Savage Beauty (59 page)

Now, would he come? Would he let her hear from him quickly? “I shall not go abroad until I have seen you.”

George Dillon did not come to Steepletop that winter. Hurt and disappointed, Edna wrote to him the day before her thirty-seventh birthday, as she prepared to leave for Europe. It was not a letter guaranteed to reassure Dillon, who was overwhelmed by Edna’s demands and uneasy about Eugen’s.

My darling, forget what I wrote about feeling further away from you.… Perhaps I wanted to hurt you.… I love you terribly. Never believe that I don’t, no matter what nonsense I write. Sometimes I long so to see you that I want to hurt you, I think, just because you’re not there.

On March 11, 1929, Edna and Eugen boarded the
Rotterdam
for France. She wired Dillon four words: “Goodbye, goodbye, my darling.” By the time she returned in May, they would not have seen each other for five months.

CHAPTER 25

E
dna and Eugen returned from France in May. When Edna heard nothing from her mother after Cora’s birthday that June, she began to fret. “
I hope that the reason why you haven’t written for so long is that you are busy and having a good time, not that you’re not feeling well,” she wrote. Eugen asked if they could come to Camden for a visit at the end of the summer. Vincent added:

I have three little mountain laurels for you, tiny, but in perfect blossom.… The best time to transplant them, I now learn, is when they are in full bloom, like the azaleas, so I am having them taken up now and potted in buckets. They are perfectly sweet and you will love them. Next year they will blossom like anything.

At the end of August, they drove to Camden and set the laurel trees out. Cora gave her daughter a few sweetmary plants from her garden to plant at Steepletop. “
She gave me some little fir-trees, too,” Edna wrote to Kathleen, “tiny ones, which she dug up with her hands on Sherman’s Point the day before, when we drove her out there. She stood by the car as Ugin
packed the plants in the back; there was some pennyroyal, too. And she stood in the yard as we drove away.”

2

That fall, a full year after their first encounter, Edna received a letter from George Dillon telling her he might move to California. She wrote back frantically:

Darling, for God’s sake don’t go.… I shall die if you do.—It’s been almost more than I could bear to have you as far away as Chicago, but I always felt that if I really couldn’t stand it, by tomorrow I could be with you,—But California—oh, please don’t! I shall die if you do. I mean it. They’ll call it something else, but it will be that.

There was something plaintive and girlish in her letter; even her handwriting shrank and tightened.

Do you ever want to see me? Does it ever bother you at all, not seeing me? … “What does one do about it?—I forget, if I ever knew. It seems to me that I never knew.—No, I don’t think I could just now stand the excitement of a love-letter from you—but it would be worth the risk. I wish awfully you’d conduct the experiment upon me.———

Goodbye, darling.… I love you. Are you glad?—Or do you wish I’d stop?—Anyway, I’m glad.

Then, on November 16, just over two weeks after this letter, she wrote him angrily from Steepletop, this time by special delivery:

Saturday afternoon

Ugin & I are going to New York tomorrow. Will you please call me up at the Vanderbilt tomorrow Sunday evening at any time—otherwise Monday at about 6 o’clock—and reverse the charges?—I insist that you call me up, & I insist that you reverse the charges. And I want you to be prepared to tell me whether or not you will come to Steepletop at once. If not, Ugin & I shall leave for Chicago at midnight Monday.… We shall go to the Blackstone.—You cannot keep me from coming to Chicago, if you won’t come here. If you think I care at all what the whole world says about me, in comparison to being absent from you at this time, you have never really loved either me or anybody else. Let them spy, let them follow, let them listen on the telephone, let every loose-tongued gossip in the country know that I love you & that I came to Chicago to see you.—I don’t mean that I shall do anything at all indiscreet or reckless—I only mean that there are times when all such considerations become a lot of rot.—In any case, either you come here, & at once, or I come to Chicago. You have nearly killed me. I won’t stand it any longer. I love you and I’m going to see you.

It is impossible to know exactly what prompted this outburst, but her will is behind every phrase. She is offended, and she is determined. Four days later, having heard from him, she softened:

Thursday

Darling, I’m sending you the enclosed envelope just for fun—to show you that we were about to leave for the station when you called—the time being an hour later here.——

Poor child, how I have harassed you. I will never do it again. I should not have done it now but that I was so sure you were in trouble & was very worried. But in any case, I’ll never do it again.—So breathe freely.

He had said he would come to Steepletop, perhaps even settle in New York. She assured him that if he did, she could help him find work. “Let me know what your plans are, as soon as you have time.… I wonder will you really come?”

From the beginning of their affair they had been separated, not only by the physical distance between Chicago and Steepletop but by her marriage, by her far greater fame as a poet—and, inevitably, by the emotional confusion and even distrust those differences were bound to engender. Dillon could be sulky, angry, jealous, and despairing. In an undated letter he gives us a clue as to how he felt when they were not on good terms with each other, when he had spoiled the little time they had together:

Darling,

I don’t know what kind of depressed, drunken, insane letter I wrote you, but I can well imagine, because I haven’t heard from you—I haven’t heard from you at all.

