In fact, two of the young men were so smitten they wangled the job of serving her breakfast. However, they were “too fussed” to make the most of the situation. They noticed that Mr. Boissevain wore striped pajamas, “but neither of the boys dared to look at Miss Millay and so could give no description.”
The chance to compare Frost’s work with hers—it would be the only time they shared a platform—was not of the slightest interest to the press. There were only anecdotes pointing up the differences in their style. Robert Frost was represented as curmudgeonly and surly; Millay was girlish, elfin, and seductive. The first evening, both were the guests of President and Mrs. Sills of Bowdoin, who thought it would be pleasant to have the governor of the state meet Frost for dinner. “But Mr. Frost refused to be lionized. He asked to be excused on the ground that he never would attend a dinner on the evening he was going to speak.”
The following morning at ten, Frost, scheduled to be interviewed, had overslept. When the reporter returned at eleven, he came down sleepily. “His complexion had none of the New England ruddiness, and actually had a yellowish tint. Mr. Frost was not feeling well and said so.” Frost then launched into a description of his past:
“I earned only $15 a week until I was 35 years old.… And I had a wife and children to feed.”
You wonder what they ate.
“O, we scratched along somehow,” he replied. “Part of the time I didn’t make $15 a week. It is difficult to determine just what you get on a farm.”
When the reporter told him that it was “heroic” to have survived such a beginning, Frost would have none of it: “With me it was … an animal passion. That’s just what it was, an animal instinct—more than instinct—a passion to write poetry.”
His victory—and here he winked at the reporter—was that the University of Michigan, “a State institution in the Middle West,” had just offered him a lifetime appointment with
absolutely no demands upon his time except that he live near the college. He does not have to teach any classes, although he may conduct what they call a seminar the last few months of next year, and his full professor’s salary goes on just the same.
Millay had not overslept, for the next morning the reporter quoted her.
“I am not writing poems any more,” she said. “I have become terribly interested in the drama and I want to write plays. Yes, I am writing one now, a four-act play. I have finished the first act. Then I want to write a sonnet sequence of about 150 sonnets based on psychological experiences in my life.
“No, I cannot write in New York. It is awfully exciting there and I find lots of things to write about and I accumulate many ideas, but I have to go away where it is quiet.
“We have bought a farm, which we are not going to farm, in the Berkshire Hills, and I hope to work on my plays there.”
Next to Frost’s remarks about his lack of a living income, this must have seemed like girlish flummery. What is happening here is a refashioning of herself after her marriage. She would better be able to write in the country. She would dress well. She would no longer cuss like a trooper. She was redefining herself publicly.
But she was an amateur compared to Frost’s performing self. Frost called it “barding around,” and he would supplement his income for fifty years by giving such readings, at which he was eventually, if not this time at Bowdoin, canny and masterful. He performed his poetry for $50 at first, but by 1950 he was finally getting $1,000 for each appearance. He’d given forty readings in 1922 alone—grueling schedules of trains and discomfort and sleepless nights in strange hotel beds. Just the year before this reading, he’d been asked who might be willing to read at Amherst, where he was then teaching. He recommended Millay without reservation. According to his most recent biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, he was wry about Millay, “whose notorious sexual life and highly charged verses,” he said, “had won her a large audience. Miss Millay is a great audience killer.… She loses nothing of course by her reputation for dainty promiscuity.… She is already a love-myth. I don’t have to tell you how much I admire her less flippant verse.”
On May 24, 1925, Eugen, who had already taken over a good deal of Vincent’s correspondence (sometimes even to her mother, whom he called “Mother Millay,” or “M.M.” for short), had very good news indeed: Edna was to be given an honorary doctor of letters degree by Tufts College in Boston. “So,” he wrote Cora, “after the 15th of June, you will have to address your letters to your daughter: Edna St. Vincent Millay, A.B. Litt.D.”
