Restoring St. Vincent Millay’s garden
AUSTERLITZ, N.Y. — The staircase looks innocent enough, three narrow steps up to a landing, turn left, 11 more steps up to the second floor of this sprawling white clapboard farmhouse called Steepletop. But this is a house full of dark memories, and none more spooky than on these stairs.
“I must warn you not to use the spindles for support,” says Peter Bergman, leading a visitor on a tour. “And mind your left shoulder on the overhang at the top.”
“Are these the stairs, where … ?” asks the visitor.
“There’s only one set of stairs in this house,” he replies.
Sometime in the dawn of an October morning almost six decades ago, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay tumbled down these stairs, landing in a crumpled heap on the lower landing. Hours later her farm manager found her and summoned a local doctor, but it was too late. Her neck was broken, and she had died as fiercely and adamantly as she had lived. Her death at 58 extinguished an incandescent chapter in American literature. In the 1920s, when she came to Steepletop, Millay was one of the most famous women in the United States, not just for her poetry and plays, but as a bohemian who predated the sexual revolution and feminism of the 1970s by half a century or more.
“Everything she did made headlines,” said Bergman, executive director of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society. “She was a rock star.”
Like a lot of rock stars, Millay had been in a downward spiral for years before her actual fall. Addicted to alarming doses of morphine and other drugs, reliant on wine and gin, and never far from the next cigarette, she had gone into physical, emotional and creative decline in the years leading up to her death.
Bergman rejects the idea that she may have thrown herself down the stairs, and said that she was beginning to write brilliantly once more after weaning herself off the dope and emerging from the grief of the death of her husband, Eugen Boissevain, the year before. Bergman thinks of her late, sparse and ingenious sonnet “Chaos,” written before Eugen’s death. “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines/ And keep him there; and let him thence escape/ If he be lucky.”
Chaos doesn’t reign at Steepletop today, but the house itself is in a form of time warp: gloomy and worn, yes, but intact and pretty much the way it looked on Edna’s last day. The shades are drawn to protect its belongings from sunlight, and this adds to the pallid dinginess of walls that are whitewashed but nowhere papered.
But it was this way then. One of her former lovers, the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, visited her toward the end, in 1948, and he found the comparison to his earlier visit in 1929 to be painful: “The couches looked badly worn; the whole place seemed shabby and dim.” Boissevain was gray and stooped, and the once alluring, heartbreaking poet — slender and crowned with a mop of red hair — looked aged and shaky. “There was a look of fright in her bright green eyes.” The episode is recounted in Nancy Milford’s 2001 biography of Millay, “Savage Beauty.”
The house is imbued with Edna from top to bottom. In the drawing room, there’s her Steinway piano along with a second, lesser grand piano for guests. The kitchen still contains the modern breakfast bar and counters and appliances that Ladies’ Home Journal designed and installed for her, after the farm was electrified in the 1940s.
Upstairs, Bergman opens some drawers in Edna’s bedroom to reveal her collection of handbags. Another drawer contains her wool socks. When she wore clothes, Edna wore only the best. Until three years ago, her gowns, capes and dresses all hung in the closets here. Now they have been cleaned and stored.
In the bathroom, her monogrammed towels still hang. Her makeup is there, on the little vanity. On the table in her private library is a yellowed copy of the New York Times from April 24, 1950. In every room, it’s as if she is still in the next.
The house, you see, passed to her sister, Norma Millay Ellis, who lived there until her death in 1986. Norma kept it as a shrine to Edna. In the 1970s, she established the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, both in the hopes that her sister’s work would never tumble down the stairs.
But in the firmament of American literature, perhaps no bright star flickered so soon after an artist’s death — though her reputation was already fraying in her last decade.
Bergman hopes to change that. A writer with an eclectic career in the arts, he began as a child actor, worked for a decade at the Library & Museum for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and came to Steepletop from Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s historic house in the Berkshires.
Bergman, a youthful 62, was appointed by the Millay Society’s board 18 months ago to direct efforts to restore the house and its garden and grounds, along with a series of outbuildings that include Millay’s writing cabin. The grounds are open, as is a trail to the Millay family grave site, but the house won’t be ready for public tours until at least 2010, Bergman says. He works out of a converted garage near the house that doubles as a Millay gift shop and exhibition gallery. He reckons it will take more than $3 million to repair the house and gardens. For now, he is raising funds to pay for a garden historian to prepare a cultural landscape report that will document how the garden was planted and used by the Boissevains.
