Me, I have been sick in bed about all the time since mother came—the weather is frightful here, it has rained every day for nearly three months. But in spite of hell, we have had a swell time together.—Mother is so wonderful, & she enjoys every minute of it. I take her everywhere, on all my rough parties, & she is always the best sport present—everybody loves her & is crazy about her.… (Margot now says I must eat my noix de veau braisé aux endives while it is hot.)
At the beginning of Cora’s stay in France, mother and daughter went everywhere together, most often with Margot. Cora began meticulously to list to her “Dear girls” at home where she’d been, with whom, and what they’d seen. This was just one weekend in May:
I saw Bernhardt, went with Margot and Sefe, Sat. night, saw the Russian Ballet at L’Opera. Margo Schuyler … and Sefe and I, went out to Pere Lachaise, the great grave-yard where Abelard and Heloise are buried in one grave, saw Chopin’s tomb, and Oscar Wilde’s. Sat. P.M. with John, Margo and Curtis Moffitt, to the Eiffel Tower and to the top, in four stages by elevator and then a short flight of stairs. Sat. Ev’g. with Margo and Sefe to Russian Ballet. Yesterday, we three girls, and John and Max Eastman, to the country. Not much time to write.
Vincent said she was saved from total exhaustion only by the “fact that she has just acquired a small blister on her heel.… Isn’t it wonderful, sweetheart, that I really did it & here she is!—And it was all due to you, Normie, that I had her come so soon. She is the sweetest looking thing, & you have no idea … how everybody loves her.”
The handsome Max Eastman, who knew Millay’s work but knew her only slightly from that single evening in New York during the Masses trial, drifted into her life in Paris that spring, having decided to fall in love with her. “The idea of loving someone more like myself … a companion of my ambition as well as of my mind and body, had always intrigued me. And so much the better if she was famous—for I like to admire those whom I love. I like to love those whom I admire.”
Eastman was in Genoa, where he had gone to cover the postwar conference; he was traveling with George Slocombe. Then he went to find her in Paris.
We dined together, making conversation successfully, and after coffee, I asked her to come to my room on the rue des Beaux Arts and read me some poems. I was not, alas, falling in love with her, but still only hoping I might. She did come, and as my room was infinitely narrow with only the bed to sit on, we sat, or rather lay, on the bed together with our heads propped against a pillow. She read to me, after one or two less personal poems, a sonnet which defends, or pays its respects to, a love that is momentary and involves no complications. But by that time … though we were almost in each other’s arms, we were not together. We were still making conversation.
If by the early 1920s Edna Millay had become a romantic figure—someone to make love to as a mark of one’s own increased stature—she was not about to become that for Max Eastman.
That June, when Millay sat for a photograph by Man Ray, she looked desperately unhappy. Her face was drawn, her shoulders hunched; she was wrapped in a woolen shawl, hugging her arms across her stomach. Cora wrote Norma:
She is not at all well, and would have seen a doctor here about her stomach, but thought it would be more sense to wait till we get to England.… And it is more than probable that the food here, with no cream and nothing but boiled milk had a great deal to do with her trouble, which a French doctor would not understand, and which a change of food might correct with the help of out-door life and quiet.
In a carbon copy of another letter to Norma dated June 30, 1922, Cora told her that “Tess Root, and Mrs. Townsend, [new] friends of ours,” were going ahead to meet them in England.
“She [Vincent] was sitting across the table from me. Someone had given her a bunch of violets,” Tess Root later recalled. “We started chatting and she suddenly said, ‘We agree about so many things. Take these violets.’ And then we were friends forever.”
Dwight Townsend left an extraordinary record of her own in a remembrance she wrote years later:
She dropped into our hotel room wearing a childish blue gingham dress with a white apron attached. Now, girls go about cities like that. Then it seemed very unconventional—no hat, no gloves, no purse. She looked like a schoolgirl as she might wander around a small town.
