Savage Beauty (23 page)

2

“The
Miscellany
is offering four prizes of fifteen dollars each for the best poem, best story, best essay, & best play,” Vincent wrote home on her return to Vassar in January. She was going to send them “Barbara-on-the-Beach,” a short story she’d written at Barnard,

&, in order to be almost sure of the prize, if you don’t think I oughtn’t,—
Interim
. It might help me to get a scholarship next year.… & anyway it would undoubtedly smooth things out for me here. On the days when I didn’t have my lessons people would think,—instructors especially—“O, well, she’s been writing a poem.”

Vincent Millay was a canny young woman, for that was exactly what was said about her throughout her college career.

A month and a half later, on February 23, she wrote her mother again about “Interim.” This time she’d made up her mind: “It would make a bigger hit in a college full of women than anywhere else in the world and might do a lot for me, help to get a scholarship for next year, you know.”

She seemed to need to justify her decision both to her mother and to herself—“If you don’t want me to do it, mother …”—she was angling for her approval. And although the fifteen dollars was not much, it was better than nothing, “& I want to be sure of getting the prize.… After all, I shall write other poems, better than that, or I’m not much good.”

She became so absorbed in college life that her family began to feel neglected. When her mother didn’t hear from her for weeks and wanted to know why, Vincent finally wrote:

Don’t worry about your bad, bad run-away child.… All that keeps me from writing long, long letters about Vassar is that I’m getting so crazy about Vassar & so wrapped up in Vassar doings, that I don’t have so much time as I used to have when I just liked it well enough.… But oh, I love my college,
my
college, my
college!
Last night by the light of the moon we ran into a band of Seniors & a few others whom we knew out in the athletic circles on the bleachers, strumming the mandolin & singing, & we got boosted up along o’ the rest & sang, too,—& the moon shined bright as day & the warm wind blowed, & oh, didn’t we love our college!—I thought—Lord love you—“If Mother could only see me now!”

Now, lemme go, I gotta study,—or they won’t let me stay.

Miss Dow was keeping her on a fairly short shoestring, but the relationship continued to be warm, and Vincent began to call her Aunt Calline, as Lydia Babbott did. Just before exams, Miss Dow had sent her another box of clothes.

If she’s trying to spoil me utterly, to turn my mind entirely from academic pursuits, & make an absolute butterfly of me,—why, she has struck the way to do it.… and so it is perhaps a blessing that this last exquisite yellow chiffon & heavy silk embroidery thing is hopelessly large & will have to be all made over.

.…

O, girls, I have saved the best for last! It is what I needed more than anything else in the world, perhaps,—an afternoon dress. Sweller than anything you ever saw, simply regal in every scrap of material, unquestionably this season’s.… O,
girls!

It is made of very soft taupe satin (must be just about the shade of that suit I had, violetish-gray) the skirt is Frenchily long, tho perfectly manageable—made with very soft panniers at the side which end in a row of buttons.… Its very clingy. I’ve been draping myself around without any petticoat & with one bronze shoe on to get the effect.

She inked in the long sleeves in a sketch, with their “purple plushy velvet” bands. “With my hair at one end & my bronze shoes at the other it is rather nice.” But the very best she saved for last: Wanamaker’s department store sent four women to McGlynn’s parlor to model its spring styles, “& I have paid $10.50 for a tan linen, tailory, cutey,
so
becoming, with a white muslin collar, spring dress, that I really need, to wear to college. Yes, I know. And I’m going to, from now on.” She was a girl who wanted to be beautiful, and well liked and powerful in her class. And she set out to be just that.

At the Kennerleys’ in Mamaroneck that spring, Arnold Genthe took a photograph of her standing among the blossoms of a magnolia tree in full bloom. Wearing that linen dress, she just touched the branches of the tree, her glance away from the camera and slightly downcast, her long curling hair caught in a knot at the nape of her neck. She looked winsome and young and fragile, as if at any minute she might become a wood nymph.

