Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  except that here there are mountains instead of sea. We are about a week out on our walking trip—have a coolie along as a guide and to carry our pack. We have been spending the nights so far in Japanese inns, sleeping on the floor, eating on the floor,—rice, tea & fish; rice, fish & tea; tea, fish & rice, etc.

  They were walking now between twelve and twenty-two miles a day. By the end of their trip in Japan, they’d walked 114 miles. “But,” as Vincent wrote Cora:

  the moment we struck the cities again we got the flu. We went to Peking—a two day train trip from Shanghai, where our steamer docked—because we were crazy to see the place; it is the old capital where the emperor lived, where the young dethroned emperor still lives, in a little walled Forbidden City within the city. And when we got there we went to the hotel & went to bed with the flu—picked it up on the train, probably,—& stayed in bed ten days.

  When they recovered, they took a steamer to a small seaside village on the Yellow Sea called Chefoo. There they chartered a Chinese junk and sailed every day “to some island or other & build a fire & make coffee, & swim & lie in the sun. So now we are feeling pretty fit again.”

  But the most curious thing, she said, was that no one who had ever been in a Chinese seacoast village could grasp how she’d managed to build a fire; they

  would say, “Of what?”—for there is no drift-wood. They are the cleanest beaches in the world. There are no forests to send logs down river to the sea, there are apparently never any wrecks, & wood is so scarce in China that if a drifting spar appeared on the horizon, I am sure that the entire village would swim out to it, yelling & beating each other off, to drag it in. It is my boast that there does not exist a beach where I can’t gather wood enough for a fire, & so far I have just held my own. I gather the fire-wood in my bathing-cap! A dried walnut shell!—I see it from afar & make for it. This is not a joke—it is the truth,—dried shells & the corks of bottles & bits of bark no bigger than my finger—these make the drift-wood fire. I have never yet found a piece of drift-wood as large as my hand.

  Vincent lies curled against Eugen’s naked chest in the prow of their small boat, her dark straw bonnet in her lap; his sarong is slung low around his hips; they smile into the bright sunshine, a line of hills rising just beyond his shoulders as they sail the Yellow Sea.

  Hong Kong, she said, was the most Chinese of all the cities they’d seen. On July 14, they were in Hong Kong bound for Singapore, “having the most wonderful time.” They were three days out of Shanghai when their ship had gone aground in the yellow Yangtze mud, freighted down with her cargo of eggs. That night, as they slept in the heavy wet heat, the ship pitched “like a floating cork,” sending Vincent’s perfumes and salves crashing onto the thickly carpeted floor. In the morning she learned

  (a.) That I was about the only passenger aboard who had slept a wink, & (b.) That we had during the night passed unscathed through the whiskers of a healthy typhoon. Oh, mummie, you know, day before yesterday all day almost, first on the starboard & then on the port side, the spray of the ship was full of beautiful bright rainbows! & last night the phosphorus made the edge of the waves all like green electric light,—& there was heat lightning, & I said, “Oh, Eugen, rainbows by day & phosphorus by night,—I can hardly bear it!”—& he said, “If you should see a rainbow at night, I don’t think you could bear it.” And just at the moment he finished speaking there was a flash of lightning, & across the phosphorescent crest of the wave at which I was looking, a beautiful perfect rainbow appeared bright for a moment, & instantly was gone.—And I did bear it. Little Vincent big strong girl now.—I think not many people have seen a rainbow made by lightning on phosphorus. It was marvelous beyond words.—Oh, mummie, I am having the most thrilling time!

  Two weeks later they had reached Java. In mid-August, they stopped for a spell in the foothills of the mountainous interior of Java, where they stayed in the house of a friend of Eugen’s. Writing from the interior of Java, Eugen said they were keeping house together and that Edna “gives instructions and scoldings as fluently as any Baboe.” Her note explained that this was how the word was pronounced in Malay and that it meant a Javanese Malay woman servant. The house was at 4,500 feet. “The air is wonderful, and Edna is as strong as a horse. We climbed the other day a high mountain 11000 feet high.”

