That summer Edna and Eugen had a tennis court built up on the top of the field where her little studio from the days of The King’s Henchman had burned down. It was a first-rate court, with hard red clay laid over pebbles and basalt, better even than the country club courts in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, she bragged a little to George. But she could barely play on it because her arm was hurt: “It hurts my arm to type, too, but not so much. They say what ails my arm is bursitis, which is the same as tennis elbow, or tennis shoulder.” As odd as it must have seemed, Eugen had strained his shoulder, practicing hard serves, and had been laid up too.
In a footnote to Millay’s published letters, Norma Millay added this note: “The trouble with her arm was the first evidence of serious injury caused by an accident in the summer of 1936 which was to give the poet increasing pain.” Eugen was considerably clearer about what had happened in his letter to Charlie:
We had an accident which might have been serious but happily ended with only great discomfort to Edna. Going around a sharp turn the door of the Station-Wagon flew open and Edna was thrown out. She rolled down an embankment. She had an enormous bump on her head, scratches & bruises all over. And her right arm, which was just getting better, is bad again and she cannot play the piano or write the typewriter. Damn bad luck.—We certainly have had … bad luck this year!
In the fall, still locked in struggle with her manuscript, she decided to dedicate Conversation to Arthur Ficke and drove over to Hardhack to tell him. Arthur was overwhelmed with pleasure. “On this day, Oct. 24, 1936,” he entered in his diary,
Edna St. Vincent Millay came to see me, and Gladys and Eugen … and then Vincent formally asked my permission to dedicate her forthcoming book of poems “To the poet Arthur Davison Ficke.” I am dizzy, and in tears. Vince cried a little, too.
It would be hard for an outsider to understand why I am a little dizzy today. Vincent is a fool—and also a great poet. If there is anything that I don’t know about her, both as an ass and an angel, then that matter is unknown to anybody, even herself.
He continued in what was his first and only specific acknowledgment of just how close they had been: “Yet in spite of all this, I am deeply stirred by her desire to give public expression to the fact that, for almost twenty-five years, we have been very important to each other—as friends, lovers, colleagues, lonely fellow-sparks in a dark world.” That same night he wrote to her quickly:
My dear—I have always loved you, and I have always felt that your finest poems were surpassed by no poems that have ever been written, anywhere, anytime.
And in the terrific loneliness that is the fate of every poet, I have dreamed sometimes that a little of my work, too, might be remembered.… I know of no present assurance that could mean to me as much as the fate that you will dedicate your book to me. I feel as if I had been told—“Rise, Sir Arthur Ficke!” … Isn’t it funny that you didn’t fully understand how deeply I would be moved by your publishing of our “bans.”!
The next day, he wrote again:
Miss Millay, Esq:
I shall not easily forget yesterday. I don’t know, really, whether you are a better poet than I am: such matters remain among the religious mysteries. But I do know that your reputation as a poet is much greater than mine. I also know that my love for you has been no little or laughable element in my life: it has been a real thing, for many years. I also know that an absurd feeling (which you will understand instantly) makes me wish that my otherwise-futile life might result in a few of my poems entering into the blood-stream of the race. I also know, now, that you really love me, and that you are not ashamed of the fact that I love you.… It’s just that I’m very proud that you care to record the fact that we have meant something in each other’s lives. When, someday, I die, please reread my sonnets to you “Beauty in Exile”—and then, perhaps for the first time, you will fully grasp the fact that I loved you.
I graciously accord you permission to dedicate your forthcoming book to me. It is only by this complete reversal of what I feel that I can say what I mean.
Arcturus
However uncomfortable Edna may have felt, she had loved him, and once he had stood for all she dreamed of. She did dedicate Conversation to him, but she trimmed “To the Poet” from her dedication, which read, simply, “To Arthur Davison Ficke.”
In mid-January 1937, nine months after the publication of their Baudelaire, Millay called George Dillon from the St. Regis, where she’d dug in to complete Conversation. He wrote back immediately:
It was strange to hear your voice last night. Somehow quite in line with this strange and unseasonable January—the Forsythia in bloom, etc. I wonder what prompted your atavistic impulse. Anyway, I’m glad you had it.
In the excitement of hearing your voice again I forgot to say anything about those superb Oregon pears you sent us at Christmas. We did enjoy them immensely.
I was glad to know that you’ve been writing poems, and wish you could send me some.… Today I’ll probably spend thinking about you and not doing a damn thing.
How oddly forlorn his letter sounds. How distant they must have become. Imagine sending him fruit at Christmas—a gift for an old relative, for someone with whom the connection is thin. After this note she did write back, but by the close of her letter there was a plaintive sadness to her tone: “I wish you would write me, and tell me how you are and what you are doing. I love you always, even though we never see each other and you never hear from me.”
