She is the oddest mixture of genius and childish vanity, open mindedness and blind self-worship, that I have ever known. She lets me, as a fellow-craftsman, dissect her mistakes and scold her and make fun of her, because she feels perfectly safe in the fundamental admiration I have for her best work: but … She has built up so enormous an image of herself as the Enchanted Little Faery Princess that she must defend it with her life.
Barely a month before, when Witter Bynner was visiting Edna at Steepletop, Arthur was deeply hurt that Vincent had not invited him and wrote to tell her so:
You know, Vince, there is a part of my nature which I cannot alter, an utterly incurable sense of despair. Perhaps I spread that horror to others; perhaps I blight and discourage you when I come into contact with you. I don’t mean to do it—but perhaps I do it.
But he had rights in their friendship, too:
I will not relinquish my right to keep on loving you. I shall not relinquish my rights to remember great poems, great letters, great moments of love.… I love you, my dear. I have always loved you. I always shall. One power can stop that—but it is not you.
A week later, on September 4, 1941, Ficke continued his almost obsessive notes about Millay in his private journal. He wrote that while she knew a great deal,
of recent years, all her critical acumen has been swamped by waves of hysterical emotion. I wonder if perhaps she is having the menopause? … doubtless she would rather die than make this admission that she is growing older. She looks very old and worn sometimes: this is partly her illness. My God, I just looked up her age: she was born in 1892, so is only 9 years younger than I am—that is, she is 49. I do not think she realizes that at all.
Critical as he could be, he never doubted the power or the openness of her work:
Vincent, especially, made girls feel that passion was clean and beautiful.… She appeared at a moment when American youth had need of her.… [for] the lesson of beauty that she taught them: for the revolt she expressed was not merely away from a stuffy prison and also toward an open meadow.… there was an unmistakable wind of pure dawning in what she did.
Edna Millay was sharply aware of her declining critical reputation—how could she not be?—and of her aging. “When Joseph Freeman and his wife were Arthur’s weekend guests, Edna summoned Freeman to Steepletop. One of the founders in 1926 of The New Masses, Freeman was labeled a Communist, although he insisted, somewhat disingenuously, that he was a poet who happened to be interested in communism. Edna had not seen him since Conversation, when she had asked him to be the model for the young Communist, Carl. Freeman described his recollections of their meeting, and of Arthur’s plan, sixteen years later in a letter to Floyd Dell:
On the way to Austerlitz, Arthur explained to me that he was greatly concerned about Edna. She was suffering from imaginary backaches and ought to be psychoanalyzed; he had been analyzed and had been greatly benefitted; he had been urging Edna to go to an Analyst—but she refused; what he wanted me to do was to persuade her to go. But why should she listen to me? …
At Austerlitz, Gene … handed us highballs, then told me that Edna was in her study and wanted to see me alone. I don’t know why, but this embarrassed me.… it seemed to me that anything Edna had to say to me she could say and ought to say in front of Gene and Arthur; and I said so. Gene went in, spoke to Edna and came back: No, she had to see me alone. So I went in and there she was in a big armchair, pale and fragile … and her eyes were sad. She asked me to sit down and got to the point at once. Life had become unbearable; she was getting old.… She was losing her looks, she was losing her ability to write, her poems are no good any more, the young men no longer fall in love with her, life was not worth living.… As she spoke she began to weep—the tears rolled down her hollow cheeks.
Freeman couldn’t bear to see a woman cry and began to console her. She was as beautiful as ever. How could young men help falling in love with her? When he told her that if he were young, he would fall in love with her,
she began to smile and, while she insisted that she had lost her looks and the power to evoke love in young men and her poetic gift, she did not sound as earnest about it as before.… here, at her elbow, was her latest group of sonnets—and they were terrible, she could not bear to look at them.
They couldn’t be bad, he told her,
and the fact is that for me that afternoon Edna was beautiful, and if I were younger, or perhaps simply unattached, I might … have fallen in love with her; and even without looking at her sonnets, I knew, knew absolutely they could not be bad. I asked her to read them; she said no, no, she couldn’t; you read them. So I read one aloud; she listened with a strange light in her face; it was a beautiful poem and I said so, and tears came into her eyes, this time tears of joy … for being a fool, I thought it was more important for the ageless poet to know that her poetry was still beautiful than for the woman of fifty to have young lovers. Now Edna laughed—and now she was ready to read her poems aloud and when she read them they were even more beautiful—and the afternoon sun came in through the window and I was listening to a clear young voice and looking at a young beautiful face. When she was done reading, we kissed—not the kiss of Eros, the kiss of Agapé; warm, loving, and chaste. And she said, the others may come in. Arthur and Gene came in and I could see they were astonished and delighted that Edna was all smiles, all joy; and we had some drinks … and Arthur and I kissed Edna and shook hands with Gene and left Steepletop.
As they drove back, Arthur asked if Edna had agreed to go to an analyst. Caught in Edna’s spell, Joseph Freeman had completely forgotten his task.
