Authors: Nancy Milford
Dressed in linty black, very tight in the arm’s-eye and smelling of sweat.
She rose, lifting my arm, and set her cold shears against me,—snip-snip;
Her knuckles gouged my breast. My drooped eyes lifted to my guarded eyes in the glass, and glanced away as from someone they had never met.
“
Ah, que madame a maigri!
” cried the
vendeuse
, coming in with dresses over her arm.
“
C’est la chaleur
,” I said, looking out into the sunny tops of the horse-chestnuts—and indeed it was very warm.
I stood for a long time so, looking out into the afternoon, thinking of the evening and you …
While they murmured busily in the distance, turning me, touching my secret body, doing what they were paid to do.
She very much wanted Dillon to publish “The Fitting.” He’d seen it before in France and had suggested a change she agreed to that was shrewd—what had been “quiet body” became “secret body” in the next-to-last line. But in manuscript the poem, which had been written on Jan’s stationery from the Petite Villa Hou’zée, was called “Short Story,” and the body is neither “quiet” nor “secret” but sacred.
CHAPTER 34
T
hat summer and fall Eugen worked to make Steepletop shipshape: hired men came to cable the great old maples that edged their lawns, and the dark evergreens that skirted the pool as well as the apple trees on the near end of the blueberry field were pruned and treated, sprayed and fed. The head gardener was Edna. She spaded and weeded, but she was, she told a reporter from
Good Housekeeping
,
a bad transplanter. When I find that the hole I’ve dug for a rosebush is too small and I have to drag it out and dig some more, or when roots which I’ve carefully spread out curl back and slap at me, I become irritated. My husband will spend hours transplanting one rose. He has infinite patience. I haven’t.
In the hardy garden were beds of oriental poppies and lupine the color of ink. There were white double-headed peonies, called Festiva Maxima, and rose beds of hybrid teas whose fragrance lasted into fall. The harebell seeded itself everywhere, and the wild red columbine, “which I dug up and brought down in my lap from the top of a mountain near here. Hollyhocks did well in the rock garden where they no more belonged than they did in the driveway, where they also thrived.”
In September, Eugen had two ornamental wrought-iron washstands made with elegantly fitted mirrors and marble tops for the pool. At the
end of one secluded alley of evergreens was a fat little marble cherub by Randolph Rogers, done up as an Indian with a quiver of arrows slung over his plump chest. Iron gate hinges were made to match the ornamental washstands, with a drying rack and a hat tree, and charlie was commissioned to do paintings in automobile paint to weather the outdoors. At the entrance to the garden were two fleshy putti resting on clouds, one blowing a trumpet, the other peering at a cedar waxwing alighted on his finger.
“
Tell Charlie,” Eugen wrote Norma, “the behind of one of the cupids needs a little rouge and powder.” He assured her that the nude that hung over their outdoor bar, which he had christened “Barroom Fanny” (and that looked very like Norma), “came through the winter swell, the tough baby.”
The summer was going to be glorious, they insisted to their friends. When Eolo Testi, one of the young men who played cello in their quartet at the Blochs’ summer music school in Hillsdale and, as Edna wrote, “sort of lives here,” beat the pants off Eugen at tennis, they filmed it. First, a tan Eugen is playing very smartly if a bit stiffly, dressed in white tennis shorts; both men are bare-chested, and Edna officiates perched atop a high wooden stand. Eugen calmly walks to the net, unbuttons his shorts, and steps out of them, handing them over the net to the laughing dark-haired young man who has just trounced him. Edna rushes toward Eugen, smiling, and wraps him in a blanket. That summer of 1938, Edna Millay was voted one of the ten most famous women in America.
On July 13,
Edna wrote to Blanche Bloch, who had been giving her piano lessons, asking if the quartet they had often before brought to Steepletop could come again for a dress rehearsal.
“
Long before Tanglewood,” Blanche Bloch remembered, “we had a music school in Hillsdale, and we would have our rehearsals in the Millay house. Edna never liked to meet people. She was conscious of who she was. And others were conscious of who she was. She would sit in a big hat in the first row.
