Eugen’s response was made to Charlie. Norma’s letter had bothered Edna considerably, he said, and while she wanted to respond to “certain assertions and opinions of Norma’s,” she found it difficult to write.
… am writing to you because you are a correspondent after my own heart, who does not like to answer letters, so there is a good chance that this will be the end of this kind of correspondence.
I mentioned several times to Edna to ask her sister Norma to come and help us for a week. She was not very enthusiastic about it because Norma generally spends so much time telling Edna how she must feel about things and what she ought to have done in the past and what she ought to do in the present and the future and tires her so much. I had spoken a couple of times with Norma over the telephone and received a few letters in which she seemed to me to be more mellow and quiet and I made some inquiries from somebody who had seen her last summer sometime and who had told me that she had changed quite a lot.… So we took a chance.… I telephoned Norma to find out whether she was well enough and strong enough to come here to help us.… Then, to my surprise, that same evening she telephoned me back that she was leaving that noon. I did not want her to come just then but I thought it was possible this was the only time she could come and so you both arrived here. The first night everything went well but after you left everything went wrong. I think, through a misunderstanding on Norma’s part, she thought she was asked to come here to make a diagnosis of Edna’s case and that she came here as an M.D. and a psychiatrist, whereas, I had hoped she would come here as a mother’s helper to cook and help clean the house and look after Edna, none of which she did. She did upset Edna quite a lot by complaining about me and lecturing her on this, that and the other thing.
Whatever Edna may have felt is described only through Eugen’s words. He made, in this letter, no effort to disguise his contempt for Norma’s feelings. He had asked Norma
not to come barging into Edna’s bedroom without knocking. The trouble here is that Norma thinks there is a great intimacy between Edna and herself, which certainly has not been the case for the thirty years that I have known Edna. It is possible that many years ago they were intimate but now the only thing that binds them is the memory of a common childhood several decades ago. If Norma would treat both Edna and myself as acquaintances whom she does not know very well I think that lots of friction would be avoided.
Edna was apparently furious that Norma had consulted doctors without her permission or request. According to Eugen, they had been to “in the last three years by actual count twenty-nine doctors … and been to six hospitals,” so they knew at first hand any kind of information a doctor could give. “In the meantime, I hope that if we see Norma again it will be on the footing of people who would like to have the other person like them and show their best side the way one does with people you are not very intimate with but would like to have like you.”
A copy of this letter, written on Steepletop stationery and dated March 7, 1944, was in the files at Steepletop, left unsigned. Why hadn’t Edna interceded on her sister’s behalf? For as bossy as Norma could be, there is no doubting her love.
3
If Vincent and Eugen’s effort to track their addictions with a close record was intended to diminish their reliance on drugs, they had clearly failed: the notebooks continued with a few breaks until July 24, 1944. On the twenty-seventh, Edna entered Doctors Hospital in New York City under the name of Mrs. Boissevain. Mary Halton was her doctor (she had also been Kathleen’s), and Dr. Foster Kennedy, a distinguished neurologist, was called in as attending consultant. The diagnosis was “nervous exhaustion & neuritis.” Dr. Halton gave Millay’s general medical history:
Patient began to be nervous about 10 years ago—periods became scant & began missing—was treated on and off with ovarian extract—nine years ago became despondent—began to take some drinks of alcohol beverages—more than ever before—
Eight years ago was thrown out of an automobile—shoulder became painful—was given much morphine and other sedatives from this time on—x-rays were negative—nerves were injected with “novocain”—abdominal pain came on—was operated on “for adhesions.”
The pain in the shoulder region had then shifted to her lower back and was now more generalized. She had come to dislike food, had a poor appetite, and felt pain when she was nervous. “… unable to sleep and takes morphine and luminal sodium … by hypo—also takes nembutal—Has also taken demerol—is unable to work—”
At this time, she was drinking gin every day, usually mixed with ginger ale. She was in a terrible state, crying about her inability either to sleep or to work.
