Savage Beauty (86 page)

Arthur saved her from her excesses. But he also kept her from publishing passages she’d written about what she thought sonnets were and about her own first literary sources and influences. When he tried to describe
her character in his journal, he did not acknowledge his own competitiveness, her addiction, or the terrible pressure she was under because of her sister’s needs and accusations. But he did help.

She is the oddest mixture of genius and childish vanity, open mindedness and blind self-worship, that I have ever known. She lets me, as a fellow-craftsman, dissect her mistakes and scold her and make fun of her, because she feels perfectly safe in the fundamental admiration I have for her best work: but … She has built up so enormous an image of herself as the Enchanted Little Faery Princess that she must defend it with her life.

Barely a month before, when Witter Bynner was visiting Edna at Steepletop, Arthur was deeply hurt that Vincent had not invited him and wrote to tell her so:

You know, Vince, there is a part of my nature which I cannot alter,
an utterly incurable sense of despair
. Perhaps I spread that horror to others; perhaps I blight and discourage you when I come into contact with you. I don’t
mean
to do it—but perhaps I do it.

But he had rights in their friendship, too:

I will not relinquish my right to keep on loving you. I shall not relinquish my rights to remember great poems, great letters, great moments of love.… I love you, my dear. I have always loved you. I always shall. One power can stop that—but it is not you.

A week later, on September 4, 1941, Ficke continued his almost obsessive notes about Millay in his private journal. He wrote that while she knew a great deal,

of recent years, all her critical acumen has been swamped by waves of hysterical emotion. I wonder if perhaps she is having the menopause? … doubtless she would rather die than make this admission that she is growing older. She looks very old and worn sometimes: this is partly her illness. My God, I just looked up her age: she was born in 1892, so is only 9 years younger than I am—that is, she is 49. I do not think she realizes that at all.

Critical as he could be, he never doubted the power or the openness of her work:

Vincent, especially, made girls feel that passion was clean and beautiful.… She appeared at a moment when American youth had need of her.… [for] the lesson of beauty that she taught them: for the revolt she expressed was not merely away from a stuffy prison and also toward an open meadow.… there was an unmistakable wind of pure dawning in what she did.

Edna Millay was sharply aware of her declining critical reputation—how could she not be?—and of her aging. “When Joseph Freeman and his wife were Arthur’s weekend guests, Edna summoned Freeman to Steepletop. One of the founders in 1926 of
The New Masses
, Freeman was labeled a Communist, although he insisted, somewhat disingenuously, that he was a poet who happened to be interested in communism. Edna had not seen him since
Conversation
, when she had asked him to be the model for the young Communist, Carl. Freeman described his recollections of their meeting, and of Arthur’s plan, sixteen years later in a letter to Floyd Dell:

On the way to Austerlitz, Arthur explained to me that he was greatly concerned about Edna. She was suffering from
imaginary
backaches and ought to be psychoanalyzed; he had been analyzed and had been greatly benefitted; he had been urging Edna to go to an Analyst—but she refused; what he wanted me to do was to persuade her to go. But why should she listen to me? …

At Austerlitz, Gene … handed us highballs, then told me that Edna was in her study and wanted to see me
alone
. I don’t know why, but this embarrassed me.… it seemed to me that anything Edna had to say to me she could say and ought to say in front of Gene and Arthur; and I said so. Gene went in, spoke to Edna and came back: No, she had to see me alone. So I went in and there she was in a big armchair, pale and fragile … and her eyes were sad. She asked me to sit down and got to the point at once. Life had become unbearable; she was getting old.… She was losing her looks, she was losing her ability to write, her poems are no good any more, the young men no longer fall in love with her, life was not worth living.… As she spoke she began to weep—the tears rolled down her hollow cheeks.

Freeman couldn’t bear to see a woman cry and began to console her. She was as beautiful as ever. How could young men help falling in love with her? When he told her that if he were young, he would fall in love with her,

she began to smile and, while she insisted that she had lost her looks and the power to evoke love in young men and her poetic gift, she did not sound as earnest about it as before.… here, at her elbow, was her latest group of sonnets—and they were terrible, she could not bear to look at them.

They couldn’t be bad, he told her,

and the fact is that for me that afternoon Edna
was
beautiful, and if I were younger, or perhaps simply unattached, I might … have fallen in love with her; and even without looking at her sonnets, I knew, knew absolutely they could not be bad. I asked her to read them; she said no, no, she couldn’t; you read them. So I read one aloud; she listened with a strange light in her face; it was a beautiful poem and I said so, and tears came into her eyes, this time tears of joy … for being a fool, I thought it was more important for the ageless poet to know that her poetry was still beautiful than for the woman of fifty to have young lovers. Now Edna laughed—and now she was ready to read her poems aloud and when she read them they were even more beautiful—and the afternoon sun came in through the window and I was listening to a clear young voice and looking at a young beautiful face. When she was done reading, we kissed—not the kiss of Eros, the kiss of Agapé; warm, loving, and chaste. And she said, the others may come in. Arthur and Gene came in and I could see they were astonished and delighted that Edna was all smiles, all joy; and we had some drinks … and Arthur and I kissed Edna and shook hands with Gene and left Steepletop.

As they drove back, Arthur asked if Edna had agreed to go to an analyst. Caught in Edna’s spell, Joseph Freeman had completely forgotten his task.

