Strangeness and I have lived too long alone.
Or “The Spinner’s Song”:
No time, no time, to sing my songs,
But time to spin my spinning!
No way, no way, to right the wrongs,
But ways enough for sinning.
No laugh to take, no laugh to give,
But tears and tears for crying;
No living worth the death to live,
But life enough for dying.
2
In March, the League of American Penwomen had asked Elinor Wylie to be one of its guests of honor at an authors’ breakfast in Washington, D.C. Elinor, who had left her first husband and their child to run off with Horace Wylie, a married man, had never been forgiven for her indiscretion. Her husband eventually became insane, her son committed suicide, and Mrs. Wylie would not give Mr. Wylie a divorce until much later. It had been a disastrous series of scandals and catastrophes. Now, thinking at last she’d been forgiven, she agreed to be honored. Then she received a second letter. “Washington is still provincial enough to object to you! I might as well tell you the truth,” the hostess for the breakfast explained. “Do not think that either Mrs. Seton or I were in ignorance in our invitation … but we thought it of no consequence to anybody, anymore than it would be with a man.” But it was. Wylie’s invitation was abruptly canceled. “I wrote a letter to the League of American Penwomen, telling them where to get off,” Vincent wrote in her diary. “I wish I had been a Fifth Avenue street sparrow yesterday—or in other words:
I wish to God I might have shat
On Mrs. Grundy’s Easter hat.
Her letter was controlled, principled fury; she dropped a copy of it to Elinor in that day’s mail: “My darling: … Please read the letter, then post it at once.—Be a good girl, & do as I tell you, & post it at once.”
For Edna, too, had been invited to be the League’s guest of honor, and while she had told it she regretted not being able to attend, she was “sensible to the honour you did me, and that I hoped you would invite me again.” Now, however, she wrote, each word like a sting, “It is not in the power of an organization which has insulted Elinor Wylie, to honour me.” How could she be a guest at a gathering of writers
where honour is tendered not so much for the excellence of one’s literary accomplishment as for the circumspection of one’s personal life.
Believe me, if the eminent object of your pusillanimous attack has not directed her movements in conformity with your timid philosophies, no more have I mine. I too am eligible for your disesteem. Strike me too from your lists, and permit me, I beg you, to share with Elinor Wylie a brilliant exile from your fusty province.
One can almost feel the heat from the sparks flying from her pen. Elinor was delighted:
My darling—
A thousand thanks for your beautiful & noble defense. If Grattan had collaborated with Keats or Shelley they could not have contrived such eloquence.…
Your
Elinor
I have written you a ballad—to you—which perhaps you’ll like. Hope so, at least.
Millay’s fury was aroused not only in defense of friends but by social and political injustice. Throughout her life, as early as “Renascence,” when it seems naive, to Aria da Capo, written in the aftermath of World War I, when it does not, Millay wrote against the folly of men engaged in the deadly game of what she called “feverish ambition” who would kill for colored glass, as they did in Aria da Capo.
In the spring of 1920, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were accused of taking part in the holdup and murder of a shoe factory paymaster and a payroll guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists. When their judge, Webster Thayer, was overheard to say, “Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?” there was good reason to believe there would be a miscarriage of justice. Judge Thayer was determined from the start to secure a conviction.
What had been an obscure case—they were tried, found guilty, and, after many appeals, sentenced to death in April 1927—had during those seven years enflamed the conscience of America. For under Massachusetts law then, it was the same trial judge who ruled on the appeals from his own verdicts. Edna Millay joined the picket line before the State House in Boston demonstrating for their reprieve—along with Katherine Anne Porter, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Michael Gold, and hundreds of others, walking with placards in the hot August sun. Photographed holding her poster aloft, her jaw set in dissent, Millay was taken to the police station, where she was formally charged with “sauntering and loitering” and was bailed out by Eugen, who’d come to Boston with her to put up bail for many of their friends.
On August 22, 1927, the afternoon before the execution, Millay was able to schedule an interview with Governor Alvan T. Fuller. She hoped to persuade him to order a stay of execution. She based her appeal in part on a case in Maine, about which Cora had supplied her with the information. A man had been hanged for a crime it was later discovered he had not committed. Later that afternoon she wrote the governor:
I suggested that, for all your careful weighing of the evidence, for all your courage in the face of threats and violent words, for all your honest conviction that these men are guilty, you, no less than the governor of Maine in my story, who was so tragically mistaken, are but human flesh and spirit, and that it is human to err.… You promised me, and I believed you truly, that you would think of what I said. I exact of you this promise now.… I cry to you with a million voices: answer our doubt. Exert the clemency which your high office affords.
There is need in Massachusetts of a great man tonight. It is not yet too late for you to be that man.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
For all her persuasive eloquence, Fuller, a self-made millionaire who thought a pair of immigrant anarchists would destroy the very foundations of American civilization, did not believe in clemency for these two men. He did not order a stay of execution, and they were electrocuted just past midnight on August 23, 1927. The outrage of their execution was denounced throughout the world.
