Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  All we get is the American viewpoint here and we can’t see the other side.

  She said that she would like to write a play about democracy versus fascism. She linked her own turning to drama as a “natural progression.” Propaganda, she said, was never good art; it wasn’t even good propaganda. By the time she reached San Francisco the caption beneath her photograph read, WE MUST FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY. “ ‘I used to be a most ardent pacifist,’ said Edna St. Vincent Millay at Hotel St. Francis yesterday, ‘but my mind has been changed. I am afraid the only hope of saving democracy is to fight for it—not necessarily to be dragged into a war unprepared, but to choose our own time.’ ”

  There were, she said, men in power who were

  not human beings in the sense that we have been brought up to understand that term. We have beasts in control of human beings. I am not speaking of the German people themselves, but if we have a wild animal to deal with we cannot be pacifists forever. Whatever we do, we cannot keep aloof from the general world situation; it is silly to think we can.

  But she didn’t stop there.

  Persons who begin writing lyric poetry at a young age are deeply concerned with themselves.… As they mature, they begin to grow out of themselves and they feel concern for others. Lyric poets who continue writing lyric poetry are likely to go into a dry rot and just write the same thing over again.

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  Although the relationship between Edna and Kathleen had become strained, Edna and Eugen went to see her in Santa Monica during her tour. Howard had left Kathleen, and although she had tried to write screenplays (she was briefly hired to work on Disney’s Snow White) in the end all her efforts had failed. She was broke, she was drinking heavily, and her health had deteriorated dangerously. The two sisters spent the afternoon together, and Edna gave her money and said she’d help with the cost of her divorce, if that was what Kathleen wanted. The next Edna heard from her was a collect wire on January 28, 1939:

  DEAR SISTER HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME SO SOON AGAIN I AM SORRY TO TROUBLE YOU BUT MY FRIENDS REMIND ME THAT I PROMISED AND THREATEN TO TAKE THINGS IN THEIR OWN HANDS AGAIN BECAUSE UNFORTUNATELY I HAVE NEW OBLIGATIONS SINCE PEOPLE KNOW YOU HAVE BEEN HERE AND I AM TOO TROUBLED AND WORRIED PLEASE WIRE ANY ANSWER YOU DESIRE LOVE AS ALWAYS

  KATHLEEN

  Eugen wrote back quickly: a $100 check had been mailed to her two days before. He asked whether she’d received their first check, sent two weeks before.

  Your wire was not entirely clear.—But then we are accustomed to receiving garbled wires as they are telephoned to our house, then taken more or less down and finally reach us. (By the way, our telegrams are more public than a p.c., we don’t care, but in case you want to say something you don’t want to make public property, I suggest an air-mail letter).—

  The way we received the wire it read in part, “unfortunately I have new obligations since people know you have been here.”—

  In case this is the way you wired it then of course it would seem to mean that you have acquaintances who mistakenly take Edna for a rich woman from whom they can expect money.—Alas, I wish it were true! But we live a fairly hand to mouth existence. She has six people who are dependent on her which has been quite a drain on the old pocket book.—

  I know she wants to help you get a divorce if she possibly can.—So when you are ready to do this, let her know, and she’ll do what she can. You wrote you thought of going to Reno, because you thought other methods might be unpleasant for Edna.—Don’t give that a thought. It won’t bother her in the least. Just do it as you want to do it, which I hope will be the least costly way.

  There were two pages of rough notes attached to his letter, which while they probably were not sent to Kathleen, give a fairly clear idea of what Eugen was thinking. The first was simply that while Edna wanted “to save you all possible chagrin & unpleasantness she is going to be … hard put to find the money.” He did not cotton to the implicit threat in her wire. “You must not forget Kathleen, that we have been entirely out of touch with you and you may think that we know something, when in reality we know nothing but that altogether too short visit in December.”

  Kathleen wrote directly to Edna two days before her birthday:

  Dear Sister Edna—(Titter Binny!)

  You know, I positively got sentimental the other night … the fire was low—and so was I. So—I had the radio on—low, too—and three women were harmonizing—and I remembered those three Millay brats and how they used to sing together—you know, Edna, I think I sometimes miss that more than any other thing in my whole life in the gay days of long ago! Do you ever miss the singing, too?

  Then she told her she was feeling better but still worried about money:

  I owe the butcher and the baker and the electric light bill—but not so much as I did when I saw you in December. The only trouble was that after you had been seen in these yere parts in that sixteen-cylinder Cadillac I had to pay the back rent.… I can’t use any excuses now as I could before. I know it is silly—but it does happen to be so.

  And while she’d originally told her she needed $500 for her divorce, now she asked for $700, although even “that will not cover all the money for the whole two months there.” She needed $500 “now—soon, that is, any time so that I can get things over with before the heat sets in too much—I still have to watch the blood pressure, you know, it mustn’t ever get back to two hundred and forty again, or I’ll explode or something.” She signed herself “Kathleen” with “Wumps” in parentheses beside it. “Love, dear—and of course, I’ll pay you back for helping me now over this messy thing—one of these days.”

