Savage Beauty (56 page)

Authors: Nancy Milford

Tonight Elinor told Gene & me from beginning to end the story of her strange & wonderful life up to the present moment, a most engrossing tale, full of tragedy.—She is the most lovely creature. Gene is crazy about her. If he weren’t, I’d be furious.

April 5

Ugin brought up breakfast to Elinor & me in my bed & made a lovely fire in my fireplace. Elinor, Gene & I drove down to Austerlitz in a snowstorm, Gene on the seat & Elinor & I tucked in on the floor, facing back—went to Columbia Inn & drank muscatel & read mail. Elinor loved it.—In the evening we discussed the relative weight of
St. Agnes’ Eve
or
Epipsychidion
—not as poems—but as love-poems, Elinor holding that the last twenty lines or so of it are highly sensuous & impassioned, I insisting that, except for a phrase or two, they are so much rhetorical hot air.—Later she read aloud to me from Shelley—the lovely little “If thou coulds’t be as thou hast been” one, & “Less oft is peace in Shelley’s mind” & “Listening to my sweet piping.” Finally she read the
West Wind
. “The Best Poem Ever Written!” she cried when she finished. I did not dispute her. I do not think naturally in terms of best-next-best. I think I love the
Grecian Urn
better. But I am not sure.

This morning Elinor read to herself from
Mortal Image
, while I played first Chopin, then Bach, then Beethoven on the piano. I play so badly. But not too badly, I think, to be allowed to play them.

It sounded like a romantic idyll, these two poets together, each with her red hair, Elinor’s the color of dark copper, Edna’s of flame, Elinor tall and so slender that Edmund Wilson called her “skeletally thin.” Her skin was so white, Edna teased her, it looked as if she lived underwater.

On April 7, the morning Elinor was to leave, they got into an argument over Kathleen’s novel,
The Wayfarer
, which had been published the year before. Elinor didn’t like it. Edna suggested she read the second part again—and this time she relented. “
I gave it to her & made her sit down & read the part about Mother’s life on the Maine farm, which is so beautifully treated. ‘Why, this is lovely!’ she said after a little while. ‘I never read this.’ ”

It comes as a surprise to learn that Vincent admired her sister’s novel enough to insist that Elinor read it, because there had been no mention of Kathleen’s work in any of the correspondence among the Millays since 1926, when
The Wayfarer
had first been published. The only indication that Kathleen was writing and publishing came in a letter Vincent wrote to Cora on May 25, two months after the opening of
The King’s Henchman
. Her letter is sharp and incisive. It’s also about a different book,
The Evergreen Tree
, a book of poems published by Boni & Liveright that fall. In other words, Kathleen had now directly entered Vincent’s domain. Vincent told her mother, who must have been prompting her to respond on Kathleen’s behalf:

I wrote Kathleen ages ago about her book. I told you I would, & I did. And that’s that.

Now will you please stop worrying.

Kathleen is about to publish a book, as thousands have done before her. A person who publishes a book wilfully appears before the populace with his pants down. And there’s nothing you can do about that.

Kathleen is not a baby. She is a grown-up person quite able to take care of herself. And she has been struggling for years to be allowed to manage her own affairs. If she knew the kind of letter you wrote me in her behalf, she’d froth at the mouth & spit brimstone.

But she didn’t stop there.

Kathleen is about to publish a book. If it’s a good book, nothing can harm her. If it’s a bad book, nothing can help her. And all your stewing & fretting will accomplish just one end: it will make you very sick & a nuisance to yourself, and a care to everybody,—so will you please forget it, & relax, & interest yourself in something else? If you don’t, you’re not the intelligent woman you have the reputation of being; you are just one more typical, sentimental, agitated
mother!

Won’t you please RELAX?

Kathleen is not a baby. She is six years older than I was when my first book of poems was published.… I ask you to SNAP OUT OF IT and stop making yourself sick for nothing! Pull yourself together, & go to Maine, & start your garden. And I’ll send you lots of plants, & help you all I can, with advice, & my own experience, & seeds, & money, & any darned thing you want. If you’ll only be good, & STOP WORRYING!!!

With a hell of a lot of love,
Vincent

The slim black volume of Kathleen’s verse looked, in terms of its design, very like Vincent Millay’s, except that the stamping was in silver rather than gold. The poems were too close to Vincent’s for comfort. One, “Blight,” even had the same title. They are oddly self-pitying, a little lame and sorrowful.

IMMIGRANT

Nothing in this house is of my making,
No one in this place is kin to me;
They know me not in sleeping or in waking,
I am alone in this great company.

I want a fire that will be mine for raking,
I want a room that will know me for its own,
I want a love that will be mine for taking,
Strangeness and I have lived too long alone.

Or “
The Spinner’s Song”:

No time, no time, to sing my songs,
But time to spin my spinning!
No way, no way, to right the wrongs,
But ways enough for sinning.

No laugh to take, no laugh to give,
But tears and tears for crying;
No living worth the death to live,
But life enough for dying.

