Savage Beauty (93 page)

Edna was upstairs when the two women arrived, Alice Blinn remembered.

“
We were waiting a rather long time for her to come down. I still remember the sound of her coming across the slate hall entranceway. I suppose we were anxious. Then I looked up to see her strike a pose in the doorway. ‘Who am I?’ ” she asked.

“ ‘You’re Henry the Eighth by Holbein,’ I said quickly, for that was exactly what she looked like. Then she turned and struck another pose. I said, ‘Edna, if I knew you’d read a book I read when we were children I’d say you were the Little Colonel.’

“ ‘I am! I am, Alice!’

“And, of course, she was so pleased. How we laughed. It was not often, but she could be playful, even then.”

It was during this visit, late one night at Steepletop after Eugen’s death, that Alice talked with Edna about her need for a will. Who would manage her estate, Alice asked, prepare her manuscripts for publication or for sale?

“She sat very quietly listening to me, and she was very serious, looking up at me with that rather quizzical expression she had. Certainly she listened intently. And then she said, ‘Well, Alice, I’m not sure whether Norma isn’t the one to do it.’

“And that was it. That was the end of it. I knew she had made her decision. Why she made it, I do not know. I don’t think I understood it then nor now, but there was no question that that was the end of the conversation.”

When George Dillon heard about Eugen’s death from a word dropped in a letter, he quickly wrote to Edna:

It seems incredible and wrong. I have no details and don’t even know where you are but am trying to hope that you will let me know, or tell someone to let me know, if I can do anything whatever to help. This sounds horribly dutiful. It is not. I am free to do whatever you need me for, and it would be what I most want to do.

Then he said what she must have needed to hear: “Please remember that you can count on me. George.”

She scribbled a note hastily, in what looks like a drunken scrawl, next to George’s address and phone number in Richmond for Mary Herron, the postmistress in Austerlitz, who was helping her with her correspondence: “
Mr. George Dillon (or his mother or father). Say that I have been in hospital for two weeks and have just now received his letter. Ask him if he can
come to Steepletop for a few days, to be with me and help me.—Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

Dillon did not come. He too had fallen ill. He was home from the hospital in mid-October when she telephoned him.

He wrote in reply, “
It meant a great deal to me, as you knew it would, to know that Eugen had spoken of me so recently. I always looked upon him as a justification for the human race, and as time has gone on, I realize more and more how incomparable he was.” Then he said that while he knew she had courage aplenty, what he hoped was that she would find release in her work.

He said he’d resigned from his editorship of
Poetry:

The truth is, I don’t react strongly to the poetry now being written. The war output was deplorable … I did look for something to turn up after the war. But where is it? (The young people who care about poetry seem to be largely concerned with theory, and not very new or interesting theory, rather than performance.)

He might get a job that would take him back to North Africa, where he had been stationed during World War II. But it was uncertain. He’d let her know. He sounded adrift. George could not have known what very bad shape Millay was in when she returned to Steepletop that September.

Eugen had been dead less than two weeks when Millay entered Doctors Hospital for the third time, on September 11, 1949. The admitting physician was Dr. William Hall Lewis, Jr., who was a friend of her neighbors the LaBranches. “
A session occurred in New York at this time,” Dr. Lewis recalled, “in late August or early September. Friends of hers who were in the city considered that she should have some attention from them, and also that she should be in a position to have some medical supervision to judge her moods and depressive reactions.” They were afraid she could not cope with being alone.

Dr. Lewis’s diagnosis was “Acute neurasthenia” aggravated by “Nutritional deficiency” and “Cirrhosis of the liver.” “The medication given at this time consisted of more nutritional intake with a modest sedation of barbiturates. Was also given vitamins and liver extract by injection.… She required some Sodium Luminal, grains 2, by injection. For relaxation. Also, a nurse is prescribed to be with the patient twenty-four hours for present. Do not leave alone. Medication consisted thereafter of Sodium Luminal or Seconal taken by mouth. She was allowed to have—a note of 9/16/49—wine, one and one-half bottles per twenty-four hours.”

She had come in complaining of simple exhaustion. Dr. Lewis said she had apparently been drinking for some time and was worn out. She told the nurse that she “desires large amount of sedation.”

It was a bright, sunny day, Dr. Lewis recalled, when the ambulance arrived at Steepletop at eleven o’clock to pick her up and take her to Doctors Hospital. At the last minute Edna decided she would be better off at home. There was a forty-five-minute discussion when the nurse who was to accompany her in the ambulance reported to Dr. Lewis “that a sedative was given to Edna in order for her to make the trip.”

The journey was on the Taconic Parkway, which was heavily traveled, especially on a pretty fall Sunday. Once under way Edna suddenly rapped on the partition between her and the driver’s seat and requested that the ambulance pull over because “she needed to wee-wee.” The shades were drawn for her privacy, and the ambulance men looked straight ahead. After some time Edna reported that she had not been successful and felt she could do better if the shades were raised. Still unable to go, she “requested the driver to whistle.… The driver started to whistle as best as he could under the circumstances.” The nurse who was with her “did notice that the companion driver was getting more and more red in the back of the neck until he finally exploded in great volumes of laughter.” They finally got under way, and she was admitted to the hospital late that afternoon.

