Savage Beauty (48 page)

Millay had been considering a satirical play on sex as early as her notebook in 1918–19, when she had drawn up a cast for “
Figs from Thistles / An Unmorality of the Seven / Deadly Virtues.” Her characters were “Vice, a very young girl” and her maiden aunts, “Humility, Abstinence, Thrift, Self-Sacrifice, Piety, etc.” The character called “Life” was “a lovely boy, dressed in green.” But she did no more than list their names.

Roughly three years later, in the black notebook where she had made her first Paris entries, she began a sketch for another one-act play called “Food,” and she was again having fun with her characters’ names: Matrix,
Utera, Aphrodisia and Venerea (daughters of Matrix), Erotic, son of Utera, Semen, husband of Matrix, and Lascivia, “a neighbor who wears French clothes.” Later she added “Master Bates, their little son.” As broad as these characters’ names are, it’s impossible not to link the play to
Hardigut
, for they share the same theme: secrecy about sex, and food as its allegorical equivalent.

We must eat to remain healthy; we must have sex to remain fully alive. It should be openly engaged in, Millay thought, and not hidden by taboos. But she was not able to complete these sketches: neither play was written, the novel was never finished. In her poetry sex surfaced constantly, sometimes ironically and sometimes sensuously, but in such a way that the reader thinks it is about Millay’s own sexuality, about her own life. The reader is encouraged, invited even, to suspect autobiography. It may be a naive way to read, but it is as enduring as human curiosity. This confusion between what an author imagines and writes, and what she may actually do, would help earn Millay a small fortune—and a large audience.

There was a summer colony at Croton-on-Hudson, where a cluster of charming old frame houses on Mt. Airy Road formed the center of a group of friends who knew each other from the Village. It was a politically radical, socially unconventional, jolly group who liked to play together and were not given to bourgeois tidying up. “
The houses,” one wrote, “have no gardens, the grass grows long and the rose bushes are weed tangled.” But they shared a glorious view of the Hudson River, and it was a green refuge from the city, only an hour away.

Behind the Boardman Robinsons’ house was a clay tennis court where Max Eastman and Eugen Boissevain, who were sharing a house that summer, could be seen playing tennis in their white flannels. “It was as though Greenwich Village in summer array had been dumped down with almost deliberate pageantry upon the grass,” one of them wrote. Doris Stevens, who had met Millay in London, and Dudley Field Malone, with whom she was then living, had taken a house. Max’s sister, Crystal Eastman, and her husband, Walter Fuller, had too. Even John Reed had had a house there before his death in the Soviet Union. And Floyd Dell had been invited to stay that summer by several intense young mothers who Dell thought might send their children to Russia for an education.

In this festive community Edna Millay found herself playing charades one April evening, paired by chance with Eugen Boissevain. She was a houseguest of Dudley Malone and Doris Stevens. Floyd Dell was also there, watching.

Eugene and Edna had the part of two lovers in a delicious farcical invention, at once Rabelaisian and romantic. They acted their parts wonderfully—so remarkably, indeed, that it was apparent to us all that it wasn’t just acting. We were having the unusual privilege of seeing a man and a girl fall in love with each other violently and in public, and telling each other so, and doing it very beautifully.

Floyd, who had been disappointed by Eugen Boissevain and Max Eastman when he had first taken Edna and Norma to meet them, was now prepared to be more generous. “The very next day she was all in; Eugene took her to his home, called the doctor, and nursed her like a mother.”

A far less generous interpretation of Eugen came from someone outside that charmed circle of Village comrades. Jonathan Mitchell, who would become Doris Stevens’s second husband, said, “
As soon as she returned to America, Doris asked Edna Millay to Croton. Gene was visiting Max at the time. The story was that Gene appeared that weekend at Doris’s with a blooming tulip and wanted to know which room the lady poet was sleeping in. And he never left her side again.

“Gene had an ability to get on with anybody. Like a cruise director. He did decorative things.… And my guess is that he had all those qualities of kindness and graciousness and tenderness.… But he behaved like a male nurse to her, always going around saying, ‘Hush, hush!’ And of course Edna was taken with him. Well, why not, eh? In the first place, he was big and handsome—and Edna had gone through this frightful humiliation.

“He used to call her ‘the poetess’—I mean, literally! He would say, ‘What would the poetess like for luncheon?’ She
was
always something very special—not one of us, you see. And Gene was the keeper of this marvel.”

According to Arthur Ficke, who had taken a house in Croton right next door to him, Boissevain came to see him “in a frenzy” after having met Millay. “He said that Vincent was the most fascinating person alive—where did she live, and how could he see her again?” Ficke offered to arrange a lunch date with her the next day, and a delighted Boissevain insisted he come, too.

He was out of his head. Finally I said to him that Miss Millay was nobody’s fool, and that he was one of the most attractive men alive—why didn’t he just take the Millay by the horns and invite her to come out and spend a week at his country place? “Hell, Arthur,” he said, “I don’t want to have a
dirty little love affair
with her; I want to marry her!”

He was that certain that quickly. After their lunch “Eugene sent for a grand open car with a grand liveried driver, and we went up Fifth Avenue,
stopping at the important street-corners long enough for Eugene to rise in the car and bow to the astonished spectators.” Once he jumped out of the car, reached into his pocket for an imaginary gold piece, and gave it to an imaginary beggar woman. “Of course, we were all drunk as owls—but it was not with champagne only. Terrific emotions were in the air, for all three of us; and we were half mad with the conflict of them.”

