Authors: Nancy Milford
I will see that you get your checks on time, but on the other hand you will have to trim your sails so that you do not get caught in a jam, because that would be unfortunate for you as we would not be able to help you. And that is a fact.—So for your own sake I implore you not to run up any bills for they will not be paid by us.… you seem determined to go to Maine and you might run into some embarrassing incidents should you try to get credit there.
It is unfortunate that you are set on going to what is probably the most expensive summer resort in the U.S.A.
Kathleen left the hospital immediately after her telephone conversation with Eugen,
before
his letter to her arrived. When she received it, she wrote directly to Edna:
Please thank Ugin for telling me exactly what you can do. I wanted you to tell me when I saw you but I guess you did not understand. It has been so long since you knew what it was to wonder where tomorrow’s food was coming from—and, of course, since Ugin was born to money, he has never known—I suppose neither of you can realize what constant illness and worry can do to me.
Eugen, not Edna, answered her. He said he’d “implored” her not to leave the hospital but “
to stay … until you had found a place to go to on leaving the hospital.” Then he gave up and said she should go to Maine and Edna would pay for the rental of a cottage. Four days later Kathleen wired thanking Ugin for his “nice letter”:
HEAT HERE TERRIBLE WOULD LOVE TO LEAVE FOR MAINE … SORRY PAID NEW APARTMENT RENT SATURDAY.
But if he could wire her another $100, she could still take a cottage. Eugen exploded in barely controlled anger:
August 23, 1939
Dear Kathleen:
I just received your wire and I must admit that it is impossible for me to follow your changing plans. However, it is not necessary for me to understand them as you are white and twenty and I am sure you know what you want.
It is unfortunate that you rented an apartment last Saturday, now that a few days later you change your mind and think it preferable to go to Maine.… why you should rent an apartment for a month, against your doctors advice, is beyond me.…
Now you wire that you need another $100. I am sorry we are not able to give you that; unfortunately, we are unable to do more than we told you we could do.
We are leaving Sunday or Monday at the latest for a prolonged trip, and no mail will be forwarded to us beyond that time, so you will be unable to communicate with us after Saturday.
On the same day, he wrote to Norma in cold fury:
As to Kathleen, I will not give you any news from her. I hate the God damned bitch. She has spoiled my summer and has done everything crazy and difficult that it is possible for a creature to do. She is unmanageable, and I am sure that she is cookoo. She is wily in getting money out of Edna and I am sure that she is trying to suck as much money out of her as she possibly can. However, these are only my own personal opinions. Edna, however, who has been holding out until now, hoping for a comeback from Kathleen and that everything would be straight, admits at last that the evidence goes to show that she has been lied to and double crossed and milked of every penny that can be squeezed out of her.… If you are very sensitive to moods and nuances in literature you will have gathered by this time that I am in a bad humor and not to be played with.
It was in this sorry stew of family resentment, illness, and anger that Eugen received, on September 7, 1939, a psychiatric assessment of Kathleen, who had been examined earlier in August at New York Hospital. The psychiatrist wrote that while
she was suffering from high blood pressure and alcoholism, she was certain that Edna’s fame had damaged her own success as a writer. But far worse was her fixed idea that Vincent had stolen ideas from her and incorporated them into her work. The doctor thought that only a neutral authority could intercede, and he suggested a young woman who was a colleague of Dr. Guion, whom Kathleen had seen and trusted.
Edna’s sudden call for money from her publisher was to pay Kathleen’s hospital bills—and to pick up far more than medical expenses. Within five months Edna had sent Kathleen more than $1,000 and paid her various medical bills, which amounted to another $500. That both sisters had been hospitalized within months of each other—which Kathleen did not know—in the same hospital was bizarre. But the fierce downward spiral of Kathleen’s dependence on Edna and her anger toward her were hardly over.
3
By May 1940, after a series of violent German assaults, Rotterdam was destroyed, Holland had fallen to the Nazis, and the British expeditionary force sent to help France in a last-ditch effort to repulse the German invasion had been pushed to the sea at a spot on the coast called Dunkirk. On June 14, Paris fell to the Nazis, and America’s Ambassador Bullitt was reported to be in German “protective custody.” Huge black headlines marked the faces of all the newspapers. That morning in June
The New York Times
, the
Herald Tribune
, and the
Daily News
published Edna Millay’s stinging attack against isolationism, “Lines Written in Passion and in Deep Concern for England, France and My Own Country.” In the
News
the poem was set, incongruously, beside its own isolationist editorial. “Not in years,” wrote the wire services, “has a poet sought so directly the ear of so wide a public.… In an era in which poets have been accused of having too little to say to the many, Miss Millay suddenly launched her ringing call to arms under the impact of the tragic drama in France.”
She asked the American public directly to abandon isolationism, to heed, “the shrieking plea/For help, of stabbed Democracy.” The poem was picked up by newspaper after newspaper throughout the United States and Canada, each one commenting that she’d sent it forth from her sickbed in the Berkshires. They said it was a landmark in literary history. They said she had written the first important poem of the second great war.
Dear Isolationist, you are
So very, very insular!
Surely you do not take offense?—.…
’Tis you, not I, sir, who insist
You are an Isolationist.
…
No man, no nation, is made free
By stating it intends to be.
…
(Meantime, the tide devours the shore:
There are no islands any more.)
…
Oh, build, assemble, transport, give
That England, France and we may live,
Before tonight, before too late,
To those who hold our country’s fate
In desperate fingers, reaching out
For weapons we confer about,
All that we can, and more, and now!