On May 21, 1925, Edna St. Vincent Millay was deeded a property of 435 acres, “two roods and twenty-five rods of land more or less,” for a consideration of $9,000 in the town of Austerlitz, in Columbia County in New York State. They’d found an abandoned farm through an advertisement in The New York Times. By July she named it Steepletop, after a common wildflower that grew everywhere on the hills and meadows around the house. A tall single-stemmed plant with a cluster of pale pink flowers at the top that forms a plume, it’s more often known as hardhack. The place had been a dairy farm.
“Here we are, in one of the loveliest places in the world,” Edna wrote her mother. The house was not, however, quite in the “really splendid condition” they said it was. In fact, by June 22 she was telling her mother that they were “working like Trojans, dogs, slaves.” Still, they were “crazy about it.” But their expenses mounted: “The furnace & bathroom alone come to a thousand dollars. It’s terrible. But it’s going to be a sweet place when it’s finished—and it’s ours, all ours, about seven hundred acres of land & a lovely house, & no rent to pay, only a nice gentlemanly mortgage to keep shaving a slice off.”
Then she fell into the sort of comical baby talk that always signaled something was wrong: “We’re so excited about it we are nearly daft in the bean—kidney bean, lima bean, string-bean, butter-bean—you dow whad I bean—ha! ha! ha!”
One month later they were still at it. Gene’s nephew Freddie, his brother Robert’s son, was a landscape gardener; he’d given them help and fresh courage because they were just about spent in the exhausting labor of the renovation.
You see, we have had living with us for three weeks now six masons, four plumbers, two carpenters, two ineffectual and transient servants, and fifteen insubordinate and mischievous berry-picking children. They don’t spend the night here, but they might as well, for they appear in the morning before we are dressed, and tramp through the bedrooms without knocking, bearing ladders and bricks and trowels and buckets of cement.
There wasn’t “a spot within a quarter of a mile where I can stand and brush my teeth except in full sight of some of them.”
She wanted to show her mother everything, not just write to her. But she’d even had to stop writing because “I have a headache all the time lately and spots before my eyes, and, as mother used to say, I don’t feel so darned well myself. I have no idea what the trouble is.… I imagine I got too tired just at first. I worked frightfully hard.”
She tried to make the renovation sound like a romp, but the constant disorder and the hard work were taking their toll:
I am going to Pittsfield … to have my eyes examined. I went to a general practitioner in Great Barrington, a very good man, I think, who assures me there’s nothing the matter with my heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, lights, etc., so I imagine it must be my eyes. I’ve had a headache for two months now without an hour’s respite, and dark spots before my eyes all the time, so if it isn’t something else, it damn well must be my eyes, for it’s damn well something.
Then she told her mother that if she needed more money than she was enclosing, “I can always go out and gather a few dollars for you; but it’s been a very wet spring here, and it will be late in October before the dollars are really ripe enough to drop from the bough.”
2
In June 1925, just as Arthur Ficke was leaving for Harvard to read the Phi Beta Kappa poem at commencement, he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He went anyway, but immediate
ly afterward the Fickes left for Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, the location of a famous sanitarium for tuberculosis. Eugen, who maintained the correspondence, wrote to them from Austerlitz in the fall:
Darling children,
—I’m writing in Vincent’s bed room. She is feeling rotten. But the fire is blazing away in the fireplace and the hot water spouts out of the spigot in the bathroom, and things are getting to look like something.…
But we are homesick for you two. The couch is in front of the huge big fireplace in the living room, but we want to have you sit on it, and we want to discuss many things with you. We haven’t had a discussion with you for so long that I’m afraid poor Arthur will have so many wrong ideas about God and Coolidge and cheese and automobiles and books, Poor Artie. Come quickly to Vince and Ugin and we will tell you what’s what in this world and the next.… We are planning to fetch the Mercer next week and will come over to see you and rest and drink gin and talk too much and smoke too much. That is provided we can gather enough money to get the Mercer out of hock.
