Savage Beauty (80 page)

In a handwritten postscript she added that she’d send “Rendezvous” later; she was not including it at present because it was so badly typed “it is impossible.”

There must have been a good deal of conversation in the house about these poems. Millay waited ten days to send her December 29 letter off to George. One day later, on January 9, Eugen (unbeknownst to her) wrote directly to Dillon about them:

Vincent told me that she had written you a letter about her new poems. She had, however, been postponing sending you her poems … she thinks she ought to tear them up and that they are no good.

I am crazy about them and I think that they are amongst the very best that she has written, but then I am not a poet and I am swayed so easily by Vincent’s opinion about all poetry and about her poetry especially, that I am not sure enough to advise her.… It is in moments like these that I know I must fail her, not being a poet and I must look to you to help her. Please do it.

Love,
Ugin

What were these poems that they caused her such uncertainty? Mary Kennedy, who had known Millay since her marriage to Deems Taylor, remembered Millay coming to discuss them late one night in her apartment in New York:

She had come by herself. She’d been drinking, you see. She read me these poems to Dillon. They were greatly changed, I believe, when she published them. They were about betrayal … not adultery. I did not think, then, that they were for Eugen, and I do not now. They were about a real betrayal—in other words, it has given me my death wounds.… With Edna there were two warring elements and they were never resolved.

Oh, it’s heartbreaking! It’s vanity! The poetry, she knew. No one could touch her in that. But as a person, you see, as a woman, as a lover. Well … She was capable, then, of picking up a barman. I saw her do that! It was the drink. And vanity. Of course, who knows how far it went? Perhaps the barman refused to go with her. Or perhaps they did not go to bed.

Millay sent George Dillon “Rendezvous” and the eight poems that make up “Theme and Variations.” These last poems were the ones Mary Kennedy had kept from that night in manuscript. The theme was her sweet ally, love, and its old companion, betrayal, and the variation now was her familiar, pain:

I

Not even my pride will suffer much;
Not even my pride at all, maybe,
If this ill-timed, intemperate clutch
Be loosed by you and not by me,
Will suffer; I have been so true
A vestal to that only pride
Wet wood cannot extinguish, nor
Sand, nor its embers scattered, for,
See all these years, it has not died.

And if indeed, as I dare think,
You cannot push this patient flame,
By any breath your lungs could store,
Even for a moment to the floor
To crawl there, even for a moment crawl,
What can you mix for me to drink
That shall deflect me? What you do
Is either malice, crude defense
Of ego, or indifference:
I know these things as well as you;
You do not dazzle me at all.

Some love, and some simplicity,
Might well have been the death of me.

George did respond. He wrote all over the margins of her typescript. He didn’t much like this first one, particularly the last couplet; it seemed “tacked on,” he told her. The final poem, the eighth, is elegiac:

The time of year ennobles you.
The death of autumn draws you in.

The death of those delights I drew
From such a cramped and troubled source
Ennobles all, including you,
Involves you as a matter of course.

You are not, you have never been
(Nor did I ever hold you such),
Between your banks, that all but touch,
Fit subject for heroic song.…
The busy stream not over-strong,
The flood that any leaf could dam.…

Yet more than half of all I am
Lies drowned in shallow water here:
And you assume the time of year.

I do not say this love will last;
Yet Time’s perverse, eccentric power
Has bound the hound and stag so fast
That strange companions mount the tower
Where Lockhart’s fate with Keats is cast,
And Booth with Lincoln shares the hour.

That which has quelled me, lives with me,
Accomplice in catastrophe.

She had made two brilliant changes between this typescript and what had been her working draft, where she’d written:

Where Brutus walks in Caesar’s thongs
And Booth with Lincoln shares the hour

Millay cut the reference to Brutus and Caesar and found a more apt poetic assassin in Lockhart. Lockhart, whom very few people other than scholars had heard of, was in his day such a savage critic that he was nicknamed “The Scorpion.” “When he condemned Keats’s
Endymion
, he was accused, by Byron, of having hastened the young, sick poet’s death.

Her final couplet is compelling and again far better than it had stood in draft, where she had written, “That which had quelled me, rides with me/Golden, in high catastrophe.” But “Golden” and “high” were words that inflated the ending and meant far less than the potency of “Accomplice.” “That which has quelled me, lives with me, / Accomplice in catastrophe.” For what she was talking about in these poems was her own part
in the assassination of her spirit. These, the final lines of the entire sequence, must be the most powerful. They strike not only a ringing close but a true one. And while George Dillon did not take any of the eight poems in “Theme and Variations” for
Poetry
magazine, he did take “Rendezvous”:

Not for these lovely blooms that prank your chambers did I come. Indeed,

I could have loved you better in the dark;

That is to say, in rooms less bright with roses, rooms more casual, less aware

Of History in the wings about to enter with benevolent air

On ponderous tiptoe, at the cue “Proceed.”

