Savage Beauty (76 page)

She was standing at the little mahogany bar Eugen had rigged up near the swimming pool with her foot hooked roguishly on the brass rail, sipping Pol Roger 1921, when she turned to the reporter again. “Mind you, I hope it will confound MY critics; not THE critics!” she said and smiled at him.

The reporter, Michael Mok, asked his readers if they had any idea what the smile of Edna Millay looked like. “Her face around the luminous sea-green eyes crinkles, hiding the gold flecks of the freckles; she tilts back her head, shaking her bobbed russet hair; she parts her lips, letting her small even teeth glisten in the sun.” Millay was once more her high-keyed, caroling self: “The nightingale of the Berkshires has pulled the thorn from her breast.” Three years before, when Mok had first met her, she had been disconsolate: “The fist of the world was pounding the door of her ivory tower. It opened a crack. Through it she saw the rise of the Fascist fury, heard the clink of armaments. Hatred again inflamed Europe; fear cowed the innocent. She averted her face.” But since then, she had “decided that the only way to fight evil is to come to grips with it.” And
Conversation
was her way to settle the score.

“You know me as a passionate pacifist,” she told Mok, “but now, sometimes, I’m almost tempted to think that we must arm.” Then, in a declaration of what she understood her role as a poet to be, she made her position absolutely clear:

Everything that touches the individual as an individual is matter for poetry, but when the poet becomes a member of the mass, his vein is bound to be exhausted.

The poet can be concerned with what goes on outside, but the moment the outside comes in, dictates to him what pen, what ink, what paper he shall use, what thoughts he shall think, he declines and dies.

I think there might be a great Communist poet, a great Fascist poet. Communism and Fascism are subjects for poetry, but Communism and Fascism will never permit those poems to be written.

I can’t imagine myself living, working, in such a world. I should either have to stultify myself or be shot.

The liberty under which this new book of mine comes out is more precious to me than anything anywhere. That’s what makes life real.

At this point Eugen, who had been quietly standing behind the bar, coughed and said, “At the rate my Pol Roger is going it would be cheaper to cut this short and take you two in to lunch. But Vincent … doesn’t bring out a book every day. How about one more glass?”

However, two of Millay’s closest friends from the past, Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, did not like
Conversation
at all. Wilson,
who had sided with American Communists in the 1932 election and was now considered to be a leftist in New York literary circles, was disappointed because
the conflict between the Communist and the stockbroker was really

the conflict between the classless and the class ideal, and Miss Millay has sidestepped this by making the pretenses of both parties ridiculous. For her, the whole upshot of the matter seems to be that both the stockbroker and the radical hanker only after the status of obedient cogs in a smoothly running machine. But is this what they are fighting about in Spain? Miss Millay probably does not really think so, since she has lately contributed to a volume of translations of Spanish poems, for the benefit of the Loyalist cause.

She had also written for the Spanish cause “
Say that We Saw Spain Die”:

      O splendid bull, how well you fought!

Lost from the first.

      … the tossed, the replaced, the watchful
torero
with gesture elegant and spry,

Before the dark, the tiring but the unglazed eye deploying the bright cape,

Which hid for once not air, but the enemy indeed, the authentic shape,

A thousand of him, interminably into the ring released … the turning beast at length between converging colours caught.

Save for the weapons of its skull, a bull

Unarmed, considering, weighing, charging

Almost a world, itself without ally.

What Wilson wanted was the lyric girl whose work and self he’d loved almost two decades earlier. At the close of his review he was reduced to lambasting the entire current state of verse in America: “Compare MacNeice and Auden with Yeats and Houseman; Robinson Jeffers with John Masefield; Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral
with his earlier work.… And now Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of the sole surviving masters of English verse, seems to be going to pieces, too.” He ended on a note that read like an epitaph: “Yet I miss her old imperial line.”

A quarter century later, in 1960, the iconoclastic British critic Kenneth Tynan, writing in
The New Yorker
, had called
Conversation
“
the brilliant book of orchestrated debate that is to my mind Miss Millay’s highest intellectual achievement.” He closed with Carl’s lovely, mournful affirmation of life:

Beautiful as a dandelion-blossom, golden in the green grass,

This life can be.

Common as a dandelion-blossom, beautiful in the clean grass, not beautiful

Because common, beautiful because beautiful;

Noble because common, because free.

Tynan understood Millay to be a “thinker.… a ravaged observer of the human plight,” not a “pretty non-combatant, a delicate fashioner of pathetic parlor verse.”

CHAPTER 33

W
hile it was important to Millay not to lose the friends to whom she’d once been attached, there were few women among them unless they were the wives of men she and Eugen were close to: Gladys
and Arthur, Alyse and Lulu, Mary and Deems. She had very little contact now with either of her sisters. Kathleen had all but disappeared from her life, and Norma was being kept at arm’s length. She counted very few writers in her inner circle. Charlie suggested that this was because Eugen picked her friends. Bill Brann, who after a very successful career in advertising now bred and trained Thoroughbreds, and George LaBranche, a stockbroker who raised pheasants on his nearby estate and had written a book on fly fishing, were men with whom Eugen was comfortable, and both lived nearby. Maybe in her wide public fame Millay lost or had never shared that sense of belonging to the same generation that Edmund Wilson prized so highly in his friendships with the men he knew at Princeton: Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop. Millay didn’t see Wilson anymore because of a misunderstanding between them about his portrayal of her as Rita Cavanaugh in his novel
I Thought of Daisy
. It wasn’t that she was offended by his characterization of her; she felt the novel was badly written. “Whenever he or Bishop reviewed her work, as they just had with
Conversation
, they fell hard on her, judging her work sharply and with a sense of disappointment.

