Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  She was a sunny sight, curled up on the davenport of their hotel suite, with the afternoon light falling upon her. Healthy glowing cheeks of a child, tawny hair with a bronze gleam to it, green eyes merry … her small self intensely enthusiastic—like a child.

  There were flowers spilling abundantly everywhere in the suite, “selected and placed by that cultivated, charming Dutch gentleman, her husband, a man who wears tweeds beautifully, is a perfect host and who anticipates her every wish.” Eugen intruded into the interview only when Millay left the room, to say, “She didn’t tell you what a marvelous gardener she is.… Vincent has a ‘growing hand,’ everything she touches grows.” The hardest thing he did on her behalf was “teaching new maids not to bother her when she is just sitting still, curled up on a chair, without pencil or paper or even a book. She works that way. She never puts down a single word until a poem is complete.”

  To talk about briefing a maid in the midst of the Depression was, if not a blunder, at least insensitive. In all the interviews that spring, there was only one in which Edna mentioned her mother’s death. The interview began with her story of how she had become a poet: “ ‘Mother gave me poetry,’ she says, with a poignant wistfulness which somehow catches at one’s throat. ‘She wrote, too, at night after she had tucked us into bed. She published only a few of her writings—she wrote from the love of writing.’ ”

  It was only then that she said that her mother had just died. “I’ve been numb … like a person under an anesthetic. Now I seem to be emerging from under the anesthetic and I ache terribly. I can’t seem to realize it all—I keep saying ‘I’ll ask mother’—she always had the answer for everything.”

  2

  At the end of March, just over six weeks after her mother’s death, she at last heard from George Dillon. She wrote back at once:

  I had felt sure that you would write me, when you heard about it. But so many days went by, & still you didn’t write. I was pretty unhappy about that, on top of everything else.

  Probably you don’t know that Ugin’s mother died just a week before mine did.—We’re pretty sunk.—Three weeks ago we ran away from Steepletop and came here.… And we’ve been so dazed with liquor ever since.… I’m not sober yet, and I don’t intend to be.

  I wish to God you’d write me once in a while, tell me how you are, tell me what you’re doing,—or if you don’t want to tell me that, tell me whether or not it’s raining in Chicago, tell me anything, only just keep on talking to me.—It was pretty hideous thinking I had lost you too, just when I needed so seriously everything in life I had that was beautiful, to remind me that life could be borne at all. Very likely I was right to think I’d lost you, but don’t let it go into effect just yet.…

  Please tell me how you are, and how you spend your time. Tell me what I don’t want to hear. It’s all right. I can stand anything. I really can. Except your silence.

  George must have answered her letter immediately, for six days later she wrote again: “My darling, your letter healed so many wounds. Even though I’m still in the dark as to your strange repudiation of me, I’m comforted. You say that you do still love me, that you did want to see me. I don’t care about the rest.”

  She asked to see everything he was writing and said she was sending him her book. She had wanted to send him “one of the beautiful vellum ones, but it would only embarrass you.—I called it ‘Fatal Interview,’—did you know?—It’s from a poem of Donne. Long ago I decided that my first book after the Buck in the Snow should be dedicated to Elinor Wylie. So I have dedicated this book to her.” “When she came to write “goodbye” to him, she smudged it: “(I can’t seem to write that word when I am writing to you).… Please write to me, and send me your poems.—My darling, I love you so much.”

  There was one sonnet she hadn’t sent him, Sonnet XLVII, which falls near the close of the sequence:

  Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;

  In my own way, and with my full consent.

  Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely

  Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.

  Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping

  I will confess; but that’s permitted me;

  Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping

  Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.

  If I had loved you less or played you slyly

  I might have held you for a summer more,

  But at the cost of words I value highly,

  And no such summer as the one before.

  Should I outlive this anguish—and men do—

  I shall have only good to say of you.

  She acknowledged that she’d lost him, but that admission was leavened by her assertion that it had been with “my full consent”—even “In my own way.” Though apparently revealing, the poem remains covert; the poet has managed the neat trick of having the last word. She is both wounded and defiant. Even in her hurt, her anguish, she will survive both her anguish and the loss of him. And that, of course, is precisely what she did.

  3

  Fatal Interview was published on April 15, 1931. Its sales in the first ten weeks after publication were an astonishing 33,000 copies. Even before publication the demand for the first edition was so substantial that Harper appointed a three-man committee to draw lots to decide fairly who should get the limited copies. The fifty-dollar limited edition, autographed by Millay, was three times oversubscribed. At auction, a copy of the fifty-dollar edition of Buck went for two hundred dollars. According to one newspaper report, there was no living American author whose first editions enjoyed such esteem with collectors. In the heart of the Depression, Mil-lay’s sonnet sequence was selling as if it held secrets. And while there had always been a certain curiosity about Millay’s life, now, after the publication of Fatal Interview, everybody wanted to know more about its author.

  One reporter drove to Austerlitz to find out.