  Edna put in her own two cents:

  It is true about the mountain, mother. From the top of it, after we had got there, after many groans and sighs from the weaker vessel, meaning me, we could see the whole world nearly, only not quite Camden. We take a lot of exercise, and I am feeling awfully well. We live on stuff from the garden here, spinach and carrots and rhubarb,—and rice, if not from our garden, at least, from the gardens of our neighbors, as you might say.

  Eugen added that he wished Cora

  could see your girl now. You would not know her: she is so strong and husky. We get up at six and then she eats a breakfast as is a breakfast. We walk and climb a young mountain pretty nearly every day, or otherwise ride horses. She eats for dinner and lunch mountains of spinach, salade, and lovely vegetables, and twice a day plate fulls of rhubarb and three times a day buttermilk. She has just had the curse, and during all that time we went for big walks every day and she only once layed down for half an hour! She had no gin, no asperine or other dirty poisons and not even a hot water bag! The time before last just the same. What do you say about that.

  Eugen could hardly finish crowing about his care of her.

  They stayed well throughout their sometimes arduous and exciting adventurous journey through the Dutch East Indies, where it was steaming hot, or in the mountains, where it was extraordinarily chilly. But by the time they reached India they were both seriously ill, Vincent with a form of dysentery and Eugen with such a severe tropical fever that he had to spend a week in a hospital in Bombay. It wasn’t until early October that they left India bound for Marseille. And even at that, he wrote Arthur,

  We left the hospital too soon, to catch the boat to Marseilles and on the boat I got flebitus. I had to be taken from the boat to the train in a stretcher and ambulance and the same way in Paris from the train to the hotel. Edna arranged everything wonderfully, although she was still very weak. We are now 14 days in this hotel. I have not moved and must lie perfectly quiet on my back. Vincent does everything for me, which is a lot.

  Eugen’s illness put Millay in the position of taking care of him, when from the first hours of their meeting, let alone their marriage, he had been nursing her.

  He thought he was doing pretty well now, and they were planning to visit his family in Holland within a week or so, “And then for New York, where with the help of God we hope to be in your arms before the end of November, about 14 days after this letter reaches you.” But two weeks later, they were still in Paris.

  3

  The Boissevains were, on their father’s side, descended from an old French Huguenot family that had gradually achieved a certain degree of wealth; they had become shipowners and prominent members of the Walloon church. Eugen’s father, Charles, was the editor and later director of the Algemeen Handelsblad, a leading Dutch newspaper. He was for many years an immensely popular journalist.

  The Boissevains were, in the words of Hilda von Stockum Marlin, one of Eugen’s nieces, “a teeming family.” She was seventeen when Vincent and Eugen came to visit. “I was only one—truly only one—of the lesser members of our family. There were eleven children and scores of grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.

  “When she first came, we all stood at the entrance to Drafna, on the great front portico, to greet her. I seem to remember her in some slight, frail, gauzy long frock. And what did she do before the great assembling of Boissevains? In front of Granny, Eugen’s mother? She came running directly to me with her arms outstretched. She said something to the effect of—‘You, too, write poems!’

  “Well, it was such an embarrassment to me! You must understand my position in this family, and to be sin
gled out in such a manner, at such a time. I did not turn from her so much as I withdrew into myself. I no longer remembered, if I had ever known, that one of my fond aunts had sent her a poem … perhaps some translations of mine. And yet there I stood singled out by her. It was completely undeserved.

  “Perhaps she felt my aloofness, which was really only shyness and puzzlement. I had no idea what to say, or what to do, or where to look. I remember, later, Eugen trying to tell his mother—and Granny was a difficult, wonderful, artistic woman herself, with—it must be said—the Irish gift for malice. He would try to say how wonderful this Girl Poet was. And Granny would narrow her eyes, and smile, and wave his words aside, and say: And Eugen? What about Eugen!’

  “He may not have been her favorite, but he was surely—among the younger brothers and sisters—among the favorites. And then he would carry her, Edna, up those long flights of stairs at Drafna to their rooms.”

