Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  The New York Evening Post ran a feature in the next day’s issue: “Edna and Deems Call It a Night, Countless Curtains for Little Lady and All the Glory of a Metropolitan Premiere.” The house was completely sold out. Spectators packed the standing room five and six feet deep along the sides and back of the house. There were seventeen curtain calls and applause lasting twenty minutes.

  “Our two years’ sentence is up!” cried Miss Millay to Eugene Boissevain.… “No one sleeps tonight. It is our New Year’s,” she caroled with a child’s exuberance.

  Miss Millay may, as she said, have felt as if she were stepping on clouds when she took her curtain calls, but to be cruelly accurate, she actually spent most of her time stepping on her train.

  It was a long train, an unruly train, a train which insisted upon getting between her two little red slippers and making its owner look more like a schoolgirl than ever. But the smile never faded. It was too well earned. It lingered and grew and the little woman with the tawny bob scampered back and forth.

  Gladys had come east for the opening night, and everybody was there, “My Darling,” she wrote Arthur the next morning,

  Tess and the Warburgs and Rebecca West.

  I almost cried because you were not there. It was exciting! … Vincent and Deems appeared at the end of each act and came again and again for prolonged applause. Vincent had a marvelous dress of red and gold but she was quite fussed and acted rather baby-girlish on the whole. But at the end of the third act people began calling for a speech and finally Vincent and Deems came forward and Deems looked at Vincent helplessly and Vincent at him. Then she spread out her hands, made a little duck of her head, and said, “All I can say is—that I love you all.” Giggles and applause—then Deems—“I—I was just going to say the same thing”—laughter and applause.

  There was only one hitch: that afternoon, Florence Mixter, in whose apartment Vincent and Eugen were staying, came to Gladys Ficke in a huff. She had opened the box of photographs Gladys had left with her two days earlier; inside were nude photographs of both couples. Mrs. Mixter was outraged. She thought the photos scandalous.

  Gladys tried to explain to Arthur what had happened. She’d left the photographs at Florence’s because carrying them around New York was risky, and she’d told Florence to give them to Edna and Eugen. Instead, Florence had looked at the photographs, ignoring the personal note from Arthur which he had put on top. “Apparently she spent two days of orgie—did not give the films to the Kids—said nothing to them and came to roast me.”

  When Edna and Eugen discovered what had happened, they went to Kathleen’s and burned the films. Millay’s response to Mrs. Mixter was icy, contemptuous, and confrontational. “Why didn’t you lock it up?” she demanded to know. “It was not necessary for you to look at it! … When you saw the note from Arthur, why didn’t you stop? And when you saw the first film why didn’t you stop?” Mrs. Mixter was silenced.

  Arthur gave the whole episode quite another meaning. Florence had been attracted by the pictures and felt it was wicked, he suggested, for “she was slightly in love with all four of us.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Edmund Wilson saw Millay the weekend after the opening in New York at what he called “Our formal dinner across a too-wide table drinking Boissevain’s whiskey and sauterne.” He scrutinized her carefully and ungenerously, as if to make up for what he later called his adoration. “I saw her wince and the collapse for a moment of her manner: nervous, trembling, worried and dismayed—” She didn’t know the new slang, and he did. She’d never heard of Hart Crane, and Wilson had. Suddenly she said to him, “I’m not a pathetic figure—I’m not!”

  “Whoever said you were?” he shot back. Then he softened. “She was all burning and lit up when I came in, quite different from her paleness and brittleness when I had seen her in bed the winter before, and she put her arms around me and kissed me, leaving Boissevain behind in the bedroom, and it was I who was too stiff and unresponsive.”

  In the pages of The New Republic, Edmund Wilson continued to champion her work. “When one looks back on the American poetry of the season,” he wrote in the May 11, 1927, issue, “one is aware of only two events which emerge as of the first interest: ‘The King’s Henchman,’ by Miss Millay, and ‘White Buildings,’ by Mr. Hart Crane.”

