Savage Beauty (67 page)

He did have a confession to make to her: he’d been in love with a girl eight years earlier and he’d just seen her again. “We spent the night together, and I just received such a beautiful letter from her. It makes me very happy. I had a few love affairs. Very lovely ones, of which I will tell you when I see you.” After which he added, “Difficult to write about. You know.”

Eight years before would have been only a year after they had married. Eugen had therefore then been sexually involved with other women almost from the beginning of their marriage, and it was something they discussed openly.

Yet talking about an affair doesn’t necessarily imply freedom from jealousy, or from hurt. While Eugen appeared to be accepting, even encouraging, Edna’s affair with Dillon, he also wrote to her in language laced with sexual possessiveness and jealousy. In a letter sent in early June, he told her he could still see her standing on the balcony of the Hôtel Port-Royal in her yellow dressing gown waving good-bye to him,

and that desperate desolate feeling I had then, that it was goodbye, that it was the King is dead … that the queen-bee had left the hive with all the young bees and the old bees staid back to die silently and without complaints.… But I’ll let things go just so far for just so long, and then I am going to think only of Ugin, and then I am going after you and get you back, even if it was only for a night.

One morning he got up early, made the fire, had a cup of tea, and, sleepily, began to think of her “wickedly. I make pictures of you and I want to have you here. I want you so badly. I want to see your beautiful body and feel all over you and smell your lovely body and play with your naughty breasts and your kitty, the only clean wicked kitty in the world.” Then he told her exactly what he wanted her to do. She was to have a very good manicure, “and don’t put that awful red ugly stuff on them. I took a naughty undy of yours in my bed yesterday. I miss one of them. Oh, well, I’ll punish you for all your wickedness. I have thought out delicious and
refined tortures.… I kiss your wet lips.” In ink, scrawled at the bottom of the letter, he added:

Couldn’t you take a small handkerchief and put it in your kitty, before you take a bath and mail it to me. I’m longing for your Perfume.—I’m longing to smell you.—All your clothes are so washed and cleaned. I couldn’t get a smell of you.—Goodbye beautiful. I kiss your exciting breasts. Ugin.

She cabled him to come to Paris. He hesitated. In a letter postmarked June 20, he wrote:

Everything would be damn simple if I knew you really wanted me: I’d be on a steamer by now. But may be you do it half because you want me, and half out of softness to me. May be in your funny Scramoodle-mind you have a little fear, that I will be a little bit of a nuisance and a little bit of a problem.

Did she want him to catch that day’s boat? Or had she been sitting one night having dinner with George, “and a few bottles of wine and you felt awfully gay and happy and adventurous and you said, ‘How Ugin would enjoy this. Let’s send him a cable and tell him to come.’ And may be you were a little drunk. And then, bingo, there I’d be, outstaying my welcome before I had arrived.”

He decided to await her next cable. “I wish I knew your plans. If I have failed you in this, I will beat myself to death.… But I’m going to prevent you from killing our love by kindness to Ugin. I will not be a piece of irritating, dragging piece of family.”

Pages later, he suddenly guessed why she had cabled: “You are expecting a baby. And you want me to be around so that people cannot figure out who’s it is.” If that were true, she should come to New York. He’d come and fetch her, but she should see a doctor right away. All she had to do was cable the single word: come. What he did not want to do, “having been so Goddamn wise these last months … [was] to spoil everything now.”

CHAPTER 28

E
dna Millay was not pregnant. She was, however, having a very difficult time with George. Finally, on June 22, she wrote Eugen the letter he’d
longed for. She said she hadn’t written before because she knew how indiscreet he was with letters, but now

I really don’t care who knows about the three of us, so long as they don’t talk to me about it. George & I have been awfully happy together, but we’re bad for each other, & we both know it. Neither of us is getting any work done. I don’t mind, because I don’t feel like working yet & don’t want to.

But Dillon did mind. He took his Guggenheim Fellowship seriously, and he wanted “to be sober & studious & live within his really almost impossible income. He got seven hundred dollars less than they usually give … & he had to promise not to take a job or anything while he’s living on the Fellowship.”

