Authors: Nancy Milford
Norma enclosed four and a half single-spaced pages of notes drawn from medical sources that she listed on the last page as a sort of bibliography, and waited for a reply.
About this time, Norma heard from Ann Eckert, a friend of Kathleen’s and the beneficiary of her will. Kathleen had wanted their mother’s manuscripts to go to the Morgan Library in New York, and Miss Eckert, who had contacted the library, said it seemed very interested.
Then the little cottage, about which I have had to write to England to Kathleen’s husband Howard, she wanted to give to me as you know. I am deeply touched by all this, and deem it the biggest compliment.… Perhaps this Spring we could go to Kathleen and plant an Evergreen tree there for her. She loved them so very much.
Norma sent a copy of Eckert’s letter to Vincent, along with the letter she had written in reply. In closing, she said she was eager to hear from her sister about her letter “and my plan for you to get helped onto your feet.” “I have learned in a general and impersonal way,” she wrote, “that many amazingly prominent persons have gone to New York Hospital with the understanding that they didn’t wish it to be ‘News’ and that no bit of knowledge of their presence there has ever leaked out.” She assured Vincent that she’d have the personal care of a certain doctor “and be his private patient because the climacteric (do I
kill
you, sister) is his particular field.” She said, discreetly, that “anything else that might be bothering you can be cleared up at the same time.… I want so to have a very well and strong sister that I hope I’ll be hearing from you soon.” She was clever enough to send her love “to you and to Gene … I hug you both.”
Eugen’s response was made to Charlie. Norma’s letter had bothered Edna considerably, he said, and while she wanted to respond to “certain assertions and opinions of Norma’s,” she found it difficult to write.
… am writing to you because you are a correspondent after my own heart, who does not like to answer letters, so there is a good chance that this will be the end of this kind of correspondence.
I mentioned several times to Edna to ask her sister Norma to come and help us for a week. She was not very enthusiastic about it because Norma generally spends so much time telling Edna how she must feel about things and what she ought to have done in the past and what she ought to do in the present and the future and tires her so much. I had spoken a couple of times with Norma over the telephone and received a few letters in which she seemed to me to be more mellow and quiet and I made some inquiries from somebody who had seen her last summer sometime and who had told me that she had changed quite a lot.… So we took a chance.… I telephoned Norma to find out whether she was well enough and strong enough to come here to help us.… Then, to my surprise, that same evening she telephoned me back that she was leaving that noon. I did not want her to come just then but I thought it was possible this was the only time she could come and so you both arrived here. The first night everything went well but after you left everything went wrong. I think, through a misunderstanding on Norma’s part, she thought she was asked to come here to make a diagnosis of Edna’s case and that she came here as an M.D. and a psychiatrist, whereas, I had hoped she would come here as a mother’s helper to cook and help clean the house and look after Edna, none of which she did. She did upset Edna quite a lot by complaining about me and lecturing her on this, that and the other thing.
Whatever Edna may have felt is described only through Eugen’s words. He made, in this letter, no effort to disguise his contempt for Norma’s feelings. He had asked Norma
not to come barging into Edna’s bedroom without knocking. The trouble here is that Norma thinks there is a great intimacy between Edna and herself, which certainly has not been the case for the thirty years that I have known Edna. It is possible that many years ago they were intimate but now the only thing that binds them is the memory of a common childhood several decades ago. If Norma would treat both Edna and myself as acquaintances whom she does not know very well I think that lots of friction would be avoided.
Edna was apparently furious that Norma had consulted doctors without her permission or request. According to Eugen, they had been to “in the last three years by actual count twenty-nine doctors … and been to six hospitals,” so they knew at first hand any kind of information a doctor could give. “In the meantime, I hope that if we see Norma again it will be on the footing of people who would like to have the other person like them and show their best side the way one does with people you are not very intimate with but would like to have like you.”
A copy of this letter, written on Steepletop stationery and dated March 7, 1944, was in the files at Steepletop, left unsigned. Why hadn’t Edna interceded on her sister’s behalf? For as bossy as Norma could be, there is no doubting her love.
3
If Vincent and Eugen’s effort to track their addictions with a close record was intended to diminish their reliance on drugs, they had clearly failed: the notebooks continued with a few breaks until July 24, 1944. On the twenty-seventh, Edna entered Doctors Hospital in New York City under the name of Mrs. Boissevain. Mary Halton was her doctor (she had also been Kathleen’s), and Dr. Foster Kennedy, a distinguished neurologist, was called in as attending consultant. The diagnosis was “nervous exhaustion & neuritis.” Dr. Halton gave Millay’s general medical history:
Patient began to be nervous about 10 years ago—periods became scant & began missing—was treated on and off with ovarian extract—nine years ago became despondent—began to take some drinks of alcohol beverages—more than ever before—
Eight years ago was thrown out of an automobile—shoulder became painful—was given much morphine and other sedatives from this time on—x-rays were negative—nerves were injected with “novocain”—abdominal pain came on—was operated on “for adhesions.”
The pain in the shoulder region had then shifted to her lower back and was now more generalized. She had come to dislike food, had a poor appetite, and felt pain when she was nervous. “… unable to sleep and takes morphine and luminal sodium … by hypo—also takes nembutal—Has also taken demerol—is unable to work—”
At this time, she was drinking gin every day, usually mixed with ginger ale. She was in a terrible state, crying about her inability either to sleep or to work.
The nurses’ reports recorded the agony she was suffering as her dosage of morphine was reduced from ¼ grain, or 15 milligrams, to ⅙ grain, or 10 milligrams. On August 3, 1944, 5
A.M.:
“awakened cheerful. Very happy to think she only had three doses of morphine.” But after an injection at 7
A.M
. and another at 11
A.M.