“We held our dress rehearsals at Steepletop. We rehearsed in the front room, with the two pianos—two members of the quartet lived with them for a while, Dante Bergonzi and Eolo Testi.… second violin was Brodus Earle, and Arno Kyam played viola. Boissevain and Ficke and a doctor sponsored the quartet.”
Sitting in the garden behind their house, Blanche Bloch recalled that Edna had studied with her for five years. “She was musical. She had the best taste in music. But she had tiny hands and she couldn’t play Chopin
études. She simply could not do it. She wanted to play only virtuoso pieces, she didn’t have enough technique, and I told her that she couldn’t. She would say, ‘Blanche, play me this! play me that!’ She never stopped. I remember that she wanted to play the Rachmaninoff Second—well, we could play it slowly, in half-time.”
Alexander Bloch, Blanche’s husband, who was a composer and conductor, said, “Sometimes she’d just call up and sing pieces of music, maybe that she’d just heard or that had gone through her mind, and she’d say, ‘Allie, what is that?’ When I knew, which was not too often, I’d tell her.”
Blanche interrupted him: “Edna did exactly what she pleased, when she pleased, and where she pleased. One must remember that about her. And she would just disappear when she wanted to.
“Whereas, Gene—oh, Gene was one of the most charming men. “When he laughed, he filled the world with vitality. And he told the most wonderful stories. He had a really rich brother with whom he once carried on about being a sheep rancher—it was something like that—he wrote this brother that he had a great sheep ranch! That was just like him. Well, the brother came over after all this correspondence about feed and breeds, you know, and there was only one sheep! Oh, perhaps they had three.
“After her manuscript was burned in Florida she came to see us. All the newspapers published the story of her loss of manuscripts. We were not at all sure what we were going to say—how could anyone be consoled after such a loss? And do you know what she said? She said, ‘O, Florida. O, cold Florida! Could any state be horrida?’ Well, we both just roared with laughter—and with relief.”
2
Before the publication of
Huntsman, What Quarry?
, her first book of lyric poetry in five years, in May 1939, Millay again began a reading tour. She traveled by train, by car, and, if the train was delayed, very rarely by airplane. She crossed the country as far east as Boston, as far north as Buffalo, as far south as Fort Worth and as far west as Los Angeles. She read in Pitts-field and Albany, then in Cleveland and Dayton, Springfield and Columbus, Danville and Chicago. She went to Indianapolis, Decatur, and Cincinnati. To Huntington, West Virginia, and back either to Cincinnati again or on to Newport-Hamilton/Norwood, Ohio, on the Kentucky border. She read in St. Louis, Tulsa, Denton, Dallas, and Forth Worth; in El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Denver, Omaha, Cedar Rapids, and Des Moines. She read in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and in some tiny town just above Charlottesville in the center
of Virginia, in Raleigh/Durham, and then the long trip back up to Baltimore, New York City, Hartford.
Her only break was when, two weeks into her tour, she took one day off to attend the New England Futurity at Narragansett, where Bill Brann’s two-year-old colt won $33,000. She told a reporter in Dayton, Ohio, that when he had won she’d become so excited she couldn’t stand up.
“
‘I’m crazy about seeing horses run,’ she confessed, ‘I have studied everything in the English manual but I’m no feminine Bing Crosby yet. I’d like to have a stable of a few horses myself, and perhaps some day my poetry will earn enough to make that possible.’ ” Eugen commented dryly that the reporter hadn’t come to interview her as a jockey.
She read new poems that dealt with the conflicts raging in Europe: “Say that We Saw Spain Die” (which had just been published in
Harper’s Magazine
) and a trio of sonnets about China and Japan. “Poets are deeply aware of world conditions,” she explained at one lecture. “In fact, they have a tendency more than any other writers to become very world-conscious and you will find much of this reflected in future poetry.” She cautioned, however, that it was destructive to move from headlines into verse: “It’s dangerous to write immediately one’s emotions are stirred, for then one is apt to say things that may be wrong or regretted afterwards.”
