On April 3, 1911, Edna St. Vincent Millay took her first lover. She was 19 years outdated, and she or he engaged herself to this man with a hoop that “got here to me in a fortune-cake” and was “the image of all earthly happiness.” Millay had simply graduated from highschool and had taken cost of working the family whereas her mom labored as a touring nurse. She fastened her youthful sisters dinner, washed and mended all their garments, and entertained their visitors. Her lover had no identify and no physique; he was a figment she’d conjured as much as assist her get by means of the stress and loneliness of being a teenage caretaker. This primary lover, her “shadow,” is just not usually recounted among the many many others she later had, however Millay had numerous methods of constructing these exhausting days of her early maturity endlessly charming and alive. In a single notice to her lover, she describes the chafing dish she served her siblings’ dinner on, which she referred to as James, and jokes, “Why don’t you come over some night and have one thing on ‘James’—doesn’t that sound dreadful—‘have one thing on James’!”
Millay’s imaginary lover is the one one talked about in nice element within the pages of her diary, collected for the primary time as Rapture and Melancholy. The editor of the gathering, Daniel Mark Epstein, ventures that “few, if any, critical reputations” in American literature “have so rapidly arisen and burned so brightly” as Millay’s: In 1923, solely 12 years faraway from her days as a surrogate mom, she turned the primary girl to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and in her extremely publicized life she additionally turned recognized for her many flesh-and-blood lovers within the literary world in addition to her deadly dependancy to morphine.
However her diary doesn’t embody these items, and it usually skips over essentially the most dramatic occasions in her life. The Millay who emerges in these entries is just not the famed poet, performer, and lover however one other Millay, whose internal world helps situate the story of her life anew. She embraces the mundanity of the non-writing life, that a part of each literary artist’s existence unseen by critics and readers, and finds moments of rapture within the melancholy of those pages.
In 1912, whereas she was nonetheless residing at house in Camden, Me., the 19-year-old Millay submitted her poem “Renascence,” which she had begun writing the 12 months earlier than, to a prestigious poetry competitors. It was a favourite among the many judges, and Millay got here house from selecting blueberries for supper sooner or later to discover a letter from a New York editor informing her that her poem had been chosen to be revealed in a quantity referred to as The Lyric 12 months. Critics raved about her poem, and shortly individuals started to court docket her.
Caroline Dow, the dean of the YWCA Coaching College in New York, used her connections to seek out Millay sponsors who would fund her research at Vassar Faculty; Charlotte Bannon, who knew the pinnacle of the English division at Smith Faculty, promised to rearrange for a full scholarship if Millay have been accepted there. Millay selected Vassar, with a preparatory semester at Barnard Faculty. She boarded a sleeper practice and arrived in New York Metropolis on the age of 21, in pigtails, having misplaced her comb on the journey. Her fame, by then, preceded her.
In New York, Millay needed to take English, French, and Latin programs to make up for her scarcity of highschool credit; she balanced her mounds of homework with excessive teas and luncheons and mixers on the Poetry Society (with “celebs, roughly,” as she mentions in a single entry) and common conferences along with her patrons to offer them updates. She was anticipated to maintain her grades up and to proceed to jot down her verse. For essentially the most half, these particulars are talked about solely in passing, usually in the identical breath with extra home issues: ironing and discussing Horace; sending out laundry and writing poems within the library.
At Vassar, Millay was untouchable. She negotiated her first ebook deal, which might result in the publication of Renascence, and Different Poems in 1917, revealed poetry in magazines, and took half in school theater productions. She obtained in hassle continually for skipping courses, smoking and ingesting within the dorms and within the cemetery, and sneaking off campus to go for a drive along with her buddies up the Hudson River. On no less than one event, she spent the time allotted for a geometry take a look at writing a letter to a pal. “Maybe I’ll be expelled,” she quips, however she couldn’t be; although she was suspended simply earlier than commencement, she was given a particular exemption to obtain her diploma. Whereas in school, she additionally developed a relationship with the poet and playwright Arthur Davidson Ficke, an affair that may result in a lifelong friendship and greater than a decade of normal letters, however he doesn’t make a single look in her diaries till lengthy after the affair has ended.
Millay’s diary animates the world round her, as she turns on a regular basis objects right into a forged of characters. Her new hat is “an expensive,” and the tap in her new room provides her a “feeling of comradeship” as a result of the new water comes out the place the chilly water ought to. When she goes to Paris a number of years later, she writes concerning the Seine (“a French river. It speaks no English”) and little pleasures like tavern desserts: brown pears “squat & twisted as quinces…. I questioned if they’d not ripened close to a wall, possibly, in a thorny backyard, the place within the summer-time go strolling of a day an outdated blind girl & a little bit boy in vivid blue apron.”
These weren’t quiet instances for her. The identical day she purchased her pretty new hat and expressed reduction in her diary that she didn’t have an ulcerated tooth, she mentions offhand, in the identical breath, “Noticed one thing about me within the April Bookman.” It was a review of “Renascence” by William Aspenwall Bradley, who referred to as the poem “a extra exceptional manufacturing” than any of the opposite poems within the assortment it initially appeared in, however Millay doesn’t point out that. Nor does she point out that her purpose for going to Paris was to get away from the tangle of her messy love life, which by then encompassed Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, whose work and friendship have been strained by their frequent romantic curiosity.