The nurses’ reports recorded the agony she was suffering as her dosage of morphine was reduced from ¼ grain, or 15 milligrams, to ⅙ grain, or 10 milligrams. On August 3, 1944, 5 A.M.: “awakened cheerful. Very happy to think she only had three doses of morphine.” But after an injection at 7 A.M. and another at 11 A.M., thirty minutes later she was crying with pain. At noon her doctor visited her.
She was given morphine again at 6 P.M., at 8:30, and at 10:15. She was also given sleeping medication. “Had a much better day,” the nurse reports. “Resting in bed—less depressed today.” But she was still complaining of severe pain in her back.
By August 6, she was crying hysterically. “Very much disturbed,” the nurse reports. “Dr. Kennedy visited. Complaining of severe pain running and staggering about room.”
Over the next two weeks she continued to complain about pain and remained “restless and nervous.” Sometimes she seemed disoriented and confused. She never slept for long. By the end of the third week of August she was free of morphine. She was still receiving other medication, and quite a lot of it, but not morphine. Then the nurses’ reports pick up again:
August 23, 1944: Rolling about bed—beating with hands. Crying with pain. Very dramatic in trying to show nurse how intense the pain is. No effect from medication. Still noisy and complaining of intense pain.
They gave her what was called a sterile hypo, a shot with nothing in it, a placebo. It had no effect. Then she was given an injection of Luminal, a barbiturate, and for the first time in her entire hospitalization she slept from 11 P.M. until 6:35 A.M.
August 28, 1944: 7 p.m. Drowsy & depressed, talks to nurses. “I foolishly tried to run out of the hospital in my nightgown,” moaning, “Oh, what a disgrace to be here.” “Oh, why did I come here.” Very dramatic, said, “When one has sunk so low, even as I there is no hope.” Told nurse “You must give me all you can” (sedatives).
On August 29, in the morning, she awakened at four and had hot tea. She was still not sleeping well. She was “elated & noisy—singing.” Later in the morning she told the nurse she wanted “something to pull herself together.”
She was discharged just under one month later, on September 27. While it looked as if the doctors had managed to wean her from morphine by substituting other drugs, she continued to smoke and drink, and the progress report was ominous: “Patient discharged. Still an alcoholic—initial condition unimproved. Diagnosis—exhaustion????”
Among her notes scribbled in pencil at Steepletop, there’s one with the initials “N.Y.R.” (New Year’s Resolutions?); at the top of the first page, Edna wrote:
1. Care for Nothing so much, (after your poetry) as to make You-Know-WHO(m) happy. Put everything from your mind but this, and your work. (And what’s more, keep everything else but these two things out of your mind!)
2. Never mention yourself, if possible to avoid it, especially before YOU-KNOW-WHO(m). Never bring the conversation round to yourself, even for a minute, even to illustrate a point, or in a brief parenthesis, to show that you understand what YOU-KNOW-WHO is saying. Never mention anything from your past, any incident of your childhood. Forget that you exist.
3. —Go out of doors EVERY DAY, no matter What you are working on, for at least a short walk.
You-Know-Who is Eugen. The relationship between them had turned i
nto a destructive dependence. Now there were other notes, pages of them, with strange drawings of her own face in a grimace, of a heart pierced by an arrow with drops of blood spilling into the text.
Things I must do for Eugen, if I truly love him,—and I do, more than anybody ever loved anybody.
1. Even if I am suffering TORMENT, speak in a voice with no hint of pain, speak in the strong, gay rich voice he loves, the voice of a person vitally interested in things, deeply amused by and full of laughter at other things, even when I don’t care anything about anything.… DON’T WHINE!—Never, even when you are dying, if you are still conscious, permit yourself to speak in a SICK VOICE! CRY AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE! BUT NEVER WHINE!!!
