Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  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.

  Her fury turned into disgust, then physical revulsion:

  Our class had a play this winter. He was my father. I put my arms around his neck and kissed him every night for weeks. Oh, I could strike my mouth! I can feel the touch of him now. I laid my head on his knee and clasped his hand. Oh, I loved him dearly in the play, but if I had known what I know now, my mouth would have burned him when it touched him. Oh, Mammy, I can tell it all to you, for it won’t hurt you, it won’t sadden you, except as you know it hurts and saddens me. I can’t tell it all to mama. She knows all that happened, but she doesn’t know the way it feels to me. Only it worried her that I didn’t cry about it.… But I couldn’t cry even to please her. I cry when I’m angry, not when I’m hurt.

  Thwarted and angry, finding her rival repellent, she fell ill. No amount of oranges, sherry, or milk would cure her.

  When the class photos were taken, Martha Knight remembered, Vincent wasn’t there. “She was absent a good deal her last, her senior year, as I recall. I don’t know if she was ill or somehow discouraged about her future—I just don’t know. We did not discuss it. But she missed the class picture, and Mrs. Millay called me up and got irate.… She said that if I had told Vincent, she could have come up. But I hadn’t thought to tell her. I mean, I didn’t intend not to, I just hadn’t thought to tell her.”

  Instead Vincent had her photograph taken in town, wearing her graduation dress. Seated on a Roman bench, she is wearing two great white hair ribbons, one at the back of her neck, the other perched atop her head like a white moth. Her bright hair is swept back from her face, caught up behind her ears. Her dress is of flowered Persian lawn, with a deep V bodice trimmed with lace, the long puffed sleeves caught just below her elbow, her tiny waist cinched with ribbon. She looks weighed down with bows and ruffles. Her gaze is direct and unsmiling.

  The graduation exercises were held the evening of June 16, 1909, in the Camden Opera House. Martha Knight gave the first essay, on Scottish folklore, while Stella played a piano solo. Then the boys recited their talks on “The Value of Higher Education” and “The Uses and Values of Electricity”; near the close of the commencement ceremonies, Henry Hall, who stumbled out of nervousness, read his class poem, “Our Destiny.”

  The final speaker was Vincent Millay. Jessie Hosmer, who was sitting in the audience that night, said she would never forget the small girl with her bright red hair, her chin lifted, her head thrown back, who seemed almost to sing out her essay, the poem “La Joie de Vivre”: “Well, she spoke it just as if she was doing what she was doing. She was stealing thunder.”

  All the heat and urgency of being young was in her poem, and it began like an anthem to youth:

  The world and I are young!

  Never on lips of man,—

  Never since time began,

  Has gladder song been sung

  Her writing vindicated her. “Oh, Mammy,” she wrote in her diary, “they gave me the prize!” With that ten dollars she went to visit her aunts in Massachusetts, alone, for the entire summer.

  CHAPTER 5

  In October, Vincent won the lead in a traveling stock company’s production of Willowdale, in which each of her sisters had a small role. Vincent, playing the prim Milly Bassett, “who loves Tom” and loses her primness, stole the show. When the company left Camden for their next stop, the ingenue there fell ill and Vincent was summoned from Camden to play the role. Throwing her clothes into a suitcase, racing to catch the steamer and then the train, she wrote in her scrapbook, “Spree! Lunch & Bath at Midnight.” Kerosene lamps were lit in the train stations along the way and stoves were banked with coal, for in November it was already winter in the North.

  She’d played amateur roles before at home, but this was different: “—oh, this was life! It was more than life,—it was art.” While at home, “I might pretend to myself as much and as long as I liked,—until the deep-vibrant-note I had discovered in my voice … out-Hedda-ed Nazimova—yet was my native village unthrilled and unconvinced; I was asked to serve ice-cream at church socials, and the grocer-boy called me by name.” But no longer. The costumes had not been altered since she’d worn them, and the other girls in the company “hooked me up the back and pinned me together in a dozen places, one knelt and put on my shoes while I balanced with my hand on her shoulder, one went to find the frilly sun-bonnet I was to carry on in the first act.”

