Was it my luck that this extraordinary collection was in no university library? Can luck strike twice? Just as no one had Zelda Fitzgerald’s papers but her daughter, Scottie, who handed them to me in shopping bags, so no one had ever seen this collection. handed them to me in shopping bags, so no one had ever seen this collection. Except, of course, her sister. For who but a Norma Millay or a Lavinia Dickinson, the younger sister of Emily Dickinson, each of whom in her day was considered eccentric, neurotic, and difficult, if not downright ignorant, would have cared with such intensity to have cherished the past so carefully? And with such mixed motives?
In October 1934, Edna Millay read at Yale. A young graduate student, Richard Sewell, who forty years later would become the biographer of Emily Dickinson, never forgot the impression she made that night. Walking to the center of Woolsey Hall, wrapped in a long black velvet cloak, her bright hair shining, she “stood before us,” he remembered, “like a daffodil.”
gaze upon the naked body of my sister?”
There were only three things she said she’d destroyed. One was a letter returned to her by a no-longer-young man to whom Edna had written.
Norma said it was indiscreet. Edna described his physical beauty in detail and made what she wanted clear. He was homosexual. Norma said,
“Maybe
she didn’t care. Anyway, he turned her down. We can’t have that.” There was an ivory dildo, which Norma admitted was difficult to burn, but she’d managed. And there was a set of pornographic photographs, taken, she thought, about the same time as the nude photographs from Santa Fe in 1926 or 1927, when Millay was writing her libretto, The King’s Henchman, for the Metropolitan Opera. These were of Eugen and Edna, she said. Some were taken down at the pool, perhaps shot by Eugen using a timing device on his camera. Norma guessed that Arthur Davison Ficke had a hand in shooting them. “Vincent was already a famous poet, how could she have let these photographs of her be taken? Well, she did. Naughty Vincent Millay! I found them, and I destroyed them. For her own good! You can put that down!”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose very name her mother said was song, was shy and small and intense, almost prim. Her hair was her glory—it was the color of fire. Thick and curling, it fell to her waist. Her skin was as pale as milk. She was the firstborn, the eldest of three sisters who were as unalike and yet as close as the fingers on a hand. They had to be, for there was nothing and no one behind them but their mother. Their parents had separated in 1900 in Maine.
I remember a swamp… that made a short-cut to the railroad station when I was seven. It was down across that
swamp my father went, when my mother told him to go & not to come back.
(Or maybe she said he might come back if he would do better-but who ever does better?)
This book begins at home, where all family romances start. There were in the Millay family certain stories that rose out of the past with a power and thrust that was felt through three generations of women. These were tales of romance and hardship, but, even more crucially, of female infidelity and freedom won at high cost. They were as much of a shared legacy as their red hair. Bargains were struck between mother and daughter, and acts were committed with no knowledge of the consequences that would befall them.
What I had not counted on was that creature for whom there is no name, the American Eve, dead at fifty-eight.
CHAPTER 1
camden, with its ring of mountains rising behind the white clapboard houses facing Penobscot Bay, made the most of its view. Nowhere else on the coast of Maine was there such dramatic natural beauty. The houses were like weathered faces turned to watch the sea. The upland meadows of ox-eyed daisies, timothy, and sweet fern, the dark green woods of balsam and fir swept to the gentle summit of Mount Megunticook, and the rock face of Mount Battie rose from the edge of the sea as if to hold it. But it was a far less generous time than the early days of shipbuilding, upon which the town’s wealth had been founded. Now even the great woodsheds along the wharves were mostly abandoned, permanent reminders of the long death of shipbuilding. The wool mills looming behind the town offered scant wages and long hours. Later in her life Edna St. Vincent Millay would say she was
“a girl who had lived all her life at the very tide-line of the sea,” but in the fall of 1904, she moved with her family into 100 Washington Street on the far edge of town, in a section called Millville because it was near the mills.
It was the smallest house in the poorest part of town, but it was one their mother could afford when she brought her girls to Camden after her divorce.