  The King’s Henchman was reviewed by Elinor Wylie on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday book section. She began by quoting Thomas Hardy’s singular comment: “There were two great things in the United States: the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and our ‘recessional buildings’ ” (by which he meant skyscrapers). Wylie added that “when she and this generation are gone, the die which stamped her style will be broken.” Her only hesitation had been that Millay might be more comfortable as “an Elizabethan or a Greek than a Saxon of the tenth century.” That doubt vanished in the second act. When Wylie “beheld Aethelwold and Aelfrida caught in the invisible nets of love, I saw that I had been an idiot not to trust this girl Edna Millay, even into the mists of the tenth century.”

  On the eve of the opening, The New Yorker, founded in 1925, ran a profile called “Vincent.” It was among its first profiles and was written by Griffin Barry. “Vincent” was Barry’s first and last contribution to the magazine. In the words of Katharine White, who was then Mrs. Angell, who had helped Harold Ross found the magazine, the piece was “very meager, poor, and inaccurate.… Ross had not set up his demon checking department.” She guessed that it was Ross’s experience with this profile that decided him to set up The New Yorker’s legendary fact-checking department.

  “In those early days we all did everything,” she recalled, “and one day soon after the publication of the Profile, Mrs. Cora Millay … came storming into the office threatening a lawsuit.” Ross told her to mollify Mrs. Millay, which was no easy matter. “I talked with her for a long time and finally pacified her by asking her to write a letter that we would run under our heading ‘We Stand Corrected.’ ” Cora’s chief complaint was in the very first paragraph:

  Edna Millay’s father was a stevedore on the wharves at Rockland, Maine. So was his father. Before him, certain Millays owned houses and lands—but that was long ago. Her mother appears to remember little of her own biography, but it is known that as a girl she migrated from Maine to Boston to sing in the chorus of the Castle Square Opera Company.

  Barry’s description of Vincent’s days at Vassar was a combination of perceptiveness laced with bile: “A knowing and rather disagreeable childishness crept in.” He continued, “Edna’s own resemblance to an eerie child was liked at Vassar; a critic might say that she wrote poems to that.” He told about her nearly losing her degree; he had her in “male disguise … though that is perhaps only myth,” which was, of course, a way to both put it into print and disclaim it at the same time. He said that while she maintained a brave front, “it was known that in private she drooped. Social approval, high and low, then as now, was very necessary to this poor young poet from a Maine small town.” He had her saved by a wealthy, “motherly” patroness, whose “keep of the poet would be met—delicately, regularly.”

  When Barry got to describing Paris in 1921, which was when he knew her best (and also when she left him for George Slocombe), he made two telling observations about her poetry and how she had become the voice of her generation:

  They celebrate the loves of footloose youth—of footloose girls, not men. This verse is too passionate to be called light poetry, but there is a curious omission in it, for there is no poem of abandonment to love. The only genuine surrender is to death.… It is the only intensity available after a love that has burned on nothing but itself—only a metaphor, perhaps, that the poet uses for goodbye.

  The generation that had just gone to war, he continued, “had seen nothing so accurate about itself in print.” Flaming youth “was still unnamed—spanked, if possible, deplored, unsung. The jazz age was unknown. Fitzgerald had yet to write his descriptions of moneye
d, jigging youth” when “sonnets by a girl in Greenwich Village … began to be widely known.” Barry described tables full of Americans in Paris who knew her poems by heart, but when he wrote about Millay’s increasing fame, his anger stained his prose:

  Luckily, Edna Millay likes almost anybody’s parties. Among people she is confiding or detached, according to her mood, and she does not demand attention. Usually she knows how to rule a situation or a group, if she wants to. If luck is against her and she loses control of the social steering-gear, she can turn her attention swiftly to the weather or the Einstein theory or you—and have a good time anyway. Mostly she drifts and watches. She has been known to tremble when she meets a person whose literary reputation exceeds her own.

  Cora’s letter of detailed corrections to the editors of The New Yorker was published on April 23, 1927. By then, Vincent had written to her: “About that stevedore—forget it.—A stevedore is … almost as important to a ship as its captain.… Forget it, darling. It was meant for an insult.—But it isn’t. And forget the s.o.b. that said it.—V.”

