Authors: Nancy Milford
Vincent added:
Darling Artie and Gladdie,
Vincent can’t write a letter ’cause she’s so tired and sick, and got a headache, and got the curse, and you know, and all that—but she loves you both desperately, desperately, and longs to see you … & oh, Artie & Gladdy, we miss you so! Please, please love us always, & we’ll love you always, & then, anyway, there’ll always be that!—
Vincent
Not long after this they received a letter from Gladys telling them that they were going to Santa Fe for Arthur to recuperate. Eugen wrote his third letter that week trying to talk them out of going. As for Vincent, she was beside herself: “
I am speechless with despair. Just when we’re beginning to see the end of the tunnel. Oh, what’s the use. I suppose you’ll be gone a year.”
They would try to see them before they left, “but,” she wrote, “suppose we can’t—& suppose you can’t come here—it’s
Separation
, by God, that’s what & nothing less.”
Gene admitted in another letter that Vincent had been sick for the past three months, “
pretending not to be sick and would work and then have to stay in bed for days.” He was, he said, dreadfully unhappy about her. “What is the good of the house, the scenery, the beauty, the apples and pears and the ripening tomatoes if Vincie is feeling rotten? What’s the good of anything?”
By November they were in New York, where they had systematically begun to search for a doctor
who would cure Vincent. We went everywhere and saw every kind of specialist, from a pedicure to a sinecure (I hope you get my jeu-de-mots). Finally a specialist in Boston who had examined her sinuses sent us to N.Y.… She has been X-rayed all over and all kinds of tests taken in the most unromantic way, and now they know that she has been suffering from toximia, which has finally got her dreadfully weak and she was having now a nervous breakdown.
Bed rest and isolation were required. “Just a little of me, but not much. She has a nurse who does funny things to her at 8 a.m. and keeps it up until 4 p.m.”
He had to close Steepletop. “All the beautiful, expensive water put in with such heart-breaks, and so much money, is going to be cut off.… And then Eugin is going to walk the lonely streets of New York, with a lump in his throat. And Vince in bed, and Artie and Gladdy way down south and everything.———”
While his letter bounded gaily on for nineteen pages, there was this: “Gladdy, will you come and have some fun with Ugin in New York. I will ship my sick poet to yours. And then we’ll pick them up later. Whatyer-say?—Let’s park them for a while.” It was the first sign that Eugen was tiring of all the illness.
3
By the fall Millay had sent only two scenes of the last act of
The Casket of Glass
to Deems Taylor. The third scene remained in her handwritten draft. Having made that beginning in the midst of the pandemonium of construction at Steepletop, now she tossed it. She began fiddling with a new idea. By November, Eugen said she had it: “
Vincent now has a theme for her opera. She is crazy about it.
“My poet,” he continued, “is doing fairly well, but it is a slow business.” They were staying in New York briefly and then spent a week in Atlantic City, “waiting until she can come to a sanatorium in Stockbridge.… Then she stays two or three weeks and/or months, and then she must come to New York to see whether they want to take her tonsils out.”
Edna was really no better in Atlantic City. Eugen put her to bed, tucked her in with a hot-water bottle at her feet before a wide-open window:
She looks over the ocean, she drinks in soft mild salt sea air; her nostrils quiver with delight, like full blooded Arabian steed.—And twice a day Ugin pushes her in a chair on wheels, miles & miles along beautiful sea and pretty shops.—And we are indecently happy.
Eugen remained cheerful. It must have been hard to remain always the cheerful one. Only once in the drifts of letters he wrote, early in December, did he admit
God, but it will be wonderful when Vincent is on her feet again and can do what she likes, and may be, once we all four get roaringly, indecently, hilariously, indiscretely and indiscriminatingly drunk. I’m sick of medicines and doctors and carefulness. Well, that’s off my chest.
At last, instead of going to the sanitarium in Stockbridge, in December they returned to Steepletop. “
We saw the last dozen specialists last week, and it was agreed and decided by them that what we had done for Vincent so far was all wrong, and now she must have good air and exercise and we must go back to Steepletop.”
