Authors: Nancy Milford
CHAPTER 26
Darlings, I knew that you were sorry. But there’s nothing to say. We had a grand time. But it’s a changed world. The presence of that absence is everywhere.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay to Llewelyn Powys, April 20, 1931
T
hey fled to New York, where they stayed at the St. Regis Hotel just off Fifth Avenue and tried, Edna said, to drink themselves into oblivion. It didn’t work. She was dogged by reporters. “
If you love the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay you needn’t fear disillusionment in seeing her in person,” one of them wrote in the
World-Telegram
. “Imagine a child with a small, pleasant body, hair still shading off into shining bronze, the levelest gray-green eyes you ever met, with a child’s quickness and ready smile—above all the intense quickness of a child—and you begin to picture that elusive person who is America’s first poetess, Edna Millay.”
“This elf,” he called her, who boasted of staying out all night pub crawling. She grinned up at him. “Don’t you like that word? I wish I had invented it.” She was in New York, he said, to see about her next collection of poems,
Fatal Interview
. When he asked her to tell him about it, she said, “it is very intense and very passionate.… Personal? Of course, everything one writes is personal. But if it were actual reporting of my own experience, I certainly shouldn’t admit it.”
The reporter said she had come a long way from the Vassar girl “who came down here in wartime and began battling gayly with poverty.” Mil-lay, however, insisted, “I am just the same person.”
Another reporter found that unlikely. She had instead “progressed straight up Fifth Avenue from the dimmer purlieus of Washington Square to occupy, as she was doing today, a suite in the St. Regis.” While there were still darkened basement bistros in Greenwich Village, such as the Vagabondia and the Pink Kitten, Millay said she didn’t like the Village anymore; she didn’t even like New York. “It’s a swell and exciting place to come to once in a while, from her mountain farm in the Berkshires. She buys the latest gowns and frocks and shoes and hats, then retires to her mountain fastness and puts them in closets.” He went on to describe her dining alone with Eugen in evening dress in their farmhouse—or working during the day in her garden in a tweed shirt and sweater. Puzzled by her contrary images he said, “At times she would seem a huge, husky woman; most of the time, however, as ethereal and wistful as Lillian Gish,” the most famous film star of the era.
She said she had worked for two years on the fifty-two sonnets that made up
Fatal Interview:
“All over the rambling farmhouse she scatters notebooks—‘Composition, 10 Cents.’ … One is always beside her bed, equipped with sharp pencils. She scrawls her verses, and frequently has difficulty transcribing them after they are cold.” But primarily this reporter was impressed with her self-possession and poise.
She spoke carefully. She smoked Egyptian cigarettes. She thought the best poet in America was Robinson Jeffers. Overhearing her, Eugen shot back playfully that he thought the best meals in New York were to be had at the speakeasies in the fifties. They were a pair, an enviable couple. One interview, which went out on the NEA News Service to twenty-nine papers throughout the country, was titled “Here’s a Charming Double Interview in Which Edna St. Vincent Millay, Famed American Poetess, Sees Herself as Her Husband Sees Her”:
She was a sunny sight, curled up on the davenport of their hotel suite, with the afternoon light falling upon her. Healthy glowing cheeks of a child, tawny hair with a bronze gleam to it, green eyes merry … her small self intensely enthusiastic—like a child.
There were flowers spilling abundantly everywhere in the suite, “selected and placed by that cultivated, charming Dutch gentleman, her husband, a man who wears tweeds beautifully, is a perfect host and who anticipates her every wish.” Eugen intruded into the interview only when Millay left the room, to say, “She didn’t tell you what a marvelous gardener
she is.… Vincent has a ‘growing hand,’ everything she touches grows.” The hardest thing he did on her behalf was “teaching new maids not to bother her when she is just sitting still, curled up on a chair, without pencil or paper or even a book. She works that way. She never puts down a single word until a poem is complete.”
To talk about briefing a maid in the midst of the Depression was, if not a blunder, at least insensitive. In all the interviews that spring, there was only one in which Edna mentioned her mother’s death. The interview began with her story of how she had become a poet: “ ‘Mother gave me poetry,’ she says, with a poignant wistfulness which somehow catches at one’s throat. ‘She wrote, too, at night after she had tucked us into bed. She published only a few of her writings—she wrote from the love of writing.’ ”
It was only then that she said that her mother had just died. “I’ve been numb … like a person under an anesthetic. Now I seem to be emerging from under the anesthetic and I ache terribly. I can’t seem to realize it all—I keep saying ‘I’ll ask mother’—she always had the answer for everything.”
2
At the end of March, just over six weeks after her mother’s death, she at last heard from George Dillon. She wrote back at once:
I had felt sure that you would write me, when you heard about it. But so many days went by, & still you didn’t write. I was pretty unhappy about that, on top of everything else.
Probably you don’t know that Ugin’s mother died just a week before mine did.—We’re pretty sunk.—Three weeks ago we ran away from Steepletop and came here.… And we’ve been so dazed with liquor ever since.… I’m not sober yet, and I don’t intend to be.
I wish to God you’d write me once in a while, tell me how you are, tell me what you’re doing,—or if you don’t want to tell me that, tell me whether or not it’s raining in Chicago, tell me anything, only just keep on talking to me.—It was pretty hideous thinking I had lost you too, just when I needed so seriously everything in life I had that was beautiful, to remind me that life could be borne at all. Very likely I was right to think I’d lost you, but don’t let it go into effect just yet.…
Please tell me how you are, and how you spend your time. Tell me what I don’t want to hear. It’s all right. I can stand anything. I really can. Except your silence.
