More about Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford
Jan. 23rd, 2007 05:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaLast night I dreamt it was raining. Seeking shelter, I visited the homes of various friends who told me they wouldn't let me stay. Couldn't I see the water was rising? No, their homes would surely be swamped by the rising waters, I would be much safer somewhere else, anywhere else, but in their homes. I was turned out into the rain, almost as though I was considered a cause or a curse of the deluge, thinking I would drown in the downpour long before I was lost in the flood.
I woke early and decided to finish the Edna St. Vincent Millay biography, thinking I'd rather be done with it than have it crawling about my head for the next few weeks. I'm not sure I have a choice. It's finished, the second half much diminished in a stupor of morphine, alcohol, and spousal succoring, but I imagine that the biography will be with me for some time, apt to pop-up in unexpected times and ways.
I can't decide whether to admire her husband or hate him. On the one hand, he seems to have preserved her and enabled her to continue working long after she might have destroyed herself. On the other hand, he kept her in a perpetually childlike state and coddled her appetites like a spoiled pet. He didn't challenge her to life, he tried to smooth and sustain it, at what seems to be great cost to her spirit. Without him she would've been dead, but with him, she might as well have been.
It's interesting to me that so many 'great artists' seem to have settled upon a caretaker arrangement where someone looks after every aspect of their physical and emotional well-being while the artist is freed from the mundane aspects of life to do nothing but create. Less a muse than a nursemaid. Very often this is not a healthy atmosphere for the artist, even if it sounds like every artist's dream.
I kept being struck that they could live as they did, without any work but poetry. While money comes up as a source of conflict throughout the biography, it's never fully explained how they manage it.
The saddest part about her later life is a complete sense of isolation. Where in her earlier life she was part of a thriving, artistic, community. Her friendships later in life consisted almost entirely of those persons from her youth who had not yet died and she had not yet alienated.
I'm not sure what else to say at this time, except that Leila and I will have to have a very long talk; there is a definite sense of discomfort about what I see of my own life in Vincent's biography, particularly in her childhood and relationship with her mother.
P.S. I got another present in the mail yesterday, but I did not open it because a note on the outside said not to. I suppose it might be nice to still have some gifts when the day actually comes, but my attention keeps straying; what is in the box?
I woke early and decided to finish the Edna St. Vincent Millay biography, thinking I'd rather be done with it than have it crawling about my head for the next few weeks. I'm not sure I have a choice. It's finished, the second half much diminished in a stupor of morphine, alcohol, and spousal succoring, but I imagine that the biography will be with me for some time, apt to pop-up in unexpected times and ways.
I can't decide whether to admire her husband or hate him. On the one hand, he seems to have preserved her and enabled her to continue working long after she might have destroyed herself. On the other hand, he kept her in a perpetually childlike state and coddled her appetites like a spoiled pet. He didn't challenge her to life, he tried to smooth and sustain it, at what seems to be great cost to her spirit. Without him she would've been dead, but with him, she might as well have been.
It's interesting to me that so many 'great artists' seem to have settled upon a caretaker arrangement where someone looks after every aspect of their physical and emotional well-being while the artist is freed from the mundane aspects of life to do nothing but create. Less a muse than a nursemaid. Very often this is not a healthy atmosphere for the artist, even if it sounds like every artist's dream.
I kept being struck that they could live as they did, without any work but poetry. While money comes up as a source of conflict throughout the biography, it's never fully explained how they manage it.
The saddest part about her later life is a complete sense of isolation. Where in her earlier life she was part of a thriving, artistic, community. Her friendships later in life consisted almost entirely of those persons from her youth who had not yet died and she had not yet alienated.
I'm not sure what else to say at this time, except that Leila and I will have to have a very long talk; there is a definite sense of discomfort about what I see of my own life in Vincent's biography, particularly in her childhood and relationship with her mother.
P.S. I got another present in the mail yesterday, but I did not open it because a note on the outside said not to. I suppose it might be nice to still have some gifts when the day actually comes, but my attention keeps straying; what is in the box?
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Date: 2007-01-23 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 03:46 pm (UTC)It's interesting that the poems we remember her for now aren't necessarily the ones that made her famous then. Tastes do change.
I think what bothered me most about the book was how few friends (especially female) ones she had. I would've liked more anecdotes told by friends, without them her life seemed claustrophobic. I also hated her young lover (George somebody, see I've forgotten already!) he seemed such an unworthy subject for a crush.
The irony of her life is that she demanded a sort of emotional freedom for women, but was woefully ill-prepared to handle it, or provide for herself in any other way.
I also felt her medical history was kind of vague. Clearly she struggled with substance abuse and mental illness, but what is lacking is a sense of how those things were dealt with at the time, and how these problems were perceived in relation to her life specfically.
Anyway, I'm not about ready to run out and read another book about her life, or her letters. The baby talk was just too much for me, but it was a well-written biography.