Savage Beauty (41 page)

But she looked older, more mature—at least she has on the occasions when I have seen her; she assured me that perhaps the next day she would be like a little girl again. She was very serious, earnest, and sincere about herself—inspired, I suppose, by my presence, … and told me that she wanted to settle down to a new life: she was tired of breaking hearts and spreading havoc.

Then he told Bishop about Slocombe:

Unfortunately, he had a wife and three children at Saint-Cloud and a very cruel situation had arisen. She did not know whether he would get a divorce or not, but if he did, she would marry him, go to England to live, and have children. She was very happy, she said. I am sorry to say that, when I first talked to her, I was inclined, with the memory of my own scars still giving out an occasional twinge, to jeer at her seriousness and be sarcastic at the expense of the pain she expressed at having wrecked another home.… She … has a new distinction of dress, but she can no longer intoxicate me with her beauty or throw bombs into my soul; when I looked at her it was like staring into the center of an extinct volcano. She made me sad; it made me sad, curiously enough, that I had loved her so much once and now did not love her any longer. Actually, of course, I would not love her again for anything; I can think of few more terrible calamities; but somehow felt that, impossible and imperfect as she is, some glamour and high passion had gone out of life when my love for her died.

He must have realized how inflated his own rhetoric was, for he added, “Well, these are old Dr. Wilson’s last words on the chief maelstrom of his early years. Preserve them carefully, but do not publish them until all parties are dead.”

Wilson was far more uncertain of how he felt about Edna than he admitted to Bishop; in fact, he seemed to friends to have pursued her to Paris. While she had not invited him, he nevertheless took a hotel close to hers, where he felt uncomfortable because she was “very much allied with the Bohemians of the Left Bank, with whom I was not much at home.” Millay liked and admired Edmund Wilson, but she never again considered him as a lover.

CHAPTER 16

I
n the spring of 1920, George Slocombe had come to Paris from London, where, at twenty-six, he was already a political reporter for
The Daily Herald
. He was rumored to have brought the czar’s jewels out of Russia in the confused aftermath of the Revolution. He stood just over six feet, and, with his mahogany hair and bright red beard, which he wore full at a time when men were clean-shaven, he looked like “a radiance,” one of Edna’s lovers, Griffin Barry, said in envy. Slocombe had married a Russian girl who was the daughter of the
homme d’affaires
of the Grand Duke Michael, for whom he’d been a tutor.

Slocombe led a daring life as a young journalist and went to Paris when it was the most promising city in the world. The hotels were still filled with the journalists and small fry of the diplomatic corps who had remained in residence after the Versailles Peace Conference was over.

That spring the city seemed caught in a spell, the creamy white blossoms of the chestnut trees perfuming the air while tiny red taxis, their drivers wearing boiled-leather top hats, took Americans into Montparnasse, which was still a village. “
The Café du Dôme, not yet internationally celebrated, was a small, dark and modest establishment,” Slocombe wrote. Inside, foreigners played chess and a small group of American writers and artists played poker. The Rotonde hadn’t yet swallowed up the little narrow Café Vavin, “at which Trotsky was frequently seen, and Lenin more rarely.”

No more extraordinary state of affairs had existed on the Continent since the Congress of Vienna.… Civil war in Russia and Hungary, D’Annunzio and his toy cannon manning the walls of Fiume … famine in Austria and Germany, typhus in Russia, revolutionary agitation in France and Italy.

It was into this world in the spring that Edna Millay began to move with Slocombe, until sometime in early July, when he told his wife. By the night of July 19, only two weeks after Wilson had written to John Bishop, Edna and Slocombe quarreled.

The next morning Slocombe wrote her a long letter, in which he began by calling her David: “
The name I first called you by, I will call you by last.” He was leaving her, he explained,

not because I don’t love you any longer, but because I love you too much. I leave you before our love becomes less than the perfect thing it has been to me: & because I want to love you all my life as I love you now.… I know that if we had been married I should have tried to master you.… I must master those I love [and] I could not succeed in mastering you without making you something less than you are.… If I had been sure … that you would be happy in subjection, I might have been forced to do the ignoble, but still inevitable & even necessary act of leaving my wife & children.

This self-serving, peculiar explanation went on, “Edna, David, I kiss your lips and your eyes and God help me your little round knees.” He asked only two things of her: if they met in the street, she should not be afraid to talk to him. “I even think I shall not be happy without seeing you sometimes, if only at a distance.” And could she write him a letter, since he had “never had a letter of yours & I would like one to keep with the picture of you.” The man’s caution combined with his arrogance was stunning; no wonder Edna fled. As for Slocombe, once he’d made his decision to leave her, he was unable to keep it. He wrote her every other day until she escaped to Dieppe.

When he hadn’t heard from her by mid-August, he pressed her: “If you are forgetting me, there is no harm in a friendly little note once in a month is there?” This time she did weaken, telling him how strange it was to be without him in her life. He jumped at her reply; he was “eager & crazy to see you again.” He asked her to return to Paris by September 1, because “on Sat. Sept. 3rd I take my family to … Italy.”

