Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  It hath a great and thick root of a reddish colour; long, narrow, hairy leaves, green like the leaves of bugloss, which lie very thick upon the ground; the stalks rise up compassed round about, thick with leaves.… It is a herb under the dominion of Venus, and indeed one of her darlings.… If you apply the herb to the privities, it draws forth the dead child.

  Alkanet was the abortive Cora was searching for. Once she found it in flower in July, she was able to use it to cause Vincent to miscarry in the first few weeks of her pregnancy. Her mother, in other words, country-wise nurse that she’d been, aborted her own daughter.

  There is a snapshot of Vincent from that time, standing in a wide meadow, eating an apple. Her hair is bobbed, curly, thick, and wild in the wind coming up from the downs. She wears the same striped jacket she wore in Woodstock, except this time the jacket will not close in front.

  “I cannot say that she had a miscarriage in Dorset,” Dwight Townsend says slowly, recalling events that took place half a century ago. “I cannot say that she did not. Edna and I would talk in the evening in front of the fire in Shillingstone. She would tell me more or less why she was promiscuous. I was so fond of her. And I tried to make sense of her, of it—this quality—of what she was saying. But it didn’t make any sense to me.

  “I had never had a lover. Oh, yes, I had married. I had a child. But I had never had an affair. And it seemed, it just seemed to me, that is Edna—I just felt as if this kind of life produced such an entrancing person.… she tried to give me instructions. Once I remember her saying, ‘When a man looks at you you simply look back. Or ask him for something, for a match.’ And I said, ‘Edna, men don’t ask me for a match or for the time. And if I am going to the post office for a stamp, I come home with one. I am not met by a man.’ I did not have whatever it takes, whatever it is to arrest men. But she did. Oh, yes. She did! And could. And did!”

  “Norma.”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “The envelope you showed me, the one your mother marked with ‘Shillingston/the fits of the mother,’ with all those tiny pages of tissue-paper notes about herbs and witchcraft—that’s from Culpeper, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I asked you whether or not Vincent told you she had an abortion in Dorset.”

  “She didn’t tell me. Mother did. Vincent drank a potion Mother had concocted and walked and walked and walked. Later Vincent said, ‘How did you know?’

  “ ‘Mother told me,’ I said. Vincent seemed surprised. ‘Mother told you?’

  “Well, sure. Mother and I were pals.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “That’s all I know. Oh, yes, and she said the Frenchman looked like our father.”

  In Millay’s “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” the emotional intensity builds up as one waits for something dreadful to happen. In the penultimate quatrain the mother dies equipping her son for life. That is, in fact, the second theme of the poem. The first is maternal self-sacrifice. The ballad could have been resolved in any number of ways, but the mother’s death, while seeming to be sentimental, is so charged with feeling that instead it serves perfectly to resolve the poem:

  A smile about her lips,

  And a light about her head,

  And her hands in the harp-strings

  Frozen dead.

  Sainted, maybe, but dead, surely. Matricide, cloaked in sentiment. It’s no accident that Millay wrote the poem in Europe, in her mother’s absence, for only in that situation could she transform the grip of Duty! Duty! Love! Love! into a work of the highest achievement of her career so far. Just as none of the Millay daughters would weave hair, none of them would become mothers. To do so was to risk this deadly devotion.

  Early in September, after her pregnancy was over, Vincent went to London with Tess. From London she wrote her mother, who remained in Shillingstone, to tell her that she hadn’t felt quite up to doing certain things. “Not that I’ve been sick, but I’ve been uncomfortable until today. Now I am done menstruating & all right.” She enclosed a pound for her mother, whom she seems to have been writing to every other day. When three days passed without a letter she wrote, “I’ve been such a bad girl. It comes over me all of a sudden that I’ve not written you for days, & it makes me sick to think of it. I’ve just this minute telegraphed you.”

