Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  Leaned against her shoulder.

  Her thin fingers, moving

  In the thin, tall strings,

  Were weav-weav-weaving

  Wonderful things.

  In her hands the harp is transformed into a magic loom upon which she will weave not simply dross into gold—but bright “gold threads whistling

  Through my mother’s hand.

  I saw the web grow,

  And the pattern expand.

  What web? Where else in Millay’s life have we seen a mother who weaves to earn a living for her brood? In fact, we’ve seen it twice. The harp with a woman’s head is the lap loom upon which Cora wove hair, a skill she had learned from her own mother, but which she refused to pass down to her daughters.

  “She didn’t want us to know how,” Norma said matter-of-factly. “There’s no more to it than that. But look what Mother made for us,” Norma said as she lifted out of a trunk three identical porcelain-faced dolls—identical except for their hair. One was dark, and one was blond, and one was fiery red. Norma asked me if I wanted to hold them, and I didn’t. They seemed to me spooky, lying in their old muslin clothes, but their hair was real, all right, and richly colored, and dead.

  When I said that I found the dolls macabre, Norma thought I meant dirty. “No, Nancy, the hair was washed. Mother washed our hair before she used it.” Here was some fragment of their real bodies, and Norma wanted me to touch them as she fondled their hair, as if they were relics. I recoiled from them as if they were tiny pieces of flesh. It was an odd moment—I felt flushed. It was just a little too close for me, in the library at Steepletop. Vincent’s bright red hair was bristling with color, as shiny as a fox’s pelt.

  “I must wash their clothes, then you won’t be afraid to touch them.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “What am I afraid of?”

  “I don’t know. Oh, maybe I have a little tiny hunch.”

  Even accounting for the slow transatlantic mails, Vincent didn’t hear from Cora until very late in the fall. “Mother has been a terrible woman for a time in not writing her sweet lovely one,” she began. So it wasn’t the slow mails; she hadn’t written. “I guess I thought you must know how I loved that wonderful poem”; she called it “that wonderful poem” twice, as if she were uncertain how to praise it. Then she told Vincent that she’d given it to Kay, who had returned it to her via Norma (whose nickname she uses here),

  and we all love it. Charlie and Non were mad about it, and Non told Charlie a little more so that he had a little better idea of what it might mean to us. But I should never think of mentioning anything like that to Howard, and Kay would not want to do so. And it is just as well.

  Astonishingly, Cora, Kathleen, and Norma had decided not to tell Kathleen’s husband about the poem because it was so centered on their own past.

  None of it mattered at that moment, when Vincent was thinking of George Slocombe, to whom she’d just written. He wrote back quickly that he would try to be “to you what you would have me be … in any case you are the only woman I love, or want to love.” He said her letter broke his heart. “Do you remember a walk back through the woods to Blois, when you picked flowers, & told me of your mother’s cupboard & kitchen? Do you remember anything?”

  She remembered far too much. For all his declarations of love, she did not hear from him again until the end of November, when she was traveling with Griffin Barry to Italy.

  CHAPTER 17

  Millay had been in Rome less than a week when the American ambassador, Richard Washburn Child, suggested it would be an adventure to travel to Albania, which had just been opened to the West but whose borders, in the aftermath of World War I, remained unfixed and in dispute. The young John Carter, whom she’d met in Paris and who was connected to the embassy, would accompany her.

  The rugged isolation of tiny Albania, with its rival clans and religions, was as legendary as its beauty. Its coastline, with the ruins of old Venetian fortifications set among fields of wild dill, black mountains rising from the sea, was ravishing. But after five hundred years of Ottoman domination Albania remained backward, fiercely independent, and desperately poor.

