Savage Beauty (47 page)

In Millay’s “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” the emotional intensity builds up as one waits for something dreadful to happen. In the penultimate quatrain the mother dies equipping her son for life. That is, in fact, the second theme of the poem. The first is maternal self-sacrifice. The ballad could have been resolved in any number of ways, but the mother’s death, while seeming to be sentimental, is so charged with feeling that instead it serves perfectly to resolve the poem:

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

Sainted, maybe, but dead, surely. Matricide, cloaked in sentiment. It’s no accident that Millay wrote the poem in Europe, in her mother’s absence, for only in that situation could she transform the grip of
Duty! Duty! Love! Love!
into a work of the highest achievement of her career so far. Just as none of the Millay daughters would weave hair, none of them would become mothers. To do so was to risk this deadly devotion.

Early in September, after her pregnancy was over, Vincent went to London with Tess. From London she wrote her mother, who remained in Shillingstone, to tell her that she hadn’t felt quite up to doing certain things. “
Not that I’ve been sick, but I’ve been uncomfortable until today. Now I am done menstruating & all right.” She enclosed a pound for her mother, whom she seems to have been writing to every other day. When three days passed without a letter she wrote, “
I’ve been such a bad girl. It comes over me all of a sudden that I’ve not written you for days, & it makes me sick to think of it. I’ve just this minute telegraphed you.”

She told Cora she had motored with Tess to a summer cottage on an island in the middle of the Thames. She was going to work on one more article for
Vanity Fair
, and she included two more pounds in her letter.

“Sweet darling, I didn’t even write you that I got the rest of the money all right!—I suppose you’re worried!—Maybe, oh of course, you need money, too! Oh, I could kick myself!—Don’t ever forgive me, Mummie!—Your bad, Vincent.”

She visited Doris Stevens in London. “
Edna, Doris felt, was again getting ready to take off,” Doris’s husband, Jonathan Mitchell, recalled, “and she really had no idea of what she would do. She might remain in England, she might not. She wanted to go to Italy. She wanted to go back to Paris. It was a time of mustering of forces.”

She did try to tell Doris what had happened. “And it was an incredible story,” Jonathan Mitchell remembered, “of her mother, of rolling in the fields! Well, they produced a miscarriage, and it made Edna frightfully sick. There were doctors in London to whom she might have turned, you understand, and Miss Stevens would have helped her. But instead the two of them went off like two animals—off together in the hedges of Dorset!”

By the middle of October Edna wrote Norma, “
just to break the silence between us, baby.” She had caught sight of the poet A. E. Housman in Cambridge

and chased his retreating tall, thin figure and cotton umbrella for about half a mile through the streets … till he turned in at Trinity College, where he is professor of English, and was lost in the gloom. I caught just a glimpse of his face, a nice face. They say nobody ever sees him, that he goes along like a shadow and is lost before he’s found.

She enclosed the photograph Man Ray had taken of her in Paris, “pretty rotten, but never mind,” and described an enchanted dinner with the sculptor Constantin Brancuşi in his studio:

It’s the greatest, barest studio you ever saw, all white beams and white blocks of marble and everything covered with white dust like a flour mill, and we ate our dinner off a great round marble thing like an enormous mill-stone, and all full of little depressions and bitten-out places where he has pounded and banged at his work—no cloth on the table, and in the entire room not a square-foot of fabric of any sort, no hanging tapestries, no kimonos flung over easels, no pictures, nothing—only some beautiful, pure curving figures standing on pedestals, looking like nothing on earth that you ever saw, things complexly wrought into a simplicity that fools one,—and little Brancusi with his fine, shaggy, grizzly-dark head and beautiful black eyes, dressed in loose trousers and a shirt rather like a smock, and heavy rough shoes, which either
were
wooden sabots or looked exactly like them—a little Roumanian peasant and a great sculptor all at the same time, shuffling in from the kitchen with bowls of soup, and chicken that he had broiled himself, and poking up the fire in the big, rough, white-stone stove, like a stove you build on the beach, that he had made himself, and the two of [us] chattering at each other in two different kinds of French, and eating big white radishes sliced across like turnips, and drinking sweet white wine.

She admitted to her family she was not writing “much poetry” but said she had sent on to her new agents a short story called “The Murder in the
Fishing Cat
. I tell you, me and Eddie Poe,—there’s no stopping us Americans. As for
HARDIGUT
, it’s really going to be published next spring.” Horace Liveright, who had advanced her $500, was now pressing her agents for the novel. “Now little Ediner is hopping to the south of France to write the dam thing. But don’t tell anybody; Liveright thinks it’s all ready but the numbering the chapters.”

Not long after Edna’s letter to Norma, Cora wrote to tell Norma that they were sailing at midnight for Le Havre. “
A friend of Sefe’s wrote of a little place called Cassis, about 8 m. from M. on the R.R. and the Mediterranean, not a resort, which is what we want for the winter.”

Millay remained ill. Her illness, her discomfort, her colds, stomach, or digestive problems only intensified after her mother’s arrival. To Norma and Charlie she tried to take a jaunty note: “
No, I’ve never tried Kellogg’s Bran.… If Mr. Kellogg has invented something that will move my bowels, I will marry him.”