George must have answered her letter immediately, for six days later she wrote again: “
My darling, your letter healed so many wounds. Even
though I’m still in the dark as to your strange repudiation of me, I’m comforted. You say that you do still love me, that you did want to see me. I don’t care about the rest.”
She asked to see everything he was writing and said she was sending him her book. She had wanted to send him “one of the beautiful vellum ones, but it would only embarrass you.—I called it ‘Fatal Interview,’—did you know?—It’s from a poem of Donne. Long ago I decided that my first book after the Buck in the Snow should be dedicated to Elinor Wylie. So I have dedicated this book to her.” “When she came to write “goodbye” to him, she smudged it: “(I can’t seem to write that word when I am writing to you).… Please write to me, and send me your poems.—My darling, I love you so much.”
There was one sonnet she hadn’t sent him, Sonnet XLVII, which falls near the close of the sequence:
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that’s permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish—and men do—
I shall have only good to say of you.
She acknowledged that she’d lost him, but that admission was leavened by her assertion that it had been with “my full consent”—even “In my own way.” Though apparently revealing, the poem remains covert; the poet has managed the neat trick of having the last word. She is both wounded and defiant. Even in her hurt, her anguish, she will survive both her anguish and the loss of him. And that, of course, is precisely what she did.
3
Fatal Interview
was published on April 15, 1931. Its sales in the first ten weeks after publication were an astonishing 33,000 copies. Even before
publication the demand for the first edition was so substantial that Harper appointed a three-man committee to draw lots to decide fairly who should get the limited copies. The fifty-dollar limited edition, autographed by Millay, was three times oversubscribed. At auction, a copy of the fifty-dollar edition of
Buck
went for two hundred dollars. According to one newspaper report, there was no living American author whose first editions enjoyed such esteem with collectors. In the heart of the Depression, Mil-lay’s sonnet sequence was selling as if it held secrets. And while there had always been a certain curiosity about Millay’s life, now, after the publication of
Fatal Interview
, everybody wanted to know more about its author.
One reporter drove to Austerlitz to find out.
A book of poems by a modern writer which sells a thousand copies is rated as a success by publishers. Several of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s books have sold more than fifty thousand copies.… Millay … throughout the years will be a bookseller’s staple, like Shakespeare and ink and two-cent stamps.
In the past, he continued, every young man in the English-speaking world had quoted Rudyard Kipling’s line that “a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke”; now young women had taken to heart Mil-lay’s quatrain as signal of their freedom in this new age:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
In article after article she appeared in a consistent role. She might be photographed wearing a tailored suit with the inevitable soft collar and necktie of a gent, but she was always—whether described by a male or female reporter—a lovely, fragile child.
It is safe to say that by the late summer, with 50,000 copies of
Fatal Interview
in print and
The King’s Henchman’s
becoming the most successful American opera yet mounted by the Metropolitan Opera, Edna Millay had become not simply a literary figure but a celebrity. If Scott Fitzgerald was far more than the prose chronicler of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was his contemporary, told their generation what to say about how they felt, and she said it with wit, style, and passion. She gave the Jazz Age its lyric voice.
While Millay’s poems were selling, and while she was providing the press with copy, there was something disturbing about the public vision of
her that the press promoted. How would she keep from becoming that fragile child whom they adored?
Elizabeth Breuer, who’d written about Cora the spring before, wanted to do a companion piece about Vincent. She was a close friend of Norma’s from New City (where as the wife of the painter Henry Varnum Poor she was called Bessie Poor), and Millay felt ambivalent about the interview. She wanted to do Norma a good turn, but clearly the inquisitiveness of any reporter, no matter how good a friend, was on her mind when she wrote to Norma:
Say, listen, Unconscious! … If you want me to give any interview to Bessie Poor, you bring Bessie Poor up here. If you’re going to get something out of it, I’ll do it, and I’ll see that she gets some exclusive material … of course I can’t give out any dope from what you call “Ugin’s angle.” I can’t say, “Yes, I wrote these sonnets to my husband,” or, “No, I wrote these sonnets to my butler,” or, “Must I be faithful just because I’m married” or “Must I be unfaithful just because I’m married?”
When Breuer arrived with Norma one afternoon, there were several guests already at Steepletop. Max Eastman with his Russian wife, the painter Eliena Krylenka, the poets Theodore Maynard and Harold Lewis Cook, as well as their neighbor Bill Brann, a stockbroker and breeder of a stable of racehorses, were all sitting in the living room gathered about a large round of Stilton. Central to the gathering was not Edna but Eugen:
… he was dominating the whole roomful of people by the beauty of his sun-browned body, clad only in a pair of khaki shorts; by the vigor and gayety of his mind and person, by his quick jests and quiet courtesy. His keen blue eyes darted piercing, laughing glances; his whole body quivered with some jest. He is like Douglas Fairbanks in physical bearing and quickness, and has the patrician bearing and cast of features of a Dutch aristocrat, being a junior member of a family of international bankers of Holland.
Soon there were sounds of a high, sweet voice in the air. The door opened, and we arose to the advance of a little figure with a delicate face and red-gold, curly hair, dressed in white—Edna, or “Vincent” Millay as her friends and family call her. She perched up on a lounge with the quick, sudden movement of a bird, and was off in a gay recital with her tall neighbor, which had to do with horses and dogs and other country interests.
This was a pretty girl talking.
“She might be anywhere between twenty and thirty-five years old,” Breuer wrote, whereas she was six months shy of forty. Millay was again made into a child, a gifted, fragile, birdlike, faery child: