Customer Reviews

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book, one of two biographies of Edna St. Vincent Millay out this year, provides us with a full-fleshed view of the lyric poet. Nancy Milford had unparalleled access to the correspondence of Millay, and interviews with her surviving sister, Norma. Milford wrote the book over a period of years, allowing her study of Millay some time for seasoning and reflection.

The early slangy, insouciant letters between the poet and her mother and sisters, are a delight, revealing their loving, teasing relationships. (I admit to being surprised by their wide use of baby talk.) Since Millay moved in literary circles and knew many writers, the letters back and forth to lovers and friends are wonderfully expressive. Many female readers may wish that their husbands and boyfriends could write of love and longing as eloquently!

Milford reveals how Millay labored over her art, how creating her lyrics which seem to flow smoothly and effortlessly, required energy and commitment on her part to produce.

She details Millay's slide into alcoholism and drug dependence in her later years. One wonders how intelligent, educated people like Millay and her husband Eugene could fall into such a state, but apparently there was no one in their lives to do what today is trendily called "an intervention," and as they became more and more isolated, Millay's physical decline was accelerated.

Kudoes to Nancy Milford for a comprehensive biography of a passionate American poet!

It seems cruelly ironic that after 30 years of working on a biography of an obscure (to most Americans living today) poetess, Nancy Milford would have to compete with another biographer's book on the same subject, published within the same month. It is even more cruel that despite the fact that Daniel Epstein's biography of Mrs. Millay, "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" was only 3 years in the making, it is much more of a definitive biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay than Milford's highly emotional and occasionally subjective portrait could ever hope to become. Bill Moyers wrote that in Milford's tome, "Millay lives! And she casts a spell over the reader as mesmerizing as her poetry..." This is true. The problem is that the only reason Millay casts a spell over the reader, is because this overly-long book is practically an edited version of her journals. I have no problem with lengthy biographies, but, quite surprisingly considering the amount of time she spent immersed in Millay's archives, Milford does not seem to have enough of a grasp of the story, to understand that a lot of details that she leaves in are absolutely unnecessary. She also does not understand that a lot of the occasionally frustratingly long excerpts quoted from Millay's journals, letters and notes could have easily been paraphrased and summarized, and that actual analysis would have been more welcome in its place. At times, I felt like I was wading through these documents myself, and had to decide which of them were important and which were not. As far as I know that is for the author to do.
Furthermore, unlike Epstein, who expertly discusses Millay's place in the pantheon of America's greatest poets and debates the reasons for her subsequent banishment from the literary scene, Millay's biography never really moves out of the realm of the poetess' inner journey, rendering a highly charged and inherently incomplete portrait. Characters come in and out without explanation, Milford never explains Millay's amorous adventures with other women as being lesbian relationships and the reader is left to guess whether Milford's lack of explanation suggests that she believed these affairs were without consequence and unrevelatory about the poet's real sexuality. Were these affairs common at the time? Was her lesbianism or bisexuality an open secret to Millay's coterie? Is Eugen's constant use of the word "love" to describe his feelings for Millay's lovers possibly suggestive of a menage-a-trois? Time and again the reader is left with more questions than answers, and Milford herself constantly poses questions for the reader, in a let-the-reader decide stance that does not suggest much skill on the part of the biographer.
Personally, I felt lost half of the time as I devoured the highly readable book. Despite its shortcomings, and its inferiority in relation to Epstein's shorter yet more complete portrait of Edna Millay, Savage Beauty is a beautiful story of family, romance, literary genius and ultimately, descent into addiction and death. Nancy Milford's prose is as readable as Millay's poetry; it is her flawed build-up of the story, and lack of context for the reader, that makes it less than perfect.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, long my favorite poet, lived a fascinating, wild and even shocking life. Learning the truth about her may disturb some people, but I was happy to learn the details, sordid and exemplary. Nancy Milford writes engagingly and her biography of "Vincent" became for this reader quite a page-turner. The author's use of correspondence to and from Millay, and about Millay, reveals the character of this jazz-age poet with a sense of immediacy and freshness. (In that sense, this biography has a great deal in common with David McCullough's current best-selling and very engaging biography of John Adams.)

Millay drank, was dependent on prescription pain killers, was promiscuous, and otherwise flouted the conventional morals of her time. She also wrote exquisite poetry and expressed not only beauty of spirit and self, but from time to time high-mindedness -- for example, in trying to evoke the national conscious during America's isolationist response to the rise of fascism in Europe.

This biography is worth reading, as is Millay's poetry.

