Her reviews, however, were becoming more and more mixed. Some were downright dismissive, beginning to suggest that her celebrity had outstripped her poetry and that the younger generation was moving on. In the first sentence of Horace Gregory’s review in the New York Herald Tribune Books section, he made direct reference to Millay’s popularity:
In reading the name of Edna Millay across the title page of a new book of poems a number of definite pictures flow through the mind. It is like unrolling a newsreel of twelve years ago. I remember a sunlit, white-columned veranda of a sorority house in a middle-Western university. A girl in a red sweater was reading aloud to me the first poem in “Second April.”
He could tell from this young woman’s voice that the poem meant more to her than what it actually said. It meant “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” It was, he wrote, as if she had been reading a letter from a friend.
Here was a woman speaking to other women, a poet who was a celebrity in New York’s Greenwich Village, who had been an actress on the stage of the Provincetown Theater, a young woman who smoked cigarettes as she read her poems in lecture halls, rented for the evening by local women’s clubs. These details, trivial as they may seem today, were then the gestures of revolt against convention; the poet was a new woman, the symbol of emancipation whose presence was acknowledged by Woodrow Wilson as he signed the bill admitting Votes for Women into an amendment of the Constitution.
This may have been the first time her life was being reviewed, her work taken to task for its reception and popularity; it would not be the last. Mil-lay’s poetry appealed to a larger public than most poets ever hope to reach. Gregory reduced that appeal to immature girls—or, as they aged, to unhappy women. It was an attack disguised as a review.
It was left for Miss Millay to crystallize an impression left upon the public mind when Sara Teasdale wrote:
My room was white with the sun
And Love cried out to me,
“I am strong, I will break your heart
Unless you set me free.”
She was to recite that statement as a Bill of Rights and to give it a name, a personality, a legend. It was as though she had created a character … who could say with perfect freedom that she had fallen in love or out, who could be faithless as any man or as faithful. The gesture was always a bit theatrical, and one always found it difficult to discern where genuine emotion left off and a pose began.… Following a standard set by a crude application of American Pragmatism, the picture “worked”; it was effective, and after it had stepped from its frame into the lives of a thousand women, it began to animate a thousand lesser Millays. Hundreds of women were stirred to writing verse, to say again what Edna Millay had said the year before.
In closing, Gregory strangely chided her for no longer writing for undergraduates. Undergraduate girls distrusted her now, he claimed; “their freedom is of the kind described by Spender and Auden, that lies at the end of a road through ruin and dissolution, a map whose landmarks are ‘Das Capital’ [sic], the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of D. H. Lawrence.…
“If,” he said, these undergraduates “are reading women poets” at all, they “veer toward the more intense, more sensitive verse of Leonie Adams and Louise Bogan.”
It was left to Louise Bogan—the poet Horace Gregory chose to compare favorably to Millay—to champion Wine. Bogan wrote in Poetry magazine that the difficult transition of any poet as she matured was to risk breaking with her past achievements:
In her latest book, Wine from These Grapes, Edna Millay at last gives evidence that she recognizes and is prepared to meet the task of becoming a mature and self-sufficing woman and artist. It is a task she never completely faced before.… The accent of chagrin and desperation, both resolved and unresolved, is there—the sound of bitter thought, of meditation, of solitude, of the clear, disabused and unexcited mind.… she has crossed the line, made the break, passed into regions of cold and larger air.
A month after this review, the same reporter who had mocked the desperate and uncertain Scott Fitzgerald for his Tender Is the Night caught Millay at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. She had, he noted, grown up. “I’m forty-two; just mention it once in your story and then, please, forget it!” In boldface, the headline read, “Poetic Strife Begins at 42 for Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
The press would hang on her words and then skewer her with them. The subhead of the piece in the New York Post was “Indignation at the Cosmic Scheme Is the Motif of Our Erstwhile Sprite.”
Millay knew she was undermining herself by giving the reporters the words they would use to nail her: “I know I sound like a fool.… I always look like a moron in the newspapers.” When she’s asked to be specific, she is, and not about poetry:
I am disgusted with the hollow talk of disarmament. Men sent to Geneva equipped with every facility.… Thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent.… There’s talk of world peace … talk, talk, talk.
And then you follow the newspapers: Italy resents German attitude … France ready to fight for the Saar Valley.… In England, Ramsay MacDonald says there shouldn’t be so much freedom of speech and so many attacks on the established things.…
Winston Churchill cries out that Britain should have an air force second to none, like her navy.… And then we observe Armistice Day. We put wreaths on the grave of the Unknown Soldier, who’s pretty damn well known by now as the symbol of the next war … while Japan penetrates China.
Listening in stunned silence, the reporter asked two questions: First, should the profit system be abolished?
Yes, I blame the system.… I should like to live in a world where everybody has a job, leisure for study, leisure to become wiser, more perceptive.… I am willing to give up everything I possess, everything I ever will have.… I am willing to live in the simplest life … to live in a hut, on a loaf a day (Oh, I do know this sounds idiotic!) to achieve it.