In March, the League of American Penwomen had asked Elinor Wylie to be one of its guests of honor at an authors’ breakfast in Washington, D.C. Elinor, who had left her first husband and their child to run off with Horace Wylie, a married man, had never been forgiven for her indiscretion. Her husband eventually became insane, her son committed suicide, and Mrs. Wylie would not give Mr. Wylie a divorce until much later. It had been a disastrous series of scandals and catastrophes. Now, thinking at last she’d been forgiven, she agreed to be honored. Then she received a second letter. “
Washington is still provincial enough to object to you! I might as well tell you the truth,” the hostess for the breakfast explained. “Do not think that either Mrs. Seton or I were in ignorance in our invitation … but we thought it of no consequence to anybody, anymore than it would be with a man.” But it was. Wylie’s invitation was abruptly canceled. “
I wrote a letter to the League of American Penwomen, telling them where to get off,” Vincent wrote in her diary. “I wish I had been a Fifth Avenue street sparrow yesterday—or in other words:

I wish to God I might have shat
On Mrs. Grundy’s Easter hat.

Her letter was controlled, principled fury; she dropped a copy of it to Elinor in that day’s mail: “My darling: … Please read the letter, then post it at once.—Be a good girl, & do as I tell you, & post it at once.”

For Edna, too, had been invited to be the League’s guest of honor, and while she had told it she regretted not being able to attend, she was “sensible to the honour you did me, and that I hoped you would invite me again.” Now, however, she wrote, each word like a sting, “
It is not in the power of an organization which has insulted Elinor Wylie, to honour me.” How could she be a guest at a gathering of writers

where honour is tendered not so much for the excellence of one’s literary accomplishment as for the circumspection of one’s personal life.

Believe me, if the eminent object of your pusillanimous attack has not directed her movements in conformity with your timid philosophies, no more have I mine. I too am eligible for your disesteem. Strike me too from your lists, and permit me, I beg you, to share with Elinor Wylie a brilliant exile from your fusty province.

One can almost feel the heat from the sparks flying from her pen. Elinor was delighted:

My darling—

A thousand thanks for your beautiful & noble defense. If Grattan had collaborated with Keats or Shelley they could not have contrived such eloquence.…

Your
Elinor

I have written you a ballad—
to you
—which perhaps you’ll like. Hope so, at least.

Millay’s fury was aroused not only in defense of friends but by social and political injustice. Throughout her life, as early as “Renascence,” when it seems naive, to
Aria da Capo
, written in the aftermath of World War I, when it does not, Millay wrote against the folly of men engaged in the deadly game of what she called “feverish ambition” who would kill for colored glass, as they did in
Aria da Capo
.

In the spring of 1920, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were accused of taking part in the holdup and murder of a shoe factory paymaster and a payroll guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts.
Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists. When their judge, Webster Thayer, was overheard to say, “Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?” there was good reason to believe there would be a miscarriage of justice. Judge Thayer was determined from the start to secure a conviction.

What had been an obscure case—they were tried, found guilty, and, after many appeals, sentenced to death in April 1927—had during those seven years enflamed the conscience of America. For under Massachusetts law then, it was the same trial judge who ruled on the appeals from his own verdicts. Edna Millay
joined the picket line before the State House in Boston demonstrating for their reprieve—along with Katherine Anne Porter, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Michael Gold, and hundreds of
others, walking with placards in the hot August sun. Photographed holding her poster aloft, her jaw set in dissent, Millay was taken to the police station, where she was formally charged with “sauntering and loitering” and was bailed out by Eugen, who’d come to Boston with her to put up bail for many of their friends.

On August 22, 1927, the afternoon before the execution, Millay was able to schedule an interview with Governor Alvan T. Fuller. She hoped to persuade him to order a stay of execution. She based her appeal in part on a case in Maine, about which Cora had supplied her with the information. A man had been hanged for a crime it was later discovered he had not committed. Later that afternoon she wrote the governor:

I suggested that, for all your careful weighing of the evidence, for all your courage in the face of threats and violent words, for all your honest conviction that these men are guilty, you, no less than the governor of Maine in my story, who was so tragically mistaken, are but human flesh and spirit, and that it is human to err.… You promised me, and I believed you truly, that you would think of what I said. I exact of you this promise now.… I cry to you with a million voices: answer our doubt. Exert the clemency which your high office affords.

There is need in Massachusetts of a great man tonight. It is not yet too late for you to be that man.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

For all her persuasive eloquence, Fuller, a self-made millionaire who thought a pair of immigrant anarchists would destroy the very foundations of American civilization, did not believe in clemency for these two men. He did not order a stay of execution, and they were electrocuted just past midnight on August 23, 1927. The outrage of their execution was denounced throughout the world.

Once again, Millay, who just a few months before had been called “the young sovereign of the written word,” made use of her poetry to express political outrage. “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” was published on August 22, 1927, in the afternoon edition of the New York
World: