Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  But Eugen was mightily puzzled. On July 4, he wrote:

  My own sweet darling … I wonder what you mean by all right and I wonder why you want me to telephone you. I cannot get you out of my mind. I took a walk, but it is no good.… I know that you love me, but I long to hear you say it or write it. Of course you said a lot when you said that if you’d have to choose between us, you would come back to me.… But I am jealous of him. For what you feel for him. Are you a little bit in love with me? Do you sometimes think of me and want to touch me? That would be something.

  It was a reassurance she did not give him.

  2

  On the afternoon of June 24, 1932, Natalie Clifford Barney gave a tea for Edna at her legendary salon at 20, rue Jacob on the Left Bank, “to introduce a lot of French poets & people to Little Wincy-Pince,” Edna told Eugen.

  It’s going to be awful, such a noisy crowd. Miss Barney is charming, though, a great friend of Mme. Delarue-Mardrus, a great and famous Lesbian in her own right, & formerly a great & devoted friend of Remy de Gourmont, to whom he wrote his “Letters to an Amazon,” etc.—It will be interesting. I’m going to wear my simple little black ensemble from Worth’s.

  Goodbye,

  Heaps of love, darling

  From Freckles.

  Natalie Barney was rich, eccentric, tiny, seductive, and American. In her youth she was called “the wild girl from Cincinnati.” One of her dearest friends, Elisabeth de Gramont, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, said that in her were combined the grace of the American woman “and Palestinian nonchalance.” She was a Jew. Hidden in the courtyard of her small house was a temple of friendship around which Colette, as well as Mata Hari, had once gamboled nude and on horseback. The ground floor of the main rooms of the house had been covered in pink damask, but that was in 1909, when Barney first rented the property. Now the damask had paled until it was the color of silken flesh. There were alabaster chandeliers festooned with pretty glass fruits, and several dour portraits hung in the entry hall, among them friends of Natalie’s painted by her mother, Alice Pike Barney, who had studied with Whistler. The entire house seemed to breathe decadence.

  It was into this milieu that Millay’s friend Allan Ross Macdougall brought Donald Gurney, who was “fresh out of Harvard, if one can ever be that,” he said many years later. “You see, I was looking for a Proustian world—Proust had been to Natalie’s—and no, that was not what I found. Natalie was already an older woman. She looked like an abbess—she dressed like one. She was very severe, a long dark cloak. She was very handsome, even then, blond and blue-eyed, clear eyes. Romaine Brooks was there, of course.… She looked like a good English housekeeper in her grey flannels with white collar and cuffs.”

  Early that June 1932, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus had written to Edna in Paris, saying “Miss Barney needs to see you. I do too.” How, she asked, did she expect them to assist in her French “gloire” if she kept slipping away like an eel? On the twelfth of June, Millay heard directly from Natalie Barney, who invited her to dine the next night, at eight, in Millay’s former quartier on the Left Bank. “We want you to help us choose the poems to be read on the 24th. ‘Dougy’ will read 2 sonnets and L.D.M. two of her translations—and Rachel one of them and one English? poem—and you?” She added this touching note: “I am glad of your dedication to Elinor Wylie. I only know that masterpiece of hers Mr. Hazard & Mr. Hodge … and a few poems; perhaps you will tell me more about the living poet—and not let me miss meeting you. I sometimes feel somewhat of an exile.”

  Millay didn’t make that supper. She had begun to work on her preface to The Princess Marries the Page, and she was in the mood to finish it. “I can’t keep Harpers waiting any longer,” she wrote Eugen. “—People will be interested in what I tell them, very likely. They’re crazy about That Personal Touch.”

  The winter before, when the reviews from Fatal Interview were still coming in, she’d arranged with Harper to publish what she called this “little play.” She was always precise about what the format and look of her books should be. “Woodblocks won’t do at all,” she wrote her editor, Eugene Saxton.

  The play is too slight to be printed so seriously. What I really want—and if it is too expensive just now to bring it out in this way, then I would really rather wait, I think, until everybody has more money—what I really want is a big, flat book perhaps 14 by 10 with many colored illustrations.… I want the book to be a Christmas gift book and as gaudy as a Christmas tree.

