Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  In this festive community Edna Millay found herself playing charades one April evening, paired by chance with Eugen Boissevain. She was a houseguest of Dudley Malone and Doris Stevens. Floyd Dell was also there, watching.

  Eugene and Edna had the part of two lovers in a delicious farcical invention, at once Rabelaisian and romantic. They acted their parts wonderfully—so remarkably, indeed, that it was apparent to us all that it wasn’t just acting. We were having the unusual privilege of seeing a man and a girl fall in love with each other violently and in public, and telling each other so, and doing it very beautifully.

  Floyd, who had been disappointed by Eugen Boissevain and Max Eastman when he had first taken Edna and Norma to meet them, was now prepared to be more generous. “The very next day she was all in; Eugene took her to his home, called the doctor, and nursed her like a mother.”

  A far less generous interpretation of Eugen came from someone outside that charmed circle of Village comrades. Jonathan Mitchell, who would become Doris Stevens’s second husband, said, “As soon as she returned to America, Doris asked Edna Millay to Croton. Gene was visiting Max at the time. The story was that Gene appeared that weekend at Doris’s with a blooming tulip and wanted to know which room the lady poet was sleeping in. And he never left her side again.

  “Gene had an ability to get on with anybody. Like a cruise director. He did decorative things.… And my guess is that he had all those qualities of kindness and graciousness and tenderness.… But he behaved like a male nurse to her, always going around saying, ‘Hush, hush!’ And of course Edna was taken with him. Well, why not, eh? In the first place, he was big and handsome—and Edna had gone through this frightful humiliation.

  “He used to call her ‘the poetess’—I mean, literally! He would say, ‘What would the poetess like for luncheon?’ She was always something very special—not one of us, you see. And Gene was the keeper of this marvel.”

  According to Arthur Ficke, who had taken a house in Croton right next door to him, Boissevain came to see him “in a frenzy” after having met Millay. “He said that Vincent was the most fascinating person alive—where did she live, and how could he see her again?” Ficke offered to arrange a lunch date with her the next day, and a delighted Boissevain insisted he come, too.

  He was out of his head. Finally I said to him that Miss Millay was nobody’s fool, and that he was one of the most attractive men alive—why didn’t he just take the Millay by the horns and invite her to come out and spend a week at his country place? “Hell, Arthur,” he said, “I don’t want to have a dirty little love affair with her; I want to marry her!”

  He was that certain that quickly. After their lunch “Eugene sent for a grand open car with a grand liveried driver, and we went up Fifth Avenue, stopping at the important street-corners long enough for Eugene to rise in the car and bow to the astonished spectators.” Once he jumped out of the car, reached into his pocket for an imaginary gold piece, and gave it to an imaginary beggar woman. “Of course, we were all drunk as owls—but it was not with champagne only. Terrific emotions were in the air, for all three of us; and we were half mad with the conflict of them.”

  Arthur seemed to be working himself into the relationship between Edna and Eugen from the beginning. He was more passionately attached to the idea of loving Edna Millay than he was to anyone or anything else. His own attachments, whether to Hal or to Gladys Brown, his new wife, paled before his sense of wanting to be in on the love of the century. He was a peculiar fellow, possessive of a woman whom he had elected not to have—or was afraid to. “Oh, maybe a one-night stand with Arthur,” Charlie Ellis said with a wink. “But it couldn’t have been much more.” With gallant Eugen Boissevain, however, it was about to be everything more.

  By May 2, 1923, Vincent was using a Croton return address with her agents, Brandt & Kirkpatrick, and advised them to write to her in care of “Eugene Boissevain, Mt. Airy.” She was living with Boissevain.

  On April 30, 1923, Edna received a letter from Columbia University informing her

  that at the meeting of the Advisory Board of the School of Journalism, held on April 26, you were nominated for the Pulitzer Poetry Prize of $1,000 for the best volume of verse published during the year, based on “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” “A Few Figs From Thistles,” and eight sonnets published in “American Poetry, 1922, a Miscellany.”