Not that I like the ash-trays over-crowded and the place in a mess,

Or the monastic cubicle too unctuously austere and stark,

But partly that those formal garlands for our Eighth Street
Aphrodite are a bit too Greek,

And partly that to make the poor walls rich with our unaided loveliness

Would have been more chic.

Yet here I am, having told you of my quarrel with the taxi-driver over a line of Milton, and you laugh; and you are you, none other.

Your laughter pelts my skin with small delicious blows.

But I am perverse: I wish you had not scrubbed—with pumice, I suppose—

The tobacco stains from your beautiful fingers. And I wish I did not feel like your mother.

5

On January 11, 1939, Edna read at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she’d first read in 1927. She and Eugen were houseguests of the president of the college, Loring Dodd, and his wife, Ruth Dodd. Arriving the afternoon of her reading, she lay down for a nap. Through what was later called “sheer exhaustion,” she overslept and
didn’t reach Clark’s lecture hall until considerably after 8:15
P.M.
, the time at which her performance was scheduled to start.

In a letter she later wrote to Mrs. Dodd but did not send, she remembered walking down the staircase of their house to meet the three of them standing in the hall below her, “
my husband’s face white and tense with anxiety for me, your husband’s face black with anger against me, and your own sweet face twisted a little as if you had just been crying.” She remembered, too, stumbling sleepily down the stairs

in my long velvet train and my one glass slipper!—or at least it seemed like that, for I had been abruptly awakened from such a happy dream and recalled to a world where people must, with frantic haste, get into their costumes and, dizzy with fatigue, step briskly and brilliantly out onto a stage to perform night after night their difficult and exacting chore.

She told the story like a fairy tale twisted into nightmare. “I had often spent the afternoon preceding my appearance on the stage, and the night following it, in the house of a friend, or even in the house of a stranger, perhaps the president of the University.” But she would never do it again. It was too hard on her hosts “and impossibly difficult for me.” Lavish dinners were prepared, guests were invited to meet her, “and I always forgot to write beforehand saying that I never ate dinner just before giving a reading.” “What she required was rest, alone.

Afterward there would be receptions arranged, which she “would be unable to attend because I had to catch, in a hurry, a train for some other city.” There had been, that winter of her tour, she wrote, many disappointed hostesses and several angry ones.

She decided never to do that sort of thing again, instead “always to go to a hotel where I should be a care to nobody, upset nobody’s arrangements and be, myself, free.” Why was she constructing this maze of excuses? She said that her doctor had told her she could not go on this tour without, in addition to her husband “to care for me,”

also a personal maid to pack and unpack me, and to get me into my costume.… she was always there to awaken me from an exhausted slumber, to draw my bath, throw me into it, drag me out of it, dry me off, haul my gown over my head, hook it, button it, snap it, straighten out the train of it, set me down before my dressing table and, holding my head against her shoulder with one hand, with the other hand paint my mouth and brush my lashes with mascara.

While Eugen had dinner downstairs with the Dodds, “I, as naturally as an exhausted animal, crawled into bed and went to sleep.” She sounds lifeless, like a mannequin being manipulated.

The
Worcester Telegram
reported the next morning only that “Edna St. Vincent Millay—as vehement, mettlesome and exciting as one of her poems—stirred an audience to an answering mood last night.” Edna St. Vincent Millay, they said, “the youthful, provocative figure of last night’s performance, is proof of the youthful springs of her genius.” In fact, she would never be able to make a national reading tour again.

PART NINE
ADDICTION

CHAPTER 35

T
he weather was miserable that spring at Steepletop. It was icy cold, and “the trees are hardly in bud and the field mice are still sheltering in my house. I don’t blame the poor little brutes,” Eugen wrote to Dillon. “I am doing the same myself.” But the weather would turn warm, their pool would be swimmable, their tennis court playable, “so what about coming and seeing your little Berkshire friends sometime this summer?” George wasn’t to beg off on account of his work because he could keep in touch with his office by telephone. “And you needn’t pay for it because, evidently, I needn’t pay it, at least I haven’t paid the telephone bill for five or six months. I think it’s the influence of Roosevelt on the utilities.” If Eugen wasn’t exactly inveigling George to come, he was certainly trying to make it hard to refuse. But this time, George didn’t bite.

That March 1939, Hitler stormed into Prague in an open Mercedes-Benz with bright red Nazi flags snapping on its fenders. Czechoslovakia, dismembered by the Allies in Munich, had fallen. Millay’s sonnet “Czecho-Slovakia” became a memorial.

If there were balm in Gilead, I would go
To Gilead for your wounds, unhappy land,
Gather you balsam there, and with this hand,
Made deft by pity, cleanse and bind and sew
And drench with healing, that your strength might grow,
(Though love be outlawed, kindness contraband)
And you, O proud and felled, again might stand;
But where to look for balm, I do not know.
The oils and herbs of mercy are so few;
Honour’s for sale; allegiance has its price;
The barking of a fox has bought us all;
We save our skins a craven hour or two.—
While Peter warms him in the servants’ hall
The thorns are platted and the cock crows twice.