Like any poet worth her salt, Millay had deep knowledge of the natural world and infused her work with it. She grew cultivated plants, had a large fruit and vegetable garden, and there was a whole hillside field of wild, low-bush blueberries for the picking. She named the property after a beautiful pink flowered native spirea called steeplebush. In July and August it is joined by a related white flowering spirea that creates a cloudlike blanket over the upland meadow above the farmhouse. Look back from this vantage point, and you have a stunning view of the Berkshires in nearby Massachusetts.
Wendy Carroll, a landscape architect who is guiding the garden restoration, has been clearing weeds from overgrown areas, and she has uncovered many plants that the poet installed decades earlier, including a ring of white flowering peonies below the huge hemlock tree beside the house. She is unearthing the wholesome and inspiring landscape, but on the other side of the house, the character of the gardens shifts from bucolic to bacchanalian. Around a ruined bar, Edna and Eugen built a vine-clad pergola and installed a well-stocked bar, which included a nude painting by Norma’s husband, the artist Charles Ellis.
“The bar had come out of a speakeasy that had been closed in Albany,” Bergman said. “It’s mahogany and has bullet holes.”
One watering hole leads to another: the concrete, spring-fed swimming pool that the poet had built. All around, arborvitaes were planted to screen this pleasure garden from the mountain road below. The Boissevains and their guests would bathe and frolic in the nude.
“Nudity was a big element here,” Bergman said. “She liked the freedom of it.” This extended to her weeding, which she recorded in her diary. “Got a marvelous tan.”
If the house has remained unchanged, the garden has not. The arborvitaes are now tall, sickly trees, and the sense of enclosure is long gone. Big conifers are pushing menacingly into the hill above the pool, whose water is black-green opaque and home to brown frogs.
Up the hill, the pines that Edna planted around the writing cabin to remind her of a Maine childhood have also grown too big. Bergman opens the cabin itself to reveal another time-warp moment. A plain cedar structure, it measures just 10 feet by 17 feet and contains a wood-burning stove, two lamps, two small desks and chairs and sheaves of notepaper. The air is dank. Edna’s alarm clock sits on one of the desks.
Her normal routine, Bergman said, was to have breakfast in bed, then work in bed for a while. Get up, do some gardening, take lunch and then retire to the cabin in the afternoon. She would set the alarm clock for so many hours, and then work until it rang.
In this shack, she would write such works as “Fatal Interview,” her collection of sonnets inspired by her affair with the young poet George Dillon. “The scar of this encounter like a sword/ Will lie between me and my troubled lord.”
“Mine the Harvest,” a collection published posthumously, was penned in this cabin, as was “The Murder of Lidice.” Bergman said this work, more than any other, damaged Millay’s reputation and led to her physical decline. The subject of a current exhibition in the barn, the poem was written in 1942 with Europe under Hilter’s jackboot. In Czechoslovakia, a brutal SS general was assassinated, and in retaliation the Nazis razed the village of Lidice and killed or interned its entire population.
The poem appeared in Life magazine, and as a book, and was performed in radio broadcasts that went to Europe and South America. A recording was made. But for all its popular appeal, critics and other prominent poets sniped that she cheapened her art for propaganda purposes. She later wrote to Edmund Wilson to tell him it was bad poetry and had caused her a breakdown.
By the end of her career, Millay’s rhyming poetry seemed old hat against the modern verse of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the like.
Poet J.D. McClatchy, who published a book of selected poems by Millay in 2002, wrote that it “is an irony that her detractors, even today, dismiss her work as sentimental, cloying, fusty. In their day, of course, her poems startled readers with their edgy candor.”
He added that “two dozen of her poems can stand among the best lyrics of the twentieth century, and all of her work urges re-discovery.”
Bergman says her writing has a directness and clarity about it that makes it ageless. “One of the goals we have here is to reintroduce her to the American public,” he says, and he is confident that her star will rise again. Not least because of a recent incident.
A man telephoned to ask if he could bring his girlfriend to Steepletop. “She felt she couldn’t die without first seeing where Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote,” he said. On the appointed date, “there were these kids, he was 24, she was 23, and they were soldiers who had just been assigned to Afghanistan. This is what they wanted to see.”