  She was asked to keep this news confidential until the full list of the awards was released to the papers, on May 14.

  That spring, Millay became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In her first interview in the New York Evening Post, “A Fireside Afternoon in Croton Hills with Girl Winner of $1,000 Pulitzer Poetry Prize,” she said she would use her prize to return to Maine. “My mother is on her way there now and will find a house by the sea for us to live in together.”

  Eugen’s farmhouse, where his maid brought them salad and dandelion greens, where the rooms were filled with flowers, where even the little wire-haired fox terrier, Jerry, whom she’d trained to bring her a box of cigarettes between his teeth—all were given to her by Eugen. As she talked with the reporter she began to shiver, and she pulled her green silk wrapper closer around her shoulders, telling her that what

  lies deepest of all is my love for this silly old America of ours. Why does it do what it sometimes does? Why does it think so foolishly sometimes? It is because life is brown and tepid for many of us. I want to write so that those who read me will say … “Life can be exciting and free and intense.” I really mean it!

  She saved the more private news for her mother, to whom she wrote on May 30:

  Dearest Mother:

  I have been a bad girl not to write you, or send you any money.… But you will forgive me when you know my excuse. Darling, do you remember meeting Eugen Boissevain one day in Waverly Place?—It was only for a moment, & possibly you don’t remember. But anyway, you will like him very much when you know him, which will be soon. And it is important that you should like him,—because I love him very much, & am going to marry him.

  There!!!

  “Will you forgive me?” she wanted to know. “—My mind has been pretty much taken up with all this, & I have neglected my mummie.” They planned to marry in the summer; just when depended on when she got well. She wanted, they both wanted, to visit Cora in Maine.

  We are going to motor up. Gene has a beautiful big Mercer,—at least he had, but now he has given it to me, so I have one. Won’t that be fun?

  You must need money dear.… Let me know as soon as you get this & I will send you some—I haven’t at the moment a great deal (except my thousand bucks, which I ain’t going to bust for god or hero,—.…)

  She wrote again two days before her mother’s birthday: “Darling Mother: I am in town just for a few days, motoring out to Croton again this afternoon. At last I am doing what I should have ages ago, having an excellent diagnostician examine me thoroughly.” She was being sent to all kinds of specialists. “For the last three days I have been going to an X-ray man two or three times a day, having my stomach and bowels X-rayed.” She told her not to be alarmed, because it didn’t “mean that I feel any worse than I have done for the last two years; it just means that at last I am going about getting cured in a reasonable way.” But the truth is, she was terribly sick.

  I am allowed to work only one hour a day now, and I have to be lying down fifteen hours out of the twenty-four, and I must be pretty quiet and see almost nobody. These are severe instructions, severely enforced. I must tell you again not to worry about me; I don’t feel bad at all; I am just being helped to get perfectly well, you see.

  It was, she knew, not much of a birthday letter,

  all about me and nothing about you, but I know that nothing would be so nice a birthday-present for you as to know that I am being taken care of, and am going before long to be well and strong again. Eugen has been taking me to these doctors; probably by myself I would never have done it. You will lik
e him, mother.

  I’d just turned to Charlie and asked if at that time he had thought it likely that Vincent would marry Boissevain.

  “Yes, I think I did. He was the solution to a lot of problems for her because he was obviously the mother type.”

  I asked him what he meant.

  “Just in the complete attention, at all times, to her needs.” Then Norma pinched him quiet. She was irritable, intimating that I should have asked her opinion first, which I usually did. Now she commandeered the conversation. She had a point to make, and it was not about Eugen’s caregiving.

  “I went up to Croton before the marriage. I was making some things for her to wear. I remember a lovely pink-and-lavender chemise, mauve it was, of beautiful silk. She gave me a job to make it for her. It was never done, finished; she couldn’t stand to have it fitted.

  “She was working on The Harp-Weaver then, and I—Arthur was up there helping her work to put the book together—And I wanted to help. Anyway, I went up. And we were just sitting there. They [Edna and Eugen] decided they were going to get married. Jan [Eugen’s brother] was there, and he told me they were going to be married.… They were getting married right away, like the next day.