  Tom de Booy described Eugen’s father, Charles: “emotional, romantic, warmhearted, and intelligent and always defended his liberal principles. His column, ‘From Day to Day,’ became famous.… In January 1900, during the Boer War, he sent an impressive open letter to the duke of Devonshire, in which he fiercely attacked Great Britain’s aggression.” His letter had been persuasive and eloquent enough not only to draw the attention of the head of the Labour Party in England, which had distributed copies to the working classes of Great Britain, but also to be sent to the president of the United States. His emissary was the eighteen-year-old Eugen, who personally delivered it. Charles Boissevain had also staunchly defended Dreyfus. “We,” Tom said, “the grandchildren, admired him; he was a very remarkable man. Of course he had his weak points: vanity, but it was a disarming vanity.”

  In 1865, when Charles was in Dublin reporting on the International Exhibition, he met and fell in love with Emily Heloise MacDonnell, whose father was provost of Trinity College, Dublin. “They were never well off (like Charles’s elder brother, Jan, a prominent businessman and cofounder of big shipping companies), but thanks to several legacies they were able to bring up their eleven children in good style and were accepted as equals by the patrician families of Amsterdam. But they were never considered entirely ordinary by Dutch standards.” For they had on the one hand a certain French esprit coupled with an Irish quality that de Booy charmingly called “happy-go-luckiness.” Several of their children never quite adapted themselves to the Dutch style of respectability. And three of the sons, Eugen and his brothers Jan and Robert, lived abroad their entire adult lives.

  Although Eugen had been born in Amsterdam, when he was seven his parents had moved their brood to Drafna near Naarden, an old fortress town that lay close to the inland edge of the Zuider Zee.

  Drafna was a three-story half-timbered chalet built entirely of wood, with great open porches and summer awnings above them. It sat upon forty acres of woodland with its own pond, meadows, stable, and tennis court. In the glass negatives of the surviving photographs and snapshots taken of the family, there are wonderful scenes of the eleven children with their English nurse, Polly. These are tableaux out of the nineteenth century, the children astride ponies and bicycles or riding gray goats, with geese and large brindled dogs, their tails like plumes, bounding among the children, the tiniest of whom are tucked within wood carts.

  The little boys are in bloomers, the older ones in knickers and soft-billed caps; the older girls in mutton-sleeved white starched blouses, with cocked hats festooned with snowy egret feathers. At the seaside, the women would step into great curtained bathing machines, which were pulled by the servants into the water while the women delicately undressed and donned their bathing outfits of caps, tunics, and long skirts as gaff-rigged catboats beat away from shore.

  What they all remembered was Eugen’s first wife, Inez. Tom de Booy, who was only fourteen, said, “I remember the intense excitement at Drafna when, in the summer of 1913, a telegram had arrived from Eugen announcing his first marriage.… ‘Have married Inez Milholland; are coming home Thursday next. Please postpone criticism till after our departure.’ But when they arrived everyone fell in love with Inez.

  “She was devastatingly beautiful and charming,” Tom recalled. “We had never seen a woman like her, and I fell in love with her immediately. She smoked cigarettes. Eugen and Inez kissed each other incessantly, even at table, and she won the hearts of almost every brother-in-law, although some were a bit shocked by her un-Dutch behavior! I’m sure several of my aunts heaved a sigh of relief when Eugen and Inez left Drafna.”

  It was Edna’s intensity and her loveliness that Tom remembered, whereas Hilda could not shake the impression Inez had made with Eugen: “They were both splendid physical specimens, they were a match for each other. And then here was this frail, small person, this poet—whom, one instinctively felt, much had been made over. In her family she was the wunderkind! Among us she was simply one of many talented family members. There were singers and actors; there was this sense of an extraordinary, perhaps even overwhelming family of gifted and artistic people. And Eugen! Well, he was the most artistic of the brothers. His gift was, I suppose, for life and for intimacy. And for play, of course.