And: “Do you want Communism?”
No, no, I do not.… Communism is repugnant to me.… I am intensely an individualist.… I cannot bear to have a thousand well-wishers breathe on my neck.
From this point on, the FBI—which had been tracking her lackadaisically since she had given one dollar to buy Soviet tractors back in 1920—became more alert.
That fall Millay’s editor, Eugene Saxton, invited her to meet another Harper author, the young Frederic Prokosch, whose novel Harper was about to publish. Prokosch made no impression whatsoever upon Millay, but he observed her with curiosity. In his memoirs nearly fifty years later, he described Saxton as a lovable Pickwickian character, “like a figure in an engraving by Phiz.” He found Saxton at the bar in the Vanderbilt, sitting beside “a lady in a gray flannel suit, with a blue-striped shirt and a green silk cravat. Her cheeks were puffed and shiny, her hair hung loose and colorless, and her eyes were blurred and watery, as though worn by lamentation.”
Millay had just come from autographing three hundred and thirty-five sets of the limited edition and thirty-six sets on Japan vellum of the ultra-limited edition of Wine. She was cross-eyed with fatigue. They had a round of martinis.
“I have spent the whole morning signing my books,” said Miss Millay. “I am utterly exhausted. Just look. My hand is shaking. That’s the trouble with being a celebrity. One gets sucked into the whirlpool. One does things that one shouldn’t be doing and says things one shouldn’t be saying and life grows horribly cheap and perfunctory and vulgar. I should never have consented to read my poems in public. It makes them sound so blatant. I feel like a prostitute.”
“Not a prostitute surely, Edna dear,” said Saxton with alarm.
“Or pretty damn close to it. One feels so pawed over. I keep thinking of Emily Dickinson. All those thousands of slips of paper. Nobody ever pawed her over in this cheap, macabre fashion.”
“There still was a trace of a prancing charm and a young vulnerability,” Prokosch wrote. He felt a sort of
loyalty to Miss Millay which dated b
ack to the exhilarating twenties. Wine from These Grapes had just been published and I was sadly disappointed but I still felt an affection for Second April and Fatal Interview. “The sonnets I loved best,” I murmured half guiltily, “were ‘Only until this cigarette is ended’ and ‘Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave.’ ”
She glanced at me quickly with a panic-stricken glitter. “You say loved. It’s all over, then? Never mind. It’s rather a blow but there are worse things that can happen, even to the best of us.” … Then she plucked a cigarette from a flat silver case and lit it ceremoniously with her freckled fingers.
2
When George Dillon found himself increasingly bogged down in the Baudelaire translations, Edna and Eugen invited him to Steepletop for the summer. Eugen wired the invitation, which George accepted immediately: “It is like you to send the telegram others would just think of sending. In this case your good deed is going to flower and bear fruit—it is as welcome as a rainfall on the dusty hills of Kansas and it has the same effect on my drooping spirit.” George had sent Millay several of his translations and asked her to write the introduction to his Baudelaire, if she liked them. Crucially, she agreed.
George’s letter to Eugen continued:
I have never done anything that made me feel so alone, so absolutely cut off from the world around me.… Your friendly appreciation, and a note from Vincent saying that she will write the introduction, have sufficed to bring back something of the old enthusiastic feeling I had a year ago, and I am determined to finish the book to the best of my ability.
The trouble was, he wrote Vincent, that by then he would probably be good for nothing, “and if I come I shall expect to be treated like an uninteresting old uncle and set off in a corner or under a tree with a book.”
There was something wildly disingenuous about this response. George Dillon was twenty-eight to Eugen’s fifty-five; Edna Millay was forty-three. Some old uncle! Years later he would tell a mutual friend that “though their hospitality was warm and constant, I didn’t go often to Steepletop.… they were usually surrounded by much older friends, and I felt somewhat out of it.” But by then he was cloaking the intimacy of their relationship. In 1935, no matter how avuncular he may later have claimed to be, when he accepted the invitation he was about to enter their world again. This exquisite fragment of an unpublished and undated poem found among Dillon’s papers tells us how he felt about Millay:
Finding her body woven
As if of flame and snow
I thought, however often
My pulses cease to go,
Whipped by whatever pain
Age or disease appoint,
I shall not be again
So jarred in every joint,
So mute, amazed, and taut
And winded of my breath—
Beauty being at my throat
More savagely than death.
It was a lovely summer at Steepletop. Cool green woods led to their farmhouse, its spring-fed pool surrounded by gardens of roses and Japanese irises. Two small stone fountains splashed water, and the grassy paths were overgrown with sweet fern, bordered by pines and fields of blueberries. Steepletop was not one of the grand dark-shingled Berkshire cottages. It was gay and playful and bohemian, free of the careful formality of Edith Wharton’s estate, The Mount, in nearby Lenox. It was a place where swimming suits were not welcome.
