Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  When the outrage of Lidice reached America, Rex Stout, the president of the Writers’ War Board, asked Edna Millay, whom he knew from their days in the Village, to write a poem to help ensure that Lidice would never be forgotten. By October she had finished “The Murder of Lidice,” a long narrative poem that was broadcast over NBC on October 19 and short-waved to England and Europe. Spanish and Portuguese translations were beamed to South America.

  Norma described in a letter to her sister how she had felt as she had waited alone for “The Murder of Lidice” to come on the radio at 10:30 that night: “When Woollcott’s voice came on, it was trembling with nervous excitement—that seasoned old dear, too! I knew then that it was going to be something terrific and felt alright and settled back—and it was terrific. It wasn’t just radio at all—it was alive.”

  Praise poured in from around the nation, and Millay’s correspondence swelled. She was asked for another poem, to help rally the American public to the war effort on the home front. The Advisory Council of the Writers’ War Board then asked her to speak on shortwave for three or four minutes to remind Americans of the English spirit on the second anniversary of the London air blitz.

  Meanwhile, some of her friends were deeply critical of her war effort, perhaps none more so than Arthur Ficke, who scolded in his journal:

  Tonight Edna Millay’s poem “The Murder of Lidice” is to be read over the radio. I have seen it in its fragmentary stages, when she was all confused about it.… I don’t know how people manufacture such things. What worries me is that this is so bad for her, so utterly false to her real nature.…

  She has always required the center of the stage—but that was good for her, so long as it was her own private drama that was being enacted. As a lyric poet, she was superb, unsurpassable.… I cannot, I will not, believe that this war is an ultimate conflict between right and wrong: and though I do not doubt for a moment that we are less horrible than the philosophy and practice of Hitler, still I think we are very horrible: and I will not, I must not, accept or express the hysterical patriotic war-moods of these awful days.

  It was astonishing that Millay was able to write at all, given the amount of drugs she was taking. She knew the risk to her reputation of writing propaganda. Even Rex Stout, a writer himself, although of immensely successful mysteries, conceded that she was opening herself up to negative criticism. “Well, of course, if a poet writes something for an intellectual reason, it is a different kind of writing entirely,” he said. “We had asked her for a propaganda poem, a piece of propaganda. They’re a different genre, and they’re bound to be.… I think Edna was really bothered by what some goddamned critic wrote about her poem. She shouldn’t have been capable of feeling, of reacting to what some literary critic who has never written a creative line in his life says. But she was, of course she was.” Her sense of urgency was, in fact, prophetic.

  We now know what no one in America knew then: that the Germans had actually filmed their eradication of Lidice as an instructive device, demonstrating to Nazi soldiers how to raze an entire village.

  To Hal she later wrote that she was very busy: “yes, of course, writing more verses for my poor, foolish, bewildered, beloved country.” But she wrote very little propaganda poetry after “Murder of Lidice.” The poem “Not to Be Splattered by His Blood (St. George Goes Forth to Slay the Dragon—New Year’s 1942)” had been written well before the outbreak of the war, she told him.

  Norma had been in a difficult position in relation to her sister for some time. Kept increasingly at arm’s length, she persisted in her attempts to reestablish their connection. “I’ve gotten a little selfconscious through the years at ringing the lovely Cuthbert from her tea to find out if-and-where you live,” she wrote in a birthday letter in 1942. Her uneasiness toward Eugen was evident: “I’d send my love to Gene … if this wasn’t a bit of business just between us girls. I send my love to you.” There was often in her letters, alongside her ambivalence at being cut off, an admiration about which there was no equivocation: “Your sonnets in tetrameter have been very alive in this room over the last month. You are a great poet. And great poetry has great power.”

  Yet Norma’s voice was not always so reassuring. Her concern for her sister’s health was very real:

  Listen Darlings—you have to get to New York City and right away quick. Don’t laugh & think of the things in the way of such a move because I love you both & I know what I’m talking about. You’ll have deep snow there any minute and you say there is no one there to help you and you are “two sick people.” You can’t do this.… (and, darling Gene, there is no reason why you should kill yourself & give out energy you need to help you recover) and if Vincent isn’t able to travel normally—listen—really listen—before it snows you in—call a hospital in Hudson & get an ambulance with a doctor to take you into the city where, if anywhere, you can get help.… You understand I don’t know your circumstances—I am not being presumptuous, I just know & know terribly and cannot bear it that you must act at once & leave Steepletop.

