Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  He said he’d resigned from his editorship of Poetry:

  The truth is, I don’t react strongly to the poetry now being written. The war output was deplorable … I did look for something to turn up after the war. But where is it? (The young people who care about poetry seem to be largely concerned with theory, and not very new or interesting theory, rather than performance.)

  He might get a job that would take him back to North Africa, where he had been stationed during World War II. But it was uncertain. He’d let her know. He sounded adrift. George could not have known what very bad shape Millay was in when she returned to Steepletop that September.

  Eugen had been dead less than two weeks when Millay entered Doctors Hospital for the third time, on September 11, 1949. The admitting physician was Dr. William Hall Lewis, Jr., who was a friend of her neighbors the LaBranches. “A session occurred in New York at this time,” Dr. Lewis recalled, “in late August or early September. Friends of hers who were in the city considered that she should have some attention from them, and also that she should be in a position to have some medical supervision to judge her moods and depressive reactions.” They were afraid she could not cope with being alone.

  Dr. Lewis’s diagnosis was “Acute neurasthenia” aggravated by “Nutritional deficiency” and “Cirrhosis of the liver.” “The medication given at this time consisted of more nutritional intake with a modest sedation of barbiturates. Was also given vitamins and liver extract by injection.… She required some Sodium Luminal, grains 2, by injection. For relaxation. Also, a nurse is prescribed to be with the patient twenty-four hours for present. Do not leave alone. Medication consisted thereafter of Sodium Luminal or Seconal taken by mouth. She was allowed to have—a note of 9/16/49—wine, one and one-half bottles per twenty-four hours.”

  She had come in complaining of simple exhaustion. Dr. Lewis said she had apparently been drinking for some time and was worn out. She told the nurse that she “desires large amount of sedation.”

  It was a bright, sunny day, Dr. Lewis recalled, when the ambulance arrived at Steepletop at eleven o’clock to pick her up and take her to Doctors Hospital. At the last minute Edna decided she would be better off at home. There was a forty-five-minute discussion when the nurse who was to accompany her in the ambulance reported to Dr. Lewis “that a sedative was given to Edna in order for her to make the trip.”

  The journey was on the Taconic Parkway, which was heavily traveled, especially on a pretty fall Sunday. Once under way Edna suddenly rapped on the partition between her and the driver’s seat and requested that the ambulance pull over because “she needed to wee-wee.” The shades were drawn for her privacy, and the ambulance men looked straight ahead. After some time Edna reported that she had not been successful and felt she could do better if the shades were raised. Still unable to go, she “requested the driver to whistle.… The driver started to whistle as best as he could under the circumstances.” The nurse who was with her “did notice that the companion driver was getting more and more red in the back of the neck until he finally exploded in great volumes of laughter.” They finally got under way, and she was admitted to the hospital late that afternoon.

  “In my discussion with Edna it did not seem that she was unduly depressed. Or showing any suicidal inclinations,” Dr. Lewis remembered. “Being accustomed to wine and other alcohol content, it was agreed she could have a liter and a half of wine per day.… Later the nurses informed me that she was obtaining one bottle of wine a day from each of four individuals separately who came to call upon her, putting them on the top shelf of the closet in the hospital room. I immediately discussed this with her and … she felt that I was inconsiderate in my appreciation of the value of wine … it was a beautiful amber and rosy liquid that inspired the literary imagination. I told her that in view of her medical condition and past history it seemed best to have some moderation.… She reacted very strongly to that.… I was entirely too medical, and I was treating this beautiful liquid of the Gods like a common medicine.”

  By September 14, she was taking hot tea, grapefruit juice, and claret in the morning. At 3 P.M., the nurse noted that she was “out of bed in chair. Has had very good day.… Seems stronger & steadier.” Edna was making very definite plans now, and although two friends had called wanting to come and visit her, she’d put them off.