  When she heard the silky swoosh of the curtain rising, she glanced in the mirror, took a deep breath, and ran onstage

  with my sun-bonnet over my arm and held out my hands to Danny; there was a sudden hush all over the house, more pleasant to me than would have been the most enthusiastic hand. For this was genuine, the result of keen and unfeigned interest and curiosity. Probably every person in the house knew that I was the girl who ha
d been sent from out of town.… Not that there would have been any pains to conceal it; on the contrary, because of its unquestionable advertising advantages.

  Flushed with excitement, she calculated her effect: “There, away from home, I was under no restraint from loving friends in the orchestra seats or hated rivals whose talent and time had not been solicited. For the first time in my life I could, from rise to fall of the curtain, unstintedly play the part.”

  She let her voice fill to its most vibrant; she knew her voice was becoming a remarkable instrument that she could use to draw the audience to her. “I did not hurry with my lines.… I made my pauses tell. I felt that the audience liked me, and I did my best to make it love me. I did little wistful things, made little forlorn gestures, and once or twice smiled piteously. It seemed to me I could hear the lumps come into their throats.”

  Afterward, the company’s producer and director, Van Duzer, offered her a position in his permanent company—if he should ever bring it together. She never heard from him again. Instead she received an autographed photograph of his wife, a middle-aged woman holding a lorgnette and wearing a flat straw hat like a plate of salad greens.

  Then she returned to Camden, and the winter turned to iron.

  Throughout the fall and winter, her father’s letters to her remained the same as they had always been. In September, he inquired about their mother’s health, sent five dollars, promised to “send you some more the first of the week if possible,” and closed fretting about his own health: “I am having a bad time with my stomach but I guess it isn’t going to be any thing serious.” One week later he sent two dollars: “I have got money coming in soon and will keep you going somehow.” How that seven dollars would keep any of them going is hard to tell. Still, he assured Vincent, “I think there is no doubt I will get to see you this fall. I intend to, if possible.” Seven dollars within three weeks was very unlike him. But the assurance of his own arrival—“I think there is no doubt.… I intend … if possible”—was just like him. By December 11, the reality was clear:

  My dear girl; I cannot possibly go to see you just now. I haven’t the money but I am going just as soon as I can. I haven’t been able to do much for two months I have a very bad cold now but I always expect it this time of year. I would like to go now so much. But I will get to see you this winter sure.

  But he didn’t come. He sent them a little money for Christmas presents instead, a dollar each. “I wish I could make you some Xmas presents but it don’t look like it now.” It’s hard to imagine a more forlorn, defeated man than Henry Millay must have seemed to his daughters.

  On Christmas Day, alone in the house with her sisters, Vincent wrote to her mother, assuring her that they were having a “beautiful Christmas.” She put the best face on their being without her. She’d had a quarter ton of coal put in; she’d bought a pound of “nice butter”; she told in exact detail what each of the girls had done to make their presents for one another. Only one of their gifts appears to have been bought. Then she enclosed a copy of her next St. Nicholas poem, “Friends.” “This is all I can think of now. We must dress for dinner. Good-bye, Honey. With love, Vincent.” Her letter was dutiful, as if she were working to muster the details. Within six months of graduation she had taken over the running of their household. Only her poems began to tell how she felt under the weight of that domestic burden.

  The last poem she sent to St. Nicholas (because after eighteen one could no longer contribute) won its Cash Prize, which was the hardest to get. The editors spent half their editorial praising it, calling it “a little gem,” pointing to its “striking excellence” in the use of double rhymes.

  She wrote the magazine a farewell letter:

  Dear St. Nicholas:

  I am writing to thank you for my cash prize and to say good-by, for “Friends” was my last contribution. I am going to buy with my five dollars a beautiful copy of “Browning,” whom I admire so much that my prize will give me more pleasure in that form than in any other.

  Although I shall never write for the League again, I shall not allow myself to become a stranger to it. You have been a great help and a great encouragement to me, and I am sorry to grow up and leave you.

  Your loving graduate

  Edna Vincent Millay

  “Rosemary,” a poem she’d written earlier that same year, was shot through with longing for childhood, a perfectly acceptable convention although at seventeen she was a little young to long.

  The things I loved I may go to see.

  I may lie in them no more.

  But I stand at the door of the used-to-be,

  And dream my childhood o’er.

  …

  I sit at my window alone.