When Rolfe Humphries reviewed Millay’s
Collected Sonnets
in
The Nation
, he damned her with faint praise:

Miss Millay’s public has grown, unfortunately … to include collectors as well as readers; so there is always apt to be some fancy business, now, about her publications. This encourages skeptical criticism, and the fact that the direction of her progress has been from legend to success somewhat confuses discussion of her merit as an artist. If she is not taken quite seriously in this role today, it may be that she was taken too seriously twenty years ago … placing her out of her class, over her head, instead of keeping her where she really belonged, with Meredith, say, or as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s naughty younger sister in the parlor, the last of the female Victorians, and in that sense only, the herald of the Coming Woman.

PART TEN
THE DYING FALL

CHAPTER 38

O
nce there were three sisters, and the eldest, who had always been talented, was now rich and famous. The middle sister was as pretty, lighthearted, and lazy as she was without true ambition. But the youngest sister, while gifted—she had published two novels and three books of poems—sounded too much like her eldest sister for her own good, and nothing went right for her. There was a twist of envy that gnawed and grew in her as if it were malignant, until she became devious and ill.

Now, imagine this scene at Steepletop earlier in their lives. One sister, whose house it was, enters the room like a lion; she tosses her curly red mane, licks the inside of her wrist, draws it carefully over her ears as if it were a paw, and roars. The youngest enters the room like a Model T Ford, batting her eyes like headlights on bright, making a noise like a horn honking. Only one of the three sisters will survive to tell all the stories she knows, and that is the sister who now sits in the room, scooping out Stilton, drinking a scotch and soda while waving an Egyptian cigarette aloft, laughing, singing a snatch of song, and watching. She is the sister who tells the tales: Norma Millay.

In 1940, a friend of Norma’s, an ardent collector of first editions and any rare Millayana she could find who had dealt for some years with a bookseller in Greenwich Village, gave Norma disturbing news: the bookseller had received a diary purportedly kept by Norma, Vincent, and Kathleen when they were children in Maine. It had been edited by Kathleen and sent to Macmillan for publication, “
and will show,” the friend continued,

the early influences on Vincent during her formative years—especially the fact that much of Vincent’s early poetry was derived from Kathleen whom she discouraged in any projects to write on her own, telling her that since she (Vincent) had had poems accepted by magazines,
she
was obviously the poet of the family and Kathleen would be better off helping her to get her poems in shape than wasting her time trying to write.

Surely, Norma thought, unless the entire story was a fabrication, no one had the right to publish such a diary without Edna Millay’s consent.

Norma did not know that as early as 1936, well before any clear rift had opened between Vincent and Kathleen, Kathleen had submitted a peculiar entry to
Who’s Who
. It was considerably longer than Edna’s, and under “Author,” where Kathleen’s novels,
Wayfarer
(1926) and
Against the Wall
(1929), had been listed in order of their publication along with her three books of poetry—
The Evergreen Tree, The Hermit Thrush
, and
The Beggar at the Gate
—there followed a puzzling verse entry,
Of All the Animals
, with a 1932 publication date, as well as lists of “fairy stories” with titles and dates. But there is no record anywhere of these works’ ever having been published in either magazine form or as books. Kathleen was embellishing—if not outright lying about—her achievements.

By 1940, Eugen no longer tried to conceal his disdain for Kathleen, who continued to ask for money. “You asked me whether I showed your letters to Edna,” he wrote on December 12. “No.—Generally I do not.—You two are practically strangers.—in the 18 years I have known Edna, you two have met not more, I should say, than ten times and maybe exchanged 3 letters. I don’t see why I should bother her now.”

Eugen was interceding for Edna, and it was not helpful to either of the sisters for him to be placed so effectively between them. While his intercession seemed to protect Edna from Kathleen’s wrath and jealousy, in fact it only intensified it.

As to myself, I really don’t know you at all. I have met you a few times and am now in a lively financial correspondence with you.—But you know, of course, that if it was not for the fact that you are related to E., we, you and I both, would go out of our way to avoid each other.

Furthermore, we have been hearing for many years, reports from several people how you, either drunk or sober, talk about E. behind her back. This of course does not tend to make me either like or respect you and the effect on E. is to make her distrust any expression of friendship from you, although she has always wanted to be friends with you. But now that these reports keep coming in, even after she has done so very much to help you, the situation is even more difficult than ever.… Nevertheless for your Mother’s sake & for the sake of when you [were] all young girls & used to sing songs together, which she still remembers with happiness, as you wrote sometime ago, you also do, she is very glad indeed to help you to the best of her ability, when you are up against it.

Eugen then wrote to Charlie, telling him to get from Kathleen a mahogany table, which had been Cora’s, in exchange for a check for fifty dollars enclosed in his letter, to go toward Kathleen’s debts, “
that is if the bitch sticks to her word and sells it to us.—

“If she does not sell it then
don’t
give her the check.”

But Charlie was not a skillful messenger, and he wobbled. He didn’t get the table, and he did give her the fifty dollars. Eugen’s next letter to Kathleen showed barely controlled fury:

I was pleased to hear from Charlie … that you are on your feet again and need not sell your table to pay your debts.—That is very good news indeed: now Edna need no longer keep borrowing money to pay your debts and can now stop supporting you.