The Enchantress

Whether Millay in love or in letters attained "the topmost branch," others can decide; she surely reached for it. In her lifetime, 1892 to 1950, she gained a wide popular audience. Her poetry readings drew enthusiastic crowds and her books sold well even in the meanest years of the Depression. Her play Aria da Capo, a bitter attack on private property written just after World War I, was lauded when it opened and remains in production today. The New Yorker in 1927 called The King's Henchman, with Millay's libretto, "the greatest American opera." She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, and with a firm hand directed the awards of the Guggenheim Foundation to poets during the 1930s, furthering the careers of Kay Boyle, Louise Bogan, and e.e. cummings.

Yet from Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty and Daniel Mark Epstein's What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, one comes away feeling that Millay's most willful achievement was molding a lyric persona, a dazzling mask that suffocated her at age 58. "I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me," 20-year-old Vincent wrote in her diary. "It seems to me that I am, incarnate, rapture and melancholy. . . . And what I have lived I have lived doubly, actually and symbolically."

As a teenager, Millay already had taken command of her charisma on stage.

I used continually my deep-vibrant note. I made my pauses tell. I felt that the audience liked me, and I did my best to make it love me. I did little wistful things, made little forlorn gestures, and once or twice smiled piteously. They laughed and cried with me all the way through. And at the end they gave me such a hand as I had never had before.

Epstein's book is especially good at linking these early experiences at acting with the performances and celebrity to come.

Renowned for her love poetry, Millay's drive was less to love than to enthrall. Critic Edmund Wilson--one puller on her mule team of young, old, square, hip, married, single, male, and female lovers--stressed Millay's "intoxicating effect on people, because this so much created the atmosphere in which she lived and composed." No wonder that early in her rise to fame she wrote with cloying desperation to an editor: "People fall in love with me, and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me and--and all that sort of thing. But no one speaks to me. I sometimes think no one can. Can you?" Millay would use anything, even her own isolation, to vamp with.

Nancy Milford, author also of an acclaimed biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, introduces Millay as a saucy "American Eve," an outspoken libertine who "ignited the imagination of a generation of American women" and "gave them their rallying cry." But in the chapters that follow, we find that Millay's public persona was less bohemian than Edwardian. In private, she may have smoked cigarettes and slept around, but in her public dress, diction, and performance style she echoed the grandiloquence of Tennyson, the poet she most admired.

I think however that of all alive
I only in such utter, ancient way
Do suffer love; in me alone survive
The unregenerate passions of a day
When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread,
Heedless and willful, took their knights to bed.

--Sonnet XXVI, Fatal Interview

Epstein, a poet himself, explores some of these incongruities. He notes that from childhood Millay "compartmentalized" her life, keeping two diaries, pursuing two--sometimes more--lovers at a time, writing noble Thanksgiving Day poems for the Saturday Evening Post while throwing her money away on horse racing. Though she wound up slumped in a bathrobe with a three-grain-a-day morphine habit, her lyric masks remained Lady Guinevere and the "girl-poet" with a "voice like a copper bell."

Milford had access to many more private letters and papers (through an agreement with Millay's surviving sister) and in places permits her bounty of materials to crush the narrative progress of Savage Beauty. The whiny apologies mailed home to mom, kootchy-koo love letters and WOW-ALL-CAPS telegrams threaten to blur into a scrapbook. Yet in some chapters--especially "Love and Death," which recounts Millay's love affair with the young poet George Dillon and her last great series of sonnets--Milford gathers commentary, poetry, and letters into a river of superb storytelling. Milford has also interviewed many of the poet's less famous acquaintances and hunted down more-obscure remembrances and reviews. These sources provide some of Savage Beauty's most credible insights.

Both books, however, fall short of what, to this reader, is the first obligation--and one would think the impetus--for an artistic biography: to construe where the art came from. What were Millay's work habits? And for Pete's sake, what was she reading all these years? On these subjects, so central to any writer's life, neither Milford nor Epstein offers much.

Reading between the lines of both biographies, one can note how assiduously Millay, a lonely child, turned to her diaries, to her invented "mammy" and onanistic dream-lover, in a sense rehearsing the attitudes her more mature and public self would shape into poetry. Much as both Milford and Epstein quote from the letters, neither one of them weighs these writings for their literary value or investigates how they, too, amplified Millay's talents for introspection and lyricism. In passing over such evidence of the poet at her craft, both Epstein and Milford seem, like so many others, to have been suckered by the poet's persona, presenting her as an exotic creature who, with the wave of a wand, turned emotion into sonnets. Art just isn't made that way.

In his preface, Epstein writes that "Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the last important American poets to hold the devoted interest of the serious general reader." In form and style, her poetry was to be displaced, he writes, by poetry "bristling with paradox, irony, ambiguity and allusion." During the years of Millay's greatest achievement and popularity, roughly 1917 to 1931, major works of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost were published. Yet, save for Epstein's initial summary, in his book--as in Savage Beauty--it's as if these seismic literary events never occurred. Perhaps Millay in self-protection chose to sweep aside the revolutions of modernism. But why would her biographers do so? Similarly, though Milford begins her book by claiming that Millay's daring influenced a generation of women, we never learn who her readers actually were or how they answered her "rallying cry." In both these studies, the character is drawn so large that we see each teardrop and strand of red hair but not a woman living in a world.

Poet Arthur Ficke, who of anyone came closest to a friendship with Millay, wrote of her late in both their lives: "She is the oddest mixture of genius and childish vanity, open mindedness and blind self-worship, that I have ever known. . . . She has built up so enormous an image of herself as the Enchanted Little Faery Princess that she must defend it with her life." Millay is dead, but maybe still enchanting; for Milford and Epstein have defended that image too.