The Books: Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on the biography shelf is Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford

“– oh, this was life! It was more than life, — it was art. I might pretend to myself [at home] as much and as long as I liked, — until the deep-vibrant note I had discovered in my voice … out-Hedda-ed Nazimova — yet was my native village unthrilled and unconvinced; I was asked to serve ice-cream at church socials, and the grocer-boy called me by name …”

— — Edna St. Vincent Millay on her first job as an actress in a traveling stock company

I would read anything Nancy Milford chose to write about, based on the strength of her biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, and Savage Beauty, her biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay is excellent. As with the Zelda bio, there is almost more quotation from Edna herself, through letters and journals, then there is narration from Milford, and I love it when an author does that. You get the sense that the person being written about comes to life in their own words.

Milford is also a character in the book, due to her conversations with Norma (Edna’s sister). It’s sometimes contradictory: Here is what everyone says an event was like, and here is what Norma says what happened. It’s a unique way to go about the biography, and I loved it.

I love Millay’s poems, especially her sonnets. She was a modern bohemian woman (maybe a bit too modern. Keep your drawers on, Edna…), but she wrote in archaic romantic forms, and her poems ache with longing and sincerity. They are timeless. She was writing at the height of modernism, with people like Gertrude Stein and H.D. and Amy Lowell (to name the women, anyway) dominating the poetry journals, with their experiments with language and rhythm, and she stuck to the old forms. Edna St. Vincent Millay was not just a poet. She was a celebrity in her own day. It’s interesting: the world of literature was being remade all around her, but she did not feel that pull (at least not in her work), and she had star quality – not only as a writer, but as a reader of her own work. Hearing stories of the packed houses for her poetry readings remind me of some of the stories of Anne Sexton’s earliest readings (my dad went to one). She was a commanding presence, even though she was a tiny wisp of a thing. She was a star.

Milford writes:

In October 1934, Edna Millay read at Yale. A young graduate student, Richard Sewell, who forty years later would become the biographer of Emily Dickinson, never forgot the impression she made that night. Walking to the center of Woolsey Hall, wrapped in a long black velvet cloak, her bright hair shining, she “stood before us,” he remembered, “like a daffodil.” Looking at her wrist, she told the audience that the poems she was about to read were from her new book, Wine From These Grapes, “which is coming off the press just about now.” That night she read with the zeal of a young Jeremiah, her words burning the air as she closed her reading with a sonnet from ‘The Epitaph for the Race of Man’. Tickets for her readings were wildly sought whether she was in Oklahoma City or Chicago, where the hall seating 1,600 was sold out and even with standees an extra hall had to be taken for the overflow of another 800 who listened to her over amplifiers.

Extraordinary. What kind of poet, in any age, commands that kind of attention?

She understood that she had a persona, and she used it, creating it consciously. She was not in tune with the tenor of the times, the modernist onslaught of other poets at that time, who were ripping themselves away from the influences of the 19th century. You read Millay’s stuff and you can’t believe she was writing at the same time as Eliot, Yeats, et al. You would believe she was a contemporary of Charlotte Bronte. Her “form” was the sonnet, deceptively simple (until you try to write one), and she was one of the most popular writers of the day. I love her stuff.

She was born in Rockland, Maine, one of three daughters. Her mother divorced her father (he was a bit of a loser), and the four females were then on their own. They lived in poverty, moving around, until settling in Camden. The three Millay girls were all powerhouses. They were constantly getting into trouble with school officials and everyone else in their lives for being outspoken, and doing what they wanted to do. They were clearly raised to believe they could have whatever they wanted to have. The sisters were all very close and eventually they all lived in New York together, raging through the Bohemian scene in Greenwich Village. But first, Edna went to Vassar. She was pretty openly bisexual, and had affairs with a bunch of students while she was there. She had already started making inroads into the poetry world. She wrote from a very early age. At the age of 20, she entered a poem she had written called “Renascence” into a poetry contest. The poem is extraordinary. It seems to come from a much older person. All of the judges were blown away by it but the poem only won fourth place. This actually caused a huge scandal, when other poets who had won prizes balked when they read Millay’s work. Clearly, this was the best poem in the entire bunch. Fourth place? Millay had already “arrived” and she was only 20. She went to Paris. She slept with what seems like everyone she met, male or female. She then moved to Greenwich Village, when it was really hopping (Warren Beatty captures some of that time in Reds – Edna St. Vincent Millay was part of that group). She eventually did get married, to Eugen Jan Boissevain, although it appears to have been a pretty open situation (it would have to be, with Millay involved). The two were married until Millay died at the age of 58, and while she had affairs throughout the marriage, they still remained together. It was a perfect match. He totally supported her poetic efforts, wasn’t threatened, and kept the home fires burning.

