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I first sat down to speak with Nancy Milford about the art of biography in the mid eighties. At the time her work on the poet Edna St.Vincent Millay was still in its formative stages, but Milford herself was no stranger to the craft. Zelda, her biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, had come out in 1970 to critical raves. A lyric and sensitive portrait of a woman long thought of only in terms of her more successful husband, the biography emerged at a crucial time in the women's movement and gave one of the more colorful, troubled characters of the Jazz Age a strong and vital voice.

"To give a voice to" appears to be one of Milford's central missions as a biographer, and she approaches her subject with the intuition of a sleuth and the protectiveness of a mother. "Men's lives have been written about again and again," Milford told me when we first spoke, "whereas women's lives are still largely unexplored. There's fresh material." To investigate the lives of her two legendary heroines, Milford has attended school reunions—Zelda's fiftieth from high school, Millay's fiftieth from Vassar—sifted through doctors' reports, diaries, bills, love letters, anything that would help to reconstruct a life. "You begin with a curiosity," she has said, "which then becomes a passionate concern. Who was this person? What was she like?"

Milford began Zelda as her doctoral dissertation when she was twenty-four and finished it eight years later. Savage Beauty, her biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, is a project that has taken twenty-eight years to complete and is being published this autumn. We sat down on the last day of June, a scorching day in Manhattan, to discuss it.



Jeanne McCulloch: Much has been made of the fact that your biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay has been almost thirty years in the making. Did you start it right on the heels of Zelda?

Nancy Milford: I actually thought when I finished Zelda that Ernest Hemingway was someone I'd like to write about. I love his fiction, some of his fiction. And I'm from Michigan, and although my father did not commit suicide and my mother didn't suddenly "be gone," I thought it would be fascinating. Then I went and spoke to a senior editor at Scribners, this is when Mary Hemingway was still alive, and he said, "No way, until Mary has done her thing, can anyone quote letters or unpublished manuscripts," and I thought it would be like doing a biography with my hands tied behind my back.

JM: Because there was no access to his voice.

NM: Yes, and I want the voice of the person. I actually went down to Key West and looked at Hemingway's place and there were all these defective cats that had once been his, and I thought, oh, no. I also thought of Virginia Woolf and wrote to her nephew Quentin Bell, who had not yet finished his biography. That's the only letter in my life that's ever been returned to me marked "Address Unknown." And I'll never forget there was a wry man at Harcourt Brace, who was her publisher, who told me, "Mrs. Milford, if you wish to write about Virginia Woolf, we will publish anything you write, but you must understand: She simply doesn't sell." I kept that letter. God, what a call that was.

JM: How did you arrive at your interest in Millay?

NM: Edna Millay was someone whose poetry I loved. I went to graduate school in a period when certainly no teacher, let alone a reader, would acknowledge that they'd ever read her. In the academic world, there was one female poet of the past and it was Emily Dickinson. In fact when people heard I was writing about a woman who was a poet, figuring maybe I was a serious writer, they would assume I was writing about Dickinson.

JM: And yet Millay had won the Pulitzer Prize, the first woman to do so. In her lifetime she enjoyed extraordinary popularity. Her readings drew huge crowds. Her marriage, or her trips to the hospital, these kinds of daily events would end up on the front page of the afternoon newspaper.

NM: In my introduction to Millay's Selected Poems, I quote a letter she wrote about her great popularity. It was 1920 or '21 and she's writing to a guy she kind of likes who likes her, and she makes a joke. "You know, one year they want a fat girl and then a thin one. They had Amy Lowell, and now they have me." She's the thin girl.

JM: And yet historically she fell out of fashion.

NM: Let me put it this way. In 1920, Millay won an award from Poetry magazine. Within two years Eliot wins the same prize for "The Waste Land" and the whole texture of romantic literature changes. It's a very interesting change and it's called modernism.

JM: Yet you seem to have made a deliberate choice not to use the modernist movement as a backdrop in the biography. There's no sense of "Meanwhile, on the other side of town. . . ."

NM: Sure, that's a real choice. It's not that I don't think Pound and Eliot are extraordinary. I'd be the last person to say that modernism isn't an extraordinarily interesting change, but it was a sense of, what do we lose if we lose contact with that other voice? Millay wrote splendid sonnets, some of them witty, some of them meditations. I wanted her voice to be heard.

JM: Let's talk about finding that voice. In the prologue to Savage Beauty, you wrote about playing a hunch in guessing that Millay's last surviving sister, Norma, might have her letters saved and stored away. And you found not only her letters, but papers, snapshots, diaries, drafts of poems, all of them, as you say, stowed away "within the dining room, library, bedrooms, woodshed, and front hall files . . . beneath the damask tablecloth and under the piano benches." How could you have known you might make such a discovery?

NM: I wouldn't have destroyed them, and I suspected her sister wouldn't either. That meant they had to be somewhere. I knew by then they weren't anywhere else, they weren't in any university library, so I went to see Norma at Steepletop, Millay's home, where she was living. As I knew Lavinia Dickinson had saved all of Emily's papers, I began fairly early on to see the parallels.

JM: That in both cases there is the sister who creates and the sister who saves.

NM: Because if they didn't, who did? There were no tape recorders then. And in the case of Millay this wasn't the world that everyone was interested in in literary or academic circles. I mean, it wasn't Fitzgerald, Kiki, Man Ray. And I felt that there was something rather generous and committed in the act of the younger sister keeping the papers of the genius sister, about whom I guessed they had all kinds of mixed feelings. As indeed they do.

JM: One of the unique features of your biography is that Norma becomes a real-time character in the book, as do you, the biographer. We will be reading along in chronological fashion when suddenly there's a break in the text, and we are in present time, you sitting by the fireside at Steepletop discussing that very same episode we've just been reading about with Norma. She becomes an eyewitness to the events being described.

NM: I wanted to break chronology. One of the things about biography is that it is set on a time line: She was born, she went to school, marriage, death, et cetera, et cetera. People don't expect the text to be broken by a conversation. It was a way of getting into the present tense.

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