Savage Beauty (85 page)

Margaret, who had known and adored Eugen for years, dropped him a note after drinks that Sunday:

Did I tell you this one—

There was a young girl from Madras
   Who had a beautiful ass—
   It was not what you think!
    Round, firm & pink
But grey—with long ears (or hairs)
   And ate grass—

After the limerick, she struck a worried note: “Should Edna drink & take morphine. Doesn’t one soothe & one excite? And so counter balance each other? I once took bromide—also did some plain & fancy drinking & almost choked to death.”

One afternoon Millay came into the living room fully dressed. “Mr. Boissevain made a great fuss about it,” Miss Leffler remembered, and Edna said, “Most men get excited when a woman undresses for them but this is the first time I’ve known one to get excited because a woman got dressed.”

Millay had agreed in November to write a response to Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s
The Wave of the Future
. Now, with Miss Leffler’s help, she started. She fired off question after question to her assistant: “
Find out how many times
she uses the title-phrase, either entire or just as The Waves, & copy phrases. Copy Dorothy Thompson’s remarks about title, how it was taken from a fascist book or pamphlet.” It wasn’t only that Mil-lay was distressed by the book, as she told Miss Leffler, because it “supported the fascist point of view; she was especially upset that Mrs. Lindbergh should have written such a book.”

The Wave of the Future
had been published within weeks of Millay’s
Make Bright the Arrows
. Rarely had two books that asked the same question—should America defend her allies, or should she remain isolated from them?—taken such opposing points of view. When Anne Lindbergh wrote about “our world,” she defined it as “
the world in which we were brought up—the good, the Christian, the democratic, the capitalist world.” She suggested it was vanishing through the democracies’ lack of moral fiber, in which “the race declined in hardiness,” in which there was “dissatisfaction, maladjustment and moral decay.” Near the close of her book she admitted, “I do not believe we need to be defended against a mechanized German army invading our shores, as much as against the type of decay, weakness, and blindness into which all the ‘Democracies’ have fallen since the last war.… There is no fighting the wave of the future.” Mankind had to learn “not to resist the inevitable push of progress.”

In Millay’s working notebook of November 1940, she had already begun the handwritten draft of her response. She called it “The Dyke of the Present,” a reference to protective land barriers that hold back the sea, “(A reply to Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s
The Wave of the Future
).” This draft breaks off after several pages, only to begin again, run on for a few pages more, and stop. Then, in a typescript of roughly fifty pages, she tried again and again to work out what she thought. She wrote that even if Lindbergh’s book was “at least for the first twenty of its forty-one pages, lucidly written,” the second half was marred by disingenuous sentimentality. Why should we resign ourselves to this approaching wave?

If this wave, whatever it may be, is scheduled to engulf us soon, no matter what we may do, it would seem to me more admirable, more valiant (old-fashioned words, but still with a strong and pleasant herb-like savour about them) to say to the Wave, “Here is my Honour and here is my Individuality: if you want them, come and take them; I give nothing to you.” Instead, Mrs. Lindbergh has counselled us, since we cannot avert death, not to conspire against illness.

“Why, Millay pressed, hadn’t the man who had once done a thing “which declared holiday in all our hearts,” a man “we once called ‘Lindy,’ ” why
hadn’t Charles Lindbergh returned to Field Marshal Göring “his glittering gew-gaws”?

On the last page of notes she made the one statement that may have frozen the completion of her work: “It seems at the outset such a hopeless task to raise one small voice against the many voices lifted in praise of C. & A. Lindbergh, Inc.” They were beloved; they were trustworthy; they represented the best in American life. Who would believe Edna Millay’s “one small voice” in the face of their public esteem?

“I just don’t know why she didn’t finish her answer to ‘Wave of the Future,’ ” Dorothy Leffler wrote. “She was very enthusiastic about it when she began it but then simply tired of it.… After she stopped working on her answer she never referred to it again.”

Millay was in no condition to marshal her response into a coherent essay, and she stopped cold. That April 1941, when she began to record her poems for RCA, even her superb voice seemed to fail her. It sounded thin, uncertain, and forced.

2

By the spring their finances were shot. “
Once again I must ask my publishers to come—come running—to my aid,” Edna wrote to her editor. She said she had to make it sound facetious or she couldn’t go on with the letter. “It seems to me that I never get you finally paid up, with a few hundred dollars to spare, but I have to start right in borrowing from you again.” “What was particularly infuriating was not only that she was constantly in pain but that she had to lay “one sweet luscious grand after another between the self-complacent and condescending teeth of one officious and inefficient hospital after another.”

She tried to assure Gene Saxton that she had finally hit on a cure. She was being treated by a doctor whose doses of everything from what she called “all the tons of calcium gluconate and assorted minerals” and vitamins by the barrel had begun to work. “Every day I get better. One whole day I was almost without pain.” The next sentence was stunning for what she acknowledged: “Seldom has the morphine seemed so slow in getting to me; although poor Ugin, who naturally hates like hell to have to give it to me, is quicker with it than the doctor by now.” But because of the war, “
Eugen has lost everything he had.… There is not a penny he can get at. So for the time being it’s up to me.”

