Savage Beauty (72 page)

CHAPTER 31

W
ine from These Grapes
was published on November 1, 1934, and, as was customary for her now, Millay began a reading tour before publication. In October she was at Yale; two weeks later she reached Chicago, where a letter from George Dillon was waiting for her, telling her how much he liked her new book. Earlier that summer, having returned from his Guggenheim in Paris to live with his parents in Richmond, Virginia, he had announced to her with a certain bravado that he was at last writing again. “
What marvelous news this is,” she wrote back. “I’m so happy for you; and happy for myself, too. I want to read everything you’ll let me read. It will be a great delight to me. But you know that.” He later invited her to visit him. “Your idea that we should get acquainted,” she quipped, “is as charming as it is original.”

Her tour was an overwhelming success. “When Eugen, writing to Norma from Oklahoma City, tried to describe her triumph, all he could say was “
sold out,” “standees,” and “overflow.… We are very happy but very tired.—Your angel sister is sleeping now.—We arrived here 7 a.m. She gave a reading at 11 a.m.—And now 4 p.m. we just got rid of people, and 5:20 she leaves for Waco, Texas, where she reads to-morrow.”

Millay’s schedule continued unabated. By the twentieth she had left Waco for Fort Worth. Six days later, on the twenty-sixth, she would recross the country and read in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was a taxing pace in an era when travel was entirely by train, but at the end of the month she would be staying with George Dillon at his parents’ house in Richmond.

Alix Daniels, who had kept in touch with George, said he told her he was happy and that he saw no one. He read a great deal, mostly in French, which seemed calming after a more or less stormy youth. Daniels remarked that if George’s last remaining unconventionality was a passion for irregular French verbs, she never wanted to see him again.

But George didn’t sound happy in his letters to Alix. He’d begun to translate Baudelaire that summer, and in a rare flush of pride he told her, “
My translations are marvellous, the best ever done from French into English.” By August he admitted his Baudelaire was stalled: “I begin to be worried, for I don’t want to spend the rest of my life at this kind of a grind.” In October he told her:

I almost died of boredom toward the end of the summer—the air was so heavy and I had gone stale on the work I was doing. I am still stale, and I cannot at this moment bear the sight of the translations I have done.… Now that it is Autumn, though, I begin to feel myself coming to life again and I have begun to work a little on my own verse.

When Edna and Eugen arrived in Richmond that fall, George’s cousin Missy said, his mother, who was protective of her son and had always been a stumbling block to his relationship with Millay, looked grim. She was “
a steel hand in a velvet glove.

“George was an only child, as I was, and he was, you see, sort of imprisoned by those two invalids. His mother would be sitting in the corner softly weeping and reading the Bible when Vincent was on the phone—‘When will you come? I’ll meet you in Chicago—in New York!’ You must remember, George came from a family of southern gentlemen. He had always seen his father, who was a saint, give in. And, too, he enjoyed his mother very much. I don’t know whether Vincent thought she might still get him back. I do know, because it was the talk of the family, that she came to Richmond with armfuls of roses for his mother. And that, [as she was] tired after her arduous journey, Eugen Boissevain picked her up in his arms and carried her upstairs.” He also called her “my child,” which did not sit well with Mrs. Dillon, who remarked lightly to Eugen that his “child” looked a tad elderly. The conversation slowed to a halt after that.

By the time of her December 31 royalty statement, Millay had sold just over 35,000 copies of
Wine
. Such sales, within eight weeks of publication and in the middle of the Depression, were phenomenal. With
Fatal Interview
she had reached the bestseller list for the first time. Her royalty was a solid 15 percent on the first 25,000 copies sold; thereafter it increased to 20
percent. Now Harper increased that already handsome royalty: she would earn a flat 20 percent on all copies sold after the first 5,000. It is on the December royalty statement that another 25,000 copies are listed at the new rate. Between January and June 1935, an additional 6,500 copies of
Wine
were sold. Her total sales after seven months were 66,500 copies.

Her reviews, however, were becoming more and more mixed. Some were downright dismissive, beginning to suggest that her celebrity had outstripped her poetry and that the younger generation was moving on. In the first sentence of Horace Gregory’s review in the New York
Herald Tribune
Books section, he made direct reference to Millay’s popularity:

In reading the name of Edna Millay across the title page of a new book of poems a number of definite pictures flow through the mind. It is like unrolling a newsreel of twelve years ago. I remember a sunlit, white-columned veranda of a sorority house in a middle-Western university. A girl in a red sweater was reading aloud to me the first poem in “Second April.”

He could tell from this young woman’s voice that the poem meant more to her than what it actually said. It meant “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” It was, he wrote, as if she had been reading a letter from a friend.

Here was a woman speaking to other women, a poet who was a celebrity in New York’s Greenwich Village, who had been an actress on the stage of the Provincetown Theater, a young woman who smoked cigarettes as she read her poems in lecture halls, rented for the evening by local women’s clubs. These details, trivial as they may seem today, were then the gestures of revolt against convention; the poet was a new woman, the symbol of emancipation whose presence was acknowledged by Woodrow Wilson as he signed the bill admitting Votes for Women into an amendment of the Constitution.

This may have been the first time her life was being reviewed, her work taken to task for its reception and popularity; it would not be the last. Mil-lay’s poetry appealed to a larger public than most poets ever hope to reach. Gregory reduced that appeal to immature girls—or, as they aged, to unhappy women. It was an attack disguised as a review.