  “I remember being in the living room and she opposite me. He, Gene, suddenly said to me, ‘I’m not marrying the family, you know!’

  “It came out of nowhere. She said nothing. Well, that’s not very pretty.

  “ ‘You wouldn’t want to say that again!’ I said.

  “ ‘Yes. I’m not marrying her family.’ He repeated it! I’m giving them both every chance—giving Vincent a chance to say, ‘Please don’t say it, Gene.’

  “ ‘Are you really going to marry this low, cheap son of a bitch? Can you really go on? Sister, think it over. Is this what you want to live with?’ And finally, then, I burst into tears and ran upstairs. And she hadn’t said a word.

  “I went up to the bed and threw myself on it. Suddenly everything cleared. What am I doing? You don’t have to see her.—If she’s happy. You love her enough. Then he came up, put his arms around me, and said he was sorry. He told me, ‘She made me come up. She’s never scolded me before,’ he said.”

  Norma said pensively, “You know, we’d written these things together—‘Sentimental Solon’ for Ainslee’s, and ‘The Seventh Stair’—But it had been up to her, financially. Vincent was responsible.”

  On Tuesday, July 17, Vincent and Eugen were in New York consulting with her doctors, who now insisted she enter the hospital the next day. The operation was scheduled for Thursday. Eugen wrote Arthur and Gladys urgently from the city: “We get married tomorrow morning at 12 at Croton.… You cannot be there?” Then he dashed off “God bless us all” as they raced back to Croton to prepare.

  July 18, 1923, was a brilliantly sunny, hot summer day. In a photograph, Vincent, in a dark dress, is standing in the sun, looking down. She is clearly dazed and ill, her thin arm through Eugen’s, leaning into him, her head barely touching the top of his shoulder. Strapping, beaming, and anxious, with a cigarette in his hand, he seems almost to be holding her up. Norma was Vincent’s maid of honor, and Jan, Eugen’s brother, was his best man. Charlie was there, as well as Arthur and Gladys and Floyd Dell, who took the only snapshots of the wedding. It was a hastily assembled gathering of brothers and sisters and—with the exception of Gladys and the justice of the peace—lovers. Norma remembered that at the last minute she took mosquito netting from around the porch, and “I made her a lovely veil and train from it. Then we all stood up outside on the lawn before a great big house. And they married.”

  Standing on the broad, grassy lawn behind Boardman Robinson’s house on Mt. Airy Road, Eugen slipped a ring on Edna’s finger. Someone placed a single red rose behind her right ear. “Then they got right in Gene’s Mercer and left for New York and the hospital. The point being that the only way Gene could be with her was by being married to her.”

  Five afternoon New York newspapers covered the story of her marriage, and three put it on their front pages.

  “Edna Millay Goes Under Knife”

  “Famous Love Lyricist Belies Her Own Philosophy by Marrying”

  “Honeymooning Alone in Hospital”

  “Poetess Bride to Go Under Knife”

  The newspapers stressed three things about her: that she’d married a “Wealthy New York Importer”; that she’d been successfully operated on for appendicitis at New York Hospital on West Sixteenth Street; and that her husband was “Considerably Older than Bride.”

  Just before she was operated on, Arthur came to see her, and she said, “If I die now, I shall be immortal.”

  The day after Eugen knew she’d survived the operation, he wired his mother in Holland: “MARRIED YESTERDAY EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY GIVE ME YR BLESSING.”

  Vincent’s first letter was to her own “Dearest Mummie,” and Eugen wrote it for her “because though I’m getting big & strong, I’m still very lazy and do very little cooking, scrubbing, writing and other dirty chores.”

  It was just the sort of letter to reassure Cora. She described her scar as a “transverse incision directly parallel with my waist line, about 7 inches long, above and an inch to the left and about 6 inches to the right of my celestial belly-button.” It would be, when she healed, scarcely visible. “So I can still be an oriental tummy-dancer, if I like and get you and me a lot of shekles in our respective old ages.” Eugen, she noted, was having trouble spelling. “That is what occurs when a plain business man marries a literary lady of colorful vocabulary and insubordinate intestines.” She kept up her banter: “Well I’m happily married to a kind and thoughtful man, a little bit slow in the head but all the steadier for that … (The hussy! don’t believe her. E.B.)”

