Authors: Nancy Milford
“But you know, when he was with us, he came out of the bathroom one morning and he said, ‘The only boring thing is, your nose runs while you are shaving. Well, at least Edna doesn’t have to shave.’ You see, he’d flushed all of it down the toilet! …
“Of course he was not addicted for as long a time as Edna was, so perhaps it was easier for him. But there was no fuss about it. He simply stopped.
“Hartford was a disaster. After the Hartford episode, Eugen simply had to get her out of there.”
Millay felt incarcerated and was desperate to leave. At first her letters to Eugen, especially one written on Valentine’s Day, when he had sent her flowers, seemed resigned to making the best of the situation. But after less than a month, she begged him to get her out.
4
In the summer of 1945, with the war in Europe at last over, Edna and Eugen left for Ragged Island, where they had decided to try their own cure. On the way they planned to spend the night with Tess Adams at her house on Bailey’s Island, which faced Ragged. Tess had invited Vincent Sheean and his wife, Dinah, for the weekend they would arrive. Vincent Sheean wrote about their meeting in his book
The Indigo Bunting
, a memoir Cass Canfield persuaded him to write.
“
Toward the end of the afternoon the Boissevains arrived from Steeple-top in a car loaded down with all sorts of food, pots and pans and other necessities for their stay on Ragged Island,” he wrote. They had tea in the great room facing the ocean, where there was always a fire in the immense stone fireplace. “Our conversation was lively, but Edna took very little part in it. She said enough to show that she was with us, although nothing more; she was rather silent and looked very frightened, small, and withdrawn.” She was, Sheean wrote, going through a bad time, the worst a writer could go through: “She could not write.” Sheean was still too much frightened of her to address any remark in her direction.
Miss Millay was, to put it bluntly, a frightening apparition to many of us. Her temperament was so variable that it was impossible to tell what mood might overwhelm her next.… But most of all, I think, the reason why even the most sympathetic stranger was frightened of Edna was that she was herself so terrified. Her terror communicated itself and created terror. I hardly dared to look at her more than once or twice that evening.
Eugen, of course, knew all about this. That is probably why he was so jovial, talkative, and merry at tea and afterward, to save Edna … from the pain of speech.
None of them, with the single exception of Eugen, had any true idea what was the matter with her.
Sheean was left alone on the terrace with Edna as the others went off to see about dinner. It was getting dark, the fog was closing in; they were silent while Edna sat looking out to sea. “Then she said, in her deep voice … ‘Thank you for the roses. They lasted a long time.’ ” Sheean, startled, had no idea what she meant. He hadn’t sent her any roses. In the morning Edna and Eugen left before he was up, leaving word with Tess that they were all invited to visit Ragged Island soon.
Two months later, in September, they did. Eugen picked them up in their motor dory, the
Greasy Joan
, and set out into the open Atlantic, four miles from the coast of Maine. Forty-five minutes later they coasted into anchor at Ragged, where Edna appeared in a white shirt, her dungarees rolled to the knee, as she ran down the rocky path to meet them. Sheean would never forget this sight of her:
There were circling round and round her head all the way down through the rocks, three sea gulls. She came toward us, as you might say, in a completely legendary manner.… She was glowing with health and spirits; her red hair was blown free and her green eyes were shining. She was in every respect different from the mouselike stranger of two months before.
Their house, set on a hill overlooking the rocky little harbor, was simple and bare: a table and chairs, a couple of beds, and books. There was no electricity. They fell asleep when it was dark and rose at first light. Behind the house were woods; out front, a great iron pot for boiling lobsters. “When she thought it was time, it was Edna who tossed the lobsters into the pot.… It was the only time I ever saw her do any cooking (if that is cooking).”