It was left for Miss Millay to crystallize an impression left upon the public mind when Sara Teasdale wrote:

My room was white with the sun
  And Love cried out to me,
“I am strong, I will break your heart
  Unless you set me free.”

She was to recite that statement as a Bill of Rights and to give it a name, a personality, a legend. It was as though she had created a character … who could say with perfect freedom that she had fallen in love or out, who could be faithless as any man or as faithful. The gesture was always a bit theatrical, and one always found it difficult to discern where genuine emotion left off and a pose began.… Following a standard set by a crude application of American Pragmatism, the picture “worked”; it was effective, and after it had stepped from its frame into the lives of a thousand women, it began to animate a thousand lesser Millays. Hundreds of women were stirred to writing verse, to say again what Edna Millay had said the year before.

In closing, Gregory strangely chided her for no longer writing for undergraduates. Undergraduate girls distrusted her now, he claimed; “their freedom is of the kind described by Spender and Auden, that lies at the end of a road through ruin and dissolution, a map whose landmarks are ‘Das Capital’ [sic], the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of D. H. Lawrence.…

“If,” he said, these undergraduates “are reading women poets” at all, they “veer toward the more intense, more sensitive verse of Leonie Adams and Louise Bogan.”

It was left to Louise Bogan—the poet Horace Gregory chose to compare favorably to Millay—to champion
Wine
. Bogan wrote in
Poetry
magazine that the difficult transition of any poet as she matured was to risk breaking with her past achievements:

In her latest book,
Wine from These Grapes
, Edna Millay at last gives evidence that she recognizes and is prepared to meet the task of becoming a mature and self-sufficing woman and artist. It is a task she never completely faced before.… The accent of chagrin and desperation, both resolved and unresolved, is there—the sound of bitter thought, of meditation, of solitude, of the clear, disabused and unexcited mind.… she has crossed the line, made the break, passed into regions of cold and larger air.

A month after this review, the same reporter who had mocked the desperate and uncertain Scott Fitzgerald for his
Tender Is the Night
caught Millay at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. She had, he noted, grown up. “I’m forty-two; just mention it once in your story and then, please, forget it!” In boldface, the headline read, “
Poetic Strife Begins at 42 for Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

The press would hang on her words and then skewer her with them. The subhead of the piece in the
New York Post
was “Indignation at the Cosmic Scheme Is the Motif of Our Erstwhile Sprite.”

Millay knew she was undermining herself by giving the reporters the words they would use to nail her: “I know I sound like a fool.… I always look like a moron in the newspapers.” When she’s asked to be specific, she is, and not about poetry:

I am disgusted with the hollow talk of disarmament. Men sent to Geneva equipped with every facility.… Thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent.… There’s talk of world peace … talk, talk, talk.

And then you follow the newspapers: Italy resents German attitude … France ready to fight for the Saar Valley.… In England, Ramsay MacDonald says there shouldn’t be so much freedom of speech and so many attacks on the established things.…

Winston Churchill cries out that Britain should have an air force second to none, like her navy.… And then we observe Armistice Day. We put wreaths on the grave of the Unknown Soldier, who’s pretty damn well known by now as the symbol of the next war … while Japan penetrates China.

Listening in stunned silence, the reporter asked two questions: First, should the profit system be abolished?

Yes, I blame the system.… I should like to live in a world where everybody has a job, leisure for study, leisure to become wiser, more perceptive.… I am willing to give up everything I possess, everything I ever will have.… I am willing to live in the simplest life … to live in a hut, on a loaf a day (Oh, I do know this sounds idiotic!) to achieve it.

And: “Do you want Communism?”

No, no, I do not.… Communism is repugnant to me.… I am intensely an individualist.… I cannot bear to have a thousand well-wishers breathe on my neck.

From this point on, the FBI—which had been tracking her lackadaisically since she had given one dollar to buy Soviet tractors back in 1920—became more alert.

That fall Millay’s editor, Eugene Saxton, invited her to meet another Harper author, the young Frederic Prokosch, whose novel Harper was about to publish. Prokosch made no impression whatsoever upon Millay, but he observed her with curiosity. In his memoirs nearly fifty years later, he described Saxton as a lovable Pickwickian character, “
like a figure in
an engraving by Phiz.” He found Saxton at the bar in the Vanderbilt, sitting beside “a lady in a gray flannel suit, with a blue-striped shirt and a green silk cravat. Her cheeks were puffed and shiny, her hair hung loose and colorless, and her eyes were blurred and watery, as though worn by lamentation.”

Millay had just come from autographing three hundred and thirty-five sets of the limited edition and thirty-six sets on Japan vellum of the ultra-limited edition of
Wine
. She was cross-eyed with fatigue. They had a round of martinis.

“I have spent the whole morning signing my books,” said Miss Millay. “I am utterly exhausted. Just look. My hand is shaking. That’s the trouble with being a celebrity. One gets sucked into the whirlpool. One does things that one shouldn’t be doing and says things one shouldn’t be saying and life grows horribly cheap and perfunctory and vulgar. I should
never
have consented to read my poems in public. It makes them sound so blatant. I feel like a prostitute.”

“Not a prostitute surely, Edna dear,” said Saxton with alarm.

“Or pretty damn close to it. One feels so pawed over. I keep thinking of Emily Dickinson. All those thousands of slips of paper. Nobody ever pawed
her
over in this cheap, macabre fashion.”