  Eugen was beside himself. First it had been a few hundred dollars in California. Then the $500 for her divorce had grown to $700. As early as 1936, in a letter to Norma, Eugen was clear about the reasons for his irritation with Kathleen—she had left unpaid bills in Camden for them to pay, even though she knew “how your mother hated bills in Camden”—but it was the end of his letter that struck home. “I don’t think it is very swell of Kathleen, especially since she hates Edna.” Now he wrote to her promptly:

  Dear Kathleen:

  I am sorry having to write you all the time disappointing letters.—But the fact is that Edna cannot help you to get a divorce, now that you write that it will cost about $1000.—When she saw you you said the cost would be $200.—which she gave you. You had to use this money for something else, and now that it would need another $1000 or thereabouts she cannot do it. Since Howard does not bother or interfere with you at all, might it not be advisable to wait until either you or Edna can comfortably afford it? It seems more reasonable to use the little money that Edna can spare from time to time, for you to rest and get well with.

  I am enclosing $100.—This is all we can do just now. I hope it will last you some time.

  He went on to write, “If you need later on more [sic], let her know.” But in Edna’s hand his “If” is changed to “When.” “She might be able to give you $50 a month for some time. I hope that you will be able to manage on that.” Scrawled on the back, in Eugen’s hand, is the following:

  Please try to impress on the people who are bothering you for money that Edna is far from a rich woman and that it is no use for them to harass you.—

  I am sorry about that Cadillac which we hired at the hotel for the occasion instead of taking a taxi, a taxi might have cost us … less but the larger car was more comfortable and E. was working extremely hard and was very tired.

  E. wanted to answer your letter herself but she is hurrying to complete a ms. which must go off to the printer in the next few days.—She sends you her love.

  At this point their correspondence stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Kathleen fell silent.

  In the spring of that year, Millay had heard from Agnes Yarnall, a young sculptor who’d done a bronze of her head in 1933. She’d read that Edna had been collecting shells when the hotel with her manuscript inside had gone up in flames; now she sent her (among
other things) a rare harp shell. When Millay wrote to thank her, she said her own collection was full of gaps, and these shells were rare and stunning. “You were very good to give me this.… Perhaps we shall meet again.” Now, on tour, Edna and Eugen invited Agnes to come to Cincinnati, where Millay was reading. Years later, Agnes Yarnall tried to recall under what circumstances she’d gone. “There was either a telephone call or a note, and she asked me to join them.… I got there before they did. I remember them coming in the late afternoon. On the train, I think. They seemed very tired, both of them. They had a sort of suite, but we were all on the same floor.

  “There was this great bond between them, you know—no question about it. And she depended on him—for things like trains and schedules and dates.

  “After the reading, we went to their suite. And she was nervous. She was very edgy, pacing. That sort of thing. We were sitting there. And then she did it. I don’t think she even knew that I noticed. Then she went into her bedroom and fell asleep.

  “Eugen said, ‘This happens sometimes, you must not be troubled by it.’ I said very little.… In the morning, she said quietly to me, ‘You don’t really have to go, do you? You’re disappointed in me. I’ve made you lose faith in me’—something like that. She sensed it, I suppose. And I said, ‘No, I’ve got to go home to Mother.’ Then she gave me the book you have in your hands. And she signed it.

  “I don’t flourish well in an atmosphere of depression, and I never saw them again. Now you know why. I’ve never told anyone before.… She was destroying herself and, my dear, there is nothing you can do in the face of that but watch. Or refuse to watch.”

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  Millay was back at Steepletop for the holidays, and she was nearly at the end of her tour. She had only one more reading to do, an appearance in Worcester: “An old friend,” she wrote to George Dillon, “which doesn’t bother me much.” She told him she’d gone and bought a Walt Kuhn painting: “one of the clown ones, a beauty.” The terms were simple: “One million dollars down and a ball and chain about my ankle for the rest of my life.”

  Darling,

  It is quaint how much I miss you. It is archaic. It should have gone out along with samplers and paintings on china. (But perhaps these have come in again, together with herb gardens and uncomfortable furniture.)

  She wanted George’s reaction to two groups of poems before her final manuscript went to Harper: “Theme and Variations” and “Sonnets from a Town in a State of Siege”—“please let me know at once.” She tried to make light of her insistence: “What a stolid yet exuberant letter, rambling all over the landscape, Tudor, Georgian and Victorian!” In closing, she again asked him to read the poems “if you have time. Otherwise wire me that you have no time.” When she didn’t hear back from him, she wired him. When, she asked, could she telephone him?

  In a handwritten postscript she added that she’d send “Rendezvous” later; she was not including it at present because it was so badly typed “it is impossible.”

  There must have been a good deal of conversation in the house about these poems. Millay waited ten days to send her December 29 letter off to George. One day later, on January 9, Eugen (unbeknownst to her) wrote directly to Dillon about them:

  Vincent told me that she had written you a letter about her new poems. She had, however, been postponing sending you her poems … she thinks she ought to tear them up and that they are no good.

