COULD THERE BE a more persistent biographer than Nancy Milford? It has been nearly thirty years since she first approached the dragon who stands guard over the memory of Edna St. Vincent Millay—that is, the poet’s younger sister Norma—and asked her to hand over the treasure left in her keeping: the poet’s huge and scattered store of letters, papers, snapshots, notebooks, and drafts of poems. At that time, Nancy Milford had just published a biography intended to redress the low estate of the reputation of Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and perhaps as a result of its special appeal to the then-increasingly militant population of American women, or perhaps merely on its own merit, the book sold more than a million copies. This may have been what influenced Norma Millay to give up her own ambition to be her sister’s biographer, or she may simply have been overtaken by the sheer force of Milford’s passion to do the job. Whatever the reason, what followed from Norma’s capitulation was a decades-long and clearly arduous authorial mission—”mission” does seem the only word for it—that has resulted in a careful, loving, minutely drawn portrait of this once celebrated and now largely neglected doyenne of American poetry. Perhaps, one feels the impulse to say, the portrait is too lovingly and minutely drawn. The story of Edna St. Vincent Millay is endlessly interesting in itself—she was by all accounts an utterly alluring woman, a kind of enchantress, actually, who led a fascinating and complicated life—but what Nancy Milford has achieved is akin to drawing a map of the world with the lines of latitude and longitude left out. Everything is present: the girlhood poverty, the extraordinarily important and complicated family ties, the myriad lovers, the brilliant friendships, the applause, the books, the publishers, the prizes, the international adulation, and the perpetual nonstop boozing—boozing, indeed, unto death. What’s missing is the poetry that gives us reason to be interested. To be sure, Milford treats the reader to a few tantalizing lines, but they are given no greater importance, and usually less, than stray notes sent off to her family and friends. The story of Edna St. Vincent Millay depends on the writing of the poetry—and on what, alas, the world thought about that poetry by the end of her life. Without the poetry, it is merely another tale of 1920s literary bohemia: interesting, but hardly singular. That bohemia was, as we know, a community of people who worshipped art and forswore the life of bourgeois constraints lived by their more ordinary fellow-citizens. Not all its denizens, by a long shot, turned out to be of much significance in the life of the arts, though most of them believed themselves to be. With certain notable exceptions they professed left-leaning political sentiments, but politics did not until the 1930s become a matter of real passion among them. And they tended to live from hand to mouth—financially, emotionally, and sexually. No doubt a life in bohemia, with all that swimming in alcohol and art and all that scattered but still terribly intense sex, will continue to seem romantic to the young and the prematurely settled down of every period. It unmistakably has to Nancy Milford, who along with its disquiets does a terrific job of evoking its aura of romance. The problem is, however, that unless Edna Millay were some kind of oddity among the authors of serious poetic work, what would truly have occupied her deepest passion were those verses that were forming in her head, sounding in her ear, and flowing from her pen. Admittedly, that kind of passion would be difficult to distill in a biography like Savage Beauty, which is wholly captive to its so relentlessly detailed narrative, and simply comes to an end with the death of its subject. But one cannot read Milford’s book without encountering the question of what in the end became of all those lines, many in the form of sonnets and ballads, some of them merely witty bits of defiance, some long narratives, and all of them the work of a genuinely important poet. (Random House is bringing out a volume of her poetry in conjunction with Savage Beauty, so Nancy Milford’s long labor has in this way resulted in rekindling some attention to Millay the poet, even if only for the sake of creating what publishers call a “package.”) As a poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay seems to have vanished from the poetic pantheon. She may be remembered now and then as one of those bygone creatures that used to be known as “lady poets.” Schoolchildren might be required to memorize a verse or two (if schoolchildren are anywhere required to memorize anything these days). And of course, her famous saucy quatrain is still quoted by the upscale college girls who come across it: 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! But where are her books? Where is she to be found in those collections published for use in courses of English? It is hard to remember that she once occupied pages and pages of the anthologies. There was “Renascence,” the poem that made her a celebrity, written at an incredibly young age, and “Huntsman, What Quarry?”, once as famous as poetry gets in America. There were her gestures toward Ovid and the Romans that showed her talent for epigram: Death devours all lovely things: Lesbia with her sparrow Shares the darkness,—presently Every bed is narrow. There were her widely known New York poems: