Authors: Nancy Milford
The contrast between the tone of this letter, in which she sounds girlish, and the voice of her sonnets is striking. Yet we see her battling with herself in her sonnet, fighting and then giving way to her consuming desire to possess this man. In the poems she is often a queen or a goddess, at any rate immortal. Only in one, among her most achieved, does she appear as a girl, direct, proud, and generous:
Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Have given their loves, I give my love to you;
Not in a lover’s-knot, not in a ring
Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain:
Semper fidelis,—where a secret spring
Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain.
Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do:
“Look what I have!” and “These are all for you.”
She would write for him some of her most extraordinary sonnets. He could leave her, but having been loved by him, she was triumphant:
Women have loved before as I love now;
At least in lively chronicles of the past.—
Of Irish waters by a Cornish prow
Or Trojan waters by a Spartan mast
Much to their cost invaded—here and there,
Hunting the amorous line, skimming the rest,
I find some woman bearing as I bear
Love like a burning city in the breast.
I think however that of all alive
I only in such utter, ancient way
Do suffer love; in me alone survive
The blind, imperious passions of a day
When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread,
Heedless and wilful, took their knights to bed.
She is clear as glass. She’d struck this note for a long time in her work—certainly since
Figs
and
Second April
, and especially in her sonnets. There was always a powerfully expressed notion of her own destiny above the impermanence of mortal love, which is subject to change. Against it she places her vocation. Her theme is as ancient as the Greeks: the permanence of poetry and impermanence of love, subject to change, to loss, or to ending. She wrote with a spirited certainty that had stung Floyd Dell, as well as Edmund Wilson, taunting that they would one day wake “from dreams of me, that at your side / So many nights, a lover and a bride, / But stern in my soul’s chastity.” They who would “walk the world forever for my sake, / And in every chamber find me gone again!”
Against this extraordinary assurance were the playfulness and humor of her early work, through which she had also won her readers. But then there was always a hook, as there was in this sonnet, published first in 1920:
Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The colour and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.
Millay had been telling her audience, both men and women, as she was cannily aware, to
make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away.
Witty and provocative, these were smart, saucy poems, and they had secured her an enormous audience. But now, nearly forty, with her young lover uncertain, she found her voice at another pitch. When she thought she’d lost Dillon, it was her art, her vocation as a poet, in which she took refuge.
3
The fall found Llewelyn Powys and his unhappy wife, Alyse Gregory, living in the caretaker’s cottage across the road from Steepletop while Lulu worked on his novel
Impassioned Clay
. He would dedicate it to Eugen Boissevain, “under whose roof and in the presence of whose daring spirit this book was finished.” Eugen was as rare a person, Alyse wrote, as Edna:
Handsome, reckless, mettlesome as a stallion breathing the first morning air, he would laugh at himself, indeed laugh at everything, with a laugh that scattered melancholy as the wind scatters the petals of the fading poppy.… One day his house would be that of a citizen of the world, with a French butler to wait on the table and everything done with the greatest
bienséance
, and the next the servants would have as mysteriously disappeared as bees from a deserted hive, and he would be out in the kitchen washing the dishes and whistling a haunting Slavic melody, as light-hearted as a troubadour. He had the gift of the aristocrat and could adapt himself to all circumstances.… His blood was testy, adventurous, quixotic, and he faced life as an eagle faces its flight.
Lulu needed a respite, and so did Alyse, for their retreat was tainted by his fidgeting anticipation of letters from England and his vexing indecision: he was wildly in love with Gamel Woolsey, a young American woman living in Dorset—the “little poetess,” he and Alyse called her.
Alyse Gregory knew nothing of Millay’s affair with Dillon, but she knew firsthand how unusual her hosts’ domestic arrangement was.
She felt alien in their company at Steepletop, an awkward outsider, as she recorded one night in her diary:
She in her long purple velvet gown with the white fur, the Elizabethan sleeves—looking like a favoured princess surrounded by her courtiers—E. trembling with love and veneration for her.… and I too feeling love for her—yet feeling myself like an outcast beggar.
Edna, who had after all once been Lulu’s lover, was either unaware or too involved in her own troubles to breach the gap between them. Powys lavished his attention on her, avoiding the forlorn hurt that Alyse seemed to bask in:
We discussed the difference between French and English poetry, and Edna described the feelings of a young girl at a dance—in a dance hall—as if into each dance must be packed the panic and ecstasy of her last moment of life, for underneath was death. And Gene said the saxophone was the saddest of all instruments with its wild sinking death cry. Then he talked of the difference between passion and love—his passion for little girls and his love for mature women. He was very eloquent. I saw L. sitting as I had seen him so many times when I was the centre of his life, his hands a little relaxed on his knees, wearing his Cambridge coat that I had so many times put away in a box with camphor—that I had sent to the cleaners—that I had packed and unpacked in our rooms where we had been so happy—and now he seemed so intimate to me and yet so remote—as if were we to part there would be nothing of me left to him and when I heard him read the ballads—oh, how my heart was wrung—I could hardly keep back the tears so that when Eugen shouted at me as he did several times, speaking rudely in a way that always drives me down into myself he saw that I was grave and offended and came impulsively to kneel before me saying “Darling, I have not hurt you, have I? Now kiss me” which I did, but then he went on to make more violent drunken love to me, and L. was making love to E. on the couch kissing her cheeks and neck, but without passion, without desire, or warmth because all his love is elsewhere—and suddenly I felt as if I must run, escape.