When Rolfe Humphries reviewed Millay’s Collected Sonnets in The Nation, he damned her with faint praise:
Miss Millay’s public has grown, unfortunately … to include collectors as well as readers; so there is always apt to be some fancy business, now, about her publications. This encourages skeptical criticism, and the fact that the direction of her progress has been from legend to success somewhat confuses discussion of her merit as an artist. If she is not taken quite seriously in this role today, it may be that she was taken too seriously twenty years ago … placing her out of her class, over her head, instead of keeping her where she really belonged, with Meredith, say, or as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s naughty younger sister in the parlor, the last of the female Victorians, and in that sense only, the herald of the Coming Woman.
PART TEN
THE DYING FALL
CHAPTER 38
Once there were three sisters, and the eldest, who had always been talented, was now rich and famous. The middle sister was as pretty, lighthearted, and lazy as she was without true ambition. But the youngest sister, while gifted—she had published two novels and three books of poems—sounded too much like her eldest sister for her own good, and nothing went right for her. There was a twist of envy that gnawed and grew in her as if it were malignant, until she became devious and ill.
Now, imagine this scene at Steepletop earlier in their lives. One sister, whose house it was, enters the room like a lion; she tosses her curly red mane, licks the inside of her wrist, draws it carefully over her ears as if it were a paw, and roars. The youngest enters the room like a Model T Ford, batting her eyes like headlights on bright, making a noise like a horn honking. Only one of the three sisters will survive to tell all the stories she knows, and that is the sister who now sits in the room, scooping out Stilton, drinking a scotch and soda while waving an Egyptian cigarette aloft, laughing, singing a snatch of song, and watching. She is the sister who tells the tales: Norma Millay.
In 1940, a friend of Norma’s, an ardent collector of first editions and any rare Millayana she could find who had dealt for some years with a bookseller in Greenwich Village, gave Norma disturbing news: the bookseller had received a diary purportedly kept by Norma, Vincent, and Kathleen when they were children in Maine. It had been edited by Kathleen and sent to Macmillan for publication, “and will show,” the friend continued,
Surely, Norma thought, unless the entire story was a fabrication, no one had the right to publish such a diary without Edna Millay’s consent.
Norma did not know that as early as 1936, well before any clear rift had opened between Vincent and Kathleen, Kathleen had submitted a peculiar entry to Who’s Who. It was considerably longer than Edna’s, and under “Author,” where Kathleen’s novels, Wayfarer (1926) and Against the Wall (1929), had been listed in order of their publication along with her three books of poetry—The Evergreen Tree, The Hermit Thrush, and The Beggar at the Gate—there followed a puzzling verse entry, Of All the Animals, with a 1932 publication date, as well as lists of “fairy stories” with titles and dates. But there is no record anywhere of these works’ ever having been published in either magazine form or as books. Kathleen was embellishing—if not outright lying about—her achievements.
By 1940, Eugen no longer tried to conceal his disdain for Kathleen, who continued to ask for money. “You asked me whether I showed your letters to Edna,” he wrote on December 12. “No.—Generally I do not.—You two are practically strangers.—in the 18 years I have known Edna, you two have met not more, I should say, than ten times and maybe exchanged 3 letters. I don’t see why I should bother her now.”
Eugen was interceding for Edna, and it was not helpful to either of the sisters for him to be placed so effectively between them. While his intercession seemed to protect Edna from Kathleen’s wrath and jealousy, in fact it only intensified it.
As to myself, I really don’t know you at all. I have met you a few times and am now in a lively financial correspondence with you.—But you know, of course, that if it was not for the fact that you are related to E., we, you and I both, would go out of our way to avoid each other.
Furthermore, we have been hearing for many years, reports from several people how you, either drunk or sober, talk about E. behind her back. This of course does not tend to make me either like or respect you and the effect on E. is to make her distrust any expression of friendship from you, although she has always wanted to be friends with you. But now that these reports keep coming in, even after she has done so very much to help you, the situation is even more difficult than ever.… Nevertheless for your Mother’s sake & for the sake of when you [were] all young girls & used to sing songs together, which she still remembers with happiness, as you wrote sometime ago, you also do, she is very glad indeed to help you to the best of her ability, when you are up against it.
Eugen then wrote to Charlie, telling him to get from Kathleen a mahogany table, which had been Cora’s, in exchange for a check for fifty dollars enclosed in his letter, to go toward Kathleen’s debts, “that is if the bitch sticks to her word and sells it to us.—
“If she does not sell it then don’t give her the check.”
But Charlie was not a skillful messenger, and he wobbled. He didn’t get the table, and he did give her the fifty dollars. Eugen’s next letter to Kathleen showed barely controlled fury:
I was pleased to hear from Charlie … that you are on your feet again and need not sell your table to pay your debts.—That is very good news indeed: now Edna need no longer keep borrowing money to pay your debts and can now stop supporting you.
Charlie told me that you were going to write me all about it, but of course I did not expect to hear from you, as you never yet have written to acknowledge receipt of money from Edna but only to ask for more money or complain that the check you were expecting is a day or two overdue. Under the circumstances I do not understand why Charlie gave you my check for $50.00. But nevermind, you are welcome to it.