Once again, Millay, who just a few months before had been called “the young sovereign of the written word,” made use of her poetry to express political outrage. “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” was published on August 22, 1927, in the afternoon edition of the New York World:
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room.
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.
Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before.…
Forlorn, forlorn
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.…
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.…
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.
When Kathleen came to write her next collection of poetry, The Hermit Thrush, she devoted an entire section to Sacco and Vanzetti. “The Last Thanksgiving/Massachusetts 1927” closed the group:
…
And know that we have done our best
To still a Jealous God,
And paid Him well for roasted fowl
And fish upon the rod;
For did we not, a threemonths past, put souls beneath the sod—
Burn two live men and bury them
Deep down within their grave,
Because they would not thank the Lord for what He never gave?
Edna, who had been arrested in August, was one of six demonstrators who refused to pay the minimal fine in order
to make a test case. Each pleaded not guilty, claiming they were exercising their lawful right of peaceful assembly. That November they were requested to appear in Boston for a trial. It was, ironically, at the same time as The King’s Henchman was playing there. Edna wrote her mother from Boston:
I don’t imagine anybody will go to jail.—It would have been marvelous publicity (not for me!—I mean for the Sacco Vanzetti defense people).… You have been a brick through this, Mother—just as you have been through other hard things I have put you through. Don’t think I forget anything of your loveliness to me, ever.
So much love to you, my darling,
Vincent.
But her letter had a troubling postscript. It was about the little cottage Kathleen and her husband, Howard, had bought for their mother in Maine, and while it seemed to be about money, it was really about who was the more generous child.
November 16 …
P.P.S. Aren’t you protecting Kay’s feelings somewhat at my expense? It was no secret that they bought the cottage for you. Why should it be a secret that I am paying for repairs on it? I don’t care a bit, dear, but it seems to me the wrong way of looking at it.
In a very few summers like this one I shall have paid out as much for the cottage & its extras as Kay & Howard paid for the cottage itself, & yet all so piecemeal & unromantically that it will never show to the eye at all. I would never write like this, mother, if we didn’t understand each other so well, & if you didn’t know how constitutionally incapable I am of feeling any jealousy in such matters or of wishing to publish to the world the trivial little things I do for you who have done everything for me. But I think that Kay should be glad, if the posts of the cottage were unsafe, that one of us three girls has been able to have new ones put under it, and I don’t see why it should matter to her very much that I happened to be the one. Do just as you feel about it, however, Mumbles. But it seems to me that these little secrecies and evasions tend to make the atmosphere among us strained and unreal.
*Mrs. Florence Mixter was a friend of Arthur Ficke’s and a very wealthy woman. It was to her place in the Adirondacks that Arthur had arranged an invitation for Vincent in the summer of 1920.
PART SIX
LOVE AND DEATH
CHAPTER 24
Millay’s letters to her mother dwindled throughout 1928—eight lines at the turn of the year asking Cora to come for a visit, nine lines written in March: “Sefe terribly busy—writing poetries—so not writing letters—even to Mumbles—Please forgive.” Cora, meanwhile, was busily writing her own collection of verses, which she called Little Otis. Poetry was becoming a family vocation.
Cora had begun to give poetry readings after Vincent’s Pulitzer. Her style of performance, which a Maine paper described as “such a naive way of reading … that her audience is convulsed with laughter,” was clearly modeled on Vincent’s. But Cora hadn’t published her poems. Now, with Kathleen’s help (as well as that of her publisher, W. W. Norton), she was about to. Vincent seemed to pay very little attention to her mother’s poems, maybe because she was anxious about her own writing. When she entered this note in her diary on March 31, she made the point clearly:
I seem to be driven by some force accumulated during these years when I have written no poems at all.… Stayed in bed as usual and worked until noon. Wrote an entire sonnet beginning “Life, were thy pains as are the pains of hell”; and the octave of a sonnet beginning “Be sure my coming was a sharp offense and trouble to my mother in her bed.”
—I have never worked so furiously fast before.
What she never acknowledged was that she may have felt competitive. By July, when Vincent would again ask her mother to forgive her for not writing to her: “awfully busy—We loved Little Otis—& aren’t the illustrations adorable?”—there were three Millay women publishing poetry. Only Norma held her tongue.
The spring turned out to be false, and although the roads were dangerously icy with frozen sleet, houseguests began to arrive on the evening train from New York: Elaine Ralli, who had gone to medical school after Vassar and had remained in touch with Vincent, came with Isabel Simpson, who was also a friend from Vassar, bringing caviar, marrons glacés, candied ginger, and cognac. Margot Schuyler and Eleanor Delamater brought roses to set out; and in the evening they all dressed up in fancy dress.