  With the triumph of The King’s Henchman behind her, Millay returned to Steepletop to rest, “everybody worn out and dead for a little sleep,” she wrote in the new diary Lawrence Tibbett, the leading tenor of the Metropolitan, had given her on the eve of Henchman’s opening. “Mrs. Tibbett told Ugin that everybody has told her he is known as ‘the sheik of New York.’ He is pleased as anything”—pleased, too, that Edna had dedicated Henchman to him.

  The first night back, March 1, they went to bed at nine; the next night “8 o’clock, and I am already in bed.” And she, who had rarely kept a diary with any constancy, was now writing every day because “I feel a little lonely at moments for the Metropolitan—the little crowded backentrance and the enormous dark house—and the singers in their street clothes, all so simple and friendly and sweet. I miss the Henchman and so does Ugin.”

  They’d been back only five days when Eugen suggested they go down to New York to hear it again.

  Today on the front page of the World we came upon “$100 a Day for Poet of King’s Henchman” and an article telling how my book has already sold 10,000 copies. Sometimes I get a kick out of things like that—oftener I don’t. But this time I did. I was thrilled to death. That the amount of royalties I get for a book of poems should be of front page interest to the great New York public—well, I just sat for ten minutes with my eyes sticking out, drinking it in.—Oh, what a thrilling winter this has been! Ugin and I—what fun we’ve had!—how happy we are!

  On the bestseller lists in New York at Brentano’s and Macy’s, Henchman was second on the nonfiction list, while Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was fourth on the fiction list.

  On March 8, the New York Evening Post ran a column headed “ ‘Henchman’ Leaps to Fourth Edition” with 10,500 copies in print within twenty days of publication. “Now nobody wants to intrude in Edna’s private affairs … but still it’s evident that Miss Millay’s royalties in twenty days amount to $1,056.33 and possibly more if she gets more than the customary 10 per cent on a $2 book.”

  They went on to speculate that she had, therefore, been earning $50 a day, or about $2 an hour, since February 17, when the libretto had gone on sale. Her autographed editions were inciting “riots in the larger book stores,” and the $25 Japan vellum edition was being scalped for $125. Another edition on handmade paper was impossible to buy anywhere, for any price. Her clipping service noted that even a first edition of Renascence was selling for $60.

  Elinor Wylie wired them that she was coming for a visit. Edna and Eugen were so delighted that they raced around trying “to get things in shape before Elinor got here & got so nervous & tired—but we did save just enough time to get a bath & dress. I dumped a lot of the bath-salts Gene got in Chatham into my bath, & it left a mauve line around the tub, & the whole place smelled like a whore-house.”

  Edna had known Elinor since 1921, when Edna had highly praised Nets to Catch the Wind, but their friendship quickened after Henchman. Elinor and her husband arrived at Steepletop on April 2. “It is too wonderful to have them here—dear Bill [William Rose Benét]—my beautiful Elinor! … Elinor & I had a lovely row about Shelley—a long lovely gentle jeering row.”

  The next day, both couples spent their time together walking the fields and reading. On April 4, after Bill returned to the city, Edna wrote, “I lay on the couch before the living-room fire & Elinor read me from Browning things we both used to love & half know by heart—Love Among the Ruins—& The Spanish Cloister, and other things—such fun.” That night their hired man got drunk and their housekeeper went home with him to make sure he didn’t harm anything, so Eugen cooked dinner.

  Tonight Elinor told Gene & me from beginning to end the story of her strange & wonderful life up to the present moment, a most engrossing tale, full of tragedy.—She is the most lovely creature. Gene is crazy about her. If he weren’t, I’d be furious.