What was cut from her published letters survives in the original:

And as for me, something has just happened in my own personal family affairs—not tragic, just ugly and pathetic and from a financial point of view extremely burdensome to me … without the further considerable help of Harpers’
ruinous
to me.

Kathleen had surfaced again, ill, broke, angrily demanding more money.

Millay enclosed a list of her financial needs:

March 11, 1941

(This amount of course minus such
royalties as I may have earned in
the meantime)—E. St. V M.

Harper met her needs fully. Gene Saxton had only one request: that she work to bring together her
Collected Sonnets
. “
We’ve just had a most enthusiastic session with the salesmen about the ‘Collected Sonnets.’ What they need most, in their selling, is the authority to say 1) that the volume will have 2 or 3 unpublished Sonnets and 2) a Preface.”

In scores of pages in her working notebooks, Millay tried again and again to work out what she wanted to say in a preface. In one fine passage she even tried to define the sonnet:

I did not know then what a sonnet was. I thought, as many people think, and not at all unreasonably, that a sonnet was any kind of short lyric, the word sounds like a diminutive, and informal. What greatness of spirit, what nobility of mood, what austerity, what solemn and serene behaviour, what formal grace and method of procedure as of a ritual most precise and perfect of high ecstasy restrained—what a sonnet could be, what it was meant to be, and what it sometimes even was, I was to learn.

She wrote about the sonnet’s development from Petrarch, about the influence of authors she had read when young, of Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow, for example, whom she had read only for the story,

with the exception of Hiawatha.… But I did not know that Longfellow was taken seriously by
anybody
as a poet. Not a line of his ever made my scalp tighten and my hair move upward on my head like the serpent-curls of Medusa.… For I never did believe, and never have believed a word he said.… And this has always made me feel sad, and, yes, more than a little treacherous, so deeply indebted to him am I for those happy hours in my earliest childhood, long before I could read … when my mother, sitting beside my bed after supper, in her black dress with its smoothly fitting bodice and its yoke, collar and cuffs of shining black jet, would read to me from Hiawatha or Evangeline. Sometimes on winter evenings she would read to me, or often recite from memory, for she knew, I think, the whole long poem by heart, the beautiful “Snowbound” of Whittier, and quite unconscious that I was doing so, I learned much of it by heart myself at this time, and still remember it. Until the day, much later, when I discovered for myself the exciting poetry of Emerson, I always considered Whittier by far the best of the New England poets.

Then she would veer off and begin on another tack, with pages of lists of writers who had influenced her—“
Shakespeare—yes, Milton—no, Wordsworth—yes, George Meredith—yes, Arthur Ficke—yes, D. G. Rossetti—no (?)”—as well as that poet who “
would
have influenced me if I had read him. Gerard Manley Hopkins—same thing—did not know til circa 1935.”

All the pages were akin to these. Millay would set an idea forth only to turn it aside, and no amount of piecing, turning, or recapitulation could make a coherent preface.

One night she stuck this desperate note under Eugen’s bedroom door, asking him for help:

Attention
Snig, Esq.
Personal Somewhat
Important Maybe
Please Answer

I’ve spent so much time & strength writing pieces of prefaces about what I’m going to leave out and why, and what I propose to keep in and why,—that I’ve had no occasion to look over the book itself, and see
why
I’m omitting what I’m omitting,
if
I am omitting it—or
why
I am retaining, et cet. I’ve been trying so hard to write twenty different prefaces to this benighted book that I haven’t the foggiest notion as to what the book will be composed of or whether or not it is fit to print.—This is where I stand—or, rather, lie prone, Sniggies!—Have you any suggestions?—I’m about baffled!—

Love,
me.

She was flummoxed. She knew it, and now so did Eugen, who finally wrote to Gene Saxton in an attempt to explain away her delay. She’d had the galleys since mid-May, and it was now August. In what had become a pattern with them, Eugen cloaked her inability to focus on her work by blaming illness and pain:

I am sorry having to bring you some bad news.

Edna will be unable to finish her introduction for her “Collected Sonnets.” She has been working at it for several months and has all her material gathered and has written quite a lot of it. But, the last two weeks she has been very sick and unable to do anything. She just has to give up writing it. She is terribly unhappy about it, especially as she was really enjoying writing it. As it is, the physical exertion of writing even a half page makes her back ache so badly that it is impossible for her to continue.

What she intends to do now is to write short notes or remarks explaining why the sonnets of “Conversation at Midnight” and most of the sonnets in “Make Bright The Arrows” are not included in this collection. This, however, could not be used as an introduction but will have to be added at the end of the book and called NOTES or REMARKS.

Finally Edna called Arthur Ficke for help. “Vincent has been fussing and stewing,” Arthur wrote in his journal, “about a preface for her ‘Collected Sonnets.’ She finally got into a state of despair, and about two weeks ago sent for me to go over and see her. I found, to my horror, that she was trying to produce an elaborate … treatise on the sonnet.”

Millay agreed to cut the preface. She would take Arthur’s advice and write only a note with an explanation of why certain of her sonnets were not there. But she was still in a jam and could not write even this note, when she asked him to take over the whole editing. “So I spent 24 hours correcting the proofs. Yesterday I drove over, and explained all my suggested changes to her, and she accepted them. Last night I transferred the corrections to the publisher’s copy of the proofs. And now they can be sent off.”