Authors: Nancy Milford
“Certainly she did not look at all as I had expected her to look. We took hands. We talked. And later that afternoon we went to bed together.”
When Margot didn’t hear from Vincent that night, she sent this note up to her hotel room in the morning:
I hope this won’t wake you up.
I hope you are already awake.
Dear lady … please let me come up a moment. I want to tell you something.
Margot—
Millay didn’t reply. “I was terribly in love with Vincent from the first. Did she know? Oh, yes! There was very little she did not know. But after we were together and then I didn’t hear from her, or see her, for two or
three days—I suppose I was afraid. I
was
afraid. I thought maybe she was just promiscuous.” She wrote to her again:
For goodness sake telephone me or send me a petite blue. I’m most awfully low.… Don’t practice your sadistic tendency on me now I need some moral support. This is a hell of a town tonight and I want to talk to you.
Margot
“I have no idea why I wrote ‘sadistic’; you must understand that there were a great many other people who rushed after Vincent. And she was exclusive. She was not promiscuous, which she easily might have been. But, oh, she could make it very clear.”
The only trace of this encounter Millay left behind besides a white lace hankie embroidered with her initials, which Margot kept all her life, is a provocative glimpse in a fragment of a poem of a woman in a café. It may not refer to Margot Schuyler, although its date suggests her. It is untitled and was never printed.
You are most like some pale, impersonal
Small flower, that has no color for the bee,
Only a potent fragrance. Quietly
Turning your eyes to none, troubling us all,
(Even the anxious waiter, even me)
You sit before the cafe in the heat,
Rendering the heavy air too deadly sweet.
Drawing your puff & powder from their case,
Dusting with pollen your small, serious face.
Paris April 26, 1922
“Then one morning she called me and said her mother was arriving,” Schuyler said. “I asked if I could go with her to meet Cora and she said, ‘No, I want to be with her alone.’ ”
Vincent met her mother’s boat, the
Rochambeau
, which by coincidence was the same ship she’d crossed on the year before, then whisked her off on the noon boat train to Paris, where she’d booked a front room across the hall from her own. In her room Cora found “a beautiful bouquet of lilacs and iris, from a girl friend of V’s, from Margaret V. R. Schuyler to Vincent’s mother, on
her
mother’s birthday, the 6th of April.”
“And in she walked with this old woman in a Buster Brown bob, steel-rimmed glasses, and the minute we shook hands I loved her. She was very plainspoken, Cora was. She called shit shit, and not feces. She was not an ignorant woman, not by any means. I was with her all the time, for weeks
on end. And she always had an idea. It was:
Let’s go!
—to the Tuileries! to the Louvre! Let’s bum around these backstreets! There was very little she was not game for.”
That first night they went to the Rotonde Grill for dinner, “
and then we all went to the Boeuf sur le Toit—and they danced, but it was so crowded they went to a cabaret called Zelli’s, and that was lovely,” Cora wrote home.
A young poet, Harold Lewis Cook, remembered meeting them at Zelli’s, “
that wicked, wicked nightclub in Montmartre. But the striking thing was that Edna was there with her mother. And this rather elderly, to me, then, little woman had cut her hair in the short bob of those days. I danced with both of them.… [Edna] was wearing a black satin dress—I remember the feel of the silky fabric against my hand as it slipped across her back.”
Café de la Rotonde
Tues. Apr. 25, [1922]
Dearest Kids,—
Here are your mother and sister sitting with Margot Schuyler at the famous sink of corruption (see above) of the Latin Quarter.—Mother has a cold & is imbibing a Grog Américain, which is to say a hot rum with sugar & lemon.
Me, I have been sick in bed about all the time since mother came—the weather is frightful here, it has rained every day for nearly three months. But in spite of hell, we have had a swell time together.—Mother is so wonderful, & she enjoys every minute of it. I take her everywhere, on all my rough parties, & she is always the best sport present—everybody loves her & is crazy about her.… (Margot now says I must eat my noix de veau braisé aux endives while it is hot.)
