Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  On January 11, 1939, Edna read at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she’d first read in 1927. She and Eugen were houseguests of the president of the college, Loring Dodd, and his wife, Ruth Dodd. Arriving the afternoon of her reading, she lay down for a nap. Through what was later called “sheer exhaustion,” she overslept and didn’t reach Clark’s lecture hall until considerably after 8:15 P.M., the time at which her performance was scheduled to start.

  In a letter she later wrote to Mrs. Dodd but did not send, she remembered walking down the staircase of their house to meet the three of them standing in the hall below her, “my husband’s face white and tense with anxiety for me, your husband’s face black with anger against me, and your own sweet face twisted a little as if you had just been crying.” She remembered, too, stumbling sleepily down the stairs

  in my long velvet train and my one glass slipper!—or at least it seemed like that, for I had been abruptly awakened from such a happy dream and recalled to a world where people must, with frantic haste, get into their costumes and, dizzy with fatigue, step briskly and brilliantly out onto a stage to perform night after night their difficult and exacting chore.

  She told the story like a fairy tale twisted into nightmare. “I had often spent the afternoon preceding my appearance on the stage, and the night following it, in the house of a friend, or even in the house of a stranger, perhaps the president of the University.” But she would never do it again. It was too hard on her hosts “and impossibly difficult for me.” Lavish dinners were prepared, guests were invited to meet her, “and I always forgot to write beforehand saying that I never ate dinner just before giving a reading.” “What she required was rest, alone.

  Afterward there would be receptions arranged, which she “would be unable to attend because I had to catch, in a hurry, a train for some other city.” There had been, that winter of her tour, she wrote, many disappointed hostesses and several angry ones.

  She decided never to do that sort of thing again, instead “always to go to a hotel where I should be a care to nobody, upset nobody’s arrangements and be, myself, free.” Why was she constructing this maze of excuses? She said that her doctor had told her she could not go on this tour without, in addition to her husband “to care for me,”

  also a personal maid to pack and unpack me, and to get me into my costume.… she was always there to awaken me from an exhausted slumber, to draw my bath, throw me into it, drag me out of it, dry me off, haul my gown over my head, hook it, button it, snap it, straighten out the train of it, set me down before my dressing table and, holding my head against her shoulder with one hand, with the other hand paint my mouth and brush my lashes with mascara.

  While Eugen had dinner downstairs with the Dodds, “I, as naturally as an exhausted animal, crawled into bed and went to sleep.” She sounds lifeless, like a mannequin being manipulated.

  The Worcester Telegram reported the next morning only that “Edna St. Vincent Millay—as vehement, mettlesome and exciting as one of her poems—stirred an audience to an answering mood last night.” Edna St. Vincent Millay, they said, “the youthful, provocative figure of last night’s performance, is proof of the youthful springs of her genius.” In fact, she would never be able to make a national reading tour again.

  PART NINE

  ADDICTION

  CHAPTER 35

  The weather was miserable that spring at Steepletop. It was icy cold, and “the trees are hardly in bud and the field mice are still sheltering in my house. I don’t blame the poor little brutes,” Eugen wrote to Dillon. “I am doing the same myself.” But the weather would turn warm, their pool would be swimmable, their tennis court playable, “so what about coming and seeing your little Berkshire friends sometime this summer?” George wasn’t to beg off on account of his work because he could keep in touch with his office by telephone. “And you needn’t pay for it because, evidently, I needn’t pay it, at least I haven’t paid the telephone bill for five or six months. I think it’s the influence of Roosevelt on the utilities.” If Eugen wasn’t exactly inveigling George to come, he was certainly trying to make it hard to refuse. But this time, George didn’t bite.

  That March 1939, Hitler stormed into Prague in an open Mercedes-Benz with bright red Nazi flags snapping on its fenders. Czechoslovakia, dismembered by the Allies in Munich, had fallen. Millay’s sonnet “Czecho-Slovakia” became a memorial.

