Mostly a Maine Girl

LETTERS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (384 pp.)--Edited by Allan Ross Macdougall--Harper ($5).

In February 1902, Publishers Harper & Brothers got a letter from a nine-year-old New Englander: "Gentlemen: I wish to subscribe for Harpers Young People and here enclose $2.00 for that purpose. I wish to begin with the next number and so have written as soon as I found your residence by reading one of your books."

Forty-four years later the same correspondent wrote to Harper's Board Chairman Cass Canfield: "This [alter one word of my poems] you must never do. Any changes which might profitably be made in any of my poems were either made by me, before I permitted them to be published, or must be made, if made at all, someday by me. Only I who know what I mean to say, and how I want to say it, am competent to deal with such matters." The letter was signed: Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Edna Millay had literally earned the right to lecture her publisher. By putting into her poetry the heart she perpetually wore on her sleeve, she had become that rarest of things in U.S. literature: a best-selling poet. To most young moderns of the '20s and '30s, poetry meant simply Edna St. Vincent Millay. To jazz agers and Bohemians she became a symbol for living recklessly, hand-to-mouth and bed-to-bed. Critics who then spoke of her in the same breath with Shakespeare might like to take back a lot of what they said. But even the relentless weeding-out by time has left a handful of lyrics and sonnets that still have both zest and grace.

Forbidden Apples. Poet Millay, who died in 1950, liked to say she suffered from "Epistophobia," but her old friend, Allan Ross Macdougall, has found enough of her correspondence to make Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay a tender self-portrait.

The Camden (Me.) Millays were poor. Edna's father had left them, and her mother supported the three daughters by working as a practical nurse. But the love of literature flourished on empty stomachs. When Edna was 14, her poems began to appear in St. Nicholas Magazine; when she was 20, Renascence made her famous. She was an oldish 21 when a benefactor sent her to Vassar, a school she at first disliked: "They treat us like an orphan asylum . . . A man is forbidden as if he were an apple." At the same time she wrote to her mother for a Bible ("You know it by heart, so you don't need it. But I really do need it, Mother dear . . ."), and took part in impromptu student prayer meetings. In her senior year, Edna almost lost the right to sit with her class on commencement day; she had slipped away from college for too many overnight stays. But "the class made such a fuss" that the authorities let her don cap & gown with the rest.

In Manhattan, at 25, she was broke and developing "a perfect passion for earning money, don't care much how I earn it." A fling at acting didn't help, but soon her stories under the name of Nancy Boyd broke the pinch of poverty. By 1920 magazines were competing for her poetry: "Oh, Lud! Have you noticed how Vanity Fair is featuring me of late? They just can't seem to go to print without me. And the New Republic is writing to me in longhand begging for a crumb of verse." From that time on, she could publish just about anything she wanted to write.

"Then You Get Sicker." Anyone looking for marks of the wacky genius will not find them in the Millay letters. She was deadly serious about her work; sometimes she spent months on a single short poem. And she could be much tougher on herself than her dazzled critics: "I couldn't make up my mind whether or not to send the poems, they all seem so verminous." What she wrote to her mother about her sister's first book was the kind of gritty common-sense that would have startled her fans: "A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down . . . If it's a good book nothing can harm her. If it's a bad book, nothing can help her."

After 1923, when she married a Dutch businessman named Eugen Boissevain, she did not have to worry about money again until the last years of her life, but illnesses of all sorts plagued her: "It's not true that life is one damn thing after another--it's one damn thing over & over--there's the rub--first you get sick--then you get sicker--then you get not quite so sick--then you get hardly sick at all--then you get a little sicker--then you get a lot sicker--then you get not quite so sick--oh, hell."

She became more crotchety, peevish, less productive as the '30s passed. But World War II sent her into an enraged flurry of writing: she had "enlisted for the duration." No one knew better than Edna Millay what poor stuff it was. Of Make Bright the Arrows she wrote: "A piece of propaganda, acres of bad poetry." She was sure that no matter what else she might do, "lovers of pure poetry . . . will . . . never forgive me for writing this book." She wrote a lot more "duration" poetry, and the last year of the war she paid with a breakdown.

She never again wrote good poetry. She was found dead in the isolated country house in Austerlitz, N.Y., where she had lived alone since the death of her husband in 1949. Even near the end, sick and broke, she refused her publisher's proposition to compromise what she had written by writing what she called an "erotic autobiography" to accompany an edition of her love poems.

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