Authors: Nancy Milford
As a child Vincent had been told fairy tales by her mother, who spared her daughters whatever was disagreeable or frightening by changing unpleasant endings to happy ones. It’s a form Millay would turn to again and again when she was grown. The power of the fairy tale is that through magic or enchantment, through trials and clever guessing, one’s life can be utterly altered. Quick as a wink, the ugly are made beautiful, the poor become rich, the stupid clever, the powerless powerful. It works transformations outside the realm of the real world.
Millay’s princess, who is motherless, is not passive as the princesses in fairy tales usually are; she does not wait, asleep or enchanted, to be rescued—she’s defiant. If the irreconcilable facts of life were glossed with the gold dust of fairy tale—green chins and gold plates, princesses and kings—nevertheless
The Dear Incorrigibles
was her first small act of protest against loss, anger, grief, and fear. No wonder she couldn’t finish it.
Only once in her life would she write directly about what it was like to live with her sisters and without her mother in the small house by the Megunticook River. In this strange passage from a notebook she kept when she was grown, nowhere does she say “we,” “our,” “my,” or “I”:
To live alone like that, sleep alone at night in that house set back in the field and near no other house and on the very edge of Millville, the “bad” section of town where the itinerant millworkers lived,—this was the only way they could live at all. For the house was the cheapest to be found, and their mother, when fortunate enough to get a case, which indeed was most of the time, for she was a very good nurse, competent & resourceful, was obliged to be away from them almost all the day and all the night.
But they were afraid of nothing, which was important,—not of the river which flowed behind the house, coloured with the most beautiful and changing colours,—dyes from the woollen-mills above—and in which they taught themselves to swim; nor afraid of that other river, which flowed past the front of the house, and which, especially on Saturday nights, was often very quarrelsome and noisy, the restless stream of mill workers, who never stayed long enough anywhere for one to know them even by sight.… And once it took all three of the children, flinging themselves against the front door, to close it and bolt it, and just in time. And after that, for what seemed like hours, there was stumbling about outside, and soft cursing. And after everything was quiet again the children lay awake for a long time, listening, and not making a sound, and thinking sometimes of the inconspicuous little path at the back of the house which they could follow in the blackest of nights without making a sound, through the tall grass of the field to the banks of the river, & how there, if it should seem unsafe to cross the corduroy bridge a little further upstream, they could swim across as quietly as water-rats to the further banks, & … hide themselves in less than a minute in any one of ten places where nobody on earth—no, not even with a dog and a lantern!—and the mill hands never went about with dogs and lanterns—could possibly find them.
Her fear is everywhere clear. The girls weren’t safe. There was no one to protect them.
2
Vincent was supposed to make breakfast for her sisters while their mother was away, but it was early morning and she wanted to write in her diary instead. Above her desk she’d pinned Abbie’s Christmas card:
Let us give thanks. Nature is beautiful, friends are dear, and duty lies close at hand.
“
In this case,” she wrote wryly, “duty lies very close at hand and is slumbering in the kitchen where she may lie and snooze until I get this entry written.” Her diary was not only her duty, it was also her “confidante, (that
e
on the end makes it feminine. It would be out of my power to tell all these things to a mere confidant).” Besides, it was the only one of her friends who could keep quiet long enough for her to unburden herself,
and talk I must or my boiler will burst.… It’s Sunday and therefore it’s Sunday School, and I don’t want to go one bit. It looks like rain, and I hope it will rain cats and dogs and hammers and pitchforks and silver sugar spoons and hayricks and paper covered novels and picture frames and rag carpets and toothpicks and skating rinks and birds of Paradise and roof gardens and burdocks and French grammars, before Sunday school time. There!
She didn’t go; she baked beans instead. “Beans are cheap, and we must have them at least once a week or we will be bankrupt. It will be real original to have beans baked on Sunday, and originality is my long suit.” Almost everything that could go wrong had. She fretted about setting a good example in her mother’s absence, which seemed almost constant now. But that night, after her sisters had fallen asleep, she turned to her diary again and made a remarkable entry: she gave her diary a name.