  They began the first day under starlight, before dawn, riding through mountains from the capital city of Tirana to Elbasan. Edna spent ten hours in the saddle because it was the only way to get there; it was the second time she had ever ridden. In a snapshot taken halfway between Tirana and Elbasan, she is sitting uneasily astride a dark bay, squinting into the bright light. Two armed guards are in the foreground. Standing next to her is their young Albanian interpreter, Abdullah, holding a rifle with a clip of ammunition in his hand, a cartridge belt around his waist. He is dressed in a Serbian uniform. “They wear the uniforms of anybody they can catch & tear it away from,” Millay noted in her journal; “—their army on the march must be a sight. This boy followed us everywhere just out of pure affection & wept when we had to send him away. He cared for us like a mother & like [a] dog & like a hen with ducklings.”

  Although there is never any direct mention of John Carter in her journal, there are always “you” and “we.” The intimacy of this entry suggests that they were traveling as lovers.

  Rain on the Adriatic and on the Moslem tower.… Sleepily from the chalk-white minaret an hour before daybreak the dark young muezzin calls the town to prayer—Only you & I, alarmed from slumber, listen, staring into the darkness, Ah—Ah—Ah—husky & shrill the bodiless voice in the sky climbs/mounts the wide, uneven steps to the folded feet of Allah.…

  Let us tear apart the tough thick skin of the ripe pomegranate & split the seedy fruit in two—ah, how wet & good to the love-parched mouth—how cool on the naked breast & knees drips now the clear bright blood of the crushed pomegranate—suck up & spilt—wipe the wet mouth & chin on the warm smooth shoulder—there are six pomegranates in this basket—shall we eat them all—hurl now the empty shells to the corner of the room—Ah, how stained & drenched we are!—Let the wind dry us if it will.

  They vowed never to tell anybody about their trip, “which sounds awful,” Carter later wrote Norma, “but wasn’t at all.”

  In another photograph taken in Albania she is standing with her hands on her hips, showing off the fragile lace at the wrists and throat of her long-sleeved blouse against a heavily embroidered red velvet cloak with its stiff silk sash—embroidered with real gold, she told her mother. The image is nearly that of another poet—a man with auburn curls and a surly mouth who sat for his portrait by Thomas Phillips wearing a native Albanian costume. There is the same fitted brocaded jacket, shot through with gold threads and bright trimmings, and except for the headdress, a turban and flowing scarf flung over his shoulder, this famous painting of Lord Byron looks astonishingly like Millay. Immensely popular, his brief life a scandal, his poems memorized by schoolchildren in Albania, Byron was the beau ideal of the Romantic poet in nineteenth-century England, as Millay was becoming in America in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

  “But in spite of all the hardships and inconveniences of travel in a country with no railroads or public conveyances of any kind,” she later wrote to her mother from Rome, “as a matter of fact for the most part no roads at all except a bridle path through the mountains, no plumbing, no butter, no coffee except Turkish coffee which is made with sugar, and other suchlike lacks, seeing Albania—and also Montenegro, where we traveled for a couple of days only—has been my most thrilling experience so far.”

  She said she intended to write it up for the Metropolitan but never did. Instead, as John Carter wrote, “She remained in Rome for a bit and then went to Vienna with Griffin Barry.”

  Just before leaving Rome on November 13, 1921, she totted up her expenses, listing her assets and liabilities. The latter was the longer list. She had about $53, counting everything she could lay her hands on in Italian, French, British, Belgian, Turkish, and Serbian currency. This included money in coins and paper, a
nd postage stamps. She owed $1,085 to a wide variety of friends, not including the $450 and 250 francs she owed to John Carter or what she owed to Edmund Wilson and Slocombe. Nor did she take into account the discrepancy between Vanity Fair’s account and her own figures, another 3,000 francs. She tried to calculate the difference in rates of exchange among francs, pounds, and lire but gave up with a note to herself: “It is easily seen, without transposing this all into dollars, that it means a great deal of money.”

  Four days after drawing up her list, she invited her mother to Europe. Indebtedness was a state she was accustomed to. It would not stop her; it never had.