  She told Cora she had motored with Tess to a summer cottage on an island in the middle of the Thames. She was going to work on one more article for Vanity Fair, and she included two more pounds in her letter.

  “Sweet darling, I didn’t even write you that I got the rest of the money all right!—I suppose you’re worried!—Maybe, oh of course, you need money, too! Oh, I could kick myself!—Don’t ever forgive me, Mummie!—Your bad, Vincent.”

  She visited Doris Stevens in London. “Edna, Doris felt, was again getting ready to take off,” Doris’s husband, Jonathan Mitchell, recalled, “and she really had no idea of what she would do. She might remain in England, she might not. She wanted to go to Italy. She wanted to go back to Paris. It was a time of mustering of forces.”

  She did try to tell Doris what had happened. “And it was an incredible story,” Jonathan Mitchell remembered, “of her mother, of rolling in the fields! Well, they produced a miscarriage, and it made Edna frightfully sick. There were doctors in London to whom she might have turned, you understand, and Miss Stevens would have helped her. But instead the two of them went off like two animals—off together in the hedges of Dorset!”

  By the middle of October Edna wrote Norma, “just to break the silence between us, baby.” She had caught sight of the poet A. E. Housman in Cambridge

  and chased his retreating tall, thin figure and cotton umbrella for about half a mile through the streets … till he turned in at Trinity College, where he is professor of English, and was lost in the gloom. I caught just a glimpse of his face, a nice face. They say nobody ever sees him, that he goes along like a shadow and is lost before he’s found.

  She enclosed the photograph Man Ray had taken of her in Paris, “pretty rotten, but never mind,” and described an enchanted dinner with the sculptor Constantin Brancuşi in his studio:

  It’s the greatest, barest studio you ever saw, all white beams and white blocks of marble and everything covered with white dust like a flour mill, and we ate our dinner off a great round marble thing like an enormous mill-stone, and all full of little depressions and bitten-out places where he has pounded and banged at his work—no cloth on the table, and in the entire room not a square-foot of fabric of any sort, no hanging tapestries, no kimonos flung over easels, no pictures, nothing—only some beautiful, pure curving figures standing on pedestals, looking like nothing on earth that you ever saw, things complexly wrought into a simplicity that fools one,—and little Brancusi with his fine, shaggy, grizzly-dark head and beautiful black eyes, dressed in loose trousers and a shirt rather like a smock, and heavy rough shoes, which either were wooden sabots or looked exactly like them—a little Roumanian peasant and a great sculptor all at the same time, shuffling in from the kitchen with bowls of soup, and chicken that he had broiled himself, and poking up the fire in the big, rough, white-stone stove, like a stove you build on the beach, that he had made himself, and the two of [us] chattering at each other in two different kinds of French, and eating big white radishes sliced across like turnips, and drinking sweet white wine.

  She admitted to her family she was not writing “much poetry” but said she had sent on to her new agents a short story called “The Murder in the Fishing Cat. I tell you, me and Eddie Poe,—there’s no stopping us Americans. As for HARDIGUT, it’s really going to be published next spring.” Horace Liveright, who had advanced her $500, was now pressing her agents for the novel. “Now little Ediner is hopping to the south of France to write the dam thing. But don’t tell anybody; Liveright thinks it’s all ready but the numbering the chapters.”

  Not long after Edna’s letter to Norma, Cora wrote to tell Norma that they we
re sailing at midnight for Le Havre. “A friend of Sefe’s wrote of a little place called Cassis, about 8 m. from M. on the R.R. and the Mediterranean, not a resort, which is what we want for the winter.”

  Millay remained ill. Her illness, her discomfort, her colds, stomach, or digestive problems only intensified after her mother’s arrival. To Norma and Charlie she tried to take a jaunty note: “No, I’ve never tried Kellogg’s Bran.… If Mr. Kellogg has invented something that will move my bowels, I will marry him.”

