Savage Beauty
Page 63
It was Arthur’s habit to keep a sort of chronology of his life, which he appeared to have begun in 1941 and called his “Memorandum of Dates.” For 1945 he noted, “I still very sick. Gladys cooks for me! Death of F. D. Roosevelt. Unconditional surrender of Germany. Back to Hillsdale in May.… I grow steadily worse. There is no hope now—and I care less than might be expected.”
In October 1945, Edna sent him the letter he had been longing to have from her. She told him that the sonnet he’d asked her about years before in the gun room of the LaBranches’ estate—when she’d been so angry with him for having asked her whether or not it had been written to him—was his.
And besides, you sprang the question on me so suddenly … that it almost caught me off guard. And I loathe being caught off guard; it makes me furious. (A devil’s trick that is of yours, too, Angel-in-all-else.)
Perhaps, also, I didn’t want you to know, for sure, how terribly, how sick-eningly, in love with you I had been.
And perhaps, also, I was still in love with you, or I shouldn’t have cared.
Well, anyway. The sonnet was the one beginning: “And you as well must die, beloved dust.” In case you’ve forgotten. Which you haven’t.
Vincie
Arthur Davison Ficke died on November 30, 1945. Standing in the dark, wet day by his grave at Hardhack, Edna recited her poem to him:
And you as well must die, belovèd dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fell,—this wonder fled,
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how belovèd above all else that dies.
CHAPTER 39
The month after Arthur’s death that winter, Edna Millay wrote out what she called her last will and testament. Her hand was wildly uneven and downward-slanting.
Steepletop Dec. 30th, 1945… I wish to leave everything of which I die possessed, to my husband, Eugen Boissevain. If it were legally possible (which probably it is not) I should like (in the case that the decease of my husband concurs with, or follows soon after, my own) to leave all the property of which I may die possessed, to my sister, Norma Millay (Ellis).
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I want all those things which are in the dining-room and which we bought or procured for our Dutch relatives to go to Holland. And I want the necklace which Elinor Wylie gave me to go to Rosemary Benét—E. St. V. M.
Norma thought the phrase that Eugen’s death might “concur with” or follow Edna’s own suggested they were planning a joint suicide. Things were very dark now at Steepletop, and within six weeks of writing her will, on February 6, 1946, Edna Millay was again admitted to Doctors Hospital for what was called “recurrent depression.” She arrived with Eugen, so unsteady on her feet that she staggered. She was unable to undress by herself, and the nurse who helped her noticed the unmistakable odor of alcohol on her breath. She was given Luminal Sodium and Ovaltine when she arrived, a barbiturate and a nice cup of hot chocolate, comforting and sedating. She insisted that Luminal was the only medication that made her sleep, but even with the Luminal she moved restlessly from her bed to her chair and back again, smoking constantly, talking continuously, and drinking steadily—a martini before lunch and another before dinner, as well as a bottle of red wine, which she said the doctor had permitted her.
When Eugen came to visit, there was an observable change in her mood: she was agitated, and she gave way to pouting and tenseness. There was also a good deal of weeping. In his company she seemed reduced to being childish and petulant. She did not talk about her writing or her life, except on the day before her fifty-fourth birthday, which she passed in the hospital. She was awake between 12 and 4:30 A.M., and, considerably agitated, she told a nurse that she’d never get well or rested in the hospital. One of the nurses said her mannerisms were childish and that when she was discouraged she cried, “then she made prompt right-about turn & was all right.”
There was no mention of morphine in her medical records or in the nurses’ reports, and a month later, on March 8, she was discharged as “symptom free.”
That summer, after she emerged from the hospital, Millay revived her lapsed correspondence with Edmund Wilson, who had written years earlier to tell her how much her recordings of her poetry meant to him. She said that his “verdict was like an Imprimatur to me.” She told him his letter had come to her while she was in Doctors Hospital, where she was
enjoying there a very handsome—and, as I afterwards was told, an all but life-size—nervous breakdown. For five years I had been writing almost nothing but propaganda. And I can tell you … there is nothing on this earth which can so much get on the nerves of a good poet, as the writing of bad poetry. Anyway, finally, I cracked up under it.
She did not tell him she had been addicted to morphine. That stigma was too sharp; she admitted only to a breakdown.
It is sheer desperation and pure panic—lest, through my continued silence, I lose your friendship, which I prize.… I think, and I think it often, “Where ever he is, there he still is, and perhaps some day I shall see him again, and we shall talk about poetry, as we used to do.”
She told him that, having been unable to write during the period of her breakdown, she had begun to memorize great amounts of poetry—long, difficult poems, Matthew Arnold’s “Scholar Gypsy,” Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “Lamia,” one third of Father Hopkins’s poetry, Shelley’s “To the West Wind” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”—“Anyway, I have them all now. And what evil thing can ever again even brush me with its wings?”
