The siren

Milford, by contrast, seems to be straining against the Millay mythos. That's understandable since her book, 20 years in the making, was completed with the assistance of Norma, the sole surviving sister, who died in 1986. Milford includes a few vignettes describing how she conducted her research, working in Edna's old studio at Steepletop -- where Norma lived with her husband Charles after Edna's death -- and engaging in a complicated dance of revelation and concealment with Norma. Ever the vixen, Norma made a game of tormenting would-be Millay scholars: Milford, who calls her "merciless," tells the story of Norma flattering a stuffy "gentleman" into taking off his glasses, declaring him "adorable" without them, then bringing out some nude photos of Edna and refusing to return his specs.

Such stories do more to convey the lineaments of Edna's charisma than Epstein's belabored disquisition on the thrust and retreat techniques of master seducers. Millay obviously excelled at just that -- for all Epstein's ravings about her beauty, photos show her to be merely good-looking, and more judicious observers (mostly women) would note that though she wasn't even really pretty, she was "something better than pretty -- an exciting creature" and "a totally bewitching sort of person." Milford writes of being "wary" of the whole Millay family's "enchantment." That spell consisted of spinning a sparkling cloud of wonderment around the ballad-like story of their lives and then offering their victims morsels of that magic only to pull away before full satisfaction could be attained.

It also feels as if Milford isn't quite sure how to frame Millay's story. Her previous, phenomenally successful life of Zelda Fitzgerald was an early classic of feminist biography, revealing the many wrongs Zelda suffered at the hands of her husband, Scott. Millay, who by all logic ought to be a feminist icon, actually doesn't offer the kind of life story that usually drives such narratives, a highbrow Lifetime Channel saga of injustice and exploitation ultimately transcended when the benighted woman's talent is posthumously reclaimed and celebrated by feminist thinkers. There's no satisfying jolt of indignation to be had here. It's hard to get riled up by the spectacle of a woman who got more or less exactly what she wanted from life, at least until the very end.

Millay broke every rule and never paid the price for doing so. She was brainy and professionally successful and still men chased after her. She was shamelessly promiscuous and yet she ultimately found a husband who cherished her. She put her work first and never wound up alone and bitter because of it, having never, it seems, expressed the slightest regret at not producing a child. If there's any lesson to be learned from her life, it's that charm counts for more than virtue and that the best method for getting your way with men is not to put too much stock in them to begin with. Millay believed that romantic love was inevitably transitory, and this hard-headed attitude, despite the scenery-chewing she did when in the grip of her passion of the moment, was no doubt behind her choice of Eugen Boissevain.

Feminist scholarship has long advocated the celebration of history's unsung supporting players, and in that spirit, why not say a few words in praise of Boissevain, a man who negotiated the nigh-impossible role of a genius's husband with consummate grace? For all its breathlessness, Epstein's biography steps back more often than Milford's does to offer comment on the larger shape of Millay's life, and in the case of Boissevain he seems more aware of how extraordinary the man was. He was "so sure of his virility that no woman could threaten him" and therefore may have been one of the few men in the world capable of marrying Millay and not resenting her.

Boissevain had made a practice of marrying brilliant, glamorous women -- his first wife was a fiery activist who practically died in his arms after she collapsed while making a speech for women's suffrage -- and devoting himself to them. But Eugen was no colorless, selfless helpmeet. While Millay's poetry did and always will earn her more renown, the many friends who visited the couple in the Berkshires farmhouse usually found themselves coming for Edna and staying for Eugen. Her gift for words was at the very least matched by his gift for life. He was tall, tan and vibrant, dominating whatever room he entered and reminding one observer of the dashing film star Douglas Fairbanks. One night when the couple was on the way to a party at the American Embassy in Paris, he stopped their cab to inquire about a commotion on a bridge and wound up diving into the Seine in his evening clothes to save the life of a drowning woman.

No doubt Boissevain thought that the greatest test of his mettle had come when his wife fell in love with a poet over a decade her junior and he was called upon to live up to the couple's pledge of an open marriage even though her infatuation seemed to threaten the very bond itself. He handled this crisis with an astonishingly heroic generosity, detailed in both biographies, although to do so tortured him. She, being anything but a fool, finally came back to him. Boissevain's worst trial, however, still lay before him, and in this, at last, he failed; he couldn't wean Millay from her many addictions and eventually surrendered to morphine himself.

To discover that Millay wrote some excellent poetry constitutes the unsurprising surprise of reading these two biographies; meeting Eugen Boissevain is the sort of complete surprise that makes biographies worth reading. There are some kinds of art, like his, that don't survive after the artist perishes, and it's only in biography that we can catch an echo of them. Here, taken from Milford's book, is a quote from Alyse Powys, wife of Llewelyn Powys (one of any number of Edna's former lovers who became a friend of Eugen's) that seems the perfect note to end on:

Handsome, reckless, mettlesome as a stallion breathing the first morning air, he would laugh at himself, indeed laugh at everything, with a laugh that scattered melancholy as the wind scatters the petals of the fading poppy ... One day his house would be that of a citizen of the world, with a French butler to wait on the table and everything done with the greatest bienséance, the next the servants would have as mysteriously disappeared as bees from a deserted hive, and he would be out in the kitchen washing the dishes and whistling a haunting Slavic melody, as light-hearted as a troubadour. He had the gift of the aristocrat and could adapt himself to all circumstances ... his blood was testy, adventurous, quixotic, and he faced life as an eagle faces its flight.

In the end, perhaps the most unexpected testimonial to Millay's much-touted genius was her union with such a man.

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