  Harper brought it out on October 19, 1932, with exactly the pretty, gay decorations she’d hoped for. It was stamped in gold with colored drawings and facsimiles of a sheet of music by Deems Taylor.

  Millay dropped Mary Kennedy a hasty note, inviting her to dinner on the evening of June 22. She said she wanted to pump her for information about the Philadelphia production of Princess, in which Mary had starred, “and to give myself the fun of seeing you.—I’ve been to see you twice—did you know that?—My child, I live just around the corner from you, in the very next street—it was as much of a surprise to myself as it will be to you!” Afterward she invited her to the tea at Natalie Barney’s.

  “It was all very gracefully done,” Mary recalled. “And then Edna recited some of her poems. But as she began she said that ‘Renascence’ was an adolescent experience … and I felt that she was making a little excuse for these poems.”

  Donald Gurney also remembered the evening well; he was curious, playful, and indiscreet:

  Rachel Berendt read “Renascence.” And at this point—well, Natalie Barney was in love with her, and she was a glorious creature—when she suddenly threw her arm up with the line “I screamed to touch the sky”—and her dark long hair fell forward and down across her face—ah, well, all the ladies gasped.

  Rachel Berendt was of course a famous actress, and a rather famous lesbian, too. She played all of Giroudoux; she was dark, Jewish, I should think, and with a perfectly beautiful voice.

  Of Edna Millay in that milieu:

  All I can say … is that she seemed at home. She was a smiling, a very American looking girl in that particular world—which was largely, but not entirely by any means, French, rather jaded, and always very well dressed. No self-respecting American woman would be seen there. Oh, no! Edith Wharton would never have come, never! And of the intellectual world that counted, both French and American would pass through Natalie Barney’s afternoons. Colette was often there, barefoot in her sandals, which did cause a sensation. Her feet were so dirty! Gertrude Stein was very self-assured.

  Just before she read, Millay was drawn into a conversation with Mme. Delarue-Mardrus, who was talking about her recent trip to the States. “Wonderful country! So alive, so vigorous! But such bad food!” “Edna’s eyebrow was raised quizzically as she heard these touristic clichés,” Macdougall reported. “Then she began an interrogation which was at once a patriotic dithyramb and a gastronomic prose poem in praise of her country’s native products and dishes.…

  “In your travels, chère madame, did you ever taste the lobsters that come from the waters off the coast of my home state, Maine? Broiled or boiled and served with melted, fresh country butter, they are unforgettable. Did you have fish chowder made of haddock, Maine potatoes, onions, salt pork and rich milk?” The travelled literary lady slowly shook her head.

  “Were you ever introduced to Boston Baked Beans?” Edna continued. “I mean the kind baked in an old-fashioned crock. We cook them slowly and for long hours in the oven and serve them sometimes with such brown bread as can be found in no other part of the world. Did you ever have Cherrystones or Little Necks; and did you ever, by chance, taste a Provincetown clam pie made of the deep-sea Quahogs and a liberality of olive oil and garlic, cooked by one of the Portuguese fishermen who had hauled in the clams himself? Were oyster-crabs and whitebait ever set crisp before you? Did you taste soft-shell crabs, lightly sauteed, or drink the juice of the soft-shell clam? I must say I have never met their like over here. And were y
ou ever a happy member of an old-fashioned clam-bake on a secluded New England beach?”

  “Hélas!” said Madame Mardrus; she had not been long enough in America to have experienced the primitive joys of a clam-bake.

  “Then what of the other American dishes that are seldom to be met with elsewhere on the gastronomic globe?” Edna asked. “There’s the shad roe and the shad itself, both broiled; sweet corn and sweet potatoes; pumpkin pie and deep-dish blueberry pie; diamond-back terrapin done as the Balti-moreans do it in a rich Madeira stew, or as the Philadelphians do it with egg-yolks, cream and ‘sweet butter in a lordly dish.’ Then there’s Philadelphia Pepperpot which has tripe in it, and that same city’s surprising mixture of tripe and oysters. There’s the Creole Jambalaya of New Orleans made with savory rice and shrimps almost as big as your French écrevisses.