Millay had never entirely lost track of George Slocombe, nor he of her. Since they had last known each other in France, Slocombe had achieved a distinguished international reputation as a journalist. He was now a regular contributor to American publications, among them the New York
Herald Tribune, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Vanity Fair
, and
The Nation
. His stature as a figure in international politics had grown, too. He had been commended by the British government for having initiated the negotiations that had freed Gandhi from imprisonment, which had led to the Pact of Delhi. He had become the foreign editor of the
Evening Standard
in 1932, and he had eleven books to his credit.

On the rare occasions when he had visited America, where he lectured and wrote what he called “my Monday articles” for the
Herald Tribune
, Slocombe and Millay had missed each other. On an impulse, he wrote to her now and said his pieces would be easier to write if he knew she would be reading them. He had just returned from a research trip through Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, “
a depressing tour for they are all preparing for war.”

Edna asked him to come and stay with them at Steepletop. He accepted immediately. As it turned out, she was holed up at One Fifth Avenue when he arrived. “
Darling,” he wrote when he left,

I couldn’t say anything to you over the telephone, any more than I can say anything at railway stations.… I slept last night for 12 hours and woke up & found it noon, but it took me 2 days to get used to going to sleep earlier than 3 a.m. I am in the middle of an emotional & spiritual reaction. Perhaps it is leaving you.… Darling you cannot imagine how lovely it was to be with you in New York. It gave an air of surprise & wonder to what I feared would be an unimportant if not boring stay.… Give my love to Eugen. I am glad he is my friend.

When she called him in California, where his lecture tour had taken him, he said he loved hearing her voice.

This town is too fantastic—so many young girls, so much beauty in sky and landscape, so many handsome white villas under the palms and cypresses, so many neon signs. I asked at a party last night if there were no attractive women of forty-four in Hollywood. Answer: yes but they all try to look like twenty. This town is sex crazy but not in a big way, to use their own crazy language.

In December 1937, he wrote, “
Am I going to see you in January? … Darling I love you. George.”

Early in the spring, George Slocombe went alone to Steepletop to spend a week with Edna and Eugen, “
in a lovely & rare intimacy which I think we all loved.” He found himself writing poetry there. In one poem he asked Edna what Elinor Wylie had been like. Millay’s response was her “Sonnet in Answer to a Question”; she even dated it:

MARCH 8, 1938.

Oh, she was beautiful in every part!—
The auburn hair that bound the subtle brain;
The lovely mouth cut clear by wit and pain,
Uttering oaths and nonsense, uttering art
In casual speech and curving at the smart
On startled ears of excellence too plain
For early morning!—
Obit
. Death from strain;
The soaring mind outstripped the tethered heart.

Yet here was one who had no need to die
To be remembered. Every word she said
The lively malice of the hazel eye
Scanning the thumb-nail close—oh, the dazzling dead,
How like a comet through the darkening sky
You raced! … would your return were heralded.

George Dillon was chosen as editor in chief of
Poetry
magazine after the death of Harriet Monroe. He was only thirty-one, and it looked like the
perfect position from which to continue his career, which was now floundering. He wrote asking Millay for a new poem for the magazine. She said she wanted to give him something, but she just couldn’t bring herself to send him anything yet. “
You say you know that I have some unpublished poems; that’s true, I have. But it’s not so easy to get at them as it was when you and I were looking through that black note-book together.” It wasn’t only that
Conversation
had burned up in the fire; she had also lost almost a full manuscript of new poems. “And I’m so exhausted from digging
Conversation at Midnight
piece by piece out of my memory, that I hardly have the heart to start excavations again on another site. I’m pretty sure that I can remember most of the poems when I get around to it; I’m just bored with the whole idea.”

As often in her letters to him now, she inquired politely about him: “Please let me know what you are going to do, my dear, and where you are going to be.… Have you been writing anything? If you have, I beg you to send me something. Please let me hear from you soon. Don’t be unkind, just because I’ve waited so long to answer you. I’ll be better next time. Vincent.”

Does anyone ever do better?

2

At the beginning of 1938, Eugen was telling people that Edna was often sick, in bed for days on end. One of her lecture bureaus, Famous Speakers, wrote that it hoped her health had improved so that she might accept an offer for an engagement in Chicago that paid “upward a thousand to fifteen hundred.”

She wired Norma, who had heard about her constant illnesses:

DARLING I AM NOT SICK I AM NICE AND WARM AND ALL THAT BUT I AM DOING THE GUGGENHEIMS THEREFORE HAVE NO THOUGHT FOR MAN OR ANGEL ONLY FOR POETS SO LOTS OF LOVE TO MY LITTLE SISTER AND DONT YOU BE FOOLISH SEFE

Was illness an excuse Eugen invented to defend her from the niggling obligations and duties she had no time for? But he persisted, even in a letter to George Dillon. “
The reason why you have not heard from her is that she had been sick in bed for the last two months,” he wrote to Dillon on December 5, 1937. “She is a little bit better now and doubtless you will hear from her as soon as she has recovered.” A month later, he was more specific: “Vincent, who has been sick with the flu for two months, is getting stronger every day, and I hope, will soon be quite recovered.” But by
the spring he told George that “All we need now to make everything perfect is to have Vincent entirely recovered.… She still has a nurse.” At the end of May he said he’d forgotten whether or not he’d told him “how sick Vincent has been this winter.… It has been a terrible and anxious winter. I have to have a day and a night nurse for her sometime.” Eugen took a home movie of her, filmed at Steepletop, sitting in what looks like a wheelchair, facing the camera wearing a beret, her shoulders draped with a shawl, with a private nurse attending her, albeit lighting her cigarette.