Savage Beauty (25 page)

Then she asked that they not hate her for all of this. She wanted only that Elaine should love them as she did, and that required careful staging.

In a snapshot taken that summer, Elaine is sitting at the helm of her little knockabout sloop,
Watch Your Step
, hunched and absorbed, her left hand steady on the tiller. They’re sailing directly into the sun. Norma looks away from the camera, while Vincent gazes directly into it, smiling wanly. Elaine’s gaze is absorbed and level; her right arm is draped nonchalantly over Vincent’s shoulder, her hand just grazing her breast. Vincent tilts her head slightly, leaning into the crook of Elaine’s arm. “She’s one of the strongest girls I ever saw,” Kathleen said of Elaine, “can pick Vincent right off the floor & carry her around and can make her muscles wiggle.” She and Vincent, Kathleen entered in her “Good Times Book,” “had packs of sport—She’s dear.”

But whether or not she was dear, she was very much in love with Vincent Millay. And Vincent knew it. When Elaine left at the end of August, it was with the promise that Vincent would visit her summerhouse in Bellport, Long Island, within the week. “
It won’t be long now until I see you,” Vincent wrote to her just after she left, and then she broke into the French they used when their messages were more intimate:

Mon ami, je ne t’oublie pas. Il ne faut pas avoir peur. Tu es encore mon enfant. Tu le sais bien. Et je t’aime. Tu le sais bien.
^*

—Vincent

In any relationship between two women there is never just one child to be loved. There are two, and their roles are shifting.

Before Elaine left, Vincent turned to Arthur Hooley. He had written to her the previous fall, after he’d published both “The Shroud” and “Sorrow.” It had been a queer letter in which he told her that although he wanted to see her, he didn’t know when. “It is merely a matter of my mental condition,—which is rather rotten.” Nearly everyone he’d left in England was now “on the firing line. And I am not. It’s a funny world.” His was almost the only mention of what would be called “The Great War” to surface in her correspondence during her years at Vassar.

In the spring of 1915, Hooley had published another one of her poems, “Indifference,” so they were in contact. While his letters to her were consistent from the beginning—he pined for his return to England, for the Derby, even for her—her own letters to him did not begin in earnest until the summer. Certainly she was never unaware that he edited one of the finest literary publications in America, but while she played him just as
much as he played her, that summer her equilibrium was disturbed, and she let him know. Not
why;
that she cloaked.

My Dear,—

I want to write to you. I have nothing to say,—except a thousand things which I may or may not have said when this letter is done. But I am sick of never speaking to you any more. Once I knew you, and loved to be with you, and I would love to be with you tonight. I shall live quite comfortably to the end of my life—after tonight—without you, without ever seeing you again; I shall marry one of the three men that I love, and have a wonderful time; but tonight I would rather write to you. Tonight, of these three men that I love, one would bore me, and one would frighten me;—and the other one is you. The last time I saw you, when I was a little girl, I told you quite simply that I loved you. And you tried to hush me. Do you remember? Why did you do that?—Didn’t you want me to love you? Don’t you now? Would it please you or grieve you or not interest you at all.…

Arthur, don’t say to me, “Child, child,” … I am not a child in love with you, to be patted and sent away, or to be scolded and shaken. I am an almost reasonable human being, who has not spoken to anyone for a long time.… People fall in love with me, and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me and—and all that sort of thing. But no one speaks to me. I sometimes think that no one can. Can you?

Edna

But the letter was a ruse. There weren’t three men she loved; there was only one girl in love with her, in Camden, Maine. The striking note here is that she reaches out to him, summoning, needing his response. That is just what she’d done with Ferdinand Earle.

CHAPTER 11

Like all truly intellectual women, these were in spirit romantic desperadoes. They despised organizational heretics of the stamp of Luther and Calvin, but the great atheists and sinners were the heroes of the costume picture they taught as a subject called history. Marlowe, Baudelaire—above all, Byron—glowed like terrible stars above their literature courses.