The italics and the capitals are all hers. There were the following instructions: to pull herself up by her bootstraps, to disguise her feelings, to smoke and drink very little “When Ugin is in the room”; not to bite her fingernails; to let Eugen find her outdoors “instead of Still in Bed, or in your SPECIAL CHAIR (Pah!—Old Woman!)” These pages, too, are accompanied by a macabre drawing of her face. It is hideously emblematic of how she feels she must behave toward Eugen. The upper part of the face is masked and blackened in pencil so that only the tip of her nose and a painted grinning slash of mouth show. Across the place where her eyes would be runs the phrase, like a banner, “KEEP THE CORNERS OF YOUR MOUTH U P AND DISGUISE YOUR F E E L I N G S!” There is also a page, startling to find, labeled “Advice to Little Nancy”:
Exercise will-power in all things, big or little. Don’t become self-indulgent. Don’t become sloppy in anything, in your thinking, in your dress, in anything. Don’t fool yourself. If you feel nervous, don’t purposely (half-subconsciously) make yourself more nervous. Instead, turn your attention at once upon something which interests you.… Have a drink, sometimes. Never let the other person see you using the hypodermic, or know that you are about to do so, or have just done so.
Never leave the syringe about where you see it.
In February 1945, just before her fifty-third birthday, Millay entered the Hartford Institute of Living to try another cure. Eugen stayed in New York City with Margaret Cuthbert and Alice Blinn, who remembered, “He really got sick and was in the hospital for a few days. We kept that from Edna, of course, and the doctor told us, or told him anyway, that he had a spot on his lung. Did he do anything about it? No, he was busy taking care of Edna. Of course we thought it was tuberculosis.”
She also described a scene that confirmed Norma’s suspicion: “Eugen took morphine so that he would know what it was like for her to be addicted—so that he would know what she went through trying to stop it.…
“But you know, when he was with us, he came out of the bathroom one morning and he said, ‘The only boring thing is, your nose runs while you are shaving. Well, at least Edna doesn’t have to shave.’ You see, he’d flushed all of it down the toilet! …
“Of course he was not addicted for as long a time as Edna was, so perhaps it was easier for him. But there was no fuss about it. He simply stopped.
“Hartford was a disaster. After the Hartford episode, Eugen simply had to get her out of there.”
Millay felt incarcerated and was desperate to leave. At first her letters to Eugen, especially one written on Valentine’s Day, when he had sent her flowers, seemed resigned to making the best of the situation. But after less than a month, she begged him to get her out.
4
In the summer of 1945, with the war in Europe at last over, Edna and Eugen left for Ragged Island, where they had decided to try their own cure. On the way they planned to spend the night with Tess Adams at her house on Bailey’s Island, which faced Ragged. Tess had invited Vincent Sheean and his wife, Dinah, for the weekend they would arrive. Vincent Sheean wrote about their meeting in his book The Indigo Bunting, a memoir Cass Canfield persuaded him to write.
“Toward the end of the afternoon the Boissevains arrived from Steeple-top in a car loaded down with all sorts of food, pots and pans and other necessities for their stay on Ragged Island,” he wrote. They had tea in the great room facing the ocean, where there was always a fire in the immense stone fireplace. “Our conversation was lively, but Edna took very little part in it. She said enough to show that she was with us, although nothing more; she was rather silent and looked very frightened, small, and withdrawn.” She was, Sheean wrote, going through a bad time, the worst a writer could go through: “She could not write.” Sheean was still too much frightened of her to address any remark in her direction.
Miss Millay was, to put it bluntly, a frightening apparition to many of us. Her temperament was so variable that it was impossible to tell what mood might overwhelm her next.… But most of all, I think, the reason why even the most sympathetic stranger was frightened of Edna was that she was herself so terrified. Her terror communicated itself and created terror. I hardly dared to look at her more than once or twice that evening.
Eugen, of course, knew all about this. That is probably why he was so jovial, talkative, and merry at tea and afterward, to save Edna … from the pain of speech.
None of them, with the single exception of Eugen, had any true idea what was the matter with her.