Edna was so bright and gay and vibrant. Such a totally bewitching sort of person that you just looked at her and loved her and thought, this is the most wonderful girl that ever was. You see, you must remember there was no sense of smallness, or evil in any way attached to Edna. You must know that she was—well, she was splendid.
I think Edna’s mother was rather, was a little bit in awe of her. That she had created such a creature. She was willing and eager for Edna to work out her own life, and yet I was sure there was a sadness. I could be wrong. But a sadness on Mrs. Millay’s face—of what?—that Edna had gone overboard.
One scene in particular stood out in her mind, and when she told me about it her breath seemed to catch: “We were sitting in the Dôme in Paris—the whole lot of us sitting around a table. Edna and her mother and a strange young man, a very attractive man, whom she must just have met. I don’t recall ever having seen him before. Well, they must have made an arrangement, for he would keep looking over at her, as if to say, ‘Come. Come.’ And Mrs. Millay must have noticed, for we all noticed.
“Well, at last Edna said, ‘We’ll see you later,’ something like that. And the two walked off. There was a silence. Mrs. Millay sat with her head down—this may be entirely my own imagination. Surely it was very romantic in its way. But it did seem to me, then, that Edna’s mother accepted this. But had she a choice, you see? … And all that time Mrs. Millay was sitting at our table, passed over in conversation—& here’s this man; this man who means nothing to Edna. She never saw him before and she never will see him again. I felt a real sadness radiated from her mother.”
That Millay would expose her mother to her sexual life in this way, with no effort to protect her or even to consider her own privacy, seemed punishing.
On June 28, 1922, Millay applied for and received through the agency of the American consulate general in Paris two documents. The first was an affidavit testifying that she was a citizen of the United States residing in Paris, that her name was Edna St. Vincent Millay, that she was the legitimate daughter of Henry Tolman Millay and Cora Lounnella Buzzell, that she was born in 1892 in Rockland, Maine, and that she had never been married. The second was a longer legal document, a “Certificat de Coutume”—which Norma Millay, whose French was sketchy, thought was a permit to bring costumes out of France to America—assuring the French government of all that the affidavit had, as well as that she had attained her legal majority, so that she could marry in France without her parents’ consent.
These two legal documents were drawn up by an American attorney in Paris and stamped with the raised seal of the American vice consul. Edna Millay had gone to considerable trouble to secure permission as a foreigner to marry in France. Who was it she was suddenly so intent to marry? Did she think her mother would try to stop her? There was only one person alive, who was in Paris then, who might know.
“His name was Daubigny!” Margot Schuyler remembered. “It was the name of a great painter of the nineteenth century, I believe. I thought he was a fop! A hanger-on! He was a gentleman, insofar as breeding was concerned, and for some reason that I shall never understand he swept Vincent off her feet. Completely.
“He was a pseudo-aristocrat who did nothing. He was tall, rather tall, immaculately dressed, he was French—oh, he had a delightful accent. But, no, he did not belong to our group. Nor to any other that I could tell; he insinuated himself into our group—there were other eligible men—I don’t understand it and I didn’t then. He was suave, oily, I thought—Thelma Wood, Djuna—none of us liked him. And, of course, I was extraordinarily jealous. Because Vincent showed very plainly that she didn’t want me. She wanted Daubigny.”
> Cora loathed Daubigny. Her fury at being displaced by him was astonishing; it was virulent. In a prose fragment, which is the only record we have, she whips herself into a rant as she pits herself against her daughter’s lover. “The dirty panderer!” she exploded.
If he had not been kept by some rich wanton! If he has not been a runner-in for some whore-house, I am mistaken—Borrowing money from her—making her borrow money from her friends, because of him she cannot get a chance to do her work, and spending the money on him—people at the Quarter must think that this devotion to “Mummie” was easily broken, and for a very little in exchange. The gradual, sure, insidious taking her over away from me.… even leaning over her, his head between us—she can hardly get a chance to eat—in the street, running on ahead with her, leaving me to get along as best I may.… [not] appreciative of her wonderful powers, but lustful, greedy, full of evil possession——each glance almost an orgasm … his snake-shaped head and fish-eyed—carp-mouthed face—his head darting out like a snake till you look for a red tongue to flash out and strike her—for a wound on the sweet, tender face—each glance seemed to corrode the gold in her hair, and leave it tarnished.… she swore she would drive him out of the Quarter.