Nancy Milford’s biography reveals Edna St. Vincent Millay to be self-absorbed, narcissistic to the extreme, coy and ruthless. An interesting combination. Irresistible to men, apparently. I didn’t like her very much. Lock up your husbands, boyfriends, wives, and girlfriends when she’s around. Nobody was safe. She was a home wrecker. She was a brat. I also felt kind of in awe – at someone who so clearly only lived by her own rules. Society’s rules didn’t matter to her at all. She was a siren. I found her fascinating. She was a phenom: from very early on her gift of verse was recognized. Similar to Sylvia Plath, whose verses in high school were already being published, juvenilia though they may have been. Edna St. Vincent Millay was not a woman who suffered in obscurity. No. People read her stuff, powerful people, and immediately set out to help her, introduce her to the right people, set her up so that she could be a success. It’s quite an extraordinary life story.

This is my favorite of her sonnets.

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.

When you read the details of her life, her aching lovelorn poems seem even more interesting. Not because she was a particularly poignant personality: as a matter of fact, it is the opposite. If you only read her poetry you would think she was the most sentimental person on the planet, with one great love she yearned for all her days. The fact that she was a bit of a ruthless harlot makes her romantic “persona” even more interesting, more deliberate, more an act of CONJURING than an accurate reflection of personal truth. Kudos. Her talent obviously expressed herself in the old forms, at that time in disfavor – rhyming couplets and rigid sonnets – but the amount of feeling she was able to get into each line, each verse, is incredible to me.

Millay’s reputation is a solid one, although she no longer stands as a giant of 20th century poetry, as she did at the time when she was alive. Yet her lyrical romantic sonnets are still poems that people adore, even love … and many of the greater more important poets don’t have that. It’s not good or bad, just a fact. She still can express the vagaries of love to our generation, in a more jaded time, with a high-flung cry of pain or ecstasy, that just works. It still sounds true.

Sonnet xxviii
I pray if you love me, bear my joy
A little while, or let me weep your tears;
I, too, have seen the quavering Fate destroy
Your destiny’s bright spinning — the dull shears
Meeting not neatly, chewing at the thread, —
Nor can you well be less aware how fine
How staunch as wire, and how unwarranted
Endures the golden fortune that is mine.
I pray you for this day at least, my dear,
Fare by my side, that journey in the sun;
Else must I turn me from the blossoming year
And walk in grief the way that you have gone.
Let us go forth together to the spring:
Love must be this, if it be anything.

God, I love that.

Here is an excerpt from Milford’s biography of this fascinating woman. It is from her time in Greenwich Village. She had moved there with her sisters and then her mother followed. It was a tight family bond. Maybe too tight. It also touches on her involvement with the Provincetown Players (Eugene O’Neill’s outfit). One of Millay’s first jobs as a teenager had been as an actress.

Excerpt from Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford

By this time, Walter Adolphe Roberts was taking Millay out to dinner as often as she would agree to go. He recalled the “flickering” way she talked about herself – “I had been thinking of the poet as fragile and unearthly; suddenly I perceived that she was strong.”

He knew the fifty cents a line he paid her for her poetry wasn’t going to help solve her financial problems, so when she hinted that she’d like to write fiction, “I gave her every encouragement.” “Young Love” ran in the May 1919 issue under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd, her great-grandmother’s maiden name. It tickled Roberts to be able to send her a more substantial check, and whenever possible he slyly placed one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lyrics in the space left at the bottom of a Nancy Boyd story.

Four of Millay’s workbooks survive from this period in New York; she worked quickly and in longhand, writing poems on the right-hand side of the page and then sometimes reworking them on the left-hand side. It was a pattern she followed most of her life. Sometimes the poems are dated; most often they are not. The dates are of entry, not necessarily of composition, and never of publication. A workbook was just that. She said later in life that she might write a poem down anywhere, on the back of a telegram for instance, but usually she worked them out in her mind, and when she had something she liked, she wrote it down in these paper composition books.