Eugen had been offered a job; “and,” he told Arthur,
as soon as Vincent is strong enough that I can leave her alone with Mother Millay, I intend to get my nephew here to look after things and go to New York and take that job. Jesus, how I’m longing to have her well.—We are beginning to be sick of it.
Then he added, “Oh, and I forgot to tell you that I love Vincent. No, I did tell you that some time ago, I believe.”
Cora was now with them. “Mother Millay and I do some splendid team-work and are giving Vincent a cure of rest, exercise, good food, fresh high dry air, and funny inside treatments,” Eugen wrote. “We have read all about her trouble in learned books and I think she is gaining weight and will soon be strong enough to get well.”
Now she had them both caring for her.
CHAPTER 22
K
athleen wasn’t up to snuff, either. She had begun to write fiction, and she was mired in a novel centered on her mother’s life. While Vincent had invited Cora to come to her, she didn’t want to separate her mother from Kathleen in Camden. Eugen added that it would be wonderful if
Kay could come with her, “
because the workmen will have left by that time, and you & I could look after the two little Millay kids.” But Kathleen didn’t come, and by the fall of 1925 Cora was living at Steepletop. That winter Cora hired Helen Nitkoski, the young daughter of the farmer who owned the caretaker’s house across the road from Steepletop.
Cora did the cooking and all the hard work, Helen recalled. “
All I did was get the vegetables ready and wash the dishes.… I came only in the morning, about nine or nine-thirty. She never cared what time I came. Edna, I never saw. Cora was the housekeeper. She was a hardworking woman. Edna just looked tired. She seemed fragile. Every single morning she’d go do her writing.
“Cora was very affectionate, very warm, but very lonely.… She talked a lot about her husband; he had been abusive, she said. Edna had decided not to have children. Cora told me that, and, yes, I think it disappointed her.”
Just before the turn of the year, Eugen told Arthur that Steepletop was as well equipped as a small country. It had to be; it was twelve degrees below zero, and they were snowbound.
We have 12 tons of coal in the cellar and 15 cords of wood in the shed, three fireplaces, two stoves, a furnace, a hot-water heater and plenty of matches. We have thousands of tins of everything, a huge bag of potatoes, 100 lbs. of sugar, flour, beans, peas, rice and.… Hanging from the rafters an enormous ham, bacon, pork, a brave brace of ducks, pounds and pounds of coffee, fresh fish frozen into a prehistoric fossil and resuscitated by Mother Millay into a glorious New England fish chowder.
They were, in fact, he said, living like “pigs in clover, i.e., a bit swinishly but with much good humored jostling and creature comforts.”
Even though Vincent had the curse and was drinking her customary “anticurse” gin, she’d tied her hair in pigtails with the red twine from their Christmas presents, and they were having good times again. They’d bought an organ for ten bucks at a country auction and sang Christmas hymns. “It was lovely,” Eugen said, “Mother Millay’s touching tremulous little voice and my funny voice, now on, now off the key, and Vincent’s pure, true lovely voice democratically mixed in the ether.”
But the best news came the next week, when he told “Dear Artie, darling Gladdie” that
Hallelujah! Vincent has powdered her nose; Vincent has put on naughtie, gauzy, gazie undies! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! She is ribbald, she’s flippant. She has a pretty, pretty dress on. Jehovah, the highest, Hallelujah! Vincent is a little bit better. Better, but not well. It is: bad, better, well. I have thrown the advice of the 12 plus x doctors to the winds, and am giving her a Eugen-ic cure (ha, ha, ha). And it is helping her—.… Vincent has washed her hair. Apple-jack is in my round and freckled belly and all’s well with the world.
Now, he said, if Vincent would hurry up and get well he could still take the job he’d been offered. He didn’t say what that job was, “
but I cannot leave just now.… I must make money, Vincent must finish her opera and get well.” Vincent added her own note: “This is me, Vince, in person, here to tell you that I eat my bran every day like a good nag.”