  They arrived in Cassis on November 17. Walking from the railroad station to their hotel, they saw vineyards everywhere and gray-green olive trees that had just been harvested. Soon they were eating the “Bouille-a-beisse,” as Cora wrote, so flavored with saffron and garlic that even the coins Vincent got at the post office reeked.

  And everywhere they stepped, it seemed to Vincent they crushed wild thyme underfoot. Within two days of their arrival she dove into the stillwarm Mediterranean, and when she surfaced the beads of water sparkled like tiny green jewels on her throat and shoulders. She looked like Ondine.

  Cassis

  Dec. 12

  Dearest Hunk—

  Now the real winter has come even here.… Never did two people flee before the cold as we are doing.

  But Vincent was no longer fleeing simply the cold. “Of course, … the real trouble is me. I’ve been so dam sick I can’t stand anything.—I’m weak as a kitten,—every time I hear the mistral blowing up I can hardly keep back the tears.”

  Her last letter from Cassis was to Arthur. She congratulated him about Gladys Brown, the woman he’d fallen in love with in New York: “My God—it’s marvelous.” She told him she had known, “in my way, just as well as you know in your way, how nice she is.… I knew it the first moment I set eyes on her in Prunier’s. You can’t fool me. And you didn’t think we’d like each other!—men don’t know very much.” Still, she said, “I shall love you till the day I die.” As for Hal, since Arthur was still fretting over their possible marriage, she teased, he wasn’t to give it another thought: “There’s not the slightest danger that I shall marry him: he has jilted me!”

  Within two weeks of her last letter to Norma, they left Cassis for Paris. On January 17, 1923, they boarded the S.S. Rotterdam, bound for America. Margot Schuyler saw Vincent before she left, “And she looked so ill and worn. I just looked at her, and I remember the last thing I said to her: ‘You go home and you find the most marvelous man in the world, and marry him!’ ” That must have stung, coming from a woman she’d made love to and dropped for Daubigny.

  It was hard to tell from the copious notes Cora kept during their crossing whether it was the rough seas or illness that kept Vincent in her room in bed for most of the trip. But the phrase “Vincent not feeling at all well” was frequent. The last night at sea, while the orchestra played “Ain’t We Got Fun,” Vincent remained alone belowdecks as the black Atlantic heaved.

  *In Millay’s published Letters, edited by Norma Millay, there is a typo that remained uncorrected. It read, “If you can’t suppose it, I will.” Whereas the key word was “support.”

  BOOK TWO

  STEEPLETOP

  1923–1950

  All the time there is this split in the American art and art-consciousness. On the top it is as nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey.… Look at the inner meaning of their art and see what demons they were.… The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish. Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper consciousness.

  —D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

  PART FIVE

  LOVE AND FAME

  CHAPTER 19

  The younger generation forms a country of its own.

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Ice and snow were frozen to the rails and rigging of the Rotterdam as she docked in Hoboken, New Jersey, on January 26, 1923. Millay returned just before her thirty-first birthday. “Poor me!” she’d written one of her aunts from Rome after Norma had married, “I’m the only old maid in the family! but I’m so busy just now writing a novel that I can’t be bothered getting married.” In fact, she would abandon Hardigut within a month of her arrival.

  Norma remembered her as looking tired and listless and not being able to write at all. Even Edmund Wilson, who had what he called one magnificent evening with her, felt that Europe had provided no better environment for her than New York. “She must,” he wrote, “have continued to live with considerable recklessness, for, at the end of two years abroad, she was in very bad shape again.”

  During those years abroad, her career had not languished at home. Frank Crowninshield had written her in Europe that when Second April had at last been published in August 1921, it had outsold Renascence four months after publication. “They have printed three editions … more than 3000 copies and [it] may mean 5000.”

  A reporter who called himself Young Boswell talked to her just after her return to the States; he said that he had to meet her because, he wrote, “All young men left flowers at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s door and then went home and wrote poems to her.” He rang timidly at a house in Greenwich Village. A young woman with bright red hair cut like a medieval page’s answered the door. She gave him coffee, and they began to speak of her reaction to New York after having been away.