The dated poems seemed to come in clusters: July 17, 1918: “Lord Archer, – Death” (not published in Ainslee’s until December). July 18: “I do but ask that you be always fair,” which waited a year and ten months before publication in a remarkable group of twenty sonnets in Reedy’s Mirror. But many of her finest poems were left undated, scrawled hastily across the page in pencil. Reading in those workbooks now, one can feel, even see in the dashes of thick lead strokes across the pages or her hesitant crossing out, a poet trying to seize and shape on paper the work that would distinguish her a half century after her death – the intensity and excitement are palpable.

While she was spending her time with the Provincetown Players, Roberts kept his distance. He knew the Provincetowners provided her with what he called an “effervescent social life”, but he wouldn’t join in “because I was jealous of its influence over Edna … I was enamored of such communion as she gave me, and more deeply than she guessed or probably cared. I wanted it to be an exchange between us only.” What he treasured were their times alone together when they talked about poetry, and love.

She told him “it was impossible for a poet not to be influenced by the work of those he venerated as artistic ancestors – that this was in fact desirable, for it assured a continuity and development of the general stream of poetry.” When he asked whose influences she recognized in her own work, she acknowledged Housman and Tennyson. “The former for his emotional attitude and spare poignancy of expression; the latter for narrative power and technical innovations.” He thought it “singular” that she credited Housman for he ranked her a far better poet. And while he admired Tennyson, he was puzzled that she regarded him as a technical innovator. He insisted that Swinburne was far superior. Edna looked at him quizzically and asked him to read favorite stanzas. When he began to quote

I hid my heart in a nest of roses,
Out of the sun’s way, hidden apart;
In a softer bed than the soft white snow’s is,
Under the roses I hid my heart,

she said he could have his Swinburne; the passages he quoted were ” ‘but sound’; the debt she recognized was to Tennyson.” Her true generosity was toward contemporary American poets, praising them, in Roberts’ estimation, beyond their worth.

By March 1919, Roberts was under her spell. He had taken to writing to her in French, because, he told her, he could think of nothing but her, her marvelous poetry, her splendid sensibility, her tragic and beautiful mouth, her arms, her breasts, her throat, all that was her, whether or not she loved him. It was a play on one of her own lines in this sonnet, which he did not publish:

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature had contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far, –
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

Edna, who had begun just one year before as an actress with the Provincetown Players in Floyd’s one-act plays, now had her own play, The Princess Marries the Page, on the bill to open their third season in New York. She wrote it, directed it, and played the role of the princess. She had moved from being an ingenue to one of the Players’ major creative forces.

The Players had outgrown the old front parlor in 139 Macdougal Street and moved a few doors down into 133, a four-story house that had been used as a stable. They left the hitching ring attached to the wall of the auditorium, inscribing above it “Here Pegasus was Hitched.” It was their playfulness as much as their spirit of adventure and innovation that kept them a lively force in New York. They took risks with the plays they chose. They didn’t court the press. Tickets to their performances could be obtained only by subscription. The roster of names of those who wrote plays for them was sensational. They were the new figures in American writing; besides Dell and Millay, John Reed, Eugene O’Neill, and Susan Glaspell, there were William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes, Alfred Kreymborg, Michael Gold, Harry Kemp, Maxwell Bodenheim, James Oppenheim, Wilbur Daniel Steele, and Sherwood Anderson. Those who came to act, design sets, or do odd jobs included Marsden Hartley, Alexander Berkman, Lawrence Vail, Lawrence Langner, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Art Young, Rollo Peters, Harrison Dowd, Mina Loy, and Boardman Robinson. Some even brought their mothers into the theatre: Cora Millay was about to enter the fray; also George Cram Cook’s mother, Ellen Cook, who sewed costumes; and Christine Ell’s mother, who helped her cook sixty-cent dinners in the tiny kitchen on the second floor of the theatre, where everyone gathered to talk and to celebrate. Cora became an active part of Eugene O’Neill’s The Moon of the Caribees, in which she sang and in which Charlie Ellis was cast as Smitty, o ne of the seamen on the S.S. Glencairn.

“Edna and all of the Millays were involved in this extraordinary production,” said Susan Jenkins Brown, who was then the wife of James Light, one of the Playhouse’s founders. “It was a mood play, and the Millay family provided the background music, which set the mood. The Millays, with Ma Millay, too, had this special musical ability – it was their own, the first of its kind really – a crooning group. As I remember, they stood behind the scenery – it was all swooping vocal harmonies – they weren’t seen, and … well, it was unearthly.”