  “Your letter was something to lighten the heart,” Edna wrote with clear emotion.

  [A]lmost nobody it seems ever thinks—thinks deeply and intensely and in complete forgetfulness of himself—of any other person. We are all, or nearly all, of us, so centred in ourselves; we see nothing except as it touches ourselves, what its effect upon us might be. I know almost nobody who is really capable of complete forgetfulness of himself, even for a minute, in the troubles of another.—Which is why your letter, so full of thinking yourself into two other people’s lives so empty of yourself, is such a lovely thing.

  Do you know Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”?—Did we ever read it together?—I forget. It is the story of two sisters, one of whom cannot resist the calling of the goblins in the wood, to come and buy and eat the goblin fruit, and eats it, and goes mad, and is dying of longing to taste it again; and her sister goes to the wood and risks the loss of her own health and life to get some of the goblin’s fruit to cure the one who is wasting away to death.

  Vincent and Norma had read “The Goblin Market” together when Vincent, who had sent her a copy, had been at Vassar. If Christina Rossetti’s poem is an analogy of the relationship between sisters, it was fascinating that Vincent should use it now. Surely it was she who was “dying” of her longing, her addiction to morphine, her appetite for a narcotic. Norma’s letter was a response to Vincent’s addiction. Vincent passed it off, admiring Norma’s selfless concern while ignoring her plea that they get help “before it snows you in.”

  Who can tell how, privately, she may have taken Norma’s warning? There is only one long letter in draft, unsent, written in fury and in haste after Millay had spent two hours at the Austen Riggs Clinic in Stockbridge, Massachusetts:

  Me, with my Savile Row riding-breeches.… Me with my two Top Flight tennis racquets just singing for the court.… Me, who never show my face (or perhaps it’s my figure) in New York without having at least four attractive men of my acquaintance dialing their ’phones, to take me out.… Me, to be stuck in a loony-bin with a contingent of bulging old biddies …

  Me, with my old clothes by Worth and my new clothes by Bergdorf Goodman; me, with my tweeds by Henri’s of Bond Street and my hostess gown by Jessie Turner, waddling and hissing out of the dining-room in mad haste …

  Me, a busy woman like me, with a score of interests and a dozen occupations, me, speaking over short wave to England for the British-American Ambulance Corps, me, speaking at dinner in the Waldorf ballroom for China Relief, me, up to the neck in work for the Office of Facts & Figures, the Red Cross, and a half dozen other organizations … sitting for two solid hours in your damned office … all because a little squirt of an M.D. in Great Barrington who wouldn’t know whether a baby were coming head-first or feet-first has apparently got it into what he doesn’t use in place of a head, that I am a congenital defective with criminal tendencies, an alcoholic, a drug-addict, and a generally un
desirable member of our civic group! …

  If I weren’t mad enough to spit, I might be amused enough to laugh, and I dare say by this afternoon I shall be getting a good laugh out of it.… And the further insolence of all such institutions,—the unmitigated gall to assert that …

  Here she breaks off, but the damage is done. Her protest is wildly out of proportion—undermining the impression she’s trying to create of a healthy, attractive woman, too sought after, too elegant and revered—to what? “To be stuck in a loony-bin.” Her clothes, her reputation, and her occupation with war work make her far too busy to deal with the disturbingly simple questions the young doctor has asked: Why can’t she sleep at night? Why can’t she remember where she put her hat and coat?

  Her defense was to proclaim that the Riggs Foundation made her “sick enough to chuck up.” It was “rank insolence.” It was “unmitigated gall.” It was “absurd.” It was also terrifyingly true.

