Savage Beauty (52 page)

“But ours was such a distinguished family. It was not only that our grandfather was the editor of the largest, most prestigious paper in Amsterdam, but he wrote poems, and whole issues of the paper would be mocked up and devoted to an anniversary, to a family celebration, a birthday or a marriage, a masque, a theatrical that we had ourselves written the songs for, the music, the poetry, everything. It was their great gift; they appreciated whatever in life, or art or poetry, had beauty and grace.

“Edna was, you see, walking into another world, and she was what?—bewildered, I felt. She hadn’t a clue. She was the great outstanding person in her own family. But among us she was just one, and one of many.”

Eugen and Edna were home in time for Christmas, and they would never visit Holland again.

CHAPTER 21

T
hat February, after attending a concert of Deems Taylor’s “Portrait of a Lady,” Millay wrote a letter to the anonymous music editor of the New
York
World
, who had criticized it roundly. He’d said the audience had been so enthusiastic, it must have been packed with the composer’s relatives, which Edna hotly denied: “Sir, I was a member of that audience. I heard with close attention and deep pleasure an unusually good program unusually well performed.” Last night’s audience, she wrote, far from being composed of Mr. Taylor’s relatives, “was made up of discerning and honestly delighted strangers.” The joke was that Taylor
was
the music editor, a job he quit at the end of the season in order to compose.

Deems Taylor and Mary Kennedy had first met Edna in Paris, when they had been on their honeymoon in the early summer of 1922, just before she had fled to Shillingstone.

When the Metropolitan Opera Company commissioned Deems to write an American opera, Mary suggested that Edna Millay write the libretto. “
I thought she was extraordinary. She had something to say that I wanted to hear. And I knew that from her first poems.” However, there was a snag: “She had written just this one act of
The Casket of Glass
—which turned about the Snow White fairy tale of the beautiful girl who when she takes an apple which is poisoned and it lodges in her throat—well, it was one of the classic versions of Snow White. And it could not be done. There was one entire scene where the heroine had to sing with her face covered with a cloth! And that was impossible for a singer.”

So Edna abandoned it. And then all three waited.

In May 1925, Millay was invited to read at Bowdoin College for the college’s centenary of the class of 1825, which had included Longfellow and Hawthorne. The other speakers were Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Professor Irving Babbitt of Harvard. But it was Millay who garnered the attention of the press. The reporter for
The Christian Science Monitor
began by describing how she looked, the lights of the stage playing on her “
cropped hair as Miss Millay trailed up two steps to the platform, smiling like a little girl anxious to please neighbors.”

She made no attempt to explain her poems, to point to them as good examples of what one, if one chose the imagists—the visual imagists—would do in order to gain fame as a poet. Nothing about how she became a poet.

But the students stamped their feet in approval when she’d finished. Then the reporter described what she’d worn:

a robe of gold and bronze and green and her voice was a bronze bell as she read. Back and forth she moved, slender, by turn gay and grave, pompous and flippant. Her robe, because it was traced with gold threads woven into its pattern, whispered and chimed faintly against the floor. If Miss Millay had not been a poet she could easily have been an actress.… And Miss Millay ended her evening, leaving the platform not as a great poet but as a girl, quite young, of Maine who had done her best.

It was so successful a performance that it was hard to tell whether the students or the reporter had been more “fascinated by the swift moving bronze-gold figure, so slender, so competent, at times exquisitely unreal.” In the morning this vision was gone, “and in its place a straight boyish person in lilac tweed and a tricorn.… striding fast like a boy, not at all formidable or unreal.” In other words, being a hometown girl, anxious to please, was not the same as being a great poet—and being like a boy was at least being real. This is peculiar stuff. But it lay at the heart of her increasing fame. And it continued.

What the Bowdoin students really wanted, wrote John Hurd, Jr., in the
Boston Sunday Globe
, was a good look at the poet

as a married woman with a residence in New York City. It was a remarkable thing the way their faces lighted with joy. And no wonder, she was exquisitely beautiful to look at. She is 33 years old. You would not have said she was 21. She wore a loose flowing gown of gold and bronze without a semblance of a girdle. Her sleeves, bound at the wrist no larger than a ring, flared above the elbow. But what is the use of trying to describe the way her gown fell to the top of her gold slippers and her trick of flicking her train in back of her?