  The next morning found her weeping and asking for medication; she said she’d come to rest and to sleep. She’d doze for ten minutes and then awaken weeping. She was smoking and drinking. She complained bitterly about medication and said she “requires 5 or 7 grams, not an ‘infant’s dose.’ ” Then she slept fitfully for about five hours, between two and seven.

  The next morning she was described as “In biting, fault-finding mood remedication: ‘Please don’t reason with me.’ ” Dr. Lewis visited and she told him, “I want to get out and get to work!” At 3:30, she went to the hospital’s beauty parlor for a shampoo, but by the evening she was again depressed and weepy. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to sleep, and she drank two thirds of a bottle of wine after supper.

  Friday, September 16, 1949: “Patient sitting up, drinking & smoking. Extremely agitated about way she is being treated. Repeats her story of medication & dosage she requires. Wanted gin.”

  On Sunday the eighteenth she’d been in Doctors Hospital a full week. She was irritated at what she felt to be the indignity of her treatment, asked for various remedies, and then refused them all. Then, in what looked to be a very impatient nurse’s hand: “will not try to sleep. ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT COOPERATE.” She refused even to lie down and told the nurse that if she did she would suffocate.

  By lunchtime that day she was on her feet, and she refused wine for the first time. On Monday she was drinking ginger ale and tea and eating with appetite. She was also beginning to sleep.

  While her friends refused to agree with her that she should be allowed to leave the hospital, she was determined to. It had been three weeks since Eugen had died, and she wanted to be at home, alone. Since none of them, not Tess nor Gladys Fiske nor Margaret Cuthbert would drive her, she called Cass Canfield.

  Years later, Cass Canfield could no longer recall which of her friends had called him to decide whether she could safely leave the hospital. “The doctor involved wouldn’t make the decision, and somehow it fell to me. I thought she should be at her home. After all, that was where she wrote her poems. It was her home and she belonged there, whatever she did.”

  Canfield remembered stopping on the drive to Steepletop at some inn off Route 22. “We had something to eat. I asked her if she’d like a drink and she said no. We had wine, a quart of wine. I drank perhaps a glass, a glass and a half, and she drank all the rest.

  “Yes, I was aware that she might kill herself. But I thought that was up to her in a way.”

  Once she was back at Steepletop, John Pinnie, who had been their hired man since they had bought Steepletop in 1925, stayed on with her to help run the place. The local postmistress, Mary Herron, read and answered the many letters of sympathy that came in after Eugen’s death. She also did Millay’s bookkeeping, wrote out her checks, helped with her taxes, and cared for her.

  Three months after Eugen’s death, Cass Canfield asked her to look over William Rose Benét’s introduction, written for a special edition of her Second April and The Buck in the Snow, which Harper was bringing out in a new series. She wrote five pages of detailed critical notes about the introduction, telling Canfield that there were things

  to which I properly, as a person, can object: the too familiar … use of the name “Vincent” (too familiar for a formal piece of writing … Bill Benét has always called me Vincent, as did Elinor Wylie); and the bit of gossip beginning, “I think I know of whom,” (which also would prove distracting to the reader, who would say to himself, “This might be juicy, if only I could squeeze it”)

  because it was marked by bad writing which made her feel “sick and embarrassed.” Nevertheless, she asked o
nly that one sentence be altered completely; in its place she wrote:

  In this year Edna St. Vincent Millay married Eugen Jan Boissevain, who rendered to her a devotion—and not only a devotion, but an understanding of the demands of her art—that endured until his death in 1949.

  Canfield said it was heartbreaking: her sharp loss ringing through her clear restraint.

  Lena Reusch went to clean for Millay after Eugen’s death because John Pinnie asked for her help. “He told me she needed someone and asked if I’d work for her every other day. It was Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I believe. Well, the first thing we did was, we got the dining room all fixed up. That was a mess! Things all over, every which way.”

  Edna was making plans for the house and thinking ahead to next spring. There were things that had to be done now, before the snowfall. She made a note of instructions for Bill Reusch, Lena’s husband, and put it in her bedroom desk for safekeeping.