In Dayton, she was to speak at the dinner meeting of the Nomad Club before her reading. A reporter described first what she was wearing for the reading—“a stunning gown of red velvet, trimmed in gold braid and a black velvet cape”—and then how she looked and moved:
Hair, amber red, swept back from the poet’s forehead, and hung loosely at the nape of her neck; gown, cerise red, molded the body and swept in train along the floor. Flame! and flame, too the emotions of the poet. Could the audience hear her without the microphone? She motioned toward the “monstrosity” with a gesture of scorn.
When she learned that those in the rear could not, “Miss Millay moved toward the microphone, commanding: ‘Put that thing on.’ Remarking, as though in aside: ‘I am simply furious.’ ” Beginning again, she stopped once more. What was that roaring noise? she asked. The ventilating system. Learning that it couldn’t be turned off, “she continued with the finest reading of a poem we have heard voiced by a poet, and we have heard several of the world’s great. This was ‘Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.’ ”
She read from
Figs;
she dramatized portions of
Conversation at Midnight;
and then, as always, she did her child poems from
A Very Little Sphinx
. She put one hand on her hip and glared. She slouched. She squared her shoulders and stuck her chest out. She tossed her head. She peeked up from
under her curls. She stamped her foot. She grinned. But whatever she did, she pleased her audience. The best-liked part of her program was often the early poems.
I know a hundred ways to die.
I’ve often thought I’d try one:
Lie down beneath a motor truck
Some day when standing by one.
…
I know some poison I could drink.
I’ve often thought I’d taste it.
But mother bought it for the sink,
And drinking it would waste it.
Or, assuming what the newspaper in Ohio called “a childish puckishness that makes one think of A. A. Milne,” she said:
Look, Edwin! Do you see that boy
Talking to the other boy?
No, over there by those two men—
Wait, don’t look now—now look again.
No, not the one in navy-blue;
That’s the one he’s talking to.
Sure you see him? Striped pants?
Well, he was born in Paris, France.
which brought the house down. But she could change in an instant; looking dreamily into the wings of the stage, she began:
Wonder where this horseshoe went.
Up and down, up and down,
Up and past the monument,
Maybe into town.
Wait a minute, “Horseshoe,
How far have you been?”
Says it’s been to Salem
And halfway to Lynn.
Wonder who was in the team.
Wonder what they saw.
Wonder if they passed a bridge—
Bridge with a draw.
Says it went from one bridge
Straight upon another.
And suddenly you knew, as her audience in 1938 in Dayton or Cincinnati could not have known, that the source of this poem lay in Millay’s own past. We are accompanying her in that carriage driven down a dusty country lane in Massachusetts before the turn of the century, with her grandmother as the horse shies and bolts, throwing her from the careening buggy to her death.
Says it took a little girl
Driving with her mother.
These child poems were charged with the energy of family secrets; little explosions of meaning and sharp loss. When Millay stood there, defiantly, all five feet one inch of her, she seemed to become that child—her fishtail train flowing behind her, playing with it, curling it over her arm, tossing it, snapping it like a silk banner behind her. But it was her voice that captured people. That rich, dark, deep contralto always came as a surprise from such a little person. It was the honeyed easy depth, the emotional vibrance of her voice that held her audiences to her. Yet it was odd that this forty-six-year-old woman would still alternate her serious lyrics with her girlish kiddie poems. What was she doing when she tossed her hair back from her face, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, planted her feet wide apart squarely on the floor, and began?
Last came her new sonnets, which were no longer love songs; they were meditations, as Louise Bogan called them, lamentations, measured mourning for a world that was about to go to war. She dropped her head; then, lifting her face, she ended with a ringing anthem to a freedom that was both personal and political. Women in the audience were heard to catch their breath. The audience was on its feet exploding with applause as she sank to one knee, dragging the train of her gown behind her, then raised her face into the glow and heat of Dayton’s applause.