Maybe it's because I'm not an English major or a writer, but I loved this penetrating biography. I was never bored by it and find it totally amazing that others were. Further, I'm a compulsive biography reader and would have been mystified by this life story if the unpleasant and sordid parts had been omitted. I was especially interested in the picture Milford drew of Millay's genious and how it manifested. It was also fascinating to read how the husband cared for her and seemed to understand what she needed to keep her talent alive. Alcohol and drug addiction have plagued many writers and artists of her generation and she was no exception. I think it's wise to remember that society knew very little about these illnesses then; once in their grip, Millay was probably doomed because she would have had little help available to her.

This seems to be the rough draft of a book Milford was intending to write. Lots of "facts" thrown together almost at random and lots of important details left out -- either because Milford didn't know them or didn't realize their importance or just didn't want to think about them. (For example, Milford simply skips over how Millay could be raking in so much money --she made the equivalent of $300,000 in just the second half of 1928 -- and still be broke.)

To me this book is sort of a do-it--yourself kit for a biography (with parts missing)and it's up to the reader to try to put everything together.

Lots of thanks to those who steered me to Daniel Mark Epstein's "What Lips my Lips Have Kissed." It's the much better biography of Millay. Milford does, however, out do Epstein in showing the huge role Millay's mother and sisters played in her life. The portrait of Millay's mother alone makes this book worth reading.

If you're going to read only one biography of Millay, read Epstein's. If you're going to read both, read Epstein's first. It will provide the chronology to make Milford's intelligible.

Nancy Milford must surely be the best biographer in our county today. From the moment I began SAVAGE BEAUTY I could think of little else. I read it straight through in 2 days. There is nothing stilted or contrived in Ms Milford's writing as her flawless prose moves quickly from page to page telling the story of a beautiful, talented, dreamer who is always just a step away from never-never land. Milford captures this character just as she did Zelda and maybe even more so!
As a young person I underlined everything of Edna St. Vincent Millay's in green ink (green ink was a strange necessity at the time). This Poet's work, however, was not to be talked about at my parents home. I remember writing many of her poems on index cards and carying them in my pocket.
Several years later I was living in Cambridge with my husband who was in graduate school at Harvard. It was there that I discovered her earlier work. While in college in Va. I was the script editor of our Sophmore play "The Women". I was overwhelmed by the interest in Vachel Lindsay and ee cummings. Why?? Lawrence Ferlingheti and "friends" only echoed what Millay had said years before. Being from the South, my roomate, the soccer "Destroyer" from New Jersey was suddendly explained. Ms. Milford's book put Millay's life in perspective and also mine. "Vincent" changed a generation. But then so does Nancy Milford. SAVAGE BEAUTY makes this available to all of us. The best, and best written nonfiction read of the year. Thank you. Atlanta

A phenomenon when she burst onto the literary scene in the Twenties, Edna Millay, I believe, would herself be pleased with this phenomenal biography. I discovered Millay's poetry when I was in high school in Kansas in the Fifties, the Beatnik era, but in Kansas, I certainly knew no Beatniks. Millay became my muse, the poetic string connecting me to another world beyond the endless fields of corn and wheat. I visited her home in Greenwich Village, read all of her poetry, and can still quote long passages from memory.
Savage Beauty, a large book, does ample justice to the large personality of Millay, chronicling her life and lifestyle, both of which were 'unconventional,' in every sense of the word. Such was the impact of this genius, this 'force of nature,' that she willfully created her persona, in the process lifting herself and her dependent family out of poverty and onto the front pages.
The intensity of her poetic works is mirrored in the intensity with which she lived her life. Her short signature poem 'I burn my candle at both ends; it will not last the night. But ah my foes and oh my friends, it gives a lovely light' became a slogan for an era - and even more, a definition of her own life, at the end of which she did, indeed, flame out in an excess of living.

Like Nancy Milford's brilliant biography ZELDA, her new work SAVAGE BEAUTY serves to rescue from obscurity a key female player in American life and letters - the once staggeringly popular poet Edna Saint Vincent Millay. Like ZELDA, a biography heralded for its innovative excellence, SAVAGE BEAUTY approaches its subject with originality and brilliance. Instead of merely ploddingly charting the life of Millay from birth to death, this biography weaves an entire startling universe and dares the reader to enter it. SAVAGE BEAUTY brings back that odd time in American history when poets were famous and writers like Fitzgerald could bask in literary celebrity. Even more captivating than Millay's descent into popularity, however, is Milford's portrayal of the eerie world of Millay's family. Left alone from the age of eight to raise herself and her two sisters while her mother worked out-of-town as a nurse caretaker, Millay grew up in a household distinguished by extreme material and emotional deprivation; intense sibling loyalties that endlessly reversed themselves into rivalries and back to loyalties; and the influence of a mother whose frequent absences gave her a crippling power over her daughters.

