Thoughts on Biography: Savage Beauty, by Nancy Milford

I am now reading Savage Beauty, the most recent biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford, the same author who wrote the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald I referenced a couple weeks ago.

I enjoy Milford’s biographical writing style very much. The style is not completely objective, which I found a wee bit difficult to get used to. Her style assumes some things. Which, perhaps, is not the style for everybody – and I have read biographies (eg: the massive one on the Bronte sisters, which kind of raised the bar for biographers everywhere, published about 10 years ago) which assume NOTHING.

There is definitely something to be said for only letting the facts, whatever facts may remain once a person has passed on, tell the story.

Juliet Barker’s biography of the Bronte sisters is a towering achievement in this regard. It weighs 20 pounds. The footnotes take up 1/4 of the text. It is breathtaking in its insistence on only relying on the facts. To not contribute to the Bronte myth, in any way, shape, form.

Milford takes a different tack. Her writing is very emotional – she obviously feels passionately about her subjects – She gets into Millay’s writing style, her writing breakthroughs – which, so far, have been my favorite parts of the book. A literary biography that does not analyze the writing style of the subject is crap, in my opinion.

That’s why I ate up the Ellmann biography of James Joyce. Not just because it was such an interesting life, and I loved hearing about it … but also because Ellmann made sure to get into Joyce’s prose, Joyce’s archive of symbols, Joyce’s driving force, Joyce’s metaphors … Reading that biography helped me to get through Ulysses.

However, I must mention my father. My father was my true “coach” through that book. He gave me the context, he would point out what Joyce was “doing” in passages which confused me … and with a couple of simple words from my father, Joyce’s prose cracked open, revealing vistas beyond. That was half the fun and exhilaration of that book. It is a club, a secret club … you have to figure out the “open sesames” along the way.

Here’s a perfect example of an “open sesame”, provided to me by my father.

I was reading the “Cyclops” chapter.

One potentially infuriating thing about the book is: Joyce does not label them as chapters, there is not even a delineation to guide you along, ie: Chapter 1, Chapter 2. And he certainly doesn’t toss you the bread-crumb of letting you know which episode of Homer’s Ulysses each chapter parallels – You have to figure that out yourself. Or buy one of the myriad guide-books available. So I had no idea I was reading the “Cyclops” chapter, at first.

All I knew was this: Leopold Bloom finds himself in a pub, where there is a character named only “The Citizen”, who pontificates his views loudly, and obnoxiously. “The Citizen” is an Irish nationalist … The energy in the pub is unfriendly, tense. Leopold Bloom seems to just look on, as an outsider.

I understood, sort of, what the hell was going on … but like with the rest of the book, I needed to know WHY. I needed the underbelly. I needed to figure out what Joyce was up to, because without Joyce’s intentions … you cannot understand Ulysses. It is a mystery, it seems like an exercise in style … It can be annoying, purposefully vague.

Why is this episode in the book? Why is it told in the way it is told? It is told in retrospect, by some other bystander, not Bloom, describing the encounter with “The Citizen” to members of ANOTHER pub, hours later.

Like: what the HELL IS GOING ON HERE?

I blundered my way through the prose, reading on, not getting it … I was sitting on the porch of our rented summer house in New Hampshire.

I finally just had to call my Dad, because moving on with the “chapter”, or “episode” or whatever, was pointless.

“Dad: could you come here a second?”

Here comes the dad.

“Okay – I’m reading the part where Bloom sits in this pub, and it’s all tense and weird – and I just don’t get it.”

Dad took the book. Looked at the page and said immediately, “This is the Cyclops episode.”

“How did you know that?”

“Look at the page. It’s filled with the letter I.”

Amazed, awe-struck, I looked at the page, and yes, indeed, all you could see was the letter “I”. That is the only clue he gives, in the language, that we are now in the Cyclops episode.

See, that’s the kind of stuff that makes the hairs rise up on my arm.

Here is how the chapter begins:

I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D.M.P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes.
— Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing? Did you see that bloody chimneysweep near shove my eye out with his brush?

— Soot’s luck, says Joe. Who’s the old ballocks you were talking to?

— Old Troy, says I, was in the force. I’m on two minds not to give that fellow in charge for obstructing the thoroughfare with his brooms and ladders.

— What are you doing round those parts? says Joe.