She told him she was in trouble: “I haven’t been able to write anything at all for a long time.… It sometimes seems to me that it is all over—that it will never come again.” When Sheean tried to suggest that casting her writing into prose might be a release for her, she said it was difficult. “ ‘It isn’t for me,’ she said slowly, as if thinking aloud. ‘I’m afraid of it.’ ”
Edna spent long periods at a time in the water; she was part mermaid, apparently, and was quite insensible to cold or to fatigue in water; she always swam naked.… Eugen was less thoroughly a sea child and during her incredible durations in the water he would be setting lobster pots or bringing in the lobsters, cleaning up the house or repairing nets for fishing.… “Nobody ever wears a bathing suit at Ragged Island,” she said decisively when we arrived at the harbor. “It’s a rule of the island. We think bathing dress of any sort is indecent, and so do the waves and so do the sea gulls and so does the wind. No bathing dress has been seen on Ragged Island since we came here.”
Eugen, naked, looked powerful, the color of mahogany, while Edna was softer, “nut-brown color.” “Emerging from the sea at last, dripping and with green eyes ashine, she seemed to have regained some particular strength from the long immersion.”
Dinah Sheean had admired Millay’s poetry from her childhood and now watched her intently as the poet talked and swam: “
She had passed that obvious stage of beauty in a woman’s life. Of course there are women of seventy who keep themselves, in a way. She was not like that. She was attractive, certainly. She was a little bit pouchy then. And she didn’t bear any signs of making that effort.
“Eugen had the quality of making a woman feel marvelous,” Dinah said. “He seemed genuinely to like women. There are not so many who do, you know. Oh, the concentration he had for you. And a sort of warmth.” Then Vincent Sheean suddenly remembered the roses. He’d signed the card sending the roses to her five years before, when on the occasion of the China Relief at the Waldorf-Astoria Edna had been forgotten in the melee.
Yet Millay was not in fact well. If she hadn’t drunk wine with the Sheeans on Ragged Island, she certainly did when she got home to Steepletop, where she knew Arthur Ficke lay dying of cancer of the throat at Hard-hack. Arthur had asked Ugin to tell him “very briefly, on paper” just how much morphine he took per day. “2 grains,” Ugin wrote. “At less bad times, how much could you get on with?” Eugen said ½ grain, and while Arthur asked the same two questions of Vincent’s dosages, Ugin left those spaces blank. Arthur added, “in my case, the matter of habit-forming is scarcely of importance; for not even the merriest ironic joker would suggest that I shall be alive for a very long time.”
It was Arthur’s habit to keep a sort of chronology of his life, which he appeared to have begun in 1941 and called his “Memorandum of Dates.” For 1945 he noted, “I still very sick. Gladys cooks for me! Death of F. D. Roosevelt. Unconditional surrender of Germany. Back to Hillsdale in May.… I grow steadily worse. There is no hope now—and I care less than might be expected.”
In October 1945, Edna sent him the letter he had been longing to have from her. She told him that the sonnet he’d asked her about years before in the gun room of the LaBranches’ estate—when she’d been so angry
with him for having asked her whether or not it had been written to him—
was
his.
And besides, you sprang the question on me so suddenly … that it almost caught me off guard. And I loathe being caught off guard; it makes me furious. (A devil’s trick that is of yours, too, Angel-in-all-else.)
Perhaps, also, I didn’t want you to know, for sure, how terribly, how sick-eningly, in love with you I had been.
And perhaps, also, I was still in love with you, or I shouldn’t have cared.
Well, anyway. The sonnet was the one beginning: “And you as well must die, beloved dust.” In case you’ve forgotten. Which you haven’t.
Vincie
Arthur Davison Ficke died on November 30, 1945. Standing in the dark, wet day by his grave at Hardhack, Edna recited her poem to him:
And you as well must die, belovèd dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fell,—this wonder fled,
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how belovèd above all else that dies.
CHAPTER 39
T
he month after Arthur’s death that winter, Edna Millay wrote out what she called her last will and testament. Her hand was wildly uneven and downward-slanting.
Steepletop Dec. 30th, 1945…
I wish to leave everything of which I die possessed, to my husband, Eugen Boissevain. If it were legally possible (which probably it is not) I should like (in the case that the decease of my husband concurs with, or follows soon after, my own) to leave all the property of which I may die possessed, to my sister, Norma Millay (Ellis).
