Authors: Nancy Milford
Has no one told you?—Hopeless is your flight
Towards the high branches. Here is your home,
Between the barnyard strewn with grain and the forest tree.
Though Time refeather the wing,
Ankle slip the ring,
The once-confined thing
Is never again free.
“
There were only two or three really important things in Vincent’s life,” Charles Ellis once said, “and George Dillon was one of them. He was weak, queer as a three-dollar bill.… He was a handsome boy, a very good-looking boy. But weak all the way through. And while she was not dominant—far from it—she could be suddenly assertive and aggressive, if she wanted to be. If she had reason to be. If it was something important to her.”
On Christmas Day 1932, Millay began the first of a series of Sunday-night readings of her poems over the air on a nationwide hookup on WJZ Blue Network, arranged by Eugen’s old friend Margaret Cuthbert. Cuthbert was one of the pioneers of American radio broadcasting, and according to her nothing like Millay’s reading had ever been done before on air. For the first time a literary figure was on equal footing with dramatic performers and distinguished concert artists. Thousands of people heard Millay’s voice. They heard her in Illinois and Michigan, in Nebraska and Texas, and once having heard her, they wrote to her. Sometimes they sent her their own poems. They told her that her voice was as lovely as her poetry. They sent in hundreds of letters, and in these letters they asked for her advice, they told her they’d fallen a little in love with her. A farm family in Missouri wrote “that the very sound of your voice transforms our country living room into a place of magic.” What her listeners most seemed to like was her informality, the way she’d say, as if to herself, “Don’t be nervous” when she couldn’t find a poem. They told her it was as if she were in the room with them. It was her voice that they most often responded to:
It’s simply intoxicating. Don’t, don’t ever change, and become stiff or formal or eloquent.… You sound so real, so natural, so—so very much alive. Even with the frightful cold you had.… Miss Millay—please do not stop your Sunday nights, go on and on and on. We cannot have too much of you.
It was a performance, and it was exhausting hard work. Her apparent nonchalance came from the ability that very few writers have, to seem to reach over and touch the listener with her voice.
To her friends Lulu and Alyse in England, she wrote in her offhand way, “
I got a job reading my poems over the radio—eight Sunday evenings—which kept me so late into the winter and made me so tired that when it was over we just rushed to Florida to get out of the cold and into the sunshine—I needed it badly.”
Of course it wasn’t just a job. People who’d never given a thought to poetry or poets, who may have turned on their radios out of curiosity, stayed to listen for every Sunday night for two months. A friend of Margaret Cuthbert said she would never forget the sound of Millay’s voice. “It
was
dramatic, lifting and falling without anything forced about it. She was a person who made one believe, in her presence, that there is a muse. And Edna was visited by her.
“You know, Edna did not want to record her voice, Margaret persuaded her to do it in the name of posterity. I can still hear her talking to Edna, telling her what it would mean someday, in the future.
“I remember the first time she heard the recordings played back to her. It was the first time she had ever heard her own voice. ‘Is that really my voice?’ she said and paused. ‘Quite lovely, isn’t it?’ ”
2
For years Edna and Eugen had dreamed of owning an island off the coast of Maine. In July 1933, almost a full year after her return from Paris, they drove up to visit Tess Root Adams, her dear friend from their days together in Shillingstone, at her summer place on Bailey’s Island. It was from the Root cottage that Millay first saw Ragged Island, the outermost island of Casco Bay, four miles out to sea. The Root cottage sits directly on the shore of the Atlantic coast; to the east, seen between the wooden porch pillars, lies Ragged Island. On July 3 and 4, 1933, Edna entered just four words in her diary:
Ragged Island
Garnet Rocks.
Ragged Island consisted of some eighty acres with a single house at the head of a natural harbor, which could be entered only at high tide. There were fields of wild roses, white and pink, and wild mustard that grew to the edge of the pebble beach. Two weeks later, Ragged Island was theirs.