Vincent added:
Darling Artie and Gladdie,
Vincent can’t write a letter ’cause she’s so tired and sick, and got a headache, and got the curse, and you know, and all that—but she loves you both desperately, desperately, and longs to see you … & oh, Artie & Gladdy, we miss you so! Please, please love us always, & we’ll love you always, & then, anyway, there’ll always be that!—
Vincent
Not long after this they received a letter from Gladys telling them that they were going to Santa Fe for Arthur to recuperate. Eugen wrote his third letter that week trying to talk them out of going. As for Vincent, she was beside herself: “I am speechless with despair. Just when we’re beginning to see the end of the tunnel. Oh, what’s the use. I suppose you’ll be gone a year.”
They would try to see them before they left, “but,” she wrote, “suppose we can’t—& suppose you can’t come here—it’s Separation, by God, that’s what & nothing less.”
Gene admitted in another letter that Vincent had been sick for the past three months, “pretending not to be sick and would work and then have to stay in bed for days.” He was, he said, dreadfully unhappy about her. “What is the good of the house, the scenery, the beauty, the apples and pears and the ripening tomatoes if Vincie is feeling rotten? What’s the good of anything?”
By November they were in New York, where they had systematically begun to search for a doctor
who would cure Vincent. We went everywhere and saw every kind of specialist, from a pedicure to a sinecure (I hope you get my jeu-de-mots). Finally a specialist in Boston who had examined her sinuses sent us to N.Y.… She has been X-rayed all over and all kinds of tests taken in the most unromantic way, and now they know that she has been suffering from toximia, which has finally got her dreadfully weak and she was having now a nervous breakdown.
Bed rest and isolation were required. “Just a little of me, but not much. She has a nurse who does funny things to her at 8 a.m. and keeps it up until 4 p.m.”
He had to close Steepletop. “All the beautiful, expensive water put in with such heart-breaks, and so much money, is going to be cut off.… And then Eugin is going to walk the lonely streets of New York, with a lump in his throat. And Vince in bed, and Artie and Gladdy way down south and everything.———”
While his letter bounded gaily on for nineteen pages, there was this: “Gladdy, will you come and have some fun with Ugin in New York. I will ship my sick poet to yours. And then we’ll pick them up later. Whatyer-say?—Let’s park them for a while.” It was the first sign that Eugen was tiring of all the illness.
3
By the fall Millay had sent only two scenes of the last act of The Casket of Glass to Deems Taylor. The third scene remained in her handwritten draft. Having made that beginning in the midst of the pandemonium of construction at Steepletop, now she tossed it. She began fiddling with a new idea. By November, Eugen said she had it: “Vincent now has a theme for her opera. She is crazy about it.
“My poet,” he continued, “is doing fairly well, but it is a slow business.” They were staying in New York briefly and then spent a week in Atlantic City, “waiting until she can come to a sanatorium in Stockbridge.… Then she stays two or three weeks and/or months, and then she must come to New York to see whether they want to take her tonsils out.”
Edna was really no better in Atlantic City. Eugen put her to bed, tucked her in with a hot-water bottle at her feet before a wide-open window:
She looks over the ocean, she drinks in soft mild salt sea air; her nostrils quiver with delight, like full blooded Arabian steed.—And twice a day Ugin pushes her in a chair on wheels, miles & miles along beautiful sea and pretty shops.—And we are indecently happy.
Eugen remained cheerful. It must have been hard to remain always the cheerful one. Only once in the drifts of letters he wrote, early in December, did he admit
God, but it will be wonderful when Vincent is on her feet again and can do what she likes, and may be, once we all four get roaringly, indecently, hilariously, indiscretely and indiscriminatingly drunk. I’m sick of medicines and doctors and carefulness. Well, that’s off my chest.
At last, instead of going to the sanitarium in Stockbridge, in December they returned to Steepletop. “We saw the last dozen specialists last week, and it was agreed and decided by them that what we had done for Vincent so far was all wrong, and now she must have good air and exercise and we must go back to Steepletop.”
