Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  3

  By May 1940, after a series of violent German assaults, Rotterdam was destroyed, Holland had fallen to the Nazis, and the British expeditionary force sent to help France in a last-ditch effort to repulse the German invasion had been pushed to the sea at a spot on the coast called Dunkirk. On June 14, Paris fell to the Nazis, and America’s Ambassador Bullitt was reported to be in German “protective custody.” Huge black headlines marked the faces of all the newspapers. That morning in June The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and the Daily News published Edna Millay’s stinging attack against isolationism, “Lines Written in Passion and in Deep Concern for England, France and My Own Country.” In the News the poem was set, incongruously, beside its own isolationist editorial. “Not in years,” wrote the wire services, “has a poet sought so directly the ear of so wide a public.… In an era in which poets have been accused of having too little to say to the many, Miss Millay suddenly launched her ringing call to arms under the impact of the tragic drama in France.”

  She asked the American public directly to abandon isolationism, to heed, “the shrieking plea/For help, of stabbed Democracy.” The poem was picked up by newspaper after newspaper throughout the United States and Canada, each one commenting that she’d sent it forth from her sickbed in the Berkshires. They said it was a landmark in literary history. They said she had written the first important poem of the second great war.

  Dear Isolationist, you are

  So very, very insular!

  Surely you do not take offense?—.…

  ’Tis you, not I, sir, who insist

  You are an Isolationist.

  …

  No man, no nation, is made free

  By stating it intends to be.

  …

  (Meantime, the tide devours the shore:

  There are no islands any more.)

  …

  Oh, build, assemble, transport, give

  That England, France and we may live,

  Before tonight, before too late,

  To those who hold our country’s fate

  In desperate fingers, reaching out

  For weapons we confer about,

  All that we can, and more, and now!

  …

  Let French and British fighters, deep

  In battle, needing guns and sleep,

  For lack of aid be overthrown,

  And we be left to fight alone.

  By early fall the poem was retitled “There Are No Islands Any More” and published as a separate booklet of ten pages by Harper. The manufacturer, Haddon Press, offered to do the presswork and binding for free, and the paper manufacturers fell into line. Now all Harper needed, Gene Sax-ton wrote Eugen, was a statement from Edna, signed by her and printed up front. He suggested that she write

  This poem, written by me in the cause of democracy, has been printed and distributed with my permission, free of royalty, all proceeds from the sale being turned over to the Red Cross or some similar war relief agency.

  When the poem caught the eye of the unfortunate Ferdinand Earle, who, broke and unemployed, had written asking for her help and who’d thought Millay was so ill she couldn’t utter a word, he was mightily offended. “Once-dear Edna Millay,” he wrote her, “Considering that you owe your entire first spectacular successes to my efforts, how shabby, the secretary’s indirect reply, to my letter!”

  Eugen answered him the next day, explaining that he was not Edna’s secretary but her husband:

  As she has been very sick and has recently returned from the hospital I have thought it necessary to relieve her of everything possible, of all worry and all correspondence. For that same reason I am not showing her your last letter, but will show her this letter as soon as she is feeling better and doubtless you will hear from her.

  I presume you got angry by seeing a poem written by her and evidently you did not believe my letter. However, you are mistaken. She wrote this poem in a great desire to do something during these difficult and unhappy times. That was something I could not prevent her from doing.

  It seems strange to me, that you, a poet yourself, and who has lived in Paris, should be unable to understand that even a person who has been very ill for several months and has only recently returned in an ambulance from a hospital where she has undergone a series of painful operations on the nerves of the dorsal spine and who is in such constant pain that she is obliged to be given hypodermic injections of morphine several times a day—that even a person in such a condition, filled with horror and despair at the thought that the Nazi Germans are about to march into Paris, might compose the passionate lines which you seem to have read.

  Earle was immediately contrite. And Edna answered him herself in August, addressing him, once again, as she had in Camden, as her Dear Editor:

  I am sorry that I was too ill to write you; oh, so sorry that I hurt your feelings. I am still too ill to write you,—even to dictate as I am doing now, … that is to say, it is against doctor’s orders that I do it. But … I cannot bear to have you continue to think me forgetful and ungrateful. I remember too well that day, years ago, when I came back from the pasture carrying a pailful of blueberries which I had picked, and my mother was waiting for me on the doorstep with your letter in her hand.… I think of you always with the same affectionate gratitude I felt at the time when you were trying so hard to make the other judges see my poem as you saw it, trying so hard to obtain for me that prize of $500, a fortune then. (Almost a fortune to me now, in fact. Though in the meantime there have been periods when I could have paid $500 for an evening gown. My life has always gone abruptly and breath-takingly up and down, like a roller-coaster!)

  She told him she was still far too ill to help him; she had to reserve whatever strength she had for her own work.

  But you, who were the first, outside the little village where I lived, to think my poetry of some consequence, would be the first now, I think, to consider that I should give to it all the strength that I have.

  I am, believe me, with the same grateful heart as on that day long ago when I learned that somebody beside my mother, a person whose name I later learned to be Ferdinand Earle, liked a poem of mine called “Renascence.”