At the beginning of Cora’s stay in France, mother and daughter went everywhere together, most often with Margot. Cora began meticulously to list to her “Dear girls” at home where she’d been, with whom, and what they’d seen. This was just one weekend in May:
I saw Bernhardt, went with Margot and Sefe, Sat. night, saw the Russian Ballet at L’Opera. Margo Schuyler … and Sefe and I, went out to Pere Lachaise, the great grave-yard where Abelard and Heloise are buried in one grave, saw Chopin’s tomb, and Oscar Wilde’s. Sat. P.M. with John, Margo and Curtis Moffitt, to the Eiffel Tower and to the top, in four stages by elevator and then a short flight of stairs. Sat. Ev’g. with Margo and Sefe to Russian Ballet. Yesterday, we three girls, and John and Max Eastman, to the country. Not much time to write.
Vincent said she was saved from total exhaustion only by the “
fact that she has just acquired a small blister on her heel.… Isn’t it wonderful, sweetheart, that I really did it & here she is!—And it was all due to you, Normie, that I had her come so soon. She is the sweetest looking thing, & you have no idea … how everybody loves her.”
The handsome Max Eastman, who knew Millay’s work but knew her only slightly from that single evening in New York during the
Masses
trial, drifted into her life in Paris that spring, having decided to fall in love with her. “
The idea of loving someone more like myself … a companion of my ambition as well as of my mind and body, had always intrigued me. And so much the better if she was famous—for I like to admire those whom I love. I like to love those whom I admire.”
Eastman was in Genoa, where he had gone to cover the postwar conference; he was traveling with George Slocombe. Then he went to find her in Paris.
We dined together, making conversation successfully, and after coffee, I asked her to come to my room on the rue des Beaux Arts and read me some poems. I was not, alas, falling in love with her, but still only hoping I might. She did come, and as my room was infinitely narrow with only the bed to sit on, we sat, or rather lay, on the bed together with our heads propped against a pillow. She read to me, after one or two less personal poems, a sonnet which defends, or pays its respects to, a love that is momentary and involves no complications. But by that time … though we were almost in each other’s arms, we were not together. We were still making conversation.
If by the early 1920s Edna Millay had become a romantic figure—someone to make love to as a mark of one’s own increased stature—she was not about to become that for Max Eastman.
That June, when Millay sat for a photograph by Man Ray, she looked desperately unhappy. Her face was drawn, her shoulders hunched; she was wrapped in a woolen shawl, hugging her arms across her stomach. Cora wrote Norma:
She is not at all well, and would have seen a doctor here about her stomach, but thought it would be more sense to wait till we get to England.… And it is more than probable that the food here, with no cream and nothing but boiled milk had a great deal to do with her trouble, which a French doctor would not understand, and which a change of food might correct with the help of out-door life and quiet.
In a carbon copy of another letter to Norma dated June 30, 1922, Cora told her that “Tess Root, and Mrs. Townsend, [new] friends of ours,” were going ahead to meet them in England.
“She [Vincent] was sitting across the table from me. Someone had given her a bunch of violets,” Tess Root later recalled. “We started chatting and she suddenly said, ‘We agree about so many things. Take these violets.’ And then we were friends forever.”
Dwight Townsend left an extraordinary record of her own in a remembrance she wrote years later:
She dropped into our hotel room wearing a childish blue gingham dress with a white apron attached. Now, girls go about cities like that. Then it seemed very unconventional—no hat, no gloves, no purse. She looked like a schoolgirl as she might wander around a small town.
Edna was so bright and gay and vibrant. Such a totally bewitching sort of person that you just looked at her and loved her and thought, this is the most wonderful girl that ever was. You see, you must remember there was no sense of smallness, or evil in any way attached to Edna. You must know that she was—well, she was splendid.
I think Edna’s mother was rather, was a little bit in awe of her. That she had created such a creature. She was willing and eager for Edna to work out her own life, and yet I was sure there was a sadness. I could be wrong. But a sadness on Mrs. Millay’s face—of what?—that Edna had gone overboard.