  When Norma realized that something was very wrong at Steepletop and offered to help, she learned that Eugen had joined Edna in taking morphine. “Gene was to meet me at the train station. I saw him. And it just came over me: What do I do? What does a decent sister do? I thought, will I have to kill him? You know, it just came over me. He couldn’t see me. He couldn’t even look directly at me. Then I knew. He was on it, too.”

  Norma described a scene in the front room at Steepletop when Edna threw her arms around her shoulders and said, “Oh, ours was just a childhood love.” Norma pried her fingers loose. “ ‘Oh, sure,’ I said to her, ‘of course. Just childhood!’

  “But there were locks on all the doors now. And there was nowhere we could just quietly sit together and talk without Gene’s bursting in!

  “ ‘Come on,’ I said to Vincent. ‘Let’s go somewhere, anywhere, where we can talk.’

  “ ‘We can talk here, sister,’ she said. And then she just drifted off somewhere. Where I couldn’t reach her. I couldn’t reach her anymore! Do you understand that? What it means? Then I thought: Well, I could kill him. I could kill Gene.”

  On September 21, 1943, weak and unable to eat, Kathleen entered St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. A friend who went with her stayed throughout several hours of consultations and examinations. When the doctors couldn’t discover what was wrong with her, they decided to take X rays. As she was being wheeled out of the X-ray room, Kathleen became unconscious. She died without regaining consciousness.

  Because the cause of her death was unclear, Kathleen was taken to Bellevue Hospital for an autopsy. Norma, who had tried to talk to Vincent on the telephone about it, wrote to her afterward, “They found there that she died of acute alcoholism which is what is written on the death certificate.” They found “her heart was normal,” Norma said. “It is wonderful to know that no evil thing had started up again inside her.… I find I can’t go on from here into other things I want to say—this is a little document that is ended.”

  The New York Times ran Kathleen’s obituary on September 23, under a headline that dealt the final slight: “Kathleen Millay, Sister of the Poet.”

  The only signal of Edna’s response to Kathleen’s death came exactly one week later, when she and Eugen began the first of an astonishing series of notebooks. Written primarily in Eugen’s hand, they provided a detailed record of the day, month, hour, and dosage of the drugs they were taking. They are among the most troubling and pitiful documents in American literary history.

  The first notebook begins on Tuesday, September 28, 1943, and continues to Thursday, November 30. On the first day of their record keeping, “Vince,” as Eugen called her, was taking what appears to be a total of 3 grains of morphine, starting at 7 A.M., then at 8:10, 9:20, 9:40, 10:30, 10:45, 12:45, 1, 2:15, 2:30, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7:15, 8:15, 9:30, 10:30, 12, 1, 1:30 A.M., when she finally sleeps. On September 29, she takes 3⅜ grains, the next day 2⅝. If the dosages in 1943 were the same as they are today, 65 milligrams equals 1 grain (an initial 10 milligrams of morphine might reasonably be used to lessen the pain of a cancer patient). Edna Millay was taking an average of 195 milligrams a day.

  “Never since I first began taking it have I felt so free of it, both mentally & physically, as today,” she noted on October 18 alongside her chart. Eugen’s hand added a more sinister note: “during day 4 nembutal lots of codeine.” Nembutal is an analgesic barbiturate that makes one sleep. She was taking it as well as morphine; Benzedrine, which is an upper; and codeine, a narcotic for the relief of pain. She was, in other words, taking a cocktail of drugs, some contradictory in their effects but all of which must have left her ravaged.

  There are strange notes in her hand: “What happened to that other ⅛ grain? Did it leak out?—they sometimes leak. I feel sure I didn’t take it. (Later) evidence. It leaked. The codeine hypo did the same thing. They had both been left slanting downward.” At the bottom of this page, in an apparent effort to account for the number of drugs she was taking, she wrote that it “is too much, but not discouraging, considering how many different kinds of pain I have.”

  She was making some attempt to lessen her dependence on morphine. Near the end of October, a Dr. Cassel’s name is written in the index for the day before “insulin trial.” While the amount of insulin would double and more codeine be added, together with nervosine, which, she wrote, was an “anti-jitters” medication, pints of ginger ale, and more Nembutal, the amount of morphine doesn’t seem to lessen.

