Savage Beauty Read online

  The Genethod was founded by her friend and Sunday school teacher Abbie Huston Evans. Abbie’s father was Welsh, the pastor of the Congregational church that the Millays attended. “Abbie,” Martha Knight, Ethel’s sister, remembers, “must have been about ten years or more older than Vincent. She was tall with chestnut hair and … fragile. She had an awful funny gait; she sort of sidled. I remember Ethel once saying this rhyme at one of our meetings of the Genethod: ‘Do little souls go upward / when little bodies die?’ It was just a silly little rhyme she’d made up, and we all laughed. All but Abbie, that is. She didn’t like it. She was not frivolous. Oh, but Vincent could be. She had lots of spark and spunk; she fairly snapped.”

  June 29 [1908]

  I guess I’m going to explode. I know just how a volcano feels before an eruption. Mama is so cross she can’t look straight; Norma’s got the only decent rocking-chair in the house (which happens to be mine); and Kathleen is so unnaturally good that you keep thinking she must be sick. I suppose this is an awful tirade to deliver.… But it is very hard to be sixteen and the oldest of three.

  That same day Cora promised her girls a picnic with their friends, with sardine and salmon sandwiches, bananas, fancy cookies, chocolate, and strawberry shortcake. Millay noted in her diary that she no longer felt as explosive as she had: “Scribbling must be wholesome exercise.”

  By late June, the grass left uncut in the field behind their house was lush and high, and the Millay girls made up another game to play. They would run waving long, colored silk ribbons high above their heads and try to guess who held which color. From a distance all that could be seen was swirling ribbons above the tall grass.

  At ten that night Vincent made her last entry about the party; it was important to her that it had gone well. It was not only that her mother didn’t often have the time or the money to give them; it was also that Vincent sensed the resentment in Camden toward her family’s way of doing things.

  “For instance,” one of her friends recalled, “giving parties is a lot of work for—well, for the somebody that gives them. So she didn’t have parties. Not our sort, anyway. And the point is, there was just no money. What they did was to make everything fun, I guess; make a game out of it.… I suppose their mother was responsible for this in them, too.”

  In the face of tacit disapproval, they fortified themselves by pulling their family ties even tighter about them. They had no lights when their mother was away unless they trimmed and filled the lamps, no heat unless they tended the fire, and all that time Vincent drifted into another life in the world of books and dreams.

  Ethel Knight remembered one night in particular when

  Vincent opened the front door to three of her friends who had come to spend the evening. She wore a blouse of white muslin with cuffs and boned collar made of rows of insertion edged with lace. A full gored skirt came to the tops of her buttoned boots; a patent leather belt circumscribed a wide equator around her tiny middle; and a big blue bow spread its wings behind her head where her hair was fastened in a “bun.” Books were piled on the floor from a table Vincent had cleared for games and in the center was a plate of still warm fudge.

  All too soon it was twelve o’clock, and the Knight girls had promised their mother to be home early. Still, they wanted just one more song.

  So the girls gathered around the organ and the little room was filled with song. They retreated with “The Spanish Cavalier,” they saw “Nellie Home” and ended with an old favorite—

  “There is a tavern in the town, in the town,

  And there my true love sits him down, sits him down”—

  With a lighted lamp in her hand Vincent went to the door with her guests. Going down the walk they sang:

  “Fare thee well, for I must leave thee.”

  Ethel remembered how her slim figure stood in the doorway, her red curls shining from the lamp held high in her hands, her clear deep voice taking up the refrain that followed the girls down the hill:

  “Adieu, adieu, kind friends, adieu.”

  The plate of warm fudge, the glow of light around the slender girl, her rich voice ringing out against the Maine night, seem more properly the stuff of sentimentalized fiction than of real life. And fiction larded with autobiographical detail is exactly what Millay was writing in a novel she called The Dear Incorrigibles. The story begins with the mother, Mrs. Randolph, hanging up the telephone after a summoning call from a sick relative:

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do! I’m sure, I don’t know what I’m going to do!” … “Well, neither do we,” Margaret remarked. Margaret was fourteen and accustomed to taking things cooly.

  Mrs. Randolph is around only long enough to set the scene and leave it. “Of course I’ll have to go. But who will stay with you while I’m gone?” she asks. Katharine, who at sixteen is the eldest, solves the dilemma handily:

  “Now, Muvver,” she said, cheerfully. “There’s not a thing that I can see to scowl about. What got you into trouble in the first place was your supposing right off that we couldn’t be left alone. Imagine a great big sixteen-year-old girl like me not being big enough to keep house for a little while. I should be ashamed if I couldn’t. Besides it isn’t as if we were all sole alone. Aunt Cass lives right next door.… Goodness knows we’ve aunts enough.”

  This is the familiar Millay family scene recast only as to motive: Mrs. Randolph must leave her daughters not to earn money but to help a family member in need. It is a slender piece of fiction with a light, domestic charm and no great urgency. Katharine, the eldest, is somewhat bossy and prim, a little unsure of herself and vulnerable to being hurt. Margaret is a good deal like Norma—pretty and vain, lazy and good-natured. She is the only person who challenges her older sister. In chapter 4, Vincent introduces a fairy tale, the telling of which serves to bribe her youngest sister, Helen, into doing the dishes. It began:

  Once upon a time there was a very beautiful princess who lived with her father in a palace surrounded by a lovely garden.

