Savage Beauty (64 page)

Within a few pages this draft also stopped, and she started more certainly the poem that begins “Oh, what a lovely town were Death, / Dwelt you therein …” It would become, in 1934, the first of six poems published about her mother’s death. Untitled in draft, she would call it “Valentine,” Valentine’s Day having been the actual date of her mother’s burial at Steepletop.

Oh, what a shining town were Death
Woke you therein, and drew your breath
My buried love; and all you were,
Caught up and cherished, even there.
Those evil windows loved of none
Would blaze as if they caught the sun.

Woke you in Heaven, Death’s kinder name,
And downward in sweet gesture came
From your cold breast your rigid hand,
Then Heaven would be my native land.

But you are nowhere: you are gone
All roads into Oblivion.
Whither I would disperse, till then
From home a banished citizen.

Here, in the first line, the earlier and weaker “lovely town” becomes the “shining town” in which her mother awakes rather than dwells. Alive, then, her hand capable of motion, it is no longer her wedding ring that shines in the light of memory; Death itself is defied.

That summer Millay met Georgia O’Keeffe in Lake George. There’s no evidence they had ever met before, but oddly enough they shared a friendship with Mitchell Kennerley, who had given O’Keeffe some of Millay’s books. The only record that remains of that encounter is O’Keeffe’s letter to her afterward:

My dear Edna St. Vincent Millay!

I did not mean to be cold——I was surprised to see you—
and you

came so quickly and were gone so quickly that I did not recover from my surprise.

—I must tell you too what was going through my head as you stood there—

Last summer I had a very beautiful large white studio—with a very large window and a very wide double door—It was by an irrigation ditch on the desert—

—The bushes and small trees by the ditch attracted many birds—

There was no screen at the door—

—and often the birds would fly into the room——very hard against the window thinking it was the sky———

One day a humming bird flew in—

It fluttered against the window till I got it down where I could reach it with an open umbrella—

—When I had it in my hand it was so small I couldn’t believe I had it—but I could feel the intense life—so intense and so tiny—

I opened my hand the least little bit to look to see if I really had it——and before I could see it at all it was fluttering against the window again——I caught it four times before I really had a little peep at it and let it fly out the door—

You were like the humming bird to me——If you do not understand what I mean your husband undoubtedly will

————It is a very sweet memory to me—

And I am rather inclined to feel that you and I know the best part of one another without spending much time together

————It is not that I fear the knowing—

It is that I am at this moment willing to let you be what you are to me——it is beautiful and pure and very intensely alive—

—I am busy with things that I wish to keep busy with right now—

But if I may feel free to go to you when I really feel free for that—I would like that—like it very much—only you must promise that if you are not ready when I am ready you will not let me disturb you——I will understand——and love you

Georgia O’Keeffe—

CHAPTER 27

O
n December 8, 1931, Millay wrote to George Dillon, whom she had just seen in Chicago. Crucially, it was the first time she had gone to him without Eugen. The rendezvous was fraught with conflict. “
Oh darling,” she wrote from the train, “I wanted to say so many things to you, not at all the things I said. Why did I have to tease us at the last moment with such painful things, leaving us both with our minds full of cruel images.” Dillon had told her he’d been almost crazed in her absence, and when she’d tried to reassure him—that she, too, had had periods of what she called “extravagant depression” when she thought she’d lost “both my mother & you, & tried my best to drink myself right out of the picture”—she couldn’t see, or admit, the immense difference in their situations. She had Eugen, after all.

When her train stopped in Albany, she wrote another letter from the depot. She said she couldn’t stop writing to him and she couldn’t believe she wasn’t going to see him that night. They had both been drinking heavily in Chicago. “Can’t remember taking the train—can’t remember being in the station—but I do remember that you came into the train with me for one moment & that you kissed me goodbye.” It had taken three full years—and the death of her mother—for their affair to develop to the point at which she was willing not only to dream of spending time with him but to make concrete plans. “Yes, I really mean it.—What’s the use? This seeing you for a day or two every year or two—it’s no good—it makes me too unhappy.—I love you and I want to be with you—it’s as simple as that.”

Of course, things are never as simple as that, certainly not when one is married. But how she felt about Dillon is perfectly caught in this note she scribbled in pencil beneath his telephone number:

Let us be fools & love forever,
There was a woman, if tales be true,
Who shattered Troy for a shepherd boy,
Less beautiful than you.

She would work to secure a Guggenheim Fellowship for him, which would give him both the money to write and the time to be with her in France. “Oh, darling, let me meet you in Paris.… Write me three of the million things you’ve been thinking about.… I’ll write you the one thing I’ve been thinking about:—In the spring I shall be with you.”

