Savage Beauty (71 page)

“
I knew Eugen far before I met Edna. Or even before I had met Jan. This was during the First World War. I was an actress then, and doing ingenue parts.” She remembered that when she first met Edna she thought, “There is a brilliant woman—there wasn’t a thing in the world she didn’t know about. But it was” —she hesitated—“it was like this: she looked through me and I looked through her.” They were as unalike as chalk and cheese. “They played tennis every day when they were here. And I have known so many people, interesting people, people who did things well, who were extraordinary in some way—whether they were beautiful or rich or talented or whatever—and I can remember stories and conversations about all of them. And yet with Edna I cannot tell you one thing that she said, one thing that I can remember. I found her a shy person. Look at all these books. All of them with inscriptions, and yet Edna could not waste a word, could she, unless she was paid for it? What does she write here? ‘For Jan and Charlotte,’ or something. With the date.”

But what did Millay look like? How did she dress? move? speak? “She wore very little makeup and nothing on her nails, and her hair was completely natural. She had a phobia about her hair. She washed it every day. She wore long loose robes. They were lovely, and Eugen picked everything for her—Bergdorf Goodman sort of things. He picked her clothes and her shoes, and he picked up after her, too. He cooked for her and managed the farm, the house, and her correspondence. What didn’t he do! You must understand, there was never a word spoken by Jan against Eugen. Nor against Edna, for that matter. There was an attachment that was almost—oh, an attachment between the brothers, between the two men—it was beautiful and warm and completely uncritical.”

Standing before her bookcase with its signed copies of first editions of novels by her friend Rebecca West and by Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, she began to speak, pointing to a book of Millay’s poems inscribed to them both: “There. There is as much as she’s ever written to me, to us—her words are precious, to Edna. And how do I see her? Edna—with a wall around her.”

Edna and Eugen were in Paris almost two weeks, and a good deal of time was spent having cocktails with friends: “
Ugin got very tight, I fairly so.” They saw the Fratellinis at the Cirque d’Hiver, but “
The funny little old circus stank so I was afraid I shouldn’t be able to stand it until they came on. Did, however, and loved them.” They saw Mae West in
I’m No Angel
and thought her awful: “
She exercised no come-hither at all upon Ugin,—nor upon me, either, and I am far from unsusceptible to woman’s charms.”

On April 7, she described being taken by Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks to the studio of a young painter, whose name she spelled phonetically: Chillichef. He was Pavel Tchelitchew.

Liked some of his paintings quite a lot, but thought quite a number of them pretty silly. Also liked the young man, though this, I am sure, was purely physical. He was insufferably conceited, talked all the time and about nothing but himself, can’t stand any paintings but his own, Rembrandt is awful, Vermeer is awful, except Chillichef, who is wonderful.

She’d been told that he was the great love of Edith Sitwell’s life. “
Well,” she entered wryly in her diary,

I can understand it, in a way. But God! what a selfish man. Still things like that never seem to stop us.

Took Lucie Mardrus and Germain de Castro and a young French Communist friend of theirs to Maxim’s for supper. Had a wild gay time. I got lovely tight. Instructed the taxi-driver to take us to a perfectly dreadful place, all naked girls walking about and sitting on your lap, and spiriting twenty-franc pieces off the table either with the
derrier
or the
devant
. Lord, I must have been plastered to take that party there!

By the following Monday they were in London. They tried to economize by staying at an inexpensive hotel, which she immediately hated. It was cold, shabby, and dreary. “
Saw the forty-eight dowdiest women on earth all at the same time right here in the lounge, and the ninety-six largest feet. Must be a convention,” she quipped. They went to the theater every night—to see Elisabeth Bergner in
Catherine the Great
, Sybil Thorndike, and Noël Coward’s
Conversation Piece
, “charming, but not filling.” Then they took Laurence Olivier and his wife, Jill Esmond, to supper at the Savoy Grill: “Champagne, lots of fun. Went home with them afterwards to their house in Chelsea.” She was invited to lunch the next day but went for cocktails instead.

Larry came in from a rehearsal of “Biography”; astonished to see me there, was very distrait, did some steps of a tap-dance, put a ship on the mantel and loved it there and hated it there, went out to get some green paint to paint the trellis, returned without it, et cet. All very droll. I felt uncomfortable, and beat it as soon as I could.

