Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Read Nancy Milford's biography of "Vincent" over the holiday. Absorbing, though somehow not as much fun as Gooch's City Poet: The Life & Times of Frank O'Hara or Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet despite all the gossip surrounding Millay. I hate the title, though I realize A Lovely Light or similar wouldn't have been much better. Millay's lines suffer out of context.



Millay's college-career mischief was delightful. (She was almost prohibited from graduating with her class at Vassar because she'd snuck away to see the opera. My ass, in similar confinement, woulda been grass.) Her legendary love affairs were indeed often steamy. Her relationships with her sisters also fascinated: Norma, the middle sis, became her executor and controlled the release of material for the biography with a rather tight hand, while Katherine, the youngest, competed with Vincent's literary fame and lost by a landslide, much to K's eternal bitterness. Most remarkable were the charts Vincent and her husband Eugen kept to track their morphine addictions. I've never seen anything like them--though George Perec's obsessive foodstuffs inventory comes close, it lacks the sinister, stomach-turning nature of these odd documents.



For all her reputation as a fiesty, independent, redheaded "New Woman," I was a bit disappointed in her relationships Vincent displayed a push-pull attitude that belied her deep insecurities. She was a needy lover and high-maintenance friend, and counted too much importance on her seductive abilities. On the other hand, she could be generous in her praise and strong in her support of fellow artists, patient with the (emotional and especially financial) demands of her family, and loyal (if not faithful) in marriage. She was driven and ambitious and fairly clear-eyed about the use and extents of her talent. While she was sometimes arrogant, she also strived to please her audiences (which were HUGE) because she genuinely wanted to delight them.



Plenty of poetry throughout too, though the repetition of a few well-known verses got on my nerves, and I wished I'd had the collected poems alongside as well. Annoyed by Milford's own presence in the book--she quotes from conversations she had during the course of her research with Norma and Norma's husband and slips into first-person narrative more than I liked. But those are niggling points.



Nearing the end of the book on Christmas Eve, I holed up in my borrowed bedroom. When I emerged at last to the delight of the extended family, sis asked "How was it?" "Well, it was a biography, so she died in the end. Kind of a bummer."