Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  One week later, George wrote to Saxton at Harper, using Eugen’s stationery with his name and “Steepletop” engraved on the letterhead: “Herewith the partial manuscript of the greatest verse translation of the twentieth century.” He was even cheeky:

  These copies can be treated as carelessly as you like. We will make entirely new ones for the final manuscript.

  We hope that you will still like the poems when you read them to yourself.

  Then, as a stunning postscript: “My address for the next two weeks will be in care of Mr. Boissevain, Orr’s Island, Maine.” They would be all together on Ragged Island.

  On the twenty-eighth of August, writing to Saxton from Orr’s Island, the post office for Ragged, George and Edna signed the Baudelaire contract. Dillon’s own publisher, the Viking Press, had written him a sharp letter. Viking was pleased for him that he was in a “brilliant collaboration” with Edna Millay, and it might well have been natural for him to assume “on account of Miss Millay’s longer standing as an author, that the book should go to her publishers, rather than to yours. On the other hand, the project was yours to begin with …”; the company reminded him politely that he still owed them his next book.

  When George sent this letter to Saxton, he added a note at the bottom. He was not bound to them for the Baudelaire, he said, since there was nothing in his contract about books written in collaboration. He asked that duplicate copies be sent to him, not only of the contracts but of all correspondence and proofs. While it was easier for Harper to write to Edna since they were constantly in touch with her about other matters, “that system is excellent as long as she and I are closely in touch, but after the First of the month we shall not be.”

  At the end of September, most of their translations were done, but Edna’s promised preface was still incomplete, and the biographical note she now felt compelled to write was not yet begun. She planned a week in Paris with Eugen to get both chapters absolutely right and complete.

  3

  On September 28, Millay received a disturbing letter from her father. He wrote from Kingman, Maine, and he sounded bewildered. “You will be surprised to hear from me and under such conditions,” he began. “Matters have gone badly with me for the last few years and I have gotten where I must do something.” He explained that he had suffered a stroke during the summer, and though he was improving, the town of Kingman, which owed him money, was bankrupt “and will never be in financial condition in time to be any good to me. I really have no income at all.” His friends had tried to help, but he had fallen into debt.

  Unless you can see your way clear to help me there is nothing for me but to apply to the state for aid which I am loath to do. My needs are not large; Some seven or eight dollars will take of me weekly after my immediate needs are taken care of me.

  Several times in this brief letter he misconstructed his request for help: he meant “take care of me.”

  It is quite possible that I may not have to be cared for me very long.…and if you feel that you want to help me rather than call on the state, it will make me much happier in my old age.

  H. T. Millay

  After she helped him, he wrote to her once more: “I want to tell you that what you are doing for me is plenty and I am grateful beyond any I can say. I don’t know what I might have or could have done.” He signed this letter “Your Father.” It was ironic that the small sum Henry Millay asked of his daughter was only a few dollars more than what they had so desperately needed from him in her girlhood.

  It was the last letter she would ever receive from her father, who died in December. Eugen traveled alone to Maine to attend to his burial and to gather his few remaining personal possessions. None of his daughters went to the funeral.

  Not long after Edna and Eugen left for Paris, George wrote to Saxton to tell him that they had suggested he place some of his translations in magazines. He sounded sure and buoyant. On October 2, Saxton answered with discouraging news: Harper’s Magazine would have to print several poems to get the full effect of his effort, and there was no space for months to come, “since they have just made a similar program for Miss Millay’s Conversation at Midnight.” It seems cruel, or maybe just careless, of Edna and Eugen to have recommended something they must have known was unlikely to succeed. George’s hopes were thoroughly dashed. There is no evidence that he tried any other publication or that any other magazine took his work.

  His correspondence with his new publisher grew sharper after that. On December 30, 1935, Saxton wrote to him with the good news that the Baudelaire led the nonfiction list for Harper’s spring books at its sales conference. If Dillon had never before felt diminished by the force of Mil-lay’s reputation in relation to his own, he must have felt it now. Saxton continued:

  It has to do with the order of names on the title-page and jacket of the book, and it comes down to this: The whole selling staff is convinced that the appearance of Miss Millay’s name in second place … will indicate to the bookseller and the public that Miss Millay has only a minor association with the volume; and that the result will be a considerable loss of sales.