Then the she who rages becomes the I who agonizes at this violation of her daughter:
He slinks like a whipped cur when he sees me. He acts as if he had shit in his breeches, or pooped at meetin’, as my good wholesome New England ancestors would have said. Of course he knows how I feel toward him. He has even acknowledged that he does not blame me, the slithering whelp! The spineless jelly-fish! But how anyone, favored of a goddess could slink from the gaze of an ordinary mortal, I cannot see. He should be so uplifted by her favors that he should transcend me and my attitudes, and be able to laugh in my face. I could like him more, or rather, dislike him less if he did, for I could have some respect for his taste.… She has stooped infinitely toward him, and she has not in any way raised him by it, not one atom.
She loses control completely; her physical revulsion is relentless:
She knows he makes me ill near to death—I can see his hands on her sweet flesh—when she is with him she is not even a woman—she has no right to consent—she cannot be in her right mind—she is a child being violated! O Christ! Why am I her mother! Why must I, of all the world, wish to spare her? Why am I so near that I must know? And I cannot be away from her and live, and if I stay I shall die. When he is with her my heart is hurt physically, it aches like a sore, and cries out against this outrage to my womb, and the nine months I waited for her. I would kill him if I had the courage.…
My God! Why is she so child-like! With all the appeal to me of a little girl, adolescent—and why is she so lustful? … I wonder if his hands are profaning her child-like structure now.… It is as if I were in the room. She does not always lock her door—I have blundered in there more than once and surprised her in his embrace—God damn his soul! … My baby! If I had let myself go freely, might it not have been better for her now? O Christ! Is she bearing what I had not the courage to bear, openly and unashamed? What my mother had not the courage to proclaim from the housetops, the burden of my premature birth—and God! How do I know what my grandmother did! And what she wanted to do and dared not. And he—is he but an instrument to work this out? Am I—my mother—her mother—her mother—to blame for him? To save her reason? Her balance—to prolong her marvellous gifts—Must it be? Let me be honest—I wonder if he brings back to me some of my own indiscretions—I wonder if she can remember, could she not picture some no more attractive who were allowed to fondle me—when she may have known—How do I know that some of the lovers I had hanging about me in the days of my breaking loose, and, before the re-adjustment had given me new balance—were not even more repugnant to her virgin young soul? How do I know? Does she remember? Is she bigger, and more generous than I am? Stumbling along, alert, alive never half satisfied, they may have seemed ugly quagmire, the man-holes I just skimmed over—I wonder if the real difference between us is that the added generation has given her a courage I never had, to be honest, even with myself—and all my feelings, temptations, appetites denied or gratified might not be declared to them—my babies—Now they need keep nothing from me—and I had no one who could help me, and understand.
After this remarkable outpouring, in which Cora tries to find some common ground for reconciliation among her own generation, her mother’s, and her daughters’, she jams back to her fury against this man, unabated: “I sent word to him to keep out of my way, and he had self-preservation enough to do it. The snake-headed fish.”
This is peculiar, even perverse. But the very excessiveness of Cora’s tirade reveals how damaged, how unbalanced their relationship has become.
Within two days, all was cast in a different light. On June 30, 1922, Cora wrote Norma, “Sefe … is lying down as she is very tired.… We have our tickets for London for Monday noon, July 3rd.… We expected to have been there some time ago, but several things have held us here.”
Millay was not simply tired or ill, she was pregnant. In less than a week she fled France with her mother for England. Daubigny—whatever Edna may have hoped for from him—remained in Paris.
2
As Edna and Cora crossed the Channel, they made plans to meet Dwight Townsend and her small daughter in London. Tess Root, Dwight remembered, would follow. “The weather had been cold and rainy.… The Millays were both tired and sick; we could not wait to get to the country.”
