Authors: Nancy Milford
She read in Washington, Louisville, Springfield, Pittsburgh, Evanston, Cedar Rapids, and Chicago, where she gave six lectures. In Minneapolis she gave two separate readings and, according to the local newspaper,
The World
, “on the last visit had to have the hall changed three times to accommodate the crowd.” She continued on to Omaha, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Columbus, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Rochester.
Millay’s reading tour was an immense popular success. She was described in headlines throughout the country as the “poet-girl” of American writing:
The distinguished young poet is slender, [has] bobbed hair and resembles more the shy little undergraduate than a successful poet and playwright. She is wistful, appealing, and in every way lives up to the image of the poet-girl of fiction.
The reporter described how she was dressed before he described how she read:
Last night she wore a simple blue dress, with a scarf of brilliant yellow silk around her shoulders. At times the reading of her verses was as quiet and simple as the blue dress, at times as flaming as the flame-colored scarf that clung about her.
It was as if the press couldn’t quite make up its mind how to describe a woman who was both accomplished and small.
During pauses in her readings, the poet chatted informally with her audience. In her reading, however, she withdrew herself entirely within the poem. She read expressively and enthusiastically, but with nothing of artificial rhetoricism, and the fine lyric quality of her verses was allowed to stand forth unobscured by posing and affectation.
Millay spoke publicly for the first time about marriage, calling it
one of the most civilized institutions in the world.… But … swimming is one of the most wonderful of sports, and yet there are always some people who cannot swim who insist on going into the water and getting drowned. Many people spoil marriage in a like manner. One should be sure she knows how to be married before rushing into it.
The press coverage continued with the same flattering, but troubling, attention. When, for example, Edna arrived in Rochester from Indianapolis, a wearying nine-hour trek, the reporter focused again on how she looked: “
Seated in one corner of the taxi … she looked so frail and appealing and so very little in her big fur coat and small cloche hat of Periwinkle blue with her auburn hair peeping out from under it, that one hesitated to ask too many questions.” He managed only one. “Recalling the universal interest displayed last summer when she was married to Eugen Boissevain, the question, ‘Are you terribly in love?’ was inevitable.”
She refused to answer, but “her smile,” the reporter waxed broadly, “made an answer superfluous.”
Millay was aware, from the start of the tour, that she was being characterized, and not only in the press, in a way that compromised her as a poet. For, as she wrote Eugen,
I got through my two readings yesterday well enough—the one in the afternoon in Evanston was a great success—a crowded house, large audience, etc.—But the one in the evening was in a private house in the next town—& God! how I hate reading in a private house!—A bunch of wealthy Jews, come together to see what I looked like, & bet with each other as to how many of my naughty poems I would dare read.
There were even, she remarked wryly, a few women who liked poems that were not from
Figs
, and there was a man who had driven her back to Chicago who “seemed to know all my books by heart.
—But on the whole—oh, Jesus!—If ever I felt like a prostitute it was last night.—I kept saying over & over to myself while I was reading to them, “Never mind—it’s a hundred & fifty dollars.”—I hope I shall never write a poem again that more than five people will like.
By February, writing to Eugen from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where “all your letters came, even the ones that forgot to say
Iowa
,” she was bone-tired, and her readings were flat-out performances.
Once a day my keepers come & drag me forth, “with all my silken flanks in garlands dressed,” to the miniature sacrifice.—That is all.… I give my reading still with charm & spirit, though with an ever-increasing nervousness if a door bangs or a train goes by.… Ido not even miss you very much. And I haven’t wanted you to be with me these last days.… I don’t want anybody, not even you, maybe least of all you, to see how foot-sore & dusty I am.
There was only one exception, and that was in Milwaukee, where Edna met the parents of Dorothy Coleman, the Vassar girl whose death in the 1918 flu epidemic had occasioned her tribute “Memorial to D.C.” In the summer of 1920, after Millay had published one of the five lyrics, “Prayer to Persephone,” in
Vanity Fair
, she had sent the entire group to Mr. and Mrs. Coleman. Certain phrases in the poems had distressed Mrs. Coleman, who had written to her:
My emotions are very mixed—I want to thank you—and I also want to reproach you. I thank you with all my heart for the loveliness of the poems.… But
why, why
spoil it all by those unkind,
untrue
lines in the second verse of “Dirge”!?! …
I learn from her diary that you had a bitter quarrel and said many unkind things to each other but you must remember how young she was—not even twenty-one when she was graduated.
You are endowed with brilliant talent and genius, she was just matter of fact perhaps with the gift of good common sense.
You are bound to misunderstand each other. I know that she was greatly attracted to you, that she was very happy in having gained your love but in the end she seems to have been a little frightened by your genius.
Then she asked her if she couldn’t either rewrite “Dirge” or leave it out completely.
A fragment in a notebook Millay kept in 1919 in New York set the scene for the “Memorial”—although it would never be published:
It might have been today, although
You died about a year ago,
Somebody dropped her voice & said,
“You knew that Dorothy is dead.”
It might have been this very day.
I lied & told her that I knew,
And wished that she would go away,
So I might sit & think of you.
Later in the same notebook is a draft of the poem that became the “Chorus”; here she called it “Epitaphia”:
Slip her pretty gowns
From their padded hangers,
She will dance no more
In her narrow shoes
Just a rainy day or two
In a windy tower;
That was all I had of you,—
…
I remember three or four
Things you said in spite,
And an ugly coat you wore,
Plaided black & white.
Just a rainy day or two
And a bitter word,—
Why do I remember you
As a singing bird?