  If there were balm in Gilead, I would go

  To Gilead for your wounds, unhappy land,

  Gather you balsam there, and with this hand,

  Made deft by pity, cleanse and bind and sew

  And drench with healing, that your strength might grow,

  (Though love be outlawed, kindness contraband)

  And you, O proud and felled, again might stand;

  But where to look for balm, I do not know.

  The oils and herbs of mercy are so few;

  Honour’s for sale; allegiance has its price;

  The barking of a fox has bought us all;

  We save our skins a craven hour or two.—

  While Peter warms him in the servants’ hall

  The thorns are platted and the cock crows twice.

  If she said nothing to George about the increasing anger, even despair, she felt as one country after another in Europe fell under the German boot, there were poems like this one that expressed her outrage directly.

  Vincent Sheean, the journalist and author, who was a friend of Dorothy Thompson as well as Millay, remembered Millay’s being called a premature anti-Fascist. “And what the hell did that mean?” he said. “There were very pro-Hitler elements here, and there was a great resistance to getting into the war. You know people were saying: You can do business with Hitler! And they meant it.”

  There were others, of course, who recognized the outrage in Europe—Dorothy Thompson and Anne O’Hare McCormick of The New York Times among them—but Millay was a poet, not a newspaperwoman or a columnist or a radio broadcaster. It was Thompson, whom Millay knew from their days together in Budapest, who said that America needed her poets now. “I want to propose to you a conspiracy of poets,” she proclaimed, “to offset the innumberable conspiracies which have made this world a nightmare.… We need the intuitive imagination of the great poets, to comprehend in even a small way the nature of the forces that are moving the world.”

  Thompson was lambasting the isolationists, the “ ‘appeasers,’ … the America Firsters, and ‘the architects of cynicism’ in American life.” Democracy had to be defended—in France, in Britain, wherever it existed—and there was no place in America now for complacency. Thompson was on the radio for fifteen days and nights at the end of the summer of 1939 as Poland fell and other countries in Europe were invaded. America was, however, still neutral, and most Americans wanted to keep it that way.

  In October 1939, Edna took up the cudgels in earnest. She joined a broadcast on WJZ New York on the Herald Tribune Forum. The theme was “The Challenge to Civilization.” Mrs. Ogden Reid, co-owner of the newspaper, was the moderator. The basis for the program was the host’s belief that there was a solidarity among “civilized people” who were now being challenged by the war in Europe; there was among them “an eagerness for peace.” James Conant, the president of Harvard, was the keynote speaker. Edna Millay was the second speaker. When she was introduced, she was called “an American possession … contrary to most poets she does not live in an ivory tower.… She has been called the greatest woman poet since Sappho.”

  On the old acetate recordings that were kept, her voice sounds high and rather clipped. There was something frail in it as she warned of the internal peril to America:

  In this country, where freedom of speech is poured so generously into the parched throats of aliens, and of naturalized aliens among whom, as we know, are many whose first allegiance still is to the land of their birth, not to this land, and whose chief concern is to discredit and pull apart, not to support and strengthen, our
form of government—there is danger today that the good, average American citizen, fearful of making some indiscreet remark and of helping thus to get his country into war, will become completely tongue-tied.

  What we had to fear most, she said, was the menace of the “most loyal and idealistic Communist, and the most loyal and idealistic Fascist.” If we love democracy, then “We must love it in England and in France. In Germany we must love it, if only we could find it there”—and here she paused for a long time—“but we have not found it there.”

  Why, then, should we be so afraid to say that as regards the war between a Germany whose political philosophy is repugnant to us and an allied Britain and France whose concepts of civilized living are so closely akin to our own that we hope with all our hearts that Great Britain and France may win this war and Germany lose?

  We must avail ourselves, she told her audience, “as patriotic American citizens, of this fine free speech of ours.” She closed by reading her poem “Underground System” from Huntsman, What Quarry?, which had come out in May. It is impossible now not to feel that while Millay was describing the condition in which America found itself, she was also describing her own condition.

