It is impossible to know exactly what prompted this outburst, but her will is behind every phrase. She is offended, and she is determined. Four days later, having heard from him, she softened:
Thursday
Darling, I’m sending you the enclosed envelope just for fun—to show you that we were about to leave for the station when you called—the time being an hour later here.——
Poor child, how I have harassed you. I will never do it again. I should not have done it now but that I was so sure you were in trouble & was very worried. But in any case, I’ll never do it again.—So breathe freely.
He had said he would come to Steepletop, perhaps even settle in New York. She assured him that if he did, she could help him find work. “Let me know what your plans are, as soon as you have time.… I wonder will you really come?”
From the beginning of their affair they had been separated, not only by the physical distance between Chicago and Steepletop but by her marriage, by her far greater fame as a poet—and, inevitably, by the emotional confusion and even distrust those differences were bound to engender. Dillon could be sulky, angry, jealous, and despairing. In an undated letter he gives us a clue as to how he felt when they were not on good terms with each other, when he had spoiled the little time they had together:
Darling,
I don’t know what kind of depressed, drunken, insane letter I wrote you, but I can well imagine, because I haven’t heard from you—I haven’t heard from you at all.
Forgive me for being crude and ungrateful. It’s just that I have to pay for being with you by being plunged in a worse despair every time you go away. The rest of my life seems so useless, then, that I can’t bear the thought of picking it up again. So I hide away a while, and drink and read, and take long walks, and sleep. Then I’m all right again.
I’m all right now. I remember only the happiness we’ve had, and I know the rest isn’t important. If you still love me, I’ll be glad as anyone to be alive.
For all the torment they inflicted on each other, it was a remarkably productive relationship for both of them. She sent him five sonnets in one letter, twenty-six in the next. She hadn’t had a comparable period of such intense productivity since her early days in New York. The longer they were apart, the more the poems seemed to come. She could even be playful to him about it:
These are samples. Enclosed is an order-blank, etc. Indicate the type you prefer and the number of sonnets on that subject which you wish me to supply. At the rate at which I am working now, I shall easily be able to meet the most wholesale demand. Oh, God, did I say “Easily”? I have never worked so hard.
She said they weren’t perfect, but if she waited until they were,
you will very likely not see them for at least a year longer, and it is … almost as if we were not so far apart, as if we were living in the same city. Except when we are living in the same city there never seems to be much time for reading and discussing each other’s poetry, there are so many other things to be done which are so intrinsically and immediately worthwhile, such as kissing each other. If people would only just let me kiss you for as long as I want to just once, it might be different; but after two or three days somebody always comes in and interrupts.
She hoped he liked the sonnets. She hoped he’d tell her he did, but even if he didn’t, she’d send him some more. “Yes, I’m as big as that.” She was that confident. Then she wrote quickly again: “Darling, I’m sending you with this some more sonnets.… There’s mountains of work to be done on them still.” If they were only together, she’d talk them over with him because “Some of them were written when I hadn’t heard from you for a long time, and thought maybe you didn’t love me anymore.” She decided to send him two sonnets “which I had not intended to send with the others. These two were written to Ugin. They are the two beginning ‘Believe, if ever the bridges of this town,’ and ‘If in the years to come you should recall.’ They are rather nice, and I’d like you to see them.”
Why did she want him to have these particular poems and to know they were written to Eugen? What do they contain that she wants him to know? The first of the two sonnets seems to be an assurance to Eugen that if their marriage, which she describes within a military metaphor as a sort of fortress whose “bridges” and “towers” are built “without fault or stain,” should “be taken,” she would never again seek any other refuge: “No mortal roof shall shelter me again.”
Believe, if ever the bridges of this town,
Whose towers were builded without fault or stain,
Be taken, and its battlements go down,
No mortal roof shall shelter me again;
I shall not prop a branch against a bough
To hide me from the whipping east or north,
Nor tease to flame a heap of sticks, who now
Am warmed by all the wonders of the earth.
Do you take ship unto some happier shore
In such event, and have no thought for me,
I shall remain;—to share the ruinous floor
With roofs that once were seen far out at sea;
To cheer a mouldering army on the march …
And beg from spectres by a broken arch.
The second sonnet to Eugen, which would eventually become the penultimate poem in the cycle (the final poem is to George), is equally disturbing:
If in the years to come you should recall,
When faint at heart or fallen on hungry days,
Or full of griefs and little if at all
From them distracted by delights or praise;
When failing powers or good opinion lost
Have bowed your neck, should you recall to mind
How of all men I honoured you the most,
Holding you noblest among mortal-kind;
Might not my love—although the curving blade
From whose wide mowing none may hope to hide,
Me long ago below the frosts had laid—
Restore you somewhat to your former pride?
