Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  The Nazis began to bomb Britain in earnest in the summer of 1940, and the merciless pounding continued for months on end. The French Republic was in ashes. In its place, ruling a partitioned France, was the Fascist government of Marshal Henri Pétain, a hero of the First World War.

  By now Edna Millay barely left her upstairs rooms at Steepletop. Sometimes she wandered around the house in her robe with the sound of the broadcasts on the radio tormenting her. Sometimes she and Eugen sat crouched beside their Philco, leaning into the pale golden glow of the dial as it broadcast news from the front. She could hardly sleep for pain. In the morning, as soon as she awoke, she held a tiny glass vial shaped like a tear in her hand to warm it, fixed a steel needle into a metal plunger, and shot the colorless liquid directly into her arm or her thigh. Sometimes, then, the pain let go, and she vanished. It was at first dreamy and peaceful and without pain from any source: “Luxe, calme et volupté.… ”

  At the close of her workbook for this year she wrote out the following:

  CHART

  MISS MILLAY

  Dec. 31, 1940

  Awoke 7:30, after untroubled night. Pain less than previous day. 7:35—Urinated—no difficulty or distress

  7:40—⅜ gr. M.S. hypodermically, self-administered in left upper arm + profuse bleeding, almost instantly quenched.

  7:45 to 8—smoked cigarette (Egyptian) (mouth burns from excessive smoking)

  8:15—thirsty—went to ice-box for glass of water, but no water there. Take glass of beer instead which do not want. Headache, lassitude and feeling of discomfort & stuffiness from constipation.

  8:20—cigarette (Egyptian)

  9:00—”

  9:30—Gin Rickey (cigarette)

  11:15—Gin Rickey

  12:15—Martini (4 cigarettes)

  12:45—¼ grain M.S. & cigarette

  1.—pain bad & also in lumbar region. no relief from M.S.

  She’d been awake ten minutes when she took her first injection of morphine. By noon she’d had a glass of beer, eight cigarettes, and three strong drinks. But maybe most crucially, this was the first time she wrote in her own hand that she was injecting the morphine herself. This chart, which she began on New Year’s Eve day, a time for making resolutions, established a pattern of record keeping she would continue as long as she was addicted. But first she fought that acknowledgment by denying it. She had help—right at home, where it was now the dead of winter.

  CHAPTER 37

  At the turn of the year, Edna and Eugen fled Steepletop for New York and took an apartment at 400 East Fifty-second Street, around the corner from Margaret Cuthbert. It wasn’t only the war effort that brought Millay to New York; she was far more ill than anyone knew. Margaret called a young friend of hers, Dorothy Leffler, on New Year’s Day 1941, to ask her a favor: Would she do some work for “Miss Millay who was ill and needed help badly”? Miss Leffler, who had experience as an assistant editor at Bobbs-Merrill, was asked to arrange her time so she could spend part of every day with Millay. No one explained what kind of help Millay needed or described her illness.

  When Leffler arrived the first afternoon, Millay suddenly dictated a poem to her. “Not having taken dictation in some five years, I had a terrible feeling I might not be able to read my notes and one of Miss Millay’s poems might be lost forever.” Fortunately her shorthand held, but although Leffler spent the next four months with her, that was the only time Millay ever dictated anything to her.

  Eugen explained that they were in New York so that Edna could receive medical help for an injury to the nerves of her shoulder received in an automobile accident. Edna added that she had never been free of pain since. “While I was with her,” Leffler recalled, “Mr. Boissevain would administer shots of some kind several times a day to control the pain.”

  During those four months she could recall Millay’s getting dressed and going out only four or five times. Once was to make the only recording of her reading her own poems for RCA Victor, for which she, strangely, asked Miss Leffler to make the selection. “There was no great ceremony about it. I think I said I hoped she would include a certain poem and she said, ‘Why don’t you select the poems you’d like me to record.’ And I did. She certainly wasn’t disinterested nor too ill to make the selection.” Once she accompanied Edna and Eugen to Margaret Cuthbert’s for cocktails. “That time Miss Millay simply put a coat over her robe, and we took a taxi around the corner to Margaret’s apartment.”

  Margaret, who had known and adored Eugen for years, dropped him a note after drinks that Sunday:

  Did I tell you this one—

  There was a young girl from Madras

  Who had a beautiful ass—

  It was not what you think!

  Round, firm & pink

  But grey—with long ears (or hairs)

  And ate grass—

  After the limerick, she struck a worried note: “Should Edna drink & take morphine. Doesn’t one soothe & one excite? And so counter balance each other? I once took bromide—also did some plain & fancy drinking & almost choked to death.”

  One afternoon Millay came into the living room fully dressed. “Mr. Boissevain made a great fuss about it,” Miss Leffler remembered, and Edna said, “Most men get excited when a woman undresses for them but this is the first time I’ve known one to get excited because a woman got dressed.”