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I want all those things which are in the dining-room and which we bought or procured for our Dutch relatives to go to Holland. And I want the necklace which Elinor Wylie gave me to go to Rosemary Benét—E. St. V. M.
Norma thought the phrase that Eugen’s death might “concur with” or follow Edna’s own suggested they were planning a joint suicide. Things were very dark now at Steepletop, and within six weeks of writing her will, on February 6, 1946, Edna Millay was again admitted to Doctors Hospital for what was called “recurrent depression.” She arrived with Eugen, so unsteady on her feet that she staggered. She was unable to undress by herself, and the nurse who helped her noticed the unmistakable odor of alcohol on her breath. She was given Luminal Sodium and Ovaltine when she arrived, a barbiturate and a nice cup of hot chocolate, comforting and sedating. She insisted that Luminal was the only medication that made her sleep, but even with the Luminal she moved restlessly from her bed to her chair and back again, smoking constantly, talking continuously, and drinking steadily—a martini before lunch and another before dinner, as well as a bottle of red wine, which she said the doctor had permitted her.
When Eugen came to visit, there was an observable change in her mood: she was agitated, and she gave way to pouting and tenseness. There was also a good deal of weeping. In his company she seemed reduced to being childish and petulant. She did not talk about her writing or her life, except on the day before her fifty-fourth birthday, which she passed in the hospital. She was awake between 12 and 4:30
A.M.
, and, considerably agitated, she told a nurse that she’d never get well or rested in the hospital. One of the nurses said her mannerisms were childish and that when she was discouraged she cried, “then she made prompt right-about turn & was all right.”
There was no mention of morphine in her medical records or in the nurses’ reports, and a month later, on March 8, she was discharged as “symptom free.”
That summer, after she emerged from the hospital, Millay revived her lapsed correspondence with Edmund Wilson, who had written years earlier to tell her how much her recordings of her poetry meant to him. She said that his “
verdict was like an Imprimatur to me.” She told him his letter had come to her while she was in Doctors Hospital, where she was
enjoying there a very handsome—and, as I afterwards was told, an all but life-size—nervous breakdown. For five years I had been writing almost nothing but propaganda. And I can tell you … there is nothing on this earth which can so much get on the nerves of a good poet, as the writing of bad poetry. Anyway, finally, I cracked up under it.
She did not tell him she had been addicted to morphine. That stigma was too sharp; she admitted only to a breakdown.
It is sheer desperation and pure panic—lest, through my continued silence, I lose your friendship, which I prize.… I think, and I think it often, “Where ever he is, there he still is, and perhaps some day I shall see him again, and we shall talk about poetry, as we used to do.”
She told him that, having been unable to write during the period of her breakdown, she had begun to memorize great amounts of poetry—long, difficult poems, Matthew Arnold’s “Scholar Gypsy,” Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “Lamia,” one third of Father Hopkins’s poetry, Shelley’s “To the West Wind” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”—“Anyway, I have them all now. And what evil thing can ever again even brush me with its wings?”
She began to write again. It was as if a black cloth had been lifted from her, and in the fall of 1946, the spring and summer of 1947, she published “Ragged Island,” “To a Snake,” and the sonnet “Tranquility at length, when autumn comes,” each a fully achieved, masterly poem.
Tranquility at length, when autumn comes,
Will lie upon the spirit like that haze
Touching far islands on fine autumn days
With tenderest blue, like bloom on purple plums;
Harvest will ring, but not as summer hums,
With noisy enterprise—to broaden, raise,
Proceed, proclaim, establish: autumn stays
The marching year one moment; stills the drums.
Then sits the insistent cricket in the grass;
But on the gravel crawls the chilly bee;
And all is over that could come to pass
Last year; excepting this: the mind is free
One moment, to compute, refute, amass,
Catalogue, question, contemplate, and see.