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merely an affection for spruced-up memories of colorful relations, long
dead ancestors from a regjon one no longer visits, not earnestness nor
the urgings of duty, but an immense love for the present, living,
im–
pinging kin. This world of nicknames, old jokes, little gifts flying
through the mails is startlingly passionate. With friends too there' is very
often the same extraordinarily intimate style, the same devotion, fidelity,
acceptance-and all the while we know Edna Millay was becoming
more remote from everyone, enduring very early "a sort of nervous
breakdown which interferes a bit with my keeping my promises," and
later in hospitals with "an all but life-size nervous breakdown" and at
last horribly alone in the country, cold, without even a telephone, dying
miserably after a sleepless night. How is it possible with all this fraternal,
familial feeling that the frantic, orphaned creature of the later years
came into being? And how is it possible to begin with that this jolly,
loving daughter and sister was in her most famous period in such violent
revolt? Edna Millay seems to have had a wretched life, much more so
than those persons whose earliest days were marked by a blighting, am–
biguous relation to their families and later somewhat toward everyone.
There is not anywhere a sadder story than this-the aching existence
of this woman who loved and was loved by her family and friends, who,
flaming youth and all, married only once and then, to all appearances,
wisely. Even Emily Dickinson appears on happier ground in her upstairs
bedroom.
It seems likely that Edna Millay's fame and success came too early;
the racking strain of keeping up to this is suggested everywhere. And
more important: I think Edmund Wilson in his fascinating and moving
work on her undervalues the spectacular pain of the sort of success she
had. She was a woman famous for her fascinating, unconventional per–
sonality, and for rather conventional poems. She was not in the deepest
sense "famous" or much cared for by many of the really good poets of
her own time. Hart Crane's opinion, written to a friend much stricken
with Miss Millay, is interesting: "She really has genius in a limited
sense, and is much better than Sara Teasdale, Marguerite Wilkinson,
Lady Speyer, etc., to mention a few drops in the bucket of feminine
lushness that forms a kind of milky way in the poetic firmament of the
time (likewise all times) ;-indeed I think she is every bit as good as
Elizabeth Browning... I can only say I do not greatly care for Mme.
Browning.. . . With her equipment Edna Millay is bound to succeed to
the appreciative applause of a fairly large audience. And for you, who
I rather suppose have not gone into this branch of literature with as
much enthusiasm as myself, she is a creditable heroine."