On April 14, they caught the train to Lulworth Cove “to see Lulu.” Powys had been desperately ill with tuberculosis for years, but it now seemed to be in remission. It was a bleak spring day, she said in her diary, but nevertheless they walked the three miles over the downs to Chydock. “
Lulu looking beautiful with his curly white hair, and a beard, and looked better than I had dared hope. Left my notebook of typewritten poems for my new book for them to read.” Lulu gave her a pomander. But the best thing he gave her was the knowledge that Keats had written his sonnet “Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art” in Lulworth before he left for Italy and his death.

2

Back in America, Edna wrote to Eugene Saxton and sent him sixteen poems “
for the dummy of my new book.” She wrote in her diary, “It will really be two books, I think, published together—some of the poems need a definite separation from the others.” In her letter she was even clearer:

My idea about the books is something like this: If you print them to sell separately, then they must not be called Volumes One and Two, but will be called respectively “Huntsman, What Quarry?” and “Wine from These Grapes.” If you print them boxed together … then the entire collection might be called “Poems: 1934;” or some such thing; Volume One; Huntsman, What Quarry? and Volume Two: Wine from These Grapes. (By bad typing and sloppy punctuation I have succeeded in making both titles look awful; but as a matter of fact they are both grand titles, and will look perfectly swell.)

Huntsman
was to be the more personal book, and
Wine
would be in two sections, the first

a group of miscellaneous poems in a much harder and more astringent mood … the second section a sequence of related sonnets entitled ‘Epitaph for the Race of Man.’

This book will be the more philosophical and intellectual of the two volumes; the poems in it are in no instance of a personal or intimate nature.

What she really hoped, she told him, was that Harper would publish the two books as one—Volumes 1 and 2 of “Poems: 1934.” She did not want them to be sold as two separate volumes. Which was, however, exactly what Harper did.

In the summertime, after her return from Europe while she was working
to prepare her new collection of poems, Charlie Ellis came to Steeple-top to paint her portrait.

“
I don’t believe we planned it especially. It just worked out that way,” Charlie said. We were sitting in the front room by the fireplace, and he nodded toward a chair by the window where Edna used to feed the birds.

“She is sitting in that corner, her legs are curled up under her, and she is smoking a Turkish cigarette. I can see the look on her face if I look in that corner now.… She posed easily; I mean, she didn’t move, she seemed able to hold still. And there was nothing in particular that I was after or that I posed. The pose was just the way she was sitting.

“One day, well … I was painting, looking directly at her, when she said, ‘It’s finished.’ ‘What?’ I said. And she recited this poem, which she had apparently been composing while I painted her.”

ON THOUGHT IN HARNESS

My falcon to my wrist

Returns

From no high air.

I sent her toward the sun that burns

Above the mist;

But she has not been there.

Her talons are not cold; her beak

Is closed upon no wonder;

Her head stinks of its hood, her feathers reek

Of me, that quake at the thunder.

Degraded bird, I give you back your eyes forever, ascend now whither you are tossed;

Forsake this wrist, forsake this rhyme;

Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost,

But climb.

In Charlie’s painting Millay’s breasts are full and ample beneath her pale summer dress and her face looks composed. But it is not serene. She looks contained, as if she’s holding herself in.

“I painted Gene, too, right here on the couch in the front room. He had been ill with the flu or a cold or something, and I don’t think he liked the picture much. There was an American Indian blanket behind him—here—and he was just lying back on the couch with the throw behind
him. “What I liked was his love of life. And he had that as much as anyone I’ve ever known. More so, really.” And here Charlie turned away. “He could make a great thing out of anything.”

There was a long pause in our conversation, as if Charlie were recollecting far more than he’d just said. “When you know someone over a long period of years, you remember—oh, you remember other things. There was a terrific threat. I don’t know what it was. There were times when he loved Norma and times when he hated her. I didn’t pose a direct threat. I was just a drunken Irishman. Norma did. She posed a threat to him for some reason or other.”

Norma had entered the room and, overhearing our conversation, she erupted: “You never opened your mouth to defend me, not once against that son of a bitch! Do you hear me, Charlie?” Then she bent over and pinched his arm.

Charlie looked away from me, watching a baseball game on the television set. The sound was turned off. Norma returned to the kitchen. Now that I had him alone, our voices lowered as I asked if there had been one trait all of the Millay women shared equally. He answered in a flash: “Yes. They were nasty, everlastingly.”

*Since the Guggenheim Foundation continues to respect its own assurances of confidentiality even after the deaths of all to whom they extend their fellowships, I have quoted from Millay’s drafts of letters to them.

PART EIGHT
THE GREAT TOURS