The mails from the States were irregular and slow, and Vincent asked again and again why she hadn’t heard from home, chiding Norma, “
Rise on your legs,
you poor piece of imitation Camembert, and write your sister a little note. See? And that’s that. As ever, your childhood’s friend, Sefe.” When not even bantering seemed to work, she wrote her mother, “
I do hope it is not the best reason,—that you are ill and can’t write”; because months before she’d sent her

a lovely poem of mine, called
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver .…
& I think if you had received it you would surely have spoken of it.—I send you another copy of it now. It is practically the only poem I have written since I left America.—That was just what I wanted, you know, not to write a word of poetry for a year. When it begins to get a little
easy
, or one begins to write in certain forms almost from habit, it is time to stop for a while, I think, & almost forget that one is a poet—become a prose-writer, for instance—& then let it all come back to one later, fresh, & possibly in a newer form.—The next thing I hope to do is to finish the long sonnet sequence about the New England woman.… I hope you will like this poem, darling. It is dedicated to you, of course, as may be seen at a glance.

No matter where or with whom Vincent was—in Paris, at the seashore, or in England—this poem, sent to her mother and “worshipfully” dedicated to her, loomed as something more significant than anything, with the single exception of “Renascence,” that Millay had yet written.

Wilson didn’t much like the poem when it appeared in
Vanity Fair
and told Millay so. He thought “
it verged on the sentimental.” To his surprise she defended it “strongly.” “I had known that it was about her own mother,” he wrote in his memoir of Edna, “and I knew how devoted she was to the debonair hard-bitten old lady who worked for her and educated her.”

He hadn’t felt at first how profoundly moving the poem was. Then it seized him: “the loneliness, the poverty, the undervalued Irish heritage, the Spartan New England self-discipline, the gift of artistic creation and intellectual distinction … that the mother had been able to transmit.” It was a record of “the closest relationship that Edna, up to then, I suppose … had ever known.”

THE BALLAD OF THE HARP-WEAVER

“Son,” said my mother,
  When I was knee-high,
“You’ve need of clothes to cover you,
  And not a rag have I.

“There’s nothing in the house
  To make a boy breeches,
Nor shears to cut a cloth with,
  Nor thread to take stitches.

“There’s nothing in the house
  But a loaf-end of rye,
And a harp with a woman’s head
  Nobody will buy,”
  And she began to cry.

That was in the early fall.
  When came the late fall,
“Son,” she said, “the sight of you
  Makes your mother’s blood crawl,—

“Little skinny shoulder-blades
  Sticking through your clothes!
And where you’ll get a jacket from
  God above knows.

“It’s lucky for me, lad,
  Your daddy’s in the ground,
And can’t see the way I let
  His son go around!”
  And she made a queer sound.

That was in the late fall.
  When the winter came,
I’d not a pair of breeches
  Nor a shirt to my name.

I couldn’t go to school,
  Or out of doors to play.
And all the other little boys
  Passed our way.

“Son,” said my mother,
  “Come, climb into my lap,
And I’ll chafe your little bones
  While you take a nap.”

And, oh, but we were silly
  For half an hour or more,
Me with my long legs
  Dragging on the floor,

A-rock-rock-rocking
  To a mother-goose rhyme!
Oh, but we were happy
  For half an hour’s time!

But there was I, a great boy,
  And what would folks say
To hear my mother singing me
  To sleep all day,
  In such a daft way?

Men say the winter
  Was bad that year;
Fuel was scarce,
  And food was dear.

A wind with a wolf’s head
  Howled about our door,
And we burned up the chairs
  And sat upon the floor.

All that was left us
  Was a chair we couldn’t break,
And the harp with a woman’s head
  Nobody would take,
  For song or pity’s sake.

The night before Christmas
  I cried with the cold,
I cried myself to sleep
  Like a two-year-old.

And in the deep night
  I felt my mother rise,
And stare down upon me
  With love in her eyes.

I saw my mother sitting
  On the one good chair,
A light falling on her
  From I couldn’t tell where,

Looking nineteen,
  And not a day older,
And the harp with a woman’s head
Leaned against her shoulder.

Her thin fingers, moving
  In the thin, tall strings,
Were weav-weav-weaving
  Wonderful things.

Many bright threads,
  From where I couldn’t see,
Were running through the harp-strings
  Rapidly,

And gold threads whistling
  Through my mother’s hand.
I saw the web grow,
  And the pattern expand.

She wove a child’s jacket,
  And when it was done
She laid it on the floor
  And wove another one.

She wove a red cloak,
  So regal to see,
“She’s made it for a king’s son,”
  I said, “and not for me.”
  But I knew it was for me.

She wove a pair of breeches
  Quicker than that!
She wove a pair of boots
  And a little cocked hat.

She wove a pair of mittens,
  She wove a little blouse,
She wove all night
  In the still, cold house.

She sang as she worked,
  And the harp-strings spoke;
Her voice never faltered,
  And the thread never broke.
  And when I awoke,—