Kathleen wrote back a nine-page, single-spaced letter of hurt and recrimination. Not only had Charlie been sent to spy upon her, but she was homeless, hungry, ill, and broke, and Eugen’s letter had nearly killed her.
Silly and sentimental as it may seem to you—(who care nothing for anything but money and forwarding my sister’s fame, because it is amusing to shine in the reflected glory and also doesn’t take any energy)—difficult as it may be for you to realize … I have been very hurt to finally become convinced that my sisters care nothing for me at all. I loved them dearly as we grew up and fully believed they loved me. I worked for them, took care of them when they were ill, and used energy I could ill afford to throw away—as I was always the one who was really sick.… Strange as it may seem to you—I do not blame you for any of this. It was obviously quite settled and finished long before any of the family ever met you. You are a puppet floundering about in the midst of the Millays—and will never know what it is all about. They have strange temperaments indeed for the placid mind of a stolid Dutchman. However, it is not my fault I was born into the family, any more than it is your sagacity that made you chance to be born with the proverbial silver spoon in your mouth.
She couldn’t stop:
And now you tell me my sister is actually borrowing money in order to live at the St. Regis—which, of course, has always been one of the absolute obligatory necessities and hangouts of poets since time began. And to give ambulances to dying soldiers—such charming publicity for any philanthropist, isn’t it Eugen? And—incidentally—only incidentally—to buy very cheaply the one thing on earth I prize—a beautiful antique table which is the only thing I have from my mother. Of course, Edna has her big estate, and any number of things from mother—practically all the old dishes that had been in the family for years … and she’s still borrowing money!
Her letter went on and on: Vincent had given Norma a piano and Charlie a car, whereas it was she, Kathleen, who had given their mother the cottage in Maine, in which after her mother’s death she now owned only a one-third share. If she had to do it over again, she’d keep the cottage in Maine in her own name and simply let her mother use it the rest of her life. “She never had anything, and it was obvious no one else would give her anything—and at least it made her happy at the end of her life and that is what I did it for. Sentimental—? Yes. But not so stickily sentimental as the poem that paid Edna 1000 dollars for the Pulitzer prize!”
Then Kathleen made what she called a business proposition: she would give her sisters the first chance to buy her share in the cottage. She promised that after their business in this purchase was settled she would never try to reach them again, “unless it is necessary for legal reasons.”
In the somber, careful draft of Eugen’s reply—in which all the corrections and the softening of his language are in Edna’s hand—he wrote:
I asked Edna whether she wished to buy your share in the cottage, and she said that she would rather, since you feel as you do about it—that it really belongs to you—give instead her share in it to you.—Norma feels the same way about it, and is also making over her share in it to you, in view of the way you feel about it.
Charlie would have a lawyer draw up a document and give her the keys. He had told Edna about the table, which he had intended to be a surprise present from him. “She told me that she would never want to take that away from you. So that’s settled.”
Kathleen said his letter had made her very happy. She asked him to thank “both girls for me, and please understand how I mean it when I say I sincerely hope I will never bother you anymore in any way.”
A few months earlier, in the spring of 1941, Kathleen had written to a man who had presented himself as the director of the Manuscript Division of the Drake Memorial Museum in Pennsylvania. This same man had written to Edna six months earlier, asking for a longhand manuscript copy of “God’s World,” which, he said, was at the suggestion of the president of the United States. He had enclosed
a copy of a letter from Miss LeHand, secretary to President Roosevelt. Eugen had answered his letter cordially, but nothing had come of it and their correspondence had stopped.
Kathleen, however, had responded vehemently, saying she was destitute. She said it was futile to ask her sister or Eugen for help.
I have obvious reasons for hating the name under which I was born. It is nothing short of a curse.… I live alone. I have no money.… I realize there is no reason why one sister should care what happened to another.… if only there were no such things as wealthy Dutch brotherin-laws who could tell a million people how much he did for everybody while the everybody in question could only manage to reach a half dozen people … with the truth of starvation.
After receiving two such letters from Kathleen, the man wrote to Eugen, enclosing a copy of Kathleen’s letter and threatening to publish it if Millay did not write out in longhand the poems he had asked for. Since he was using the mails to threaten and to defraud them, which was a federal offense, Eugen was able to have him arrested. The New York Times picked up the story and published Kathleen’s accusations against her sister, while adding that the Boissevains had, in fact, been supporting her.
The young man turned out to be an unemployed grocery clerk with an appetite for embezzling and fraud. After this fiasco, there was no further correspondence between the sisters.
2
On June 10, 1942, the German government announced that it had razed the entire Czech village of Lidice to the ground. The village was suspected of sheltering the underground leaders who had assassinated SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, a man so brutal his nickname was “The Hangman.” The Nazis retaliated: they shot to death 173 men and boys, deported 203 women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, and gassed 81 of the village’s 104 children. The rest of the children were sent to orphanages or German families. Then the Nazis set fire to the houses and church until nothing was left standing. “Lidice, they proclaimed, was now forever erased from the map and the memory of the world.”
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