694
PARTISAN REVIEW
This was not an easy situation for Edna Millay to live with. You
cannot give, as she did, your whole life to writing without caring hor–
ribly, even to the point of despair. And so in 1949 we find that she is
planning a satire against T. S. Eliot. In this work she says there is to
be, "nothing coarse, obscene, as there sometimes is in the work of Auden
and Pound, and nothing so silly as the childish horsing around of Eliot,
when he is trying to be funny. He has no sense of humor, and so he
is not yet a true Englishman. There is, I think, in these poems of mine
against Eliot nothing which could be considered abusive; they are
merely murderous."
This is appalling. Edna Millay was not a stupid nor even an exces–
sively vain person. She knew, in spite of this wild cry, that the literary
approval of Pound was to be valued more highly than that of Frank
Crowninshield. (Critics are often wrong, but writers are hardly ever
wrong, hide and deny it as they will, in knowing whose opinion really
counts.) Her words are not those of a poet secure in her powers, and
they are especially harsh for this writer, who was forever generous and
warm-hearted toward other poets, including nearly all of her feminine
rivals. This hopeless, killing bitterness about her own place, as I believe
the projected satire reveals, is the end of a whole life which one can at
least imagine was thrown off its natural, impressive track by a series
of seemingly fortunate fatalities. Perhaps she was not meant to go to
Greenwich Village at all and certainly not to become famous in her
youth. Sensible, moral, steadfast, a kind of prodigy-among her circle
hardly anyone except Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop even rose
to the second-rate. Not nearly enough was asked of her and she had no
time to prepare herself in solitude-until it was too late. It is a tribute,
a terrible one, to her possibilities and hopes that she was unable to enjoy
the comforts of a strong, public position and split in two. Very few
critics can find in Edna Millay's poetry the power and greatness Wilson
finds. Still there is something humanly delightful and pleasing in Wilson's
obstinacy, like the great Ruskin putting Kate Greenaway among the
finest living artists-which he did.
One cannot read even a few of Hart Crane's letters without feeling
the editor,
Bram
Weber, has made a tremendous contribution. (Of
course the "contribution" is Crane's, but he could not have presented
his own correspondence.) Fishing about in contemporary literature,
Weber has dredged up a masterpiece, for these letters are marvelous,
wonderful simply to read, important in what they add to our notion of
Crane, and in an unruly, inadvertent fashion quite profound for the
picture they give of America itself, and in particular the literary scene
