Savage Beauty (57 page)

When Kathleen came to write her next collection of poetry,
The Hermit Thrush
, she devoted an entire section to Sacco and Vanzetti. “The Last Thanksgiving/Massachusetts 1927” closed the group:

…

And know that we have done our best
To still a Jealous God,
And paid Him well for roasted fowl
And fish upon the rod;
For did we not, a threemonths past, put souls beneath the sod—
Burn two live men and bury them
Deep down within their grave,
Because they would not thank the Lord for what He never gave?

Edna, who had been arrested in August, was one of six demonstrators who refused to pay the minimal fine in order to make a test case. Each pleaded not guilty, claiming they were exercising their lawful right of peaceful assembly. That November they were requested to appear in Boston for a trial. It was, ironically, at the same time as
The King’s Henchman
was playing there. Edna wrote her mother from Boston:

I don’t imagine anybody will go to jail.—It would have been marvelous publicity (not for
me!
—I mean for the Sacco Vanzetti defense people).… You have been a brick through this, Mother—just as you have been through other hard things I have put you through. Don’t think I forget anything of your loveliness to me, ever.

So much love to you, my darling,
Vincent.

But her letter had a troubling postscript. It was about the little cottage Kathleen and her husband, Howard, had bought for their mother in
Maine, and while it seemed to be about money, it was really about who was the more generous child.

November 16 …

P.P.S. Aren’t you protecting Kay’s feelings somewhat at my expense? It was no secret that they bought the cottage for you. Why should it be a secret that I am paying for repairs on it? I don’t care a bit, dear, but it seems to me the wrong way of looking at it.

In a very few summers like this one I shall have paid out as much for the cottage & its extras as Kay & Howard paid for the cottage itself, & yet all so piecemeal & unromantically that it will never show to the eye at all. I would never write like this, mother, if we didn’t understand each other so well, & if you didn’t know how constitutionally incapable I am of feeling any jealousy in such matters or of wishing to publish to the world the trivial little things I do for you who have done everything for me. But I think that Kay should be glad, if the posts of the cottage were unsafe, that one of us three girls has been able to have new ones put under it, and I don’t see why it should matter to her very much that I happened to be the one. Do just as you feel about it, however, Mumbles. But it seems to me that these little secrecies and evasions tend to make the atmosphere among us strained and unreal.

*Mrs. Florence Mixter was a friend of Arthur Ficke’s and a very wealthy woman. It was to her place in the Adirondacks that Arthur had arranged an invitation for Vincent in the summer of 1920.

PART SIX
LOVE AND DEATH

CHAPTER 24

M
illay’s letters to her mother dwindled throughout 1928—eight lines at the turn of the year asking Cora to come for a visit, nine lines written in March: “Sefe terribly busy—writing poetries—so not writing letters—even to Mumbles—Please forgive.” Cora, meanwhile, was busily writing her own collection of verses, which she called
Little Otis
. Poetry was becoming a family vocation.

Cora had begun to give poetry readings after Vincent’s Pulitzer. Her style of performance, which a Maine paper described as “such a naive way of reading … that her audience is convulsed with laughter,” was clearly modeled on Vincent’s. But Cora hadn’t published her poems. Now, with Kathleen’s help (as well as that of her publisher, W. W. Norton), she was about to. Vincent seemed to pay very little attention to her mother’s poems, maybe because she was anxious about her own writing. When she entered this note in her diary on March 31, she made the point clearly:

I seem to be driven by some force accumulated during these years when I have written no poems at all.… Stayed in bed as usual and worked until noon. Wrote an entire sonnet beginning “Life, were thy pains as are the pains of hell”; and the octave of a sonnet beginning “Be sure my coming was a sharp offense and trouble to my mother in her bed.”

—I have never worked so furiously fast before.

What she never acknowledged was that she may have felt competitive. By July, when Vincent would again ask her mother to forgive her for not writing to her: “awfully busy—We loved Little Otis—& aren’t the illustrations adorable?”—there were
three
Millay women publishing poetry. Only Norma held her tongue.

The spring turned out to be false, and although the roads were dangerously icy with frozen sleet, houseguests began to arrive on the evening train from New York: Elaine Ralli, who had gone to medical school after Vassar and had remained in touch with Vincent, came with Isabel Simpson, who was also a friend from Vassar, bringing caviar, marrons glacés, candied ginger, and cognac. Margot Schuyler and Eleanor Delamater brought roses to set out; and in the evening they all dressed up in fancy dress.

Eleanor went as the Black Pirate; Margot as a Chinese girl in my green brocade Chinese trousers and coat and arbutus stuck over her ears, looked charming; Gene as the Maharajah of Dyokyakarta, in a batik shirt, that is to say, a sarong and a little batik tied about his head and an impeccable dinner shirt and pearl studs and black tie, and white mess jacket; I as a general houri, in an Albanian under-dress, a Turkish burnous, a headdress from Benares and a pair of slippers from Agra and a brass girdle from Paris.—We sat around the fire and told stories just like the Decameron, thrilling stories and everybody got very thrillingly intoxicated. We did not go to bed until nearly daybreak.