In April, Millay accepted an invitation from New York University to receive an honorary doctorate. In the same letter she was informed of a small dinner being given on her behalf by the chancellor’s wife, Mrs. Chase, at their house. Now, one week after having accepted, she learned that on the same evening of the dinner given in her honor by the chancellor’s wife, another separate dinner was to be given at the Waldorf-Astoria in honor of the male recipients. Her response to the chancellor of New York University, Harry Woodburn Chase, was exceedingly formal; she said that while she had received from him on April 26 the request that she accept the honorary degree the university wished to bestow upon her—and in the same letter an invitation from the chancellor’s wife, Mrs. Chase, to receive her as “guest of honour at a dinner given for a small group of ladies at the Chancellor’s house on the evening before Commencement,” she’d replied at once, accepting the award. But she had since learned that
On an occasion, then, on which I shall be present solely for reasons of scholarship, I am, solely for reasons of sex, to be excluded from the company and the conversation of my fellow-doctors. Had I known this in time, I should have declined not only Mrs. Chase’s invitation to dinner, but also, had it appeared that my declining this invitation might cause Mrs. Chase embarrassment, the honour of receiving the degree as well.
Now it was too late to do either. She was deeply offended. And she was eloquent. “I beg of you, and of the eminent Council whose representative you are, that I may be the last woman so honoured, to be required to swallow from the very cup of this honour, the gall of this humiliation. Very sincerely yours, Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
Cass Canfield, the new president of Harper, escorted Millay to the commencement. He remembered the occasion a little uneasily. He knew nothing of the insult to Millay, only the honor. “Well, I was on the board of directors—a sort of trustee—and of course they knew I was her publisher; and everyone was accompanied, so I was with her. I knew her then almost not at all.” In the photographs in the newspapers they are shown striding toward Washington Square Arch together in the bright morning sunlight. Even in heels, Millay barely reaches his shoulder. Her chin is very clearly jutting forward, and she is wearing her own doctor’s cap and gown, for by that spring 1937 she had accepted five honorary degrees—from New York University, Tufts, Russell Sage, the University of Wisconsin, and Colby College.
2
Conversation at Midnight was unlike anything she’d ever written. It was an audacious piece of wor
k, intellectually provocative, colloquial, funny, and cloaked in a masculine voice. There wasn’t a woman in it. It was also antiwar: “Have pity upon a nervous host, opposed / Not only to fascism, but also to war.” Aria da Capo, her little gem of a play written two decades earlier, had also been antiwar, but this was not commedia dell’arte; there’s not a macaroon or a shepherd in sight. Intellectually compelling, it marked her return to the political stage. The play is built around the sophisticated banter of a group of men—a stockbroker, an advertising executive, a priest, a failed but gifted painter, and Carl, a Communist, who is also a poet—all of whom have gathered in the drawing room of their host, Ricardo’s, house:
It is the room of a wealthy and somewhat eccentric bachelor of considerable culture, who has furnished his quarters to his own liking. The room is at the same time luxurious and faintly shabby. It has a high, rather ornate ceiling. There is an open fire-place with a handsomely carved white marble mantel, surmounted by a huge mirror with an elaborate gilt frame.
His house is on West Tenth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, in the elegant reaches of Greenwich Village, near Washington Square. A butler comes in with a tray of Scotch, Irish, and Bourbon whiskeys, soda and ice, two bottles of claret, and glasses. He leaves, and the conversation opens with Merton, the broker, saying casually, “That was the year I killed five hundred quail.”
The play was only somewhat about what Edmund Wilson would call The American Jitters. It was impossible between 1936, when Millay began to rewrite what she could remember of Conversation, and the fall of 1937, when it was published, not to acknowledge that Europe was again on the brink of war. This was a time when America had made swing king, when Charlie McCarthy, candid cameras, and crossword puzzles were the crazes. How to Win Friends and Influence People topped the bestseller list for 1937, along with, for the second year, the immensely popular Gone with the Wind. Self-help books and historical fiction swept an America eager to emerge from the Depression and escape from the turmoil in Europe. Since Wine was published in 1934, the Nazis seized full power in Germany and began their insidious anti-Semitic campaign. In 1936, the Rome-Berlin Axis was announced as Germany goose-stepped into the Rhineland. A civil war raged in Spain, backed by Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient remained on the bestseller list for the second year—her name forever linked in the American imagination not only with her husband’s historic flight to Paris but with the tragic kidnapping of their baby son. Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Alf Landon by 523 electoral votes, but even with his New Deal, one fifth of all Americans were unemployed.
The New York Times Book Review put Conversation at Midnight on its front page, and the Book-of-the-Month Club took it as an alternate main selection. Millay’s popular success was stunning. If mining Conversation from her memory had been hard work, publishing it was sheer, insolent fun. The correspondent from the New York Post came to Steepletop to interview her. She lifted a glass of champagne with one hand, waved a hunk of coarse sweet Russian black bread with the other, and said, “Here’s to my new book. May it comfort my friends and confound my critics!”
She was standing at the little mahogany bar Eugen had rigged up near the swimming pool with her foot hooked roguishly on the brass rail, sipping Pol Roger 1921, when she turned to the reporter again. “Mind you, I hope it will confound MY critics; not THE critics!” she said and smiled at him.