  April 5

  Ugin brought up breakfast to Elinor & me in my bed & made a lovely fire in my fireplace. Elinor, Gene & I drove down to Austerlitz in a snowstorm, Gene on the seat & Elinor & I tucked in on the floor, facing back—went to Columbia Inn & drank muscatel & read mail. Elinor loved it.—In the evening we discussed the relative weight of St. Agnes’ Eve or Epipsychidion—not as poems—but as love-poems, Elinor holding that the last twenty lines or so of it are highly sensuous & impassioned, I insisting that, except for a phrase or two, they are so much rhetorical hot air.—Later she read aloud to me from Shelley—the lovely little “If thou coulds’t be as thou hast been” one, & “Less oft is peace in Shelley’s mind” & “Listening to my sweet piping.” Finally she read the West Wind. “The Best Poem Ever Written!” she cried when she finished. I did not dispute her. I do not think naturally in terms of best-next-best. I think I love the Grecian Urn better. But I am not sure.

  This morning Elinor read to herself from Mortal Image, while I played first Chopin, then Bach, then Beethoven on the piano. I play so badly. But not too badly, I think, to be allowed to play them.

  It sounded like a romantic idyll, these two poets together, each with her red hair, Elinor’s the color of dark copper, Edna’s of flame, Elinor tall and so slender that Edmund Wilson called her “skeletally thin.” Her skin was so white, Edna teased her, it looked as if she lived underwater.

  On April 7, the morning Elinor was to leave, they got into an argument over Kathleen’s novel, The Wayfarer, which had been published the year before. Elinor didn’t like it. Edna suggested she read the second part again—and this time she relented. “I gave it to her & made her sit down & read the part about Mother’s life on the Maine farm, which is so beautifully treated. ‘Why, this is lovely!’ she said after a little while. ‘I never read this.’ ”

  It comes as a surprise to learn that Vincent admired her sister’s novel enough to insist that Elinor read it, because there had been no mention of Kathleen’s work in any of the correspondence among the Millays since 1926, when The Wayfarer had first been published. The only indication that Kathleen was writing and publishing came in a letter Vincent wrote to Cora on May 25, two months after the opening of The King’s Henchman. Her letter is sharp and incisive. It’s also about a different book, The Evergreen Tree, a book of poems published by Boni & Liveright that fall. In other words, Kathleen had now directly entered Vincent’s domain. Vincent told her mother, who must have been prompting her to respond on Kathleen’s behalf:

  I wrote Kathleen ages ago about her book. I told you I would, & I did. And that’s that.

  Now will you please stop worrying.

  Kathleen is about to publish a book, as thousands have done before her. A person who publishes a book wilfully appears before the populace with his pants down. And there’s nothing you can do about that.

  Kathleen is not a baby. She is a grown-up person quite able to take care of herself. And she has been struggling for years to be allowed to manage her own affairs. If s
he knew the kind of letter you wrote me in her behalf, she’d froth at the mouth & spit brimstone.

  But she didn’t stop there.

  Kathleen is about to publish a book. If it’s a good book, nothing can harm her. If it’s a bad book, nothing can help her. And all your stewing & fretting will accomplish just one end: it will make you very sick & a nuisance to yourself, and a care to everybody,—so will you please forget it, & relax, & interest yourself in something else? If you don’t, you’re not the intelligent woman you have the reputation of being; you are just one more typical, sentimental, agitated mother!

  Won’t you please RELAX?

  Kathleen is not a baby. She is six years older than I was when my first book of poems was published.… I ask you to SNAP OUT OF IT and stop making yourself sick for nothing! Pull yourself together, & go to Maine, & start your garden. And I’ll send you lots of plants, & help you all I can, with advice, & my own experience, & seeds, & money, & any darned thing you want. If you’ll only be good, & STOP WORRYING!!!

  With a hell of a lot of love,

  Vincent

  The slim black volume of Kathleen’s verse looked, in terms of its design, very like Vincent Millay’s, except that the stamping was in silver rather than gold. The poems were too close to Vincent’s for comfort. One, “Blight,” even had the same title. They are oddly self-pitying, a little lame and sorrowful.

  IMMIGRANT

  Nothing in this house is of my making,

  No one in this place is kin to me;

  They know me not in sleeping or in waking,

  I am alone in this great company.

  I want a fire that will be mine for raking,

  I want a room that will know me for its own,

  I want a love that will be mine for taking,