  On November 12, she made the following note to herself:

  Awake all night with sore throat:—no fair!—Last week it was a burned finger; the week before a sprained knee!—How am I to give up morphine when I need it all the time for one darned thing after another? It must be hard enough when it’s just a habit!—everybody says it is—everybody says it’s impossible, unless you go to a hospital and have nurses injecting insulin & hyoseine into you all day long!

  According to her own notations, Millay was taking drugs the full twenty-four hours of the day. She no longer paused to sleep.

  1.—(A.M.) 2

  4.— 1

  5.30 1

  6.15 1

  6.20 2

  9.00 2

  11.— 1

  12.30 2-

  1.45 2

  2.50 1

  5.00 1+

  6.20 1

  8.20 1

  8.50 2

  10.00 2

  10.45 2

  12.15 1

  12.45 1

  A few days after this, she fell sick. It may have been then that Eugen called for Norma. On November 6 and 7, he had written in his own notebook, “Misery loss of courage.”

  Norma was unaware of these drug notebooks at that time. When Eugen summoned her to Steepletop that Thanksgiving, she went as quickly as she could. “Gene called me because he needed me,” she wrote Vincent afterward,

  and, at first, we were almost getting somewhere—I wish it could have gone on but after a night’s sleep he got back in his stride and was belittling and unfriendly. He not only didn’t speak to me but couldn’t look at me. That was, of course, silly and not very helpful. If ever I saw anyone who needed help he did, and I couldn’t help because he wasn’t going to let me anymore. He said I mustn’t walk in on you anymore because you might be crying—all right—if you were crying that was just when I would care to look in on you—just when I should look in. I’m interested in why you must be crying. I’m sure I could do something about it. But his old jealousy cropped up.

  Here the undated letter—which may never have been sent—broke off without a signature, and another, much longer letter began. Protective of Edna or controlling, Eugen was very much resented by Norma. The postman had just arrived with a letter from Eugen saying that Norma’s proposed trip back to Steepletop “for a week, six weeks ago, is not feasible.” “Now there’s a bit of typical Steepletop that gets me into my subject nicely,” Norma wrote. Once again, Eugen was fending off a sister. But this sister wanted to help. The crucial thing is that Vincent, while staying
offstage and protected, was always at the center of the drama. Norma’s letter continued:

  It seemed impossible to me, you see, that you could be up there sick so long and really believe nothing could be done to stop your menopause distresses. You talk of black moods and hot flashes as though nothing could be done about them. That isn’t true.… Some research was done and a paper made of it for me on menopause and I also have notes on drug habituation.

  Norma enclosed four and a half single-spaced pages of notes drawn from medical sources that she listed on the last page as a sort of bibliography, and waited for a reply.

  About this time, Norma heard from Ann Eckert, a friend of Kathleen’s and the beneficiary of her will. Kathleen had wanted their mother’s manuscripts to go to the Morgan Library in New York, and Miss Eckert, who had contacted the library, said it seemed very interested.

  Then the little cottage, about which I have had to write to England to Kathleen’s husband Howard, she wanted to give to me as you know. I am deeply touched by all this, and deem it the biggest compliment.… Perhaps this Spring we could go to Kathleen and plant an Evergreen tree there for her. She loved them so very much.

  Norma sent a copy of Eckert’s letter to Vincent, along with the letter she had written in reply. In closing, she said she was eager to hear from her sister about her letter “and my plan for you to get helped onto your feet.” “I have learned in a general and impersonal way,” she wrote, “that many amazingly prominent persons have gone to New York Hospital with the understanding that they didn’t wish it to be ‘News’ and that no bit of knowledge of their presence there has ever leaked out.” She assured Vincent that she’d have the personal care of a certain doctor “and be his private patient because the climacteric (do I kill you, sister) is his particular field.” She said, discreetly, that “anything else that might be bothering you can be cleared up at the same time.… I want so to have a very well and strong sister that I hope I’ll be hearing from you soon.” She was clever enough to send her love “to you and to Gene … I hug you both.”