Savage Beauty (92 page)

She called it
The Cult of the Occult
, and it was not simply a satire of Eliot’s poem; she made a mockery of what was then the most influential poem of the modernist movement. She said she would give him no footnotes.

In this collection of poems, of which I think there will be about twenty, to be numbered in roman numerals as was Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” there is nothing coarse, obscene, as there sometimes is in the work of Auden and of Pound, and nothing so silly as the childish horsing around of Eliot, when he is trying to be funny. He has no sense of humour, and so he is not yet a true Englishman: read some of the verse in Punch. There is, I think, in these poems of mine against Eliot nothing which could be considered abusive: they are merely murderous.

She sent along copies of several of them, to which Canfield replied, “
I thought the verses were brilliant satire. They shed a deadly spotlight on the false attitudes and pretentiousness of Eliot and a whole group of writers that imitate him.”

2

Norma’s relationship with Vincent remained deeply troubled. Well before Wilson’s visit, in a letter which she later admitted was “probably not sent,” she wrote:

Dear Kid, Dear Toots, Dear Edna St. Vincent, Dear Flotsam,—this is a thing from your sister Jetsam (or Jettison and Flatson, if you are preference minded) and, as a bit of oily waste or a bobbling bottle of Scotch, there is no telling where this thing will beach. I, cast as Jetsam … just don’t give a good goddamn. It’s such fun just to be going places.

What are the wild waves saying, sister?

Do you think we will make the Jersey coast by nightfall?— … The answer (you must have heard) being—“Where do you get this ‘we’ stuff.” … Letters are a wonderful invention. It’s too bad you don’t take to them more. I suppose if one is a perfectionist one has to save the scraps—for bits of colour here and there. Letters are wasteful, I’m afraid.

There are pages of these letters to Vincent, which Norma did not destroy, which she even transcribed and talked about but never sent.

Oh, little sister, little sister, it is not my fault that you are ill. Why should I take it so entirely upon myself? Life is short anyway—and especially now there is no life to speak of.… Though you and I know it is the only thing worth mentioning … personal, individual, sensual life. Dear life.

Some letters are typed, even dated, as this one is, “Sunday, August 14th,” but with no year given:

I called you, sister—my biennial checkup on your health and wealth and possibly a clue to your state of mind—any gleanings. Your phone was disconnected, I was informed—no other instrument under the name of EB. listed.

This is impossible. What could it mean? The old clutching—the strangling—the search for air.… Was it that you hadn’t enough money to pay its upkeep? You have wealthy friends.… You could sell something—Gene would part with a cabbage—start a roadside stand—country doughnuts—something!

I couldn’t reach you. I—you!

When Norma finally did reach her sister, their telephone conversation got off to a bad start:

The first thing you say … is have I got any lavender for my linens and I answered have I any linen? … You were very serious about it—“O you have no linen?” It was almost a symbol of how far apart we are from understanding one another.… You have said some of the Goddamndest things to me in the last years and I have let them ride but if you are going back over our early years to try to find reasons for not loving me—let me speak too.

There are pages and pages of these letters, and they all say the same thing: I’ve lost you. “Sweetheart—sweet freckled heart.… how are you?”

In February 1949, Norma finally sent a letter and enclosed a small ring. “When we were young, Mother had given us three silver rings with green scarabs set in each ring,” she explained to me, “and inside on the flat part of the band was written, ‘
Hunk,’ ‘Sefe,’ and ‘Wump.’ And I sent her my ring, which was our signal that I was in trouble. And she said, ‘How nice to have it!’ ”

Norma had sent Vincent a poem she had written, as well as her ring. Vincent responded on March 2, 1949:

Hunk:

Your little silver ring came on my birthday. I would have written you a letter at once in answer to that, except that I had done something queer to my shoulder—wrenched it, strained it, pulled a ligament—I don’t know—one of those things you do when you are so busy doing something that you don’t notice what else you’re doing—and my shoulder hurt and I couldn’t write. I can only type a few lines now, though I’m much better; but I must get some word to you. Not only about the ring, and all that it meant, all that the three rings meant, when the three of us were children—Sefe, Hunk and Wump, and so engraved (Oh, poor little Wumpty-Woons) I can’t go on about that—

Wumpty-Woons was Kathleen’s family nickname. But Norma was having none of it. “
I wanted to
see
her. I was desperately unhappy, but the truth is: I need
you
. Not a letter! Not ‘I’m touched when I get it.’ She’s pretty far removed from the sentiment of the thing, isn’t she? She’s overcome. Honey, I wanted to be close to her!

“Because it was poetry, I knew she would have to respond.… After a while this was the only way I had to reach her.” Then Norma showed me her poem:

Of my home beneath the mantle of your wing,
So confidently cradled to your heart
You overlooked, I think, it was not part
Of you, ’Twas I who did the fashioning.
Blest with a sibling in our common seed
and happy as your satellite to soar,
I heard no menace in the ocean’s roar,
of the chill above the Mountain took no heed.
’Til flying ever higher in the light
New currents called on you for added skill—
You, sensing an impediment to flight
disclosed my house of down: you wore me still.
As gulls above the rocks will loose their prey
You forced the fingers of your stowaway.