—Mary McCarthy, “The Blackguard,” from
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

T
he Pageant of Athena was held outside on October 11, 1915, in a great open-air theater built by the trustees especially for the performance celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Vassar. Vincent played Marie de France, the twelfth-century Breton poet and the first woman to write poetry in France. The
Poughkeepsie Eagle
called it a “Wonderful Spectacle” and concentrated on Millay’s performance:

Into a scene of courtly beauty, where stately ladies and gallant cavaliers are dancing the minuet, came a dainty little figure, slight and dainty even in a dress of white satin with a train so big that two pages were needed to carry it.… Her grace was as great as her learning. So noble ladies and great lords listened … as the girl from France told her stories of love and hate and fighting.

It was a triumphant beginning to her junior year. She sent home lots of snapshots, and when she wrote on October 27, she told her family “how sweet Aunt Calline has been to me, loving me more than ever, & how I met Inez Milholland, the great suffragist.” Then her letter broke off abruptly, and she did not pick it up again, or at least mail it, until November 1, 1915.

By this time she’d received a stern, daunting letter from Miss Dow, enclosing her allowance with advice. Millay was working on a draft of a poem called “The Suicide,” which Miss Dow didn’t like one bit. She linked her own—and her friends’—continued support of Millay to “high ideals not only of womanhood but of what woman produces.” She was not referring simply to the poem.

Of course you are mistress of yr. own productions and as always I do not want to … make unreasonable demands, but tho’ I am not a literary woman there are some ways in which I might be of help thro’ various friendly avenues. It seems important to me that the next year or two you should guide yr. self & yr. products pretty carefully if the future brings what I believe it should. More of my friends have seen you now and their influence is to be had—if—your trend is in the right direction.

She made herself even clearer: “It will be easier for me to finance the next two years with their sympathetic support.… their influence can radiate pretty far into the future, if it is once held.”

She then suggested that Millay was unaware “of your dangers both from physical & temperamental conditions.” She did not mean by this that she should guard herself against illness: “Absorbing attentions from individual students are a hindrance in spite of the pleasant things they bring. Those very things are not the best for yr. nature.”

Millay had missed meeting a distinguished friend of Miss Dow’s who’d come to speak during the pageant. “I was impressed by your anxiety lest you disappoint some girl who seemed to have a claim on you for the evening.” She had heard about Elaine Ralli.

Because of yr. gifts, Vincent, life will present some complicated problems for you—I believe you have both courage & strength & yet I see such pitfalls.… I want you always clean, sweet & pure & ready to return your talent to the world enriched by an idealism which means ennobling the lives of others. I want you different from the usual type of poet who claims a freedom bordering on licence, & who thinks she can touch pitch without being soiled. How much the world with its sordidness & selfishness and now mourning needs the word that brightens, that strengthens, that illumines a path to the great fundamentals.

While she did not define those great fundamentals, it was clear that neither “The Suicide” nor Elaine Ralli was among them. “This may sound like a sermon,” she continued, “but it is not so intended; it only means love and interest in a great gift and its setting.”

Millay didn’t change a word of her poem, but she was shaken. And if she wouldn’t budge about her work, she did alter her friendship with Elaine. When she picked up the letter home she’d begun on October 27, she wrote:

You know neither you-all nor Aunt Calline nor any of my older friends were very pleased to have me with Elaine all the time, so I decided I would see if it was too late for me to make new friends or renew old ones. And I haven’t really had to do a thing, because all at once people began to come to see me & now people don’t say any more that I’m with Elaine all the time, & better still its so nicely come about that nobody says either that Elaine & I have had a row,—because people see me still with her, too.

Then she told them exactly the way it happened.