A gleeful Tess sent them the telegram confirming their purchase: WELL BABY WE BOUGHT IT. When the message was spoken over the telephone to Steepletop, it became
WHERE IS BABY WE BOARDED
. Mary Kennedy, who was visiting them, remembered that Edna and Eugen, puzzled, kept asking the operator to repeat it. Finally the exasperated operator said, “It’s perfectly clear, Madam, that the other party wants to know where is the
child
they left with you!”
When they told the Fickes they had just bought an island with a small shack on it, Arthur grumpily noted in his diary, “
suppose we shall have to go there with them someday, but … I know who will have to do all the work: Gene and Gladys and I!” Arthur was not usually so peevish. He loved Steepletop. He even loved the icy, spring-fed pool they’d built in the old stone foundation of the barn where they would laze about, naked, drinking cocktails, talking poetry, and swimming.
I don’t think I’d like naked bathing with a lot of strangers, but we four have done it together for so many years that I like it very much. Don’t let anyone try to tell me that it’s a perfectly pure, innocent performance, though! It has its own delicately voluptuous quality. Anybody who can play around with a naked Vince and pretend to himself that it is the same as talking with his grandmother is merely lying to himself. Her breasts are the most curiously “naked” breasts I have ever seen. I suppose it is because they are rather large in proportion to her small body, and because their centers are so prominent and pink. Her middle, with its scanty golden hair, is exceptionally beautiful—and so deceptively innocent-looking.
In August, Millay’s diary faltered and began to peter out. By December, in letters to both her aunt Susie and Allan Ross Macdougall, she describes being ill. Here they’d gone and bought an island intending “
to spend August there, but I had to go and get flu or something like it, and have had it all summer,—and I haven’t set eyes on my island since we bought it!” But she had been able to write, “and what little strength I had, has been used up in this most arduous of occupations.”
However immersed she was in her own work, she did manage to take time to do the Guggenheim recommendations. In March she’d wired Mr.
Moe from Florida that the Guggenheim Foundation should grant a fellowship to Mr. E. E. Cummings. If he needed it.
I put it this way because I know nothing of Mr. Cummings’ circumstances, and because I do know that both Miss Bogan and Mr. Middleton are without exaggeration desperately in need of help, and that Mr. Dillon cannot possibly continue with the work which he is now doing in France unless he receives an extension of his Fellowship.
That was pretty helpful to a lover she’d parted from. She realized that for her to be helping Cummings was, as she put it, “really funny. For if ever I disliked a man without ever having laid eyes on him, it is this same E. E. Cummings.”
She characterized his personality as “fetid.” But about one thing she was abundantly clear:
… here is a big talent, in the hands of an arrogant, peevish, self-satisfied and self-indulgent writer. That is to say, here is a big talent in pretty bad hands.…
I am not one of those who stand for the untouchable holiness of the capital letter and traditional typography. So far as I am concerned, Mr. Cummings may do anything he likes with the alphabet, the English grammar, and the multiplication table, provided only the result of his activities be something interesting, and, after a reasonable period of application, comprehensible, to a reader of culture and brains. Mr. Cummings may not, however, I say, write poetry in English which is more difficult for me to translate than poetry written in Latin. He may, of course, write it. But if he publishes it, if he prints and offers for sale poetry which he is quite content should be, after hours of sweating concentration, inexplicable from any point of view to a person as intelligent as myself, then he does so with a motive which is frivolous from the point of view of art, and should not be helped or encouraged by any serious person or group of persons.…
But, unfortunately for one’s splendid hate which had assumed almost epic proportions, by no means all of Mr. Cummings poetry is of this nature. In these books which I have just been reading there is fine writing and powerful writing (as well as some of the most pompous nonsense I ever let slip to the floor with a wide yawn), and that this author has ability I could not deny; that he has more than that I gravely suspect.
Mr. Cummings in love, for instance, his arrogance for the moment subdued, his spirit troubled and humbled, can produce such beautiful poems as are to be found in parts IV or V of “Is 5.”
