Savage Beauty (63 page)

Other poets are writing in America and in Europe today, but we have to go all the way back to Byron to find one who has been, like her, so much a matter of personal excitement to her generation. Like Byron, she speaks for the young, the rebellious.

This was the
girl poet
, a treasured, pure, tiny beauty, not the swashbuckling, burly, perverse Lord Byron who had an army of creditors and lovers and who swam the Grand Canal in Venice at night holding a torch aloft with one hand. The fact that in publicity photographs taken by Berenice Abbott after her mother’s death Edna had been dressed like a young man went unmentioned. To what, the reporter asked her, did she attribute her enormous popularity?

I think people like my poetry because it is mostly about things that anybody has experienced. Most of it is fairly simple for a person to understand. If you write about people who are in love, and about death, and nature, and the sea, thousands … understand … my poetry because it’s about emotions, about experiences common to everybody.

Then, too, my images are homely, right out of the earth. I never went to a big city, you know, until I was twenty years old, so that I have an age-old simplicity in the figures I employ. I use the same figures that my great-grandmother might have used, and you can just sit in your farmhouse, or your home anywhere, and read it and know you’ve felt the same thing yourself.

People could and did memorize her poetry because “it is written in old-fashioned forms, in the very musical tradition that people have always known and loved.” But how, the reporter continued, did she feel as a woman about the laurels hung on her head? Were they heavy? A burden? Millay looked stern for a moment.

A woman poet is not at all different from a man poet. She should write from the same kind of life, from the same kind of experience, and should be judged by the same standards. If she is unable to do this, then she should stop writing. A poet is a poet. The critics should estimate her work as such. Instead they compare her poetry with that of men poets, then say condescendingly, “This is pretty good for a woman poet.” What I want to know is, is it a good or a bad sonnet. That is all as a poet that I am interested in.

“ ‘What you produce, what you create must stand on its own feet,’ she continued, ‘regardless of your sex. We are supposed to have won all the battles for our rights to be individuals, but in the arts women are still put in a class by themselves, and I resent it, as I have always rebelled against discriminations or limitations of a woman’s experience on account of her sex.’ ”

Breuer asked Edna how she managed her household, admitting late that she “was asking for myself and for all women who have children and husbands and a house to take their first energy.” Millay seemed startled.

“I have nothing to do with my household,” she answered quickly. “Eugen does all that kind of thing. He engages the servants. He shows them around. He tells them everything. I don’t interfere with his ordering of the house. If there is anything I don’t like, I tell him. I have no time for it. I want to go into my dining room as if it were a restaurant, and say, ‘What a charming dinner!’ ”

She was quite clear about what form her insulation from the world of domesticity should take:

It’s this unconcern with my household that protects me from the things that eat up a woman’s time and interest. Eugen and I live like two bachelors. He, being the one who can throw household things off more easily than I, shoulders that end of our existence, and I have my work to do, which is the writing of poetry.

But I haven’t made the decision to ignore my household as easily as it sounds. I care an awful lot that things be done right. Yet I don’t let my concern break in and ruin my concentration and my temper.…

I work all the time. I always have notebook and pencil on the table at my bedside. I may wake up in the middle of the night with something I want to put down. Sometimes I sit up and write in bed furiously until dawn. And I think of my work all the time even when I am in the garden or talking to people. That is why I get so tired. When I finished “Fatal Interview” I was exhausted. I was never away from the sonnets in my mind. Night and day I concentrated on them for the last year and a half.… When you write a poem something begins to be a part of your thought and your life, and you become more and more conscious of it. It forms as if conjured out of steam. After I’ve written off the first rush of what one may call inspiration, then I really begin working on it. I begin by picking it to pieces and say, “This is awful.” “That’s not so bad.” The rest, the final and inevitable shaping of the poem, is just hard work.

In the middle of their discussion about writing, the gong sounded for dinner. Soon the bright white dining room was festive with good talk and
delicious food. Two of Charlie Ellis’s paintings were hung on the walls, and the mahogany sideboard and table were laid with fine linens and china. “What gayety at the table!” Breuer wrote admiringly. “A philosopher and a social revolutionist, a painter, a singer, a poet, a writer, and a country gentleman, all engaged in sipping honey from life.”

But Breuer made one observation in this interview that was unsettling: after dinner Millay quietly disappeared. “Eugen came down and joined us, saying he had just put Vincent to bed. She was tired out after such an exciting day of visitors. He had constantly to guard her against fatigue. She gave herself so intensely to every person.”

Here was a woman nearly forty, a successful, productive author who now earned the money upon which Steepletop was run, being put to bed like a child. Eugen took care of her so that she might find that silence within which writers make their work. But there is a difference between that kind of usefulness, that kind of service and sheltering, and putting her to bed after supper. Listen to how he described himself to Breuer. He had been talking to her of his delight with his pheasant preserve, of their young English setter, Ghost Writer, whom he was trying to train, and of Altair, their German shepherd. He talked about their cattle and their pet black pig, Cochy. He explained that he had four men working the farm.