— Devil a much, says I. There is a bloody big foxy thief beyond by the garrison church at the corner of Chicken Lane– old Troy was just giving me a wrinkle about him– lifted any God’s quantity of tea and sugar to pay three bob a week said he had a farm in the county Down off a hop of my thumb by the name of Moses Herzog over there near Heytesbury street.

— Circumcised? says Joe.

— Ay, says I. A bit off the top. An old plumber named Geraghty. I’m hanging on to his taw now for the past fortnight and I can’t get a penny out of him.

— That the lay you’re on now? says Joe.

— Ay, says I .

Now: what I LOVE about this …

Well, I love a lot about this.

I love James Joyce for being such a genius. For making reading such a game, such an exhilarating ride. Where you can feel like you are not just an observer, but a participator. You must participate actively – you MUST accept him as your leader – and then try to figure it all out.

I love that he never spells things out.

But what I love most of all – what I find so awe-inspiring – is that you can tell what episode you are in, merely by LOOKING at what the text looks like on the page. My dad didn’t even read a WORD of it. He just saw “I I I I I I I” when he glanced at the page, and knew. So many “I”s must mean Cyclops.

Isn’t that brilliant?

The Ellmann biography spends as much time on the origins of Ulysses, and analyzing each episode, as it does on James Joyce’s childhood.

That is really what I am talking about here.

A biography which gets to know its subject through his or her art, rather than just snooping through letters and diaries – now that is a beautiful thing.

Nancy Milford, author of Zelda and now Savage Beauty is all about that.

I grew to trust Milford’s gift as an author during the sections in Zelda, where Milford discusses Zelda’s attempts to write.

Milford did not fall into the trap of many people (mostly women) who write biographies about “the woman behind the man”. She did not try to raise Zelda up to Scott’s level. She did not try to unearth a hidden genius. She looked at what Zelda wrote, her stories, her failed novel, and came to the conclusion: “Obviously, whatever was inside of her, whatever was expressed so brilliantly in her letters, was not accessible to her when she sat down to write fiction.” Milford would look at an unedited passage from one of Zelda’s stories, and then compare it to the version after Scott took his editing pen to it … and, hands down, Scott made it better.

I am not interested in someone trying to convince me that the world is a less vibrant place because nobody appreciated Zelda Fitzgerald’s art, and because her husband got all the glory.

Please don’t make me read “The Yellow Wallpaper” and try to convince me that it is AS good as Moby Dick or Madame Bovary.

F. Scott Fitzgerald deserved all the glory, because he was a writer, a glorious writer, and she was not … at least not outside of her letters to him, which are, actually, breathtaking. In the letters, the personality of Zelda leaps off the page, she pulses, she is vibrant, real, funny, tragic, heartfelt … all those things. But letters are different from being a craftsman. Sitting down, and choosing how to tell your tale, and finding the right way to do it … is quite a different matter. Zelda could not marshal her forces in that direction, which was a tragedy for her. She went mad because of it.

Zelda had quite enough an interesting life as it is – without some author trying to re-dress a grievance – ie: ZELDA was the true hero, SCOTT just sapped her dry … Zelda could not write fiction to save her life. The excerpts in the book are hideous. Stilted. Ridiculous. Un-readable, actually.

Milford, by recognizing that, even though the book was ABOUT Zelda, a woman who, obviously, she had enormous sympathy for … made Milford into a “reliable” narrator, in my eyes.

So back to Edna St. Vincent Millay.

I did not know much about her. At least not about her life. I know she wrote sonnets. I know her face, I know she was very beautiful, and very celebrated, as a poet, DURING her lifetime. A very rare thing, especially for women, at that time.

One of her sonnets has always been a favorite of mine, although sometimes I forget about it.

It usually unearths itself in my consciousness (I know it practically by heart) when I am very very sad, and finding myself trying to get over someone with whom I was once in love.

It takes me forever to get over someone, if I once was in love with them.

And this sonnet, more than any other poem I’ve read, expresses that sentiment so perfectly, so well, that it seems to come FROM me:

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, — so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

For some reason, that poem just gets to me. Like a lance through my heart.

I know that feeling. I know that feeling. Being dogged at every step by the memory of the loved one …

Her language – so formal and yet so passionate, too – appeals to me on a very deep level.

It is clear, from what I have read so far, she led an extraordinary life. An unexpected life. Men fell in love with her and never got over her. Women fell in love with her and never got over her.

I am just at the part where she gets into Vassar – being ushered into that world by powerful friends who decided to give this little red-headed self-educated poetess from Camden, Maine a shot at greatness.