Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  Darling … I will come to Paris in April, whether I get the fellowship or not. As I told you, I shall be poor—even poorer, perhaps, if I get the fellowship, for then I should attempt to live on the income from that.

  Then he told her just how much in love with her he was:

  In spite of the neurotic moods that come between us—in spite of my bad manners and insane behaviour. You have been sweet and patient always, and I am really grateful. If I ever amount to anything, it will be because you loved me, and continued to love me through these terrible years.

  There were terms, however, to their romantic departure, and Millay set them. She was traveling with Eugen.

  At the end of April, Eugen dropped a postcard to Norma and Charlie from Paris: “Darlinks, here we are. Walked in Mallorca, fought the bulls in Spain, and stopped for a month with my brother in Antibes.” Later that week they were invited to a formal dinner at the American Embassy in Paris, where Millay was to be the guest of honor. They were in a cab on the way to the embassy when Eugen, tossing his cigarette out of the window, saw three men running across a bridge. Curious, he told Edna he wanted to find out what was going on and jumped out of the taxi. Leaning over the parapet of the bridge, he saw a woman’s white face in the water. “Her hand was flung up for a moment,” he said later, “as if in appeal to me, and then she went under.”

  Without hesitation, he stripped himself of his high silk hat, his overcoat, and his scarf and dropped his “smoking” on the footpath leading down to the water. Some who were watching called out to him not to jump in because she was dead. But he had seen her raise her hand. He dove in. Floyd Dell quoted Eugen about the adventure in a piece he wrote for the New York Herald Tribune:

  The Seine is not a wide river—or so it seems from the outside. But when you are in it the Seine is one of the widest rivers in the world, besides being very cold, very swift and very dirty. As I swam toward the woman—who might already be dead—I wished I were not there. I was afraid that if she were alive she might grab me and drown me. Something like that had almost happened to me once, in Holland. I was afraid of her. I resented her. Why did she have to pick this time to jump into the river, just when I was passing by, on my way to a beautiful dinner? I did not feel at all heroic. I felt sorry for myself. At the same time I remembered her white face, and her hand flung up in appeal to me, and I felt a kind of personal affection for her, not as if she were a stranger, but as though she were some one whom I had an absolute obligation to save.

  “When he reached her, afraid of being seized, he dove under her, grabbing her neck as he came up. All he got was a cheap fur neckpiece. He plunged again. This time he held her by the back of her neck and swam diagonally to the shore. The woman was unconscious and pale but alive.

  “Parisians who happened to pass about seven o’clock last night on the Pont Royal,” said L’Intransigeant,

  were witnesses of a not commonplace scene. An American gentleman in evening clothes (who afterward modestly declined to give the police his name) had leaped from the bridge and rescued from drowning a young woman who had thrown herself in despair from the Pont du Carrousel just upstream. From the American Embassy word got about that this brave American gentleman was Eugen Boissevain, who was in Paris with his wife, Edna Millay, the poet.

  “Eugen Boissevain,” the article continued, “is the sort of person who might turn up anywhere and do some extraordinary thing—a great, broad-shouldered, sun-browned Hollander with an enormous gusto for life, gay, laughter-loving, irrepressible and unexpected.”

  They raced back to their hotel. Eugen changed into the only dark suit he had, and they arrived at the embassy an hour late.

  The next day they went to the Hôpital de la Charité, where the poor young woman was recovering. Her name was Pauline Venys, and she knew Eugen was the instrument of God sent to rescue her.

  George Dillon had never traveled to Europe, let alone walked in Mallorca. He had no money other than the little he’d saved from his advertising job in Chicago, but he was becoming the darling of the critics, and he was about to enjoy a popular success of his own. On April 28, 1932, Dillon won the Pulitzer Prize for The Flowering Stone, as the best book of poetry published in 1931. In its press release, the Pulitzer committee wrote, “Of the four or five volumes which received most serious consideration, Mr. Dillon’s verse seemed most original and authentic.… his poems are exceedingly beautiful. The prize is awarded to him as a young poet of very great promise.”