  The publisher’s emphasis was “to be placed on Miss Millay’s name, because it is her identification with the book that will increase the orders.”

  Dillon was to understand that none of this was Saxton’s personal viewpoint, “and I am not unmindful of your priority in the Baudelaire project and Miss Millay’s wish to recognize this.” This had nothing to do with quality or honor or position or priority, he assured him. However: “There can be no question that the use of Miss Millay’s name will make a tremendous difference in the fate of the book.” If Dillon agreed—and if Millay did—“wire me simply: Agree reversing names.’ ”

  In point of fact, Saxton had already delivered the same message to Mil-lay. He was not, he insisted, “unmindful of what you have said in your correspondence about Dillon’s priority in the Baudelaire project and your wish to recognize this.” But there was no question that the “use of your name will make a tremendous difference in the fate of the book.” He had hesitated to put this question before her, “and I know it will be an embarrassing one for you.” He assured her that he was not sending a copy of this letter to Dillon, and he asked her simply to wire him AGREE REVERSING NAMES, “and I will put the whole question to Dillon as a suggestion from this office, without indicating that you have reached any decision on the question. I can in fact frame a letter to him which I can also send to you at the same moment and ask for your joint reply.” But Millay did not agree. George’s name would come first.

  At the end of November, Edna wrote to Gladys Ficke, telling her that Eugen had found them a house in Florida

  somewhere between Palm Beach and Miami. I am going down tomorrow with the servants. I wanted so much to get over to see you and our darling Artie, but I am so simply exhausted after getting the Baudelaire off to Harpers, that packing—even with somebody else to pack under my direction!—is taking all the strength I have.… So I shan’t see you, kids, before I go. But I’ll see you next summer; and we’ll have lots of fun, because Arthur will be well again, and more like his cute, gay old self, and I shan’t be working so hard, so perhaps I shall be a bit more like my cute, gay old self!

  Eugen had found a furnished house near the Branns, their neighbors in Austerlitz, in Delray Beach. It had everything, Edna said, but hot water. The water was supposed to be heated on the roof by the sun, but since they had arrived it had been cold and rainy and foggy. Eugen wrote to Deems Taylor telling him there was nothing to do but collect shells and drink.

  Edna and I pick up shells.… Quite a number of people pick up shells. We have quite a number of palm trees around our house. Edna likes the noise they make; but I don’t. When the wind blows they make quite a lot of noise; Edna likes it. I don’t, though. Edna doesn’t like the Branns’ butler, though. I do, though. He puts lemon-juice in the martinis. I don’t like that.

  Eugen’s postscript was hilarious:

>   How much money can you lend me until the first week in May? I shall be quite rich again on the first of May, but I’m not very rich right now; in fact, all I have in my pockets is a fifty-cents piece, and I have to keep that to do a trick with. I could misuse two grand. But even one grand would come in and go out very handy. If not that, maybe you could let me have three dollars.

  Once they were settled at Delray Beach, Edna’s letters to Harper about the production of the Baudelaire began in earnest. By Christmas Day, she told George she was trying to get their final proofs back to Harper in

  time to have a nervous breakdown.… It is obvious that Harper & Bros. are trying to kill us so that they’ll never have to have anything to do with either of us again. You will have noticed that when they give us a week’s extension they give the printers a fortnight; it’s easy to see who is teacher’s pet here.… I’m perfectly furious with them.

  In a turn at once affectionate and chiding, while thanking him for catching a mistake she’d made, she twitted him for changing “Eldorado” to “El Dorado” in her translation of “Le Voyage”:

  Poe spelled it Eldorado; and that is probably why Baudelaire spelled it that way. Baudelaire must have read Poe’s poem “Eldorado” before he wrote “Le Voyage.” I know what an old pedant you are, and what a hopeless Anglophile; but it seems to me that in this particular book, what was good enough for Poe and good enough for Baudelaire ought to be good enough for us.