In fact, two of the young men were so smitten they wangled the job of serving her breakfast. However, they were “too fussed” to make the most of the situation. They noticed that Mr. Boissevain wore striped pajamas, “but neither of the boys dared to look at Miss Millay and so could give no description.”

The chance to compare Frost’s work with hers—it would be the only time they shared a platform—was not of the slightest interest to the press. There were only anecdotes pointing up the differences in their style. Robert Frost was represented as curmudgeonly and surly; Millay was girlish, elfin, and seductive. The first evening, both were the guests of President and Mrs. Sills of Bowdoin, who thought it would be pleasant to have the governor of the state meet Frost for dinner. “But Mr. Frost refused to be lionized. He asked to be excused on the ground that he never would attend a dinner on the evening he was going to speak.”

The following morning at ten, Frost, scheduled to be interviewed, had overslept. When the reporter returned at eleven, he came down sleepily.
“His complexion had none of the New England ruddiness, and actually had a yellowish tint. Mr. Frost was not feeling well and said so.” Frost then launched into a description of his past:

“I earned only $15 a week until I was 35 years old.… And I had a wife and children to feed.”

You wonder what they ate.

“O, we scratched along somehow,” he replied. “Part of the time I didn’t make $15 a week. It is difficult to determine just what you get on a farm.”

When the reporter told him that it was “heroic” to have survived such a beginning, Frost would have none of it: “With me it was … an animal passion. That’s just what it was, an animal instinct—more than instinct—a passion to write poetry.”

His victory—and here he winked at the reporter—was that the University of Michigan, “a State institution in the Middle West,” had just offered him a lifetime appointment with

absolutely no demands upon his time except that he live near the college. He does not have to teach any classes, although he may conduct what they call a seminar the last few months of next year, and his full professor’s salary goes on just the same.

Millay had not overslept, for the next morning the reporter quoted her.

“I am not writing poems any more,” she said. “I have become terribly interested in the drama and I want to write plays. Yes, I am writing one now, a four-act play. I have finished the first act. Then I want to write a sonnet sequence of about 150 sonnets based on psychological experiences in my life.

“No, I cannot write in New York. It is awfully exciting there and I find lots of things to write about and I accumulate many ideas, but I have to go away where it is quiet.

“We have bought a farm, which we are not going to farm, in the Berkshire Hills, and I hope to work on my plays there.”

Next to Frost’s remarks about his lack of a living income, this must have seemed like girlish flummery. What is happening here is a refashioning of herself after her marriage. She would better be able to write in the country. She would dress well. She would no longer cuss like a trooper. She was redefining herself publicly.

But she was an amateur compared to Frost’s performing self. Frost called it “barding around,” and he would supplement his income for fifty
years by giving such readings, at which he was eventually, if not this time at Bowdoin, canny and masterful. He performed his poetry for $50 at first, but by 1950 he was finally getting $1,000 for each appearance. He’d given forty readings in 1922 alone—grueling schedules of trains and discomfort and sleepless nights in strange hotel beds. Just the year before this reading, he’d been asked who might be willing to read at Amherst, where he was then teaching. He recommended Millay without reservation. According to his most recent biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, he was wry about Millay, “
whose notorious sexual life and highly charged verses,” he said, “had won her a large audience. Miss Millay is a great audience killer.… She loses nothing of course by her reputation for dainty promiscuity.… She is already a love-myth. I don’t have to tell you how much I admire her less flippant verse.”

On May 24, 1925, Eugen, who had already taken over a good deal of Vincent’s correspondence (sometimes even to her mother, whom he called “Mother Millay,” or “M.M.” for short), had very good news indeed: Edna was to be given an honorary doctor of letters degree by Tufts College in Boston. “So,” he wrote Cora, “after the 15th of June, you will have to address your letters to your daughter: Edna St. Vincent Millay, A.B. Litt.D.”

