THE NEWYORKER, MAY 16, 2022 77
Much of the verse in “The Buck in the
Snow and Other Poems,” a collection
from 1928, seems inspired by her life on
the farm, but it largely falls flat. Anx-
ious to maintain her reputation, Millay
tried writing deeply felt but propagan-
distic political poems, some of which
were collected in “Make Bright the Ar-
rows” (1940). These met with critical dis-
approval. Millay had to produce: Bois-
sevain, who had liquidated his business
in 1924, didn’t have a steady income, and
Millay’s family, particularly her young-
est sister, Kathleen, needed financial sup-
port. She continued to write and to give
reading tours, during which she alter-
nated recent poems and verses she’d com-
posed decades earlier, as if to remind au-
diences of the “poet-girl” they had loved.
M
illay’s fears of aging infuse “Fatal
Interview,” her book about Dillon,
which she composed throughout her thir-
ties. In contrast to her earlier love son-
nets, which are filled with images of flow-
ering and growth, the dominant metaphors
of these sonnets are death, decay, and dis-
ease. Leeches are administered, doctors
called. There are jailers and dungeons
and “a casket cool with pearls.” Millay’s
speaker is a predator, ravishing the love
object, or “a dense and sanguine ghost,”
returned to “haunt the scene where I was
happiest.” There’s something vampiric
about the love affair represented here, as
if the speaker—and perhaps Millay her-
self—were sucking the life out of the be-
loved and using it to fuel creativity.
By the mid-thirties, the intensity of
Millay’s affair with Dillon was waning,
and she was forced to reckon with the
loss of her youth. Her diaries show her
both resisting and succumbing to her
fate. She became addicted to morphine,
first prescribed to help with lingering
nerve pain from a car accident; by the
early forties, she was taking as much as
two hundred and twenty milligrams in
a day, far more than the standard hos-
pital dose, along with codeine, pento-
barbital, and alcohol. She recorded each
morphine injection in her diaries; she
might have her first dose at 5:30 A.M.
and her last after midnight. Boissevain,
in a strange show of devotion, began in-
jecting himself with morphine, too,
though never in such quantities. Ashamed
of her addictions and of her descent into
middle age, Millay used her diaries to
scold herself. “Let Ugin find you out-
doors, instead of Still in Bed, or in your
SPECIAL CHAIR (Pah!—Old Woman!)
in the drawing room,” she wrote. “Keep
young, keep pretty FOR UGIN.”
But Boissevain wasn’t her sole ador-
ing fan; she had to keep pretty for the
others, too. In his biography, Epstein
writes that Millay “dreaded old age as
only a woman who has been very beau-
tiful can”; he intimates that she became
increasingly dependent on drugs be-
cause she couldn’t cope with “the de-
mise of her erotic power.” This isn’t ex-
actly wrong, but it ignores the ways that
Millay’s financial and professional for-
tunes were tied up with her youth and
beauty. “At forty-seven years of age,”
Epstein writes, “the image she saw in
the mirror was disturbing”—not least,
one imagines, because it would be scru-
tinized by reporters, photographers, and
fans with long memories.
The end of Millay’s life was sad. She
and Boissevain were in debt. Her repu-
tation had crashed. Her drug use had
sped up her aging: Wilson, who saw her
more clearly than anyone, described her,
at age fifty-six, as “heavy and dumpy,”
with a “bird-lidded look” that reminded
him of her mother. Still, she remained
observant and curious. In her last diary
entry, from May, 1949, she notes that the
rabbits and deer grazing around the farm
have gray fur, not brown, and resolves
to ask her handyman about the animals’
“winter hair.”
Despite her many years as a cosmo-
politan, Millay was at heart a country
girl, a New Englander. It’s tempting to
imagine what would have happened to
her had she never left Maine. Perhaps
she would have become a female Rob-
ert Frost: living in the country, writing
poems out of passion, not for money, and
finding success only later in life, after
wisdom and experience had accrued.
Or—and this seems more probable—
she would have ended up like the woman
in “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree”:
tired, disappointed, married to a man she
doesn’t love, polishing the stove until she
can see her face in it. For all her excesses
and insecurities, her faults and bad de-
cisions, there is still something admira-
ble about Millay’s curiosity, her play in
the klieg lights, her appetite for life. In
1912, Infinity and Eternity had beckoned,
and the young Millay had followed.
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