Savage Beauty (65 page)

Susan Jenkins Brown, a book editor at the Macaulay Publishing Company, the firm that had published Kathleen’s second novel,
Against the Wall
, in 1929, remembered a scene with Kathleen in the very early thirties, when she had come into the office. As the conversation was drawing to a close, out of nowhere, Kathleen said defiantly that Edna’s poetry had all come from her.

“
I thought, ‘She is a madwoman,’ ” Brown recalled. “I thought that immediately. I said to myself, ‘Just don’t say anything because it is useless.’ … You know, we all knew, that it was because of Edna that her mother had come to New York. And it was Edna who saw Kathleen into Vassar. I knew that—so to have
this
sitting in front of me!”

Kathleen would never publish another collection of poems.

2

“
Edna St. Vincent Millay Heads for Spain Aboard Freighter,” announced the headline of a New York newspaper on February 21, 1932. She was quoted as saying saucily, “This trip is an impulse from which I may never return.”

She called George in Chicago the night before she set sail. When he wrote to her, he said she had “the most beautiful voice in the world.”

Darling … I will come to Paris in April, whether I get the fellowship or not. As I told you, I shall be poor—even poorer, perhaps, if I
get
the fellowship, for then I should attempt to live on the income from that.

Then he told her just how much in love with her he was:

In spite of the neurotic moods that come between us—in spite of my bad manners and insane behaviour. You have been sweet and patient always, and I am really grateful. If I ever amount to anything, it will be because you loved me, and continued to love me through these terrible years.

There were terms, however, to their romantic departure, and Millay set them. She was traveling with Eugen.

At the end of April, Eugen dropped a postcard to Norma and Charlie from Paris: “
Darlinks, here we are. Walked in Mallorca, fought the bulls in Spain, and stopped for a month with my brother in Antibes.” Later that week they were invited to a formal dinner at the American Embassy in Paris, where Millay was to be the guest of honor. They were in a cab on the way to the embassy when Eugen, tossing his cigarette out of the window, saw three men running across a bridge. Curious, he told Edna he wanted to find out what was going on and jumped out of the taxi. Leaning over the parapet of the bridge, he saw a woman’s white face in the water. “Her hand was flung up for a moment,” he said later, “as if in appeal to me, and then she went under.”

Without hesitation, he stripped himself of his high silk hat, his overcoat, and his scarf and dropped his “smoking” on the footpath leading down to the water. Some who were watching called out to him not to jump in because she was dead. But he had seen her raise her hand. He dove in. Floyd Dell quoted Eugen about the adventure in a piece he wrote for the New York
Herald Tribune:

The Seine is not a wide river—or so it seems from the outside. But when you are in it the Seine is one of the widest rivers in the world, besides being very cold, very swift and very dirty. As I swam toward the woman—who might already be dead—I wished I were not there. I was afraid that if she were alive she might grab me and drown me. Something like that had almost happened to me once, in Holland. I was afraid of her. I resented her. Why did she have to pick this time to jump into the river, just when I was passing by, on my way to a beautiful dinner? I did not feel at all heroic. I felt sorry for myself. At the same time I remembered her white face, and her hand flung up in appeal to me, and I felt a kind of personal affection for her, not as if she were a stranger, but as though she were some one whom I had an absolute obligation to save.

“When he reached her, afraid of being seized, he dove under her, grabbing her neck as he came up. All he got was a cheap fur neckpiece. He plunged again. This time he held her by the back of her neck and swam diagonally to the shore. The woman was unconscious and pale but alive.

“Parisians who happened to pass about seven o’clock last night on the Pont Royal,” said
L’Intransigeant
,

were witnesses of a not commonplace scene. An American gentleman in evening clothes (who afterward modestly declined to give the police his name) had leaped from the bridge and rescued from drowning a young woman who had thrown herself in despair from the Pont du Carrousel just upstream. From the American Embassy word got about that this brave American gentleman was Eugen Boissevain, who was in Paris with his wife, Edna Millay, the poet.

“Eugen Boissevain,” the article continued, “is the sort of person who might turn up anywhere and do some extraordinary thing—a great, broad-shouldered, sun-browned Hollander with an enormous gusto for life, gay, laughter-loving, irrepressible and unexpected.”

They raced back to their hotel. Eugen changed into the only dark suit he had, and they arrived at the embassy an hour late.

The next day they went to the Hôpital de la Charité, where the poor young woman was recovering. Her name was Pauline Venys, and she knew Eugen was the instrument of God sent to rescue her.

George Dillon had never traveled to Europe, let alone walked in Mallorca. He had no money other than the little he’d saved from his advertising job in Chicago, but he was becoming the darling of the critics, and he was about to enjoy a popular success of his own. On April 28, 1932, Dillon won the Pulitzer Prize for
The Flowering Stone
, as the best book of poetry published in 1931. In its press release, the Pulitzer committee wrote, “Of
the four or five volumes which received most serious consideration, Mr. Dillon’s verse seemed most original and authentic.… his poems are exceedingly beautiful. The prize is awarded to him as a young poet of very great promise.”

George wrote back to the committee from Paris that the prize had never meant more to anybody than it did to him: “
I feel strengthened and encouraged as never before.” But, he continued, “this is my first trip abroad, and you’d have to call out the marines to get me back now!” He sounded young and jubilant, and by then he was a man who knew he’d won the Guggenheim, too.

Alix Daniels, a friend and colleague of George’s from
Poetry
magazine, described the apartment he took on the boulevard Saint-Germain:

It was one of those banal little places furnished with dingy odds and ends—a salon sparsely furnished with furniture that ran to rickety curved legs and dusty green velvet upholstery, a tiny inconvenient kitchen, a bedroom with a huge armoir. Even the concierge was impossible—a hefty dame upholstered in black bombazine.

