Savage Beauty (84 page)

Her champion at Harper, Gene Saxton, understood her need to get the poems into book form immediately. “The poems themselves are, of course, of the utmost timeliness, and have great drive and emotion,” he wrote Eugen. “That is why it is so essential to speed the production.” Would she be willing to have Harper rush the book through without sending her proofs? It would follow her copy absolutely.

Within two weeks of his letter the poems were set in galleys. “Everyone here has been much moved by the emotional quality of the poems,” Saxton
wrote, “and there is a mixture of surprise and pleasure in the unexpected arrival of this volume in the autumn list.” Her new book,
Make Bright the Arrows
, would be published on November 20.

On November 15, Charles Lindbergh gave his famous—or infamous—“Our Drift Toward War” speech, in which he warned that America was woefully underprepared for war, its defenses inadequate against the Nazis’ power. President Roosevelt may have assured the French that America’s efforts would be redoubled, promising France “more equipment,” but America’s Congress remained strongly isolationist. Lindbergh was advocating staying out of Europe’s war.
He had visited Germany six times between 1936 and 1938 at the invitation of Field Marshal Göring, who had given him Germany’s highest medal for distinguished aviation, which he had accepted.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh had written a “Prayer for Peace,” which her husband arranged to have published in
Reader’s Digest
for Christmas 1939. She had qualms about what she was writing: “
I am filled with mistrust and misgivings about it.… Will it hurt C? Or help him?” Clearly she knew that her husband was being accused of being pro-Nazi.

The following summer, while Britain was being bombed in a ferocious air war, Anne Lindbergh began to work on an article that was eventually published as a forty-one-page book,
The Wave of the Future
. “I do not ‘write’ it exactly, I am so full of it.… It flows out of me, unmindful of how it is ‘written.’ ”

Charles Lindbergh took his wife’s article to New York and showed it to Alfred Harcourt, publisher of her two bestselling books,
North to the Orient
and
Listen! The Wind
. Harcourt was anxious to publish it at once.

That August, Anne Lindbergh explained to her mother, Mrs. Dwight Morrow, who was deeply opposed to the Lindberghs’ point of view, that her goal was to give “
a moral argument for isolationism … because I think it is vital to stay out.” She had been “impelled to write it, because of my personal loyalty and desperate feeling of injustice to C., but I wouldn’t do it on that alone.”

In November 1940, Edna Millay was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Newspaper reporters in New York interviewed her at her suite at the St. Regis, where she sat, they wrote, “half lost” in a huge chair, her “auburn hair still worn as she wore it when an undergraduate.” In the accompanying photographs, she looked unwell. Her hair was flat, her face puffy, her mouth turned down like the rim of a cup. Instead of being dressed for the photographs accompanying the interview, she was wearing a dressing gown.

She was asked by one journalist if she found it odd that the American Academy of Arts and Letters had waited until now to make her a member, since she had been “
for 25 years one of America’s most distinguished poets.”

“After all,” she said today … “perhaps I wasn’t ready for such an honor. Perhaps they thought I wasn’t mature enough.”

There was a faint twinkle in the little red-haired poet’s eyes—eyes somewhat weary from a late celebration, in company with her husband Eugen Boissevain and William Lyon Phelps.… “We stayed up very late—and we drank lots of sherry.”

She had decided, she told the reporters, to take an apartment in the city “to be closer to the realities, closer to where men and women are giving aid to Britain, trying to aid the oppressed of France and Poland and Norway.” She explained that she would become a propagandist for democracy:

If I can write just one poem that will turn the minds of a few to a more decent outlook … what does it matter if I compose a bad line or lose my reputation as a craftsman? … I used to think it very important to write only good poetry. Over and over I worked it to make it as flawless as I could. What does it matter now, when men are dying for their hopes and their ideals? If I live or die as a poet it won’t matter, but anyone who believes in democracy and freedom and love and culture and peace ought to be busy now. He cannot wait for the tomorrows.