Vincent’s letter to Norma had continued:

—I want to write you about your poem, that fine poem you sent me—later I will—but in the meantime, how many poems as good as that have you written? Get them together, in case you haven’t, work over them in case you need to in some instances, write more, in case you haven’t enough, bring out a book. There’s no doubt at all that you have the talent, the imagination and the technique. Any publisher would publish the book, if this poem is a sample of its quality. So get on with it, and don’t let anything stop you: you’re good.

Love,
Sefe

Almost four decades later, Norma sat with her head down, her hands clasping her brow. She brought her fist down sharply on the kitchen table. “
Imagine having to write a sonnet good enough that she would have to recognize it—and
me!
” she said. “It’s an extraordinary letter of Vincent’s, but I worked hard for that. I had not said, ‘This is your sister, Norma, I want to see you,’ but ‘Sister, I must see you! I must! If I come up will you go to a bar with me where we will sit and talk?’

“She would say to me, ‘Oh, Sister, we can sit and talk here.’

“I couldn’t talk alone with her. Because of Gene. Because Gene would come bursting into the room, as he’d done before. She said, ‘Sister, were you trying to kill me?’

“ ‘No, I was just trying to get close to you.’ ”

It was as if the voices of the sisters were crowding into the room, across
time, addressing each other, defending their lives and their choices. Norma broke the intensity of this scene with resolution: “I like myself better as a person than I like her as a person. You can put that down. A writer, to write all the time—you cannot do that without being selfish. Vincent was not self-centered at all. I think she was just naturally selfish. She had to be. She had to guard her time, her … oh, what? Her self. And so did Gene.”

On August 22, 1949, Gene wrote to Norma. Edna, he said, was hard at work writing. “She tells me that she had hoped that you were busy doing the same thing.” In closing, he reminded her that they had taken out their telephone more than a year and a half before. He said it was a “noisy and impertinent machine” that they never wanted back. “The outside world, friends and relatives can always reach either of us by letter.” Clearly, Norma was someone who inhabited that outside world. Then he told her, “Edna and I are leaving Wednesday for Boston. Edna is taking me to a hospital for an operation.” He did not tell her he had lung cancer.

Seven days later, on August 29, 1949, Eugen Jan Boissevain died at Deaconess Hospital in Boston.

CHAPTER 40

It seems to me that what happened to Edna was as dreadful as what happened to Scott Fitzgerald—though she had more character and more genius. Of course she always pulled herself together … but I don’t think you ought to try—as people’s families so often do—to suppress the tragic aspects because they might be painful or shocking to Edna’s more conventional admirers. Her poetry is not the work of a being for whom life could ever have been easy or gone along at a comfortable level. It will always give the lie to any too respectful biography … but it will also always be there to make the casualties of her life seem unimportant.

—Edmund Wilson to Norma Millay, January 31, 1952

N
orma had not yet received Eugen’s letter telling her they were going to Boston for his operation when the telephone rang. “
I picked up the phone, and a voice said, ‘Boston calling.’ Then a little voice said, ‘Oh, sister.’
It was Vincent. And I said, ‘Oh, sister!,’ but she didn’t reply. There was a long silence. And then I suddenly understood.” It was not necessary to say that Eugen had died. “We talked a little bit about poetry. We talked about that sonnet I had written. Vincent said, ‘You didn’t know?’

“ ‘Why, no. How could I know?’ ”

After she hung up, Norma immediately wrote to her:

Dear, I’m not calling back to say this because you might possibly be asleep and that would be a blessing.… Charlie and I would, as you know, love to have you come here. Whatever your plans are you will need rest.… We could come get you anywhere and you could be as alone and quiet as you wished here.

Edna hadn’t thought Eugen would die. The operation had gone well, although Boston was in the middle of a heat wave that August and there was no air-conditioning in the hospital, which had made his labored breathing even more difficult. They had put him in an oxygen tent and then taken it away because he was doing well. Norma described sitting at the kitchen table at Steepletop after his death: “
And Vincent was breathing—she was telling us how she had helped him breathe—she almost took on his illness. He said to her, ‘We’re going places now.’ Then she went back to the hotel to rest. And then they called her.” He had had a cerebral hemorrhage.

Tess Adams had received word from Eugen and written back quickly, but not quickly enough, for her letter was delivered to Edna in Boston. “Darling Ugin, I think of you as being as strong as the sea.” After all, she wrote as lightly as she could manage, “why does a big guy like you need two lungs?” She asked him to tell Edna she would go to Boston immediately to be with her: “I would vanish except when she wanted a buffer, or a friend.” Now it was Tess who drove the grief-stricken Millay back to Steepletop.

Alice Blinn and Margaret Cuthbert arrived the day after Edna returned to Steepletop. They, too, had received a letter from Eugen on August 20 saying he had not been feeling well and had seen a number of doctors who had told him he had cancer in his right lung.

Very unpleasant. I’ll have to be there 4 to 6 weeks. (If the operation is successful.) Terrible for poor Vince. She will be all alone here but she wants to be alone. I am so afraid it will interfere with her work. I hope, if everything goes O.K. to be back before snow flies.… my dear love to both of you. And Good Luck to all of us.—Ugin.