By mid-May, George Dillon had been with Millay in Paris for just over a month. She had remained at the Hôtel Port-Royal, an elegant old hotel on the Left Bank, where Eugen wrote to her from the M.S.
Lafayette
, en route to New York, on May 10.

Darling—

 … I passed George’s train. C’est egal, quand meme!—My love, all my love to you—I’m thinking of you as gay and happy. I’m fine.—Goodbye my courageous lion. When I come back you must be again the roaring lion.… Skiddlepins—the brave.

Eugen had decided to leave them alone together. The implication was that Dillon would be the tonic she needed. Just before his ship reached Plymouth, he wrote to her again:

Uge had rainbows on the starboard side all day long. And I thought of all the rainbows we had seen together.

The people seem of the dullest. Except one girl in a beautiful grey dress a la Louise Boulanger. She is cute. A lovely smile and she is small and dainty and reminds me of you, vaguely. I had a drink in the bar and … well you know, … I thought of you & missed you and so had to drink another and missed you more.

I love you. More than ever you can know.—

Darling Scramoodle, sweet sweet Freckels, I love you. Be happy and without a care. Button up your over coat and be careful about booze and crossing streets. I love you—…—I kiss you on your soft sensitive lips. I love you.… Poor Bibs! Loving so much two galumps! and one is more than an ordinary girl can stand!—Never you mind. You can manage it—and you’ll have a life richer than any girl, but not rich enough to scare me—Go to it Scramoodles, and no heartaches or feeling sorry for ANYBODY!—

My undying love
Sniggybus

The girl in the gray dress stands out in this letter as a hint from Eugen that he, too, is sexually alive. In the closing lines of the second sonnet in
Fatal Interview
, which she’d told George was for Eugen, she had written:

Along my body, waking while I sleep,
Sharp to the kiss, cold to the hand as snow,
The scar of this encounter like a sword
Will lie between me and my troubled lord.

Her affair with Dillon had altered her sexual relationship with her husband. If she was no longer, or rarely, making love with Eugen, this time alone with George became more weighty. Unwilling or unable to give up Eugen, Edna was meanwhile trying to decide if she needed them both in her life, and how to manage it.

3

On the morning of May 14, Edna dispatched a letter of four sentences to Eugen. She wished him a happy birthday and assured him she loved him: “Darling … Going to write you a biggie, biggie letter in a minute. I love you. I couldn’t possibly love anybody else as much as I love you.” But there was no biggie to follow. She cabled him the next week on the exact date of his birthday. Eugen told her by return post that he didn’t know what he would have done without her greetings. He did note, however, that all her wires had been sent from Paris between 1 and 3 A.M., “So you are going early to bed!—Bad darling, sweet, sweet Scramoodles. But be careful of yourself.—Please look after yourself.—Please,
please
, be selfish!”

Three days after her four-line letter, she wrote again. “
Darling Skiddlepins,” she said, “This is another skimpy awful letter, but you know how I am about letters.—I’ve missed you just all the time. Everything is marvelous, but there’s nobody such fun as you.—I’m happy, though,—I can’t write you much because you always leave letters around so!”

Alix Daniels, who was in Paris at this time and was no friend of Millay’s, thought that Edna’s demands were exhausting her young lover and that she was driving him away with her sexual jealousy. “
She was a woman who was sexually high-geared. She was wearing George out. He once said, ‘It’s too much for me.’ She was forever testing him and his feeling for her.
For instance, one day as the three of us were walking across the Pont-Neuf in Paris, Vincent stopped and leaned perilously over the parapet. George took her arm and pulled her back. Then she said, ‘So, you don’t want me to take the leap. Would you leap in after me and drag me ashore? Perhaps though you’d do the same for that poor fellow under the bridge should he leap in.’ It was a
clochard
—one of those derelicts who lurk under bridges in Paris. George said, ‘You are not bracketed in my mind with that tramp, and you know it.’ She shrugged and treated him to one of those saberlike flashes from those little gray-green eyes of hers and we walked on.

“Well, when the evening was over and we were taking a taxi back to our hotels, Edna said she was getting out with me. I made excuses, each one more lame than the one before. She pressed. Finally I said, ‘Besides, the bed is too small.’ She said, ‘Oh, we won’t be doing any sleeping!’ The idea was that if she couldn’t have George, she’d take me.

“But the next day I was sent a gold Cartier heart, some silk handkerchiefs, and a bouquet of violets! That was the way she was. She was not really interested in me, mind you. She wanted George. Whether it was to dance with him or to sleep with him, she wanted him on her own terms. And when he would not or could not accept those terms, she retaliated.”

Norma had been listening to what I’d told her about Alix Daniels, and she was impatient. “Oh, why drag all that in? Isn’t the story good enough without women?”

That night, sitting before the fire at Steepletop after we’d finished drinking our coffee with heavy cream, Norma, who had been watching
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
on TV, looked across the room at me. I was half asleep, dozing on one of her couches. “Naancy,” she drawled in her low voice, as if it were three syllables, “haven’t you ever wanted to reach out and touch …” She paused. “I remember standing down at the pool while———, you know she was———’s wife, swam toward me. Her small lovely breasts seemed to be floating on the water, and I just wanted to reach out and touch their tips.” Norma made a very theatrical yawn, bringing the back of her small fist to her lips, and stretched. “People used to say that I did what Vincent Millay wrote about.” Norma’s eyes glowed
wickedly in the firelight as she scratched the belly of her cat, Debs. “How are you going to handle that?”