  It was only in this letter to Ferdinand Earle and in a draft of a letter to George Dillon that Millay explained the apparent cause of her illness:

  … for something over a year now I have been very sick,—or, rather, not sick, simply in constant pain, due to an injury to certain nerves in my back referred to by the ten or twelve different doctors & surgeons who have tried to cure the trouble, as nerves 4, 5 & 6 of the dorsal spine—referred to by me as that place up under my right shoulder-blade. The nerve injury is the result, it seems probable, of my having been thrown out of the station-wagon one night—not by the driver, as you are probably thinking, but by the sudden swinging open of the door against which I was leaning; I was hurled out into the pitch-darkness—a very strange sensation it was, too—and rolled for some distance down a rocky gully before I was able to grab at some alders or something & come to a halt. I have had three operations on these nerves and should be quite well now, I think, if I were not still, naturally, rather weak.

  In her reworked and redated (September 14, 1940) typescript of this letter, she for the first time called the operations unsuccessful.

  Professor Irwin Edman of Columbia University reviewed Millay’s pamphlet “There Are No Islands Any More,” alongside Stephen Vincent Benét’s Nightmare at Noon and The Irresponsibles by Archibald MacLeish. While there was no questioning the urgency of the situation or the integrity of the writers, the critic was meant to be something more than a thermometer measuring excitement and sincerity or even what Edman called “moral seriousness.” All three authors were exemplary, but as works of art what they had written was questionable. Millay had very clearly subtitled hers “Lines Written in Passionate and Deep Concern,” and most readers, Edman felt sure, would remember her lines published in what he called “display
form” by newspapers during the crucial days of the fall of France that past June. He called her work epigrammatic journalism. He didn’t like the white heat of Millay’s emotion. “If artists are to become writers of burning tracts, it seems to be intellectually irresponsible to condemn the discipline of art because it is not the discipline of a military emergency.”

  Harper, which had been supportive of her in June, when in ten days it had deposited $4,000 into her accounts, adding up to an advance from May 1940 to the end of the year of $10,000, had not expected another book from her within the year of the publication of Huntsman. But then, neither had she. The urgency, despair, and fury she felt about America’s lack of response to the war, its continuing isolation, found voice in her work now. Her poems began to run in newspapers around the country; The New York Times published four sonnets in its Sunday Magazine on October 13, 1940.

  Her champion at Harper, Gene Saxton, understood her need to get the poems into book form immediately. “The poems themselves are, of course, of the utmost timeliness, and have great drive and emotion,” he wrote Eugen. “That is why it is so essential to speed the production.” Would she be willing to have Harper rush the book through without sending her proofs? It would follow her copy absolutely.

  Within two weeks of his letter the poems were set in galleys. “Everyone here has been much moved by the emotional quality of the poems,” Saxton wrote, “and there is a mixture of surprise and pleasure in the unexpected arrival of this volume in the autumn list.” Her new book, Make Bright the Arrows, would be published on November 20.

  On November 15, Charles Lindbergh gave his famous—or infamous—“Our Drift Toward War” speech, in which he warned that America was woefully underprepared for war, its defenses inadequate against the Nazis’ power. President Roosevelt may have assured the French that America’s efforts would be redoubled, promising France “more equipment,” but America’s Congress remained strongly isolationist. Lindbergh was advocating staying out of Europe’s war. He had visited Germany six times between 1936 and 1938 at the invitation of Field Marshal Göring, who had given him Germany’s highest medal for distinguished aviation, which he had accepted.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh had written a “Prayer for Peace,” which her husband arranged to have published in Reader’s Digest for Christmas 1939. She had qualms about what she was writing: “I am filled with mistrust and misgivings about it.… Will it hurt C? Or help him?” Clearly she knew that her husband was being accused of being pro-Nazi.

  The following summer, while Britain was being bombed in a ferocious air war, Anne Lindbergh began to work on an article that was eventually published as a forty-one-page book, The Wave of the Future. “I do not ‘write’ it exactly, I am so full of it.… It flows out of me, unmindful of how it is ‘written.’ ”

  Charles Lindbergh took his wife’s article to New York and showed it to Alfred Harcourt, publisher of her two bestselling books, North to the Orient and Listen! The Wind. Harcourt was anxious to publish it at once.

  That August, Anne Lindbergh explained to her mother, Mrs. Dwight Morrow, who was deeply opposed to the Lindberghs’ point of view, that her goal was to give “a moral argument for isolationism … because I think it is vital to stay out.” She had been “impelled to write it, because of my personal loyalty and desperate feeling of injustice to C., but I wouldn’t do it on that alone.”

  In November 1940, Edna Millay was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Newspaper reporters in New York interviewed her at her suite at the St. Regis, where she sat, they wrote, “half lost” in a huge chair, her “auburn hair still worn as she wore it when an undergraduate.” In the accompanying photographs, she looked unwell. Her hair was flat, her face puffy, her mouth turned down like the rim of a cup. Instead of being dressed for the photographs accompanying the interview, she was wearing a dressing gown.

  She was asked by one journalist if she found it odd that the American Academy of Arts and Letters had waited until now to make her a member, since she had been “for 25 years one of America’s most distinguished poets.”