That January there was still no manuscript, and Deems couldn’t wait any longer. He wrote suggesting that they postpone the opera. On January 5, Eugen replied for Edna:
Vincent says: “Postpone, Hell,” and sends you enclosed synopsis of the opera by Deems Taylor “Aethelwold.”
It is going to be called Aethelwold, unless you can think of something better, which you probably cannot.… This is a very rough sketch and will be changed, very likely, considerably by both you and Edna, and she does not like to have unfinished work kicking around. That reminds me, will you please get hold of the Synopsis of “Snowwhite,” and return it to Edna, when you come here to finish the opera.
But Edna’s health was no better:
We cannot find out what is the trouble. It is not a nervous breakdown. She cannot use her eyes AT ALL now, and I must do all her reading and writing. Her headache has never stopped for a single minute, and is very often dreadfully bad. Do you know of a good doctor who will give some time to find out what is the matter, and make her well?
In precisely two weeks the first draft of Act I, thirteen pages ending with “(curtain, and about time),” arrived, typed out on yellow paper. Millay was now calling it
“THE KING’S HENCHMAN
or
THE WARLOCK.”
Taylor wired her immediately:
FIRST SCENE BEYOND MY FONDEST HOPES GO AHEAD WITH SCENE TWO MY CORRECTIONS COULD BE WRITTEN ON A DIME LETTER STOP LOVE AND CONGRATULATIONS FROM BOTH
On January 19, she sent him her “Song of the Harper,” which would open the opera. It was as alliterative and rolling as the Anglo-Saxon ballads it was based on, with heavily stressed two-beat lines that swung back and forth into each other, intensifying the beauty of the language with each swinging line:
Wild as the white waves
Rushing and roaring,
Heaving the wrack
High up the headland;
Hoarse as the howling
Winds of the winter.…
Eugen explained to Deems that “The Song of the Harper” was written entirely “
in the old Saxon style, and will give the atmosphere much better, being a story out of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of an incident, which took place in the year 755, much better than a story of Eadgar’s conquests.”
But despite her continuing illness, one of the effects of which was like “
looking at everything through a dotted veil,” Edna’s next note to Deems was confident:
I’m sending this with all its imperfections on its head.—It is much too long … & frightfully rough in places & a little silly in other places, ’n’ everything. But parts of it are pretty good. And it’s time you should see it. Let me know your reaction at once. Then I’ll spend a week following your suggestions, or strengthening myself & my book against them,—& then go on as you suggested, to the second scene.
Love,
Edna
Warlock
is an Anglo-Saxon word, which, in its original sense, meant “a traitor, a breaker of a pledge.”—You may think this is too ancient & hidden to use, since that meaning is quite obsolete, but it’s a grand title, & we could always explain it in the
Argument
.
E
.
But since Deems didn’t much like “The Warlock” as a title, she said, “I’m not at all sure that I do myself——then
The King’s Henchman
is the best title so far; so let’s call it that until we hit on something better, and see how it wears.”
She would not, however, give in about the Anglo-Saxon names of her characters, Eadgar and Aelfrida, who would not be modernized into Edgar
and Elfreda. “For who-the-hell am I writing this libretto anyway, Deems Taylor or George Gershwin?”
Then she gave him a gentle lecture:
Honest, old bean, nobody’s going to know who Eadgar was, anyway; and if you go and spell him without his remote and softening diphthong, people will only feel the more self-conscious about their ignorance. Audiences aren’t annoyed by diphthongs, Deems, they’re comforted by ’em; and thousands, nay, what do I say?—millions, of poor starved souls, whose lives are just one unvarnished vowel after another without even w and y, will lap up our pretty diphthongs with tears.
As for Aethelwold, if he had been born in Wales instead of East Anglia, and his name were Llwwghghftrw,—why, I would have changed his name all by myself long ago, I would have
felt
somehow you couldn’t sing that name.… As for your remarks about “Ethel,”—if you say that again I shall at once change the name of my lords Cymric, Gunner and Wulfred, to Ella, Lilla and Ida, also good Anglo-Saxon masculine names.
I’m terribly sorry, Deems. But I’ll be a sister to you.