Instead, Eugen dashed outside and fired off his gun, then ran back to raise a toast to Christ, the “darling boy,” while an offended Lulu chastised him. Alyse recorded one last wintry scene: swathed in blankets and furs against the cold, bundled into a sleigh, Lulu is lying beside Edna, while she and Eugen sing a German song. Altair, their German shepherd, races beside the two great steaming horses.
At the end of January, Eugen and Edna left for New York for a few days. Alyse observed that their trips had begun to have an “atmosphere of
riotous nights of drinking and loud talk—We came away feeling ravished and this is sad, for Edna has always underneath an ardor sensitive and untraduced.”
4
Throughout the fall and winter Millay worked on her book of sonnets. Harper made up a dummy and announced it as
Twice Required
, a title taken from a line in her fourteenth sonnet, “Since of no creature living the last breath is twice required.” That December she’d written her mother, telling her there would be “
about forty in all in my new book which will be published in March.” One month later, she told Norma there would be “
about forty-four.” But now she had definitely settled on a title:
Fatal Interview
. “This is a phrase from a poem by John Donne.…
‘By our first strange and fatall interview,
By all our desires which thereof did ensue.’
“I shall quote these two lines in the front of the book.”
That fall she began to publish in magazines the sonnets that would form the heart of
Fatal Interview
. Three were published in
Poetry
and five at Christmas in
Harper’s Magazine
, with another five the same month in
The Saturday Evening Post
. In the spring of 1931
The New Republic
would publish eight of her sonnets and
Harper’s Magazine
two. In other words, not only would there be excellent advance notice of her work by the time of the book’s publication in April 1931, but there was also a substantial market being created beyond her established audience.
Millay was being well served by her editor at Harper, Eugene Saxton. There had been, from the first, limited editions of her work: Mitchell Kennerley had printed fifteen copies of
Renascence
on Japan vellum in 1917, and even Frank Shay, after printing hundreds of copies of
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
with brightly colored paper wrappers, had done five copies on Japan vellum, which was about as limited as you could be. By 1924, with the printing of “Renascence” as a separate poem by the Goudys on William Morris’s Kelmscott handpress, Millay’s work had become a collector’s prize. Still, it was not until 1928, with Harper’s publication of
The Buck in the Snow
, that there were in effect three editions of a single book of hers: the regular trade edition, which sold for two dollars; a limited edition, of which five hundred would be autographed and numbered for fifteen dollars; and an ultralimited edition of thirty-six books on Japan vellum bound in boards for thirty dollars. Harper planned to call the limited
edition the “Steepletop Edition” after her home and asked her for a snapshot from which a small woodblock would be cut to represent it. She must have scotched that idea, but the fact remains that by 1928, when she was thirty-six, she was being published in trade, limited, and ultralimited editions.
That was the year when Eugene Saxton, who had been Elinor Wylie’s editor at George H. Doran Company, made Millay an appealing offer: that while their “
present agreement includes an option for two volumes” of which
Buck
was only the first, and since her project
Selected Poems for Young People
, as a reprint of an earlier work,
does not properly come under this option clause.… the royalty terms are definitely fixed under this agreement and our contract provides for a 15% royalty.… However, in view of the conversation we had in this office with Mr. Boissevain when he was here last, we are anxious to meet you in any way we can.
In other words, while explaining to her, as all publishers explain to all authors, that increasing her royalty might prevent the company from “spending an adequate sum for promotion,” he nevertheless agreed to a 20 percent royalty on all copies sold after 25,000. This was exceptional. Harper would also pay her that royalty on all copies of the limited edition. Saxton didn’t stop there. He was an inventive supporter of her work and suggested that if she was willing to write out in longhand five poems from
Buck
on her ordinary manuscript paper, “we could insert these sheets in copies 1 to 5 of the vellum edition and price them at approximately $100.00 to $150.00”; if she was willing to do that, the company would pay her one third of the price of the book. “Personally, I think it is possible we might be able to get as much as $250.00 for copy No. 1.” Then he sent her some new books that he thought she might like “with a glass of apple jack at the elbow.”
5
Shortly after New Year’s 1931, Cora began to gather notes for a possible book about the childhood and school days of her girls. As she exchanged her annual holiday letters with her sister Clem, unhappy memories began to stir between them. It was “
sufficiently wearing, emotionally,” she wrote to her sister, “making notes for a sketch that will be a sort of memoir.
It is remarkable, when I look back and have time to look back, how much my family was with me from the time I was married.… I am, I hope, looking at things clearly, and if I live, Henry is going to have justice done him. You will be glad of this, for you never had a better friend. It is no wonder if people said that he had married the whole family.
Her phrase “if I live” lingers uneasily in the mind. It was in this letter of January 22 that Cora first indicated her illness: “
I am much better if I were not, I could not be here alone this winter. I cannot type for very long a time without it’s making my back ache, so I can not do much extra writing now, and as my handwriting since I fell is worse than ever, I type most of my letters.”