I think I’ll call her Ole Mammy Hush-Chile, she’s so nice and cuddly and story-telly when you’re all full of troubles and worries and little vexations. It’s such a comfort to confide in her and let the cares roll off your mind. After this I’m going to talk right to her and not be content with a proxy.
For Mammy was there whenever she needed her, as her mother was not. She was doing what she always did now; she took what she needed from books, she made up what she could use. And she was careful to admit no ambivalence; not a touch of anger or resentment surfaced—she reassured herself that her real mother was a treasure.
I make two cups of tea in the little blue china teapot, and we sit opposite each other and drink it nice and hot while we watch each other’s faces in the fire-light of the crackling stove. It makes up for all the time she’s gone, Mammy Hush-Chile; I forget all about the things that went wrong and she forgets all about the doctors and the patients and the surgery and the sleepless nights.
Now, for the first time in any of her diaries, she mentioned her poetry:
I’ve written so many verses and keep on writing so many more, that I became afraid that if I didn’t write them into one big book I might forget some of them.… I love my verses so that it would be like taking my heart out if I should wake up some morning and find that all I could remember of one of my most loved—was the name. O, mammy, I mustn’t let it happen, you mustn’t let me, you dear old white-souled, black-faced cuddle-mammy.… I haven’t neglected it; there are fifteen poems in it already.
If her mother had given her poetry when she was a child, now in the summer of 1908, when she was sixteen, she gave her mother the
Poetical Works of Vincent Millay
and dedicated it to her:
To My Mother,
Whose interest and understanding have
been the life of many of these works
and the inspiration of many more, I lovingly
dedicate this little volume.
E.V.M.
July 10, 1908.
During the two years that she kept the
Poetical Works
, she wrote out sixty-one poems in her clear slant hand in a brown copybook, with an alphabetical index at the back carefully noting the age at which she had written each poem. Forty of these poems were written before she turned sixteen; another ten would be added that year. She placed her gold-medal poem, “The Land of Romance,” first.
In these poems she is serving her apprenticeship, and her themes are those of a Victorian, albeit New England, girlhood. Winter is king, raindrops sing, gardens drip with loss. There are moonbeams and fairies in abundance, and love is either lost, dying, or dead. There is a great deal of loneliness. But there is very little renunciation for its own sake, and there are few poems devoted to duty or to domestic accomplishment unless they are treated with rebellious humor. None is pious.
If she has not yet broken clear of the nineteenth century—it was, after all, only 1908—she uses the first person with ease, her language is usually simple and direct, and her rhythms swing clear. She doesn’t yet have her own voice, but she is working to acquire it, and even a simple poem such as “Homing” begins to sound like her own.
Homing bird and homing bee;
Nest and hive in the apple tree;
Sweet song, sweet honey,—but sweeter to me
The homing.
Nest where two crooked branches meet;
Hive in the hollow trunk’s retreat;
Sweet song, sweet honey,—but far more sweet
The homing.
You who drowse on weary wing,
You who sleepily, sleepily sing;
Tell me, sweeter is anything
Than homing?
There is only one sonnet, written at seventeen, “To My Mother.” But there are other poems written to her mother; she called this one “Song.”
Dearest, when you go away
My heart will go, too,
Will be with you all the day,
All the night with you.
Where you are through lonely years,
There my heart will be.
I will guide you past all fears
And bring you back to me.
It is striking that it is she who protects her mother, who shares her loneliness, who guides her rather than being guided by her.
What is most remarkable about the
Poetical Works of Vincent Millay
is that at sixteen she had a sense of vocation. Her title placed her squarely in the company of Burns, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell, each of whose
Poetical Works
lined her mother’s bookcases. It would be a mistake, however, not to notice that the
Poetical Works
of the wildly popular nineteenth-century poets—James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, Mrs. Felicia Hemans, and Jean Ingelow—let alone volumes of fairy tales and copies of songs her mother had written, as well as Scottish border ballads, Irish and old American ballads kept in her family for more than two generations and sung to her as a child, were just as prominent. She was grounded in two very different traditions; the nineteenth-century worthies were as familiar to her as popular ballads and songs.