But they weren’t in Paris primarily to work. They were in Paris together to enjoy each other and to figure out what their relationship would be like without Eugen. Now she explains, defensively, to Eugen that she is paying her own way everywhere. “But just being with me tends to make him extravagant, because he just can’t realize that I don’t mind at all eating at seven francs prix fixe places & riding on the Metro. I really don’t.” But when she goes on to say she is nearly broke because she has bought some model dresses at Louise Boulanger’s, she is certainly undermining any claim to thrift. She sounds petulant.

Then she drops her guard and tells Eugen the truth about Dillon: “Last Sunday evening I told George we’d better not see each other any more for a while. It was pretty hard to do, because it means an entire break; we don’t communicate with each other in any way at all.”

It was, she continues, only three days ago,

But it has seemed a long time because I realize we may never see each other any more. That’s probably not the case, but it might turn out that way. I did it all by myself & very much against his will. He said that he would give up anything for me, even his work, & why didn’t we forget everything else & just stay together & be happy & let everything go smash. Of course he wouldn’t & couldn’t give up his work for anybody, but to hear him talk like that made me realize how desperate he had become. And I couldn’t stand it. I’m keen about his poetry, & I helped him to get this Guggenheim thing, & I’m not going to be the one to bitch it all up for him now.—Oh, I know you think he’s a mess, & has no stamina, & you’re probably bored by all this. But you’ve been urging me to write you how things are. And this is how they are. Finally I practically put him out of the apartment. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done.

In this letter she made one of the rare comments on George’s attitude toward Eugen: he was jealous.

Of course he’s known all along that I miss you & want to see you, and that keeps him upset.… He’d like to put me to the choice between you, but he knows that if he ever really did that I’d go back to you, although I never said so. That’s why I think it more than likely that I shan’t see him any more. Now that I’ve sent him on his way & he’s alone, he’s probably making a strong effort, since he can’t have me all to himself, to get along without me altogether.

She was alone, and she didn’t know what to do. She might go to the Riviera, she might return to Steepletop,

But of course what I’m really hoping is that things are not over between George & me, & if that is true it would be a bad idea to go so far away. For whereas you & I are never really apart, no matter how far away from each other we may be, between myself & George the distance widens very rapidly when once we’re separated. And this doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love me, because he does. But he just is like that.

It would be marvelous if you were here. When I cabled you I was simply asking you to come, & I thought you would understand that. But since you didn’t & since you were somewhat bewildered & afraid of making a mistake, so wanted to wait until you had a letter from me explaining things,—why, now I just don’t know.

Edna may have wanted him to come, but she wanted the burden of the decision to rest with him. She did not want too much read into any decision of hers; she did not even appear to want to make a clear choice. She continued to equivocate:

You couldn’t live with me here in this flat, because George has been with me here so much of the time, & to the concierge he’s my man. She would think me pretty light, and I’m foolish & sensitive enough to be able to be troubled by that. Besides, I should still want to have a place of my own. It’s been very good for me, I believe. Perhaps I shall finally succeed in thinking things out a bit & come to some conclusion. It’s good for me to have to do things for myself. Even paying my own taxi is good for me. And I don’t over-tip any more. And I’m not drinking very much.—But it would be marvelous to have you near me so that I could see you often, often. I long so to see you, darling. I’ve missed you so.

By now, June 28, their letters had crossed, and while she was telling him she had decided to do without George, Eugen was guessing that she had abandoned the better part of herself to him.

Is there any danger, Edna, that you are reverting to type, and becoming a regular woman, and losing interest in your work and yourself as a poet, and are just only interested in helping Him to be a poet and only interested in His poetry.… If you are going to give yourself up and your personality to be the silent power behind some man, like most women do, that would be the last straw and I’d get so disgusted with life, that I wouldn’t care, oh hell I wouldn’t care who got the nomination for the presidency by the Democratic Party and I even wouldn’t care who became president of this great and free Republic. Do what you like my dear, but remain a poet, for Christ’s sake.