  George sheepishly agreed. He even agreed to the changes she made in the table of contents, and he requested of Harper only two things:

  On the page where our books are listed, mine are to be put underneath those of Miss Millay. I think the reason is obvious. It is only in connection with the Baudelaire, and due to the special circumstances of its production, that my name could take even typographical precedence above hers.

  But he did ask that in the copyright notice his name “correspond to the order of the names on the title page”; in other words, his name first.

  This is a small thing, but it will help in a slight way to substantiate the fact that this particular book was my project: which is the only excuse anyway for what will seem grotesque to everyone who opens the book—I mean the precedence of an obscure name over an illustrious one.

  When Millay got the jacket proof, she wired George:

  TITLE OF BOOK HEARTBREAKINGLY PEDESTRIAN AND DULL EVERYBODY WILL THINK IT BIOGRAPHY OF BAUDELAIRE ARE YOU AGAINST USING FLOWERS OF EVIL AS TITLE WHY NOT GIVE OURSELVES SAME BREAK OTHERS HAVE HAD.… THIS IS EXTREMELY SERIOUS

  VINCENT

  George answered immediately; he hadn’t seen the jacket proof. Millay exploded.

  It never occurred to me that the sons-of-bitches wouldn’t have sent you a proof of the jacket, too. What ails them? Let’s clear out and the hell with them. Let’s send them a corrected copy of the Bronx and Queens telephone directory and skip. Let’s go to the Galapagos and gather boobies’ eggs.

  In the meantime I am sending on to you the jacket-proof which by mistake, instead of being mailed to Edna Ferber, was mailed to me.

  Time was short. And while she told him that she knew he’d been in the advertising business and she hadn’t, “I’ve been buying longer than you’ve been advertising; and I know that if I went to Brentano’s with money to buy just seven books, this book would be the eighth.” She asked him to think it over.

  You have just one hour before Sharper and Smothers (alias Harper and Brothers) come in with the confession, a fountain-pen, and a piece of lead pipe.… What shall the title be?—I suggest “POSTCARDS FROM HAPPY-DUST CHARLIE TO HIS LENOX AVENUE MOLL.”

  Love and all that,

  Vincent

  A flurry of wires crossed between them. They settled on the title she had insisted upon, Flowers of Evil. George’s final letter to Saxton was far more conciliatory than hers had been; he thanked and congratulated Sax-ton “in your role of third collaborator.”

  Flowers of Evil was published on April 2, 1936. George Dillon would never publish another book of his own poems.

  CHAPTER 32

  Two days after publication, in the April 4, 1936, issue of the Saturday Review, Mary Colum savaged their Baudelaire. “For some strange reason poets admire themselves more for their feats in translation than for their own original work: Miss Millay has succumbed to this particular illusion and she glows over the performance of herself and Mr. George Dillon,” she wrote. Whereas Dillon, she said, had grasped something of the intellectual structure of Baudelaire’s mind, he had captured “almost nothing of the emotional structure; Miss Millay gets something of both. The reason that she does not achieve a closer approach to an acceptable rendering is partly because she is a woman.” Baudelaire, it will be remembered, was not. Because Millay and Dillon had agreed from the beginning to sign the translations each had done with their own initials and in the rare instances where they had worked on a poem together to sign both sets of initials, they exposed themselves to this sort of criticism.

  Edna wired Arthur Ficke from Florida:

  LIFE IS BLAH AND ART IS BLEATING, AND THE GRAVE THING GOD ITS GOAL; ELSE I MIGHT SOME DAY BE MEETING MARY COLUM SOUL TO SOUL

  The reviewer for The New York Times soon provided balm enough. He wrote that their translation was “incomparable.” He called it a “magnificent translation … by two poets whom the unquiet shadow of Baudelaire … must surely bless.”

