Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford
A review of Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty
“Childhood is the kingdom in which no one dies. Nobody that matters, that is.”
Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford (2001). Published by Random House.
I didn’t really know anything about Edna St. Vincent Millay until I started doing hands-on work with female playwright work, and even then, I knew her for her plays, not her poetry. And so when the heavens shone a light on me in the middle of the thrift store, out of the dusty book jackets I unearthed a godly find: Nancy Milford’s biography of her, Savage Beauty. I didn’t realize Milford had a biography on Millay out, I just knew her name from the fact she had done an extensive biography on my other 1920s queen, Zelda Fitzgerald.
I think I’m going to have to set this review up differently, because it is a very in-depth biography of Millay. Literally, it’s about the size of a brick, and if I’m eyeballing it, I’d say it’s roughly 500-600 pages. It’s definitely not something you can sit down to read in one sitting, it’s dense, there’s a lot of words per page, and it’s all straight up facts.
Blurb
Thomas Hardy once said that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The most famous poet of the Jazz Age, Millay captivated the nation: She smoked in public, took many lovers (men and women, single and married), flouted convention sensationally, and became the embodiment of the New Woman.
Thirty years after her landmark biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, Nancy Milford returns with an iconic portrait of this passionate, fearless woman who obsessed America even as she tormented herself.
Chosen by USA Today as one of the top ten books of the year, Savage Beauty is a triumph in the art of biography. Millay was an American original--one of those rare characters, like Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway, whose lives were even more dramatic than their art.
Thoughts About Content, Format, etc.
Milford had been requested to write this biography by the only surviving Millay sister at the time, who died before she even got her own copy, and I can see why she was requested. Her attention to detail is immaculate, and the way she reconstructs the history of Edna is done in an elegant way. Since we’re talking about a major figure in poetry, I really appreciated that we often got a sprinkle of lines from the poems Millay wrote, especially as we followed the sequential timeline of writing the poems.
I really felt like I came out of this book being a Millay expert. Obviously, no one will ever be the true expert of another human being, but I literally now want to make Millay my queen. Her life really is fascinating. She was the daughter of a single-mother raising three kids, and her father was basically nonexistent in her life. He had walked out after the divorce. They really weren’t poor, but Millay would send her earnings home, all while maintaining a public figure profile in the streets of New York City.
Edna St. Vincent Millay is an interesting poetic and historical figure to study, because she really gained that cult celebrity status, despite being a woman and a poet. She was seen as a fashionable icon and people desperately wanted to photograph her. Even as a young girl, she could never afford Vassar College herself, so a wealthy benefactor that liked her poetry paid for her to take some classes at Barnard in NYC, then transfer into Vassar. Still, Millay wasn’t very academically-inclined, and she found herself failing the Barnard and Vassar courses.
I will admit though, this book was really dense and a struggle to get through. I’m someone who likes to sit and try and get through a book as quickly as possible—not necessarily rushing it, but wanting to get through it in fewer sittings. I could not do that with this book because of the formatting. There were just so many words on a page and too many pages. It took roughly a month for me to finish it, and it truly was a journey getting to that point.
As a poet and writer myself, I found this biography to be absolutely fascinating. I love reading about other people, especially creatives, because then you find the inspiration behind their work. Oftentimes we confuse the act of writing too much with intimacy, and cannot separate the author themselves with the work that they write. Because of this, I find it so compelling that Millay hit such poetic fame at a young age. Her poem “Renascence,” which is what brought her great acclaim, was written before she was even educated at Vassar. She was barely even twenty yet. This is a true demonstration of how we undermine young writers, act like they cannot write quality works at their age. That is indeed a lie. Young writers are completely and utterly valid, and Millay is proof of that.
The formatting was pretty basic. It’s a biography, it’s generally meant to go from birth to death. And it fulfilled that expectation.
Something I also enjoyed were the cuts to Edna’s sister. Obviously, she died before the publication of the memoir, but she was an integral part to Milford’s research as well as a firsthand witness to the family dynamic, childhood, and later life. I found it super interesting, too, when it cut to Norma and she didn’t remember things properly. She’d insist it’d happen this way, then backtrack what was presumably minutes later, citing her failing memory and age as a reason why she can’t remember.
All in all, I really recommend this book because Edna St. Vincent Millay is flirty, combative character in American literature, one who can’t be forgotten. She is the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, she was involved in the original Provincetown Players in NYC’s Greenwich Village, and she was a major feminist during the 1920s. What else is there to love about this woman?
Oh and above all else? I decided I’m going to be the new Edna St. Vincent Millay after reading this. I may never reach the acclaim she had, but I want to channel her spirit into everything I do. I’m absolutely smitten with her.
