Edna St. Vincent Millay - Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay

THE DIARIES OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Rapture and Melancholy

The Diaries of
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edited by

DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN

Foreword by

HOLLY PEPPE

Copyright 2022 by Yale University.

Foreword copyright 2022 by Holly Peppe.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay material reprinted with the permission of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, www.millay.org. All rights reserved.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).

Designed by Mary Valencia.

Set in Adobe Garamond type by Integrated Publishing Solutions.

ISBN 978-0-300-24568-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941258

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).

For India Kotis

by Holly Peppe

Are personal diaries fair game for curious readers? Do we have the right to eavesdrop on a writers intimate thoughts recorded in a worn leather journal or little red book bound by lock and key? Fifteen-year-old Edna St. Vincent Millay had no qualms answering those questions in her first diary, written in 1907, threatening, whosoever, by stealth or any other underhand means, opens these pages to read, shall be subject to the rack, the guillotine, the axe, the scaffold, or any other form of torture I may see fit to administer. More than a century later, her razor-sharp wit and remarkable self-awareness, punctuated by vanity, insecurity, and cynicism, not to mention humor, generosity, compassion, and profound moments of joy, make her forbidden diaries irresistible reading.

Other than the poets sister Norma, who died in 1986, very few people have had access to this astonishing collection of personal writing. Since 1998, when the diaries were transferred to the Library of Congress from Steepletop, Millays home in Austerlitz, New York, they have remained safely out of view, available only to credentialed scholars.

With this book, Daniel Mark Epstein has changed all that. An award-winning poet and acclaimed biographer, he knows the diaries well, having used them as primary source material for his biography of Millay, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, published in 2001. Passionate about their value as rare literary and historical documents, he provides insightful chapter introductions and detailed endnotes that help the reader navigate the many people and events that shaped Millays spellbinding life. The ideal editor for this long-awaited volume, Epstein keeps the reader in mind, never sacrificing our fascination with human behavior to protect the integrity of his subject, one of Americas most accomplished and, in her day, most popular and financially successful poets.

I first read selections from the diaries in 1984, sitting on a faded cream-colored sofa embroidered with exotic birds and flowers in Millays living room at Steepletop, sipping Cointreau with Norma, who was then ninety, as we translated the poets leggy scrawl one line at a time. Id landed at Steepletop a few years earlier when I accepted Normas invitation to stay with her while researching Millays sonnets for a dissertation I was writing. It was an extraordinary experience to see the poet and her work through her sisters eyes, and a privilege to help care for Norma in the last months of her life.

Norma herself had moved there in 1951, the year after Millays death, and spent the rest of her life organizing and preserving thousands of pages of writing, photos, and personal artifacts left in the house. As her sisters literary executor, she published a few new editions of poems and one collection of unpublished work, but tackling the diaries was too daunting and time intensive a task.

The value of Epsteins efforts to bring the diaries to light cannot be overestimated. They provide us with delicious new details about Millays life, from her sweet revenge against high school boys envious of her talent, to vivid accounts of her sexual fantasies at age nineteen, to her sudden dissatisfaction with her husband after six years of marriage. During her writing career Millay continued to ward off jealous boysthis time, sexist male poets and criticsby publishing one best-selling poetry collection after another and attracting thousands of adoring fans during cross-country reading tours. But in later years, as her health began to fail and her popularity as a poet waned, her fighting spirit weakened and she chronicled her dependence on her elixirs of choicegin, wine, champagne, and finally morphineto numb her physical and emotional pain.

Reading these diaries is a wild and dangerous ride, but Epstein holds steady at the wheel, guiding us forward as we begin to understand that Millays rich intellect, uncanny facility with language, and clever humor were countered by an obsessiveness that led to addiction. Yet long before that tragic turn, were captivated by the mind of an unconventional woman who was already defining herself at age sixteen, setting the stage for whats to come: Went to the ball at Lincolnville tonight... Wore my pink silk muslin. I was the only red-headed girl in pink, at which I was not surprised. Red-heads are supposed to wear blue.

Holly Peppe,
Literary Executor for
Edna St. Vincent Millay

In preparing the manuscript of this book I transcribed every diary and journal entry in Millays hand that I could find among her papers. More than ninety percent of the diary entries were made in the years 19071914 and 19271935. The young womans diaries from her adolescence through her first college year are so dramatic and integrated that it is impossible to abridge them without ruining the fabric of the story, so her entries for these years are complete except for a few verses she wrote in her journal that are extraneous to the narrative. There are some entries of interest between 1914 and 1927, including a brief and prosaic Japan travelogue. In the interest of focus, I have included Millays impressions of Paris and Albania in the 1920s, which show her progress as a prose stylist and journalist, while omitting the Japan diary. In the later diaries recorded at Millays farm in upstate New York there is a good deal of repetition of details about gardening and agriculture, so I have omitted a small portion of these sections, with no disturbance to the logic of her story. During her later years when she was in a lot of pain, she used her diary to keep obsessive records of her use of painkilling drugs; there is much repetition in these, so I have selected a dozen entries to represent a hundred similar ones.

The diaries as presented here are therefore very nearly complete. Pretty much everything of substance that has survived is here, preserving the force and coherence of the narrative and the historical integrity of the document. Before 1914, Millay wrote in more than one diary at a time. I have merged these diaries chronologically, and where I believe it will be helpful I have noted that she is shifting from one book to another.