It’s interesting here to watch the way she transformed what she knew about Coleman by linking it to herself. It was Millay who had an “ugly coat … Plaided black & white.” Even the image of the singing bird is one that would remain potent for her—she would use it again when she wrote of Elinor Wylie after Wylie’s death. So that by the time “Dirge” had been worked and reworked, the pronoun was “me” rather than “her”—which it would become in the published version. This is the unpublished draft version:
Boys & girls that held me dear
Those of you that held me dear
Do your weeping now:
All you loved of me lies here.
Brought to earth the insolent brow
Quenched the withering tongue.…
In the late fall of 1920, Millay wrote to Mrs. Coleman, promising to leave out “Dirge.” Mrs. Coleman said she was grateful, as she was afraid of “the lines being misunderstood. However if you cannot change them we will let the wonderful tenderness of the poem comfort us.” And it must have, for there is no evidence that Millay either left out “Dirge” or made any of the cuts Mrs. Coleman had suggested. What she did leave out of the
“Memorial” but not the book was “Elegy Before Death,” with its extraordinarily lovely closing quatrain:
Oh, there will pass with your great passing
Little of beauty not your own,—
Only the light from common water,
Only the grace from simple stone!
At the end of her tour Edna wrote Eugen that if only he were there in the chair beside her how “
totally
,
ABSOLUTELY
different everything would be.” There was only one thing that sustained her: “Oh, it will be so lovely when we go around the earth together!—I told some people yesterday that we are going to Java & China in March.—Why not?—For we are, we are!—Aren’t we?”
2
Just before their departure for the Far East, Eugen drew up a “Personal Account.” According to this ledger, he’d been taking regular loans from his company of $800 or $1,000, beginning early in 1923, just before he met Millay. His debits from the close of 1922 to March 1924, were $7,833.41, while his credits were $4,115.16. In other words, he was $3,718.25 in debt to himself.
The truth was, Eugen wasn’t much of a businessman. A favorite nephew of his, Tom de Booy, tried to give an idea of what he was like in the early 1920s. There was a strain in the Boissevain family, marked, some thought, by their Irish blood. “
The Boissevains are,” Tom said, “some of them, like rare flowers that bloom once and do not endure. And Eugen was not a good, a successful businessman. He would go off; he did not care deeply enough.”
Before they left, Vincent gave her mother a rough itinerary, with dates where and when she could be reached:
Hotel Imperial, Tokio, Japan—Cable till 20 May— write till April 30—
c/o Nederlandsch Indische Handels bank, Hongkong, Cable 15 June Write—May 20
c/o Nederlandsch Indische Handels bank, Singapore Cable 10 July Write June 10
c/o Mercantile Bank of India, Ltd. Colombo, Ceylon— Cable till 30 July write till July 1st—
After that c/o Morgan Harjeste Co. Place Vendôme—Paris
Still exhausted from her reading tour, Edna must have felt ill when they left because their first letters, written from San Francisco, assured both Arthur Ficke and Cora that she was feeling better. Eugen stressed just how well she was:
Dear Mother Millay,
… Your great little girl is much better. She stood the trip wonderfully well. Tomorrow we go aboard the Tayo Maru and will arrive in Yokohama the 5th of May. I’m sure the sea trip is going to make her a strong husky brute. I will send you a line from every port so that you will know how things are with your little daughter.
You were such a darling the day we left. I don’t know how we ever would have got packed without you. Edna had only her black suit case with her in the dressing room and EVERYTHING was there and easily to be got at. We both blessed you and sang your praises several times a day.—And bless you for fixing the socks for my huge Trilby hoofs.—You
are
a darling and with all your faults I love you.
Vincent added only three words at the bottom of his letter: “Love from
Sefe
.”
As they arrived in Honolulu, Eugen wrote one of what he called his “bulletins” to Cora about Vincent: “
She is doing fine. She had a lovely rest, and is feeling much stronger. There is a beautiful marble swimming pool on the top-deck. We swim in it twice a day.” Since the boat had only sixty passengers instead of the more than three hundred it was equipped to carry, it was like being on their own private yacht.
“The old lady is in wonderful trim,” he told Arthur and Gladys. “She has rested and rested and now is full of pep”; to which Edna added, “Hello, kids! Where will you be when you get this? I wonder. Paris, maybe.—I know six Japanese words.”
In Japan, Edna began to keep a journal of their trip. She told her mother that they planned to spend only a day or two in Tokyo and then travel by train to Nikko, “
then
on foot
from Nikko to Fujiyama, a pilgrimage to the sacred mountain.—(Do you remember Shillingstone to Romsey?) Love, darling, from Vincent.”
The following day, May 5, they docked at Yokohama and took the train to Tokyo, where they stayed at the huge Imperial Hotel, which looked like a frosted cake. Their room was expensive, and the service was deplorable: “
ring for it, clap for it, whistle for it, shout for it, then go get it.”
By May 9, they’d begun their walking trip, fourteen miles the first day, twelve the second to Kirifuri waterfall, where they climbed a steep hill to an unfrequented Buddhist shrine. There were “candles, tin swords, paper prayers, paper fringes hung at entrance. Picnic here, silence, butterflies.
Names of Europeans scratched in stone of temple—Charlie Brown, 1918, sort of thing.… image of cats just inside entrance in grey stone.”
On Sunday, May 11, they went with their guide on an eighteen-mile walk to Ashio and found a Japanese inn with matting on the floor, a hibachi with charcoal fire, a tea tray, two cushions, and a bowl of azaleas. They had supper on the floor before a table that was, she noted, five inches high; they dined on salmon and poached eggs shirred with rice and soy and an “awful stinking root called
daiko
. Now I know what it is that gives Japanese villages their peculiar stench.”