The reporter, Michael Mok, asked his readers if they had any idea what the smile of Edna Millay looked like. “Her face around the luminous sea-green eyes crinkles, hiding the gold flecks of the freckles; she tilts back her head, shaking her bobbed russet hair; she parts her lips, letting her small even teeth glisten in the sun.” Millay was once more her high-keyed, caroling self: “The nightingale of the Berkshires has pulled the thorn from her breast.” Three years before, when Mok had first met her, she had been disconsolate: “The fist of the world was pounding the door of her ivory tower. It opened a crack. Through it she saw the rise of the Fascist fury, heard the clink of armaments. Hatred again inflamed Europe; fear cowed the innocent. She averted her face.” But since then, she had “decided that the only way to fight evil is to come to grips with it.” And Conversation was her way to settle the score.
“You know me as a passionate pacifist,” she told Mok, “but now, sometimes, I’m almost tempted to think that we must arm.” Then, in a declaration of what she understood her role as a poet to be, she made her position absolutely clear:
Everything that touches the individual as an individual is matter for poetry, but when the poet becomes a member of the mass, his vein is bound to be exhausted.
The poet can be concerned with what goes on outside, but the moment the outside comes in, dictates to him what pen, what ink, what paper he shall use, what thoughts he shall think, he declines and dies.
I think there might be a great Communist poet, a great Fascist poet. Communism and Fascism are subjects for poetry, but Communism and Fascism will never permit those poems to be written.
I can’t imagine myself living, working, in such a world. I should either have to stultify myself or be shot.
The liberty under which this new book of mine comes out is more precious to me than anything anywhere. That’s what makes life real.
At this point Eugen, who had been quietly standing behind the bar, coughed and said, “At the rate my Pol Roger is going it would be cheaper to cut this short and take you two in to lunch. But Vincent … doesn’t bring out a book every day. How about one more glass?”
However, two of Millay’s closest friends from the past, Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, did not like Conversation at all. Wilson, who had sided with American Communists in the 1932 election and was now considered to be a leftist in New York literary circles, was disappointed because the conflict between the Communist and the stockbroker was really
the conflict between the classless and the class ideal, and Miss Millay has sidestepped this by making the pretenses of both parties ridiculous. For her, the whole upshot of the matter seems to be that both the stockbroker and the radical hanker only after the status of obedient cogs in a smoothly running machine. But is this what they are fighting about in Spain? Miss Millay probably does not really think so, since she has lately contributed to a volume of translations of Spanish poems, for the benefit of the Loyalist cause.
She had also written for the Spanish cause “Say that We Saw Spain Die”:
O splendid bull, how well you fought!
Lost from the first.
… the tossed, the replaced, the watchful torero with gesture elegant and spry,
Before the dark, the tiring but the unglazed eye deploying the bright cape,
Which hid for once not air, but the enemy indeed, the authentic shape,
A thousand of him, interminably into the ring released … the turning beast at length between converging colours caught.
Save for the weapons of its skull, a bull
Unarmed, considering, weighing, charging
Almost a world, itself without ally.
What Wilson wanted was the lyric girl whose work and self he’d loved almost two decades earlier. At the close of his review he was reduced to lambasting the entire current state of verse in America: “Compare MacNeice and Auden with Yeats and Houseman; Robinson Jeffers with John Masefield; Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral with his earlier work.… And now Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of the sole surviving masters of English verse, seems to be going to pieces, too.” He ended on a note that read like an epitaph: “Yet I miss her old imperial line.”
A quarter century later, in 1960, the iconoclastic British critic Kenneth Tynan, writing in The New Yorker, had called Conversation “the brilliant book of orchestrated debate that is to my mind Miss Millay’s highest intellectual achievement.” He closed with Carl’s lovely, mournful affirmation of life:
Beautiful as a dandelion-blossom, golden in the green grass,
This life can be.
Common as a dandelion-blossom, beautiful in the clean grass, not beautiful
Because common, beautiful because beautiful;
Noble because common, because free.
Tynan understood Millay to be a “thinker.… a ravaged observer of the human plight,” not a “pretty non-combatant, a delicate fashioner of pathetic parlor verse.”
CHAPTER 33
While it was important to Millay not to lose the friends to whom she’d once been attached, there were few women among them unless they were the wives of men she and Eugen were close to: Gladys and Arthur, Alyse and Lulu, Mary and Deems. She had very little contact now with either of her sisters. Kathleen had all but disappeared from her life, and Norma was being kept at arm’s length. She counted very few writers in her inner circle. Charlie suggested that this was because Eugen picked her friends. Bill Brann, who after a very successful career in advertising now bred and trained Thoroughbreds, and George LaBranche, a stockbroker who raised pheasants on his nearby estate and had written a book on fly fishing, were men with whom Eugen was comfortable, and both lived nearby. Maybe in her wide public fame Millay lost or had never shared that sense of belonging to the same generation that Edmund Wilson prized so highly in his friendships with the men he knew at Princeton: Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop. Millay didn’t see Wilson anymore because of a misunderstanding between them about his portrayal of her as Rita Cavanaugh in his novel I Thought of Daisy. It wasn’t that she was offended by his characterization of her; she felt the novel was badly written. “Whenever he or Bishop reviewed her work, as they just had with Conversation, they fell hard on her, judging her work sharply and with a sense of disappointment.
Savage Beauty Page 52