These diaries reveal a moment-by-moment sort of life, by which the key historical past of a squat brown pear or a rogue faucet or a chafing dish could also be simply as vital as the general public lifetime of the author. The Millay of those diaries, then, reveals a unique sort of author: much less engaged with an viewers, along with her readers, editors, or fellow writers, and extra engaged within the distinctly personal pleasure of merely taking on the planet. A well-known author’s letters are written with the data that they are going to be learn—definitely by the recipient, but in addition maybe finally by most of the people. Diaries, then again, are motivated by a way more ambiguous impulse. Solely in diaries does a author have the true freedom to be nobody however a witness to the world, the liberty to not inform a narrative or make a degree. It appears to me that being excited about writers’ lives necessitates being additionally within the nothingness that usually fills these lives; we wish pleasure, however studying the personal observations of a author’s largely static environment can maybe excite us concerning the world as it’s, and never because it guarantees to be.
Between 1917 and 1927, Millay revealed her first, then her second, then her third quantity of poetry. She introduced her mom to New York and started to assist her household. She gained the Pulitzer, obtained married, and fell dangerously unwell, with a situation that may have an effect on her well being for the remainder of her life. If studying about Millay by means of a standard biographical narrative will be salacious—it’s really a racy story—then her diaries are quieter, extra languid. What Millay considers to be “racy,” then again, in a letter to her mom from Paris, is the “Paris gossip” about “public bathrooms”—that’s, the truth that loos are labeled “W.C.” for “water closet,” besides that the French pronounce it vatair closette. “Isn’t that killing?”
What’s the level of those observations, these foolish jokes, or of studying diaries in any respect? We don’t get Millay’s secrets and techniques on craft or unfiltered disclosures about her numerous lovers. The truth is, her diary supplies the other of this. She didn’t talk about concepts in it, and for the best decade of her life she didn’t even preserve a diary. A lifetime of work and feeling, from which artwork and love are created, is within the context of its day by day recording really fairly unusual. Maybe when retaining observe of the on a regular basis, it’s the pointless pleasures that change into extra attention-grabbing. Her pages shine with spontaneous feeling, photographs which have little to do with the fated course of her life. Millay’s diary presents a surprisingly nonlinear studying of her life—every day is full in itself, and offers no indication that it had a predecessor.
After her marriage ceremony to Eugen Jan Boissevain, which happened shortly after Millay’s life-saving appendicitis operation and for which she wore a veil manufactured from mosquito netting, Millay and her new husband bought a house in Austerlitz, N.Y., the place they gardened and watched birds. They hosted buddies incessantly, however Millay’s sickness made her continually drained, and she or he trusted Boissevain to do the house responsibilities, put her to mattress, and generally even write her journal entries for her. For the rest of her life, Millay battled her dependancy and her despair, partly brought on by a tumultuous relationship with the youthful poet George Dillon, whom she fell in love with in 1928 and by no means fairly obtained over.
She did studying excursions, traveled round Europe, labored for the Guggenheim Basis, and revised her manuscripts, however her diary presently is crammed with intensive lists of flowers and greens planted—pansies, geraniums, lilacs, buttercups—and birds seen and heard: Baltimore orioles, goldfinches, her first ruby-throated kinglet, singing warblers, and the “thrilling arpeggios” of thrushes. She delivered calves and picked up snakeskins and killed moles. In the meantime, she appears to have now not loved doing public performances, saying she felt “awkward” and didn’t know “what to do with my fingers” when she gave a studying. Each time she did point out the work of being a author, she complained of it being “a bore.” As soon as she needed to drag herself away from bed to satisfy Eleanor Roosevelt.
Regardless of her despair, Millay continued to really feel thrilled by essentially the most on a regular basis issues, simply as she did as a youngster. “Apple sauce for dinner tonight,” she wrote when she first moved to Austerlitz, “I by no means get used to this—it’s way more fantastic than the phone—effectively, I don’t know—the phone is fantastic too—.” Roses, swallows, bathrooms, taps, rainstorms, clothes with trains, the 12 months’s first sounds of tree toads: No shock was too small, no pleasure too easy. Millay and her husband soaked candy peas, meaning to plant them on Easter Sunday as a result of, she wrote, “we consider in resurrection.” She caught butterflies, fed chickadees in her mattress, celebrated each jar of raspberries became preserves.
Towards the top of her life, Millay’s diary turns into barely unsettling. She writes herself notes and reminders to not “change into sloppy” and “by no means let the opposite individual see you utilizing the hypodermic,” in addition to an hourly account of her substance consumption (a morphine injection, two cigarettes, a glass of beer, and a gin cocktail earlier than 10 within the morning). Learn this fashion, the entries depict a dramatic descent, however this isn’t a very helpful manner of studying them.
Millay’s diary is nearly a photographic damaging of the extra well-known narratives of her life: Her fame’s shadow is her love of the fireside and her backyard; her despair’s shadow is her irrepressible sense of surprise, which by no means faltered. Diaries are essentially incomplete and inaccurate on this manner, even when they’re essentially the most personal type of writing. There isn’t a actual closing phrase right here, no huge image. As Millay famous in an entry in November 1927, “This ebook by no means will get written in, besides when there’s nothing to jot down.”