“In my discussion with Edna it did not seem that she was unduly depressed. Or showing any suicidal inclinations,” Dr. Lewis remembered. “Being accustomed to wine and other alcohol content, it was agreed she could have a liter and a half of wine per day.… Later the nurses informed me that she was obtaining one bottle of wine a day from each of four individuals separately who came to call upon her, putting them on the top shelf of the closet in the hospital room. I immediately discussed this with her and … she felt that I was inconsiderate in my appreciation of the value of wine … it was a beautiful amber and rosy liquid that inspired the literary imagination. I told her that in view of her medical condition and past history it seemed best to have some moderation.… She reacted very strongly to that.… I was entirely too medical, and I was treating this beautiful liquid of the Gods like a common medicine.”

By September 14, she was taking hot tea, grapefruit juice, and claret in the morning. At 3
P.M.
, the nurse noted that she was “out of bed in chair. Has had very good day.… Seems stronger & steadier.” Edna was making very definite plans now, and although two friends had called wanting to come and visit her, she’d put them off.

The next morning found her weeping and asking for medication; she said she’d come to rest and to sleep. She’d doze for ten minutes and then
awaken weeping. She was smoking and drinking. She complained bitterly about medication and said she “requires 5 or 7 grams, not an ‘infant’s dose.’ ” Then she slept fitfully for about five hours, between two and seven.

The next morning she was described as “In biting, fault-finding mood remedication: ‘Please don’t reason with me.’ ” Dr. Lewis visited and she told him, “I want to get out and get to work!” At 3:30, she went to the hospital’s beauty parlor for a shampoo, but by the evening she was again depressed and weepy. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to sleep, and she drank two thirds of a bottle of wine after supper.

Friday, September 16, 1949: “Patient sitting up, drinking & smoking. Extremely agitated about way she is being treated. Repeats her story of medication & dosage she requires. Wanted gin.”

On Sunday the eighteenth she’d been in Doctors Hospital a full week. She was irritated at what she felt to be the indignity of her treatment, asked for various remedies, and then refused them all. Then, in what looked to be a very impatient nurse’s hand: “will not try to sleep.
ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT COOPERATE.
” She refused even to lie down and told the nurse that if she did she would suffocate.

By lunchtime that day she was on her feet, and she refused wine for the first time. On Monday she was drinking ginger ale and tea and eating with appetite. She was also beginning to sleep.

While her friends refused to agree with her that she should be allowed to leave the hospital, she was determined to. It had been three weeks since Eugen had died, and she wanted to be at home, alone. Since none of them, not Tess nor Gladys Fiske nor Margaret Cuthbert would drive her, she called Cass Canfield.

Years later, Cass Canfield could no longer recall which of her friends had called him to decide whether she could safely leave the hospital. “
The doctor involved wouldn’t make the decision, and somehow it fell to me. I thought she should be at her home. After all, that was where she wrote her poems. It was her home and she belonged there, whatever she did.”

Canfield remembered stopping on the drive to Steepletop at some inn off Route 22. “We had something to eat. I asked her if she’d like a drink and she said no. We had wine, a quart of wine. I drank perhaps a glass, a glass and a half, and she drank all the rest.

“Yes, I was aware that she might kill herself. But I thought that was up to her in a way.”

Once she was back at Steepletop, John Pinnie, who had been their hired man since they had bought Steepletop in 1925, stayed on with her to help run the place. The local postmistress, Mary Herron, read and answered the many letters of sympathy that came in after Eugen’s death. She also did Millay’s bookkeeping, wrote out her checks, helped with her taxes, and cared for her.

Three months after Eugen’s death, Cass Canfield asked her to look over William Rose Benét’s introduction, written for a special edition of her
Second April
and
The Buck in the Snow
, which Harper was bringing out in a new series. She wrote five pages of detailed critical notes about the introduction, telling Canfield that there were things

to which I properly, as a person, can object: the too familiar … use of the name
“Vincent”
(too familiar for a formal piece of writing … Bill Benét has always called me Vincent, as did Elinor Wylie); and the bit of gossip beginning, “I think I know of whom,” (which also would prove distracting to the reader, who would say to himself, “This might be juicy, if only I could squeeze it”)

because it was marked by bad writing which made her feel “sick and embarrassed.” Nevertheless, she asked only that one sentence be altered completely; in its place she wrote:

In this year Edna St. Vincent Millay married Eugen Jan Boissevain, who rendered to her a devotion—and not only a devotion, but an understanding of the demands of her art—that endured until his death in 1949.

Canfield said it was heartbreaking: her sharp loss ringing through her clear restraint.

Lena Reusch went to clean for Millay after Eugen’s death because John Pinnie asked for her help. “
He told me she needed someone and asked if I’d work for her every other day. It was Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I believe. Well, the first thing we did was, we got the dining room all fixed up. That was a mess! Things all over, every which way.”

Edna was making plans for the house and thinking ahead to next spring. There were things that had to be done now, before the snowfall. She made a note of instructions for Bill Reusch, Lena’s husband, and put it in her bedroom desk for safekeeping.

Putty up holes where bees get into garage
Take down old electric-engine house
Put 2 electric lights in woodshed (one of them in laundry closet)
Put wire cover on Incinerator
Plane 2 storm-windows
Plane doors of cupboard in Laundry
Put sash-weights & cords in 2 windows
Put panes in several Windows

Mr. Reusch came and did the carpentry. “Just fixing up different things that needed it. A new cellar door, I remember. She knew what she wanted and how it should be done, and I liked her very well. She could be very concerned about—oh, what? little things to me. And she was funny sometimes. She’d joke. I remember that I had to wax the floor and I asked her where the heavy polisher was to buff it. And she sort of smiled at me and, putting on her socks, she skated and danced across my freshly waxed floor, and did it shine!”