  Sweetheart:

  There is one thing, of course, which must be done before you come abroad. So I want you to write and tell me as soon as you can get together the evidence just how much it will take for you to go to Camden, pay up all our debts there, get the furniture out of hock and stored in some more congenial place, or sent to New York to help furnish for the kids, and live nicely while you are there.… So make me a real estimate, and don’t get scared if it looks pretty big, and remember that I want you to do the whole thing like a grand lady, travel in the Pullman even in the daytime, stand Flora Harris to a couple of drinks in the Bay View House—(I had a dreadful feeling just then that maybe Flora Harris is dead; but if she is, you know what I mean). I repeat, don’t get scared even if it looks pretty big, because I’ve got to make a lot of money anyway, and I might as well make a little more, and do the thing as it ought to be done. Also, it would be rather fun while in Camden to tell anybody who might be interested that as soon as you get your business straightened out you are coming abroad to be with me. See, dear? So don’t go trying to help me out by steaming apart stuck postage-stamps, returning cream-bottles, or picking up cigarette-butts in the street and trying to sell them to Benson & Hedges. We’re going to do this here trick nonchalant, or we ain’t going to do it.

  To Norma she joked:

  Whadda you think about my bringing the little old Irish devil over here? … I’m going to drag her up to the top of the Eiffel Tower the moment she gets to Paris & let her crow one good long crow, & then I’m going to waltz her up to the Rotonde & get her drunk, & if she wants to crow all the way home, well, I’m going to let her.

  But the real news in all those fugitive letters that at last began to arrive in Rome was that Norma had married Charles Ellis.

  Now I have two bruvvers! And two such nice bruvvers. I couldn’t have picked me nicer ones. Charlie knows I love him, unless he has lost his memory, but tell him anyway that I love him very much, and that I think he is a great actor and has a very handsome nose, and that I am proud and happy to have him in my immediate family.

  She couldn’t help noting that she, the eldest, remained unmarried: “Well, both my little sisters are young married women, and me, I am just about three months from being an old maid. My Englishman, honey, is, as you might have guessed, a married man, this time with three children. Oh, well. (Who the devil told you about him, anyhow?)” Then she sent them both her love, “and I do hope you’ll go ahead and have a baby. If you can’t support it, I will.*

  As ever, the companion of your middle age, the friend of your declining years, the old woman who’ll sit before the fire with you fifty years from now and knit the left stocking while you knit the right.

  In her own life there was still nobody she cared for as she had Slocombe, to whom she had written while she was in Albania. His letter awaited her in Rome. “I had thought you lost,” he wrote on November 19, “having no other news of you than a message from Griffin saying you were gone off into the Albanian wilds.” Then he played the remembering game that lovers play when they’ve lost each other for good. It was like licking a sore tooth to see if it still hurt. He had asked her if she remembered telling him about her mother’s cupboard filled with the healing herbs of her childhood. “Darling … I remember you too vividly & personally for me ever to forget,” he wrote. “Anyhow I am working hard afternoons & evenings in my office. The Rotonde sees me once a week on an average. My wife sees me most of the other nights. And for the rest, I have your photograph in my table drawer, & dreams of you two or three times a week, and daydreams almost all the time.” He sounded just like Jim Lawyer or Arthur Ficke: full of yearning but married and utterly unavailable.

  It was to Arthur that she admitted that first winter in Paris how lonesome she was: “Oh, if only you were there now,—just around the corner from me!—Shall I never see you again, my dear?”

  Arthur wrote back on Valentine’s Day, telling her to pick up a Japanese print he’d left with his French dealer, as well as a few thousand francs the man was holding for him. The money was his gift to her, and she was to spend it on the same kind of riotous living they would have spent it on if they had been together. Instead, she bought a Poiret gown of silk the color of her eyes. When he asked if she minded that in his next book he’d publish a group of sonnets dedicated to her, she wrote that she couldn’t care less what the world thought. At the close of her letter she asked offhandedly about Witter Bynner, “Dear, does Hal know how much you care for me?—I have wondered, idly wondered.”