  That October, Helen Rogers Reid wrote Eugen anxiously, “I can’t resist urging you to consider taking Miss Millay to [the] Harkness Pavilion.… I have such confidence in the men who work there that I believe they might be able to find the solution to your difficulties.” Clearly whatever was troubling Edna was evident to others and no longer a closely guarded secret.

  In November, in Switzerland, at the sanitarium of Davos-Platz, Llewelyn Powys hemorrhaged. Blood was constantly seeping into his mouth, his temperature was high, and he was no longer well enough to read or to see anyone. When Alyse sent a snapshot showing him lying on his cot outdoors, wrapped in striped woolen shawls, Edna wrote that he looked like that “Darling wicked voluptuous old Pan of a Lulu” whom she and Eugen both loved. In his thin, gaunt face his eyes were as radiant as stars. Alyse wrote to tell them that his curly hair and beard were long and white and “he looks wonderfully beautiful.” Edna wrote back at once:

  Lulu, my poor, poor darling, if I wait to write you in ink, a proper letter, that a man out of his happiness dashed down again, with his tired eyes might read, I shall again be so overwhelmed by all I want to say to you, that again as so many times in these past months I shall not write you at all.—And that must not be;

  I must say something to you, simply to speak to you, even if I say nothing.

  So here I am, half an hour later, just thinking of you, saying nothing.—How senseless to try to say something to give you courage when you have already so much more of that than anybody I know, except Alyse.

  —Oh, Lulu, I do so hope that by the time you get this you will be better!

  My Love, Edna

  But the bleeding would not be stanched. At one point, his breathing heavy, he gasped, “They are dragging me the wrong way.” He wanted to be allowed to die. When it was clear that he was very close to the end, he asked for paper and wrote, “Love Life! Love every moment of life that you experience without pain.” He died, after an injection of morphine to ease his pain, on December 2, 1939.

  “Alyse,” Edna wrote, “my dear and lovely Alyse, my heart’s friend;—if only I could be with you now, this afternoon, just for the length of time it takes to drink three cups of tea, quietly, saying hardly anything—

  “There is nothing that I can write; there would be nothing that I could say. But oh, if only I could be with you, my dear, just for an hour or two.”

  2

  Perhaps it was just as well that George Dillon hadn’t come to Steepletop that summer, for Millay was besieged by health problems of her own. In the fall Eugen wrote to George: “Vincent has not been feeling so very well this summer and we are going now once a week to New York to see an eye doctor and an osteopath.” She was also in the care of the distinguished Dr. Connie Guion, who had come to Steepletop.

  On November 21, 1939, Dr. Guion addressed a letter to Eugen:

  Dear Mr. Boissevain, nurse in charge! and patient!

  This will summarize the discussion which you, Miss Millay & I had together and in twos.

  My findings were

  first—a sore toe: this is an almost-healed blister, covered by a scab about so big. [She drew a picture.] It is not infected nor more tender than normal for such a condition.

  advice: Put over this a felt ring which I am sending, arrange the ring so no pressure comes on the scab. If the shoe hurts, cut out an area of the shoe large enough to relieve pressure.

  Exercise will hasten healing now because it will increase circulation.

  second—a back with curves so [and here she drew a curvy line and arrows]—These are the result of bad posture & will not be altered now. I could find no spot of localized tenderness over the area of pain or erythema.

  I believe the origin of the pain at X above is over-exercise after a too protracted period pulling plantains. I think the pain has resulted in spasm of the muscles of the back. Which results in pain.

  For this she prescribed medication, exercise, wet heat, alternating hot baths and cold showers, rubdowns, and putting “on a woolen vest.” In a curious addition to her letter she mentioned a “pain killer” Millay was taking that Guion felt increased constipation. But she does not say what the painkiller was. There’s nothing about her eyes or her headaches. There are only a sore toe, a backache due to poor posture, constipation, and what she called the “Third Condition—the menopause”:

  This underlies the whole picture; it makes the patient more susceptible to pain, less stable nervously and therefore she must use up more nervous energy to control her reactions.

