Savage Beauty (70 page)

Millay was losing control, and Eugen, who had provided it and protected her, could no longer do so.

CHAPTER 30

I
n January 1934, Eugen and Edna set sail for Marseille aboard the S.S.
Excalibur
. Just before they left, she wrote to a friend that they’d rented Eugen’s brother’s house in Antibes, “
right out on the end of the Cape, a perfectly lovely place.” She wanted to be where it was warm and beautiful, “and I shall be able to keep all my energy for my work.”

After twelve days at sea, they arrived at Jan Boissevain’s villa, the Petite Villa Hou’zée on Cap d’Antibes, where she made this diary entry:

Furious yesterday because they wouldn’t let us off for half an hour at Mallorca … and sat at the bar all afternoon, scolding and getting tighter and tighter. Last night and this morning terrible wind blew up suddenly, and the ship pitched and shuddered like anything.… Had the most awful hangover this morning, and all our packing to do, and in that sea! I must have been darned drunk last night. I don’t remember leaving the bar and going to my cabin at all. But apparently I came down just before dinner and got into bed and fell asleep like a shot. I awoke about midnight when Ugin came in. I remembered nothing, but my clothes were all over the room, and I never do that. Disgraceful. Got to cut it out. Not only that the doctor says so but that I’m getting a tummy.

The following morning, with the seas still high, she forgot her resolutions and packed “with the help of seven gin-rickeys.”

The Petite Villa Hou’zée sits on the rocks at the edge of the Mediterranean, where the sea is the color of fresh blue paint. Jan and his wife, Charlotte, owned two villas, the larger one just above the Hôtel du Cap, the smaller a cottage built at the edge of the sea. Beneath it, blasted into the rock, was a sort of cave with a table chiseled from the rock. The water could be heard splashing against the stone steps that fell into the Mediterranean from the tiny terrace of the cottage. The house rose from the rocky coast, with bamboo shades across the terrace and bright striped canvas awnings to keep the interior cool.

On Cap d’Antibes they began a healthy regimen: no smoking and no drinking; they got up at sunrise and went to bed early. They bought a badminton set in Cannes and played before breakfast, which they had outdoors, and took long walks, ambling along the quiet dusty lanes that bordered the sea and picking up pinecones for the open fires they made each night because the days were still wintry and overcast. Playfully they wired Jan to come for a visit in his own cottage. Within the week he was there, “bringing presents of
roggebrood
and a yellow cheese with aromatic seeds in it.”

Then the violent north winds of the mistral began to blow so hard they couldn’t play badminton anymore. “Had the curse and felt awful—a week overdue.” In the afternoon Edna pulled herself together and they went to the casino, where “Ugin’s system,” she wrote, worked like a charm and he made 820 francs. Three days later they were “drinking again.… But my God, you have to do something to fight off the mistral.” The weather stayed foul. “Haven’t seen the sun for over a week, except for about an hour on Thursday. This morning icy wind blowing from the east, grey sky. Sea pale greenish blue and very handsome surf on our rocks. But I have a headache and feel nervous and irritable. Think I’ll get drunk.”

On February 18, they motored over to Cap Ferrat to have lunch with Somerset Maugham,

just the three of us, Dr. Fairfield—who is a sister of Rebecca West—Mr. Maugham and the man who lives with him, his secretary, et cet, Gerald Hexton, I believe his name is. Beautiful place, up on the hillside overlooking the water, delightful gardens with the most succulent-looking green grass here and there in tiny lawns and lanes. They get the grass-seed from England, and they have to dig up the lawns and re-seed them every year. I must say it is worth it.

I liked S but somehow it was not very much fun, something wrong somewhere.

February 22.

My birthday.—Didn’t think anybody would know about it. But this morning before I was up Ugin and Jan stood outside my door and sang “Happy Birthday.” And then they came in, Ugin with a beautiful bouquet of mauve stock and pink geraniums from the garden, and Jan with a great spray of almond blossoms from his little
proprieté
on the hill.

The next day, her vacation was over. “I’m working like fury now on my Guggenheim Fellowship applicants. I’ve read them all by now, and thought about them a lot; but now I want to re-read them, and collect my notes on them, and then I must write my report.—It’s a terrible job, all right. But I knew it would be.”

The next diary entry wasn’t until March 4:

Slaved all day in my room on my reports from the Guggenheim Foundation. Twenty-one poets I have read and re-read and thought about and finally written about, and then re-written about.… I’ve given hardly a moment to my own work for these two months—tennis, and reading and pondering on these twenty-one writers, that’s all I’ve done.—I’m recommending Kay Boyle, Conrad Aiken, Isidor Schneider, Walter Lowen-fels.…—Their own pet, for some reason, seems to be Horace Gregory, who means to me, if I except certain of the bawdier among the Catullus translations, precisely not a damn thing.

She said her weight was down to 105, which meant she’d lost more weight sitting in bed writing her Guggenheim reports than she had playing tennis. The next day her reports went off, and although she was exhausted, she washed her hair, slipped into her shorts, and leaped out into the sunshine to play tennis. “Afterwards went to the Casino at Juan-les-Pins and drank buckets of champagne-cocktails.”

She also danced with the professional. “He complimented me, but in a patronizing way. Thick-headed little Frenchman. I dance so much better than he does. He just knows a few little steps I’m not familiar with, that’s all—and even at that I follow him like his shadow. Stupid little beast.”