On May 21, 1925, Edna St. Vincent Millay was deeded a property of 435 acres, “two roods and twenty-five rods of land more or less,” for a consideration of $9,000 in the town of Austerlitz, in Columbia County in New York State. They’d found an abandoned farm through an advertisement in
The New York Times
. By July she named it Steepletop, after a common wildflower that grew everywhere on the hills and meadows around the house. A tall single-stemmed plant with a cluster of pale pink flowers at the top that forms a plume, it’s more often known as hardhack. The place had been a dairy farm.

“
Here we are, in one of the loveliest places in the world,” Edna wrote her mother. The house was not, however, quite in the “really splendid condition” they said it was. In fact, by June 22 she was telling her mother that they were “working like Trojans, dogs, slaves.” Still, they were “crazy about it.” But their expenses mounted: “The furnace & bathroom alone come to a thousand dollars. It’s terrible. But it’s going to be a sweet place when it’s finished—and it’s ours, all ours, about seven hundred acres of land & a lovely house, & no rent to pay, only a nice gentlemanly mortgage to keep shaving a slice off.”

Then she fell into the sort of comical baby talk that always signaled something was wrong: “We’re so excited about it we are nearly daft in the
bean—kidney bean, lima bean, string-bean, butter-bean—you dow whad I bean—ha! ha! ha!”

One month later they were still at it. Gene’s nephew Freddie, his brother Robert’s son, was a landscape gardener; he’d given them help and fresh courage because they were just about spent in the exhausting labor of the renovation.

You see, we have had living with us for three weeks now six masons, four plumbers, two carpenters, two ineffectual and transient servants, and fifteen insubordinate and mischievous berry-picking children. They don’t spend the night here, but they might as well, for they appear in the morning before we are dressed, and tramp through the bedrooms without knocking, bearing ladders and bricks and trowels and buckets of cement.

There wasn’t “a spot within a quarter of a mile where I can stand and brush my teeth except in full sight of some of them.”

She wanted to show her mother everything, not just write to her. But she’d even had to stop writing because “I have a headache all the time lately and spots before my eyes, and, as mother used to say, I don’t feel so darned well myself. I have no idea what the trouble is.… I imagine I got too tired just at first. I worked frightfully hard.”

She tried to make the renovation sound like a romp, but the constant disorder and the hard work were taking their toll:

I am going to Pittsfield … to have my eyes examined. I went to a general practitioner in Great Barrington, a very good man, I think, who assures me there’s nothing the matter with my heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, lights, etc., so I imagine it must be my eyes. I’ve had a headache for two months now without an hour’s respite, and dark spots before my eyes all the time, so if it isn’t something else, it damn well must be my eyes, for it’s damn well something.

Then she told her mother that if she needed more money than she was enclosing, “I can always go out and gather a few dollars for you; but it’s been a very wet spring here, and it will be late in October before the dollars are really ripe enough to drop from the bough.”

2

In June 1925, just as Arthur Ficke was leaving for Harvard to read the Phi Beta Kappa poem at commencement, he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He went anyway, but immediately afterward the Fickes left for Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, the location of a famous sanitarium
for tuberculosis. Eugen, who maintained the correspondence, wrote to them from Austerlitz in the fall:

Darling children,

—I’m writing in Vincent’s bed room. She is feeling rotten. But the fire is blazing away in the fireplace and the hot water spouts out of the spigot in the bathroom, and things are getting to look like something.…

But we are homesick for you two. The couch is in front of the huge big fireplace in the living room, but we want to have you sit on it, and we want to discuss many things with you. We haven’t had a discussion with you for so long that I’m afraid poor Arthur will have so many wrong ideas about God and Coolidge and cheese and automobiles and books, Poor Artie. Come quickly to Vince and Ugin and we will tell you what’s what in this world and the next.… We are planning to fetch the Mercer next week and will come over to see you and rest and drink gin and talk too much and smoke too much. That is provided we can gather enough money to get the Mercer out of hock.