They arrived in Cassis on November 17. Walking from the railroad station to their hotel, they saw vineyards everywhere and gray-green olive trees that had just been harvested. Soon they were eating the “Bouille-a-beisse,” as Cora wrote, so flavored with saffron and garlic that even the coins Vincent got at the post office reeked.

And everywhere they stepped, it seemed to Vincent they crushed wild thyme underfoot. Within two days of their arrival she dove into the stillwarm Mediterranean, and when she surfaced the beads of water sparkled like tiny green jewels on her throat and shoulders. She looked like Ondine.

Cassis
Dec. 12

Dearest Hunk—

Now the real winter has come even here.… Never did two people flee before the cold as we are doing.

But Vincent was no longer fleeing simply the cold. “Of course, … the real trouble is me. I’ve been so dam sick I can’t stand anything.—I’m weak as a kitten,—every time I hear the mistral blowing up I can hardly keep back the tears.”

Her last letter from Cassis was to Arthur. She congratulated him about Gladys Brown, the woman he’d fallen in love with in New York: “
My God—it’s marvelous.” She told him she had known, “in my way, just as well as you know in your way, how nice she is.… I knew it the first moment I set eyes on her in Prunier’s. You can’t fool me. And you didn’t
think we’d like each other!—men don’t know very much.” Still, she said, “I shall love you till the day I die.” As for Hal, since Arthur was still fretting over their possible marriage, she teased, he wasn’t to give it another thought: “There’s not the slightest danger that I shall marry him: he has jilted me!”

Within two weeks of her last letter to Norma, they left Cassis for Paris. On January 17, 1923, they boarded the S.S.
Rotterdam
, bound for America. Margot Schuyler saw Vincent before she left, “
And she looked so ill and worn. I just looked at her, and I remember the last thing I said to her: ‘You go home and you find the most marvelous man in the world, and marry him!’ ” That must have stung, coming from a woman she’d made love to and dropped for Daubigny.

It was hard to tell from the copious notes Cora kept during their crossing whether it was the rough seas or illness that kept Vincent in her room in bed for most of the trip. But the phrase “Vincent not feeling at all well” was frequent. The last night at sea, while the orchestra played “Ain’t We Got Fun,” Vincent remained alone belowdecks as the black Atlantic heaved.

*In Millay’s published
Letters
, edited by Norma Millay, there is a typo that remained uncorrected. It read, “If you can’t
suppose
it, I will.” Whereas the key word was “support.”

BOOK TWO

STEEPLETOP
1923–1950

All the time there is this split in the American art and art-consciousness. On the top it is as nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey.… Look at the inner meaning of their art and see what demons they were.… The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish.
Destroy! destroy! destroy!
hums the under-consciousness.
Love and produce! Love and produce!
cackles the upper consciousness.

—D. H. Lawrence,
Studies in Classic American Literature

PART FIVE
LOVE AND FAME

CHAPTER 19

The younger generation forms a country of its own.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

I
ce and snow were frozen to the rails and rigging of the
Rotterdam
as she docked in Hoboken, New Jersey, on January 26, 1923. Millay returned just before her thirty-first birthday. “Poor me!” she’d written one of her aunts from Rome after Norma had married, “I’m the only old maid in the family! but I’m so busy just now writing a novel that I can’t be bothered getting married.” In fact, she would abandon
Hardigut
within a month of her arrival.

Norma remembered her as looking tired and listless and not being able to write at all.
Even Edmund Wilson, who had what he called one magnificent evening with her, felt that Europe had provided no better environment for her than New York. “She must,” he wrote, “have continued to live with considerable recklessness, for, at the end of two years abroad, she was in very bad shape again.”

During those years abroad, her career had not languished at home. Frank Crowninshield had written her in Europe that when
Second April
had at last been published in August 1921, it had outsold
Renascence
four months after publication. “They have printed three editions … more than 3000 copies and [it] may mean 5000.”

A reporter who called himself Young Boswell talked to her just after her return to the States; he said that he had to meet her because, he wrote, “All young men left flowers at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s door and then went home and wrote poems to her.” He rang timidly at a house in Greenwich Village. A young woman with bright red hair cut like a medieval page’s answered the door. She gave him coffee, and they began to speak of her reaction to New York after having been away.

“The younger generation,” she said, “forms a country of its own. It has no geographical boundaries. I’ve talked with young Hungarians in Budapest, with young Italians in Rome, with young Frenchmen in Paris, and with young people all over.… These young people are going to do things. They are going to change things.”

Flashing her slender fingers through her hair, she paused just long enough for him to ask her eagerly if that meant there would be an artistic awakening in America, too. “I think that America is already artistically awake,” she said, fixing him with eyes he was sure were the color of the sea. After which, Young Boswell said he would go home and write poems to Edna St. Vincent Millay.

In November, Millay had written to Horace Liveright, who had advanced her $500 for her novel, that
Hardigut
would be ready for spring publication in New York. She described in her letter the theme of the novel: “people, otherwise perfectly sane and normal, do not eat in public, or discuss food except in innuendos and with ribald laughter.” She assured him that the book would be not only amusing and satirical but “an unmistakable allegory” about sexual hunger. But while she’d certainly learned in her
Vanity Fair
experience how to craft short prose pieces with wit and considerable skill,
Hardigut
was not a short take. Among the many scenes in her notebook or on odd scraps of paper, there’s no sense of an integrated story moving smartly forward. She seemed unable to sustain a novel.