  She had a gold plate to eat from, a gold mug to drink from, a gold chair to sit in and a gold bed to lie on … all the flowers in the garden to smell.

  And yet she was not happy.

  Why not? Because her father wants her to marry a scary old king whose kingdom “joined theirs on the left.” Stamping her foot in defiance, she refuses. Outraged by her disobedience, her father summons his wise men to decide upon a fair punishment. Her chin is to turn green. But the king, whose daughter’s beauty reminds him of his dead wife’s, cannot bear their penalty. A subterfuge is worked out. The princess is to be told her chin is green, when in fact all the mirrors in the kingdom will be broken and no one, under penalty of death, is to tell her it has remained pink. She is given a week to reconsider her defiance. When she does not relent, her father suddenly realizes that she no longer considers herself his daughter. The novel breaks off here, abandoned and incomplete.

  As a child Vincent had been told fairy tales by her mother, who spared her daughters whatever was disagreeable or frightening by changing unpleasant endings to happy ones. It’s a form Millay would turn to again and again when she was grown. The power of the fairy tale is that through magic or enchantment, through trials and clever guessing, one’s life can be utterly altered. Quick as a wink, the ugly are made beautiful, the poor become rich, the stupid clever, the powerless powerful. It works transformations outside the realm of the real world.

  Millay’s princess, who is motherless, is not passive as the princesses in fairy tales usually are; she does not wait, asleep or enchanted, to be rescued—she’s defiant. If the irreconcilable facts of life were glossed with the gold dust of fairy tale—green chins and gold plates, princesses and kings—nevertheless The Dear Incorrigibles was her first small act of protest against loss, anger, grief, and fear. No wonder she couldn’t finish it.

  Only once in her life would she write directly about what it was like to live with her sisters and without her mother in the small house by
the Megunticook River. In this strange passage from a notebook she kept when she was grown, nowhere does she say “we,” “our,” “my,” or “I”:

  To live alone like that, sleep alone at night in that house set back in the field and near no other house and on the very edge of Millville, the “bad” section of town where the itinerant millworkers lived,—this was the only way they could live at all. For the house was the cheapest to be found, and their mother, when fortunate enough to get a case, which indeed was most of the time, for she was a very good nurse, competent & resourceful, was obliged to be away from them almost all the day and all the night.

  But they were afraid of nothing, which was important,—not of the river which flowed behind the house, coloured with the most beautiful and changing colours,—dyes from the woollen-mills above—and in which they taught themselves to swim; nor afraid of that other river, which flowed past the front of the house, and which, especially on Saturday nights, was often very quarrelsome and noisy, the restless stream of mill workers, who never stayed long enough anywhere for one to know them even by sight.… And once it took all three of the children, flinging themselves against the front door, to close it and bolt it, and just in time. And after that, for what seemed like hours, there was stumbling about outside, and soft cursing. And after everything was quiet again the children lay awake for a long time, listening, and not making a sound, and thinking sometimes of the inconspicuous little path at the back of the house which they could follow in the blackest of nights without making a sound, through the tall grass of the field to the banks of the river, & how there, if it should seem unsafe to cross the corduroy bridge a little further upstream, they could swim across as quietly as water-rats to the further banks, & … hide themselves in less than a minute in any one of ten places where nobody on earth—no, not even with a dog and a lantern!—and the mill hands never went about with dogs and lanterns—could possibly find them.

  Her fear is everywhere clear. The girls weren’t safe. There was no one to protect them.

  2

  Vincent was supposed to make breakfast for her sisters while their mother was away, but it was early morning and she wanted to write in her diary instead. Above her desk she’d pinned Abbie’s Christmas card:

  Let us give thanks. Nature is beautiful, friends are dear, and duty lies close at hand.

  “In this case,” she wrote wryly, “duty lies very close at hand and is slumbering in the kitchen where she may lie and snooze until I get this entry written.” Her diary was not only her duty, it was also her “confidante, (that e on the end makes it feminine. It would be out of my power to tell all these things to a mere confidant).” Besides, it was the only one of her friends who could keep quiet long enough for her to unburden herself,

  and talk I must or my boiler will burst.… It’s Sunday and therefore it’s Sunday School, and I don’t want to go one bit. It looks like rain, and I hope it will rain cats and dogs and hammers and pitchforks and silver sugar spoons and hayricks and paper covered novels and picture frames and rag carpets and toothpicks and skating rinks and birds of Paradise and roof gardens and burdocks and French grammars, before Sunday school time. There!

  She didn’t go; she baked beans instead. “Beans are cheap, and we must have them at least once a week or we will be bankrupt. It will be real original to have beans baked on Sunday, and originality is my long suit.” Almost everything that could go wrong had. She fretted about setting a good example in her mother’s absence, which seemed almost constant now. But that night, after her sisters had fallen asleep, she turned to her diary again and made a remarkable entry: she gave her diary a name.