  The mention of Hal galvanized Arthur’s pen. Their letters began to answer each other, with the intimacy of a conversation held in secret thousands of miles apart. For of course Arthur was not going to come to her in Europe. “Yes, Hal knows that I am perfectly mad about you,” he replied, “whether he knows how mad, I don’t know.” That was in August. By late fall, their letters had turned urgent.

  Edna wrote to only three people from Albania: her mother, George Slocombe, and Arthur. “I must write you,” she told Arthur. “But when I start to write you all I can think to say to you is—why aren’t you here? Oh, why aren’t you here? … Dear, when I come back to the States, won’t you come east to see me?— … you could come to New York, because you often do, to see Hal … and don’t you love me most as much as you love Hal?”

  It was striking how often their thoughts turned to Hal. But Edna was drawing Arthur to her.

  I think we might have a few days together that would be entirely lovely. We are not children, or fools, we are mad. And we of all people should be able to do the mad thing well. If each of us is afraid to see the other, that is only one more sympathy we have. If each of us is anguished lest we lose one another through some folly, then we are more deeply bound than any folly can undo.

  Doubtless all this reasoning resolves itself into one pitiful female cry,—what ever happens, I want to see you again!—But oh, my dear, I know what my heart wants of you,—it is not the things that other men can give.

  Do you remember that poem in Second April which says, “Life is a quest & love a quarrel, Here is a place for me to lie!”?—That is what I want of you—out of the sight & sound of other people, to lie close to you & let the world rush by.… Arthur, it is wicked and useless,—all these months and months apart from you, all these years with only a glimpse of you in the face of everybody.—I tell you I must see you again.—

  Edna

  On November 22, Arthur, who had not yet received this last letter, wrote to her from Iowa, where Hal, who was visiting, had given him the astonishing news that he “has gently and politely asked you to marry him.” Arthur’s own advice to her was that since he couldn’t, they should and then adopt him. “Do you know, I’ll bet I am more interested in this damn marriage than either of you two are!” Hal added:

  What about that?

  I am beginning to think there is no such go-between as the Atlantic Ocean.

  Why have you never answered? Is there no answer?

  Hal

  Hal, not Arthur, had asked her to marry him. Except that Vincent had not yet received his letter. She wrote to him just before Christmas:

  Dearest Hal,—

  I never received your letter of which Arthur speaks.—So that his crazy card-index note, and your post-script, are all I have to tell me what is in your mind.—Do you really want me to marry you
?—Because if you really want me to, I will.

  As if that were not a remarkable enough acceptance, she amplified it for him:

  I have thought for a long time that someday I should marry you.

  Of course I can’t write to you about it, you must see that, my dear, not knowing what was in your letter. Whatever I say would be perhaps the wrong thing to say.

  … You have known me since I was a little girl. It is curious to think of that. As little as we have seen of one another, yet you are bound in the memories of my childhood.

  If, she told him, it was just a dream he’d had a month ago and now regretted or had forgotten, then she was sorry.

  I wish you could come here. It is not so very far, and I feel I must see you, and I can’t come there. But I suppose you have duties now from which you cannot be released—even for me. (It is amusing and pleasant to say to you: even for me.) In any case, I wish you could come, and wanted to.

  You will let me hear from you at once, Hal, won’t you? Oh, if you knew the comical state my mind is in! What a ridiculous person you are!

  Edna

  Then suddenly, still having heard nothing, on December 30 she cabled him: YES HAL. One week later, precisely, she cabled him again. This time the single word YES.

  On the first of January, he wrote to her at last in response to her first cable—a letter she could not have received by the time she sent her second. It was an eleven-line note with which he enclosed six poems:

  Beloved Edna:

  Your cable with its breath of you, stirs through my days.—Instead of going to China in the spring, I shall come to Europe, and we’ll talk deep. Perhaps for either of us marriage would be jolly. Perhaps not.—Uncannily I feel the beckon to be rather for Arthur than for