She began to write again. It was as if a black cloth had been lifted from her, and in the fall of 1946, the spring and summer of 1947, she published “Ragged Island,” “To a Snake,” and the sonnet “Tranquility at length, when autumn comes,” each a fully achieved, masterly poem.
Tranquility at length, when autumn comes,
Will lie upon the spirit like that haze
Touching far islands on fine autumn days
With tenderest blue, like bloom on purple plums;
Harvest will ring, but not as summer hums,
With noisy enterprise—to broaden, raise,
Proceed, proclaim, establish: autumn stays
The marching year one moment; stills the drums.
Then sits the insistent cricket in the grass;
But on the gravel crawls the chilly bee;
And all is over that could come to pass
Last year; excepting this: the mind is free
One moment, to compute, refute, amass,
Catalogue, question, contemplate, and see.
Sometimes it was in Eugen’s hand, writing for her in her notebooks, that she worked out a sonnet like this superb one:
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon—his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more or less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.
Edna and Eugen spent that summer on Ragged Island, where she underwent their own form of therapy, which seemed to consist of spending hours floating in the icy water of the Atlantic. She thrived on it. There is only this one letter from her to Eugen written then:
The House, Ragged Island
September
You have just gone down to the harbour again. It seems really only a moment since we both came up from the harbour, you drenched to the skin, I shining and excited almost to—what is the French word?— … what the hell is it?—anyway, watching it, at a safe distance until you called me to help you with the ropes (and what a silly knife you have, it doesn’t cut at all … I could have done better with my teeth).… Darling, come up from the harbour—the sea is making.…
Don’t go out, please.
We have everything here. There’s no need to tackle it.…
Meen Liefje:
Ik gaar naar top-side.
Misschien slaap ik.
Misschien niet.
Oy sey nooit t’hius.
[Dearest:
I’m going topside.
Maybe I’ll sleep.
Maybe not.
You are never home.]
When they got back to Steepletop, they marked her recovery by hanging the American flag from the windows above the entrance to Steepletop and sending a snapshot of it to Margaret Cuthbert, as they had promised they would.
But she had recovered. She was no longer dependent upon morphine, but she was not entirely well. She continued to drink (there was a small mountain of whiskey bottles left on Ragged Island); she certainly took far too many barbiturates; and no one yet knew the destructive interactions among the sorts of drugs she was relying upon.
Harper, now in the person of Cass Canfield—for Millay’s beloved editor, Gene Saxton, had died suddenly in the summer of 1943—continued to advance her $250 a month while pressing her for another book. How about an edition of her collected dramatic works? She refused in a long letter, explaining, “The effect of writing so much propaganda during the war—from the point of view of poetry, sloppy, garrulous and uninte-grated—is to make me more careful and critical of my work even than I formerly I was, so that now I write more slowly than ever. But there will be a book.”
The following year, 1948, when she was again pressed by her publishers, and again refused, she teased Harper’s distinguished director of production, Arthur Rushmore, whose suggestion that she bring out a volume of
The Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, containing a ‘mellow Foreword in retrospect’ in which she confides to the public ‘when, where, and under what impulsion’ (the italics are mine [Millay’s]) these poems were written, leaves me strangely cold.
(I did get a grin out of it, though. Pretty hard put to it, weren’t you, dearie, to say it with flowers, and yet say it?)
She didn’t doubt that it would, as he said, win her new readers. “People who never in all their lives, except when in school and under compulsion, have held a book of poems in their hands, might well be attracted by the erotic autobiography of a fairly conspicuous woman, even if she did write poetry.” But they were not the readers whose esteem she prized. And even he, she told him, “with all your exquisite skill, could not make charming the indelicacy of such a foreword—as you suggest.” With wry good humor she told Canfield, “Trusting, however, in closing, that for one year more it may be said of me by Harper & Brothers, that although I reject their proposals, I welcome their advances.”
Millay was nonetheless vexed by her continued dependence on her publisher for money. As early as July 27, 1944, she had written Cass Canfield, “You can’t go on grub-staking me for ever. For that is more or less what it amounts to.” All she’d written was war poems with very little about anything else.
And such as there might be, would not be good, not first-class.
And I can’t have that. I can’t bring out a book of lyrics, not after all I’ve written, in which there are just merely here and there a good line. I’d considerably rather die.
But dying is really rather hard, you know. Not for oneself, I mean; that’s comparatively easy: just get things all neatened up, and then go ahead and do it. No. It’s the other people. They hang on to one so.