  Putty up holes where bees get into garage

  Take down old electric-engine house

  Put 2 electric lights in woodshed (one of them in laundry closet)

  Put wire cover on Incinerator

  Plane 2 storm-windows

  Plane doors of cupboard in Laundry

  Put sash-weights & cords in 2 windows

  Put panes in several Windows

  Mr. Reusch came and did the carpentry. “Just fixing up different things that needed it. A new cellar door, I remember. She knew what she wanted and how it should be done, and I liked her very well. She could be very concerned about—oh, what? little things to me. And she was funny sometimes. She’d joke. I remember that I had to wax the floor and I asked her where the heavy polisher was to buff it. And she sort of smiled at me and, putting on her socks, she skated and danced across my freshly waxed floor, and did it shine!”

  Other local people came to reupholster the couches and make slipcovers. “She wanted something covered in green and white stripes with leaves through it from a sample book she had,” one neighbor recalled.

  “She always stood straight up, that little bit of a thing. Up straight as a ramrod. After he died I came to call to see what I could do for her. She was standing in her bathrobe at the kitchen door. And she threw this at me right off, ‘Did you think I wasn’t going on?’ Again, that intensity! I didn’t know what to say. Then we started making big plans.”

  No one had wanted her to go home to Steepletop alone. Her friends were very firm; they argued with her. They fought her, in fact. But she needed to have her way. At the turn of the year, in January 1950, five months after Eugen’s death, Edna told Norma how she’d managed. She was, she wrote,

  stuffing myself with all the best proteins and taking my stinking vitamine capsules and my loathsome Liver-Iron- and Red Bone Marrow Extract. Well, baby, I must go now, and lift a three-inch beefsteak out of the deep-freezer to thaw for my luncheon; and, for my breakfast (I am writing this at 6 A.M.) squeeze the juice from five oranges and one lemon; boil the two eggs which my chickens were boasting about all yesterday afternoon.

  She’d made recovery into a game. She had no appetite,

  So I hit upon the bright idea of splitting myself into two personalities, one the patient, one the nurse. The nurse, now, cooks my meals, and sees to it that they are not only nutritious, but also appetizing and attractive. And she prepares my medicines with no repugnance.… As for the patient, she obediently, and also absent-mindedly, swallows and swallows.… Mrs. Somebody-Anybody got her name in this manner: when in Doctors’ Hospital, I made known to several friends who visited me there, my decision to return to Steepletop and live here all alone, they were appalled, and begged me not to try it. They all said, “But you must have somebody with you! You simply can’t be there without anybody!” …

  When, finally … I was here alone, and thought up my pretty schizophrenia; I named my nurse Mrs. Somebody-Anybody. She doesn’t know that I called her that; she wouldn’t like it. So to her face I call her “Mrs. S.A.” She thinks I mean Mrs. Sex-Appeal! And she bridles, my dear, she actually bridles!

  Don’t worry about me at all, either of you. To pretend that it is not agony would be silly. But I can cope.

  In the spring, when Mary Herron asked her how she was going to bear up without Eugen, she said she was

  plenty scared.… Shrinking from being hurt too much. Scared the way I used to be as a child, when I had to go to the dentist. In the days before they gave you novocaine.

  I have already encountered the first dandelion. I stood and stared at it with a kind of horror. And then I felt ashamed of myself, and sorry for the dandelion. And suddenly, without my doing anything about it at all, my face just crumpled up and cried.

  How excited he always was when he saw the first dandelion! And long before the plants got big enough for even a rabbit to find them, he had dug a fine mess, for greens. He used to say “pick dandelions”; and I would say, “Not pick,—dig.” And he would say, “Oh, don’t scold poor Uge—he does so his best.”

  Alas, alas, and alas.

  When Mary Herron offered to pay for the fresh butter Edna had asked John Pinnie to churn for her, Edna was outraged: “After all that you have done for me, and are constantly doing—no sister could have given me more tender care—”

  We began to talk about what Norma called “that last time” she and Vincent had seen each other. At some point in the conversation Norma had called Gene “a beautiful animal.” Vincent had said, “You, too, Normie?” Then she had fallen to the floor.