They arrived in a downpour, “but after lunch the sun came out and there was Shillingstone, exactly what we were looking for. A winding, unpaved street, a few shops and small houses, many with thatched roofs. The downs around the town reached up to the sky.”
They were driven across the fields in a tiny roadster to Shillingstone the following morning. “We packed in and Mrs. Millay sat up on the back of the rumble seat. We drove all day through south Dorset towns and the children shrieked at that witch-like figure sitting up there, her cropped gray hair blowing wildly.”
Tess Root and Dwight Townsend found a house that delighted them, with a garden and a fireplace and a piano. “And so we were settled in the perfect spot. Edna found a ‘hay shed’ at the foot of the downs and rented it to work in. Afternoons she came for tea or we walked up the downs. She and I had bicycles and rode and we talked by the fire, all the evening.” Now that they’d spent time together, Dwight found Edna even more astonishing than she had in Paris; “she had Latin poetry by heart, Shakespeare and a great deal of modern poetry at her fingertips.”
But in spite of the relaxed living in Shillingstone, Edna was not well. She was worried about finances and unhappy with her publisher. She had accepted a $500 advance for a novel which she was quite sure she would never write.
“I have been sick as a dog for months,” Edna wrote to Edmund Wilson,
and so entirely convinced of the elaborate uselessness of everything, that there was nothing in the situation to get dramatic about and make a poem of, even. But little by little now I am getting back my health.…
Bunny, is it only when you’re tight that you want to be friends with me? I suppose so. And I don’t complain. I have no rights in you. But I do solemnly offer this pious pagan prayer: that one of these days you’ll become a dirty inveterate souse and bully your wife and beat your kids and kick your dog, and think of me with steadfast love.
Having heard of John Bishop’s wedding from “ye fatte Bunnye,” she sent Wilson these celebratory Chaucerian lines, ironic but no less true:
The poet synges and spylls abroad hiss breth
In prayse of prettye friends brought lowe by dethe;
Ah, me!—to lose a friend bye lyfe, I gesse,
Holds lesse of songs and more of bitternesse!
Prithee, in future houres, cher Bunnye,
Think on thy distant friend withe charytee,
That hath of thee, I sware bye the swete sonne,
No evyll thought, but m
any a wystful onne.
Edna told Norma she was getting better, but that she had been very sick. “Mother is wonderful,” she wrote. “Every day we go for a long walk, either climb one of the downs or walk to some other little village and back.” She had become once more her child.
Mother and I have dandelion greens all the time. And you’d die at mother. This is what she cooked one day all in a pot together and served up to be et: dandelions, mustard, dock, pig-weed, clover, nettles and thistles. I put the clover in myself, making fun of her for cooking nettles and thistles. Some of the neighbors had told her nettles were good, boiling takes out all the sting … and the kind of thistle she gathers is called milk-thistle, it’s much gentler than the other kind, but that’s not saying much.
Edna didn’t tell Norma what was truly at stake in her long walks, her rides on horseback, her feasts of “greens” that Cora searched for and brewed for their supper: Cora had found Culpeper’s, a seventeenth-century herbal guide, in Dorset, from which she took pages and pages of extraordinary notes: “Willow Tree … under the dominion of the moon. Leaves, bark and seed, used to staunch bleeding of wounds … to stay vomiting—Leaves bruised and boiled in wine stayeth the heat of lust in man or woman,” Cora underlined, “and quite extinguisheth it, if it be long used. ” Henbane, or caraway, under the influence of Mercury, all-heal and heart trefoil, hedge hyssop, and gentian, the leaves of which, either steeped in wine or bruised, were, “(not to be given to women with child).”
Cora was reading carefully and with a clear purpose, listing hundreds of herbs and flowers and their healing medicinal properties, searching for something—jotting down which time of year was best for brewing their seeds or roots, bark or blooms, under what signs, planets, and conditions they were most useful. The herb alkanet is mentioned again and again. In her notes, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal carried this description:
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