Savage Beauty (42 page)

There sat my mother
  With the harp against her shoulder,
Looking nineteen,
  And not a day older,

A smile about her lips,
  And a light about her head,
And her hands in the harp-strings
  Frozen dead.

And piled up beside her
  And toppling to the skies,
Were the clothes of a king’s son,
  Just my size.

A ballad is the simplest four-line verse we have in English. With its clear rhymes and even beats, it tells a plain story as simply as a song or a nursery rhyme. But it is never an exercise in innocence, for it is almost always a tale of violence ending in death. Millay’s is no exception. Although “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” may be read to bear two messages, both are fraught with peril. Millay is using the story of her own childhood and her mother’s, each with its iron poverty and maternal self-sacrifice, to equip her child for a grander life than any she would ever know without her. She is a daughter transformed into a son—and no ordinary son of a poor mother but a king’s son, a royal. It is
he
who writes the poem; when the mother speaks,

“Son,” said my mother,
  When I was knee-high,
“You’ve need of clothes to cover you,
  And not a rag have I.”

there is nothing in the house but a heel of bread

“And a harp with a woman’s head
  Nobody will buy,”
  And she began to cry.

That single phrase, “a harp with a woman’s head,” which will be repeated four times in the ballad, is the key to the poem. A ballad works by repeating certain phrases, charging them with such increased feeling that an almost unbearable tension is created. The third time Millay uses that phrase, she varies the stanza to lead us into the center of the poem, which is about the mother, the Harp-Weaver.

Looking nineteen,
  And not a day older,
And the harp with a woman’s head
  Leaned against her shoulder.

Her thin fingers, moving
  In the thin, tall strings,
Were weav-weav-weaving
  Wonderful things.

In her hands the harp is transformed into a magic loom upon which she will weave not simply dross into gold—but bright “gold threads whistling

Through my mother’s hand.
I saw the web grow,
  And the pattern expand.

What web? Where else in Millay’s life have we seen a mother who weaves to earn a living for her brood? In fact, we’ve seen it twice. The harp with a woman’s head is the lap loom upon which Cora wove hair, a skill she had learned from her own mother, but which she refused to pass down to her daughters.

“She didn’t want us to know how,” Norma said matter-of-factly. “There’s no more to it than that. But look what Mother made for us,” Norma said as she lifted out of a trunk three identical porcelain-faced dolls—identical except for their hair. One was dark, and one was blond, and one was fiery red. Norma asked me if I wanted to hold them, and I didn’t. They seemed to me spooky, lying in their old muslin clothes, but their hair was real, all right, and richly colored, and dead.

When I said that I found the dolls macabre, Norma thought I meant dirty. “No, Nancy, the hair was washed. Mother washed our hair before she used it.” Here was some fragment of their real bodies, and Norma wanted me to touch them as she fondled their hair, as if they were relics. I recoiled from them as if they were tiny pieces of flesh. It was an odd moment—I felt flushed. It was just a little too close for me, in the library at Steepletop. Vincent’s bright red hair was bristling with color, as shiny as a fox’s pelt.

“I must wash their clothes, then you won’t be afraid to touch them.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Yes, you are.”

“What am I afraid of?”

“I don’t know. Oh, maybe I have a little tiny hunch.”

Even accounting for the slow transatlantic mails, Vincent didn’t hear from Cora until very late in the fall. “
Mother has been a terrible woman for a time in not writing her sweet lovely one,” she began. So it wasn’t the slow mails; she hadn’t written. “I guess I thought you must know how I loved that wonderful poem”; she called it “that wonderful poem” twice, as if she were uncertain how to praise it. Then she told Vincent that she’d given it
to Kay, who had returned it to her via Norma (whose nickname she uses here),

and we all love it. Charlie and Non were mad about it, and Non told Charlie a little more so that he had a little better idea of what it might mean to us. But I should never think of mentioning anything like that to Howard, and Kay would not want to do so. And it is just as well.

Astonishingly, Cora, Kathleen, and Norma had decided not to tell Kathleen’s husband about the poem because it was so centered on their own past.

None of it mattered at that moment, when Vincent was thinking of George Slocombe, to whom she’d just written. He wrote back quickly that he would try to be “
to you what you would have me be … in any case you are the only woman I love, or want to love.” He said her letter broke his heart. “Do you remember a walk back through the woods to Blois, when you picked flowers, & told me of your mother’s cupboard & kitchen? Do you remember anything?”

She remembered far too much. For all his declarations of love, she did not hear from him again until the end of November, when she was traveling with Griffin Barry to Italy.

CHAPTER 17

M
illay had been in Rome less than a week when the American ambassador, Richard Washburn Child, suggested it would be an adventure to travel to Albania, which had just been opened to the West but whose borders, in the aftermath of World War I, remained unfixed and in dispute. The young John Carter, whom she’d met in Paris and who was connected to the embassy, would accompany her.

The rugged isolation of tiny Albania, with its rival clans and religions, was as legendary as its beauty. Its coastline, with the ruins of old Venetian fortifications set among fields of wild dill, black mountains rising from the sea, was ravishing. But after five hundred years of Ottoman domination Albania remained backward, fiercely independent, and desperately poor.