One scene in particular stood out in her mind, and when she told me about it her breath seemed to catch: “
We were sitting in the Dôme in Paris—the whole lot of us sitting around a table. Edna and her mother and a strange young man, a very attractive man, whom she must just have met. I don’t recall ever having seen him before. Well, they must have made an arrangement, for he would keep looking over at her, as if to say, ‘Come.
Come
.’ And Mrs. Millay must have noticed, for we all noticed.
“Well, at last Edna said, ‘We’ll see you later,’ something like that. And the two walked off. There was a silence. Mrs. Millay sat with her head down—this may be entirely my own imagination. Surely it was very romantic in its way. But it did seem to me, then, that Edna’s mother accepted this. But had she a choice, you see? … And all that time Mrs. Millay was sitting at our table, passed over in conversation—& here’s this man; this man who means nothing to Edna. She never saw him before and she never will see him again. I felt a real sadness radiated from her mother.”
That Millay would expose her mother to her sexual life in this way, with no effort to protect her or even to consider her own privacy, seemed punishing.
On June 28, 1922, Millay applied for and received through the agency of the American consulate general in Paris two documents. The first was an affidavit testifying that she was a citizen of the United States residing in Paris, that her name was Edna St. Vincent Millay, that she was the legitimate daughter of Henry Tolman Millay and Cora Lounnella Buzzell, that she was born in 1892 in Rockland, Maine, and that she had never been married. The second was a longer legal document, a “
Certificat de Coutume”—which Norma Millay, whose French was sketchy, thought was a permit to bring costumes out of France to America—assuring the French government of all that the affidavit had, as well as that she had attained her legal majority, so that she could marry in France without her parents’ consent.
These two legal documents were drawn up by an American attorney in Paris and stamped with the raised seal of the American vice consul. Edna Millay had gone to considerable trouble to secure permission as a foreigner to marry in France. Who was it she was suddenly so intent to marry? Did she think her mother would try to stop her? There was only one person alive, who was in Paris then, who might know.
“
His name was Daubigny!” Margot Schuyler remembered. “It was the name of a great painter of the nineteenth century, I believe. I thought he was a fop! A hanger-on! He was a gentleman, insofar as breeding was concerned, and for some reason that I shall never understand he swept Vincent off her feet. Completely.
“He was a pseudo-aristocrat who did nothing. He was tall, rather tall, immaculately dressed, he was French—oh, he had a delightful accent. But, no, he did not belong to our group. Nor to any other that I could tell; he insinuated himself into our group—there were other eligible men—I don’t understand it and I didn’t then. He was suave, oily, I thought—Thelma Wood, Djuna—none of us liked him. And, of course, I was extraordinarily jealous. Because Vincent showed very plainly that she didn’t want me. She wanted Daubigny.”
Cora loathed Daubigny. Her fury at being displaced by him was astonishing; it was virulent. In a prose fragment, which is the only record we have, she whips herself into a rant as she pits herself against her daughter’s lover. “The dirty panderer!” she exploded.
If he had not been kept by some rich wanton! If he has not been a runner-in for some whore-house, I am mistaken—Borrowing money from her—making her borrow money from her friends, because of him she cannot get a chance to do her work, and spending the money on him—people at the Quarter must think that this devotion to “Mummie” was easily broken, and for a very little in exchange. The gradual, sure, insidious taking her over away from me.… even leaning over her, his head between us—she can hardly get a chance to eat—in the street, running on ahead with her, leaving me to get along as best I may.… [not] appreciative of her wonderful powers, but lustful, greedy, full of evil possession——each glance almost an orgasm … his snake-shaped head and fish-eyed—carp-mouthed face—his head darting out like a snake till you look for a red tongue to flash out and strike her—for a wound on the sweet, tender face—each glance seemed to corrode the gold in her hair, and leave it tarnished.… she swore she would drive him out of the Quarter.