Sheean was left alone on the terrace with Edna as the others went off to see about dinner. It was getting dark, the fog was closing in; they were silent while Edna sat looking out to sea. “Then she said, in her deep voice … ‘Thank you for the roses. They lasted a long time.’ ” Sheean, startled, had no idea what she meant. He hadn’t sent her any roses. In the morning Edna and Eugen left before he was up, leaving word with Tess that they were all invited to visit Ragged Island soon.
Two months later, in September, they did. Eugen picked them up in their motor dory, the Greasy Joan, and set out into the open Atlantic, four miles from the coast of Maine. Forty-five minutes later they coasted into anchor at Ragged, where Edna appeared in a white shirt, her dungarees rolled to the knee, as she ran down the rocky path to meet them. Sheean would never forget this sight of her:
There were circling round and round her head all the way down through the rocks, three sea gulls. She came toward us, as you might say, in a completely legendary manner.… She was glowing with health and spirits; her red hair was blown free and her green eyes were shining. She was in every respect different from the mouselike stranger of two months before.
Their house, set on a hill overlooking the rocky little harbor, was simple and bare: a table and chairs, a couple of beds, and books. There was no electricity. They fell asleep when it was dark and rose at first light. Behind the house were woods; out front, a great iron pot for boiling lobsters. “When she thought it was time, it was Edna who tossed the lobsters into the pot.… It was the only time I ever saw her do any cooking (if that is cooking).”
She told him she was in trouble: “I haven’t been able to write anything at all for a long time.… It sometimes seems to me that it is all over—that it will never come again.” When Sheean tried to suggest that casting her writing into prose might be a release for her, she said it was difficult. “ ‘It isn’t for me,’ she said slowly, as if thinking aloud. ‘I’m afraid of it.’ ”
Edna spent long periods at a time in the water; she was part mermaid, apparently, and was quite insensible to cold or to fatigue in water; she always swam naked.… Eugen was less thoroughly a sea child and during her incredible durations in the water he would be setting lobster pots or bringing in the lobsters, cleaning up the house or repairing nets for fishing.… “Nobody ever wears a bathing suit at Ragged Island,” she said decisively when we arrived at the harbor. “It’s a rule of the island. We think bathing dress of any sort is indecent, and so do the waves and so do the sea gulls and so does the wind. No bathing dress has been seen on Ragged Island since we came here.”
Eugen, naked, looked powerful, the color of mahogany, while Edna was softer, “nut-brown color.” “Emerging from the sea at last, dripping and with green eyes ashine, she seemed to have regained some particul
ar strength from the long immersion.”
Dinah Sheean had admired Millay’s poetry from her childhood and now watched her intently as the poet talked and swam: “She had passed that obvious stage of beauty in a woman’s life. Of course there are women of seventy who keep themselves, in a way. She was not like that. She was attractive, certainly. She was a little bit pouchy then. And she didn’t bear any signs of making that effort.
“Eugen had the quality of making a woman feel marvelous,” Dinah said. “He seemed genuinely to like women. There are not so many who do, you know. Oh, the concentration he had for you. And a sort of warmth.” Then Vincent Sheean suddenly remembered the roses. He’d signed the card sending the roses to her five years before, when on the occasion of the China Relief at the Waldorf-Astoria Edna had been forgotten in the melee.
Yet Millay was not in fact well. If she hadn’t drunk wine with the Sheeans on Ragged Island, she certainly did when she got home to Steepletop, where she knew Arthur Ficke lay dying of cancer of the throat at Hard-hack. Arthur had asked Ugin to tell him “very briefly, on paper” just how much morphine he took per day. “2 grains,” Ugin wrote. “At less bad times, how much could you get on with?” Eugen said ½ grain, and while Arthur asked the same two questions of Vincent’s dosages, Ugin left those spaces blank. Arthur added, “in my case, the matter of habit-forming is scarcely of importance; for not even the merriest ironic joker would suggest that I shall be alive for a very long time.”
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