They began the first day under starlight, before dawn, riding through
mountains from the capital city of Tirana to Elbasan. Edna spent ten hours in the saddle because it was the only way to get there; it was the second time she had ever ridden. In a snapshot taken halfway between Tirana and Elbasan, she is sitting uneasily astride a dark bay, squinting into the bright light. Two armed guards are in the foreground. Standing next to her is their young Albanian interpreter, Abdullah, holding a rifle with a clip of ammunition in his hand, a cartridge belt around his waist. He is dressed in a Serbian uniform. “
They wear the uniforms of anybody they can catch & tear it away from,” Millay noted in her journal; “—their army on the march must be a sight. This boy followed us everywhere just out of pure affection & wept when we had to send him away. He cared for us like a mother & like [a] dog & like a hen with ducklings.”

Although there is never any direct mention of John Carter in her journal, there are always “you” and “we.” The intimacy of this entry suggests that they were traveling as lovers.

Rain on the Adriatic and on the Moslem tower.… Sleepily from the chalk-white minaret an hour before daybreak the dark young muezzin calls the town to prayer—Only you & I, alarmed from slumber, listen, staring into the darkness, Ah—Ah—Ah—husky & shrill the bodiless voice in the sky climbs/mounts the wide, uneven steps to the folded feet of Allah.…

Let us tear apart the tough thick skin of the ripe pomegranate & split the seedy fruit in two—ah, how wet & good to the love-parched mouth—how cool on the naked breast & knees drips now the clear bright blood of the crushed pomegranate—suck up & spilt—wipe the wet mouth & chin on the warm smooth shoulder—there are six pomegranates in this basket—shall we eat them all—hurl now the empty shells to the corner of the room—Ah, how stained & drenched we are!—Let the wind dry us if it will.

They vowed never to tell anybody about their trip, “which sounds awful,” Carter later wrote Norma, “but wasn’t at all.”

In another photograph taken in Albania she is standing with her hands on her hips, showing off the fragile lace at the wrists and throat of her long-sleeved blouse against a heavily embroidered red velvet cloak with its stiff silk sash—embroidered with real gold, she told her mother. The image is nearly that of another poet—a man with auburn curls and a surly mouth who sat for his portrait by Thomas Phillips wearing a native Albanian costume. There is the same fitted brocaded jacket, shot through with gold threads and bright trimmings, and except for the headdress, a turban and flowing scarf flung over his shoulder, this famous painting of Lord Byron looks astonishingly like Millay. Immensely popular, his brief life a
scandal, his poems memorized by schoolchildren in Albania, Byron was the beau ideal of the Romantic poet in nineteenth-century England, as Millay was becoming in America in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

“
But in spite of all the hardships and inconveniences of travel in a country with no railroads or public conveyances of any kind,” she later wrote to her mother from Rome, “as a matter of fact for the most part no roads at all except a bridle path through the mountains, no plumbing, no butter, no coffee except Turkish coffee which is made with sugar, and other suchlike lacks, seeing Albania—and also Montenegro, where we traveled for a couple of days only—has been my most thrilling experience so far.”

She said she intended to write it up for the
Metropolitan
but never did. Instead, as John Carter wrote, “
She remained in Rome for a bit and then went to Vienna with Griffin Barry.”

Just before leaving Rome on November 13, 1921, she totted up her expenses, listing her assets and liabilities. The latter was the longer list. She had about $53, counting everything she could lay her hands on in Italian, French, British, Belgian, Turkish, and Serbian currency. This included money in coins and paper, and postage stamps. She owed $1,085 to a wide variety of friends, not including the $450 and 250 francs she owed to John Carter or what she owed to Edmund Wilson and Slocombe. Nor did she take into account the discrepancy between
Vanity Fair’s
account and her own figures, another 3,000 francs. She tried to calculate the difference in rates of exchange among francs, pounds, and lire but gave up with a note to herself: “It is easily seen, without transposing this all into dollars, that it means a great deal of money.”

Four days after drawing up her list, she invited her mother to Europe. Indebtedness was a state she was accustomed to. It would not stop her; it never had.

Sweetheart:

There is one thing, of course, which must be done before you come abroad. So I want you to write and tell me as soon as you can get together the evidence just how much it will take for you to go to Camden, pay up all our debts there, get the furniture out of hock and stored in some more congenial place, or sent to New York to help furnish for the kids, and live nicely while you are there.… So make me a real estimate, and don’t get scared if it looks pretty big, and remember that I want you to do the whole thing like a grand lady, travel in the Pullman even in the daytime, stand Flora Harris to a couple of drinks in the Bay View House—(I had a dreadful feeling just then that maybe Flora Harris is dead; but if she is, you know what I mean). I repeat, don’t get scared even if it looks pretty big, because I’ve got to make a lot of money anyway, and I might as well make a little more, and do the thing as it ought to be done. Also, it would be rather fun while in Camden to tell anybody who might be interested that as soon as you get your business straightened out you are coming abroad to be with me. See, dear? So don’t go trying to help me out by steaming apart stuck postage-stamps, returning cream-bottles, or picking up cigarette-butts in the street and trying to sell them to Benson & Hedges. We’re going to do this here trick nonchalant, or we ain’t going to do it.