Indeed I think this memory even then
Must raise you high among the run of men.
They were strange poems to send to Dillon. They would certainly serve to alert him to the permanence of her loyalty to her husband. But her letter continued, and maybe this was her point:
Soon, I’ll write you another letter to keep, a happier one, my dear, the one you want. In the meantime let me assure you that I don’t in the least intend to give you up,—in fact, I dare you, I double-dare you, to escape from me. No matter what I may say, no matter how big and brave I may be on occasion, the black truth is, my lovely one, that I haven’t the faintest intent of letting you go. Vide sonnet beginning “Strange thing that I, by nature nothing prone.”
The poem is almost an extension of her love letter:
Strange thing that I, by nature nothing prone
To fret the summer blossom on its stem,
Who know the hidden nest, but leave alone
The magic eggs, the bird that cuddles them,
Should have no peace till your bewildered heart
Hung fluttering at the window of my breast,
Till I had ravished to my bitter smart
Your kiss from the stern moment, could not rest.
“Swift wing, sweet blossom, live again in air!
Depart, poor flower; poor feathers, you are free!”
Thus do I cry, being teased by shame and care
That beauty should be brought to terms by me;
Yet shamed the more that in my heart I know,
Cry as I may, I could not let you go.
“I’ve done acres of them, sweetheart. About twenty-six, I think. Isn’t that terrifying? It is four weeks and a night and half a morning since I kissed you goodbye. I shall never kiss you goodbye again. There should never be hello-kisses or goodbye-kisses,—just kisses. Anyhow, it is four weeks and a night and half a morning and a minute, since you went away from me. That’s long enough, I think, indeed I
think it’s more than long enough. I want to see you. If I don’t see you soon, I shall lie on the floor and kick and howl till something is done about it.”
The contrast between the tone of this letter, in which she sounds girlish, and the voice of her sonnets is striking. Yet we see her battling with herself in her sonnet, fighting and then giving way to her consuming desire to possess this man. In the poems she is often a queen or a goddess, at any rate immortal. Only in one, among her most achieved, does she appear as a girl, direct, proud, and generous:
Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Have given their loves, I give my love to you;
Not in a lover’s-knot, not in a ring
Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain:
Semper fidelis,—where a secret spring
Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain.
Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do:
“Look what I have!” and “These are all for you.”
She would write for him some of her most extraordinary sonnets. He could leave her, but having been loved by him, she was triumphant:
Women have loved before as I love now;
At least in lively chronicles of the past.—
Of Irish waters by a Cornish prow
Or Trojan waters by a Spartan mast
Much to their cost invaded—here and there,
Hunting the amorous line, skimming the rest,
I find some woman bearing as I bear
Love like a burning city in the breast.
I think however that of all alive
I only in such utter, ancient way
Do suffer love; in me alone survive
The blind, imperious passions of a day
When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread,
Heedless and wilful, took their knights to bed.
She is clear as glass. She’d struck this note for a long time in her work—certainly since Figs and Second April, and especially in her sonnets. There was always a powerfully expressed notion of her own destiny above the impermanence of mortal love, which is subject to change. Against it she places her vocation. Her theme is as ancient as the Greeks: the permanence of poetry and impermanence of love, subject to change, to loss, or to ending. She wrote with a spirited certainty that had stung Floyd Dell, as well as Edmund Wilson, taunting that they would one day wake “from dreams of me, that at your side / So many nights, a lover and a bride, / But stern in my soul’s chastity.” They who would “walk the world forever for my sake, / And in every chamber find me gone again!”
Against this extraordinary assurance were the playfulness and humor of her early work, through which she had also won her readers. But then there was always a hook, as there was in this sonnet, published first in 1920:
Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The colour and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.
Millay had been telling her audience, both men and women, as she was cannily aware, to
make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away.
Witty and provocative, these were smart, saucy poems, and they had secured her an enormous audience. But now, nearly forty, with her young lover uncertain, she found her voice at another pitch. When she thought she’d lost Dillon, it was her art, her vocation as a poet, in which she took refuge.