  “I don’t remember what I had said. But it certainly shouldn’t have been taken that way. I wish to God I could remember what I said.”

  Charlie slowly, thoughtfully, interrupted, “You said Gene was a beautiful animal.”

  “It certainly shouldn’t have been taken that way. We would have killed each other. I had gotten where I just wasn’t taking anything. Vincent could really look right at you. You see, she took nothing lightly. She was wary. I tried to talk to her, and she left me and went upstairs. She had gone.

  “Well, what am I going to do? She was highly sensitized at the time. And Charlie said he’d go up, and pretty soon they were laughing. And I came up, she threw her arms around me—‘I want only you, sister. You come back!’

  “ ‘I am back,’ I said in her arms.—Of course, that’s borne out by the little scrap of paper [the will].

  “But I couldn’t be Gene! She was a nervous wreck. Well, I’m a little more matter-of-fact. Well, dear, I don’t know what it is—we’re different. I don’t know what it was. And I was beginning to see that she could go on. You must remember that we had to earn a living. Then it was a whole year.”

  Millay began to handle all of her own correspondence and not rely on Mary Herron, to whom she’d written, “It’s time I stopped being such a baby.” She went to work to try to control Oxford University Press’s Book of American Verse—rather, she attempted, but failed, to limit its desire to anthologize only her very early work and her love poems.

  Suddenly it was fall. She wrote to Margaret Cuthbert, inviting them to come anytime after September 1. “When once I have the whole first year behind me, when I can no longer say to myself, ‘Only a year ago today he was still alive,’—then, something will have happened.” It “might perhaps give me something to lean against for the second year.

  “However, I know nothing about it. I am exploring strange and uncharted country. I am the first one that ever lost Eugen.”

  She’d promised a Thanksgiving poem to The Saturday Evening Post, and even though she scrapped the first version with only ten days to go, she managed to find the words she needed and finished it.

  It was her first poem to see print since Eugen’s death. She wrote to Cass Canfield, “It was going along well, I thought; but as things got worse and worse in Korea, I began to see that it was not the right poem for the occasion. ‘What,’ I asked myself, ‘would a few Indian war-hoops mean, and a neighborly little scalping party,—to a nation dreading and awai
ting the atom bomb?’ ” So she scrapped the first version of the poem “and sat there, scared frozen; the deadline only ten days off; my promise to deliver the poem long ago given to the Post; and not an idea in my head.… when I got so scared that I was fair frantic, there was nothing to do but relax, and start all over; and so I did. And almost at once the first lines of the new poem came into my head.”

  Hard, hard it is, this anxious autumn,

  To lift the heavy mind from its dark forebodings.

  “Oh,” she told Cass, “I know that I am making a big fuss about a small piece of work—but it is so wonderful to be writing again!” Her point by the close of the poem is one that reverberated in her life:

  the trained hand does not forget its skill …

  Strength we have, and courage; an acetylene will.

  She thanked Canfield for the money he’d been sending her. She’d been too busy worrying the poem along to have noticed, and then “the August slip came in.” It was “a great help to me. And it was kind of you to do it, without even speaking about it.”

  “She had, don’t you see, this clarity of mind,” Canfield insisted. “Her verses, her poems were absolutely clear. There was always a clarity in her poems—no matter what she wrote about.”

  Ragged Island—which a number of her good friends thought she might, even must, sell—she had no intention of letting go. “As soon as I can bear it,” she wrote Tess, “I shall go back there.” Maybe even the next summer. In August 1950, remembering the August before, she added, “No, my dear. Don’t bring me any lobsters. And don’t bring me any seaweed.”

  Often she worked late. To Lena Reusch, her new housekeeper, she left this note:

  This iron is set too high. Don’t put it on where it says “Linen”—or it will scorch the linen. Try it on “Rayon”—and then, perhaps on “Woollen.” And be careful not to burn your fingers when you shift it from one heat to another.