I was astonished at his choice of occupation, and he countered, “Why should it surprise you? Vincent and I live like two men, bachelors, who choose their different jobs. I gave up my work in town because it doesn’t interest me as much as this job, if I can smooth out things for her.

“It is more worthwhile for her to be writing, even if she writes only one sonnet in a year, than for me to be buying coffee for a little and selling it for a trifle more.… I have had the luck to live with superior people. Inez Milholland, my first wife, was a great personality. She opened my mind to all the great questions of existence. Max Eastman, with whom I kept bachelor hall for five years, was a thrilling intellectual companion. Now I live with a person so great in mind, so beautiful in spirit and in person, that it is the most exciting, the most stimulating kind of living to keep up with her. We study together. We play together, and it’s a race to keep up with her. It makes me in love with life.”

The next morning he made Edna breakfast, squeezing her a tall glass of fresh orange juice; and when she did not come down until about eleven, he kept the others from interrupting her while she walked to her garden and about the grounds of Steepletop.

Millay made a point of refusing to explain or to defend her choices. She said the dilemma of a marriage and a career had no effect upon her. Still,
hadn’t marriage interfered with the freedom that was so necessary to a poet?

“But we are free. I am sure I don’t feel more bound than I was before I married. I have never settled down. I never could have married the kind of person with whom I would have had to settle down, or if I had, lived with him long. My husband is responsive to my every mood. That’s the only way in which I can live and be what I am.

“I am,” she continued, “just as free as I was when I was a girl.”

Marriage hadn’t “dulled” her; she was as adventurous and alive as she had ever been. “I can be like that because my husband is like that. We get on so marvelously.” She was crazy about music; he was crazy about music. She loved the sea; he loved the sea. He was part Irish, and so was she. They were both wild about the country, yet they both loved to get away to the city “and live in grand style,” to wear evening dress and go to gay parties, to buy gorgeous clothes, and then to go home and forget all about them and wear comfortable old country things.

“I’m just terribly lucky—that’s all. Why, he even loves to travel with me on my lecture tours.”

It went on like that until Breuer finally muttered, “Children?”

“Children,” she echoed. “I don’t know. Doubtless if I had children I wouldn’t be so free, but I would try to be intelligent about it and not give every moment to them. But I don’t really know.… I am a very concentrated person as an artist. I can’t take anything lightly. After I have finished a book I am completely exhausted, and it isn’t at all because I am weak.… I can spade a garden and not get tired, but the nervous intensity attendant on writing poetry, on creative writing, exhausts me, and I suffer constantly from a headache. It never leaves me while I am working, and for that there is no cure save not to work. Doctors advise me to go away for a rest cure, but who wants to lie stretched on one’s back idle for months at a time? I might as well call it my occupational disease, resign myself to live with it and forget about it.”

Millay made a striking connection here, moving from the reporter’s question about having children to her headaches when she works. And if she were “just as free as I was when I was a girl,” that freedom was not about being unfettered; her girlhood had been lived in a state of almost overwhelming domestic responsibility.

If she saw herself as fragile, as needing to be protected, surely having a child would severely and permanently have altered her status. Having a child suggests relinquishing being one. Not becoming a mother may leave
one locked into a sort of permanent role-playing as a child. None of the Millay women had children. It is safe to say that their childhood, which they romanticized, was as much one of hardship and loneliness as it was marked by beauty. But that beauty had been achieved at a cost.

When Eugen said that they were living “like two men,” what could it have meant? In the context of the interview, it was reduced to meaning simply that they shared the work equally, each according to his own abilities and needs. But they didn’t. Only Edna appeared to be taken care of, protected, insulated. She was doing all the creative work; she was also earning all their income, or most of it. The balance between them had shifted. And why was it that no one mentioned that the subject of
Fatal Interview
was the progress of an adulterous love affair between an older married woman and a younger man?

4

Edna had begun work on a series of poems about her mother’s death that summer, in rough draft in her notebooks.

We said, Let us shut the coffin now, we cannot keep her always

Like a doll in a box, arranging her hair.…

She looks as if she were tired of being stared at, as if she were anxious to be dead.

We said, Let us shut the coffin now, this minute, and be done with it

And promise each other we won’t come in on the sly and open it for a last look;

It is morbid to act the way we do, it is wrong, it is unhealthy.…

But I’ve often thought since that they really should invent a coffin

Whose lid doesn’t close with a click, that it would be easier afterward but of course you can’t tell.

That poem remains unpublished and in draft. So does this one, studded with autobiographical details:

Lost face, never again to be seen by me,
Where shall I go now for comfort, what door try,
Trusting to find behind it comfort, as in the days
When you were behind some door—the door of the sitting-room,
The door of the kitchen, a different door from this,
A door with a knob, a door that could be opened?

I know. I know. Spring comes. Life is sweet.
And the race goes on. Goes somewhere.
And what has been eaten by all men I can eat.

When you taught me to play the piano,
Your hands, hot from the wash-tub, hastily dried,
Were red, & steamed above the keys,—
Clean
Bright & golden from the suds on your left hand,
     bubbled with suds
    showing me the chord,
   Your wedding ring would shine.