Edna and Eugen were as easy and playful with women who had been her lovers as they were with Elinor Wylie and Bill Benét, who arrived with Floyd Dell. It was one of the fine qualities of their starry bohemia.

“We talked before the living-room fire until Gene and I got sleepy, and said it was bedtime, whereupon a great groan went up from the more urban and nocturnal among us. We left Elinor and Floyd downstairs to make a night of it, but they didn’t stay long.” In the morning Elinor read Edna’s new poems and told her, Edna entered proudly in her diary, that it “may be my best book.” Then she said something “that hurt Elinor’s feelings, but she forgave me. I didn’t mean to hurt her, and I felt dreadful.” Millay promised to write a poem to salve her distress, but she couldn’t manage to shape the poem quite the way she wanted it. She would hold on to that poem for eleven years before publishing it in a group of poems dedicated to Elinor Wylie after her death.

SONG FOR A LUTE

Seeing how I love you utterly,
And your disdain is my despair,
Alter this dulcet eye, forbear
To wear those looks that latterly
You wore, and won me wholly, wear
A brow more dark, and bitterly
Berate my dulness and my care,
Seeing how your smile is my despair,
Seeing how I love you utterly.

Seeing how I love you utterly,
And your distress is my despair,
Alter this brimming eye, nor wear
The trembling lip that latterly
under a more auspicious air
You wore, and thrust me through, forbear
To drop your head so bitterly
Into your hands, seeing how I dare
No tender touch upon your hair,
Knowing as I do how fitterly
You do reproach me than forbear,
Seeing how your tears are my despair,
Seeing how I love you utterly.

(1927)

In her diary, when Eugen wrote he’d put Floyd and Elinor on the train at Hudson, Vincent would later add, “I never saw her again.”

There was one last exchange of letters between them. Elinor had asked Vincent to send her “your two poems about me” that spring before she left for England. Millay had not responded, except to send her a fresh bouquet from Steepletop for her voyage. Then, on September 19, 1928, she wrote:

My darling Elinor:

I have just read in the
Saturday Review
of your dreadful accident.—There was a silly story in the papers early in the summer—I didn’t see it, but someone mentioned it—that you had tried to kill yourself, or some such rot; naturally I paid no more attention to that than I pay to the annual drivel of myself & Gene.—Now it seems that you really did fall & were frightfully hurt.—I can’t tell you how I feel, to realize that you have been ill & in pain for months, & I haven’t written you a word.—I should have answered your letter long ago, except that you asked for those two poems about you, & I wanted to finish them before I wrote again. I worked over them, particularly the one beginning, “Seeing how I love you utterly,” for ages, but have not yet been able to finish them to my satisfaction. Which means that they won’t be included in
The Buck in the Snow
.—But here are the lines about you in the other poem:

Yet look to her that enters now,—
A silver maiden leading a silver faun;
Her eyes are fixed on you with bright intent
Behold her, how she shines!—
Her brow is lit with all the jewels of the mines,
Her legs are lashed with the chilly grasses of the dawn.

 … My dear, I am so grieved to think of what happened to you this summer.—I can see you coming down the stairs with your beautiful nearsighted eyes—for whose sake long ago I made Myopia a goddess.

2

In September 1928,
The Buck in the Snow
, Millay’s first book of poetry since
Harp-Weaver
, was published. On her reading tour in Chicago, she was introduced by a young poet, George Dillon. His first book of poems,
Boy in the Wind
, had been published the year before, when he was twenty-one and an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Now the associate editor of
Poetry
magazine, he was tall and slim, with black wavy hair carefully brushed back from his face; he looked like a modern Apollo whose glossy curls had been cut short to tame them. He was young enough, fourteen years younger than Millay, to be scared stiff at the prospect of his introduction. His voice was soft, with a slight southern drawl. He was courtly, even a little formal, as he bent down to introduce himself to her before her reading. “I’m George Dillon,” he said. He remembered that she took his hand as if she were falling into him.

Later that evening, at a party in her honor, Dillon was asked to recite his poems. When someone asked Millay if she didn’t think his poems were good for one so young, she said, “They’re wonderful for anyone!” Then she slipped him a note inviting him to lunch the next day.

No sooner had they sat down for lunch than she handed him a sonnet scribbled in pencil on the back of a telegram—or so he would tell his cousin more than thirty years later, when she found the poem folded and refolded in the pocket of his jacket.

This beast that rends me in the sight of all,
This love, this longing, this oblivious thing,
That has me under as the last leaves fall,
Will glut, will sicken, will be gone by spring.
The wound will heal, the fever will abate,
The knotted hurt will slacken in the breast;
I shall forget before the flickers mate
Your look that is today my east and west.
Unscathed, however, from a claw so deep
Though I should love again I shall not go:
Along my body, waking while I sleep,
Sharp to the kiss, cold to the hand as snow,
The scar of this encounter like a sword
Will lie between me and my troubled lord.

They became lovers. His lips were so soft, it was like kissing the flesh of a girl’s nipple. Then she told Eugen.

Millay’s letters to George Dillon began in a torrent. She told him she loved him, that he must not, cannot, doubt her, that she would bear anything—even being without him—but not his doubt of her. She wrote him four letters in thirteen days; one was eight pages long.