Forgive me for being crude and ungrateful. It’s just that I have to pay for being with you by being plunged in a worse despair every time you go away. The rest of my life seems so useless, then, that I can’t bear the thought of picking it up again. So I hide away a while, and drink and read, and take long walks, and sleep. Then I’m all right again.

I’m all right now. I remember only the happiness we’ve had, and I know the rest isn’t important. If you still love me, I’ll be glad as anyone to be alive.

For all the torment they inflicted on each other, it was a remarkably productive relationship for both of them. She sent him five sonnets in one letter, twenty-six in the next. She hadn’t had a comparable period of such
intense productivity since her early days in New York. The longer they were apart, the more the poems seemed to come. She could even be playful to him about it:

These are samples. Enclosed is an order-blank, etc. Indicate the type you prefer and the number of sonnets on that subject which you wish me to supply. At the rate at which I am working now, I shall easily be able to meet the most wholesale demand. Oh, God, did I say “Easily”? I have never worked so hard.

She said they weren’t perfect, but if she waited until they were,

you will very likely not see them for at least a year longer, and it is … almost as if we were not so far apart, as if we were living in the same city. Except when we
are
living in the same city there never seems to be much time for reading and discussing each other’s poetry, there are so many other things to be done which are so intrinsically and immediately worthwhile, such as kissing each other. If people would only just let me kiss you for as long as I want to just once, it might be different; but after two or three days somebody always comes in and interrupts.

She hoped he liked the sonnets. She hoped he’d tell her he did, but even if he didn’t, she’d send him some more. “Yes, I’m as big as that.” She was that confident. Then she wrote quickly again: “Darling, I’m sending you with this some more sonnets.… There’s mountains of work to be done on them still.” If they were only together, she’d talk them over with him because “Some of them were written when I hadn’t heard from you for a long time, and thought maybe you didn’t love me anymore.” She decided to send him two sonnets “which I had not intended to send with the others. These two were written to Ugin. They are the two beginning ‘Believe, if ever the bridges of this town,’ and ‘If in the years to come you should recall.’ They are rather nice, and I’d like you to see them.”

Why did she want him to have these particular poems and to know they were written to Eugen? What do they contain that she wants him to know? The first of the two sonnets seems to be an assurance to Eugen that if their marriage, which she describes within a military metaphor as a sort of fortress whose “bridges” and “towers” are built “without fault or stain,” should “be taken,” she would never again seek any other refuge: “No mortal roof shall shelter me again.”

Believe, if ever the bridges of this town,
Whose towers were builded without fault or stain,
Be taken, and its battlements go down,
No mortal roof shall shelter me again;
I shall not prop a branch against a bough
To hide me from the whipping east or north,
Nor tease to flame a heap of sticks, who now
Am warmed by all the wonders of the earth.
Do you take ship unto some happier shore
In such event, and have no thought for me,
I shall remain;—to share the ruinous floor
With roofs that once were seen far out at sea;
To cheer a mouldering army on the march …
And beg from spectres by a broken arch.

The second sonnet to Eugen, which would eventually become the penultimate poem in the cycle (the final poem is to George), is equally disturbing:

If in the years to come you should recall,
When faint at heart or fallen on hungry days,
Or full of griefs and little if at all
From them distracted by delights or praise;
When failing powers or good opinion lost
Have bowed your neck, should you recall to mind
How of all men I honoured you the most,
Holding you noblest among mortal-kind;
Might not my love—although the curving blade
From whose wide mowing none may hope to hide,
Me long ago below the frosts had laid—
Restore you somewhat to your former pride?
Indeed I think this memory even then
Must raise you high among the run of men.

They were strange poems to send to Dillon. They would certainly serve to alert him to the permanence of her loyalty to her husband. But her letter continued, and maybe this was her point:

Soon, I’ll write you another letter to keep, a happier one, my dear, the one you want. In the meantime let me assure you that I don’t in the least intend to give you up,—in fact, I dare you, I double-dare you, to escape from me. No matter what I may say, no matter how big and brave I may be on occasion, the black truth is, my lovely one, that I haven’t the faintest intent of letting you go. Vide sonnet beginning “Strange thing that I, by nature nothing prone.”

The poem is almost an extension of her love letter:

Strange thing that I, by nature nothing prone
To fret the summer blossom on its stem,
Who know the hidden nest, but leave alone
The magic eggs, the bird that cuddles them,
Should have no peace till your bewildered heart
Hung fluttering at the window of my breast,
Till I had ravished to my bitter smart
Your kiss from the stern moment, could not rest.
“Swift wing, sweet blossom, live again in air!
Depart, poor flower; poor feathers, you are free!”
Thus do I cry, being teased by shame and care
That beauty should be brought to terms by me;
Yet shamed the more that in my heart I know,
Cry as I may, I could not let you go.

“I’ve done acres of them, sweetheart. About twenty-six, I think. Isn’t that terrifying? It is four weeks and a night and half a morning since I kissed you goodbye. I shall never kiss you goodbye again. There should never be hello-kisses or goodbye-kisses,—just kisses. Anyhow, it is four weeks and a night and half a morning and a minute, since you went away from me. That’s long enough, I think, indeed I think it’s more than long enough. I want to see you. If I don’t see you soon, I shall lie on the floor and kick and howl till something is done about it.”