It took about a week for her letter to arrive. When it did, Eugen fired off two cables, telling her he’d sail for France as soon as he could book passage. The next morning he was calmer. It was very like him to explode in certainty and then become cool. She could still change her mind and stop him, he coaxed:

It seems such a drastic measure you are taking.… What I always understood to be your hope, that the three of us finally would be friends and that we could go on all three of us. You have gone or rather we have gone through some pretty tough times the last two years in order to try and do that and what the world has always thought the impossible. It seemed to me so dreadful for you to think that you had to make up your mind that it could not be done. Let’s make another heroic attempt. Let’s try to be all three together. Let’s try whether we cannot find a way out. May be we can teach him not to be jealous of me. May be we can teach him to like me.

It was a peculiar response: Eugen seemed to be insisting that Edna not relinquish George. He urged her to hold on to him; he apologizes for not liking her lover more.

I DO like him. Under other circumstances by this time I doubtless would love him. But although I don’t rave and roar like a jealous man, and although I don’t run around with a gun, don’t think for a moment that I am not jealous once in a while, and that I haven’t funny little moments of feeling desolate and forlorn and a little bit crazy. Well, that is not ideal soil for either love or friendship to grow in. But I have myself now entirely in hand.

Now was the moment the three of them should seize, and Paris was the place “for George and me to get to like each other, respect each other and with the grace of God to love each other.” He cabled her twice from Hills-dale, New York, on July 1, 1932:

THANKS DARLING FOR LONG LETTER JUST RECEIVED STOP INTEND SAILING NEXT WEEK TO BE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD STOP THREE OF US MUST BE TOGETHER THIS IS IMPORTANT STOP MY LOVE TO GEORGE AND A TOAST TO THE THREE MODERN MUSKETEERS

CABLE NUMBER TWO STOP REFUSE TO ALLOW YOU GIVE UP BEAUTIFUL AND PRECIOUS THING WILL BE IN PARIS TO BATTLE FOR YOU AND AM COMING PREPARED TO STAY A DAY OR A YEAR STOP HERE IS TO COURAGE AND WISDOM TO THE THREE OF US SKIDDLES

Edna immediately cabled Eugen from Paris:

DISREGARD LETTER EVERYTHING ALRIGHT MY TELEPHONE TROCADERO TWENTY FOUR NINETY FOUR CALL ME SUNDAY AFTER MIDNIGHT PARIS TIME.

But Eugen was mightily puzzled. On July 4, he wrote:

My own sweet darling … I wonder what you mean by all right and I wonder why you want me to telephone you. I cannot get you out of my mind. I took a walk, but it is no good.… I know that you love me, but I long to hear you say it or write it. Of course you said a lot when you said that if you’d have to choose between us, you would come back to me.… But I am jealous of him. For what you feel for him. Are you a little bit in love with me? Do you sometimes think of me and want to touch me? That would be something.

It was a reassurance she did not give him.

2

On the afternoon of June 24, 1932, Natalie Clifford Barney gave a tea for Edna at her legendary salon at 20, rue Jacob on the Left Bank, “to introduce a lot of French poets & people to Little Wincy-Pince,” Edna told Eugen.

It’s going to be awful, such a noisy crowd. Miss Barney is charming, though, a great friend of Mme. Delarue-Mardrus, a great and famous Lesbian in her own right, & formerly a great & devoted friend of Remy de Gourmont, to whom he wrote his “Letters to an Amazon,” etc.—It will be interesting. I’m going to wear my simple little black ensemble from Worth’s.

Goodbye,
Heaps of love, darling
From Freckles.

Natalie Barney was rich, eccentric, tiny, seductive, and American. In her youth she was called “the wild girl from Cincinnati.” One of her dearest
friends, Elisabeth de Gramont, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, said that in her were combined the grace of the American woman “and Palestinian nonchalance.” She was a Jew. Hidden in the courtyard of her small house was a temple of friendship around which Colette, as well as Mata Hari, had once gamboled nude and on horseback. The ground floor of the main rooms of the house had been covered in pink damask, but that was in 1909, when Barney first rented the property. Now the damask had paled until it was the color of silken flesh. There were alabaster chandeliers festooned with pretty glass fruits, and several dour portraits hung in the entry hall, among them friends of Natalie’s painted by her mother, Alice Pike Barney, who had studied with Whistler. The entire house seemed to breathe decadence.