Vincent

I just started rereading Savage Beauty, by Nancy Milford. The opening section of the book reminded me that this is a beautiful place where I live: 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. And then she goes on about the death of shipbuilding ... and the scant wages and long hours for workers in the woolen mills. Edna St. Vincent Millay lived in the Millville section of Camden, which is where Charlie lives. I live in one of the mill houses near the harbor. I can see Mount Battie, including the tower on top of it, from my bedroom where I'm sitting. I see church steeples and the top of the Elm Street School, where Edna St. Vincent Millay went ... and also where I went. She was such a bold girl. And brave to send her writing to magazines. Her mother left her alone with her two sisters while she went away to work. The girls took care of themselves. When their mother was a girl, her own mother left her. She fell in love with a man and left her husband. She loved her children, made a living as a hairdresser and loved this other man. And then her horse got spooked one day and she was thrown and hit her head on a rock. And that was the end of that, at age 37, calling out, "I don't want to leave my babies...." At least that's the way the story goes. I am searching through poetry of all kinds lately. It's all I want to do ... and I'm hoping I can write my way out of a few things I'd rather not do. Will keep you posted. I can not write letters to the editor or anything like that. I can't even write stories, for fear people will get fiercely angry with me for writing about a Vietnam Vet killing my asparagus and peaches, kids snorting Ritalin, or how certain people read the comic book version of Great Expectations and others do not. This is the reason I have spent the last ten years drawing and painting. I think the photo above is from First Fig, by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Sorry. Nancy Milford wrote another book which I love: Zelda, about Zelda Fitzgerald. I have a decent copy of the book out in my studio but I used to keep a tattered to pieces copy of it by my bed in the early years of being back in Maine, newly single, newly a parent, and definitely not sleeping very much. Zelda used to get eczema whenever Scott would visit her in her Swiss mountain top retreats. She suffered badly. (I had eczema too.) Eventually, she was put in a home by Scott back in the United States; she wasn't well. The home caught fire and everyone died, including Zelda. There is a very good story about W.H. Auden in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. We all have evil in us. Victims might be innocent in one capacity but not in all. He heard that a woman from his church was having night terrors so he took a blanket and slept outside her apartment door until she felt safe. He fell in love; it didn't work out ... and he said he nearly became a murderer because of it. No more dilly-dallying. Better get back to work.