If we could only trust this author to proceed along these lines, and along the line of the thrillingly lovely “Paris; this April sunset” in Part III, nothing would be clearer than that Mr. Cummings must be given anything he asks for, if it can possibly be arranged.…
What I propose, then, is this: that you give Mr. Cummings
enough rope
. He may hang himself; or he may lasso a unicorn. In any case it is high time we found out about this man Cummings. Let us give him every opportunity to show us at once whether he is a genius, a charlatan, or a congenital defective,—and get him off our minds.
Cummings got his Guggenheim. And Dillon got his extension.
3
On December 18, 1933, Millay gave a reading at Bryn Mawr College, the last of the year. “
And it was just perfect,” said a woman who had been in the audience. “After the talk—no, perhaps during it—I noticed a man sitting on the sidelines. He was very protective of Millay. But there was this strange, small, russet creature. Not pretty, mind you. Something better than pretty—an exciting creature. We wanted to meet her. So I asked, ‘How would you like to come for a little drink?’ And she said, ‘We’d love to. But I must ask Uge.’ That’s exactly what she called him. Then I knew the man sitting there was her husband.
“We came back to the house, all full of her talk. And they came in our car with us. The bottles came out, and the silver, and the crystal.” Why did she go to perfect strangers? “I have no idea. I think she was keen to get away. That’s all. And, too, we were not
perfect
strangers,” the woman said.
“There was more drinking. Again and again their glasses were refilled. She drank whiskey and soda, I remember, until about three o’clock. During this time Uge would hold her. He adored her—in the sense of worshiping her—he would hold her shoulders, trying to kiss her, and putting his arms around her knees. He finally got so drunk that he couldn’t do anything. When we saw that he was helpless, Edna got on one side, and I on the other, and we took his arms and pulled and dragged him up to his bed. We just dumped him in like a sack. He was out. And then we descended into our living room.…
“During all of this drinking she never showed anything at all. She was what I would call cold drunk; there was a chill about her. She was very controlled, very. But she would say something and laugh, she recited parts of poems—her own and others’, I think. She just sat there, drinking. And so controlled, no fumbled words, no slurred speech. I remember that she had a most special way of talking. Yes, it was a quality to her voice, and a care in her choice of words as well. I’m afraid the only way to describe it is to call it a poetic way of talking, which is a disservice to her.”
The woman who recalled this looked down at her tasseled loafers and for a moment seemed unable to speak. Then she said that the drinking and
talking must have gone on another two hours. “I do not exaggerate. We went upstairs, finally. I said good night to her. She went into her room. And I into mine. I undressed quickly and got into bed. Right after I was in my bed, she came into the room. She did not knock. She entered. She stood at the side of my bed and undid the clasp on her evening dress. It slipped down from her shoulders to the floor. She stood there absolutely naked. I was astonished. I didn’t know what to do. She stood looking at me and said—I’ll never forget her voice at that moment—‘Oh, don’t you like good old Elizabethan lovemaking? Oh, I like it!’ There was no question of what she meant. She said it almost coarsely.
“Of course, it was the drink. She would never have behaved like that, on the first night, I think, without the drinking. I was startled. She looked so small then. She just stood there like a statue, and I—I evaded her. I tried to talk to her. I didn’t want to make love to her, and we did not. I said she had to get up early for her lecture in the morning at the college tomorrow. Something like that. And I asked when she would like her breakfast. I must have sounded addled. I sort of led her back to her room. She said, ‘I’d like a bottle of whiskey, please,’ very politely.
“In the morning I did bring in, or saw that the maid did, the coffee and the whiskey. Uge was snoring. He was not in bed with her. And I’ve just now remembered that she was sitting up in bed, writing.… I can see her sitting there, looking down at her paper in the morning light.
“Uge had a cup of black coffee.… He was, I think a sort of buffer. From life, from her life, from life itself.”