Savage Beauty (68 page)

It was into this milieu that Millay’s friend Allan Ross Macdougall brought Donald Gurney, who was “
fresh out of Harvard, if one can ever be that,” he said many years later. “You see, I was looking for a Proustian world—Proust had been to Natalie’s—and no, that was not what I found. Natalie was already an older woman. She looked like an abbess—she dressed like one. She was very severe, a long dark cloak. She was very handsome, even then, blond and blue-eyed, clear eyes. Romaine Brooks was there, of course.… She looked like a good English housekeeper in her grey flannels with white collar and cuffs.”

Early that June 1932, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus had written to Edna in Paris, saying “
Miss Barney needs to see you. I do too.” How, she asked, did she expect them to assist in her French
“gloire”
if she kept slipping away like an eel? On the twelfth of June, Millay heard directly from Natalie Barney, who invited her to dine the next night, at eight, in Millay’s former
quartier
on the Left Bank. “
We want you to help us choose the poems to be read on the 24th. ‘Dougy’ will read 2 sonnets and L.D.M. two of her translations—and Rachel one of them and one English? poem—and you?” She added this touching note: “I am glad of your dedication to Elinor Wylie. I only know that masterpiece of hers Mr. Hazard & Mr. Hodge … and a few poems; perhaps you will tell me more about the living poet—and not let me miss meeting you. I sometimes feel somewhat of an exile.”

Millay didn’t make that supper. She had begun to work on her preface to
The Princess Marries the Page
, and she was in the mood to finish it. “I can’t keep Harpers waiting any longer,” she wrote Eugen. “—People will be interested in what I tell them, very likely. They’re crazy about That Personal Touch.”

The winter before, when the reviews from
Fatal Interview
were still coming in, she’d arranged with Harper to publish what she called this “little play.” She was always precise about what the format and look of her
books should be. “
Woodblocks won’t do at all,” she wrote her editor, Eugene Saxton.

The play is too slight to be printed so seriously. What I really want—and if it is too expensive just now to bring it out in this way, then I would really rather wait, I think, until everybody has more money—what I really want is a big, flat book perhaps 14 by 10 with many colored illustrations.… I want the book to be a Christmas gift book and as gaudy as a Christmas tree.

Harper brought it out on October 19, 1932, with exactly the pretty, gay decorations she’d hoped for. It was stamped in gold with colored drawings and facsimiles of a sheet of music by Deems Taylor.

Millay dropped Mary Kennedy a hasty note, inviting her to dinner on the evening of June 22. She said she wanted to pump her for information about the Philadelphia production of
Princess
, in which Mary had starred, “and to give myself the fun of seeing you.—I’ve been to see you twice—did you know that?—My child, I live just around the corner from you, in the very next street—it was as much of a surprise to myself as it will be to you!” Afterward she invited her to the tea at Natalie Barney’s.

“
It was all very gracefully done,” Mary recalled. “And then Edna recited some of her poems. But as she began she said that ‘Renascence’ was an adolescent experience … and I felt that she was making a little excuse for these poems.”

Donald Gurney also remembered the evening well; he was curious, playful, and indiscreet:

Rachel Berendt read “Renascence.” And at this point—well, Natalie Barney was in love with her, and she
was
a glorious creature—when she suddenly threw her arm up with the line “I screamed to touch the sky”—and her dark long hair fell forward and down across her face—ah, well, all the ladies gasped.

Rachel Berendt was of course a famous actress, and a rather famous lesbian, too. She played all of Giroudoux; she was dark, Jewish, I should think, and with a perfectly beautiful voice.

Of Edna Millay in that milieu:

All I can say … is that she seemed at home. She was a smiling, a very American looking girl in that particular world—which was largely, but not entirely by any means, French, rather jaded, and always very well dressed. No self-respecting American woman would be seen there. Oh, no! Edith Wharton would never have come, never! And of the intellectual world that counted, both French and American would pass through Natalie Barney’s afternoons. Colette was often there, barefoot in her sandals, which did cause a sensation. Her feet were so dirty! Gertrude Stein was very self-assured.

Just before she read, Millay was drawn into a conversation with Mme. Delarue-Mardrus, who was talking about her recent trip to the States. “
Wonderful country! So alive, so vigorous! But such bad food!” “Edna’s eyebrow was raised quizzically as she heard these touristic clichés,” Macdougall reported. “Then she began an interrogation which was at once a patriotic dithyramb and a gastronomic prose poem in praise of her country’s native products and dishes.…

“In your travels,
chère madame
, did you ever taste the lobsters that come from the waters off the coast of my home state, Maine? Broiled or boiled and served with melted, fresh country butter, they are unforgettable. Did you have fish chowder made of haddock, Maine potatoes, onions, salt pork and rich milk?” The travelled literary lady slowly shook her head.