Back at Vassar she told her mother she had remarkable news:

This I must tell you. Don’t get any false hopes, but she never speaks idly, does Aunt Calline. Lately Aunt Calline has shown interest several times in Kathleen. One day at lunch someone was asking me if I had a sister still in school. Then I bragged about Wump for all I was worth, exclusively
to
the person who had asked me, but
at
(Heaven forgive me) Aunt Calline.…—I had to be sort of calm & yet very earnest & sensible, & not stupid, & yet not too grateful. It was terribly hard. But Aunt Calline doesn’t forget. Maybe nothing will happen at once but Wump will be only eighteen, & I was twenty-one when mine came. She ought to go to college if any girl ever ought. I told Aunt Calline that
whatever
she did she excelled in,—that as far as little things like brains, & will-power, & perseverance, & endurance, & thirst for knowledge are concerned, Wump’s dust is too far in front of me even to get in my eyes.

Don’t get too excited, dears, but you know what she’s doing for me. And she’s rather fond of me. And if there’s one thing about me she
does
like, it’s the way I like my family.

It was only this once that Cora indicated how beyond mere indebtedness to Miss Dow she felt herself to be. “
I shall be on my knees crawling around after Miss Dow, yet.”

But the news in the last letter of Vincent’s freshman year was the best. On May 21, 1914, she was notified that “Interim” had won the Miscellany Prize Contest for best poem. She sent the prize money right home.

Please, please don’t feel bad that I’ve let it go for so little. I shall do more, much better, or it won’t matter. And it will mean a great deal to me here, both with the faculty & the girls. Please don’t
mind
, dear.

That she had to apologize at all to her mother shows how highly they both regarded her talent. And her future.

3

Latin prose was not going to be a snap. When Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, who was in charge of helping Millay prepare over the summer for her exams, suggested she needed a Latin tutor if she was to pass them in the fall, Millay asked if she herself would tutor her. Surprised but flattered, she agreed. Haight was forty-one, an associate professor of Latin with a passion for the classics, who was capable of being sentimental over her favorites. Millay soon became one of them.

Helen Sandison, a brilliant young instructor in the English department at the time Millay was there (and later the beloved teacher of Mary McCarthy), remembered Miss Haight as “an enthusiast”: “She was tall and spare and homely with a long face. She didn’t do her hair well or dress well; she was not impressive looking. Her whole manner of dress just lacked shape.”

Sandison felt that Vincent’s association with the Latin department had an effect at Vassar: “
Vincent just stood for the classics, you see. There was no question at all about it. They were important to her.

“And Vincent seemed devoted to Hazel. It was odd, because you could see through her in some ways. But I never got any indication that Vincent looked at her with critical judgment.”

The opening sentence of Haight’s memoir
Vincent at Vassar
is “
Once I taught a genius and she became my friend.” She explained more precisely than anyone else what Vincent faced in her course work:

The college then set exacting conditions for the B.A. degree: required year courses in English, one Classical Language, one modern (French or German), History, Mathematics, Physics or Chemistry, half a year of Philosophy, and students had to take 14 or 15 hours of class work for three years, 12 to 15 in the last year. Vincent fulfilled all these conditions and then built her course around her own interest. English studies were its foundation, and they included a wide range and great teachers: Old English and Chaucer with Christabel Fiske, Nineteenth Century Poetry, and Later Victorian Poetry, an advanced writing course with Katharine Taylor, English Drama with Henry Noble MacCracken, The Techniques of the Drama with Gertrude Buck, who started the Vassar Theater. Then she enriched her knowledge of literature by many courses in foreign languages: both Greek and Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

She also took courses in introductory psychology, economics, and art, in all of which she got C’s. She got her only D in social psychology. But she did superbly in all languages except Greek, in which she did not so much do badly as barely do it at all.