Henry Allen Moe, the president of the Guggenheim Foundation, dropped Millay a note in January, as soon as he received her recommendations: “
Dear Miss Millay: … As I have said to you before, we are constantly in your debt for the
quality
of advice you give us.” She had been asked that year about four writers: Eleanor Delamater, Abbie Huston Evans (her old friend from their Camden girlhood), Max Eastman, and George Dillon. Although Max was one of Eugen’s dearest friends, she was brutally honest about his abilities as a poet: “
I regretfully assure you that money afforded Mr. Eastman to enable him to write poetry is money unprofitably dispensed, since Mr. Eastman is,” and here she softened her draft
^*
from “a bad poet” to “not a good poet.” She also cut this sentence from what appears to be her final draft: “If, knowing the use which he intends to make of this Fellowship, you prefer Mr. Eastman before either Miss Evans or Mr. Dillon, you will be dealing American poetry a blow on the mouth from which it will stagger for years.”

Millay pointed out her relationship to Evans and gave an honest, well-mannered recommendation: “Her poetry has not and perhaps will never have wide popularity, but there is a hard integrity in it and a country-bred passion.… I most sincerely and without reserve recommend her to you.” It was generous, and it lacked heart.

But her words on Dillon rang with passionate conviction. Millay called him “the most important poet of his age writing in America today.” Her description of the nature of his needs was most revealing:

[H]e needs a respite from the advertising business, which is as bad a spiritual environment for a lyric poet as anything I know. In the second place, he needs urgently a complete change also in his physical environment.… His admirers find one real danger for him, that unless vigorously stimulated and richly fed by the world about him he may come more and more to eat and drink himself.

This is a curious thing to say about someone you love—maybe it was simply a justification for her own support, for certainly she was planning to provide him with the vigorous stimulation he required in Paris in the spring.

That September, Viking Press had brought out George Dillon’s second volume of poems,
The Flowering Stone
, dedicated to Harriet Monroe. Of its four parts, one was called “Anatomy of Death,” another “Addressed to the Doomed.” A voice of lassitude and loss underscored the entire book; even the title suggests bereavement.

The most extraordinary thing about this volume was its secret: several of the lyrics had been written to Millay, and the closing section of ten sonnets was the answering cry to her sonnet sequence in
Fatal Interview
. His sonnets, like hers, were in the Shakespearean form with its rhyming, ringing final couplet; his, too, followed the tempo of the earth’s weather, except that he began in time past, which is never truly seasonal but always somewhat funereal. Such a doomed and elegiac tone for a man so young and in his prime. He must have been as difficult to reassure or to persuade as a fearful, demanding child who will insist that the kitten is lost, the dog dead, the food lumpy and cold. He was a shallower vessel than she understood. If Millay was his muse, she appears, in his poems, as uncertain and almost spent. Here is his lovely “Woman without Fear”:

How beautiful is a woman whose avarice is over.
She is content that time should take what it will.
She is proud to have no pride. She asks of her lover
Love only, for good or ill.

She makes of her body a strange bed till morning
Wherein he breathes oblivion better than sleep;
And when he wakes she is nowhere—she has fled without warning,
And left him nothing to keep

But the trace of her tears on the pillow, and a bright strand
Out of her hair, and happiness, and a little grief.…

There is in this sleepy realm an eerie loveliness. Dillon’s beautiful, sweet lyric “She Sleeps” is marred only by the stalling clumsiness of the Latinate opening word,

Incipiently, the hush of death
Lies on her limbs like early snow.
Love, in this light-drawn tide of breath,
Cares little whether it wake or no.

As summer sleeps in autumn’s arms,
So every cry and every kiss
And all love’s laughter and alarms
Were but a clamouring toward this;

So even the fruit forsakes the vine;
So even the heart’s high branch blows bare;
So even her lips are lost from mine
Like leaves upon the flying air.

But these are odd poems in praise of love, fearful and preternaturally old. Nothing sings in Dillon’s veins—there’s not a bark of laughter, no gasp of joy; not a hoot, a drunken slip of decorum. We are in the high romantic lyric mode for sure, and we remember her rebuke in one of her earliest letters to him: “Will the gentleman from Kentucky …” What did she see in him besides his youth and beauty? Did she yearn for his languor and hesitation after years of Eugen’s irrepressible élan?

George Dillon was not the only one to publish a book of poems in the fall of 1931. Kathleen Millay’s
The Beggar at the Gate
, her third book of poetry, was reviewed by many of the same people who had reviewed Edna’s book in the spring. Percy Hutchison in
The New York Times
said that while the poems were “
Melodious, intelligent, varied and exquisite within their limitations, [they] are, nevertheless, limited.” William Rose Benét was little better: “
Kathleen Millay is primarily an impromptu singer.… There is rhythm in everything she writes, but one sometimes longs for a stricter discipline of the verse as a whole.” The Boston
Transcript
said flatly that the book did not “yet lift the author out of the ranks of the minor poets.” That “yet” was merciful. If the sisters were competitors for critical esteem, Kathleen’s portion was stinting. Without Cora, there was no longer an intermediary to soften the critical blows.