  She said she’d close now that Eugen was beginning to call her names. She signed herself for the first time Edna St. Vincent Millay Boissevain. But she couldn’t resist adding to her mother, “I hasten to sign myself as ever your devoted son, Sefus.”

  She had not been operated on simply for appendicitis. Four days after her operation, Norma wrote to Cora to explain: “They not only removed her appendix but straightened a prenatal twist in the intestine.… The intestine at this place near the appendix had … twisted and grown together in one place—or grown to the appendix, I don’t know which—but it was straightened and fixed.”

  Cora had asked “Two sweet questions about Gene,” which Norma now hastened to answer:

  Well—he is an importer of sugar and a speculator or broker of same. He has a business of which he is the name and head—importing business. If he goes to the office once in a while—this is a joke he is with Edna so much—he will be able to support our Ed St. Bincent in the manner to which she is not accustomed but which she damned well deserves. He is quoted in all the papers stories of this marriage as “a wealthy Dutch importer” but that, between us, isn’t true—he has had several fortunes in his life and will doubtless make another, but he has enough to do anything they will want to do, keep a maid and a couple of cars (he just paid $600 to have the Mercer overhauled) and travel or buy a country place etc. And I think be able to pay the hospital and surgical expenses for his wife—which will be no mean item, my dear. This information is for you—he can pass as a “wealthy importer” if you want him to, I guess. His name is pronounced Bois-se-vain and the Bois is the French word for woods and is pronounced like bwa.… accent on the first syllable. It is a French name anyway but really everybody says it as “bwa-se-vain” so you had better too. Now you can say it over many times and get in practise. Haven’t you a cat you can name for Gene or something you can address once in a while?

  It was a charming letter and certainly belied whatever tension had existed between Norma and Eugen just before the marriage. Cora was so relieved she immediately wrote to her sister Susie, repeating to her exactly how to pronounce her new son-in-law’s last name and adding that Vincent not only had a private room and two private nurses but “a beautiful car, a big Mercer Gene
gave her.”

  Within a month of her operation Edna was recuperating back in Croton, where Tess Root Adams sent her a bouquet of wildflowers.

  Tess, darling,—

  No, they were not withered & I did not laugh,—all my childhood is in those bayberry bushes, & queen-of-the-meadow, or maybe you called it hardhack, & rose-hips. And cranberries—I remember a swamp of them that made a short-cut to the railroad station when I was seven. It was down across that swamp my father went, when my mother told him to go & not come back.

  (Or maybe she said he might come back if he would do better—but who ever does better?)

  It’s striking that at the moment of her own marriage, what she remembered was her parents’ failure.

  CHAPTER 20

  He is forty-three years old but it isn’t necessary for you to say anything more than he is “around forty.” He acts like a kid and is really marvelous looking. Handsome in a distinguished way with a beautiful smile. He is far from white—a dark tan where he has worked the garden in a batik cloth only about his loins has seen to that. He is the only man in whom Edna has ever been interested who will stand a show of making her a bully good husband.

  —Norma Millay to Cora Millay, c. July 1923

  Eugen, drawn by Vincent’s fragile loveliness as she regained her health, photographed her again and again during those first few weeks of her recovery. She lay back against soft pillows, sunk indolently into a chaise longue on the sunny porch of his Croton house, her abundant hair curled fetchingly away from her cheekbones, her long slim arm outstretched as cigarette smoke played around her lips. The silk kimono Arthur had given her fell away from her breasts as she posed in the garden. In another snapshot, perhaps taken by Arthur, she looks grave and utterly beautiful as she poses against a batik throw. But in early October she was still weak enough for Arthur to have to help her correct proofs for her book The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, which her new publisher, Harper & Brothers, would publish at the end of November.