Arts and Letters

This makes no pretense of being a critical study of the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The musician who ventures into the field of literary criticism runs the risk of doing badly, and with difficulty, what the literary critic does easily and well—an opinion enthusiastically shared, I imagine, by the literary critics. What follows is a simple tribute, a tribute to the memory of an old friend.

A few weeks ago, a young man of letters, discussing Miss Millay's work, wrote that her poetry is for the young, and for the young alone. If he honestly believes that, he must be younger than he thinks; for only the very young could reach so sweeping a conclusion. Still, in a sense that he did not intend, he is right. Her work, throughout her career, has a quality of youth and vitality that finds its readiest response in the hearts of those who can mature without aging.

Like Scott Fitzgerald, she began as a product and interpreter of her times. New York's Greenwich Village, in the 'teens and early twenties, was an American version of the Paris Montparnasse. It was peopled by young persons who believed profoundly in their own talents and demanded the freedom, both aesthetic and personal, to develop those talents. To some, of course, the Village was a playground. Others, however sincerely, were pathetically mistaken as to the value of their work. But there were also some whose subsequent careers were such as to make us grateful to the Village for harboring them.

Edna Millay was one of them. Her earlier work is intensely personal in its outlook, and at times almost childishly Byronic. It is black and white, with very little grey. It is flippant at times, as in the quatrain:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

At others, it reflects a black pessimism that only the young could survive:

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

As she matured, her work, while always introspective, became less and less literally subjective.

I first met Edna Millay in Paris, almost thirty years ago. She was small, wiry, intense, almost morbidly shy. She had green eyes, set in a pointed, faintly freckled face that might have belonged to a leprechaun, and topped by a wealth of tawny blonde hair, cut in a boyish bob. She was inordinately vain of that hair, and wore it in that same bob until the day of her death. She was in Paris through the good judgment and generosity of Frank Crowninshield, then editor of Vanity Fair. Believing whole-heartedly in her talent, he had commissioned her to write a series of twelve monthly articles, on any subjects she chose. These she wrote under the pseudonym of "Nancy Boyd"; and the monthly payments she received for them, while not large, were sufficient to allow her to live abroad and have leisure for her serious work. From that European year came some of her best poems, as well as a short story, "The Murder in the Fishing Cat," that has found its way into many anthologies.

Her attitude toward her own work was a combination of great pride in it and equally great humility. She did not underestimate its value, but she held it to a rigidly high standard. She insisted upon being ashamed of Make Bright the Arrows, the volume of war poems that she published in the early forties. They were not as bad as that. They were frankly topical, as they were meant to be; and as a lyric poet she resented the necessity for making them so. But if Browning could afford to write "The Lost Leader," Millay could afford Make Bright the Arrows. She was ruthlessly self-critical, and would agonize for days over a single, imperfect line. This attitude, as well as her precarious health, accounts for the comparatively small bulk of her output. Even so, in a writing career of thirty-four years she turned out six plays, an opera libretto, and eleven volumes containing about five hundred poems, including upwards of one hundred and seventy sonnets, many of which, in the opinion of one reader at least, are the finest since those of Keats.

She was generous in the extreme to the work of other poets. Professional jealousy was not in her. She had great admiration for Louise Bogan and Elinor Wylie, both of whom were close friends. It would be hard to find two poets who had less in common than Edna Millay and E. E. Cummings. Yet when his application for a Guggenheim fellowship was referred to her, she wrote an exhaustive, 3,000-word analysis of his work, recommending that he receive one.

One might think that her poetry, being so intensely lyric, would be a mine of precious material for composers. Yet composers find it oddly difficult to set her poems to music. There are several technical reasons why this is so, among them her frequent use of inversions and parentheses, which tend to become obscure when sung, and the extreme irregularity of her meters, especially in her later work. But the chief reason, I believe, is that, like Keats, she does not need music. What she has to say is expressed so completely, her emotional aim is so unerring, that music added to it becomes merely an intrusion.

These difficulties, however, do not exist in the case of the work that brought her and myself into intimate contact. At the risk of being over-personal, let me point out that in 1925, when the Metropolitan Opera Company commissioned me to write an opera, I was given a free hand as to my choice of story and librettist. Thinking that I might as well start at the top and work down, I approached Edna Millay with very little hope of success. To my immense surprise—and, of course, delight—she promptly agreed to give me a libretto. Whereupon I, as promptly, left it to her to find the right story for the proposed opera. By the end of November, 1925, she had completed one act of an opera based upon a story from which Walt Disney was later to produce a masterpiece—Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. At Christmas time she scrapped it and began all over again, this time choosing a story out of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which she called The King's Henchman. In one respect the libretto of The King's Henchman is an astounding literary feat. Since the action of the opera takes place in tenth century England, she undertook to recreate the flavor of the language of tenth century England. Throughout the entire three acts there is not a single word of French or Latin origin. The result was a libretto that towers high over anything of its kind ever written in English. As American operas go, The King's Henchman was a success. And that success owes much to the grave beauty, simplicity, and dignity of Edna Millay's text.

Incidentally, The King's Henchman is probably the only opera ever written by correspondence. Miss Millay had been subject to recurrent and unpredictable attacks of blinding headaches. As a consequence, not daring to face a season in New York, she spent most of the year 1926 on her farm in the Berkshires, working when she was able and sending me the text in installments. As fast as one installment would arrive, it would be set to music, while awaiting the arrival of the next. By a minor miracle, the result of our widely separated labors made dramatic and musical sense.

Any discussion of Edna Millay's career must inevitably involve mention of her husband, Eugen Jan Boissevain, who profoundly influenced her work. A prosperous coffee importer, when they were married, in 1923, he sold out his business and devoted his life, literally, to furthering her career. Holland-born, and speaking English with a strong Dutch accent, he nevertheless had an uncanny sense of English poetry, and was as merciless a critic of her work as she was herself. He was convinced that he had a genius on his hands, and made it his business to see to it that that genius had room to expand. He kept the world at bay, managing their farm at Austerlitz, New York, discouraging all visitors except a few intimates, attending to her correspondence, acting as cook and housemaid when servants were difficult to find—in short, constituting himself a wall behind which she could work undisturbed.

His death, in 1949, left her stunned. She was taken to a hospital in New York to recover from the shock. There, many of her friends and relatives urged her not to go back to the farm, "Steepletop," or at least to go with a companion. She refused. "I must be at Steepletop," she said. "That is the only place where I can get used to his not being there."

She arranged to have the telephone at Steepletop accept only outgoing calls. "If it rang," she said, "I would hear his footsteps as he ran to answer it." At the time of his death she was working on a new book of poems. "I must be alone to finish it," she said. "He made me start it, and I must finish it. That is what he would want me to do." And so, for the greater part of a year, she remained at Steepletop, utterly alone, working on her poems.

On the night of October 19, 1950, she sat in the living room at Steepletop, correcting the final galley proofs of her new book. Some time during that night she made the last correction, and started up to bed. Late the following afternoon the farmer noticed that the lights were still on in the first and second stories of Steepletop. He made his way into the house, and found her body huddled at the foot of the stairs. The task that her husband had laid upon her was finished. One could almost believe that she had hurried to tell him so.