  I am crazy about them and I think that they are amongst the very best that she has written, but then I am not a poet and I am swayed so easily by Vincent’s opinion about all poetry and about her poetry especially, that I am not sure enough to advise her.… It is in moments like these that I know I must fail her, not being a poet and I must look to you to help her. Please do it.

  Love,

  Ugin

  What were these poems that they caused her such uncertainty? Mary Kennedy, who had known Millay since her marriage to Deems Taylor, remembered Millay coming to discuss them late one night in her apartment in New York:

  She had come by herself. She’d been drinking, you see. She read me these poems to Dillon. They were greatly changed, I believe, when she published them. They were about betrayal … not adultery. I did not think, then, that they were for Eugen, and I do not now. They were about a real betrayal—in other words, it has given me my death wounds.… With Edna there were two warring elements and they were never resolved.

  Oh, it’s heartbreaking! It’s vanity! The poetry, she knew. No one could touch her in that. But as a person, you see, as a woman, as a lover. Well … She was capable, then, of picking up a barman. I saw her do that! It was the drink. And vanity. Of course, who knows how far it went? Perhaps the barman refused to go with her. Or perhaps they did not go to bed.

  Millay sent George Dillon “Rendezvous” and the eight poems that make up “Theme and Variations.” These last poems were the ones Mary Kennedy had kept from that night in manuscript. The theme was her sweet ally, love, and its old companion, betrayal, and the variation now was her familiar, pain:

  I

  Not even my pride will suffer much;

  Not even my pride at all, maybe,

  If this ill-timed, intemperate clutch

  Be loosed by you and not by me,

  Will suffer; I have been so true

  A vestal to that only pride

  Wet wood cannot extinguish, nor

  Sand, nor its embers scattered, for,

  See all these years, it has not died.

  And if indeed, as I dare think,

  You cannot push this patient flame,

  By any breath your lungs could store,

  Even for a moment to the floor

  To crawl there, even for a moment crawl,

  What can you mix for me to drink

  That shall deflect me? What you do

  Is either malice, crude defense

  Of ego, or indifference:

  I know these things as well as you;

  You do not dazzle me at all.

  Some love, and some simplicity,

  Might well have been the death of me.

  George did respond. He wrote all over the margins of her typescript. He didn’t much like this first one, particularly the last couplet; it seemed “tacked on,” he told her. The final poem, the eighth, is elegiac:

  The time of year ennobles you.

  The death of autumn draws you in.

  The death of those delights I drew

  From such a cramped and troubled source

  Ennobles all, including you,

  Involves you as a matter of course.

  You are not, you have never been

  (Nor did I ever hold you such),

  Between your banks, that all but touch,

  Fit subject for heroic song.…

  The busy stream not over-strong,

  The flood that any leaf could dam.…

  Yet more than half of all I am

  Lies drowned in shallow water here:

  And you assume the time of year.

  I do not say this love will last;

  Yet Time’s perverse, eccentric power

  Has bound the hound and stag so fast

  That strange companions mount the tower

  Where Lockhart’s fate with Keats is cast,

  And Booth with Lincoln shares the hour.

  That which has quelled me, lives with me,

  Accomplice in catastrophe.

  She had made two brilliant changes between this typescript and what had been her working draft, where she’d written:

  Where Brutus walks in Caesar’s thongs

  And Booth with Lincoln shares the hour

  Millay cut the reference to Brutus and Caesar and found a more apt poetic assassin in Lockhart. Lockhart, whom very few people other than scholars had heard of, was in his day such a savage critic that he was nicknamed “The Scorpion.” “When he condemned Keats’s Endymion, he was accused, by Byron, of having hastened the young, sick poet’s death.
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br />   Her final couplet is compelling and again far better than it had stood in draft, where she had written, “That which had quelled me, rides with me/Golden, in high catastrophe.” But “Golden” and “high” were words that inflated the ending and meant far less than the potency of “Accomplice.” “That which has quelled me, lives with me, / Accomplice in catastrophe.” For what she was talking about in these poems was her own part in the assassination of her spirit. These, the final lines of the entire sequence, must be the most powerful. They strike not only a ringing close but a true one. And while George Dillon did not take any of the eight poems in “Theme and Variations” for Poetry magazine, he did take “Rendezvous”:

  Not for these lovely blooms that prank your chambers did I come. Indeed,

  I could have loved you better in the dark;

  That is to say, in rooms less bright with roses, rooms more casual, less aware

  Of History in the wings about to enter with benevolent air

  On ponderous tiptoe, at the cue “Proceed.”

  Not that I like the ash-trays over-crowded and the place in a mess,

  Or the monastic cubicle too unctuously austere and stark,

  But partly that those formal garlands for our Eighth Street

  Aphrodite are a bit too Greek,

  And partly that to make the poor walls rich with our unaided loveliness

  Would have been more chic.

  Yet here I am, having told you of my quarrel with the taxi-driver over a line of Milton, and you laugh; and you are you, none other.

  Your laughter pelts my skin with small delicious blows.

  But I am perverse: I wish you had not scrubbed—with pumice, I suppose—

  The tobacco stains from your beautiful fingers. And I wish I did not feel like your mother.

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