three within four years, they were clearly neither submissive nor weak. Clementine Buzzell did not minister to household peace—no matter what Godey’s magazine or The Ladies’ Companion advised; she was out in her buggy scouting for hair work immediately after her divorce. When Vincent Millay heard the stories of her grandmother’s lover—and her aunt’s accusations about hermother’s friend Mr. Gales—she knew the women in her family had been headstrong, that they had had the courage or the grit to achieve their independence at whatever cost to themselves and their children.
There was one quality in Vincent’s nature that was left out of almost every family description of her childhood. It was not her talent, nor her ability to absorb the hardship she faced alone with her sisters, nor the balancing act she performed with her aunts. It wasn’t even that in her mother’s constant absence she must be good or that because others were helping them she must be grateful.
Only Norma talked about her sudden rages. Norma remembered having her mouth stuffed with geranium leaves, suffocating under the pillow Vincent had placed over her and then sat on. It hadn’t felt like a prank. Now, in Newburyport, she remembered Vincent in a fury: “I don’t remember why. But she ran outside and stuck a kitchen knife in a tree. We watched.” She remembered, too, a conflict of wills between Vincent and their mother. Vincent was banished to the basement until she would apologize. She refused. After what seemed like days to Norma, with no apology forthcoming, she and Kathleen stole downstairs to send her little boats with food and messages tucked inside. It was their mother who finally relented. “We used to say of Vincent that she had a bee chasing her. When she was bewildered by what she … I have to be so careful what I say. We had to calm her down a bit. Once in a while, when reality would hit her—something she couldn’t handle in her lovely way, then she was wild.”
Cora was ready to leave Newburyport behind her and head for Camden. She won her divorce that January, and Henry’s brother Bert Millay, who testified for her, told her if she went back to Camden, she might be given alimony. They stood in the courtroom while the judge asked Bert Millay if his brother Henry had abused her. “He has, shamefully,” he answered.
She was granted her divorce in an uncontested suit on January 11, 1904, “for the cause of cruel and abusive treatment” and awarded custody of the three children and a sum of five dollars a week for their support.
CHAPTER 4
V incent began a diary she called Rosemary , in which she charted the upheavals of her domestic life and of her struggle to surpass the limitsof a Camden girlhood. If Rosemary provides the mementos of that girlhood, it also bears witness to Millay’s passionate interior life, which was never entirely bound to her family or at ease within her community. She started the diaries innocently enough at the suggestion of Ethel Knight, whom she’d met through the St. Nicholas League. But whereas Ethel kept her diary without missing a day, Vincent rarely kept hers with any regularity. From the beginning she felt her lapses signaled a lack of self-respect, and she chastised herself for them. She intended to be worthy of her own self-respect, and worthiness was linked to God. At sixteen she was serious, severe even, and somewhat self-important. She attended the Congregational church and was part of a girls’ Bible study group, the Genethod, the Welsh word for “daughter.” New England Protestant though she was, Millay was not much interested in self-surrender, either to God or to convention. Her greatest praise was reserved for the “God of Life.”
The Genethod was founded by her friend and Sunday school teacherAbbie Huston Evans. Abbie’s father was Welsh, the pastor of the Congregational church that the Millays attended. “Abbie,” Martha Knight, Ethel’s sister, remembers,
There was one quality in Vincent’s nature that was left out of almost every family description of her childhood. It was not her talent, nor her ability to absorb the hardship she faced alone with her sisters, nor the balancing act she performed with her aunts. It wasn’t even that in her mother’s constant absence she must be good or that because others were helping them she must be grateful.
Only Norma talked about her sudden rages. Norma remembered having her mouth stuffed with geranium leaves, suffocating under the pillow Vincent had placed over her and then sat on. It hadn’t felt like a prank. Now, in Newburyport, she remembered Vincent in a fury: “I don’t remember why. But she ran outside and stuck a kitchen knife in a tree. We watched.” She remembered, too, a conflict of wills between Vincent and their mother. Vincent was banished to the basement until she would apologize. She refused. After what seemed like days to Norma, with no apology forthcoming, she and Kathleen stole downstairs to send her little boats with food and messages tucked inside. It was their mother who finally relented. “We used to say of Vincent that she had a bee chasing her. When she was bewildered by what she … I have to be so careful what I say. We had to calm her down a bit. Once in a while, when reality would hit her—something she couldn’t handle in her lovely way, then she was wild.”
Cora was ready to leave Newburyport behind her and head for Camden. She won her divorce that January, and Henry’s brother Bert Millay, who testified for her, told her if she went back to Camden, she might be given alimony. They stood in the courtroom while the judge asked Bert Millay if his brother Henry had abused her. “He has, shamefully,” he answered.
She was granted her divorce in an uncontested suit on January 11, 1904, “for the cause of cruel and abusive treatment” and awarded custody of the three children and a sum of five dollars a week for their support.
CHAPTER 4
V incent began a diary she called Rosemary , in which she charted the upheavals of her domestic life and of her struggle to surpass the limitsof a Camden girlhood. If Rosemary provides the mementos of that girlhood, it also bears witness to Millay’s passionate interior life, which was never entirely bound to her family or at ease within her community. She started the diaries innocently enough at the suggestion of Ethel Knight, whom she’d met through the St. Nicholas League. But whereas Ethel kept her diary without missing a day, Vincent rarely kept hers with any regularity. From the beginning she felt her lapses signaled a lack of self-respect, and she chastised herself for them. She intended to be worthy of her own self-respect, and worthiness was linked to God. At sixteen she was serious, severe even, and somewhat self-important. She attended the Congregational church and was part of a girls’ Bible study group, the Genethod, the Welsh word for “daughter.” New England Protestant though she was, Millay was not much interested in self-surrender, either to God or to convention. Her greatest praise was reserved for the “God of Life.”
The Genethod was founded by her friend and Sunday school teacherAbbie Huston Evans. Abbie’s father was Welsh, the pastor of the Congregational church that the Millays attended. “Abbie,” Martha Knight, Ethel’s sister, remembers,
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