  “We have also our native blueberries. And there are our cranberries and our beach-plums which I used to gather on Cape Cod. We make delicious preserves from them. Oh, there are many other products and dishes native to states and regions of my country. If you have never tasted them, ma chère, you cannot in all fairness judge American cuisine.… ”

  As Madame Mardrus started to say something in reply we were called into the other room. I heard her there tell her friend, Romaine Brooks, the painter, that she thought Edna’s defense of her country’s specialités gastronomiques was tres bien faite.

  Norma was surprised when Gene, as she usually called him, told her Edna was going to call from Paris and that he insisted she be with him when he took the call in Pittsfield. “I didn’t know why she’d stayed [in Paris]—or that Dillon was there.… Gene was terribly excited and nervous. And I didn’t realize there was a chance of her not coming back. Until I got in the car. He said, ‘Maybe she’s not coming back, Norma.’ He began to talk nervously, talked because he was nervous. He never really talked to me before. And I didn’t know what he was talking about. My God! He might easily, being Gene, not have asked me to come along.… We got to the hotel, and I sat in the lobby. He went to the desk. They assigned him a room, and he went upstairs. After a while … he came to the top of the stairs and shouted, ‘Norma! Come say hello to Vincent. She is coming home!’

  “So, yes! Sure I did! It sounded as if she were underwater; it was a bad connection.… I said, ‘I can’t wait to see you. When are you coming home?’

  “She seemed excited. I was very gay. Gene was beside himself.”

  On July 5, the day of their telephone call, Millay had apparently decided to come home. Eugen was not to go to her in France; instead he went to New York to await her arrival. “I’m going to fetch Edna!” was how he put it to Norma.

  CHAPTER 29

  Edna did not leave Paris after she talked to Norma and Eugen on July 5, 1932. Alix Daniels insisted that Millay remained in Paris, but the rancor that laced her memories made her a questionable source. Millay, however, kept a series of index cards listing chronologically the crucial events of her life. In 1932, along with her walking trip to Mallorca, she made this notation: “Eugen to Paris—Veendam 3rd class Venice.” Venice?

  George Dillon had formed a friendship with a man called Arthur Meeker from Chicago who adored him, and together they had decided to go to Venice without Millay. Whether she was hurt or humiliated and angry is hard to know for certain; whether Dillon was more deeply involved with Meeker than anyone knew or admitted is impossible to know. But Millay decided to follow them. Eugen did come to Paris and, according to their passports, they both entered Italy on August 8 and departed together on the tenth. By August 11, 1932, they left Le Havre, bound for America. Eugen was bringing her home, just as he’d said he would.

  There is almost no correspondence in Millay’s hand from the time she returned to Steepletop in August 1932 until that Christmas. In a working notebook there is this poem, dated November 12, 1932:

  Distresséd mind, forbear

  To tease the hooded Why;

  That shape will not reply.

  From the safe chair

  To the wind’s welter

  Flee, if storm’s your shelter.

  But no, you needs must part—

  Fling him his release!—

  On whose ungenerous heart

  Alone, you are at peace.

  Her choice of verbs is key: “Forbear … Flee … Fling him his release!” She is in her old high mode, imperious, if hurt, very like her voice in “Fatal Interview.” But the final two lines betray a recognition more painful than loss: she needs him.

  The poem will become Part III of the five-part “Not So Far as the Forest,” published the following year in a magazine but withheld from book publication until 1939, when it was included in Huntsman, What Quarry? For Huntsman, she wrote later in a letter to her editor, was to be made up of “mostly love poems” composed of “what might be called the more personal of the new poems I have been writing.”

  V

  Poor passionate thing,

  Even with this clipped wing how well you flew!—though not so far as the forest.…

  Rebellious bird, warm body foreign and bright,

  Has no one told you?—Hopeless is your flight

  Towards the high branches. Here is your home,

  Between the barnyard strewn with grain and the forest tree.

  Though Time refeather the wing,

  Ankle slip the ring,

  The once-confined thing

  Is never again free.

