Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  “Lovéd,” Cora wrote back, dismissing the notion with an air of parental good sense, “the idea of living with you and a grandson cannot tempt me into hoping his father will have to forego that privilege, unless he may be someone you will not want, which heaven forbid.” How disingenuous this was coming from a woman whose own mother had chosen to forgo that privilege, as had she. Leaving a husband was mother’s milk to the Millays.

  Vincent’s homesickness was for her mother. Even as she teased Norma

  Dearest Darling Baby Sister ’Loved Hunk,—it does seem a long long time, little sweet sing, since us heard from each other! … Sweetheart, this is a silly letter for one grown-up sister to write another grown-up sister, but maybe it will express … how much I love you, & how often I miss you.

  But it was her mother for whom she longed:

  It is nearly six months now since I saw you. A long time. Mother, do you know, almost all people love their mothers, but I have never met anybody in my life, I think, who loved his mother as much as I love you. I don’t believe there ever was anybody who did, quite so much, and quite in so many wonderful ways. I was telling somebody yesterday that the reason I am a poet is entirely because you wanted me to be and intended I should be, even from the very first. You brought me up in the tradition of poetry, and everything I did you encouraged. I can not remember once in my life when you were not interested in what I was working on, or even suggested that I should put it aside for something else. Some parents of children that are “different” have so much to reproach themselves with. But not you, Great Spirit.… If I didn’t keep calling you mother, anybody reading this would think I was writing to my sweetheart. And he would be quite right.

  Between this letter, written on June 15, and her next, sometime in the last week of July, when she was going to the seashore, Vincent invited her mother to come to Europe

  and play around with your eldest daughter.… We could go to Italy and Switzerland, and to England and Scotland, and, if there are not too many riots and street fights there at the time,—mavourneen, we would go to Ireland! … and then, my Best Beloved, you and I will just have ourselves a little honey-moon.

  Before she left Paris, she mailed Cora a poem. She told her mother she could show it to her sisters. “P.S.—Do you suppose, when you & I are dead, dear, they will publish the Love Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay & Her Mother?”

  She hadn’t said why she was suddenly leaving Paris, and she certainly didn’t tell her mother she had had to borrow travel money from Edmund Wilson, who had just arrived there. “You told me that if I got into desperate straits you could raise some money for me,” she wrote to Wilson. “Well, I am there now. That’s just where I am.—I will pay it back very soon,—that is to say, in a month’s time.—If you can’t do it, will you please wire me that you can’t.”

  There was considerably more going on in her life than she admitted in any of her letters to her mother or to her sisters: in the spring she had fallen deeply in love with the young English journalist George Slocombe, from whom she was about to flee.

  When Edmund Wilson arrived in Paris, he immediately looked up Edna and found her at the Hôtel de l’Intendance, “a very first-rate hotel on the Left Bank and better dressed, I suppose,” he wrote John Bishop, “than she has ever been before in her life.” She was sitting at her typewriter with a pile of manuscripts on her desk, wearing a little black dress.

  But she looked older, more mature—at least she has on the occasions when I have seen her; she assured me that perhaps the next day she would be like a little girl again. She was very serious, earnest, and sincere about herself—inspired, I suppose, by my presence, … and told me that she wanted to settle down to a new life: she was tired of breaking hearts and spreading havoc.

  Then he told Bishop about Slocombe:

  Unfortunately, he had a wife and three children at Saint-Cloud and a very cruel situation had arisen. She did not know whether he would get a divorce or not, but if he did, she would marry him, go to England to live, and have children. She was very happy, she said. I am sorry to say that, when I first talked to her, I was inclined, with the memory of my own scars still giving out an occasional twinge, to jeer at her seriousness and be sarcastic at the expense of the pain she expressed at having wrecked another home.… She … has a new distinction of dress, but she can no longer intoxicate me with her beauty or throw bombs into my soul; when I looked at her it was like staring into the center of an extinct volcano. She made me sad; it made me sad, curiously enough, that I had loved her so much once and now did not love her any longer. Actually, of course, I would not love her again for anything; I can think of few more terrible calamities; but somehow felt that, impossible and imperfect as she is, some glamour and high passion had gone out of life when my love for her died.

  He must have realized how inflated his own rhetoric was, for he added, “Well, these are old Dr. Wilson’s last words on the chief maelstrom of his early years. Preserve them carefully, but do not publish them until all parties are dead.”

  Wilson was far more uncertain of how he felt about Edna than he admitted to Bishop; in fact, he seemed to friends to have pursued her to Paris. While she had not invited him, he nevertheless took a hotel close to hers, where he felt uncomfortable because she was “very much allied with the Bohemians of the Left Bank, with whom I was not much at home.” Millay liked and admired Edmund Wilson, but she never again considered him as a lover.

