Authors: Nancy Milford
In an undated notebook Edna made very detailed, orderly notes for her doctor in Great Barrington: “My birthday yesterday reminded me that I am over forty-five.…” It was February 23, 1938, when Edna Millay would have been forty-six.
1. What virtue is there in the old-fashioned spring remedy—said to cleanse the system, particularly the blood—of impurities?
2. a. Is there iron in dandelion greens, boiled, with no water thrown away?
b. Of what good to the system is the property known as (I don’t know how it is spelled) Thoraxicum,—which is found in dandelion greens?
c. Is there more iron in spinach (particularly the perennial kind, called “Good King Henry”) than in boiled dandelion leaves & roots?
3. What virtue as a spring tonic is to be found in an infusion (very strong, dark and bitter) of the leaves and flowers of the plant called “boneset,” or “thoroughwort”—Eupatorium perboliatum?
a. What are the foods considered very bad for persons with a very high blood pressure?
b. Would not these foods be useful in raising the blood pressure—of a person whose b.p.—like my own—is, for his age, too low? …
c. Might not this low blood pressure, all by itself, account for the fact that to get out of bed, to take a bath, to dress, to arise from a comfortable chair when once seated in it, to do any work at all, whether housework or writing, or getting on a heavy fur coat, hat and gloves, drawing on and clasping the clasps of galoshes, rising and selecting a walking-stick, pulling open a door hard to open, and stepping out into a world of icy, slippery roads, or roads deep under snows and exhausting to proceed along for even the hired man—might not this low blood pressure all by itself account for the fact that I must exert so great an amount of will-power, and of stern discipline of quick, anxious, angry and determined mind over inert and uninterested matter, in order to force myself to do anything at all?
d. Is “Benzedrine” the only thing which can for a few hours give me a feeling of energy, and the power to do the things I do much desire to do, but am kept from doing by physical, not mental inertia?
e. Would it harm me in any way to take per diem:
6 capsules of Taka-combex;
2 pellets (1 black—the vitamins, and 1 grey, the minerals) of Vi-Syneral?
and 1 injection (a moderate amount) of Betaxin,—which I think is plain Vitamin B1?
f. I think that I am badly in need of minerals,—calcium, iron, iodine, phosphate, etc.
She continued to ask a few more questions, mostly about boosting the calcium in her diet by drinking milk from their Guernsey cows, with lime added to make it easier for her to digest, “(as, I believe, is often done in the case of babies who reject their milk).” She even suggested taking calcium gluconate, which she’d once taken, because, she wrote, “[Note: my bones are soft; my teeth are brittle. Do not these facts indicate a lack of organic calcium?]”
What Millay did not mention in her long list of remedies and complaints was any pain as a result of the automobile accident a year and a half earlier.
There is a puzzling letter in Millay’s files from Henry Allen Moe, the president of the Guggenheim Foundation, dated January 1938. He asked Millay not to fret about a loan she’d taken from the foundation: “
A delay in payment will make no difference to Senator Guggenheim or to the Foundation.” Why she needed the money and why she asked for it was nowhere made clear, but the need was real enough for Eugen to have approached Curtis Hidden Page, a manuscript and rare-books dealer, who offered to buy
Renascence
for three or four hundred dollars, which seemed to Eugen to be too little:
I think if we can’t get $800 for it, we should wait for better times.… Nobody has money and as for anybody to have money to spend on art, beauty, or fun or other idiotic luxuries, I think we must wait for 1940 when we may see Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt walk out of the White House unless he leaves it before that, feet first.
At the end of February, Eugen thanked Curtis Hidden Page for his check for $650, “in behalf of ourselves, our grocers, butchers, tailors and candlestick-makers.”
Now, the poor girl is hard at work reading two suitcases full of books, Mss., sheet proofs, etc. etc. in order to pick out the people for the Guggenheim Fellowships.—This takes her two months of her precious life every year!—I am trying to make her give it up.—but then she is cursed with a social conscience and a New England conscience at that! I’m glad I was born without that disturbing and useless thing.
In a letter that exists in three drafts, the last (and presumably final) one dated March 18, Millay addressed Mr. Moe and the members of the committee. It is a sorry communication:
These reports reach you in many instances in an unfinished state; some of them are mere sketches; some of them consist of only a line or two.… I had not taken into consideration that I might fall ill and be unable to continue with, and to perfect the work, as I had planned it.… I beg you to forgive in this report much material which seems, since I am unable to present it to you in a finished state and in a context which would have explained my use of it, rambling and in some instances extraneous.
By now something was very much the matter: her illness had invaded her working life. Her critical acuity, however, remained untouched. Among her draft papers is a two-page report on a poet whom she recommended that the Guggenheim Foundation turn down:
He writes nothing but sonnets. He has become so skilled in this form that he writes sonnets easily and naturally; his emotion is accustomed to being penned in this stall, and enters it willingly. This is true of all sonnet writers … true of all poets who habitually write ballades; Villon could have made you a ballade while fencing with you.… We all make mistakes; we all think at times that we have written a very good poem, when we have, in fact, written an undistinguished one.
With Muriel Rukeyser, whose application she also rejected, her report ran to four pages. When she veered off course somewhat, her veering was always interesting:
I think I know something about the particular kind of arrogance which Miss Rukeyser impresses me as having. Young women full of energy and ideas, as well as somewhat radical ideals, can have a pretty bad time of it and become pretty angry and discouraged working as under-graduates in any American college.… I know that when I was at Vassar, although I felt great respect and admiration for many members of the faculty and still admire and deeply love a few of them, I was constantly being irked by what seemed to me either utter lack of imagination, or merely officious nonsense on the part of some others; and I can see in my mind now that particular walk with which I must have moved about the campus: a slight swinging of the hips to keep the chip on the shoulder in place.