On her return to Poughkeepsie in the fall, Vincent stopped in the city to see Mitchell Kennerley, who took her to the Plaza for breakfast and afterward for a smoke in his private office. Vincent had refused a cigarette at the hotel “because someone might be there ‘who knows I do not smoke.’ ” Kennerley thought that very funny indeed. Then he called up Arnold Genthe, the photographer who had taken the stunning photos of her the spring before in Mamaroneck, whose studio was at Fifth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. His single shot of her standing among the magnolia blossoms would become the blaze that marked an era in American poetry as her own. She found his studio glorious, with tapestries, colored divans, mysterious cabinets, “
& photographs, photographs everywhere of beautiful women & famous people, Paderewski, & David Belasco, & Billie Burke.… To think that he wanted to take
me!
”

But her modesty had its limits. “Besides having beautiful hair, an extraordinary good forehead in spite of the freckles, an impudent, aggressive, & critical nose, and a mysterious mouth,” she wrote, “I have, artistically, & even technically, an unusually beautiful throat.” Genthe draped her in a heavy deep-blue cloak to reveal it “& made me lean forward & lift
back my head,—and photographed my throat!” Afterward they went out and had dinner together, because Genthe told her in his deep German accent, “ ‘to eat … is the best little thing we do.’ ”

Being on campus was more expensive than McGlynn’s. Vincent’s twenty-dollar-a-month allowance from Miss Dow went like water, but it made “such a difference in knowing people, and North is
full
of the best people in our class … and some awfully nice Juniors.” One of those Juniors was Elaine Ralli. From her first mention of Elaine, her diary entries are full of ambiguity. But the crucial note will be her use of the masculine pronoun—Elaine has become a boy.

Elaine is jealous when Bad Vincent loves anybody but hisself. He is almost even jealous when Bad Vincent loves
him
, because that is his nature.

She doesn’t explain who the jealous Elaine is until her next letter home, on November 4, 1914.

She’s Elaine Ralli, a Junior, another hockey hero, cheer-leader, rides horseback a lot, very boyish, & makes a lot of noise, not tall, but all muscle.

The two girls could not have been less alike. Still, Vincent told Norma,

She’s just naturally taken me, for better or for worse, and Lord knows why. And the way she treats me is killing. I’ll be talking, in the middle of a crowd of people, and if Elaine wants me for anything, the first thing I know she has come and got me, just plain lugged me off to another part of the field. Everybody recognizes the situation, and accepts it unquestioningly, and there’s no fuss about it. They just go on talking. And I say, “Hello, Elaine.”

What situation did everyone recognize and accept? “
Vincent was very definitely a person to whom others formed crushes, and attachments,” Virginia Kirkus, one of Elaine’s classmates, explained.

And these were both obvious and intense. I was not among those girls, but there were a great many of them.… They simply trailed after her. And I do think she enjoyed it largely.… She was a natural subject. She was different from others, from the rest of us. She had an elusive, physical charm which we didn’t associate with our own sex in those days. I think I was naïve. I was matter-of-fact. Vincent was not matter-of-fact about anything.

But it was not that
she
formed the attachments. She was reserved, not aloof exactly, but deeply reserved. Elaine Ralli was almost the opposite of Vincent. She was very aggressive in her human relations.

In a snapshot taken of them on the lawn in front of Main, Elaine is swirling Vincent, holding her aloft in her arms, their eyes locked in hilarious laughter. Vincent’s hands are clasped tight around her neck, holding on for dear life.

Elaine Ralli was a year ahead of Vincent at Vassar but three years younger, nineteen to her twenty-two. Her family was Greek, and their fortune had something to do with the East India Tea Company. They lived in a grand apartment on the fashionable Upper West Side of Manhattan. She’d had a luxurious childhood with European travel and French governesses. “
She had this confidence or early assurance,” a friend of hers remembered, “that comes from having money early. She was freer. She was made free by it. She hadn’t had to buckle under, because she’d had this absolutely glorious childhood.” She was not pretty—she was short with a broad, flat face—but her skin was a pure olive, and her hair, which she wore in a braid around her head, was thick and glossy and black. Elaine was as direct as her gaze. They were good enough friends that Vincent spent Thanksgiving with the Rallis in Manhattan and stopped there again during the Christmas holidays before she went home.