Indoors, Vincent and George began work on what was becoming their translation. For what had been “entirely George Dillon’s book,” Edna would write in her preface to the Baudelaire, had in fact become a collaboration. At first she had told herself she was just translating a phrase for fun, then as an exercise she’d translated an entire poem. After that she admonished herself, “you’ll go straight back to work on your own book, which is the most important thing in the world to you, and you won’t even think of translating another. This is what I said to myself, but neither of us believed me.… I was in for it.” This was precisely the phrase she had used in an early letter to Dillon, when she had first been in love with him. “From that day to this moment I have thought of nothing, lived for nothing, but my translations from Les Fleurs du Mal.”
George liked to sleep late, while Eugen, up early, bare-chested and in shorts, puttered around the gardens in the morning and whistled for Altair and Ghost to go for a walk. He cooked every meal, tempting feasts with lots of wine, and there were always gin rickeys at cocktail time by the pool. Eugen’s hair was thinning in the front now, and a faint bald spot showed up at his crown in the snapshots they took that summer—whereas George’s black unruly curls, wet after a swim, were as slick as licorice.
On June 11, there was a very silly sonnet-writing session among Edna, George, and Eugen at Steepletop, a copy of which Edna sent to Arthur Ficke. “Me & George & Ugin had hysterics over this sonnet last night. We shrieked, we rolled on the floor, we stuffed rugs into our mouths. Perhaps you can think up some more. There are some more. We just had to stop because we were afraid we were going to die.
“I was Brynhilde, but am now grown old.
I saw Valhalla fallen, and Wotan dead.
My spear is heavier than my arm can hold,
My wingéd casque a weight upon my head.…
I see around me in a rocky place
A ring of flame, and hear the voice of him,
Sieglinde’s son, who, roving with a pack
Of young companions, children of the brave,
Shouted and plunged and took upon his back
The crested fire as it had been a wave.
Oh, laughing boy,—oh, to this moment dear!
Who seeing me stared and said, ‘A woman here?’
Of young companions, bravest of the brave
” ” , in the brook to lave
” ” ” , none of them a slave,
” ” ” , hating to behave,
” ” ” , through the forest grave (nave)
” ” ” , hunting for a cave,
” ” ” , in a manner suave,
” ” ” , boredom off to stave,
” ” ” , still too young to shave,
” ” ” , hell about to pave,
” ” ” , did not stamp or rave
” ” ” , (one of them called ‘Dave’)”
But what happened when Edna and George sat in the library upstairs at Steepletop sparring over a word, disagreeing, then suddenly in absolute agreement? Eugen must have felt out of place. No one not engaged in those impossibly strict translations could have hoped to share the enflaming intensity of their labor, their intellectual play, their connection.
On July 23, Eugen left them alone together at Steepletop and wrote to Edna from the Turner Inn in Keene, New Hampshire:
Darling,
Although we did not make an agreement, I come Friday trusting that we did really make an agreement.—
I’ll leave Monday.—
All my love
Uge
This note implied a lot. Eugen would return, but for a weekend only. “When three weeks later he sent her a snapshot of himself, freshly shaven, in a linen suit, looking very well groomed, he looked worried. As well he might be. For once again, Eugen had withdrawn, leaving them alone. On his way to Ragged Island, Maine, Eugen wrote her again:
Darling Freckles,
I’m so unbelievably happy, that I must write to you.… It was blowing a little and the sea was running, but not quite so badly as when we sailed and rowed over. You remember.… At 6 p.m. the wind had freshened, white caps all over and dirty clouds to the S.W.… An hour later it blew like the devil.… A nice little storm, with the breakers making white spray against a black sky way up in the air, and the grass blown flat on the ground, and the Greasy Joan [their skiff] riding sweetly on the hall-off, and I snug in the kitchen looking at “the scenery.”—I know this reads like a letter of a 12 year old boy to his mama, but that’s the way I feel.…
It is funny, but the happier I am the more I want you and long for
you and Christ I long for you. I want to show you so many things.… My warmed over fish chowder is smelling up the whole house, so I guess it is boiling and I’d better eat it.
He was beginning to sound just as he had in the letters he had written to her when she’d been in France with Dillon in the summer of 1932—Eugen, the one who cooks and provides, tempting her with sweet dishes, with flowers, with the natural world of which he is master. It took him six more pages to tell her what he really felt:
Love certainly is funny, not to say entertaining.—Here I am happy, oh so happy, being alone on my beautiful fearful island.… and I must write and long for a red haired freckled unfaithful little bitch with beautiful breasts and an innocent child’s red kitty.… This is a crazy letter.
Eugen’s excessiveness was a part of his nature. He was stirred by her unfaithfulness. She seemed to be most alluring to him when she was least available.
I am crazy with delight of all here, and crazy for you.—Remain my own darling unfaithful Vince and my darling, Scramoodles and true, after your own fashion to your own
Skiddlepins.—
Eugen never knew when to stop. He pressed—not like a man who was sure of himself but like a man who was demonstrating his need and his sincerity. He insisted. He repeated. It’s as if by insisting he could make his love more true.
And then, finally:
I L O V E Y O U.—
Ugin signing off.—
Please, please standbye?—
He was interminable. But he also seemed, this time, to be in control.
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