  Millay had agreed in November to write a response to Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s The Wave of the Future. Now, with Miss Leffler’s help, she started. She fired off question after question to her assistant: “Find out how many times she uses the title-phrase, either entire or just as The Waves, & copy phrases. Copy Dorothy Thompson’s remarks about title, how it was taken from a fascist book or pamphlet.” It wasn’t only that Mil-lay was distressed by the book, as she told Miss Leffler, because it “supported the fascist point of view; she was especially upset that Mrs. Lindbergh should have written such a book.”

  The Wave of the Future had been published within weeks of Millay’s Make Bright the Arrows. Rarely had two books that asked the same question—should America defend her allies, or should she remain isolated from them?—taken such opposing points of view. When Anne Lindbergh wrote about “our world,” she defined it as “the world in which we were brought up—the good, the Christian, the democratic, the capitalist world.” She suggested it was vanishing through the democracies’ lack of moral fiber, in which “the race declined in hardiness,” in which there was “dissatisfaction, maladjustment and moral decay.” Near the close of her book she admitted, “I do not believe we need to be defended against a mechanized German army invading our shores, as much as against the type of decay, weakness, and blindness into which all the ‘Democracies’ have fallen since the last war.… There is no fighting the wave of the future.” Mankind had to learn “not to resist the inevitable push of progress.”

  In Millay’s working notebook of November 1940, she had already begun the handwritten draft of her response. She called it “The Dyke of the Present,” a reference to protective land barriers that hold back the sea, “(A reply to Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s The Wave of the Future).” This draft breaks off after several pages, only to begin again, run on for a few pages more, and stop. Then, in a typescript of roughly fifty pages, she tried again and again to work out what she thought. She wrote that even if Lindbergh’s book was “at least for the first twenty of its forty-one pages, lucidly written,” the second half was marred by disingenuous sentimentality. Why should we resign ourselves to this approaching wave?

  If this wave, whatever it may be, is scheduled to engulf us soon, no matter what we may do, it would seem to me more admirable, more valiant (old-fashioned words, but still with a strong and pleasant herb-like savour about them) to say to the Wave, “Here is my Honour and here is my Individuality: if you want them, come and take them; I give nothing to you.” Instead, Mrs. Lindbergh has counselled us, since we cannot avert death, not to conspire against illness.

  “Why, Milla
y pressed, hadn’t the man who had once done a thing “which declared holiday in all our hearts,” a man “we once called ‘Lindy,’ ” why hadn’t Charles Lindbergh returned to Field Marshal Göring “his glittering gew-gaws”?

  On the last page of notes she made the one statement that may have frozen the completion of her work: “It seems at the outset such a hopeless task to raise one small voice against the many voices lifted in praise of C. & A. Lindbergh, Inc.” They were beloved; they were trustworthy; they represented the best in American life. Who would believe Edna Millay’s “one small voice” in the face of their public esteem?

  “I just don’t know why she didn’t finish her answer to ‘Wave of the Future,’ ” Dorothy Leffler wrote. “She was very enthusiastic about it when she began it but then simply tired of it.… After she stopped working on her answer she never referred to it again.”

  Millay was in no condition to marshal her response into a coherent essay, and she stopped cold. That April 1941, when she began to record her poems for RCA, even her superb voice seemed to fail her. It sounded thin, uncertain, and forced.

  2

  By the spring their finances were shot. “Once again I must ask my publishers to come—come running—to my aid,” Edna wrote to her editor. She said she had to make it sound facetious or she couldn’t go on with the letter. “It seems to me that I never get you finally paid up, with a few hundred dollars to spare, but I have to start right in borrowing from you again.” “What was particularly infuriating was not only that she was constantly in pain but that she had to lay “one sweet luscious grand after another between the self-complacent and condescending teeth of one officious and inefficient hospital after another.”

  She tried to assure Gene Saxton that she had finally hit on a cure. She was being treated by a doctor whose doses of everything from what she called “all the tons of calcium gluconate and assorted minerals” and vitamins by the barrel had begun to work. “Every day I get better. One whole day I was almost without pain.” The next sentence was stunning for what she acknowledged: “Seldom has the morphine seemed so slow in getting to me; although poor Ugin, who naturally hates like hell to have to give it to me, is quicker with it than the doctor by now.” But because of the war, “Eugen has lost everything he had.… There is not a penny he can get at. So for the time being it’s up to me.”

  What was cut from her published letters survives in the original:

  And as for me, something has just happened in my own personal family affairs—not tragic, just ugly and pathetic and from a financial point of view extremely burdensome to me … without the further considerable help of Harpers’ ruinous to me.

  Kathleen had surfaced again, ill, broke, angrily demanding more money.

  Millay enclosed a list of her financial needs:

  March 11, 1941

  As things stand now, I shall be

  the debtor of Harper & Bros. on

  or about the 20th of May, 1941,

  to the amount of $3,500.00

  I need immediately 1,000.00

  I shall need on Apr. 10 1,000.00

  From June up to and

  including November

  I shall need per month

  $600, this amounting to 3,600.00

  If Harpers’ can advance me

  this amount as outlined I

  shall owe on or about Nov. 20

  9,100.00

  (This amount of course minus such

  royalties as I may have earned in

  the meantime)—E. St. V M.