We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry; And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear, From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere. And there was the pose of wry sophistication taken in the sonnets that she turned out by the dozen: I, being born a woman, and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind Am urged by your propinquity to find Your person fair, and feel a certain zest To bear your body’s weight upon my breast So subtly is the fume of life designed To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind And leave me once again undone, possessed. Think not for this, however, this poor treason Of my stout blood against my staggering brain I shall remember you with love, or season My scorn with pity—let me make it plain: I find this frenzy insufficient reason For conversation when we meet again. One of the things that put a little tarnish on Millay’s immense reputation was that in the 1930s she became so impassioned about Nazism that she wrote a few basically propagandistic poems intended to stir anti-German sentiment among the American public, most famously a long poem about the Nazi destruction of the Czechoslovakian town of Lidice that appeared in Life magazine. She also agreed to take part in a radio campaign organized by the then-celebrated journalist Dorothy Thompson, insisting over and over that Americans must come to the aid of the country’s fellow democracies, Britain and France. Such behavior was hardly considered praiseworthy among most of the members of the community of arts and letters, many of whom among other things had not made up their minds to support the side of the “bourgeois-capitalist” society in which they lived until the country was actually at war. An even more important stress placed upon her reputation, however, was the growing schism between the highbrow and the popular created by the modernist revolution. And Edna St. Vincent Millay was certainly popular. She won prizes. Her books sold well. Moreover, she traveled all over the country to read her poetry to huge and enthusiastic audiences—she was said to be a thrilling performer—and she even read her poems over the radio, coast to coast. She lived until 1950, and though Nancy Milford did not put it this way, between the lines one can see that she died a lonely, broken woman. Readers of Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light—and how many of those are to be found among us these days, I wonder—will find at the end of that 1952 book a tribute to her written after her death. Wilson had once been in love with her, as had many men, and he had remained something of a friend—though he, too, had expressed disapproval of her using her gift to stir the public against the Nazis. But in the course of his elegy he says, “Let me register this unfashionable opinion here, and explain that Edna Millay seems to me one of the only poets writing in English in our time who have attained to anything like the stature of great literary figures in an age in which prose has predominated.” Of course, it was not only prose that predominated in 1952: Among the poets, there were the towering figures of Eliot and Pound and Yeats, with Auden coming on close behind them. Granting, says Wilson, that “there is always a certain incommensurability between men and women writers,” which makes it difficult to compare her to these three, in his view she did have in common with them her capacity to give “supreme expression to profoundly felt personal experience, she was able to identify herself and stand forth as a spokesman for the human spirit, announcing its predicaments, its vicissitudes, but, as a master of human expression, by the splendor of expression itself, putting herself beyond common embarrassments, common oppressions and panics.” A tribute both extravagant and more than a bit stuffy (on both counts not at all like its subject), it betrays the pressure of the need to assert what had already become, in Wilson’s own words, an “unfashionable opinion.” Not that Wilson had ever shown himself loath to express unfashionable opinions, but in this case he somehow cannot offer this one with his customary authorial transparency. Perhaps without meaning to, he himself had also succumbed just a little to the tide of fashion. In any case, no one, and least of all Edna Millay, could actually live “beyond common embarrassments, common oppressions and panics,” and such things must inevitably be part of the telling of the story of a life. But they should not do so without pride of place for that which has to matter most—”the splendor of expression itself.” What better way to attempt to explain a poet than simply by quoting? In a sonnet from her book The Harp-Weaver, Millay writes: Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare Let all who prate of beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty bondage into luminous air. O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day When first the shaft into his vision shone Of light anatomized! Euclid alone Has looked on beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away Have heard her massive sandal on the stone. Beauty indeed—though, whatever the book title claims, hardly savage. Still to have sent a reader looking for Edna Millay’s sonnets ought by itself to be thanks enough—and thanks indeed—to her indefatigable biographer, Nancy Milford. Midge Decter is a writer in New York. Her memoir An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War has just been published by HarperCollins.