  Twenty-five years later, when George Dillon was revising their Baudelaire for a paperback edition, he told Alix Daniels, “There was no deliberate claptrap, just a lot of innocent bad taste and lack of skill.” “What had kept the book in print all those years, he knew, was “the lively and imaginative Millay style, and of course it is the charm of her translations (they are wonderfully faithful, too) … this, and the fact that she should have written them at all.”

  Edna and Eugen remained in Florida until May, the month after publication, when Edna returned to writing her verse drama Conversation at Midnight, which she had interrupted to work on the Baudelaire with George. On the first of May she wrote, “We start motoring … today,—at least, if I stop writing Arthur and start washing my hair. We expect to be at Steeple-top by the eighth.”

  They didn’t make it to Steepletop that week. Driving north in their Cadillac, they stopped to visit the islands of Captiva and Sanibel, where the shelling was splendid. They arrived at the Palms Hotel on the beach at Sanibel just an hour or so before sunset. In their eagerness to get to the beach while there was still light, they engaged a room and sent their luggage on ahead. Suddenly Eugen remembered that he’d left the manuscripts under the front seat of the car. He rushed back to the hotel to put them with the rest of their baggage. Millay ran ahead of him onto the beach to search for seashells. Something made her look back. The hotel was engulfed in flames.

  They lost everything: a stunning emerald ring, her cherished seventeenth-century copy of Catullus, which was “the only thing that touched me emotionally, the only thing I mourned for.… the only thing that could comfort me at all when I got to thinking about it, was to say over and over to myself, ‘Desinas ineptire—desinas ineptire, desinas ineptire— … et quod vides perisse perditum ducas.’ ” Which was from the Eighth Lyric of Catullus: “Cease this folly … and what you see is lost set down as lost.”

  They had to drive thirteen hundred miles back to Steepletop in a car whose bushings had burned out, “plodding north at thirty-five, thirty, twenty-five, twenty miles an hour, to the accompaniment of an increasingly interesting populace,” swathed in something that had once been a white linen suit, wrapped up in a rug because even her coat was lost in the fire. She was such “a complete mess” that they slunk into hotels in the dark of night only to creep out at daybreak.

  But those losses were not the hardest to bear. Norma, who’d read in the newspaper about the fire and the complete loss of Vincent’s manuscripts, wrote to her immediately: “Sweetheart.… The greatest tragedy would be not that your manuscript was destroye
d but that it might never have been written.” But since it had been written and she had a superb memory, it was all inside.

  It happened to be a rude fire, baby, but that is none of your business. Forget it.… The important thing is that you have a lot of work to do and you have done a lot of work before and are not afraid of it.… I love you not only I find because you are my poet and my beloved sister but because I know you.… I have built up quite a life without you but there are certain things I know that are part of the foundation of my life—that are in my blood, and I know you. I can’t help you by saying this.… that you already know. I am perhaps a little drunk with this day of painting, of poetry, Bourbon and my love for you. Norma.

  “It was a major tragedy,” Eugen wrote back.

  The terrible thing is, that Edna lost the entire Mss. of her new book, which was going to the printer in June.—And the Mss. of practically another book.—I hope she will be able to remember many of them.—But the whole thing has shaken her up quite a bit, and she does not seem to wish to start trying to remember them.… but with her vitality and courage, she’ll get over it, bye and bye, and be once more interested in her work.—Poor Kid.

  In the summer she began the work of remembering the poems and writing new ones. She thought she could have “the Conversation,” as she called her play, to Gene Saxton at Harper in time for spring publication, but she had an enormous amount of work still to do, and she was hampered psychologically by knowing it had been completely destroyed.

  Under more favourable conditions, since I have a very good memory, I might have been able to recall the whole book,—if, for instance, a copy of it had been in existence somewhere, though at the moment unavailable; or if I had been required to recall it, not knowing that the only copy had been burnt. Conscious, however, that with the exception of a few of the poems which had been published in Harper’s Magazine the preceding autumn, no line of the book existed anywhere except in my memory, if indeed there, I was handicapped by the strain under which I worked.