Savage Beauty (58 page)

My darling,

You must never doubt me again. Truly, that is the one thing I could not bear. For indeed that is the only ugly thing that ever could be between us. I remember that just for an instant once I questioned something you said: I said, “Is that really true?”—and you said in such a strange way,—“You don’t believe me.”—And your face was just as if somebody had blown out the candle there.

They had, she said, the two most precious things two people could possess: “that we love each other; and that we have told the truth about it.” But she added something disquieting:

How easily could I cry with John Donne:

“I am two fools, I know:
for loving, and for saying so.”

I am two fools, my dear. And I am so very happy & proud that I neither fought against this love when once I had caught a glimpse of its grave-face, nor even for a moment thought to keep it from you.——I tell you now,—and you must never doubt it again—that I shall love you always, and that I shall never let you go out of my life.

That last phrase was almost a threat. Then:

What will come of all this none of us can tell, I think. And by that I mean,—none of us three. The situation is a strange one truly: I am devoted to my husband.* I love him more deeply than I could ever express, my feeling for him is in no way changed or diminished since I met you; but whenever I think of you, and I think of you all day and half the night, an enchanted sickness comes over me, as if I had drunk a witch’s philtre, and if I should never see you again, I believe that I should waste & dwindle in true fantastic style until I snapped in two.

That was her asterisk. At the bottom of her letter she told him that what she’d written “sounds so false—like something said on the stage—ugly, too. But I didn’t mean it so.” There was a glimpse of her high-handedness here, and no amount of warning him, or apologizing, could alter it. Unfortunately, none of Dillon’s letters from this period in their lives survives.

Let me add to the strangeness of it all, this: that you like and admire Eugen, and that he likes you extremely, is fond of you. What will come of all this I can’t see. But I feel sure I shall not lose you. Once I wrote, “After the feet of beauty fly my own.” This is the fact. I have never once turned my back on the beautiful thing. And surely the Goddess is not offended.—Surely I shall see you again, and kiss you again.—(Oh, my darling, I must be careful how I write such words!—It sets me to remembering you too keenly. What sweet agony it is to remember kissing you, to imagine the sound of your voice.)

I am writing this just having received your letter and the poem. That you should now be writing your lovely lines to me is almost too great happiness.

She told him she had one last reading in New York before she could return to Steepletop, and she was desperate to be home.

Longing to write you from there, to read your letters in that place.
 I must go now.
  Goodbye.
   I love you.

By then she had received his second letter. “Oh, God, what fun it is to be happy again, & to be writing romantic ardent nonsense to the only infant dragon-killer since Hercules wore didies!”

But she added a note that could hardly have been reassuring to Dillon: “And oh how proud I shall be in a month or so, stepping the streets of Paris, the only woman in the whole fashionable town with shoes & hat & handbag of genuine dragon-skin!” How could she have thought that he would share her delight when being in Paris clearly meant she would be without him? He must “not say the poem you sent is not lovely. For it is. It is I who
tell you. And I know a great deal about such matters. The last line of it nearly took my breath away forever—so beautiful—and about
me
.”

3

Her last reading was on December 17, 1928, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As she was dressing to go onstage, somebody mentioned casually that Elinor Wylie had just died. Stunned, Millay walked onto the enormous stage, stepped downstage, and said simply, “A greater poet than I has died, and with your permission I’d like to read her poems to you.” Mary Kennedy was in the audience and remembered Millay’s voice as low and steady, “and when she recited those poems, that was in the realm of poetry. Her realm. Her world.” Dressed in a long gown of heavy creamy silk, her hair a flame of red, she looked to a young man in the audience “
incandescent.”

Wylie’s funeral was the next day, December 18, in the apartment on West Ninth Street where she had lived with her husband, William Rose Benét. “
Young Phil Hitchborn, Elinor’s son by her first marriage, was present and reminded me of a red fox,” William’s sister, Laura Benét, remembered. The room was crowded to overflowing. The Van Dorens were there, and Mary and Padraic Colum. “Nancy Hoyt, Elinor’s younger sister, came late & went around kissing the men.” Mary Kennedy recalled, “
Carl Van Doren wept so that his wife Irita took him home, her arm tucked in his.” Elinor lay dressed in her silver Poiret gown. Edna Millay bent over the coffin and whispered a poem to her, the poem Elinor had written to her, and placed a sprig of laurel in Elinor’s hands.

Musa of the sea-blue eyes,
Silver nightingale, alone
In a little coffin lies:
A stone beneath a stone.

She, whose song we loved the best,
Is voiceless in a sudden night:
On your light limbs, O loveliest,
May the dust be light!

Bill Benét, distraught, wrote to her two days later, on December 20:

Dear Vincent:

I am moved to write you because I have thought a lot about your speaking “Musa of the sea-blue eyes,” and I have been sitting in her chair in her blessèd end of the apartment, drinking brandy & soda & reading “Trivial Breath” & “Black Armour” all through. And in the copy of “Black Armour” I picked out had been placed your original review of “Nets to Catch the Wind.” …

I was greatly privileged. She was a darling child & an archangel & a genius. I am just a man. I did love her. O that I could ever have said one impatient word to her!

She was darling to me. I wish to tell you this of her death. She died as she was sure to die, standing up, stricken down suddenly, like a hero killed in battle.

It was after a quiet Sunday night supper.… I asked her if she’d like a glass of water. “I’d love it.” I went into the kitchenette & turned on the tap, I heard her say, “Oh my God!” … I called casually, “What’s the matter?” Then I heard her get up and she said in a strange voice, “I don’t know!”

