Authors: Nancy Milford
Charlie told me that you were going to write me all about it, but of course I did not expect to hear from you, as you never yet have written to acknowledge receipt of money from Edna but only to ask for more money or complain that the check you were expecting is a day or two overdue. Under the circumstances I do not understand why Charlie gave you my check for $50.00. But nevermind, you are welcome to it.
Kathleen wrote back a nine-page, single-spaced letter of hurt and recrimination. Not only had Charlie been sent to spy upon her, but she was homeless, hungry, ill, and broke, and Eugen’s letter had nearly killed her.
Silly and sentimental as it may seem to you—(who care nothing for anything but money and forwarding my sister’s fame, because it is amusing to shine in the reflected glory and also doesn’t take any energy)—difficult as it may be for you to realize … I have been very hurt to finally become convinced that my sisters care nothing for me at all. I loved them dearly as we grew up and fully believed they loved me. I worked for them, took care of them when they were ill, and used energy I could ill afford to throw away—as I was always the one who was really sick.… Strange as it may seem to you—I do not blame you for any of this. It was obviously quite settled and finished long before any of the family ever met you. You are a puppet floundering about in the midst of the Millays—and will never know what it is all about. They have strange temperaments indeed for the placid mind of a stolid Dutchman. However, it is not my fault I was born into the family, any more than it is your sagacity that made you chance to be born with the proverbial silver spoon in your mouth.
She couldn’t stop:
And now you tell me my sister is actually borrowing money in order to live at the St. Regis—which, of course, has always been one of the absolute obligatory necessities and hangouts of poets since time began. And to give ambulances to dying soldiers—
such
charming publicity for any philanthropist, isn’t it Eugen? And—incidentally—
only
incidentally—to buy very cheaply the one thing on earth I prize—a beautiful antique table which is the only thing I have from my mother. Of course, Edna has her big estate, and any number of things from mother—practically all the old dishes that had been in the family for years … and she’s still
borrowing
money!
Her letter went on and on: Vincent had given Norma a piano and Charlie a car, whereas it was she, Kathleen, who had given their mother the cottage in Maine, in which after her mother’s death she now owned only a one-third share. If she had to do it over again, she’d keep the cottage in Maine in her own name and simply let her mother use it the rest of her life. “She never had anything, and it was obvious no one else would give her anything—and at least it made her happy at the end of her life and that is what I did it for. Sentimental—? Yes. But not so stickily sentimental as the poem that paid Edna 1000 dollars for the Pulitzer prize!”
Then Kathleen made what she called a business proposition: she would give her sisters the first chance to buy her share in the cottage. She promised that after their business in this purchase was settled she would never try to reach them again, “unless it is necessary for legal reasons.”
In the somber, careful draft of Eugen’s reply—in which all the corrections and the softening of his language are in Edna’s hand—he wrote:
I asked Edna whether she wished to buy your share in the cottage, and she said that she would rather, since you feel as you do about it—that it really belongs to you—give instead her share in it to you.—Norma feels the same way about it, and is also making over her share in it to you, in view of the way you feel about it.
Charlie would have a lawyer draw up a document and give her the keys. He had told Edna about the table, which he had intended to be a surprise present from him. “She told me that she would never want to take that away from you. So that’s settled.”
Kathleen said his letter had made her very happy. She asked him to thank “
both girls for me, and please understand how I mean it when I say I sincerely hope I will never bother you anymore in any way.”
A few months earlier, in the spring of 1941, Kathleen had written to a man who had presented himself as the director of the Manuscript Division
of the Drake Memorial Museum in Pennsylvania. This same man had written to Edna six months earlier, asking for a longhand manuscript copy of “God’s World,” which, he said, was at the suggestion of the president of the United States. He had enclosed a copy of a letter from Miss LeHand, secretary to President Roosevelt. Eugen had answered his letter cordially, but nothing had come of it and their correspondence had stopped.
Kathleen, however, had responded vehemently, saying she was destitute. She said it was futile to ask her sister or Eugen for help.
I have obvious reasons for hating the name under which I was born. It is nothing short of a curse.… I live alone. I have no money.… I realize there is no reason why one sister should care what happened to another.… if only there were no such things as wealthy Dutch brotherin-laws who could tell a million people how much he did for everybody while the everybody in question could only manage to reach a half dozen people … with the truth of starvation.
After receiving two such letters from Kathleen, the man wrote to Eugen, enclosing a copy of Kathleen’s letter and threatening to publish it if Millay did not write out in longhand the poems he had asked for. Since he was using the mails to threaten and to defraud them, which was a federal offense, Eugen was able to have him arrested.
The New York Times
picked up the story and published Kathleen’s accusations against her sister, while adding that the Boissevains had, in fact, been supporting her.
The young man turned out to be an unemployed grocery clerk with an appetite for embezzling and fraud. After this fiasco, there was no further correspondence between the sisters.
2
On June 10, 1942, the German government announced that it had razed the entire Czech village of Lidice to the ground. The village was suspected of sheltering the underground leaders who had assassinated SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, a man so brutal his nickname was “The Hangman.” The Nazis retaliated: they shot to death 173 men and boys, deported 203 women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, and gassed 81 of the village’s 104 children. The rest of the children were sent to orphanages or German families. Then the Nazis set fire to the houses and church until nothing was left standing. “
Lidice, they proclaimed, was now forever erased from the map and the memory of the world.”
When the outrage of Lidice reached America, Rex Stout, the president of the Writers’ War Board, asked Edna Millay, whom he knew from their days in the Village, to write a poem to help ensure that Lidice would never be forgotten. By October she had finished “The Murder of Lidice,” a long narrative poem that was broadcast over NBC on October 19 and short-waved to England and Europe. Spanish and Portuguese translations were beamed to South America.
