Authors: Nancy Milford
Sometimes it was in Eugen’s hand, writing for her in her notebooks, that she worked out a sonnet like this superb one:
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon—his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more or less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.
The “sweet Order” is of the sonnet, emblematic not only of shapely discipline but of her own terrible struggle.
Edna and Eugen spent that summer on Ragged Island, where she underwent their own form of therapy, which seemed to consist of spending hours floating in the icy water of the Atlantic. She thrived on it. There is only this one letter from her to Eugen written then:
The House, Ragged Island
September
You have just gone down to the harbour again. It seems really only a moment since we both came up from the harbour, you drenched to the skin, I shining and excited almost to—what is the French word?— … what the hell is it?—anyway, watching it, at a safe distance until you called me to help you with the ropes (and what a silly knife you have, it doesn’t cut at all … I could have done better with my teeth).… Darling, come up from the harbour—the sea is making.…
Don’t go out, please.
We have everything here. There’s no need to tackle it.…
Meen Liefje:
Ik gaar naar top-side.
Misschien slaap ik.
Misschien niet.
Oy sey nooit t’hius.
[Dearest:
I’m going topside.
Maybe I’ll sleep.
Maybe not.
You are never home.]
When they got back to Steepletop, they marked her recovery by hanging the American flag from the windows above the entrance to Steepletop and sending a snapshot of it to Margaret Cuthbert, as they had promised they would.
But she had recovered. She was no longer dependent upon morphine, but she was not entirely well. She continued to drink (there was a small mountain of whiskey bottles left on Ragged Island); she certainly took far too many barbiturates; and no one yet knew the destructive interactions among the sorts of drugs she was relying upon.
Harper, now in the person of Cass Canfield—for Millay’s beloved editor, Gene Saxton, had died suddenly in the summer of 1943—continued to advance her $250 a month while pressing her for another book. How about an edition of her collected dramatic works? She refused in a long letter, explaining, “
The effect of writing so much propaganda during the war—from the point of view of poetry, sloppy, garrulous and uninte-grated—is to make me more careful and critical of my work even than I formerly I was, so that now I write more slowly than ever. But there will be a book.”
The following year, 1948, when she was again pressed by her publishers, and again refused, she teased Harper’s distinguished director of production, Arthur Rushmore, whose suggestion that she bring out a volume of
The Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, containing a ‘mellow Foreword in retrospect’ in which she confides to the public ‘when, where, and
under what impulsion
’ (the italics are mine [Millay’s]) these poems were written, leaves me strangely cold.
(I did get a grin out of it, though. Pretty hard put to it, weren’t you, dearie, to say it with flowers, and yet say it?)
She didn’t doubt that it would, as he said, win her new readers. “People who never in all their lives, except when in school and under compulsion, have held a book of poems in their hands, might well be attracted by the erotic autobiography of a fairly conspicuous woman, even if she did write poetry.” But they were not the readers whose esteem she prized. And even he, she told him, “with all your exquisite skill, could not make charming the indelicacy of such a foreword—as you suggest.” With wry good humor she told Canfield, “
Trusting, however, in closing, that for one year more it may be said of me by Harper & Brothers, that although I reject their proposals, I welcome their advances.”
Millay was nonetheless vexed by her continued dependence on her publisher for money. As early as July 27, 1944, she had written Cass Canfield, “
You can’t go on grub-staking me for ever. For that is more or less what it amounts to.” All she’d written was war poems with very little about anything else.
And such as there might be, would not be good, not first-class.
And I can’t have that. I can’t bring out a book of lyrics, not after all I’ve written, in which there are just merely here and there a good line. I’d considerably rather die.
But dying is really rather hard, you know. Not for oneself, I mean; that’s comparatively easy: just get things all neatened up, and then go ahead and do it. No. It’s the other people. They hang on to one so.
But Harper did continue to stake her, and
to everyone’s delight, in the spring of 1945 there was an Armed Services Edition of her
Lyrics and Sonnets
, with a proposed printing of 140,000 copies.
When Canfield returned to New York from his work for the Office of War Information in France, he wrote to Millay telling her that it had been pointed out that in Sonnet XIV in “Epitaph for the Race of Man,” the name Aeolus should be Ixion. “Apparently it was Ixion who, for an insult to Hera, was punished by being tied to a wheel that turned perpetually. Would you want us to make this change?” he innocently asked.
For a woman who insisted to her dearest friends that she was unable to write letters, that it was a disease for which she had invented a word, “epis-tolaphobia,” Millay answered Canfield in an astonishing five-page letter of splendid invective:
It occurs to me with something of dismay, that, if I were dead—instead of being as I am, alive and kicking, and I said
kicking
—the firm of Harper & Brothers … might conceivably, acting upon the advise of a respected friend, alter one word in one of my poems.
This you must never do. Any changes which might profitably be made in any of my poems, were either made by me, before I permitted them to be published, or must be made, if made at all, someday by me. Only I, who know what I mean to say, and how I want to say it.… no other person, could possibly lay hands upon any poems of mine in order to correct some real or imagined error without harming the poem more seriously than any faulty execution of my own could possibly have done.… I am speaking of poetry composed with no other design than that of making as good a poem as one possibly can make, of poetry written with deliberation and under the sharp eye of an ever-alert self-criticism, of poetry in other words, written with no ulterior motive, such as, for instance, the winning of a world-war to keep democracy alive.