But Harper did continue to stake her, and to everyone’s delight, in the spring of 1945 there was an Armed Services Edition of her Lyrics and Sonnets, with a proposed printing of 140,000 copies.
When Canfield returned to New York from his work for the Office of War Information in France, he wrote to Millay telling her that it had been pointed out that in Sonnet XIV in “Epitaph for the Race of Man,” the name Aeolus should be Ixion. “Apparently it was Ixion who, for an insult to Hera, was punished by being tied to a wheel that turned perpetually. Would you want us to make this change?” he innocently asked.
For a woman who insisted to her dearest friends that she was unable to write letters, that it was a disease for which she had invented a word, “epis-tolaphobia,” Millay answered Canfield in an astonishing five-page letter of splendid invective:
It occurs to me with something of dismay, that, if I were dead—instead of being as I am, alive and kicking, and I said kicking—the firm of Harper & Brothers … might conceivably, acting upon the advise of a respected friend, alter one word in one of my poems.
This you must never do. Any changes which might profitably be made in any of my poems, were either made by me, before I permitted them to be published, or must be made, if made at all, someday by me. Only I, who know what I mean to say, and how I want to say it.… no other person, could possibly lay hands upon any poems of mine in order to correct some real or imagined error without harming the poem more seriously than any faulty execution of my own could possibly have done.… I am speaking of poetry composed with no other design than that of making as good a poem as one possibly can make, of poetry written with deliberation and under the sharp eye of an ever-alert self-criticism, of poetry in other words, written with no ulterior motive, such as, for instance, the winning of a world-war to keep democracy alive.
Cass Canfield said he could only offer his “unconditional surrender. My forces are spent and I have no arms left to lay down.” But he did tell her with a pride only somewhat less fierce than her own, “I think I need not tell you that this House intends to preserve your poetry as it is; to do otherwise would make us as guilty as an art dealer who tampered with an El Greco painting.”
In 1948, Marie Bullock, the founder of the Academy of American Poets, invited Millay to serve on its board of chancellors, assuring her all that would be required of her was one or two brief notes each year. But Millay weighed appointments seriously; she read both the bylaws and the certificate of incorporation very carefully. Then she turned Mrs. Bullock down cold. No one had ever turned the academy down. In a wonderful letter, Millay tried to soften her objections by suggesting to Mrs. Bullock that she “wished you had not, in your earnestness, got yourself all embroiled with a firm of lawyers who in their bossy dustiness have made it so difficult for you to do the beautiful thing you want to do.” Mrs. Bullock’s husband was the lawyer whose firm had drawn up the bylaws.
Millay’s objections were twofold: First, the Fellows who received the $5,000 stipend, generous in those days, had to report their progress in writing three times a year, within thirty days prior to the quarterly payment. Second, no fellowship holder could engage in gainful occupation during the period of the award. That meant that a poet could not teach, edit, or serve in government—even though, clearly enough, a number of chancellors did. It was true, Millay wrote, that five thousand dollars was a lot of money.
But pottage is pottage, even when it is five thousand dollars worth of pottage. And I can have no part in seducing any poet into accepting this award, under these conditions.
I think of what Shelley said, in “An Exhortation”:
“Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet’s free and heavenly mind.
…
Spirits from beyond the moon,
Oh, refuse the boon!”
While the academy did amend its bylaws the following year, they retained their spirit—a poet could still not engage in any gainful employment—actually the word used is “occupation”; when in November 1949, badly in debt, Millay was offered the fellowship herself, she declined in no uncertain terms. Her friend the poet Leonora Speyer said she was “a goose.” Max Eastman called her a “self-spoilt child,” a “martinet and self-indulgent.” Later Hal Bynner would say it had been “striking evidence of her cocky Irish integrity.”
Edmund Wilson and his wife, Elena, were at the music festival in Tangle-wood that summer of 1948. They wrote asking if they might come to call at Steepletop.
Edna and Eugen’s living room seemed to Wilson the same as it had been in 1929, the last time he’d been there: the blackened bronze bust of Sappho with the fierce ivory whites of her eyes staring from the entrance corner, the two magnificent dark grand pianos, the ornate golden birds Edna had brought back from their trip to the Orient, “but now the birds were paler, their background was gray; the couches looked badly worn; the whole place seemed shabby and dim.”
Another startling thing he noticed, not having seen her in nineteen years, was the change in Edna’s relationship to Eugen. “As we drove through the long tunnel of greenery that led to the Steepletop house, I felt, as I had not done before, that Edna had been buried out there.” An aging Eugen shuffled out to meet them. “He was greying and stooped. It seemed to me he was in low morale. ‘I’ll go and get my child,’ he said. I did not realize at first that this meant Edna.”