Savage Beauty (73 page)

“There still was a trace of a prancing charm and a young vulnerability,” Prokosch wrote. He felt a sort of

loyalty to Miss Millay which dated back to the exhilarating twenties.
Wine from These Grapes
had just been published and I was sadly disappointed but I still felt an affection for
Second April
and
Fatal Interview
. “The sonnets I loved best,” I murmured half guiltily, “were ‘Only until this cigarette is ended’ and ‘Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave.’ ”

She glanced at me quickly with a panic-stricken glitter. “You say
loved
. It’s all over, then? Never mind. It’s rather a blow but there are worse things that can happen, even to the best of us.” … Then she plucked a cigarette from a flat silver case and lit it ceremoniously with her freckled fingers.

2

When George Dillon found himself increasingly bogged down in the Baudelaire translations, Edna and Eugen invited him to Steepletop for the summer. Eugen wired the invitation, which George accepted immediately: “It is like you to send the telegram others would just think of sending. In this case your good deed is going to flower and bear fruit—it is as welcome as a rainfall on the dusty hills of Kansas and it has the same effect
on my drooping spirit.” George had sent Millay several of his translations and asked her to write the introduction to his Baudelaire, if she liked them. Crucially, she agreed.

George’s letter to Eugen continued:

I have never done anything that made me feel so
alone
, so absolutely cut off from the world around me.… Your friendly appreciation, and a note from Vincent saying that she will write the introduction, have sufficed to bring back something of the old enthusiastic feeling I had a year ago, and I am determined to finish the book to the best of my ability.

The trouble was, he wrote Vincent, that by then he would probably be good for nothing, “
and if I come I shall expect to be treated like an uninteresting old uncle and set off in a corner or under a tree with a book.”

There was something wildly disingenuous about this response. George Dillon was twenty-eight to Eugen’s fifty-five; Edna Millay was forty-three. Some old uncle! Years later he would tell a mutual friend that “
though their hospitality was warm and constant, I didn’t go often to Steepletop.… they were usually surrounded by much older friends, and I felt somewhat out of it.” But by then he was cloaking the intimacy of their relationship. In 1935, no matter how avuncular he may later have claimed to be, when he accepted the invitation he was about to enter their world again. This exquisite fragment of an unpublished and undated poem found among Dillon’s papers tells us how he felt about Millay:

Finding her body woven
As if of flame and snow
I thought, however often
My pulses cease to go,
Whipped by whatever pain
Age or disease appoint,
I shall not be again
So jarred in every joint,
So mute, amazed, and taut
And winded of my breath—
Beauty being at my throat
More savagely than death.

It was a lovely summer at Steepletop. Cool green woods led to their farmhouse, its spring-fed pool surrounded by gardens of roses and Japanese irises. Two small stone fountains splashed water, and the grassy paths were overgrown with sweet fern, bordered by pines and fields of blueberries.
Steepletop was not one of the grand dark-shingled Berkshire cottages. It was gay and playful and bohemian, free of the careful formality of Edith Wharton’s estate, The Mount, in nearby Lenox. It was a place where swimming suits were not welcome.

Indoors, Vincent and George began work on what was becoming
their
translation. For what had been “entirely George Dillon’s book,” Edna would write in her preface to the Baudelaire, had in fact become a collaboration. At first she had told herself she was just translating a phrase for fun, then as an exercise she’d translated an entire poem. After that she admonished herself, “you’ll go straight back to work on your own book, which is
the most important thing in the world to you
, and you won’t even
think
of translating another. This is what I said to myself, but neither of us believed me.… I was in for it.” This was precisely the phrase she had used in an early letter to Dillon, when she had first been in love with him. “From that day to this moment I have thought of nothing, lived for nothing, but my translations from
Les Fleurs du Mal
.”

George liked to sleep late, while Eugen, up early, bare-chested and in shorts, puttered around the gardens in the morning and whistled for Altair and Ghost to go for a walk. He cooked every meal, tempting feasts with lots of wine, and there were always gin rickeys at cocktail time by the pool. Eugen’s hair was thinning in the front now, and a faint bald spot showed up at his crown in the snapshots they took that summer—whereas George’s black unruly curls, wet after a swim, were as slick as licorice.

On June 11, there was a very silly sonnet-writing session among Edna, George, and Eugen at Steepletop, a copy of which Edna sent to Arthur Ficke. “
Me & George & Ugin had hysterics over this sonnet last night. We shrieked, we rolled on the floor, we stuffed rugs into our mouths. Perhaps you can think up some more. There
are
some more. We just had to stop because we were afraid we were going to die.

“I was Brynhilde, but am now grown old.
I saw Valhalla fallen, and Wotan dead.
My spear is heavier than my arm can hold,
My wingéd casque a weight upon my head.…
I see around me in a rocky place
A ring of flame, and hear the voice of him,
Sieglinde’s son, who, roving with a pack
Of young companions, children of the brave,
Shouted and plunged and took upon his back
The crested fire as it had been a wave.
Oh, laughing boy,—oh, to this moment dear!
Who seeing me stared and said, ‘A woman here?’

Of young companions, bravest of the brave
” ”   , in the brook to lave
” ”  ” , none of them a slave,
” ”  ” , hating to behave,
” ”  ” , through the forest grave (nave)
” ”  ” , hunting for a cave,
” ”  ” , in a manner suave,
” ”  ” , boredom off to stave,
” ”  ” , still too young to shave,
” ”  ” , hell about to pave,
” ”  ” , did not stamp or rave
” ”  ” , (one of them called ‘Dave’)”

But what happened when Edna and George sat in the library upstairs at Steepletop sparring over a word, disagreeing, then suddenly in absolute agreement? Eugen must have felt out of place. No one not engaged in those impossibly strict translations could have hoped to share the enflaming intensity of their labor, their intellectual play, their connection.