Those were the last words she spoke. He ran to her. “I lifted her in my arms and began almost babbling in terror and asking her to speak to me. But she was beyond speaking. She died as I lifted her, I know. Death was in her throat.” He thought he could feel her heart beating. He put a pillow under her head, ran to the phone to call a doctor, then held her until the doctor came. She had suffered a stroke.

“I wish I had been able to climb her heights with her,” he continued. “You geniuses are all the same. You strike us to awe—but how can we help loving you humanly?

“To see you two together was beautiful.… I guess it is one of the things that neither Eugen nor I will ever forget.” For she was, he said, a child of God, like Shelley.

“
Darling You,” she wrote to Dillon on Christmas Eve day, less than a week after her last letter, “it seems that I have so little time for writing you—for I can’t write you unless I am alone. But as for thinking of you, that I can do all day long, & nobody knows. Eugen, of course, does know sometimes, that I am thinking of you.”

Whether or not she was longing to see him, or to dream of him, she was busy planning her trip abroad; she and Eugen would sail on the nineteenth of January.

I feel that I must see you before I go.—I remember how I said to you that night you drove me to the theatre; “I am sailing for Europe in January”—how suddenly you turned & asked, “For how long?”—I knew then that I should never be able to forget you.

I shall try to see you before I go. What I mean is, I cannot bear it, & I will not have it, to go without looking at your face once more.—Oh, God, what would I not give to have you here at this moment.… I am glad that it does not get easier; I am glad that I love you truly, glad that I am in for it, glad that I have no choice, glad that I am up to my mouth in love with you, and that the sand is dragging at my feet.

In a postscript she asked him to “Forgive the fuss I’ve made.” All she wanted was to see him. Couldn’t he come to Steepletop for the weekend of January 4 to 7 “(or for the whole week, if Mr. Dillon can possibly wrangle it.)—In any case, you could leave Friday afternoon, arriving in Albany Saturday, where we would meet you, & if you had to leave so soon we would motor you to Albany Sunday evening. But try to make it longer. And
do come!
”

Mr. Dillon, however, had taken a job in an advertising agency in Chicago, and spending a weekend in New York was not such a simple matter. He must have reminded her of that, for on the twenty-ninth she wrote him an eight-page letter, sent special delivery:

And do you think for a moment
I
don’t know how it feels to be waiting for a letter seven days?—Big baby!—That’s just what you’ve put
me
through, and you don’t care a bit. It is true that my life is full, and full of wonder and excitement, that every day of my life is splendid. But don’t you know, or did I forget to tell you, how big a part of my life you are?—And you are just as far from me as I am from you. Oh, darling, yes you are!

This, she said, brought her to the business at hand, “and the gentleman from Kentucky will please stop crying.” He had to come to Steepletop.

I don’t want you to mess things up for yourself; I don’t want you [to] run the risk of losing your job. But I am sure that if you bring your ponderous brain to bear upon this matter, you can make him listen to reason.—Tell him it is a matter of life & death—which is the truth. (My darling, I am so gay and so matter-of-fact, because I have made up my mind that whatever happens, I am going to see you soon, and because that calls for engineering.)

Even Eugen agreed with her, she said: “Believe me, my very, very dear, that he is right. And he is so wonderful that if you know him you will surely love him. He loves you already, I think.”

My lovely thing, my darling, darling—don’t be apprehensive that I am trying in desperation to change your passionate beautiful love for me into something less—into simple friendship, I mean,—which is less. Someday, perhaps, we shall be friends—but I hope the day is far off when you feel only friendship for me.—I say that frankly enough, I think—I love you too much, in every possible way, to want to change in the slightest detail or degree what you feel for me.

If that disturbed him or seemed equivocal and compromising, she admitted, “You do not understand all this, perhaps.” She added, “It may seem contradictory to you. Please don’t try to understand, then. Just come. Believe in me. Trust me, I beg of you. Do what I ask.”

This was followed by a letter from Eugen:

Vincent is writing you, asking you to come to Steepletop. I, too, want you to come: I am going to make you love me and you must make me love you.—So put on a gay tie, and pack your evening clothes and a clean, clean shirt and come and we’ll drink wine together and laugh together.… Affectionately, Ugin.

When Edna read over what she’d written to George, she knew it was inadequate.

My darling, I shiver with terror lest in some way this letter confuse you too much.—I am afraid to send it. But I must send it. I can do no better than this just now. If it troubles you, burn it now, at once, forget all that it says, except that I love you & must see you. Believe in me, if you never believed in anything before,—and, oh, continue to love me.

She closed this extraordinary plea with an odd remark. She knew this was a desperate letter, but if he was “what I think you are, if you are what I love so dearly, you will understand, I think, why Eugen wanted to write you, too.” She ended playfully, explaining again and again to him what she, what
they
meant by their invitation:

Sweetheart,—what it means is: will you please come to visit me in my crazy, unfinished, half-finished, disorderly house, where there is a place for nothing, & nothing in its place, except the only important things in the world.—I want to show you the tiny pool we built, absurd, nothing at all, & the hut in the blueberry pasture where I wrote the
King’s Henchman
, I want to sit on the edge of your bed while you have your breakfast—I want to laugh with you, dress up in curtains, be incredibly silly, be incredibly happy, be like children, and I want to kiss you more than anything in the world.