Arthur seemed to be working himself into the relationship between Edna and Eugen from the beginning. He was more passionately attached to the idea of loving Edna Millay than he was to anyone or anything else. His own attachments, whether to Hal or to Gladys Brown, his new wife, paled before his sense of wanting to be in on the love of the century. He was a peculiar fellow, possessive of a woman whom he had elected not to have—or was afraid to. “Oh, maybe a one-night stand with Arthur,” Charlie Ellis said with a wink. “But it couldn’t have been much more.” With gallant Eugen Boissevain, however, it was about to be everything more.

By May 2, 1923, Vincent was using a Croton return address with her agents, Brandt & Kirkpatrick, and advised them to write to her in care of “Eugene Boissevain, Mt. Airy.” She was living with Boissevain.

On April 30, 1923, Edna received a letter from Columbia University informing her

that at the meeting of the Advisory Board of the School of Journalism, held on April 26, you were nominated for the Pulitzer Poetry Prize of $1,000 for the best volume of verse published during the year, based on “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” “A Few Figs From Thistles,” and eight sonnets published in “American Poetry, 1922, a Miscellany.”

She was asked to keep this news confidential until the full list of the awards was released to the papers, on May 14.

That spring, Millay
became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In her first interview in the New York
Evening Post
, “A Fireside Afternoon in Croton Hills with Girl Winner of $1,000 Pulitzer Poetry Prize,” she said she would use her prize to return to Maine. “
My mother is on her way there now and will find a house by the sea for us to live in together.”

Eugen’s farmhouse, where his maid brought them salad and dandelion greens, where the rooms were filled with flowers, where even the little wire-haired fox terrier, Jerry, whom she’d trained to bring her a box of cigarettes between his teeth—all were given to her by Eugen. As she talked
with the reporter she began to shiver, and she pulled her green silk wrapper closer around her shoulders, telling her that what

lies deepest of all is my love for this silly old America of ours. Why does it do what it sometimes does? Why does it think so foolishly sometimes? It is because life is brown and tepid for many of us. I want to write so that those who read me will say … “Life can be exciting and free and intense.” I really mean it!

She saved the more private news for her mother, to whom she wrote on May 30:

Dearest Mother:

I have been a bad girl not to write you, or send you any money.… But you will forgive me when you know my excuse. Darling, do you remember meeting Eugen Boissevain one day in Waverly Place?—It was only for a moment, & possibly you don’t remember. But anyway, you will like him very much when you know him, which will be soon. And it is important that you should like him,—because I love him very much, & am going to marry him.

There!!!

“Will you forgive me?” she wanted to know. “—My mind has been pretty much taken up with all this, & I have neglected my mummie.” They planned to marry in the summer; just when depended on when she got well. She wanted, they both wanted, to visit Cora in Maine.

We are going to motor up. Gene has a beautiful big Mercer,—at least he had, but now he has given it to me, so I have one. Won’t that be fun?

You must need money dear.… Let me know as soon as you get this & I will send you some—I haven’t at the moment a great deal (except my thousand bucks, which I ain’t going to bust for god or hero,—.…)

She wrote again two days before her mother’s birthday: “
Darling Mother: I am in town just for a few days, motoring out to Croton again this afternoon. At last I am doing what I should have ages ago, having an excellent diagnostician examine me thoroughly.” She was being sent to all kinds of specialists. “For the last three days I have been going to an X-ray man two or three times a day, having my stomach and bowels X-rayed.” She told her not to be alarmed, because it didn’t “mean that I feel any worse than I have done for the last two years; it just means that at last I am
going about getting cured in a reasonable way.” But the truth is, she was terribly sick.

I am allowed to work only one hour a day now, and I have to be lying down fifteen hours out of the twenty-four, and I must be pretty quiet and see almost nobody. These are severe instructions, severely enforced. I must tell you again not to worry about me; I don’t feel bad at all; I am just being helped to get perfectly well, you see.

It was, she knew, not much of a birthday letter,

all about me and nothing about you, but I know that nothing would be so nice a birthday-present for you as to know that I am being taken care of, and am going before long to be well and strong again. Eugen has been taking me to these doctors; probably by myself I would never have done it. You will like him, mother.

I’d just turned to Charlie and asked if at that time he had thought it likely that Vincent would marry Boissevain.

“Yes, I think I did. He was the solution to a lot of problems for her because he was obviously the mother type.”

I asked him what he meant.

“Just in the complete attention, at all times, to her needs.” Then Norma pinched him quiet. She was irritable, intimating that I should have asked her opinion first, which I usually did. Now she commandeered the conversation. She had a point to make, and it was not about Eugen’s caregiving.

“I went up to Croton before the marriage. I was making some things for her to wear. I remember a lovely pink-and-lavender chemise, mauve it was, of beautiful silk. She gave me a job to make it for her. It was never done, finished; she couldn’t stand to have it fitted.

“She was working on
The Harp-Weaver
then, and I—Arthur was up there helping her work to put the book together—And I wanted to help. Anyway, I went up. And we were just sitting there. They [Edna and Eugen] decided they were going to get married. Jan [Eugen’s brother] was there, and he told me they were going to be married.… They were getting married right away, like the next day.

“I remember being in the living room and she opposite me. He, Gene, suddenly said to me, ‘I’m not marrying the family, you know!’

“It came out of nowhere. She said nothing. Well, that’s not very pretty.

“ ‘You wouldn’t want to say that again!’ I said.

“ ‘Yes. I’m not marrying her family.’ He repeated it! I’m giving them both every chance—giving Vincent a chance to say, ‘Please don’t say it, Gene.’

“ ‘Are you really going to marry this low, cheap son of a bitch? Can you really go on? Sister, think it over. Is this what you want to live with?’ And finally, then, I burst into tears and ran upstairs. And she hadn’t said a word.