, thirty minutes later she was crying with pain. At noon her doctor visited her.
She was given morphine again at 6
P.M.
, at 8:30, and at 10:15. She was also given sleeping medication. “Had a much better day,” the nurse reports. “Resting in bed—less depressed today.” But she was still complaining of severe pain in her back.
By August 6, she was crying hysterically. “Very much disturbed,” the nurse reports. “Dr. Kennedy visited. Complaining of severe pain running and staggering about room.”
Over the next two weeks she continued to complain about pain and remained “restless and nervous.” Sometimes she seemed disoriented and confused. She never slept for long. By the end of the third week of August she was free of morphine. She was still receiving other medication, and quite a lot of it, but not morphine. Then the nurses’ reports pick up again:
August 23, 1944: Rolling about bed—beating with hands. Crying with pain. Very dramatic in trying to show nurse how intense the pain is. No effect from medication. Still noisy and complaining of intense pain.
They gave her what was called a sterile hypo, a shot with nothing in it, a placebo. It had no effect. Then she was given an injection of Luminal, a barbiturate, and for the first time in her entire hospitalization she slept from 11
P.M
. until 6:35
A.M
.
August 28, 1944: 7 p.m. Drowsy & depressed, talks to nurses. “I foolishly tried to run out of the hospital in my nightgown,” moaning, “Oh, what a disgrace to be here.” “Oh, why did I come here.” Very dramatic, said, “When one has sunk so low, even as I there is no hope.” Told nurse “You must give me all you can” (sedatives).
On August 29, in the morning, she awakened at four and had hot tea. She was still not sleeping well. She was “elated & noisy—singing.” Later in the morning she told the nurse she wanted “something to pull herself together.”
She was discharged just under one month later, on September 27. While it looked as if the doctors had managed to wean her from morphine by substituting other drugs, she continued to smoke and drink, and the progress report was ominous: “Patient discharged. Still an alcoholic—initial condition unimproved. Diagnosis—exhaustion????”
Among her notes scribbled in pencil at Steepletop, there’s one with the initials “N.Y.R.” (New Year’s Resolutions?); at the top of the first page, Edna wrote:
1. Care for
Nothing
so much, (after your poetry) as to make You-Know-WHO(m) happy. Put everything from your mind but this, and your work. (And what’s more,
keep
everything else but these two things out of your mind!)
2.
Never
mention yourself, if possible to avoid it,
especially
before YOU-KNOW-WHO(m).
Never
bring the conversation round to yourself,
even for a minute, even to illustrate a point
, or in a brief parenthesis, to show that you understand what YOU-KNOW-WHO is saying.
Never
mention anything from your past, any incident of your childhood. Forget that
you
exist.
3. —Go out of doors EVERY DAY, no matter
What
you are working on, for at least a short walk.
You-Know-Who is Eugen. The relationship between them had turned into a destructive dependence. Now there were other notes, pages of them, with strange drawings of her own face in a grimace, of a heart pierced by an arrow with drops of blood spilling into the text.
Things I
must
do for Eugen, if I truly love him,—and I
do
, more than anybody ever loved anybody.
1. Even if I am suffering TORMENT, speak in a voice with
no hint
of pain, speak in the strong, gay rich voice he loves, the voice of a person vitally interested in things, deeply amused by and full of laughter at other things, even when I don’t care
anything
about
anything.… DON’T WHINE!
—Never, even when you are dying, if you are still conscious, permit yourself to speak in a
SICK VOICE!
CRY AS LITTLE AS
POSSIBLE!
BUT
NEVER
WHINE!!!
The italics and the capitals are all hers. There were the following instructions: to pull herself up by her bootstraps, to disguise her feelings, to smoke and drink very little “When Ugin is in the room”; not to bite her fingernails; to let Eugen find her outdoors “instead of
Still in Bed
, or in your
SPECIAL CHAIR
(Pah!—Old Woman!)” These pages, too, are accompanied by a macabre drawing of her face. It is hideously emblematic of how she feels she must behave toward Eugen. The upper part of the face is masked and blackened in pencil so that only the tip of her nose and a painted grinning slash of mouth show. Across the place where her eyes would be runs the phrase, like a banner, “KEEP THE CORNERS OF YOUR MOUTH
U P
AND
DISGUISE
YOUR F E E L I N G S!” There is also a page, startling to find, labeled
“Advice to Little Nancy”:
Exercise will-power in
all
things, big or little. Don’t become self-indulgent. Don’t become sloppy in
anything
, in your thinking, in your dress, in
anything
. Don’t fool yourself. If you feel nervous, don’t purposely (half-subconsciously) make yourself
more
nervous. Instead, turn your attention at once upon something which interests you.… Have a drink, sometimes.
Never
let the other person see you using the hypodermic, or know that you are about to do so, or have just done so.
Never
leave the syringe about where you see it.
In February 1945, just before her fifty-third birthday, Millay entered the Hartford Institute of Living to try another cure. Eugen stayed in New York City with Margaret Cuthbert and Alice Blinn, who remembered, “
He really got sick and was in the hospital for a few days. We kept that from Edna, of course, and the doctor told us, or told him anyway, that he had a spot on his lung. Did he do anything about it? No, he was busy taking care of Edna. Of course we thought it was tuberculosis.”
She also described a scene that confirmed Norma’s suspicion: “Eugen took morphine so that he would know what it was like for her to be addicted—so that he would know what she went through trying to stop it.…