Rukeyser was writing in “U.S.1” about the horror of the men who had died of silicosis contracted while working in a tunnel in West Virginia, and while Millay found it both “inexcusable and criminal” to permit such mining without safety devices to protect those men, nevertheless “the business of a person who wishes to make a poem about this situation is primarily to write poetry. This section of Miss Rukeyser’s book is not poetry. It is an indignant and reiterated statement that this sort of thing is a shocking thing.” The work of a poet, she explained, is not the same as the work of a reporter, an agitator, or a reformer; and when Rukeyser broke into prose in the trial section of the case, it was “not even good propaganda for her point.”
If you could make her see that we don’t really care at all about her religion, her politics or her morals, that as far as we are concerned, she is free to go tattooed forward, aft and amidships with anchors and mermaids, or to worship the God Bip, and be as anthropophagous as a crocodile; that if her writing should prove to be very high class indeed, we would even try to bail her out for minor munchings, and keep her out of trouble generally, then, perhaps something might really be done.
Again and again in her notes Millay addressed the political orientation of the applicants—and insisted upon the sanctity of the artist’s work. She also cautioned the foundation about its direction and, in doing so, revealed her own. She never asked; she insisted.
My task … is made extremely difficult by the fact that my tastes in poetry, as in all the arts, is so catholic.… Belonging to no party, no church, having no cause which I would bolster at the expense of good writing, having no axe to grind, my task, as I said, is difficult. Of the six writers I am recommending this year, three are definitely revolutionists, one is definitely a classicist, one is probably mad and the other is doubtless trying to recover from shell-shock. What are you going to do about them? … I have come loudly out into the open, and am running the risk of making an utter fool of myself. I think the Guggenheim Foundation cannot properly be administered on any other terms; we may not foster the conservative at the expense of the experimental; the solid at the expense of the slippery; we must take chances; we must incur danger. Otherwise we shall eventually become an organization which gives prizes for acclaimed accomplishment, not fellowships for obscure talent, tangible promise, probable development, and possible achievement.
Later, when her friend the poet Harold Lewis Cook told her he was too intimidated by the august award even to apply for it, she wrote him:
Listen, toots, nobody who ever had this Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry ever did a darned thing with it.… Some people have kept on working just about as they would have worked if they hadn’t got it and some people have been entirely dried up by getting it. What has George Dillon done since he wrote those two marvellous first volumes? Nothing except translate (along with me) about half the poems of Baudelaire and become editor of “Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.” … I have yet to see any person, at least in the Poetry Department, do a darned thing which he told the Guggenheim he was going to do. Most of them have done flat nothing.
By the fall of that year, Eugen phoned Henry Allen Moe to tell him that Miss Millay would be unable to judge poets for the Guggenheim Foundation any longer. He gave no reason.
Whatever her private opinion about George Dillon’s lack of productivity, when Dillon again asked for a few poems from her for his magazine, she wired him in Chicago that she could send him six or seven now. He took all of them (adding her “Sonnet in Tetrameter,” which she feared might be too “early Millay”) for his October 1938 issue. If he had any suggestions to make, she wrote, “
for God’s sake, make them.” And here she struck a note of loneliness: “I have been for a long time without anybody to talk with about my poetry, any other poet I mean.” The other poets she knew disliked her new stuff and loathed the work of the new poets she admired. She sounded defensive: “I imagine that, although you like these poems, you might very well have preferred poems less early-Millay in character … poems more concerned with, apparently, things going on in the world outside myself today; poems more, if we may still use that old-fashioned word, ‘modern.’ ”
She signed this letter “Love” after she’d told him, “When I think of my reading engagement in Chicago, it makes me happy to remember that you will be there. I think I should feel lonely in Chicago without you.”
The next day she wrote to him again to say that she was sending him a photograph for the magazine’s Gallery, a Carl Van Vechten photograph in which she is wearing a dark, heavy suit and looks as if she means serious business. She enclosed a handkerchief he’d left at Steepletop. “
Probably the others of this kind are all worn out by now and this will come to you almost (but not quite, I am sorry) like a gift.”
INTENTION TO ESCAPE FROM HIM
I think I will learn some beautiful language, useless for commercial
Purposes, work hard at that.
I think I will learn the Latin name of every songbird, not only in America but wherever they sing.
(Shun meditation, though; invite the controversial:
Is the world flat? Do bats eat cats?) By digging hard I might deflect that river, my mind, that uncontrollable thing,
Turgid and yellow, strong to overflow its banks in spring, carrying away bridges;
A bed of pebbles now, through which there trickles one clear narrow stream, following a course henceforth nefast—
Dig, dig; and if I come to ledges, blast.
The poems she sent to George have one thing in common: they have an intensity that, while not new in her work, had been lacking in the recent past. They are free verse with very little rhyme; and each is marked by a sense of overwhelming loss.
THE FITTING
The fitter said, “
Madame, vous avez maigri
.”
And pinched together a handful of skirt at my hip.
“
Tant mieux
,” I said, and looked away slowly, and took my under-lip
Softly between my teeth.
Rip—rip!
Out came the seam, and was pinned together in another place.
She knelt before me, a hardworking woman with a familiar and unknown face,