe she couldn’t bear the weight of a permanent attachment, in which she had no reason to believe. The love of her life remained her mother, and until that tie was broken it held her fast.
You know, mother, the quaintest thing. All around Paris in public places, where we have a sign up saying
toilet
(a word we took from the French, of course) they have signs up saying
“Water Closet”
or just the letters “W.C.” Isn’t that killing? Of course they think it very grand. They pronounce it, naturally, a little like this:
“Vatair Closette”
Well, enough of this Paris gossip, dearie!—Isn’t it racy, though? So far my note seems to be all about … public toilets.
Cora was overjoyed at Vincent’s simply being in Paris; any news was part of
their
triumph: “How we used to think and dream and plan and work and give up one thing and reach out for another. Hasn’t it been a big wonderful, terrible, triumphant, old haul up the hill? And if it had been smooth and less steep, we would not have gotten so much out of it.” She cautioned Vincent against making it too hard for herself now:
The other night after I went to bed I lay for a long time thinking of the terrible winter you had last year—one thing piling upon another to the breaking point, and the getting away last spring, and all the demands upon my little girl. I hope you will be able to recover from it all during your stay abroad, and come back when you get ready to come all saddled and bridled and fit for the fight again; but not the same fight, ever again. Other burdens may come, and will, of course, but never the same ones … again.
Some of those burdens lay at home. A man in New York told her he was keeping in touch with Norma and Kathleen “
so that through them the memory of you … shall keep fresh. Our few weeks intimacy was & is one of the bright spots in my life.” He told her how blooming Kathleen looked, and he confided about Norma that although she was playing in
Matinata
, the curtain-raiser to
Emperor Jones
,
I don’t think she’s overly satisfied or contented. She’s a queer child & not satisfied with what she can do well.… I think she misses you a lot; but that’s natural, so do I. She one time said she was going to Europe, & I said & live how? & she said Oh Edna always looked after me. Well, I said, she’s a fool if she does again.
The week before her twenty-ninth birthday, stricken with homesickness, Vincent wrote her mother:
February 13—
Two
o’clock in de
mo’nin’
In bed
Dearest Muddy,—
Jus’ a lil’ note to say goodnight to my muddy afore I goes to sleep. I’ve written a lot today—just got through—& am tired.
Then she lapsed into excessive guilt: Had she forgotten to return the five dollars she’d borrowed from her mother just before she’d left for
France? “Oh darling, if I did, I shall never get over it! … It makes me cry when I think I didn’t send it—& I’m crying right this minute, all of a sudden, like a nut, just for thinking I forgot, simply forgot, something my dearest wanted.”
She circled a tiny spot on the paper: “Tear-drop, see? I had to do something ridiculous, to shake me out of it, darling.… I’ll send you some money soon, dear.… Goodnight, my dearest thing in the world.
Vincent
. ”
This was a pattern in their correspondence now that mirrored a new pattern in real life: Millay fled, embarking on something of her own rather than staying with her mother. Then she felt guilty. Her guilt was almost always linked to having abandoned Cora, but she assuaged it only with money, not by returning.
Up until then, Cora had been spending the winter and early spring in Newburyport with her sister Clem, where she had been deeply unsettled by a visit from her youngest sister, Georgia. Swanning about in her splendid black Packard, with her boys wrapped in bearskin next to her, Georgia asked Clem why Cora didn’t work, as she was able. “
Clem told her she supposed it was because the girls didn’t want me to,” Cora wrote to her daughter. “I’m tired of Georgia and her ways and talk and coarsenesses and selfishnesses and do not think I shall trouble her very much more or let her trouble me.” But for all the grief and jockeying for position among those sisters, Clem and Susie, Georgia and Cora could not do without one another.
The Lamp and the Bell
was a play that Millay was commissioned to write while she was in Paris, for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Vassar College. It was in five acts with a cast of forty-eight, not counting musicians, cupids, pages, and children. Freighted with the heavy cargo and paraphernalia of mock Elizabethan drama, it listed but stayed afloat because it was centered in the remarkable love between two young women who become stepsisters. Nothing could have been cannier for Vassar. It was lavishly produced outdoors on the greensward, where Vincent had often performed, and it was a ringing success.
What was disturbing, almost chilling, was the letter Edna Millay wrote to her mother from Paris after the play was finished: “
I have a curious feeling that someday I shall marry, and have a son; and that my husband will die; and that you and I and my little boy will all live together on a farm.” This is nearly a reprise of the central theme of the play: that the enduring love between women is the only bond that lasts.
“Lovéd,” Cora wrote back, dismissing the notion with an air of parental good sense, “the idea of living with you and a grandson cannot tempt me
into hoping his father will have to forego that privilege, unless he may be someone you will not want, which heaven forbid.” How disingenuous this was coming from a woman whose own mother had chosen to forgo that privilege, as had she. Leaving a husband was mother’s milk to the Millays.
Vincent’s homesickness was for her mother. Even as she teased Norma
Dearest Darling Baby Sister ’Loved Hunk,—it does seem a long long time, little sweet sing, since us heard from each other! … Sweetheart, this is a silly letter for one grown-up sister to write another grown-up sister, but maybe it will express … how much I love you, & how often I miss you.
But it was her mother for whom she longed:
It is nearly six months now since I saw you. A long time. Mother, do you know, almost all people love their mothers, but I have never met anybody in my life, I think, who loved his mother as much as I love you. I don’t believe there ever was anybody who did, quite so much, and quite in so many wonderful ways. I was telling somebody yesterday that the reason I am a poet is entirely because you wanted me to be and intended I should be, even from the very first. You brought me up in the tradition of poetry, and everything I did you encouraged. I can not remember once in my life when you were not interested in what I was working on, or even suggested that I should put it aside for something else. Some parents of children that are “different” have so much to reproach themselves with. But not you, Great Spirit.… If I didn’t keep calling you mother, anybody reading this would think I was writing to my sweetheart. And he would be quite right.
Between this letter, written on June 15, and her next, sometime in the last week of July, when she was going to the seashore, Vincent invited her mother to come to Europe
and play around with your eldest daughter.… We could go to Italy and Switzerland, and to England and Scotland, and, if there are not too many riots and street fights there at the time,—mavourneen, we would go to Ireland! … and then, my Best Beloved, you and I will just have ourselves a little honey-moon.
Before she left Paris, she mailed Cora a poem. She told her mother she could show it to her sisters. “P.S.—Do you suppose, when you & I are dead, dear, they will publish the
Love Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay & Her Mother?
”
She hadn’t said why she was suddenly leaving Paris, and she certainly didn’t tell her mother she had had to borrow travel money from Edmund Wilson, who had just arrived there. “
You told me that if I got into desperate straits you could raise some money for me,” she wrote to Wilson. “Well, I am there now. That’s just where I am.—I will pay it back very soon,—that is to say, in a month’s time.—If you can’t do it, will you please wire me that you can’t.”
There was considerably more going on in her life than she admitted in any of her letters to her mother or to her sisters: in the spring she had fallen deeply in love with the young English journalist George Slocombe, from whom she was about to flee.
When Edmund Wilson arrived in Paris, he immediately looked up Edna and found her at the Hôtel de l’Intendance, “
a very first-rate hotel on the Left Bank and better dressed, I suppose,” he wrote John Bishop, “than she has ever been before in her life.” She was sitting at her typewriter with a pile of manuscripts on her desk, wearing a little black dress.