“Were you ever introduced to Boston Baked Beans?” Edna continued. “I mean the kind baked in an old-fashioned crock. We cook them slowly and for long hours in the oven and serve them sometimes with such brown bread as can be found in no other part of the world. Did you ever have Cherrystones or Little Necks; and did you ever, by chance, taste a Provincetown clam pie made of the deep-sea Quahogs and a liberality of olive oil and garlic, cooked by one of the Portuguese fishermen who had hauled in the clams himself? Were oyster-crabs and whitebait ever set crisp before you? Did you taste soft-shell crabs, lightly sauteed, or drink the juice of the soft-shell clam? I must say I have never met their like over here. And were you ever a happy member of an old-fashioned clam-bake on a secluded New England beach?”

“Hélas!”
said Madame Mardrus; she had not been long enough in America to have experienced the primitive joys of a clam-bake.

“Then what of the other American dishes that are seldom to be met with elsewhere on the gastronomic globe?” Edna asked. “There’s the shad roe and the shad itself, both broiled; sweet corn and sweet potatoes; pumpkin pie and deep-dish blueberry pie; diamond-back terrapin done as the Balti-moreans do it in a rich Madeira stew, or as the Philadelphians do it with egg-yolks, cream and
‘sweet butter in a lordly dish.’
Then there’s Philadelphia Pepperpot which has tripe in it, and that same city’s surprising mixture of tripe and oysters. There’s the Creole Jambalaya of New Orleans made with savory rice and shrimps almost as big as your French
écrevisses
.

“We have also our native blueberries. And there are our cranberries and our beach-plums which I used to gather on Cape Cod. We make delicious preserves from them. Oh, there are many other products and dishes native to states and regions of my country. If you have never tasted them,
ma chère
, you cannot in all fairness judge American cuisine.… ”

As Madame Mardrus started to say something in reply we were called into the other room. I heard her there tell her friend, Romaine Brooks, the painter, that she thought Edna’s defense of her country’s
specialités gastronomiques
was
tres bien faite
.

Norma was surprised when Gene, as she usually called him, told her Edna was going to call from Paris and that he insisted she be with him when he took the call in Pittsfield. “
I didn’t know why she’d stayed [in Paris]—or that Dillon was there.… Gene was terribly excited and nervous. And I didn’t realize there was a chance of her not coming back. Until I got in the car. He said, ‘Maybe she’s not coming back, Norma.’ He began to talk nervously, talked because he was nervous. He never really talked to me before. And I didn’t know what he was talking about. My God! He might easily, being Gene,
not
have asked me to come along.… We got to the hotel, and I sat in the lobby. He went to the desk. They assigned him a room, and he went upstairs. After a while … he came to the top of the stairs and shouted, ‘Norma! Come say hello to Vincent. She is coming home!’

“So, yes! Sure I did! It sounded as if she were underwater; it was a bad connection.… I said, ‘I can’t wait to see you. When are you coming home?’

“She seemed excited. I was very gay. Gene was beside himself.”

On July 5, the day of their telephone call, Millay had apparently decided to come home. Eugen was not to go to her in France; instead he went to New York to await her arrival. “I’m going to fetch Edna!” was how he put it to Norma.

CHAPTER 29

E
dna did not leave Paris after she talked to Norma and Eugen on July 5, 1932. Alix Daniels insisted that Millay remained in Paris, but the rancor that laced her memories made her a questionable source. Millay, however, kept a series of index cards listing chronologically the crucial events of her life. In 1932, along with her walking trip to Mallorca, she made this notation: “Eugen to Paris—Veendam 3rd class Venice.” Venice?

George Dillon had formed a friendship with a man called Arthur Meeker from Chicago who adored him, and together they had decided to go to Venice without Millay. Whether she was hurt or humiliated and angry is hard to know for certain; whether Dillon was more deeply involved with Meeker than anyone knew or admitted is impossible to know. But Millay decided to follow them. Eugen did come to Paris and, according to their passports, they
both
entered Italy on August 8 and departed together on the tenth. By August 11, 1932, they left Le Havre, bound for America. Eugen was bringing her home, just as he’d said he would.

There is almost no correspondence in Millay’s hand from the time she returned to Steepletop in August 1932 until that Christmas. In a working notebook there is this poem, dated November 12, 1932:

Distresséd mind, forbear
To tease the hooded Why;
That shape will not reply.

From the safe chair
To the wind’s welter
Flee, if storm’s your shelter.

But no, you needs must part—
Fling him his release!—
On whose ungenerous heart
Alone, you are at peace.

Her choice of verbs is key: “Forbear … Flee … 
Fling
him his release!” She is in her old high mode, imperious, if hurt, very like her voice in “Fatal Interview.” But the final two lines betray a recognition more painful than loss: she needs him.

The poem will become Part III of the five-part “Not So Far as the Forest,” published the following year in a magazine but withheld from book publication until 1939, when it was included in
Huntsman, What Quarry?
For
Huntsman
, she wrote later in a letter to her editor, was to be made up
of “
mostly love poems” composed of “what might be called the more
personal
of the new poems I have been writing.”

V

Poor passionate thing,

Even with this clipped wing how well you flew!—though not so far as the forest.…

Rebellious bird, warm body foreign and bright,