  George wrote back to the committee from Paris that the prize had never meant more to anybody than it did to him: “I feel strengthened and encouraged as never before.” But, he continued, “this is my first trip abroad, and you’d have to call out the marines to get me back now!” He sounded young and jubilant, and by then he was a man who knew he’d won the Guggenheim, too.

  Alix Daniels, a friend and colleague of George’s from Poetry magazine, described the apartment he took on the boulevard Saint-Germain:

  It was one of those banal little places furnished with dingy odds and ends—a salon sparsely furnished with furniture that ran to rickety curved legs and dusty green velvet upholstery, a tiny inconvenient kitchen, a bedroom with a huge armoir. Even the concierge was impossible—a hefty dame upholstered in black bombazine.

  By mid-May, George Dillon had been with Millay in Paris for just over a month. She had remained at the Hôtel Port-Royal, an elegant old hotel on the Left Bank, where Eugen wrote to her from the M.S. Lafayette, en route to New York, on May 10.

  Darling—

  … I passed George’s train. C’est egal, quand meme!—My love, all my love to you—I’m thinking of you as gay and happy. I’m fine.—Goodbye my courageous lion. When I come back you must be again the roaring lion.… Skiddlepins—the brave.

  Eugen had decided to leave them alone together. The implication was that Dillon would be the tonic she needed. Just before his ship reached Plymouth, he wrote to her again:

  Uge had rainbows on the starboard side all day long. And I thought of all the rainbows we had seen together.

  The people seem of the dullest. Except one girl in a beautiful grey dress a la Louise Boulanger. She is cute. A lovely smile and she is small and dainty and reminds me of you, vaguely. I had a drink in the bar and … well you know, … I thought of you & missed you and so had to drink another and missed you more.

  I love you. More than ever you can know.—

  Darling Scramoodle, sweet sweet Freckels, I love you. Be happy and without a care. Button up your over coat and be careful about booze and crossing streets. I love you—…—I kiss you on your soft sensitive lips. I love you.… Poor Bibs! Loving so much two galumps! and one is more than an ordinary girl can stand!—Never you mind. You can manage it—and you’ll have a life richer than any girl, but not rich enough to scare me—Go to it Scramoodles, and no heartaches or feeling sorry for ANYBODY!—

  My undying love

  Sniggybus

  The girl in the gray dress stands out in this letter as a hint from Eugen that he, too, is sexually alive. In the closing lines of the second sonnet in Fatal Interview, which she’d told George was for Eugen, she had written:

  Along my body, waking while I sleep,

  Sharp to the kiss, cold to the hand as snow,

  The scar of this encounter like a sword

  Will lie between me and my troubled lord.

  Her affair with Dillon had altered her sexual relationship with her husband. If she was no longer, or rarely, making love with Eugen, this time alone with George became more weighty. Unwilling or unable to give up Eugen, Edna was meanwhile trying to decide if she needed them both in her life, and how to manage it.

  3

  On the morning of May 14, Edna dispatched a letter of four sentences to Eugen. She wished him a happy birthday and assured him she loved him: “Darling … Going to write you a biggie, biggie letter in a minute. I love you. I couldn’t possibly love anybody else as much as I love you.” But there was no biggie to
follow. She cabled him the next week on the exact date of his birthday. Eugen told her by return post that he didn’t know what he would have done without her greetings. He did note, however, that all her wires had been sent from Paris between 1 and 3 A.M., “So you are going early to bed!—Bad darling, sweet, sweet Scramoodles. But be careful of yourself.—Please look after yourself.—Please, please, be selfish!”

  Three days after her four-line letter, she wrote again. “Darling Skiddlepins,” she said, “This is another skimpy awful letter, but you know how I am about letters.—I’ve missed you just all the time. Everything is marvelous, but there’s nobody such fun as you.—I’m happy, though,—I can’t write you much because you always leave letters around so!”