Eleanor went as the Black Pirate; Margot as a Chinese girl in my green brocade Chinese trousers and coat and arbutus stuck over her ears, looked charming; Gene as the Maharajah of Dyokyakarta, in a batik shirt, that is to say, a sarong and a little batik tied about his head and an impeccable dinner shirt and pearl studs and black tie, and white mess jacket; I as a general houri, in an Albanian under-dress, a Turkish burnous, a headdress from Benares and a pair of slippers from Agra and a brass girdle from Paris.—We sat around the fire and told stories just like the Decameron, thrilling stories and everybody got very thrillingly intoxicated. We did not go to bed until nearly daybreak.
Edna and Eugen were as easy and playful with women who had been her lovers as they were with Elinor Wylie and Bill Benét, who arrived with Floyd Dell. It was one of the fine qualities of their starry bohemia.
“We talked before the living-room fire until Gene and I got sleepy, and said it was bedtime, whereupon a great groan went up from the more urban and nocturnal among us. We left Elinor and Floyd downstairs to make a night of it, but they didn’t stay long.” In the morning Elinor read Edna’s new poems and told her, Edna entered proudly in her diary, that it “may be my best book.” Then she said something “that hurt Elinor’s feelings, but she forgave me. I didn’t mean to hurt her, and I felt dreadful.” Millay promised to write a poem to salve her distress, but she couldn’t manage to shape the poem quite the way she wanted it. She would hold on to that poem for eleven years before publishing it in a group of poems dedicated to Elinor Wylie after her death.
SONG FOR A LUTE
Seeing how I love you utterly,
And your disdain is my despair,
Alter this dulcet eye, forbear
To wear those looks that latterly
You wore, and won me wholly, wear
A brow more dark, and bitterly
Berate my dulness and my care,
Seeing how your smile is my despair,
Seeing how I love you utterly.
Seeing how I love you utterly,
And your distress is my despair,
Alter this brimming eye, nor wear
The trembling lip that latterly
under a more auspicious air
You wore, and thrust me through, forbear
To drop your head so bitterly
Into your hands, seeing how I dare
No tender touch upon your hair,
Knowing as I do how fitterly
You do reproach me than forbear,
Seeing how your tears are my despair,
Seeing how I love you utterly.
(1927)
In her diary, when Eugen wrote he’d put Floyd and Elinor on the train at Hudson, Vincent would later add, “I never saw her again.”
There was one last exchange of letters between them. Elinor had asked Vincent to send her “your two poems about me” that spring before she left for England. Millay had not responded, except to send her a fresh bouquet from Steepletop for her voyage. Then, on September 19, 1928, she wrote:
My darling Elinor:
I have just read in the Saturday Review of your dreadful accident.—There was a silly story in the papers early in the summer—I didn’t see it, but someone mentioned it—that you had tried to kill yourself, or some such rot; naturally I paid no more attention to that than I pay to the annual drivel of myself & Gene.—Now it seems that you really did fall & were frightfully hurt.—I can’t tell you how I feel, to realize that you have been ill & in pain for months, & I haven’t written you a word.—I should have answered your letter long ago, except that you asked for those two poems about you, & I wanted to finish them before I wrote again
. I worked over them, particularly the one beginning, “Seeing how I love you utterly,” for ages, but have not yet been able to finish them to my satisfaction. Which means that they won’t be included in The Buck in the Snow.—But here are the lines about you in the other poem:
Yet look to her that enters now,—
A silver maiden leading a silver faun;
Her eyes are fixed on you with bright intent
Behold her, how she shines!—
Her brow is lit with all the jewels of the mines,
Her legs are lashed with the chilly grasses of the dawn.
… My dear, I am so grieved to think of what happened to you this summer.—I can see you coming down the stairs with your beautiful nearsighted eyes—for whose sake long ago I made Myopia a goddess.
2
In September 1928, The Buck in the Snow, Millay’s first book of poetry since Harp-Weaver, was published. On her reading tour in Chicago, she was introduced by a young poet, George Dillon. His first book of poems, Boy in the Wind, had been published the year before, when he was twenty-one and an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Now the associate editor of Poetry magazine, he was tall and slim, with black wavy hair carefully brushed back from his face; he looked like a modern Apollo whose glossy curls had been cut short to tame them. He was young enough, fourteen years younger than Millay, to be scared stiff at the prospect of his introduction. His voice was soft, with a slight southern drawl. He was courtly, even a little formal, as he bent down to introduce himself to her before her reading. “I’m George Dillon,” he said. He remembered that she took his hand as if she were falling into him.
Later that evening, at a party in her honor, Dillon was asked to recite his poems. When someone asked Millay if she didn’t think his poems were good for one so young, she said, “They’re wonderful for anyone!” Then she slipped him a note inviting him to lunch the next day.
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