George Dillon had remained in Paris after their time together in 1932. Although there is no correspondence from him in her files, they must have maintained some connection, for she now sent him the manuscript of her next book of poems. He responded with a twelve-page letter and very carefully told her which of the poems he liked the best and why, and which he thought less good. His tone throughout was self-conscious and oddly precious:

Well, my dear, this is what I really think.… I spent all last evening reading them and thinking about them, and writing you this ponderous batch of notes—and now I must send it off at once, or I shall become disgusted with the idea of myself as a critic of poetry, and not send it at all.… if it makes you angry, throw it away and forget it.

He hoped she would read it on one of the rare days when the mistral was not blowing. He sounds like a careful elderly uncle.

Two days later she made a very simple entry: “Must go to Paris tomorrow for a few days.” On March 9 she left by train: “Very luxurious and elegant compartment, all to myself, very deluxe. I wanted to travel cheaper, we’re so poor this year.” It was raining, the mistral continued to blow, and she was testy. “I feel like the devil. And the sheets are of cotton, and I hate cotton sheets. These are particularly cheap and offensive. They feel like very old paper-covered books with dust on them—Thank heaven I have a flask of gin along.”

When she arrived she met George Dillon for lunch at his hotel:

A charming place in the rue Galilée.—Came back to the hotel and washed my hair—in water that was absolutely cold!—but absolutely!—No difference whatever in the temperature from the two fawcets. Took a bath in ice-cold water, too.… Had dinner with George—didn’t notice where—and went to the theatre.… Went somewhere afterwards and had some drinks.

The next day they met again, and again they lunched together at his hotel.

Then came back to my hotel and showed George a lot of my new poems.… He made one or two extremely intelligent and valuable suggestions, which I shall at once try to carry out.—Had some whisky and sodas sent up.—Went out to dinner rather late. Came back to my hotel and talked some more, and read some more poems.

In the morning George left to catch the boat train for Le Havre; his destination was Baltimore. Millay wrote simply, “I did not see him.” George was going home without any fresh work, and without a job.

Eugen and Jan were awaiting her at Antibes. Their welcome was to fill the house with flowers, “and in my room sweet-peas and little daisies, and a camellia.”

The next day she stayed in bed working on her poems as the mistral played havoc with her nerves. Eugen, she said, “gave me a marvelous suggestion about
The Hedge of Hemlocks
.” She was uneasy: “I distrust the mood I am in, and dare do nothing definite.” The poems seemed good to her, though maybe too much so: “They all look good. A dangerous state of mind.”

She was still drinking too much and as a consequence had what she called “one of my old-time headaches.” They managed to play five sets of tennis all the same, and she and Eugen actually beat Jan in two of the sets. “But we all played as if we were in diving-suits.”

The next day she received notice that she had been elected to the Cosmopolitan Club,

and this although I … do not want to be a member of their club, and never did want to, and said plainly to several of their members who approached me … that I would rather be found shot in a night-club
cabinet
than be caught dozing over a copy of
Town and Country .…
Not that I have anything in particular against this particular club,—but I don’t like clubs, and I’m darned if I’ll join them.

March 22.

Thursday
. 1934—Cap d’Antibes

Have been working very hard these last few days on my
Epitaph for the Race of Man
. Have finished several of the sonnets which I began years ago. Am having a hard time with the one beginning “When Death was young and bleaching bones were few.” The trouble is I need to have my dinosaur both a brontosaurus and an allosaurus—herbivorous in the third line and carnivorous in the seventh line!—And I’m afraid I just can’t work it.—Played tennis this afternoon, and never played so well. Jan said it was for the first time really tennis. Very tired afterwards, however. Went to the Casino and drank martinis.

The following day she worked all day and finished “See where Capella with her golden kids.” “Ugin read the whole series aloud to me, seventeen of them. Kept getting shivers up my spine, and at the end I found myself very shaken. A strange experience.”

The next night she couldn’t sleep and worked through the night on
Epitaph
, writing an entire sonnet, “What rider spurs him from the darkening east.”

Jan’s wife, Charlotte, arrived in Cannes from New York. “Well,” Millay wrote wryly, “our peaceful bachelor establishment is invaded by the lewd presence of woman. Awoke this morning to hear Charlotte scolding Jan because he didn’t have a lady’s-maid waiting to unpack for her. They had a terrible row. And she’s been home just one day.”

In the morning of March 26, while Edna was packing to leave, Charlotte stormed into her room, “
all primed for a fight, started right in without a word of preamble to say that she’d have me to know she wasn’t a bitch even though I did think she was a bitch, et cetera. I was never so astonished. I simply stood there. Finally I said that I didn’t know what she was talking about but if I’d said anything to hurt her feelings I was sorry.”

Charlotte left the room after that. But Millay wrote, “I was horribly upset, all cold and shaky. I can’t stand such things. I can’t stand people who like to row and make scenes.” Then she made a truly remarkable statement:

Eugen and I have [been] married nearly eleven years, and we have never had a quarrel, but
not one
. Two or three times one of us has been irritable or spoken sharply to the other, but the other has never taken it up, so it has always stopped right there.—Uge and I left tonight on the train for Paris, and I must say we were both relieved to get away without further trouble. Women are awful, really. I have very little respect for them, with a few exceptions. They are so uncontroled and self-indulgent, and so
noisy!
I’m a stout feminist, and all that, but I do think that for the most part women are pretty awful.

Nearly a half century after that scene, Charlotte Boissevain was reclining on a chaise longue wrapped in a white terry-cloth robe, facing the creamy light from the Mediterranean. She was nearly ninety. She was tiny, and her hair was dyed the color rich older women seem to color their hair, the color of a base metal, brass or copper, like the flesh of peaches near the pit.
She was talking about Edna Millay in the Petite Villa Hou’zée on Cap d’Antibes.