When Peter Monro Jack reviewed
Make Bright the Arrows
in
The New York Times Book Review
, he wrote, “Miss Millay was compelled to write this book. Her readers will be compelled to read it.” There was no doubt that it was a piece of propaganda, but he reminded them that Milton, Wordsworth, and Rupert Brooke had written propaganda in the heat of war. “Miss Millay may have written more nicely, but she has never written more strongly, with absolute belief and accuracy.”

Reviewing her again in the New York
Herald Tribune
Books section, Professor Irwin Edman did not agree: “But it is a sad obligation to report that the tragedy of the present hour has not wrung great poems out of Miss Millay, nor, with the exception of a few sonnets and possibly the opening poem, even notably good ones.” He stopped just short of savaging the book. He did like the sonnet “Blue bright September air, with her and there / On the green hills a maple turning red.” But he admonished Millay that her arrows could have been made bright only by art: “But it must be poetry, first.… That is not true of most of these sincere but sputtering verses.”

Millay sent George Dillon the book a few weeks after publication. She cautioned that her new book was “not poems, posters; there are a few good poems, but it is mostly plain propaganda.” She added that if “some bright boy reviews it for Poetry, please remind him that I know bad poetry as well as the next one.” She thought that by subtitling it “1940 Notebook,” she’d made it plain enough “that this book is a book of impassioned propaganda, into which a few good poems got bound up because they happened to be propaganda, too.”

Eleven years later Dillon said this was the last letter on the subject of poetry he ever received from Vincent Millay. “
It was a book containing several poems I had advised her not to publish. After trying it on two well known critics, who annihilated it, and on two others who refused it, I printed what seemed to me at the time a just and respectful review.” Reading it over years later, he realized that the review had been, “in a feminine way, ruthless.” While he didn’t lose Millay’s friendship, “My punishment was that she never sent me her poetry again.”

Even her old Vassar friend Charlotte Babcock Sills, to whom she had sent
Make Bright
, was offended by the book. Millay insisted she was adamant about America’s
not
getting into the war in Europe, “
And if this book had really been the book you took it to be … would I have done the insolent and cruel thing which it would have been to send to you and Mac a book of poems trying to incite this country to send American boys into foreign lands to fight?” For the Sillses had three grown sons.

Have you the slightest conception of what this reputation means to me, who have been building it carefully for more than twenty years, taking a long time, months, sometimes as long as several years before permitting a poem to be published because I felt that in one line of it, one syllable was not as close to perfection as I might be able to make it?

Thus, you see, the dearest thing in life I possess which might possibly be of help to my country, has already gone over the top, in the hope that your sons need never go to war.

But it was a disingenuous defense, and her letter did nothing to mask Millay’s own strain.

4

At the end of 1940, a benefit was organized in New York for United China Relief, to which a number of writers were invited to help raise money for Chinese trapped in the war of resistance to Japan. Vincent Sheean was asked by Henry Luce to be the chairman of the dinner given at the Waldorf-Astoria to launch the organization. Writers were invited to sit at
the speakers’ table, and Edna Millay was asked to recite a poem. When Sheean saw her, he thought she looked like “a stricken deer.”

“
Edna Millay had come to the dinner in her smallest and most frightened mood. She had been very ill and she had worried immeasurably over Hitler’s victories in Europe and the disappearance of so many brave small countries, including Eugen’s. The atmosphere at the Waldorf was not favorable to her.” Sheean tried to take care of her; the glare of the blue lights was awful. He found her standing behind her chair.

“ ‘I can’t sit with strangers only,’ she said in an agonized whisper. ‘Please, I must have Eugen sitting beside me. Believe me, it’s true. I don’t know what will happen if he isn’t here. Please, please—otherwise I’ll have to go home.’ ” She was, he remembered, trembling all over. “So I went to Pearl [Buck], and she arranged it that Edna had a place with Eugen beside her at the central table.” But in all the commotion of the evening, with some of the speeches broadcast over national networks, Edna’s having been asked to recite a poem was forgotten. Sheean was outraged; the next morning he sent her roses, along with a note regretting what had happened.