  CHAPTER 16

  In the spring of 1920, George Slocombe had come to Paris from London, where, at twenty-six, he was already a political reporter for The Daily Herald. He was rumored to have brought the czar’s jewels out of Russia in the confused aftermath of the Revolution. He stood just over six feet, and, with his mahogany hair and bright red beard, which he wore full at a time when men were clean-shaven, he looked like “a radiance,” one of Edna’s lovers, Griffin Barry, said in envy. Slocombe had married a Russian girl who was the daughter of the homme d’affaires of the Grand Duke Michael, for whom he’d been a tutor.

  Slocombe led a daring life as a young journalist and went to Paris when it was the most promising city in the world. The hotels were still filled with the journalists and small fry of the diplomatic corps who had remained in residence after the Versailles Peace Conference was over.

  That spring the city seemed caught in a spell, the creamy white blossoms of the chestnut trees perfuming the air while tiny red taxis, their drivers wearing boiled-leather top hats, took Americans into Montparnasse, which was still a village. “The Café du Dôme, not yet internationally celebrated, was a small, dark and modest establishment,” Slocombe wrote. Inside, foreigners played chess and a small group of American writers and artists played poker. The Rotonde hadn’t yet swallowed up the little narrow Café Vavin, “at which Trotsky was frequently seen, and Lenin more rarely.”

  No more extraordinary state of affairs had existed on the Continent since the Congress of Vienna.… Civil war in Russia and Hungary, D’Annunzio and his toy cannon manning the walls of Fiume … famine in Austria and Germany, typhus in Russia, revolutionary agitation in France and Italy.

  It was into this world in the spring that Edna Millay began to move with Slocombe, until sometime in early July, when he told his wife. By the night of July 19, only two weeks after Wilson had written to John Bishop, Edna and Slocombe quarreled.

  The next morning Slocombe wrote her a long letter, in which he began by calling her David: “The name I first called you by, I will call you by last.” He was leaving her, he explained,

  not because I don’t love you any longer, but because I love you too much. I leave you before our love becomes less than the perfect thing it has been to me: & because I want to love you all my life as I love you now.… I know that if we had been married I should have tried to master you.… I must master those I love [and] I could not succeed in mastering you without making you something less than you are.… If I had been sure … that you would be happy in subjectio
n, I might have been forced to do the ignoble, but still inevitable & even necessary act of leaving my wife & children.

  This self-serving, peculiar explanation went on, “Edna, David, I kiss your lips and your eyes and God help me your little round knees.” He asked only two things of her: if they met in the street, she should not be afraid to talk to him. “I even think I shall not be happy without seeing you sometimes, if only at a distance.” And could she write him a letter, since he had “never had a letter of yours & I would like one to keep with the picture of you.” The man’s caution combined with his arrogance was stunning; no wonder Edna fled. As for Slocombe, once he’d made his decision to leave her, he was unable to keep it. He wrote her every other day until she escaped to Dieppe.

  When he hadn’t heard from her by mid-August, he pressed her: “If you are forgetting me, there is no harm in a friendly little note once in a month is there?” This time she did weaken, telling him how strange it was to be without him in her life. He jumped at her reply; he was “eager & crazy to see you again.” He asked her to return to Paris by September 1, because “on Sat. Sept. 3rd I take my family to … Italy.”

  The mails from the States were irregular and slow, and Vincent asked again and again why she hadn’t heard from home, chiding Norma, “Rise on your legs, you poor piece of imitation Camembert, and write your sister a little note. See? And that’s that. As ever, your childhood’s friend, Sefe.” When not even bantering seemed to work, she wrote her mother, “I do hope it is not the best reason,—that you are ill and can’t write”; because months before she’d sent her

  a lovely poem of mine, called The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver .… & I think if you had received it you would surely have spoken of it.—I send you another copy of it now. It is practically the only poem I have written since I left America.—That was just what I wanted, you know, not to write a word of poetry for a year. When it begins to get a little easy, or one begins to write in certain forms almost from habit, it is time to stop for a while, I think, & almost forget that one is a poet—become a prose-writer, for instance—& then let it all come back to one later, fresh, & possibly in a newer form.—The next thing I hope to do is to finish the long sonnet sequence about the New England woman.… I hope you will like this poem, darling. It is dedicated to you, of course, as may be seen at a glance.

  No matter where or with whom Vincent was—in Paris, at the seashore, or in England—this poem, sent to her mother and “worshipfully” dedicated to her, loomed as something more significant than anything, with the single exception of “Renascence,” that Millay had yet written.

  Wilson didn’t much like the poem when it appeared in Vanity Fair and told Millay so. He thought “it verged on the sentimental.” To his surprise she defended it “strongly.” “I had known that it was about her own mother,” he wrote in his memoir of Edna, “and I knew how devoted she was to the debonair hard-bitten old lady who worked for her and educated her.”

  He hadn’t felt at first how profoundly moving the poem was. Then it seized him: “the loneliness, the poverty, the undervalued Irish heritage, the Spartan New England self-discipline, the gift of artistic creation and intellectual distinction … that the mother had been able to transmit.” It was a record of “the closest relationship that Edna, up to then, I suppose … had ever known.”