3
The fall found Llewelyn Powys and his unhappy wife, Alyse Gregory, living in the caretaker’s cottage across the road from Steepletop while Lulu worked on his novel Impassioned Clay. He would dedicate it to Eugen Boissevain, “under whose roof and in the presence of whose daring spirit this book was finished.” Eugen was as rare a person, Alyse wrote, as Edna:
Handsome, reckless, mettlesome as a stallion breathing the first morning air, he would laugh at himself, indeed laugh at everything, with a laugh that scattered melancholy as the wind scatters the petals of the fading poppy.… One day his house would be that of a citizen of the world, with a French butler to wait on the table and everything done with the greatest bienséance, and the next the servants would have as mysteriously disappeared as bees from a deserted hive, and he would be out in the kitchen washing the dishes and whistling a haunting Slavic melody, as light-hearted as a troubadour. He had the gift of the aristocrat and could adapt himself to all circumstances.… His blood was testy, adventurous, quixotic, and he faced life as an eagle faces its flight.
Lulu needed a respite, and so did Alyse, for their retreat was tainted by his fidgeting anticipation of letters from England and his vexing indecision: he was wildly in love with Gamel Woolsey, a young American woman living in Dorset—the “little poetess,” he and Alyse called her.
Alyse Gregory knew nothing of Millay’s affair with Dillon, but she knew firsthand how unusual her hosts’ domestic arrangement was. She felt alien in their company at Steepletop, an awkward outsider, as she recorded one night in her diary:
She in her long purple velvet gown with the white fur, the Elizabethan sleeves—looking like a favoured princess surrounded by her courtiers—E. trembling with love and veneration for her.… and I too feeling love for her—yet feeling myself like an outcast beggar.
Edna, who had after all once been Lulu’s lover, was either unaware or too involved in her own troubles to breach the gap between them. Powys lavished his attention on her, avoiding the forlorn hurt that Alyse seemed to bask in:
We discussed the difference between French and English poetry, and Edna described the feelings of a young girl at a dance—in a dance hall—as if into each dance must be packed the panic and ecstasy of her last moment of life, for underneath was death. And Gene said the saxophone was the saddest of all instruments with its wild sinking death cry. Then he talked of the difference between passion and love—his passion for little girls and his love for mature women. He was very eloquent. I saw L. sitting as I had seen him so many times when I was the centre of his life, his hands a little relaxed on his knees, wearing his Cambridge coat that I had so many times put away in a box with camphor—that I had sent to the cleaners—that I had packed and unpacked in our rooms where we had been so happy—and now he seemed so intimate to me and yet so remote—as if were we to part there would be nothing of me left to him and when I heard him read the ballads—oh, how my heart was wrung—I could hardly keep back the tears so that when Eugen shouted at me as he did several times, speaking rudely in a way that always drives me down into myself he saw that I was grave and offended and came impulsively to kneel before me saying “Darling, I have not hurt you, have I? Now kiss me” which I did, but then he went on to make more violent drunken love to me, and L. was making love to E. on the couch kissing her cheeks and neck, but without passion, without desire, or warmth because all his love is elsewhere—and suddenly I felt as if I must run, escape.
Instead, Eugen dashed outside and fired off his gun, then ran back to raise a toast to Christ, the “darling boy,” while an offended Lulu chastised him. Alyse re
corded one last wintry scene: swathed in blankets and furs against the cold, bundled into a sleigh, Lulu is lying beside Edna, while she and Eugen sing a German song. Altair, their German shepherd, races beside the two great steaming horses.
At the end of January, Eugen and Edna left for New York for a few days. Alyse observed that their trips had begun to have an “atmosphere of riotous nights of drinking and loud talk—We came away feeling ravished and this is sad, for Edna has always underneath an ardor sensitive and untraduced.”
4
Throughout the fall and winter Millay worked on her book of sonnets. Harper made up a dummy and announced it as Twice Required, a title taken from a line in her fourteenth sonnet, “Since of no creature living the last breath is twice required.” That December she’d written her mother, telling her there would be “about forty in all in my new book which will be published in March.” One month later, she told Norma there would be “about forty-four.” But now she had definitely settled on a title: Fatal Interview. “This is a phrase from a poem by John Donne.…
‘By our first strange and fatall interview,
By all our desires which thereof did ensue.’
“I shall quote these two lines in the front of the book.”
That fall she began to publish in magazines the sonnets that would form the heart of Fatal Interview. Three were published in Poetry and five at Christmas in Harper’s Magazine, with another five the same month in The Saturday Evening Post. In the spring of 1931 The New Republic would publish eight of her sonnets and Harper’s Magazine two. In other words, not only would there be excellent advance notice of her work by the time of the book’s publication in April 1931, but there was also a substantial market being created beyond her established audience.
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