  “There were only two or three really important things in Vincent’s life,” Charles Ellis once said, “and George Dillon was one of them. He was weak, queer as a three-dollar bill.… He was a handsome boy, a very good-looking boy. But weak all the way through. And while she was not dominant—far from it—she could be suddenly assertive and aggressive, if she wanted to be. If she had reason to be. If it was something important to her.”

  On Christmas Day 1932, Millay began the first of a series of Sunday-night readings of her poems over the air on a nationwide hookup on WJZ Blue Network, arranged by Eugen’s old friend Margaret Cuthbert. Cuthbert was one of the pioneers of American radio broadcasting, and according to her nothing like Millay’s reading had ever been done before on air. For the first time a literary figure was on equal footing with dramatic performers and distinguished concert artists. Thousands of people heard Millay’s voice. They heard her in Illinois and Michigan, in Nebraska and Texas, and once having heard her, they wrote to her. Sometimes they sent her their own poems. They told her that her voice was as lovely as her poetry. They sent in hundreds of letters, and in these letters they asked for her advice, they told her they’d fallen a little in love with her. A farm family in Missouri wrote “that the very sound of your voice transforms our country living room into a place of magic.” What her listeners most seemed to like was her informality, the way she’d say, as if to herself, “Don’t be nervous” when she couldn’t find a poem. They told her it was as if she were in the room with them. It was her voice that they most often responded to:

  It’s simply intoxicating. Don’t, don’t ever change, and become stiff or formal or eloquent.… You sound so real, so natural, so—so very much alive. Even with the frightful cold you had.… Miss Millay—please do not stop your Sunday nights, go on and on and on. We cannot have too much of you.

  It was a performance, and it was exhausting hard work. Her apparent nonchalance came from the ability that very few writers have, to seem to reach over and touch the listener with her voice.

  To her friends Lulu and Alyse in England, she wrote in her offhand way, “I got a job reading my poems over the radio—eight Sunday evenings—which kept me so late into the winter and made me so tired that when it was over we just rushed to Florida to get out of the cold and into the sunshine—I needed it badly.”

  Of course it wasn’t just a job. People who’d never given a thought to poetry or poets, who may have turned on their radios out of curiosity, stayed to listen for every Sunday night for two months. A friend of Margaret Cuthber
t said she would never forget the sound of Millay’s voice. “It was dramatic, lifting and falling without anything forced about it. She was a person who made one believe, in her presence, that there is a muse. And Edna was visited by her.

  “You know, Edna did not want to record her voice, Margaret persuaded her to do it in the name of posterity. I can still hear her talking to Edna, telling her what it would mean someday, in the future.

  “I remember the first time she heard the recordings played back to her. It was the first time she had ever heard her own voice. ‘Is that really my voice?’ she said and paused. ‘Quite lovely, isn’t it?’ ”

  2

  For years Edna and Eugen had dreamed of owning an island off the coast of Maine. In July 1933, almost a full year after her return from Paris, they drove up to visit Tess Root Adams, her dear friend from their days together in Shillingstone, at her summer place on Bailey’s Island. It was from the Root cottage that Millay first saw Ragged Island, the outermost island of Casco Bay, four miles out to sea. The Root cottage sits directly on the shore of the Atlantic coast; to the east, seen between the wooden porch pillars, lies Ragged Island. On July 3 and 4, 1933, Edna entered just four words in her diary:

  Ragged Island

  Garnet Rocks.

  Ragged Island consisted of some eighty acres with a single house at the head of a natural harbor, which could be entered only at high tide. There were fields of wild roses, white and pink, and wild mustard that grew to the edge of the pebble beach. Two weeks later, Ragged Island was theirs. A gleeful Tess sent them the telegram confirming their purchase: WELL BABY WE BOUGHT IT. When the message was spoken over the telephone to Steepletop, it became WHERE IS BABY WE BOARDED. Mary Kennedy, who was visiting them, remembered that Edna and Eugen, puzzled, kept asking the operator to repeat it. Finally the exasperated operator said, “It’s perfectly clear, Madam, that the other party wants to know where is the child they left with you!”