  Alix Daniels, who was in Paris at this time and was no friend of Millay’s, thought that Edna’s demands were exhausting her young lover and that she was driving him away with her sexual jealousy. “She was a woman who was sexually high-geared. She was wearing George out. He once said, ‘It’s too much for me.’ She was forever testing him and his feeling for her. For instance, one day as the three of us were walking across the Pont-Neuf in Paris, Vincent stopped and leaned perilously over the parapet. George took her arm and pulled her back. Then she said, ‘So, you don’t want me to take the leap. Would you leap in after me and drag me ashore? Perhaps though you’d do the same for that poor fellow under the bridge should he leap in.’ It was a clochard—one of those derelicts who lurk under bridges in Paris. George said, ‘You are not bracketed in my mind with that tramp, and you know it.’ She shrugged and treated him to one of those saberlike flashes from those little gray-green eyes of hers and we walked on.

  “Well, when the evening was over and we were taking a taxi back to our hotels, Edna said she was getting out with me. I made excuses, each one more lame than the one before. She pressed. Finally I said, ‘Besides, the bed is too small.’ She said, ‘Oh, we won’t be doing any sleeping!’ The idea was that if she couldn’t have George, she’d take me.

  “But the next day I was sent a gold Cartier heart, some silk handkerchiefs, and a bouquet of violets! That was the way she was. She was not really interested in me, mind you. She wanted George. Whether it was to dance with him or to sleep with him, she wanted him on her own terms. And when he would not or could not accept those terms, she retaliated.”

  Norma had been listening to what I’d told her about Alix Daniels, and she was impatient. “Oh, why drag all that in? Isn’t the story good enough without women?”

  That night, sitting before the fire at Steepletop after we’d finished drinking our coffee with heavy cream, Norma, who had been watching Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman on TV, looked across the room at me. I was half asleep, dozing on one of her couches. “Naancy,” she drawled in her low voice, as if it were three syllables, “haven’t you ever wanted to reach out and touch …” She paused. “I remember standing down at the pool while———, you know she was———’s wife, swam toward me. Her small lovely breasts seemed to be floating on the water, and I just wanted to reach out and touch their tips.” Norma made a very theatrical yawn, bringing the back of her small fist to her lips, and stretched. “People used to say that I did what Vincent Millay wrote about.” Norma’s eyes glowed wickedly in the firelight as she scratched the belly of her cat, Debs. “How are you going to handle that?”

  If Edna’s letters to Eugen were scant, his to her were voluminous, abundant in their details, pages and pages telling her what he’d done, whom he had seen, how he felt. He kept telling her how beautiful Steepletop was:

  … the hyacinths are in full blossom, large blooms like in Holland … the lawn mowed and trim and neat; the drive nearly raked; the water in the swimming pool, shining in the moonlight like a real body of water. Oh, hell, I cannot describe but I know that never, even at Drafna, did I feel such delight and emotion, at coming home to the most beautiful place in creation.… I lit a fire and sat in the big room, naked looking at the fire, for the first time at Steepletop without you.

  Here was a man trying to live by the terms they had agreed upon—an open, free marriage—yet telling her mercilessly of the loveliness that they had created together as he cut his first asparagus, took them to the summerhouse down by the pool, and ate his harvest with “melted fresh Steepletop-butter also a bottle of white wine. I am glad nobody saw me,” he continued. “I felt like a traitor eating them without you. It would have been criminal not to have done it, but I hardly could swallow and I fear I had tears in my eyes. Funny if someone had seen that. Crying over an asparagus.”

  Couldn’t she return to Steepletop? They could “go back together, or if you prefer, I’ll stay here.… Let me know what you want to do.…—Let me know. But remember, I was going away for only a month or so, and here I have been away almost a year.”

  The next letter was just as long, just as plaintive, and just as filled with domestic details. He had done the income taxes, he would send in the renewal slip for her driver’s license. He begged her at least to give him her telephone number: “I just must hear your voice again.” Of course, he said, he could hear her voice by thinking of it, “but I do not get it right and it drives me crazy. Am I a nuisance? … I wanted you to know that I can come back at any moment. I am a nuisance, but can I help it that I love you?”