One day I was going over to pageant rehearsal & as I came out of Main I met Fran Garver going in. “Come on back,” she said, “& get some fudge. I’ve made some in the candy-kitchen, & I give it to the people I love.” So then I said, “Oh, do you love me?”—And Fran said, “Yes; I always have.”—Now that wasn’t wildly exciting, because Fran loves a great many people. But then, so do I,—and what I was after was particular friends, & I have always liked Fran a lot anyway—she has perfectly beautiful eyes—so
that
was nice. Fran’s roommate went to New York the next week-end to march in the Suffrage Parade, & I spent Saturday night with Fran,—but everybody knew I had just come back from Mohonk, where I had spent Friday night & Saturday at the hotel on the lake, with
Elaine
.

Her aim seemed not so much to lose Elaine’s friendship as to loosen its grip. The problem was that these young women were apt to fall in love with her. “Beloved!” Fran Garver’s letter to her that winter term began, “if I could only see you for a second I’m sure this chronic ache would go away.

I think no feeling, ever, has come so strongly over me as the all-gone choking sensation I have when I’m in your room,—when you’re gone. The only time I ever felt anything like that was when my mother, whose breath I had been watching for half an hour, smiled at me happily & closed her eyes. I knew she was dead.… Vincent dear, it was because you had the same beautiful expression in your eyes as my dying mother did, that I couldn’t bear to have you look at me the night you were so tired. I didn’t write to you Thurs night because I knew I’d make love to you.… Everything that was danced or sung or played had an undercurrent of you. You haunt me beloved—beloved Vincent. I love you—.… If you don’t marry when we’re out of V.C. I shall earn a million and you shall write & we’ll divide the money & when it pleases you you’ll visit me and do exactly as you wish—

Elaine was struggling with her own feelings about Millay. In an undated and unsigned, but initialed, letter she began:

You will excuse the paper I know—You see I must find some common way to begin altho’ why I cannot say for certainly you are the most uncommon of people.… How I want to come back to you—yes I know I have just left—but the longing in me never leaves and this is a night that seems for you and me. Do not worry—we are friends but I am still in love—that is a characteristic of you [she then slipped into French] et je suis encore un enfant—la tienne? ah! dit “oui.” If I am not careful I will be covering this paper with words that make a poor endeavor to tell you I love you—the reason I repeat so often those words is because I can really find nothing to express the hunger, the yearning and oh! the love for you—and you are so small! … You have not spoken to me for so long about your poems and I dare not ask—will you not say something—surely some day you will find time to say something to me. Have you heard the rain? It is cold to-night and I’m too restless for rain—only for the touch of you—will I ever not want that.

The letter, with poems slashed in ink across the back page, ends with “If ever I can see you, will you come—mes bras vous attendent—et mon
coeur ne pense qu’a toi.… oh! Why can’t I go to you—?” It was signed E.P.R.—Elaine Pandia Ralli.

But the chill in their relationship, especially after Thanksgiving, was undeniable. Elaine saw Millay turning to other girls for friendship that seemed to her to lessen, even to supplant, her own. She didn’t know why. “
Dearest little old sweetheart—miss you dear—Gee!” she began lightly but awkwardly, with none of the ease she could express when she was confident: “I want you just as much as I’ve always wanted you, with all my heart—You know that I never could feel towards anyone the way I do towards you—it is more than true—remember what we’ve said—yes and done.”

She told her, again and again, in a tone that became increasingly desperate, not only how much she loved her but that Vincent must never doubt her, that she was the only person in the world for her. And that she was Vincent’s child.

A friend who knew Ralli much later in her life said that after a while Elaine “
knew Vincent had dropped her. She had, then or shortly thereafter, but while at Vassar … a serious crack-up. She was in the infirmary, and then she went home, and her mother cared for her. I remember her telling me stories of her mother feeding her, sitting her in the sunlight on the porch, that sort of thing. I don’t think Daisy Ralli ever knew how much Elaine cared for Vincent. She, of course, knew she cared, but how much, or how deeply, she would not have known. And she could not have guessed.