Milford’s long dig into the poet’s life is sure to reignite interest in Millay’s poetry. (There’s also another new biography, “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed,” by Daniel Mark Epstein.) Even by the time of her death in 1950–she pitched down the stairs one night and broke her neck, at the age of 58–Edna St. Vincent Millay had drifted out of fashion. But everybody remembered these prophetic lines: 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! Her life was an incendiary cocktail of literary ambition, fame, sexual adventure and addiction. In 1932 she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry; the public, fascinated by her passionate, provocative verse, flocked to her cross-country reading tours as if she were a pop star.
The oldest of three sisters, Millay was raised in poverty in Maine by a mother determined to foster her children’s talents. Edna’s first poems were published when she was still a teenager; they won her a patron, who sent her to Vassar, where she had her first love affair, with a woman. In the ’20s, she lived a bohemian life in Greenwich Village and a more glamorous life in Paris, mingling with jazz-age figures like Edmund Wilson, who fell hopelessly in love with her. She was charismatic: small, with pale skin and flaming red hair, and a perpetual girlishness that made her underlying sexiness even sexier. Eventually, she married an accommodating man who did everything for her, including the cooking. Her painful love affair with a much younger poet, George Dillon, fueled some of her greatest sonnets–and took place right under her husband’s nose.
If all the detail Milford unearthed sometimes threatens to swamp the story, it also gives this portrait its richness, complexity and wit. Not every biographer would tell us about a poet’s fashion obsessions (“I love my little black satin slippers with the rhinestone buckles”). Or give us a guide to plants (Edna’s mother once made her an herbal concoction to induce an abortion). Or count the empty booze bottles (28 in one month). But Milford nicely breaks up her narrative by fast-forwarding to the white-haired Norma, years later, Scotch in hand, talking about her dead sister. Norma, who died in 1986, becomes a one-woman chorus to this tragedy–sometimes flirty, sometimes elusive, not unlike Edna herself.
Edna Millay isn’t easy to like. She slept with her friends’ husbands, she was narcissistic and self-destructive. But after nearly 30 years of living her parallel life, Milford is adamant: “I liked her,” she says. “There were times I just didn’t get it exactly. I had to work through that. But she took radical political positions that were rather noble. And I read her, strangely enough, as if she were a contemporary.” Milford has edited a volume of Millay’s poems for the Modern Library. Recent generations of feminists have had to settle for literature of sexual liberation by writers like Erica Jong–or Candace Bushnell. How much better to return to Edna: 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…
Savage BeautyNancy Milford (Random House)