  He was not so lonely without her that he did not make plans to see friends: Deems Taylor was going to stay with him, and Margaret Cuthbert was scheduled to come the following week. He’d even driven down to see Norma and Charlie in New City, where Norma had proudly shown him her flower beds and rock garden just beyond their house.

  My dear she has nothing in it but the plants you gave her.… Next to the plants are still the little wooden markers with your handwriting on them giving the names and instructions. It was more than I could stand. I had to light a cigarette, and look at any airplane which luckily passed overhead, and tie my bootlace or else she would have noticed.

  In these interminable letters Eugen is calling to his wife to return to him, to Steepletop, to the pastoral life they’ve created together, where he is at his fullest as husband. It is spring in the Northeast, the earth is swelling with life, the bees are swarming, the cows are coming to calf, the horses are foaling, Ghost is in heat. Even her mother’s lilacs, which she’d placed near the sunken garden, are white with blossoms. Toward evening he wrote again:

  I’ve done the things you told me to do. How long, Edna, how long must I wait? … I will see you soon my dear? Good-night darling Freckles. I am but half alive away from you. Never have I longed for anyone, as I am longing for you. I want you.… I want to see you! and SMELL you! and hear you!

  All he received in return was a brief note written on his birthday:

  Darling Wham-wham, I had my breakfast this morning with your little picture propped up before me on the tray. I was missing you just awfully. I do a great deal of the time.—I hope Steepletop is beautiful now. It must be, I think. Paris has been clear & very hot the last few days. Today is filthy hot.

  She enclosed her license, which she’d just found, and told him to have Norma forge her signature if he could not. “Please don’t fail me, Skid-dlepins!” Clearly, she hadn’t received his last letter. How dispassionate and reserved she was, especially in comparison with his outpourings.

  As for Eugen, his days were beginning to have a pattern. He got up at seven, made himself a glass of fresh orange juice, worked in the garden, sunbathed and swam, and then drove to Pittsfield to post his letters to her. He had a hunch she’d left the Port-Royal. “I hate not knowing where you are,” he wrote. “Is it absolutely impossible for the three of us ever to be together?—must one always hide?—Well we’ll have to find out.—We’ll be intelligent and courageous and we’ll find out.—And then others can profit by our mistakes and successes.”

  He insisted that he was “pleased with our couple.” But his last sentence read, “I wish I was a couple again,” because there were now two couples. “Do I write too often?” he as
ked. Even as he mailed that letter, he wrote another, slipped into an envelope with no salutation and no signature:

  What ever happens, what ever you want, what ever changes you may go through: don’t be afraid.—I’ll understand everything.—and I will always love you.—Always love you.—I understand you, I get in your mood, as other people only understand themselves.—no matter what you do, I’ll be as clever understanding and making excuses and justifying, as if I’d done it myself.—so don’t be scared about anything.—

  I love you.—

  I worship you.—

  I know you.—

  She had written three letters to his twelve, one of which consisted of two sentences. On May 25, she tried to be more expansive. She told him she’d loved his cables about Steepletop and swimming and described a lavish party she’d gone to the night before, given by Elsa Maxwell:

  I wore my new white dress & red jacket & beautiful white slippers with sparkling white buckles & long white gloves & a lovely new glittering handbag: But I was all alone, there wasn’t a person there I’d ever seen before except Elsa herself & the girl she lives with, and I was not at Elsa’s table. And everybody knew everybody else & I felt just like a Freshman the day he arrives at college. It was awful.

  People were sweet to her, she told him,

  but I had the curse (of course I would have—came on just as I was dressing to go) & I felt awful & I felt blue & the music was awful for dancing, Hungarians playing jazz—what you might call “weather sultry”—track slow.… Anyway I was shockingly lonely, and I stayed on & on long after I wanted to go, because I hated so to go alone.