Milford's dazzling intelligence shines through most obviously in her portrayal of the peculiar matriarchy of the Millay family, a self-contained unit held together by its members' voracious need for admiration and their ability to bolster one another's narcissism. Milford's frequent introductions of Millay's sister Norma - who is still alive during part of the biography's writing - reveals the biographical innovativeness that distinguished ZELDA. Norma surfaces and resurfaces throughout the narrative, piping up to contradict the biographer or egg her on, or to drop enticing or irritating tidbits that interrupt and chafe against the biography, giving the reader a first-hand sense of what it must have been like to be a member of this family, a poet both resented and revered by her all-important mother and sisters. There are some amazing scenes in this book - for example, one in which the Millay sisters keep their recently deceased mother's cadaver outside Edna's kitchen door for several wintry days, while bulldozers gouge a grave in the frozen ground of an unused field, where the Millay daughters intend to bury Mrs. Millay in cold isolation.

No character in this biography, however - including Millay's enigmatic and self-made iconoclast mother - is portrayed without sympathy, and ultimately Milford's ability to pull her readers inside the hearts of all of her characters proves essential to this biography's success. Unlike Zelda, whose poignancy is underscored by her descent into psychosis, Millay is disturbingly sane - her ability to fritter away her life and talent in compulsive and self-absorbed love affairs, drugs and alcohol is as repellent as it is understandable. And unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose well-intentioned but at times abrasive support of his psychotic wife is profoundly moving, Millay's husband Boissevain emerges as an oddly passive character whose uncritical worship of his wife is pathetic and unsettling. (By the end of this biography, you're convinced that the popular insignificance of many of America's current great poets is probably the best thing that ever happened to American poetry.) The dance between narcissism and artistic productivity and inspiration has never been more acutely and disturbingly portrayed. Milford both focusses an unsparing eye on Millay's self-absorption and convincingly details the mesmerizing attractiveness Millay exerted on others, caught so eerily in this verse fragment of her lover George Dillon, a young poet fifteen years her junior: "I shall not be again/So jarred in every joint,/So mute, amazed and taut/And winded of my breath--/Beauty being at my throat/More savagely than death." These lines, which lend their words to the title of Milford's biography, are richly evocative of Millay's power and self-destructive longing for literary genius and recognition. It is a tribute to Milford's genius as a biographer that she was able to ponder, embrace and understand such a complicated and wholly unique personality as Edna Saint Vincent Millay.

This is one of the best books I have read in several years. It is magical, provocative,and educational - a true treasure. I've never been interested in reading biographies, but after reading this, I've realized what I've been missing.

I also disagree with one reviewer that Edna St. Vincent Millay is "obscure" to most living Americans. I think many easily recognize her name - and even if they don't, this book is a fabulous way to learn about an otherwise unfamiliar individual.

Nancy Milford, author of the much-acclaimed "Zelda," has come up with a stunning second act with "Savage Beauty," the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. This book was 20 years in the making - I suspect the fractious "keeper of the documents" sister Norma Millay was a good part of the reason for the delay in publishing. We are fortunate that Ms. Millay kept meticulous diaries, and was so fascinating to her writerly contemporaries, they wrote pages and pages in their own diaries about the incandescent Ms. Millay.

I had always thought ESVM must have come from some grand, aristocratic background to have such an imposing moniker. It turns out she was named in honor of St. Vincent's charity hospital in New York which had saved her drunken Uncle Charlie's life. She was born in a hardscrabble town in Maine and had a "difficult" childhood in every sense of the word. Her mother was a self-taught nurse and took cases far from home, necessitating that her three daughters were often completely alone for weeks at a time. Vincent (as she was always called by her family and friends) at age eight and the eldest, was in total charge of running the household. Yet the bonds between the sisters and mother were strong their entire lives. Vincent was frighteningly precocious, writing poetry and keeping diaries from her seventh year. Her loneliness must have been appalling.

Ms. Millay was tiny, with beautiful flame-red hair, and mesmerizing eyes. She had a lovely alto voice, and no one could read her works as well as she did herself. The word "charisma" was invented for her, and she fascinated males and females alike. She was so many things: wild and prim, a serious poet who came dangerously close to light verse, a sympathetic friend and an implacable enemy, spiritual with a hard headed business sense, and vulnerable, but manipulative.

Ms. Milford has done a spectacular job of winnowing the essence of the poet. The structure of the book is excellent with occasional asides of conversations between the author and Norma Millay. Ms. Milford is a compassionate biographer, but an objective one. The research is excellent and her conclusions well drawn, but free of armchair psychology. An outstanding biography that I highly recommend.