  I think I’ll call her Ole Mammy Hush-Chile, she’s so nice and cuddly and story-telly when you’re all full of troubles and worries and little vexations. It’s such a comfort to confide in her and let the cares roll off your mind. After this I’m going to talk right to her and not be content with a proxy.

  For Mammy was there whenever she needed her, as her mother was not. She was doing what she always did now; she took what she needed from books, she made up what she could use. And she was careful to admit no ambivalence; not a touch of anger or resentment surfaced—she reassured herself that her real mother was a treasure.

  I make two cups of tea in the little blue china teapot, and we sit opposite each other and drink it nice and hot while we watch each other’s faces in the fire-light of the crackling stove. It makes up for all the time she’s gone, Mammy Hush-Chile; I forget all about the things that went wrong and she forgets all about the doctors and the patients and the surgery and the sleepless nights.

  Now, for the first time in any of her diaries, she mentioned her poetry:

  I’ve written so many verses and keep on writing so many more, that I became afraid that if I didn’t write them into one big book I might forget some of them.… I love my verses so that it would be like taking my heart out if I should wake up some morning and find that all I could remember of one of my most loved—was the name. O, mammy, I mustn’t let it happen, you mustn’t let me, you dear old white-souled, black-faced cuddle-mammy.… I haven’t neglected it; there are fifteen poems in it already.

  If her mother had given her poetry when she was a child, now in the summer of 1908, when she was sixteen, she gave her mother the Poetical Works of Vincent Millay and dedicated it to her:

  To My Mother,

  Whose interest and understanding have

  been the life of many of these works

  and the inspiration of many more, I lovingly

  dedicate this little volume.

  E.V.M.

  July 10, 1908.

  During the two years that she kept the Poetical Works, she wrote out sixty-one poems in her clear slant hand in a brown copybook, with an alphabetical index at the back carefully noting the age at which she had written each poem. Forty of these poems were written before she turned sixteen; another ten would be added that year. She placed her gold-medal poem, “The Land of Romance,” first.

  In these poems she is serving her apprenticeship, and her themes are those of a Victorian, albeit New England, girlhood. Winter is king, raindrops sing, gardens drip with loss. There are moonbeams and fairies in abundance, and love is either lost, dying, or dead. There is a great deal of loneliness. But there is very little renunciation for its own sake, and there are few poems devoted to duty or to domestic accomplishment unless they are treated with rebellious humor. None is pious.

  If she has not yet broken clear of the nineteenth century—it was, after all, only 1908—she uses the first person with ease, her language is usually simple and direct, and her rhythms swing clear. She doesn’t yet have her own voice, but she is working to acquire it, and even a simple poem such as “Homing” begins to sound like her own.

  Homing bird and homing bee;

  Nest and hive in the apple tree;

  Sweet song, sweet honey,—but sweeter to me

  The homing.

  Nest where two crooked branches meet;

  Hive in the hollow trunk’s retreat;

  Sweet song, sweet honey,—but far more sweet

  The homing.

  You who drowse on weary wing,

  You who sleepily, sleepily sing;

  Tell me, sweeter is anything

  Than homing?

  There is only one sonnet, written at seventeen, “To My Mother.” But there are other poems written to her mother; she called this one “Song.”

  Dearest, when you go away

  My heart will go, too,

  Will be with you all the day,

  All the night with you.

  Where you are through lonely years,

  There my heart will be.

  I will guide you past all fears

  And bring you back to me.

  It is striking that it is she who protects her mother, who shares her loneliness, who guides her rather than being guided by her.

  What is most remarkable about the Poetical Works of Vincent Millay is that at s
ixteen she had a sense of vocation. Her title placed her squarely in the company of Burns, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell, each of whose Poetical Works lined her mother’s bookcases. It would be a mistake, however, not to notice that the Poetical Works of the wildly popular nineteenth-century poets—James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, Mrs. Felicia Hemans, and Jean Ingelow—let alone volumes of fairy tales and copies of songs her mother had written, as well as Scottish border ballads, Irish and old American ballads kept in her family for more than two generations and sung to her as a child, were just as prominent. She was grounded in two very different traditions; the nineteenth-century worthies were as familiar to her as popular ballads and songs.

  In her senior year, Vincent was made editor in chief of the school paper, The Megunticook. She had a role in every play put on that year. She gave her first piano recital. And she continued to work on a poem she’d begun that summer. It was her most ambitious and longest work, intended to be delivered at graduation, when she was sure to be made class poet. By Christmas the Millays had moved into a larger house in the center of town at 40 Chestnut Street that overlooked the bay. The girls even had a window looking out onto the water.

  In the early spring, Cora was on a case in Rockland. One of her letters home to Vincent was the first indication that something was wrong. She told her she just might be able to run up “for an hour’s stay some evening,” but what she really wanted was for Vincent to take thirty cents, “and get you some oranges. Now be sure to do it.” She continued, “When I get home I’ll see to things and I’ll take care of you till you are in school again bright as a button.”