Their brown frame house was set in a large field, and just beyond it flowed the Megunticook River, into which the mills sometimes spilled their dyes. The house, on low ground, could be reached only by walking down a long, rickety wooden sidewalk from the street. When the Megunticook River overflowed and the weather turned cold with no heat in the house, the kitchen floor flooded and froze and the girls gleefully ice-skated across it.
The house was close enough to their mother’s aunt Clara Buzzell, a large, easygoing person who ran a boardinghouse for the mill hands, that she could keep an eye on the girls while their mother worked. Cora wrote to her daughters often; the three little sisters felt her presence even when she was absent, which was almost all the time.
pretending to be brides, and little Kathleen would call out, ‘Goodnight, Cherest!’ in the direction we thought our mother would be.”
Not everyone in Camden agreed with the way the Millays lived. When their neighbor Lena Dunbar came to visit, she was dismayed: “For instance, they had shades at their window and nothing else. I don’t think they cared much. Well, once they stenciled apple blossoms, painted that pattern down the sides of the window. Or, for instance, they had a couple of plum trees in
their backyard and they never waited for the plums to ripen, but would pick them green, put them in vinegar, and call them ‘mock olives.’ Well, no one else did that sort of thing in Camden, don’t you see?”
Emma Harrington, who taught eighth and ninth grades at the Elm Street grammar school, where Vincent enrolled that fall, never forgot her. “She was small and frail for a twelve-year-old… Her mane of red hair and enormous gray-green eyes added to the impression of frailty, and her stubborn mouth and chin made her seem austere, almost to the point of grimness.” She kept her after school after reading her first composition to find out if someone had helped her with it. Tactfully, she asked if her mother had seen her excellent work. Vincent interrupted her: “Excuse me, Miss Harrington, ….. but I can tell that you think I didn’t write that composition. Well, I did! But the only way I can prove it will be to write the next one you assign right here, in front of you. And I promise it will be as good as this one, and maybe better.”
It was her determination to excel that drew attention. That first winter, she clashed with the principal of the school. He was a good teacher but quick-tempered. Vincent questioned him whenever something he said puzzled her, and she was often puzzled. He felt she was challenging his authority and began to mangle her first name. He called her Violet, Veronica, Vivienne, Valerie, any name beginning with a V but her own, which he considered outlandish. Unshaken, Vincent would respond, “Yes, Mr. Wilbur. But my name is Vincent.” One day he erupted during an exchange and shouted that she’d run the school long enough. He grabbed a book from his desk and threw it at her. She picked the book up carefully, took it to his desk, and walked out of the classroom.
That afternoon Mrs. Millay marched to the school and demanded an explanation. Trying to conclude their heated interview, Wilbur pushed her away from his door sharply enough that she nearly fell down the stairs.
Dusting herself off, Mrs. Millay strode into the office of the superintendent of schools, who quickly agreed with her that Vincent should not return to the Elm Street School. He transferred her to Camden High School, midway in the first term.
While the title and length of the poem were assigned by the editor for its March 1907 competition, Millay made it the story of a child’s quest to find romance. The child (who always speaks as “I” and is never identified as either a boy or a girl) first asks a man to show the way. The man, described as thin, trembling, and uncertain, says he does not know the way, then that he can’t remember it. Next the child turns to a woman, who does not respond at first but continues to work at her spinning wheel, until impatiently:
“Oh! Why do you seek for Romance? And why do you trouble me?
“Little care I for your fancies. They will bring you no good,” she said,
“Take the wheel that stands in the corner, and get you to work, instead.”
What is most interesting about the poem now is the difference between the man’s inability to give any direction or help at all and the woman’s fiercely practical advice: get to work.
On the same page as the poem, the editor of the League cautioned young writers, “Very sad, very tragic, very romantic and very abstruse work cannot often be used, no matter how good it may be from the literary point of view, and while the League editor certainly does not advocate the sacrifice of artistic impulse to market suitability, he does advocate … the study of the market’s needs.” It is hard to know how seriously E. Vincent Millay took any of this, but she did correctly judge what was and was not suitable to the needs of St. Nicholas, for by the time she was eighteen and too old to enter their competitions anymore, she had won every prize they gave.
hexafu 