  A book of poems by a modern writer which sells a thousand copies is rated as a success by publishers. Several of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s books have sold more than fifty thousand copies.… Millay … throughout the years will be a bookseller’s staple, like Shakespeare and ink and two-cent stamps.

  In the past, he continued, every young man in the English-speaking world had quoted Rudyard Kipling’s line that “a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke”; now young women had taken to heart Mil-lay’s quatrain as signal of their freedom in this new age:

  My candle burns at both ends;

  It will not last the night;

  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

  It gives a lovely light!

  In article after article she appeared in a consistent role. She might be photographed wearing a tailored suit with the inevitable soft collar and necktie of a gent, but she was always—whether described by a male or female reporter—a lovely, fragile child.

  It is safe to say that by the late summer, with 50,000 copies of Fatal Interview in print and The King’s Henchman’s becoming the most successful American opera yet mounted by the Metropolitan Opera, Edna Millay had become not simply a literary figure but a celebrity. If Scott Fitzgerald was far more than the prose chronicler of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was his contemporary, told their generation what to say about how they felt, and she said it with wit, style, and passion. She gave the Jazz Age its lyric voice.

  While Millay’s poems were selling, and while she was providing the press with copy, there was something disturbing about the public vision of her that the press promoted. How would she keep from becoming that fragile child whom they adored?

  Elizabeth Breuer, who’d written about Cora the spring before, wanted to do a companion piece about Vincent. She was a close friend of Norma’s from New City (where as the wife of the painter Henry Varnum Poor she was called Bessie Poor), and Millay felt ambivalent about the interview. She wanted to do Norma a good turn, but clearly the inquisitiveness of any report
er, no matter how good a friend, was on her mind when she wrote to Norma:

  Say, listen, Unconscious! … If you want me to give any interview to Bessie Poor, you bring Bessie Poor up here. If you’re going to get something out of it, I’ll do it, and I’ll see that she gets some exclusive material … of course I can’t give out any dope from what you call “Ugin’s angle.” I can’t say, “Yes, I wrote these sonnets to my husband,” or, “No, I wrote these sonnets to my butler,” or, “Must I be faithful just because I’m married” or “Must I be unfaithful just because I’m married?”

  When Breuer arrived with Norma one afternoon, there were several guests already at Steepletop. Max Eastman with his Russian wife, the painter Eliena Krylenka, the poets Theodore Maynard and Harold Lewis Cook, as well as their neighbor Bill Brann, a stockbroker and breeder of a stable of racehorses, were all sitting in the living room gathered about a large round of Stilton. Central to the gathering was not Edna but Eugen:

  … he was dominating the whole roomful of people by the beauty of his sun-browned body, clad only in a pair of khaki shorts; by the vigor and gayety of his mind and person, by his quick jests and quiet courtesy. His keen blue eyes darted piercing, laughing glances; his whole body quivered with some jest. He is like Douglas Fairbanks in physical bearing and quickness, and has the patrician bearing and cast of features of a Dutch aristocrat, being a junior member of a family of international bankers of Holland.

  Soon there were sounds of a high, sweet voice in the air. The door opened, and we arose to the advance of a little figure with a delicate face and red-gold, curly hair, dressed in white—Edna, or “Vincent” Millay as her friends and family call her. She perched up on a lounge with the quick, sudden movement of a bird, and was off in a gay recital with her tall neighbor, which had to do with horses and dogs and other country interests.

  This was a pretty girl talking.

  “She might be anywhere between twenty and thirty-five years old,” Breuer wrote, whereas she was six months shy of forty. Millay was again made into a child, a gifted, fragile, birdlike, faery child:

  Other poets are writing in America and in Europe today, but we have to go all the way back to Byron to find one who has been, like her, so much a matter of personal excitement to her generation. Like Byron, she speaks for the young, the rebellious.

  This was the girl poet, a treasured, pure, tiny beauty, not the swashbuckling, burly, perverse Lord Byron who had an army of creditors and lovers and who swam the Grand Canal in Venice at night holding a torch aloft with one hand. The fact that in publicity photographs taken by Berenice Abbott after her mother’s death Edna had been dressed like a young man went unmentioned. To what, the reporter asked her, did she attribute her enormous popularity?

  I think people like my poetry because it is mostly about things that anybody has experienced. Most of it is fairly simple for a person to understand. If you write about people who are in love, and about death, and nature, and the sea, thousands … understand … my poetry because it’s about emotions, about experiences common to everybody.

  Then, too, my images are homely, right out of the earth. I never went to a big city, you know, until I was twenty years old, so that I have an age-old simplicity in the figures I employ. I use the same figures that my great-grandmother might have used, and you can just sit in your farmhouse, or your home anywhere, and read it and know you’ve felt the same thing yourself.

  People could and did memorize her poetry because “it is written in old-fashioned forms, in the very musical tradition that people have always known and loved.” But how, the reporter continued, did she feel as a woman about the laurels hung on her head? Were they heavy? A burden? Millay looked stern for a moment.