  “After all,” she said today … “perhaps I wasn’t ready for such an honor. Perhaps they thought I wasn’t mature enough.”

  There was a faint twinkle in the little red-haired poet’s eyes—eyes somewhat weary from a late celebration, in company with her husband Eugen Boissevain and William Lyon Phelps.… “We stayed up very late—and we drank lots of sherry.”

  She had decided, she told the reporters, to take an apartment in the city “to be closer to the realities, closer to where men and women are giving aid to Britain, trying to aid the oppressed of France and Poland and Norway.” She explained that she would become a propagandist for democracy:

  If I can write just one poem that will turn the minds of a few to a more decent outlook … what does it matter if I compose a bad line or lose my reputation as a craftsman? … I used to think it very important to write only good poetry. Over and over I worked it to make it as flawless as I could. What does it matter now, when men are dying for their hopes and their ideals? If I live or die as a poet it won’t matter, but anyone who believes in democracy and freedom and love and culture and peace ought to be busy now. He cannot wait for the tomorrows.

  When Peter Monro Jack reviewed Make Bright the Arrows in The New York Times Book Review, he wrote, “Miss Millay was compelled to write this book. Her readers will be compelled to read it.” There was no doubt that it was a piece of propaganda, but he reminded them that Milton, Wordsworth, and Rupert Brooke had written propaganda in the heat of war. “Miss Millay may have written more nicely, but she has never written more strongly, with absolute belief and accuracy.”

  Reviewing her again in the New York Herald Tribune Books section, Professor Irwin Edman did not agree: “But it is a sad obligation to report that the tragedy of the present hour has not wrung great poems out of Miss Millay, nor, with the exception of a few sonnets and possibly the opening poem, even notably good ones.” He stopped just short of savaging the book. He did like the sonnet “Blue bright September air, with her and there / On the green hills a maple turning red.” But he admonished Millay that her arrows could have been made bright only by art: “But it must be poetry, first.… That is not true of most of these sincere but sputtering verses.”

  Millay sent George Dillon the book a few weeks after publication. She cautioned that her new book was “not poems, posters; there are a few good poems, but it is mostly plain propaganda.” She added that if “some bright boy reviews it for Poetry, please remind him that I know bad poetry as well as the next one.” She thought that by subtitling it “1940 Notebook,” she’d made it plain enough “that this book is a book of impassioned propaganda, into which a few good poems got bound up because they happened to be propaganda, too.”

  Eleven years later Dillon said this was the last letter on the subject of poetry he ever received from Vincent Millay. “It was a book containing several poems I had advised her not to publish. After trying it on two well known critics, who annihilated it, and on two others who refused it, I printed what seemed to me at the time a just and respectful review.” Reading it over years later, he realized that the review had been, “in a feminine way, ruthless.” While he didn’t lose Millay’s friendship, “My punishment was that she never sent me her poetry again.”

  Even her old Vassar friend Charlotte Babcock Sills, to whom she had sent Make Bright, was offended by the book. Millay insisted she was adamant about America’s not getting into the war in Europe, “And if this book had really been the book you took it to be … would I have done the insolent and cruel thing which it would have been to send to you and Mac a book of poems trying to incite this country to send American boys into foreign lands to fight?” For the Sillses had three grown sons.

  Have you the slightest conception of what this reputation means to me, who have been building it carefully for more than twenty years, taking a long time, months, sometimes as long as several years before
permitting a poem to be published because I felt that in one line of it, one syllable was not as close to perfection as I might be able to make it?

  Thus, you see, the dearest thing in life I possess which might possibly be of help to my country, has already gone over the top, in the hope that your sons need never go to war.

  But it was a disingenuous defense, and her letter did nothing to mask Millay’s own strain.

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  At the end of 1940, a benefit was organized in New York for United China Relief, to which a number of writers were invited to help raise money for Chinese trapped in the war of resistance to Japan. Vincent Sheean was asked by Henry Luce to be the chairman of the dinner given at the Waldorf-Astoria to launch the organization. Writers were invited to sit at the speakers’ table, and Edna Millay was asked to recite a poem. When Sheean saw her, he thought she looked like “a stricken deer.”

  “Edna Millay had come to the dinner in her smallest and most frightened mood. She had been very ill and she had worried immeasurably over Hitler’s victories in Europe and the disappearance of so many brave small countries, including Eugen’s. The atmosphere at the Waldorf was not favorable to her.” Sheean tried to take care of her; the glare of the blue lights was awful. He found her standing behind her chair.

  “ ‘I can’t sit with strangers only,’ she said in an agonized whisper. ‘Please, I must have Eugen sitting beside me. Believe me, it’s true. I don’t know what will happen if he isn’t here. Please, please—otherwise I’ll have to go home.’ ” She was, he remembered, trembling all over. “So I went to Pearl [Buck], and she arranged it that Edna had a place with Eugen beside her at the central table.” But in all the commotion of the evening, with some of the speeches broadcast over national networks, Edna’s having been asked to recite a poem was forgotten. Sheean was outraged; the next morning he sent her roses, along with a note regretting what had happened.