Norma described in a letter to her sister how she had felt as she had waited alone for “The Murder of Lidice” to come on the radio at 10:30 that night: “
When Woollcott’s voice came on, it was trembling with nervous excitement—that seasoned old dear, too! I knew then that it was going to be something terrific and felt alright and settled back—and it was terrific. It wasn’t just radio at all—it was alive.”
Praise poured in from around the nation, and Millay’s correspondence swelled. She was asked for another poem, to help rally the American public to the war effort on the home front. The Advisory Council of the Writers’ War Board then asked her to speak on shortwave for three or four minutes to remind Americans of the English spirit on the second anniversary of the London air blitz.
Meanwhile, some of her friends were deeply critical of her war effort, perhaps none more so than Arthur Ficke, who scolded in his journal:
Tonight Edna Millay’s poem “The Murder of Lidice” is to be read over the radio. I have seen it in its fragmentary stages, when she was all confused about it.… I don’t know how people manufacture such things. What worries me is that this is
so bad for her
, so utterly false to her real nature.…
She has always required the center of the stage—but that was good for her, so long as it was
her own private drama
that was being enacted. As a lyric poet, she was superb, unsurpassable.… I cannot, I will not, believe that this war is an ultimate conflict between right and wrong: and though I do not doubt for a moment that we are less horrible than the philosophy and practice of Hitler, still I think we are very horrible: and I will not, I must not, accept or express the hysterical patriotic war-moods of these awful days.
It was astonishing that Millay was able to write at all, given the amount of drugs she was taking. She knew the risk to her reputation of writing propaganda. Even Rex Stout, a writer himself, although of immensely successful mysteries, conceded that she was opening herself up to negative criticism. “
Well, of course, if a poet writes something for an intellectual reason, it is a different kind of writing entirely,” he said. “We had asked her for a propaganda poem, a piece of propaganda. They’re a different genre,
and they’re bound to be.… I think Edna was really bothered by what some goddamned critic wrote about her poem. She shouldn’t have been capable of feeling, of reacting to what some literary critic who has never written a creative line in his life says. But she was, of course she was.” Her sense of urgency was, in fact, prophetic.
We now know what no one in America knew then: that
the Germans had actually filmed their eradication of Lidice as an instructive device, demonstrating to Nazi soldiers how to raze an entire village.
To Hal she later wrote that she was very busy: “
yes, of course, writing more verses for my poor, foolish, bewildered, beloved country.” But she wrote very little propaganda poetry after “Murder of Lidice.” The poem “Not to Be Splattered by His Blood (St. George Goes Forth to Slay the Dragon—New Year’s 1942)” had been written well before the outbreak of the war, she told him.
Norma had been in a difficult position in relation to her sister for some time. Kept increasingly at arm’s length, she persisted in her attempts to reestablish their connection. “I’ve gotten a little selfconscious through the years at ringing the lovely Cuthbert from her tea to find out if-and-where you live,” she wrote in a birthday letter in 1942. Her uneasiness toward Eugen was evident: “I’d send my love to Gene … if this wasn’t a bit of business just between us girls. I send my love to you.” There was often in her letters, alongside her ambivalence at being cut off, an admiration about which there was no equivocation: “
Your sonnets in tetrameter have been very alive in this room over the last month. You are a great poet. And great poetry has great power.”
Yet Norma’s voice was not always so reassuring. Her concern for her sister’s health was very real:
Listen Darlings—you
have
to get to New York City and right away quick. Don’t laugh & think of the things in the way of such a move because I love you both & I know what I’m talking about. You’ll have deep snow there any minute and you say there is no one there to help you and you are “two sick people.” You can’t
do
this.… (and, darling Gene, there is no reason why you should kill yourself & give out energy you need to help you recover) and if Vincent isn’t able to travel normally—listen—really
listen—
before it snows you in—call a hospital in Hudson & get an ambulance with a doctor to
take
you into the city where, if anywhere, you can get help.… You understand I don’t know your circumstances—I am not being presumptuous, I just know & know terribly and cannot bear it that you must act
at once
& leave Steepletop.
“
Your letter was something to lighten the heart,” Edna wrote with clear emotion.
[A]lmost nobody it seems ever thinks—thinks deeply and intensely and in complete forgetfulness of himself—of any other person. We are all, or nearly all, of us, so centred in ourselves; we see nothing except as it touches ourselves, what its effect upon us might be. I know almost nobody who is really capable of complete forgetfulness of himself, even for a minute, in the troubles of another.—Which is why your letter, so full of thinking yourself into two other people’s lives so empty of yourself, is such a lovely thing.
Do you know Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”?—Did we ever read it together?—I forget. It is the story of two sisters, one of whom cannot resist the calling of the goblins in the wood, to come and buy and eat the goblin fruit, and eats it, and goes mad, and is dying of longing to taste it again; and her sister goes to the wood and risks the loss of her own health and life to get some of the goblin’s fruit to cure the one who is wasting away to death.
Vincent and Norma had read “The Goblin Market” together when Vincent, who had sent her a copy, had been at Vassar. If Christina Rossetti’s poem is an analogy of the relationship between sisters, it was fascinating that Vincent should use it now. Surely it was she who was “dying” of her longing, her addiction to morphine, her appetite for a narcotic. Norma’s letter was a response to Vincent’s addiction. Vincent passed it off, admiring Norma’s selfless concern while ignoring her plea that they get help “before it snows you in.”
Who can tell how, privately, she may have taken Norma’s warning? There is only one long letter in draft, unsent, written in fury and in haste after Millay had spent two hours at the Austen Riggs Clinic in Stockbridge, Massachusetts: