Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
by Nancy Milford
Random Home. 550 pp. $29.95
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
by Daniel Mark Epstein
Henry Holt. 300 pp. $26.00
Once, in the earlier part of the 20th century, there were writers who were literate but reached a large popular audience and who were adored both for their work and for their personae, which, combined, appeared larger than life. Living like rock stars, they tended to die in much the same manner: of liquor or drugs, burned out or suicides. Nancy Milford has written about two of them—F. Scott Fitzgerald (and his wife Zelda) and now, 30 years later, Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Millay and Fitzgerald had too much in common: rocket-like ascents based on one book or one poem; dazzling reigns in their mid-and late twenties; descents after that into valleys of ashes; early deaths at downward arcs in their careers. But while the causative factor in Fitzgerald’s collapse—his wife’s insanity—is painfully evident, the reasons for Millay’s remain more mysterious. They concern things that Milford and Daniel Mark Epstein, Millay’s second recent biographer, allude to and hint at, but never explain.
_____________
Millay was born in 1892 into a star-struck Maine family, dirt poor but bent on accomplishment. In 1912, one poem, “Renascence,” changed her life forever. Rightly described by Epstein as a “public sensation,” it brought her fame, sponsors, and a scholarship to Vassar, which was her springboard into Greenwich Village, where she arrived in 1917. The six years that followed were simply astonishing.
In 1919, her verse play, Aria da Capo, opened, a nationwide and international sensation. A collection, A Few Figs from Thistles, was published in 1920, Second April the year after, and The Harp Weaver in 1923, the year in which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. In 1927 she wrote the libretto for an opera by Deems Taylor, The King’s Henchman; the book version ran through eighteen printings. The Buck in the Snow sold an amazing 40,000 copies in 1928. At the same time, her theatrical gifts—she had trained as an actress—made her a glittering presence whose readings were sold out all over the country. For almost two decades, she would be one of the most famous women in American life.
All this took place against, and was fueled by, a private life of mythic proportions. Whatever Millay had does not come through in pictures, but it was clearly of movie-star dimensions, and it led to sequential and concurrent affairs with some women and dozens, possibly hundreds, of men. In 1923, at thirty-one, she married Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch importer rich, handsome, and confident enough to take the back seat to a succession of flamboyant, self-dramatizing, and much more public wives (the first of whom had been the suffragette Inez Milholland). He bought Millay a townhouse, an island, and an emerald ring worth $42,000 in 1920’s money, and together they acquired a farm, Steepletop, in upstate New York.
In 1928, on a reading tour, she fell hard for George Dillon, a twenty-one-year-old boytoy who seemed hardly to merit the emotion she lavished on him, or the grand romantic drama of her verse. Boissevain “understood,” tried to welcome him into the family, and, when Millay followed Dillon to Europe, kept the home fires burning while showering her with letters pledging support and devotion. Fatal Interview, the sonnet sequence she wrote about this affair, sold 50,000 copies at the depth of the Depression. Mil-lay herself seemed to be at the peak of her powers. In fact, her decline had begun.
As early as 1922, Millay’s health had become tricky, and in July 1923, directly after her wedding, she underwent complicated abdominal surgery. In 1931, the death of her mother sent her into a long drinking binge. Shortly afterward, her affair with Dillon began to wind down, and so did her standing with the critics, though not yet the public. “Her reviews,” Milford tells us, “were becoming more and more mixed. Some were downright dismissive, beginning to suggest that her celebrity had outstripped her poetry, and that the younger generation was moving on.”
Depressed, she started to distance herself. “Her drinking in 1933 and 1934 was constant, gargantuan,” writes Epstein. Then, in 1936, she had a car accident that damaged some nerves in her back and her shoulder, and she began a devastating addiction to morphine. By 1938, Milford tells us, her husband was confiding to friends that she was constantly bedridden. By 1940, she was in seclusion at Steepletop behind a buffer of drugs and liquor, and three years later she was taking an average of three grains of morphine (200 times the prescribed dose for an advanced cancer patient) in about twenty doses a day. She would stay at Steepletop for the rest of her life. In 1949, the critic Edmund Wilson, an old friend, saw her there for the first time in nineteen years. “She had become somewhat heavy and dumpy,” he wrote later. “She was terribly nervous, her hands shook, there was a look of fright in her bright green eyes.”
Boissevain died following surgery for lung cancer in the summer of that year. Two weeks later, Millay was hospitalized for “neurasthenia,” complicated by cirrhosis and nutritional deficiencies. When she got out, she insisted on returning to Steepletop, where she made a stab at getting her life back in order, taking up some household duties and starting once more to write. On the night of October 18, 1950, she stayed up late, writing and drinking. She was found dead the next morning, her neck broken, lying at the bottom of the stairs.
_____________
What seems clear is that Millay began to take drugs for physical ailments and continued for other, less tangible woes, To some extent, then, her decline tracks the decline of Fitzgerald. But just as she lacks his stature as a major artist, her life lacks the tragic contours of his. Fitzgerald crashed, and then grew and changed mightily, taking responsibility for his wife and his daughter, infusing his work with the pain of experience. This Side of Paradise (1920) and Tender Is the Night (1934) seem to be written by two different people, so vast is the emotional chasm between them. Millay never changed, she only grew smaller, and there seems little difference between her earlier and later work.
This was the problem: she never grew up. She never found a role to play beyond her star turn as Girl Poet, or a subject beyond that of romantic attraction. When Millay was near forty, a newspaper described her as an “elf.” Her husband called her his “child” all her life. “Doubtless she would rather die than make this admission that she is growing older,” said Arthur Davison Ficke, a long-time friend and ex-lover, when Millay was in her late forties. “She has built up so enormous an image of herself as the Enchanted Little Faery Princess that she must defend it with her life.” But there is small call for sprites past a certain age, and only drink and drugs seem to have dulled the pain of her inability to find another way to live.
In any discussion of Millay’s self-destruction, her loving husband has to play a central part. He started as her protector and became her en-abler, shielding her from responsibility, and then from all consequences, save for the worst one of having never faced consequences. When she began to want drugs, he procured them for her, injected her, and then started shooting up himself to keep her company. Again the contrasting example of Fitzgerald is instructive: beginning like Millay as a “romantic egotist,” he was shocked out of his self-absorption by utter disaster, finding his own soul as a consequence. Millay’s husband sank into her self-absorption alongside her, and helped murder them both.
Nancy Milford makes no claims for Millay’s poetry, but simply presents it as she goes along. Daniel Mark Epstein calls her a neglected great poet. It would be nearer the truth to say that she was a good minor poet, sometimes powerful but too often tinkly, underrated in our day as she was overrated in her own. In an essay that is in some ways more perceptive than either of these two biographies, the literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick suggests that Millay lacked a high opinion of her own capacities, and that she was illserved by her early celebrity, which tempted her into a slick facility and kept her from being as impressive as she might have otherwise been. “Perhaps she was not meant to go to Greenwich Village at all,” writes Hardwick, “and certainly not to become famous. . . . [N]ot nearly enough was asked of her and she had no time to prepare herself in solitude—until it was too late.”
Edna Millay, it is clear, had many fine qualities: she was a hard worker, a good friend, a good citizen, and unfailingly generous to other poets and writers, especially those, like Elinor Wylie, who trod on her own lyric turf. What this poet lacked were the prosaic graces of maturity, duty, and temperance. Hers is a horrible tale, cloaked in the guise of a celebration of eros and excess—and one of the saddest stories you ever will hear.
_____________