Eugen had been offered a job; “and,” he told Arthur,
as soon as Vincent is strong enough that I can leave her alone with Mother Millay, I intend to get my nephew here to look after things and go to New York and take that job. Jesus, how I’m longing to have her well.—We are beginning to be sick of it.
Then he added, “Oh, and I forgot to tell you that I love Vincent. No, I did tell you that some time ago, I believe.”
Cora was now with them. “Mother Millay and I do some splendid team-work and are giving Vincent a cure of rest, exercise, good food, fresh high dry air, and funny inside treatments,” Eugen wrote. “We have read all about her trouble in learned books and I think she is gaining weight and will soon be strong enough to get well.”
Now she had them both caring for her.
CHAPTER 22
Kathleen wasn’t up to snuff, either. She had begun to write fiction, and she was mired in a novel centered on her mother’s life. While Vincent had invited Cora to come to her, she didn’t want to separate her mother from Kathleen in Camden. Eugen added that it would be wonderful if Kay could come with her, “because the workmen will have left by that time, and you & I could look after the two little Millay kids.” But Kathleen didn’t come, and by the fall of 1925 Cora was living at Steepletop. That winter Cora hired Helen Nitkoski, the young daughter of the farmer who owned the caretaker’s house across the road from Steepletop.
Cora did the cooking and all the hard work, Helen recalled. “All I did was get the vegetables ready and wash the dishes.… I came only in the morning, about nine or nine-thirty. She never cared what time I came. Edna, I never saw. Cora was the housekeeper. She was a hardworking woman. Edna just looked tired. She seemed fragile. Every single morning she’d go do her writing.
“Cora was very affectionate, very warm, but very lonely.… She talked a lot about her husband; he had been abusive, she said. Edna had decided not to have children. Cora told me that, and, yes, I think it disappointed her.”
Just before the turn of the year, Eugen told Arthur that Steepletop was as well equipped as a small country. It had to be; it was twelve degrees below zero, and they were snowbound.
We have 12 tons of coal in the cellar and 15 cords of wood in the shed, three fireplaces, two stoves, a furnace, a hot-water heater and plenty of matches. We have thousands of tins of everything, a huge bag of potatoes, 100 lbs. of sugar, flour, beans, peas, rice and.… Hanging from the rafters an enormous ham, bacon, pork
, a brave brace of ducks, pounds and pounds of coffee, fresh fish frozen into a prehistoric fossil and resuscitated by Mother Millay into a glorious New England fish chowder.
They were, in fact, he said, living like “pigs in clover, i.e., a bit swinishly but with much good humored jostling and creature comforts.”
Even though Vincent had the curse and was drinking her customary “anticurse” gin, she’d tied her hair in pigtails with the red twine from their Christmas presents, and they were having good times again. They’d bought an organ for ten bucks at a country auction and sang Christmas hymns. “It was lovely,” Eugen said, “Mother Millay’s touching tremulous little voice and my funny voice, now on, now off the key, and Vincent’s pure, true lovely voice democratically mixed in the ether.”
But the best news came the next week, when he told “Dear Artie, darling Gladdie” that
Hallelujah! Vincent has powdered her nose; Vincent has put on naughtie, gauzy, gazie undies! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! She is ribbald, she’s flippant. She has a pretty, pretty dress on. Jehovah, the highest, Hallelujah! Vincent is a little bit better. Better, but not well. It is: bad, better, well. I have thrown the advice of the 12 plus x doctors to the winds, and am giving her a Eugen-ic cure (ha, ha, ha). And it is helping her—.… Vincent has washed her hair. Apple-jack is in my round and freckled belly and all’s well with the world.
Now, he said, if Vincent would hurry up and get well he could still take the job he’d been offered. He didn’t say what that job was, “but I cannot leave just now.… I must make money, Vincent must finish her opera and get well.” Vincent added her own note: “This is me, Vince, in person, here to tell you that I eat my bran every day like a good nag.”
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