  A woman poet is not at all different from a man poet. She should write from the same kind of life, from the same kind of experience, and should be judged by the same standards. If she is unable to do this, then she should stop writing. A poet is a poet. The critics should estimate her work as such. Instead they compare her poetry with that of men poets, then say condescendingly, “This is pretty good for a woman poet.” What I want to know is, is it a good or a bad sonnet. That is all as a poet that I am interested in.

  “ ‘What you produce, what you create must stand on its own feet,’ she continued, ‘regardless of your sex. We are supposed to have won all the battles for our rights to be individuals, but in the arts women are still put in a class by themselves, and I resent it, as I have always rebelled against discriminations or limitations of a woman’s experience on account of her sex.’ ”

  Breuer asked Edna how she managed her household, admitting late that she “was asking for myself and for all women who have children and husbands and a house to take their first energy.” Millay seemed startled.

  “I have nothing to do with my household,” she answered quickly. “Eugen does all that kind of thing. He engages the servants. He shows them around. He tells them everything. I don’t interfere with his ordering of the house. If there is anything I don’t like, I tell him. I have no time for it. I want to go into my dining room as if it were a restaurant, and say, ‘What a charming dinner!’ ”

  She was quite clear about what form her insulation from the world of domesticity should take:

  It’s this unconcern with my household that protects me from the things that eat up a woman’s time and interest. Eugen and I live like two bachelors. He, being the one who can throw household things off more easily than I, shoulders that end of our existence, and I have my work to do, which is the writing of poetry.

  But I haven’t made the decision to ignore my household as easily as it sounds. I care an awful lot that things be done right. Yet I don’t let my concern break in and ruin my concentration and my temper.…

  I work all the time. I always have notebook and pencil on the table at my bedside. I may wake up in the middle of the night with something I want to put down. Sometimes I sit up and write in bed furiously until dawn. And I think of my work all the time even when I am in the garden or talking to people. That is why I get so tired. When I finished “Fatal Interview” I was exhausted. I was never away from the sonnets in my mind. Night and day I concentrated on them for the last year and a half.… When you write a poem something begins to be a part of your thought and your life, and you become more and more conscious of it. It forms as if conjured out of steam. After I’ve written off the first rush of what one may call inspiration, then I really begin working on it. I begin by picking it to pieces and say, “This is awful.” “That’s not so bad.” The rest, the final and inevitable shaping of the poem, is just hard work.

  In the middle of their discussion about writing, the gong sounded for dinner. Soon the bright white dining room was festive with good talk and delicious food. Two of Charlie Ellis’s paintings were hung on the walls, and the mahogany sideboard and table were laid with fine linens and china. “What gayety at the table!” Breuer wrote admiringly. “A philosopher and a social revolutionist, a painter, a singer, a poet, a writer, and a country gentleman, all engaged in sipping honey from life.”

  But Breuer made one observation in this interview that was unsettling: after dinner Millay quietly disappeared. “Eugen came down and joined us, saying he had just put Vincent to bed. She was tired out after such an exciting day of visitors. He had constantly to guard her against fatigue. She gave herself so intensely to every person.”

  Here was a woman nearly forty, a successful, productive author who now earned the money upon which Steepletop was run, being put to bed like a child. Eugen took care of her so that she might find that silence within which writers make their work. But there is a difference between that kind of usefulness, that kind of service and sheltering, and putting her to bed after supper. Listen to how he described himself to Breuer. He had been talking to her of his delight with his pheasant preserve, of their young English setter, Ghost Writer, whom he was trying to train, and of Altair, their German shepherd. He talked about their cattle and their pet black p
ig, Cochy. He explained that he had four men working the farm.

  I was astonished at his choice of occupation, and he countered, “Why should it surprise you? Vincent and I live like two men, bachelors, who choose their different jobs. I gave up my work in town because it doesn’t interest me as much as this job, if I can smooth out things for her.

  “It is more worthwhile for her to be writing, even if she writes only one sonnet in a year, than for me to be buying coffee for a little and selling it for a trifle more.… I have had the luck to live with superior people. Inez Milholland, my first wife, was a great personality. She opened my mind to all the great questions of existence. Max Eastman, with whom I kept bachelor hall for five years, was a thrilling intellectual companion. Now I live with a person so great in mind, so beautiful in spirit and in person, that it is the most exciting, the most stimulating kind of living to keep up with her. We study together. We play together, and it’s a race to keep up with her. It makes me in love with life.”

  The next morning he made Edna breakfast, squeezing her a tall glass of fresh orange juice; and when she did not come down until about eleven, he kept the others from interrupting her while she walked to her garden and about the grounds of Steepletop.

  Millay made a point of refusing to explain or to defend her choices. She said the dilemma of a marriage and a career had no effect upon her. Still, hadn’t marriage interfered with the freedom that was so necessary to a poet?