Edmund Wilson and Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

The American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay is known, if she is known, as the author of "First Fig."  The whole poem is four lines long:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--  
It gives a lovely light.

Here's four more of her lines, her version of "Rage against the dying of the light":

With all my might
My door shall be barred.
I shall put up a fight,
I shall take it hard.

Another quatrain:

Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again.

She figures prominently in Edmund Wilson's journal from the 1920s, aptly titled The Twenties and predictably succeeded by The Thirties, The Forties, The Fifties, and The Sixties, which slops over into the early 1970s, Wilson having died in June of 1972.  I read The Sixties several years ago and enjoyed it so much I'm kind of surprised I haven't until now read any of the others; the temporary plan is to read them straight through, starting with The Twenties, which I'm around a hundred pages into, though at an average of around 500 pages per decade that plan might, if not aborted, take me up to the time of my own door barring.  I can see it now.  Here lies Eric Jorgenson: he read Edmund Wilson's journals and watched a lot of sports on tv.  I remember one of Wilson's last journal entries before he died consisted of some very concise movie reviews.  This might not be exact as I'm going from memory:

Saw two movies, Godfather and French Connection: bang, bang.

Back to Millay.  She figures prominently in The Twenties because she was the first love of Wilson's life.  As he puts it on page 59, when he would have been 25 or 26:

I had just met Edna Millay and was full of her.  I sent her a copy of the following poem, and when I saw her again, she said, "That was a strange poem you sent me."  Rereading it now, I see how strange it was, as well as how extremely bad.  These early poems are quite embarrassing.  John Bishop used to say that it always made him nervous when I resorted to a high romantic vein.

John Bishop is better known as John Peale Bishop, another poet, a friend of Wilson's, and rival for, or sharer of, Millay's affections.  The strange and embarrassing poem is in the journal dutifully reproduced and followed almost immediately by a passage that is even stranger and in its way perhaps more embarrassing, too--certainly more personal but Wilson is frank about everything:

In any case, a romantic idealism combined with a certain shyness had hitherto kept me from falling in love in any serious way; and Edna ignited for me both my intellectual passion and my unsatisfied desire, which went up together in a blaze of ecstasy that remains for me one of the high points of my life.  I do not believe that such experiences can be common, for such women are not common.  My subsequent chagrin and perplexity, when I discovered that, due to her extreme promiscuity, this could not be expected to continue, were rather amazingly soothed by an equanimity on her part which was also very uncommon.  

[Our farewell evening with Edna]

. . . After dinner, sitting on her day bed, John and I held Edna in our arms--according to an arrangement insisted upon by herself--I her lower half and John her upper--with a polite exchange of pleasantries as to which had the better share.

She referred to us, I was told, as "the choir boys of Hell," and complained that our both being in love with her had not even broken up our friendship.

On first reading, I thought the purpose of this bizarre "dinner" was a double break-up, but subsequent developments now persuade me it was just a 1921 Greenwich Village good-bye before Millay removed herself to Europe, where Wilson soon followed.  God I am glad not to be young.  But you can see, perhaps, why reading this journal would make one curious about Millay.  In Europe, she acquired a Dutch husband, Eugen Boissevain, a businessman--opposites attract--with whom she settled on a farm in the Berkshires, she to write poems that critics regarded with increasing disdain and he to nurse her back to precarious health after a series of nervous collapses.  He died in 1949, followed by her the next year, of a heart attack, age 58.  Her biography does seem to have flamed out, as she predicted, so, to close with an anecdote from the pre-Dutchman era, she had come from a hardscrabble background in Maine and attended, with the aid of a patron impressed by her teen-aged poems, Vassar, where it seems she distinguished herself in activities both literary and subversive.  On one occasion, she dared the president to expel her, but he demurred, pleading that he wanted to avoid having a "banished Shelley on my doorstep."  Whereupon she is supposed to have replied, "On those terms, I think I can continue to live in this hell hole." 

Comments

[Kathleen Dixon Donnelly]

Well done! I'm doing a series of blogs on 'The Literary 1920s,' 100 years ago, and Wilson and Millay met in April, 1920. I needed some extra background, so this is very helpful. My main source for this post is Marion Meade's excellent 'Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the 20s.' Highly recommended. www.suchfriends.wordpress.com.