  “But ours was such a distinguished family. It was not only that our grandfather was the editor of the largest, most prestigious paper in Amsterdam, but he wrote poems, and whole issues of the paper would be mocked up and devoted to an anniversary, to a family celebration, a birthday or a marriage, a masque, a theatrical that we had ourselves written the songs for, the music, the poetry, everything. It was their great gift; they appreciated whatever in life, or art or poetry, had beauty and grace.

  “Edna was, you see, walking into another world, and she was what?—bewildered, I felt. She hadn’t a clue. She was the great outstanding person in her own family. But among us she was just one, and one of many.”

  Eugen and Edna were home in time for Christmas, and they would never visit Holland again.

  CHAPTER 21

  That February, after attending a concert of Deems Taylor’s “Portrait of a Lady,” Millay wrote a letter to the anonymous music editor of the New York World, who had criticized it roundly. He’d said the audience had been so enthusiastic, it must have been packed with the composer’s relatives, which Edna hotly denied: “Sir, I was a member of that audience. I heard with close attention and deep pleasure an unusually good program unusually well performed.” Last night’s audience, she wrote, far from being composed of Mr. Taylor’s relatives, “was made up of discerning and honestly delighted strangers.” The joke was that Taylor was the music editor, a job he quit at the end of the season in order to compose.

  Deems Taylor and Mary Kennedy had first met Edna in Paris, when they had been on their honeymoon in the early summer of 1922, just before she had fled to Shillingstone.

  When the Metropolitan Opera Company commissioned Deems to write an American opera, Mary suggested that Edna Millay write the libretto. “I thought she was extraordinary. She had something to say that I wanted to hear. And I knew that from her first poems.” However, there was a snag: “She had written just this one act of The Casket of Glass—which turned about the Snow White fairy tale of the beautiful girl who when she takes an apple which is poisoned and it lodges in her throat—well, it was one of the classic versions of Snow White. And it could not be done. There was one entire scene where the heroine had to sing with her face covered with a cloth! And that was impossible for a singer.”

  So Edna abandoned it. And then all three waited.

  In May 1925, Millay was invited to read at Bowdoin College for the college’s centenary of the class of 1825, which had included Longfellow and Hawthorne. The other speakers were Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Professor Irving Babbitt of Harvard. But it was Millay who garnered the attention of the press. The reporter for The Christian Science Monitor began by describing how she looked, the lights of the stage playing on her “cropped hair as Miss Millay trailed up two steps to the platform, smiling like a
little girl anxious to please neighbors.”

  She made no attempt to explain her poems, to point to them as good examples of what one, if one chose the imagists—the visual imagists—would do in order to gain fame as a poet. Nothing about how she became a poet.

  But the students stamped their feet in approval when she’d finished. Then the reporter described what she’d worn:

  a robe of gold and bronze and green and her voice was a bronze bell as she read. Back and forth she moved, slender, by turn gay and grave, pompous and flippant. Her robe, because it was traced with gold threads woven into its pattern, whispered and chimed faintly against the floor. If Miss Millay had not been a poet she could easily have been an actress.… And Miss Millay ended her evening, leaving the platform not as a great poet but as a girl, quite young, of Maine who had done her best.

  It was so successful a performance that it was hard to tell whether the students or the reporter had been more “fascinated by the swift moving bronze-gold figure, so slender, so competent, at times exquisitely unreal.” In the morning this vision was gone, “and in its place a straight boyish person in lilac tweed and a tricorn.… striding fast like a boy, not at all formidable or unreal.” In other words, being a hometown girl, anxious to please, was not the same as being a great poet—and being like a boy was at least being real. This is peculiar stuff. But it lay at the heart of her increasing fame. And it continued.

  What the Bowdoin students really wanted, wrote John Hurd, Jr., in the Boston Sunday Globe, was a good look at the poet

  as a married woman with a residence in New York City. It was a remarkable thing the way their faces lighted with joy. And no wonder, she was exquisitely beautiful to look at. She is 33 years old. You would not have said she was 21. She wore a loose flowing gown of gold and bronze without a semblance of a girdle. Her sleeves, bound at the wrist no larger than a ring, flared above the elbow. But what is the use of trying to describe the way her gown fell to the top of her gold slippers and her trick of flicking her train in back of her?