In her senior year, Vincent was made editor in chief of the school paper,
The Megunticook
. She had a role in every play put on that year. She gave her first piano recital. And she continued to work on a poem she’d begun that summer. It was her most ambitious and longest work, intended to be delivered at graduation, when she was sure to be made class poet. By Christmas the Millays had moved into a larger house in the center of town at 40 Chestnut Street that overlooked the bay. The girls even had a window looking out onto the water.
In the early spring, Cora was on a case in Rockland. One of her letters home to Vincent was the first indication that something was wrong. She told her she just might be able to run up “
for an hour’s stay some evening,” but what she really wanted was for Vincent to take thirty cents, “and get you some oranges. Now be sure to do it.” She continued, “When I get home I’ll see to things and I’ll take care of you till you are in school again bright as a button.”
Cora cautioned her against overdoing: “Don’t read anything but trash or play anything but rag-time. Eat all you can, get you some beef-steak.…
O! I’m dying to get home.… I’ve got a cure all planned out … it’s a dandy. I’ve got some sherry for you.”
No one in the family would talk about it, but Vincent had suffered a setback at school that hurt her deeply. Her classmate Stella Derry remembered:
In her class at Camden High School … she wasn’t very popular. They felt she was way beyond them.… She was the type to exclaim over things and make a lot of almost nothing. Her family made so much of everything she did that I guess the class was a bit envious.
George Frohock, president of their class, son of the Baptist minister, and captain of Camden’s first football team, was the leader of the boys devoted to mocking her. They laughed at her and mimicked her until the peak of malice was reached at class elections. Vincent, whose every attempt to speak inspired thirteen heroes to stamp and catcall until she stopped, was nominated as class poet, but she withdrew when the boys nominated Henry Hall. Worse, the girls hadn’t stood up for her.
She made only two entries in her diary for the year 1909, both marked by longing: “I’ve come back to you, Mammy Hush-Chile.” For she had suffered what she called
the first big disappointment of my life: I graduate in June—without the class poem. You wouldn’t have believed it, would you, Mammy? But it’s true, all too cruelly true.… There is a boy in my class who, when we were Juniors, used to amuse himself by writing to me queer rhymeless, meterless things which I suppose he meant for poems. This year I was Editor-inchief of our school periodical, the “Megunticook.” I was at a loss for material for one of the issues and someone suggested that he write a poem. I thought that perhaps with care he might produce some funny verses. But when it was almost time for the material to come in he came to me and said that he had it partly done and could not possibly finish it. So I, about crazy for my paper, took the thing, finished it, changed it all over, rhymed lines that didn’t rhyme, balanced the shaky meter of other lines, named the thing, and had him sign his name to it.
When it was published, everybody loved it. They even told Vincent how much they admired it. Of course she didn’t tell them she’d written the poem.
When the time came for the writer of the class poem to be elected, the boys had an idea that Henry Hall was a poet and he—oh, he’ll make a manly man some day, didn’t have stiffening enough in his great fat sluggish stolidity to get on his feet and tell them that the only poem he ever had printed in his life had been half written, wholly made over, and published by me.
Oh
it makes me white when I think that it was my own fault. And I did it just for the paper. Oh, Mammy, Mammy, Mammy, how can he sit there in front of me in school and smile at me with his round, red face! How can he speak to me with his great fat voice! … I’ve helped him take away from me the only thing I cared anything about, and now … I despise him as I despise a snake. I shiver when his coat sleeve brushes against me. I hate the sight of his fat white hand,—his pretty, lady-like white hand, that copied and copied in the symmetrical, self-satisfied writing that stole my poem, my class poem that belonged to me.