…
Let French and British fighters, deep
In battle, needing guns and sleep,
For lack of aid be overthrown,
And we be left to fight alone.
By early fall the poem was retitled “There Are No Islands Any More” and published as a separate booklet of ten pages by Harper. The manufacturer, Haddon Press, offered to do the presswork and binding for free, and the paper manufacturers fell into line. Now all Harper needed, Gene Sax-ton wrote Eugen, was a statement from Edna, signed by her and printed up front. He suggested that she write
This poem, written by me in the cause of democracy, has been printed and distributed with my permission, free of royalty, all proceeds from the sale being turned over to the Red Cross or some similar war relief agency.
When the poem caught the eye of the unfortunate Ferdinand Earle, who, broke and unemployed, had written asking for her help and who’d thought Millay was so ill she couldn’t utter a word, he was mightily offended. “
Once-dear Edna Millay,” he wrote her, “Considering that you owe your entire first spectacular successes to my efforts, how shabby, the secretary’s indirect reply, to my letter!”
Eugen answered him the next day, explaining that he was not Edna’s secretary but her husband:
As she has been very sick and has recently returned from the hospital I have thought it necessary to relieve her of everything possible, of all worry and all correspondence. For that same reason I am not showing her your last letter, but will show her this letter as soon as she is feeling better and doubtless you will hear from her.
I presume you got angry by seeing a poem written by her and evidently you did not believe my letter. However, you are mistaken. She wrote this poem in a great desire to do something during these difficult and unhappy times. That was something I could not prevent her from doing.
It seems strange to me, that you, a poet yourself, and who has lived in Paris, should be unable to understand that even a person who has been very ill for several months and has only recently returned in an ambulance from a hospital where she has undergone a series of painful operations on the nerves of the dorsal spine and who is in such constant pain that she is obliged to be given hypodermic injections of morphine several times a day—that even a person in such a condition, filled with horror and despair at the thought that the Nazi Germans are about to march into Paris, might compose the passionate lines which you seem to have read.
Earle was immediately contrite. And Edna answered him herself in August, addressing him, once again, as she had in Camden, as her Dear Editor:
I am sorry that I was too ill to write you; oh, so sorry that I hurt your feelings. I am still too ill to write you,—even to dictate as I am doing now, … that is to say, it is against doctor’s orders that I do it. But … I cannot bear to have you continue to think me forgetful and ungrateful. I remember too well that day, years ago, when I came back from the pasture carrying a pailful of blueberries which I had picked, and my mother was waiting for me on the doorstep with your letter in her hand.… I think of you always with the same affectionate gratitude I felt at the time when you were trying so hard to make the other judges see my poem as you saw it, trying so hard to obtain for me that prize of $500, a fortune then. (Almost a fortune to me now, in fact. Though in the meantime there have been periods when I could have paid $500 for an evening gown. My life has always gone abruptly and breath-takingly up and down, like a roller-coaster!)
She told him she was still far too ill to help him; she had to reserve whatever strength she had for her own work.
But you, who were the first, outside the little village where I lived, to think my poetry of some consequence, would be the first now, I think, to consider that I should give to it all the strength that I have.
I am, believe me, with the same grateful heart as on that day long ago when I learned that somebody beside my mother, a person whose name I later learned to be Ferdinand Earle, liked a poem of mine called “Renascence.”
It was only in this letter to Ferdinand Earle and in a draft of a letter to George Dillon that Millay explained the apparent cause of her illness:
… for something over a year now I have been very sick,—or, rather, not sick, simply in constant pain, due to an injury to certain nerves in my back referred to by the ten or twelve different doctors & surgeons who have tried to cure the trouble, as nerves 4, 5 & 6 of the dorsal spine—referred to by me as that place up under my right shoulder-blade. The nerve injury is the result, it seems probable, of my having been thrown out of the station-wagon one night—not by the driver, as you are probably thinking, but by the sudden swinging open of the door against which I was leaning; I was hurled out into the pitch-darkness—a very strange sensation it was, too—and rolled for some distance down a rocky gully before I was able to grab at some alders or something & come to a halt. I have had three operations on these nerves and should be quite well now, I think, if I were not still, naturally, rather weak.
In her reworked and redated (September 14, 1940) typescript of this letter, she for the first time called the operations unsuccessful.
Professor Irwin Edman of Columbia University reviewed Millay’s pamphlet “There Are No Islands Any More,” alongside Stephen Vincent Benét’s
Nightmare at Noon
and
The Irresponsibles
by Archibald MacLeish. While there was no questioning the urgency of the situation or the integrity of the writers, the critic was meant to be something more than a thermometer measuring excitement and sincerity or even what Edman called “moral seriousness.” All three authors were exemplary, but as works of art what they had written was questionable. Millay had very clearly subtitled hers “Lines Written in Passionate and Deep Concern,” and most readers, Edman felt sure, would remember her lines published in what he called “display form” by newspapers during the crucial days of the fall of France that past June. He called her work epigrammatic journalism. He didn’t like the white heat of Millay’s emotion. “If artists are to become writers of burning tracts, it seems to be intellectually irresponsible to condemn the discipline of art because it is not the discipline of a military emergency.”
Harper, which had been supportive of her in June, when in ten days it had deposited $4,000 into her accounts, adding up to an advance from May 1940 to the end of the year of $10,000, had not expected another book from her within the year of the publication of
Huntsman
. But then, neither had she. The urgency, despair, and fury she felt about America’s lack of response to the war, its continuing isolation, found voice in her work now. Her poems began to run in newspapers around the country;
The New York Times
published four sonnets in its Sunday Magazine on October 13, 1940.