  THE BALLAD OF THE HARP-WEAVER

  “Son,” said my mother,

  When I was knee-high,

  “You’ve need of clothes to cover you,

  And not a rag have I.

  “There’s nothing in the house

  To make a boy breeches,

  Nor shears to cut a cloth with,

  Nor thread to take stitches.

  “There’s nothing in the house

  But a loaf-end of rye,

  And a harp with a woman’s head

  Nobody will buy,”

  And she began to cry.

  That was in the early fall.

  When came the late fall,

  “Son,” she said, “the sight of you

  Makes your mother’s blood crawl,—

  “Little skinny shoulder-blades

  Sticking through your clothes!

  And where you’ll get a jacket from

  God above knows.

  “It’s lucky for me, lad,

  Your daddy’s in the ground,

  And can’t see the way I let

  His son go around!”

  And she made a queer sound.

  That was in the late fall.

  When the winter came,

  I’d not a pair of breeches

  Nor a shirt to my name.

  I couldn’t go to school,

  Or out of doors to play.

  And all the other little boys

  Passed our way.

  “Son,” said my mother,

  “Come, climb into my lap,

  And I’ll chafe your little bones

  While you take a nap.”

  And, oh, but we were silly

  For half an hour or more,

  Me with my long legs

  Dragging on the floor,

  A-rock-rock-rocking

  To a mother-goose rhyme!

  Oh, but we were happy

  For half an hour’s time!

  But there was I, a great boy,

  And what would folks say

  To hear my mother singing me

  To sleep all day,

  In such a daft way?

  Men say the winter

  Was bad that year;

  Fuel was scarce,

  And food was dear.

  A wind with a wolf’s head

  Howled about our door,

  And we burned up the chairs

  And sat upon the floor.

  All that was left us

  Was a chair we couldn’t break,

  And the harp with a woman’s head

  Nobody would take,

  For song or pity’s sake.

  The night before Christmas

  I cried with the cold,

  I cried myself to sleep

  Like a two-year-old.

  And in the deep night

  I felt my mother rise,

  And stare down upon me

  With love in her eyes.

  I saw my mother sitting

  On the one good chair,

  A light falling on her

  From I couldn’t tell where,

  Looking nineteen,

  And not a day older,

  And the harp with a woman’s head

  Leaned against her shoulder.

  Her thin fingers, moving

  In the thin, tall strings,

  Were weav-weav-weaving

  Wonderful things.

  Many bright threads,

  From where I couldn’t see,

  Were running through the harp-strings

  Rapidly,

  And gold threads whistling

  Through my mother’s hand.

  I saw the web grow,

  And the pattern expand.

  She wove a child’s jacket,

  And when it was done

  She laid it on the floor

  And wove another one.

  She wove a red cloak,

  So regal to see,

  “She’s made it for a king’s son,”

  I said, “and not for me.”

  But I knew it was for me.

  She wove a pair of breeches

  Quicker than that!

  She wove a pair of boots

  And a little cocked hat.

  She wove a pair of mittens,

  She wove a little blouse,

  She wove all night

  In the still, cold house.

  She sang as she worked,

  And the harp-strings spoke;

  Her voice never faltered,

  And the thread never broke.

  And when I awoke,—

  There sat my mother

  With the harp against her shoulder,

  Look
ing nineteen,

  And not a day older,

  A smile about her lips,

  And a light about her head,

  And her hands in the harp-strings

  Frozen dead.

  And piled up beside her

  And toppling to the skies,

  Were the clothes of a king’s son,

  Just my size.

  A ballad is the simplest four-line verse we have in English. With its clear rhymes and even beats, it tells a plain story as simply as a song or a nursery rhyme. But it is never an exercise in innocence, for it is almost always a tale of violence ending in death. Millay’s is no exception. Although “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” may be read to bear two messages, both are fraught with peril. Millay is using the story of her own childhood and her mother’s, each with its iron poverty and maternal self-sacrifice, to equip her child for a grander life than any she would ever know without her. She is a daughter transformed into a son—and no ordinary son of a poor mother but a king’s son, a royal. It is he who writes the poem; when the mother speaks,

  “Son,” said my mother,

  When I was knee-high,

  “You’ve need of clothes to cover you,

  And not a rag have I.”

  there is nothing in the house but a heel of bread

  “And a harp with a woman’s head

  Nobody will buy,”

  And she began to cry.

  That single phrase, “a harp with a woman’s head,” which will be repeated four times in the ballad, is the key to the poem. A ballad works by repeating certain phrases, charging them with such increased feeling that an almost unbearable tension is created. The third time Millay uses that phrase, she varies the stanza to lead us into the center of the poem, which is about the mother, the Harp-Weaver.

  Looking nineteen,

  And not a day older,

  And the harp with a woman’s head