Thoroughly Modern Millay - What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay - Review

Jeffrey Hart

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Daniel Mark Epstein (Holt, 299 pp., $26)

Readers of National Review are now becoming acquainted with the poetry of Daniel Mark Epstein; his very fine "Helen" appears in this issue (p. 62). Epstein is one of the strongest poets now writing in English. He is also a musician and a scholar; and, as his new book makes clear, an expert biographer.

The book invites us to reconsider Edna St. Vincent Millay both as a person and as a poet. He judges her to be a major poet, mostly a love poet, and I am willing to be persuaded that he is right. This is culturally interesting. The explosion on the scene of the great modernists around 1907-1913 (from Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to the Armory Show) has tended to occlude our sense of those writers, painters, architects, and so on who were not exactly modernists. But, in painting, we are now re-seeing such American realists as Thomas Eakins, Robert Henri, George Bellows, and Edward Hopper. Cezanne and Braque will never fade, but the world has also been seen with other eyes. There is Yeats and there is Joyce and there is Eliot; Epstein wishes us to realize that there is also Millay.

Besides being a writer, however, she was also a "figure." Her allure was captured gloriously by Edmund Wilson, one of her multitude of sex partners, in his 1952 book The Shores of Light. Wilson talked with an old friend about Edna, or Vincent as her close friends called her; and "she told me of seeing her years ago in Greenwich Village running around the corner of Macdougal Street, flushed and laughing 'like a nymph,' with her hair swinging. Floyd Dell, also laughing, pursued her . . . And I leave this image here at the end to supplement my firsthand impressions-a glimpse of Edna as the fleeing and challenging Daphne of her poem 'Figs from Thistles'-from the time when I did not know her, when she had first come down from Vassar to the Village." Wilson had really loved her; we hear it in this prose. When I first read these sentences from Wilson in 1952, I sort of loved her spiritedness myself.

Vincent (she had been named after St. Vincent's Hospital, which supposedly had saved the life of a relative) was a poor girl from Camden, Maine, and not only a rising poet but an immensely theatrical personality. She hit Vassar, in 1913, like a tsunami. She was tiny, with floor-length red hair, and her delivery of lines was in the grand style, a la Sarah Bernhardt. Stanislavsky and naturalism would not be invited here. Her voice was a powerful contralto, she spoke with feeling from her toes up, and on her recordings she sounds rather British; her enunciation of syllables was razor sharp, no slurs. She was a grand diva who almost brought Vassar to its knees, breaking rules at will and attracting a devoted cult following of young women who joyfully went to bed with her. She was a heroine to the entire student body. As soon as she was out of Vassar, however, she put aside the lesbianism; consigning girls to the past, she now sought to dominate men.

And if I loved you Wednesday,

Well, what is that to you?

I do not love you Thursday,

So much is true.

And why you come complaining

Is more than I can see.

I loved you Wednesday,-yes-but

What is that to me?

Hmm. On Epstein's showing I doubt that she ever loved anyone except her mother, Cora (a highly intelligent but somewhat flaky woman). Vincent was once in bed with three men, serially, on a single day: "What lips my lips have kissed" indeed. She did not love; she needed to be adored. She was a woman of the theater, and the bed was one of her stages. All of her pathological behavior in this regard must have required exceptional coldness of heart. Epstein's account of her is very troubling: A reasonable person would not have chased this woman around Macdougal Street. Indeed, he wouldn't have touched her with a 20-foot pole. Edmund Wilson was smart to bail out early. This was an entirely self-regarding Circe who turned men into swine. She was not a lesbian; she was a thespian.

But she could write, and Epstein knows this and can demonstrate her strengths. In substance she combined eroticism, though of a rather icy kind, with classical verse forms that Catullus would have admired:

We were very tired, we were very merry-

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable-

But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,

We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;

And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

I wonder if there is a theatrical quality about her verse that damages it. A poem about intimate relations should not sound as if it were being declaimed from the stage. Maybe she should have turned down the decibels. I want to reserve that judgment.

Her last phase was just awful. One thinks immediately of Wordsworth's famous lines in "Resolution and Independence": "We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."

A wealthy and gentlemanly importer named Eugen Boissevain took her over and behaved as a sort of nurse or keeper. He believed her a great poet and a treasure of civilization. He bought them an estate in Austerlitz, N.Y. in the Berkshires, and didn't interfere with her sexual affairs. Her consumption of drugs and alcohol was astonishing; through habituation, she was able to take usually lethal dosages of morphine.

There was a void within her that could not be filled. In Epstein's account, she became desiccated and self-emptied. Her beauty withered. To get right down to it, she was not likable: She represents not, as some claim, women's liberation, but rather a woman's obliteration. One morning, she was found broken and dead on the stairs of the mansion. She had fallen down the stairs, no doubt drunk or drugged, and broken her neck. She was 58.

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand.

That is spirited, even beautiful. But there's a lot to be said for steadiness and normal affection, and intensity does not exclude decency. That is the sad lesson of the fine poet, Edna Millay.

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