  “The younger generation,” she said, “forms a country of its own. It has no geographical boundaries. I’ve talked with young Hungarians in Budapest, with young Italians in Rome, with young Frenchmen in Paris, and with young people all over.… These young people are going to do things. They are going to change things.”

  Flashing her slender fingers through her hair, she paused just long enough for him to ask her eagerly if that meant there would be an artistic awakening in America, too. “I think that America is already artistically awake,” she said, fixing him with eyes he was sure were the color of the sea. After which, Young Boswell said he would go home and write poems to Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  In November, Millay had written to Horace Liveright, who had advanced her $500 for her novel, that Hardigut would be ready for spring publication in New York. She described in her letter the theme of the novel: “people, otherwise perfectly sane and normal, do not eat in public, or discuss food except in innuendos and with ribald laughter.” She assured him that the book would be not only amusing and satirical but “an unmistakable allegory” about sexual hunger. But while she’d certainly learned in her Vanity Fair experience how to craft short prose pieces with wit and considerable skill, Hardigut was not a short take. Among the many scenes in her notebook or on odd scraps of paper, there’s no sense of an integrated story moving smartly forward. She seemed unable to sustain a novel.

  Millay had been considering a satirical play on sex as early as her notebook in 1918–19, when she had drawn up a cast for “Figs from Thistles / An Unmorality of the Seven / Deadly Virtues.” Her characters were “Vice, a very young girl” and her maiden aunts, “Humility, Abstinence, Thrift, Self-Sacrifice, Piety, etc.” The character called “Life” was “a lovely boy, dressed in green.” But she did no more than list their names.

  Roughly three years later, in the black notebook where she had made her first Paris entries, she began a sketch for another one-act play called “Food,” and she was again having fun with her characters’ names: Matrix, Utera, Aphrodisia and Venerea (daughters of Matrix), Erotic, son of Utera, Semen, husband of Matrix, and Lascivia, “a neighbor who wears French clothes.” Later she added “Master Bates, their little son.” As broad as these characters’ names are, it’s impossible not to link the play to Hardigut, for they share the same theme: secrecy about sex, and food as its allegorical equivalent.

  We must eat to remain healthy; we must have sex to remain fully alive. It should be openly engaged in, Millay thought, and not hidden by taboos. But she was not able to complete these sketches: ne
ither play was written, the novel was never finished. In her poetry sex surfaced constantly, sometimes ironically and sometimes sensuously, but in such a way that the reader thinks it is about Millay’s own sexuality, about her own life. The reader is encouraged, invited even, to suspect autobiography. It may be a naive way to read, but it is as enduring as human curiosity. This confusion between what an author imagines and writes, and what she may actually do, would help earn Millay a small fortune—and a large audience.

  There was a summer colony at Croton-on-Hudson, where a cluster of charming old frame houses on Mt. Airy Road formed the center of a group of friends who knew each other from the Village. It was a politically radical, socially unconventional, jolly group who liked to play together and were not given to bourgeois tidying up. “The houses,” one wrote, “have no gardens, the grass grows long and the rose bushes are weed tangled.” But they shared a glorious view of the Hudson River, and it was a green refuge from the city, only an hour away.

  Behind the Boardman Robinsons’ house was a clay tennis court where Max Eastman and Eugen Boissevain, who were sharing a house that summer, could be seen playing tennis in their white flannels. “It was as though Greenwich Village in summer array had been dumped down with almost deliberate pageantry upon the grass,” one of them wrote. Doris Stevens, who had met Millay in London, and Dudley Field Malone, with whom she was then living, had taken a house. Max’s sister, Crystal Eastman, and her husband, Walter Fuller, had too. Even John Reed had had a house there before his death in the Soviet Union. And Floyd Dell had been invited to stay that summer by several intense young mothers who Dell thought might send their children to Russia for an education.