Before lots of things happened in my life and I decided it might be too short not to write fiction, I read a lot of biographies of my favorite novelists, including the wonderful biographies of John Updike by Adam Begley and John Cheever by Blake Bailey. If someone had asked me while I was reading these biographies what I hoped to get out of them, I probably would have said I loved the authors’ writing and I wanted to know more about them. Meanwhile, I was also reading biographies of writers I didn’t read, like John Carey’s biography of William Golding, so I think the real answer was that I wanted to find the rules to be a writer. (I’m still looking for the rules, so if you have them, please send them my way).
From the time that I began to write fiction in late 2019 to earlier this month, I hadn’t picked up a writer’s biography until I found Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I didn’t know anything about Millay and lately I’ve been poem-curious, so I thought I would try it out.
From the first words, I was hooked. I listened to the audiobook, read with skill by Bernadette Dunne (who also narrates some of my beloved Daisy Dalrymple novels), and began to understand how deeply Milford understood her subject: over the course of years, she visited with Norma Millay, Edna’s sister, at Edna’s former home of Steepletop. She had extensive access to Millay’s correspondence and even to her possessions, and this intimacy oozes from the book. Frequently, Milford breaks through the fourth wall to comment on Norma’s reaction to some piece of particularly juicy bit of gossip about the poet’s love life, which included women and men, and I thrilled in the idea that a biographer was sitting at her subject’s actual table, getting the scoop from her sister.
Added bonus: reading about Millay’s curiosity, skill, and imagination, and her bravery in submitting poetry to magazines when she was very young and living in poverty, taking care of her younger sisters while her mother lived in distant cities, helped me to slough off my insecurities and work on new projects, and even to submit to some pie-in-the-sky journals.
But. The audiobook version of Milford’s book is over 24 hours and is so detailed as to feel as though it were chronicling nearly every moment of her life, up until the end, in which, in the final moments of the book, Millay dies. Milford doesn’t provide us with a concluding chapter to interpret Millay’s legacy. Because I’ve lived with Millay for nearly a month, the abruptness of the ending left me feeling lonely. I know that Milford, having spent so much time thinking and writing about Millay, had thoughts on lasting effects on poetry, and I wanted to hear them.
Random House (2001)