  Harper met her needs fully. Gene Saxton had only one request: that she work to bring together her Collected Sonnets. “We’ve just had a most enthusiastic session with the salesmen about the ‘Collected Sonnets.’ What they need most, in their selling, is the authority to say 1) that the volume will have 2 or 3 unpublished Sonnets and 2) a Preface.”

  In scores of pages in her working notebooks, Millay tried again and again to work out what she wanted to say in a preface. In one fine passage she even tried to define the sonnet:

  I did not know then what a sonnet was. I thought, as many people think, and not at all unreasonably, that a sonnet was any kind of short lyric, the word sounds like a diminutive, and informal. What greatness of spirit, what nobility of mood, what austerity, what solemn and serene behaviour, what formal grace and method of procedure as of a ritual most precise and perfect of high ecstasy restrained—what a sonnet could be, what it was meant to be, and what it sometimes even was, I was to learn.

  She wrote about the sonnet’s development from Petrarch, about the influence of authors she had read when young, of Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow, for example, whom she had read only for the story,

  with the exception of Hiawatha.… But I did not know that Longfellow was taken seriously by anybody as a poet. Not a line of his ever made my scalp tighten and my hair move upward on my head like the serpent-curls of Medusa.… For I never did believe, and never have believed a word he said.… And this has always made me feel sad, and, yes, more than a little treacherous, so deeply indebted to him am I for those happy hours in my earliest childhood, long before I could read … when my mother, sitting beside my bed after supper, in her black dress with its smoothly fitting bodice and its yoke, collar and cuffs of shining black jet, would read to me from Hiawatha or Evangeline. Sometimes on winter evenings she would read to me, or often recite from memory, for she knew, I think, the whole long poem by heart, the beautiful “Snowbound” of Whittier, and quite unconscious that I was doing so, I learned much of it by heart myself at this time, and still remember it. Until the day, much later, when I discovered for myself the exciting poetry of Emerson, I always considered Whittier by far the best of the New England poets.

  Then she would veer off and begin on another tack, with pages of lists of writers who had influenced her—“Shakespeare—yes, Milton—no, Wordsworth—yes, George Meredith—yes, Arthur Ficke—yes, D. G. Rossetti—no (?)”—as well as that poet who “would have influenced me if I had read him. Gerard Manley Hopkins—same thing—did not know til circa 1935.”

  All the pages were akin to these. Millay would set an idea forth only to turn it aside, and no amount of piecing, turning, or recapitulation could make a coherent preface.

  One night she stuck this desperate note under Eugen’s bedroom door, asking him for help:

  Attention

  Snig, Esq.

  Personal Somewhat

  Important Maybe

  Please Answer

  I’ve spent so much time & strength writing pieces of prefaces about what I’m going to leave out and why, and what I propose to keep in and why,—that I’ve had no occasion to look over the book itself, and see why I’m omitting what I’m omitting, if I am omitting it—or why I am retaining, et cet. I’ve been trying so hard to write twenty different prefaces to this benighted book that I haven’t the foggiest notion as to what the book will be composed of or whether or not it is fit to print.—This is where I stand—or, rather, lie prone, Sniggies!—Have you any suggestions?—I’m about baffled!—

  Love,

  me.

  She was flummoxed. She knew it, and now so did Eugen, who finally wrote to Gene Saxton in an attempt to explain away her delay. She’d had the galleys since mid-May, and it was now August. In what had become a pattern with them, Eugen cloaked her inability to focus on her work by blaming illness and pain:

  I am sorry having to bring you some bad news.

  Edna will be unable to finish her introduction for her “Collected Sonnets.” She has been working at it for several months and has all her material gathered and has written quite a lot of it. But, the last two weeks she has been very sick and unable to do anything. She just has to give up writing it. She is terribly unhappy about it, especially as she was really enjoying writing it. As it is, the physical exertion of writing even a half page makes her back ache so badly that it is impossible for her to continue.

  What she intends to do now is to write short notes
or remarks explaining why the sonnets of “Conversation at Midnight” and most of the sonnets in “Make Bright The Arrows” are not included in this collection. This, however, could not be used as an introduction but will have to be added at the end of the book and called NOTES or REMARKS.

  Finally Edna called Arthur Ficke for help. “Vincent has been fussing and stewing,” Arthur wrote in his journal, “about a preface for her ‘Collected Sonnets.’ She finally got into a state of despair, and about two weeks ago sent for me to go over and see her. I found, to my horror, that she was trying to produce an elaborate … treatise on the sonnet.”

  Millay agreed to cut the preface. She would take Arthur’s advice and write only a note with an explanation of why certain of her sonnets were not there. But she was still in a jam and could not write even this note, when she asked him to take over the whole editing. “So I spent 24 hours correcting the proofs. Yesterday I drove over, and explained all my suggested changes to her, and she accepted them. Last night I transferred the corrections to the publisher’s copy of the proofs. And now they can be sent off.”

  Arthur saved her from her excesses. But he also kept her from publishing passages she’d written about what she thought sonnets were and about her own first literary sources and influences. When he tried to describe her character in his journal, he did not acknowledge his own competitiveness, her addiction, or the terrible pressure she was under because of her sister’s needs and accusations. But he did help.