On July 23, Eugen left them alone together at Steepletop and wrote to Edna from the Turner Inn in Keene, New Hampshire:

Darling,

Although we did not make an agreement, I come Friday trusting that we did really make an agreement.—

I’ll leave Monday.—

All my love
Uge

This note implied a lot. Eugen would return, but for a weekend only. “When three weeks later he sent her a snapshot of himself, freshly shaven, in a linen suit, looking very well groomed, he looked worried. As well he might be. For once again, Eugen had withdrawn, leaving them alone. On his way to Ragged Island, Maine, Eugen wrote her again:

Darling Freckles,

I’m so unbelievably happy, that I must write to you.… It was blowing a little and the sea was running, but not quite so badly as when we sailed and rowed over. You remember.… At 6 p.m. the wind had freshened, white caps all over and dirty clouds to the S.W.… An hour later it blew like the devil.… A nice little storm, with the breakers making white spray against a black sky way up in the air, and the grass blown flat on the ground, and the Greasy Joan [their skiff] riding sweetly on the hall-off, and I snug in the kitchen looking at “the scenery.”—I know this reads like a letter of a 12 year old boy to his mama, but that’s the way I feel.…

It is funny, but the happier I am the more I want you and long for you and Christ I long for you. I want to show you so many things.… My warmed over fish chowder is smelling up the whole house, so I guess it is boiling and I’d better eat it.

He was beginning to sound just as he had in the letters he had written to her when she’d been in France with Dillon in the summer of 1932—Eugen, the one who cooks and provides, tempting her with sweet dishes, with flowers, with the natural world of which he is master. It took him six more pages to tell her what he really felt:

Love certainly is funny, not to say entertaining.—Here I am happy, oh so happy, being alone on my beautiful fearful island.… and I must write and long for a red haired freckled unfaithful little bitch with beautiful breasts and an innocent child’s red kitty.… This is a crazy letter.

Eugen’s excessiveness was a part of his nature. He was stirred by her unfaithfulness. She seemed to be most alluring to him when she was least available.

I am crazy with delight of all here, and crazy for you.—Remain my own darling unfaithful Vince and my darling, Scramoodles and true, after your own fashion to your own

Skiddlepins.—

Eugen never knew when to stop. He pressed—not like a man who was sure of himself but like a man who was demonstrating his need and his sincerity. He insisted. He repeated. It’s as if by insisting he could make his love more true.

And then, finally:

I L O V E Y O U.—
Ugin signing off.—
  Please, please standbye?—

He was interminable. But he also seemed, this time, to be in control.

One week later, George wrote to Saxton at Harper, using Eugen’s stationery with his name and “Steepletop” engraved on the letterhead: “
Herewith the partial manuscript of the greatest verse translation of the twentieth century.” He was even cheeky:

These copies can be treated as carelessly as you like. We will make entirely new ones for the final manuscript.

We hope that you will still like the poems when you read them to yourself.

Then, as a stunning postscript: “My address for the next two weeks will be in care of Mr. Boissevain, Orr’s Island, Maine.” They would be all together on Ragged Island.

On the twenty-eighth of August, writing to Saxton from Orr’s Island, the post office for Ragged, George and Edna signed the Baudelaire contract. Dillon’s own publisher, the Viking Press, had written him a sharp letter. Viking was pleased for him that he was in a “brilliant collaboration” with Edna Millay, and it might well have been natural for him to assume “on account of Miss Millay’s longer standing as an author, that the book should go to her publishers, rather than to yours. On the other hand, the project was yours to begin with …”; the company reminded him politely that he still owed them his next book.

When George sent this letter to Saxton, he added a note at the bottom. He was not bound to them for the Baudelaire, he said, since there was nothing in his contract about books written in collaboration. He asked that duplicate copies be sent to him, not only of the contracts but of all correspondence and proofs. While it was easier for Harper to write to Edna since they were constantly in touch with her about other matters, “that system is excellent as long as she and I are closely in touch, but after the First of the month we shall not be.”

At the end of September, most of their translations were done, but Edna’s promised preface was still incomplete, and the biographical note she now felt compelled to write was not yet begun. She planned a week in Paris with Eugen to get both chapters absolutely right and complete.

3

On September 28, Millay received a disturbing letter from her father. He wrote from Kingman, Maine, and he sounded bewildered. “
You will be surprised to hear from me and under such conditions,” he began. “Matters have gone badly with me for the last few years and I have gotten where I must do something.” He explained that he had suffered a stroke during the summer, and though he was improving, the town of Kingman, which owed him money, was bankrupt “and will never be in financial condition in time to be any good to me. I really have no income at all.” His friends had tried to help, but he had fallen into debt.

Unless you can see your way clear to help me there is nothing for me but to apply to the state for aid which I am loath to do. My needs are not large; Some seven or eight dollars will take of me weekly after my immediate needs are taken care of me.

Several times in this brief letter he misconstructed his request for help: he meant “take care of me.”

It is quite possible that I may not have to be cared for me very long.…and if you feel that you want to help me rather than call on the state, it will make me much happier in my old age.

H. T. Millay

After she helped him, he wrote to her once more: “
I want to tell you that what you are doing for me is plenty and I am grateful beyond any I can say. I don’t know what I might have or could have done.” He signed this letter “Your Father.” It was ironic that the small sum Henry Millay asked of his daughter was only a few dollars more than what they had so desperately needed from him in her girlhood.