The Nazis began to bomb Britain in earnest in the summer of 1940, and the merciless pounding continued for months on end. The French Republic was in ashes. In its place, ruling a partitioned France, was the Fascist government of Marshal Henri Pétain, a hero of the First World War.

By now Edna Millay barely left her upstairs rooms at Steepletop. Sometimes she wandered around the house in her robe with the sound of the broadcasts on the radio tormenting her. Sometimes she and Eugen sat crouched beside their Philco, leaning into the pale golden glow of the dial as it broadcast news from the front. She could hardly sleep for pain. In the morning, as soon as she awoke, she held a tiny glass vial shaped like a tear in her hand to warm it, fixed a steel needle into a metal plunger, and shot the colorless liquid directly into her arm or her thigh. Sometimes, then, the pain let go, and she vanished. It was at first dreamy and peaceful and without pain from any source: “Luxe, calme et volupté.… ”

At the close of her workbook for this year she wrote out the following:

  CHART
MISS MILLAY
Dec. 31, 1940

Awoke 7:30, after untroubled night. Pain less than previous day. 7:35—Urinated—no difficulty or distress

7:40—⅜ gr. M.S. hypodermically, self-administered in left upper arm + profuse bleeding, almost instantly quenched.

7:45 to 8—smoked cigarette (Egyptian) (mouth burns from excessive smoking)

8:15—thirsty—went to ice-box for glass of water, but no water there. Take glass of beer instead which do not want. Headache, lassitude and feeling of discomfort & stuffiness from constipation.

8:20—cigarette (Egyptian)

9:00—”

9:30—Gin Rickey (cigarette)

11:15—Gin Rickey

12:15—Martini (4 cigarettes)

12:45—¼ grain M.S. & cigarette

1.—pain bad & also in lumbar region. no relief from M.S.

She’d been awake ten minutes when she took her first injection of morphine. By noon she’d had a glass of beer, eight cigarettes, and three strong drinks. But maybe most crucially, this was the first time she wrote in her own hand that she was injecting the morphine herself. This chart, which she began on New Year’s Eve day, a time for making resolutions, established a pattern of record keeping she would continue as long as she was addicted. But first she fought that acknowledgment by denying it. She had help—right at home, where it was now the dead of winter.

CHAPTER 37

A
t the turn of the year, Edna and Eugen fled Steepletop for New York and took an apartment at 400 East Fifty-second Street, around the corner from Margaret Cuthbert. It wasn’t only the war effort that brought Millay to New York; she was far more ill than anyone knew. Margaret called a young friend of hers, Dorothy Leffler, on New Year’s Day 1941, to ask her a favor: Would she do some work for “Miss Millay who was ill and needed help badly”? Miss Leffler, who had experience as an assistant editor at Bobbs-Merrill, was asked to arrange her time so she could spend part of every day with Millay. No one explained what kind of help Millay needed or described her illness.

When Leffler arrived the first afternoon, Millay suddenly dictated a poem to her. “
Not having taken dictation in some five years, I had a terrible feeling I might not be able to read my notes and one of Miss Millay’s
poems might be lost forever.” Fortunately her shorthand held, but although Leffler spent the next four months with her, that was the only time Millay ever dictated anything to her.

Eugen explained that they were in New York so that Edna could receive medical help for an injury to the nerves of her shoulder received in an automobile accident. Edna added that she had never been free of pain since. “While I was with her,” Leffler recalled, “Mr. Boissevain would administer shots of some kind several times a day to control the pain.”

During those four months she could recall Millay’s getting dressed and going out only four or five times. Once was to make the only recording of her reading her own poems for RCA Victor, for which she, strangely, asked Miss Leffler to make the selection. “There was no great ceremony about it. I think I said I hoped she would include a certain poem and she said, ‘Why don’t you select the poems you’d like me to record.’ And I did. She certainly wasn’t disinterested nor too ill to make the selection.” Once she accompanied Edna and Eugen to Margaret Cuthbert’s for cocktails. “That time Miss Millay simply put a coat over her robe, and we took a taxi around the corner to Margaret’s apartment.”