  She has been receiving the right material but too little of it.

  To meet this give her one ampoule of the Progynon daily. It is best given into the muscle. If she leans over the back of a chair & you give it in the upper, outer side of the buttock it will not pain her. Warm the ampoule by putting it in water just about room temperature or hold it in your hand till it is body temperature. It will run easier. I am sending you needles.

  She drew a picture of buttocks with dots for “dimples” and an X for where the shot should be administered. She taught Eugen Boissevain exactly how to give his wife an injection accurately, swiftly, and without pain. Actually, he already knew how. And so did Edna.

  CHAPTER 36

  The week after Edna saw Dr. Connie Guion at Steepletop, she went to New York with Eugen to get new passports. In their passport photos, both look worn, but Edna looks stricken and wary. Eugen checked in to the St. Regis Hotel without her, for on December 1 she entered New York Hospital, where she remained under the care of Dr. Guion for three weeks. Surviving hospital records suggest that her treatment was simple and clear: “This is the first admission of this 47 year old female complaining of pain in the back, headache and blister over left big toe joint.”

  Her past medical history was not unusual. She had been operated on for what her doctors quaintly called “congenital bands” in 1923, “with no benefit.” They noted that she was chronically constipated. Her period had begun early, and was both regular and painful. She’d had two pregnancies that had miscarried very early. She’d had her last period in February, ten months before. She was “Now in menopause—hot flushes, sweats, irritable, unstable emotionally.” She had been taking a hormone called Theelin for the past year. Her present illness had begun in the previous July with the weed-pulling episode she’d discussed with Connie Guion. She had constant headaches and back pain. But none of these complaints is sufficient to explain a three-week hospitalization.

  Then there is this striking sentence: “Her L.M.D. [local medical doctor] in Pittsfield has prescribed morphine and Dilaudid to be given her by hypodermic by her husband. She has been taking from 0.015 to 0.004 as required by her pain.” A usual dose of morphine is 10 to 15 milligrams (this notation appears to be in kilograms). To prescribe both morphine and Dil
audid, an opiate roughly three times more potent than morphine, is peculiar. Even if she were in menopause, she could have been missing periods because of the morphine, which can cause flushing, sweats, and constipation. No explanation is given of what was causing her such pain. Her physical examination revealed little beyond enlargement of her liver, a sign of alcohol damage. Her X rays showed a slight curvature of the spine and early indications of arthritis. She was allowed to roam the hospital freely and was “discharged improved” on December 21.

  As it turned out, while Dr. Guion was prescribing injections of Progynon, an estrogen, those were not the only injections she was approving. “Miss Millay’s condition,” she wrote Eugen later,

  was such that she not only required a daily visit but a visit twice a day and a telephone call at bedtime to the night nurse. She was nervous and easily upset.… I did not wish to have any discussion by the house officers of the amount of morphine she was taking. To avoid this I signed for it daily and personally ordered the drug.

  Dr. Guion must have known that Millay was dependent on morphine. She may have been aware of her increasing use and have kept her in the hospital for both observation and detoxification. If so, it is strange that she continued to sign for such significant doses.

  Connie Guion was a highly respected doctor; she was forceful, direct, astute, and used to being obeyed. A doctor who was then a very young intern remembers seeing her talk to patients on rounds: “She’d look them straight in the eye and say, ‘You are not sick!’ She’d get a glass of warm water and tell them, ‘Now, you drink it!’ ” She was not, however, a person who dealt easily with a temperament like Millay’s, and she may have been swayed by her reputation. Ten years Millay’s senior, Connie Guion had been a poor, ambitious, gifted girl who had graduated from Wellesley College at twenty-four. Commited to her family, she had put her last two sisters through college before going to medical school. Young women of her generation could not be stopped unless they married young, and Guion never married. In 1932, she was made chief of the General Medical Clinic at New York Hospital, an outpatient clinic for the treatment of the poor—not, perhaps, a first-rate appointment, but an extraordinary appointment for a woman nevertheless.