Cass Canfield said he could only offer his “
unconditional surrender. My forces are spent and I have no arms left to lay down.” But he did tell her with a pride only somewhat less fierce than her own, “I think I need not tell you that this House intends to preserve your poetry as it is; to do otherwise would make us as guilty as an art dealer who tampered with an El Greco painting.”
In 1948,
Marie Bullock, the founder of the Academy of American Poets, invited Millay to serve on its board of chancellors, assuring her all that would be required of her was one or two brief notes each year. But Millay weighed appointments seriously; she read both the bylaws and the certificate of incorporation very carefully. Then she turned Mrs. Bullock down cold. No one had ever turned the academy down. In a wonderful letter, Millay tried to soften her objections by suggesting to Mrs. Bullock that she “
wished you had not, in your earnestness, got yourself all embroiled with a firm of lawyers who in their bossy dustiness have made it so difficult for you to do the beautiful thing you want to do.” Mrs. Bullock’s husband was the lawyer whose firm had drawn up the bylaws.
Millay’s objections were twofold: First, the Fellows who received the $5,000 stipend, generous in those days, had to report their progress in writing three times a year, within thirty days prior to the quarterly payment. Second, no fellowship holder could engage in gainful occupation during the period of the award. That meant that a poet could not teach, edit, or serve in government—even though, clearly enough, a number of chancellors did. It was true, Millay wrote, that five thousand dollars was a lot of money.
But pottage is pottage, even when it is five thousand dollars worth of pottage. And I can have no part in seducing any poet into accepting this award, under these conditions.
I think of what Shelley said, in “An Exhortation”:
“Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet’s free and heavenly mind.
…
Spirits from beyond the moon,
Oh, refuse the boon!”
While the academy did amend its bylaws the following year, they retained their spirit—a poet could still not engage in any gainful employment—actually the word used is “occupation”; when in November 1949, badly in debt, Millay was offered the fellowship herself, she
declined in no uncertain terms. Her friend the poet Leonora Speyer said she was “a goose.” Max Eastman called her a “self-spoilt child,” a “martinet and self-indulgent.” Later Hal Bynner would say it had been “striking evidence of her cocky Irish integrity.”
Edmund Wilson and his wife, Elena, were at the music festival in Tangle-wood that summer of 1948. They wrote asking if they might come to call at Steepletop.
Edna and Eugen’s living room seemed to Wilson the same as it had been in 1929, the last time he’d been there: the blackened bronze bust of Sappho with the fierce ivory whites of her eyes staring from the entrance corner, the two magnificent dark grand pianos, the ornate golden birds Edna had brought back from their trip to the Orient, “
but now the birds were paler, their background was gray; the couches looked badly worn; the whole place seemed shabby and dim.”
Another startling thing he noticed, not having seen her in nineteen years, was the change in Edna’s relationship to Eugen. “As we drove through the long tunnel of greenery that led to the Steepletop house, I felt, as I had not done before, that Edna had been buried out there.” An aging Eugen shuffled out to meet them. “He was greying and stooped. It seemed to me he was in low morale. ‘I’ll go and get my child,’ he said. I did not realize at first that this meant Edna.”
When Edna entered the room, he did not recognize her. “She had become somewhat heavy and dumpy, and her cheeks were a little florid. Her eyes had a bird-lidded look that I recognized as typically Irish, and I noticed for the first time a certain resemblance to her mother. She was terribly nervous; her hands shook; there was a look of fright in her bright green eyes.” Eugen brought them all martinis, and Wilson sensed that he was managing Edna, babying her. Elena thought Eugen seemed to be shaking Wilson at Millay, “as if I had been a new toy with which he hoped to divert her.” Only when the conversation turned to poetry did Edna come to life: she grew excited and intense. She showed him a good deal of the poetry she was then working on. The living room was cluttered with notebooks and drafts, and he “could see that she was just emerging from some terrible eclipse of the spirit. This was, after all, the girl, the great poet, I knew, groping back
in luminis oras
from the night of the underworld.”
Wilson wanted his wife to hear Edna recite her own poetry, and he pressed her to do so. “As she did so, the room became so charged with emotion that I began to find it difficult to bear. I could not weep, I did not
want her to weep, and … I soon insisted upon leaving.” It was their last meeting, and while he called her “fatiguing,” even now he was not indifferent to her.
So she was still … almost as disturbing to me as she ever had been in the twenties, to which she had so completely belonged—for she could not be a part of my present, and to see her exerted on me a painful pull, as if to drag me up by the roots, to gouge me out of my present personality and to annihilate all that had made it.
He does not tell us that he wrote her again the following year asking to see her, and she refused him. “This is awful,” she wrote back, “but I can’t see you; I can’t see anybody on earth just now; I am working seventy-two hours a day; and I don’t dare run the risk of being deflected.” This was, she told him, “an ironic and hateful thing; I have so often longed to talk with you.… and I know that I shall—as soon as I am able to feel anything at all beyond the periphery of my intense occupation.” Then she corrects, quite sharply and confidently, one of his own poems he has sent her in which he used backward rhyming endings. “Don’t do it. ‘Slag’ is a fine word. ‘Gals’ is cheap, common and indecent.… don’t for God’s sake, use it, in a poem which has so much elegance.”
In a letter to Cass Canfield she confided that she’d spent the past seven months writing new poetry, but she’d also written
after having read a thoughtful review by Lewis Gannett concerning a late book by T. S. Eliot, and, more recently, after reading the brilliant and truly witty, although some times I thought, in some ways overstressed articles by Robert Hillyer in the Saturday Review of Literature, against the awarding of the Bollingen Award to Ezra Pound—a satire in verse against T. S. Eliot.