  I hear each voice, and I know

  That I miss through them all the sound of my own

  As it rang in the long-ago.

  Becoming a woman meant more than the loss of freedom and playfulness, it meant loneliness. Worse, it meant the loss of her voice.

  Truly homebound now, she turned inside. Her diary entries fell slack. On February 24, she waited to catch sight of Halley’s comet but didn’t and began to embroider a corset cover for her mother. “Mama said today, that if she dies before we do, Kathleen is to have her wedding ring and I her mother’s ring though she formally expressed a wish to have that buried with her.”

  Her father, who had not written since Christmas, wrote now, telling her a fire had destroyed most of his belongings. His letter ended with a postscript: “I am going to see you just as soon as I can get any money ahead and I mean for it to be this spring. Papa.” Ten days later he enclosed three dollars—it might not buy “many Easter hats but will get you a dinner”—and described the fire:

  The Hotel that was burned was run by an old man (and owned) and was paying him over $2000 per year besides all expenses without selling a drop of liquor. And if it had not burned I should have had a lease of it this spring.… I might have known something would happen, but I didn’t. I really thought I was going to get hold of a business that my health would stand and that would pay more than well. I had visions of being able to do a whole lot for some girls that I think about a great deal although I haven’t seen them for eight years. But I mean to see them this spring. I know Vincent I am a poor correspondent and I can’t explain why. I only know that when I have said a few words to tell you how much I inclose, my pen stops.

  This was the saddest letter he had ever written. The way he described his losses that spring suggested how constant and expected they were. Even in his letters he was distant, a solitary man of small ambitions and dashed hopes. His life had settled into small and constant illnesses, which he told her about—long winter colds, asthma, and stomach trouble. The only dream he ever admitted to his eldest daughter was this one, and he told her only after it had burned to the ground and his hopes were reduced to ashes.

  Henry Millay never contributed the five dollars a week for child care that he was supposed to. In Camden, Vincent mentioned him only once, soon after she’d arrived, when a girl in her class asked what had happened to her father. “She was quite upset and said they’d lost him, and didn’t like to talk about it. She gave the impression that he wasn’t even alive.” She didn’t mention him in her diaries, except to note that once a month she wrote to him. Why she wrote is clear enough in this poem:

  Dear Papa, I am puzzled sore

  To think why you don’t send some more

  Of that nice stuff you sent before.

  …

  Now, Papa darling, will you tell

  When ham is fifty cents a smell

  And cold soused trype is quite too swell

  To view,

  How in the world your daughters dear

  Can keep alive—or anywhere near—

  Unless from time to time we hear

  From you?

  But, Papa, this is not a fluff,

  I’ve lived on sawdust long enough:

  ’Tis quite unsatisfying s
tuff.

  And so

  Your hat in deepest mourning drape—

  Send me some pinks tied up in crape,—

  Or send me something in the shape

  Of dough.

  Boys did not loom large for Vincent, at least not in the world of her diaries. “When they appeared, it was to limit her unfairly or to hurt her. In July 1909, with her mother away working, she noted that she had gone to a ball on the fourth in Lincolnville in her pink muslin dress. “I was the only red-headed girl in pink at which I was not surprised. Red-heads are supposed to wear blue.” She hated blue. From July 6 to 25, we begin to hear of a young man named Russell Arey. “He’s the only man I know who is as Rubiyat-mad as I am,” she wrote in her first entry. He began to drop by every day. On the eleventh they went canoeing and took along the Gold Treasury of Verse. “Went ashore over on the beach and read.” On the sixteenth she made him wipe the dishes after supper. On the twenty-fifth they went for a walk down by the lily pond and had a falling-out. “Oh, what a fall was there, my country man!” she scribbled in her diary. She never mentioned him again.

  Their mother had been gone for six weeks, the better part of their summer vacation, and although she kept writing to them that she’d be home shortly, she wasn’t. “If your father sent you the rent, you will be all right now till I get home. Be saving; but have enough to eat.” On August 3, she wrote again, “Save what you can toward the rent for I want it paid right away.… Can I hear from some of you, I wonder? I am the dearest mama you have.” On the fifth, sticking three dollars in her letter and reminding them again to “hang on to it for the rent,” she finally left for home.