Marlowe and Millay

The way I ended up reading about Edna St. Vincent Millay is fairly typical of my reading habits. I was reading some bits of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, and that led me to thinking about Zelda Fitzgerald, so I went to my local bookstore looking for Nancy Milford’s acclaimed biography of her. It was out of stock, but I happened to see Savage Beauty and, since Millay had recently popped up in my mind while I was thinking about Christopher Marlowe, I picked it up.

And now I realize that “First Fig” wasn’t quite the right poem to refer to when writing about Marlowe. On leaving Cambridge, Marlowe most likely had the option of using his connections and degree to get himself a comfortable living in some country parish, performing his church duties and having plenty of time to write, as Swift and Sterne, among others, would later do. If, as David Riggs would have it, Marlowe’s refusal to pretend belief caused him to choose the rackety, uncertain life of the theatre instead, then the appropriate poem, really, would be “Second Fig”:

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Savage Beauty

The biography that started all my musing about life stories, Nancy Milford’s spectacular Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, is a dense, complex portrait of the most famous and successful poet of the Jazz Age, thickly woven of letters, diaries, poems, and news clippings. Though Millay’s sharp, ironic poems captured the tone of the early 20s, her fame was as much due to her role as a captivating, sexually adventurous woman who seemed to embody the most outré ideas of what young women, freed from convention, might be able to achieve. As such, she terrified and titillated in equal measure and became a celebrity, selling tens of thousands of books, writing hit plays, performing her work on national radio, and embarking on national speaking tours of an extent and success to rival those of Dickens. Along the way, she persistently—and willfully—refused to understand why her many lovers (including Edmund Wilson, doing his best emotionally fuddled Henry James impression) needed to fully possess and contain her.

By all accounts, Millay bewitched nearly everyone who met her. Rare is the person in Savage Beauty who fails to fall under her spell—and even those realize that everyone else around has succumbed. Photos show her to be striking and unconventionally pretty, but they don’t give much hint of the force she clearly radiated. However, even eighty years later her determination to take life on her own terms, consequences be damned, is both thrilling and unsettling. I can all too easily imagine being in Edmund Wilson’s position, or that of the putative lover to whom the speaker in this sonnet says

Yours is a face of which I can forget
The colour and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

Or the one who is told

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever

Savage Beauty, as so many biographies do, moves from excitement and passion and achievement to sadness and solitude. Nearly all of us live, it seems, not too long for life itself, but too long for biography, the drama of our lives mostly complete before the book can be. In Millay’s case, we follow her through ill health, addiction, and steadily decreasing poetic output, until, at fifty-eight, she falls down the stairs of her home to her death. It’s a sad and solitary end to a life and a work that, in the words of her lover Arthur Ficke,

made girls feel that passion was clean and beautiful. . . . She appeared at a moment when American youth had need of her. . . . [for] the lesson of beauty she taught them: for the revolt she expressed was not merely away from a stuffy prison and also toward an open window. . . . there was an unmistakable wind of pure dawning in what she did.

In her hand when she died was a notebook with a penciled draft of a poem. She’d circled three lines:

I will control myself, or go inside.
I will not flaw perfection with my grief.
Handsome, this day: no matter who has died.

Though her reputation took significant hits, especially from the Modernists, who found her work too personal, her poetry does survive. “First Fig” remains possibly the most-quoted lines of American poetry (vying only with “I, I took the road less traveled by (unless you count “You say tomay-to, I say tomah-to.”)) In his introduction to her Selected Poems in the Library of America’s American Poets Project, J. D. McClatchy mounts a convincing argument that, just as much of Millay’s initial fame came because she was a woman (Think of the effusions of a certain stratum of male rock critics over Liz Phair singing “blow job.”), much of the later critical reaction was due to plain old sexism. He quotes a contemporary review that, after reminding readers that “women live for love,” cited her for a “deficiency of masculinity.”

And while some of her poems are dated, and others are a bit flip, or too arch, many remain powerful and effective. Despite its ubiquity, I find “First Fig,” with its mix of bravado, irony, joy, and just a hint of weariness, completely effective. “Second Fig,” meanwhile, is downright cheeky:

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Several of her sonnets, meanwhile, are absolutely breathtaking in their ruthless honesty and force of feeling, harnessed by a careful, effective rhythm. I think my favorites are two of her earliest. One is this untitled sonnet of loss:

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

And the other is “Bluebeard,” where she adapts a well-known story of female curiosity and male violence and makes it, while less horrifying than usual, much more haunting:

This door you might not open, and you did’
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed. . . . Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for Truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress;
But only what you see. . . . Look yet again:
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room tonight
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I see another place.

But when I want to think of Millay and her poetry together—as, for better or worse, the poetry so often tempts us to do—I think of this couplet that closes one of her sonnets:

Pity that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

The Millay that emerges from Savage Beauty understood all too clearly that her heart would never learn. Many people don’t ever even understand that much about human nature; fewer still leave us such a clear statement of the problem.

Life stories

I spent two days flying last week, and as I read Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001), I remembered why I like to pack biographies when I travel. With nothing to distract me except the occasional, accidental sight of Martin Lawrence parading around in a dress on the screen above me, I can fully sink into the details of a life. Immersed for hours, uninterrupted by work or the need to listen for my L stop, I’m able to fully enter the subject’s world. Friends, relatives, acquaintances, peripheral as they may be, become firmly placed; I don’t have to consult the index to remind myself of who’s who. For a while, I nearly live the life I read.

I had already been thinking about completed lives, and what remains of a life. Even the quietest of us leaves a lot behind—stories, letters, legal records, collections—and a good biographer can fashion those elements into a coherent narrative of a whole person. Some biographies, like Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys (2002) (the best biography I’ve read), reveal a subject livelier, wiser, and more likable than we expected; others, like A. N. Wilson’s Tolstoy (1986), lead us—and the author—from admiration to astonished disgust. Regardless, a person’s life is rebuilt, assembled from scattered pieces and presented anew, giving us here the perspective of a close friend, there that of a secret diary, and elsewhere that of history. An anecdote gives a glimpse of a moment in time, and someone forever gone is returned. It’s hard to imagine a greater honor.

But most of us are never the subject of biographies. Our letters remain unread by anyone but the recipient, our diaries (unless we put them on the Internet) gather dust, and our secrets, successes, and failures remain, as we would surely prefer, our own. What lingers after us are the stories people remember and retell, the stories they repeat to each other over the years, and maybe, if we’re lucky, pass down to their children and grandchildren. For the promise that such stories would live on, Achilles was willing to sacrifice his life. Few of us are as needy as Achilles; we don't have to sacrifice our lives. We just have to live them.

So I learn that Stacey’s grandmother, on discovering that a young Stacey had managed to climb onto the roof of the garage, admonished her, not to get down, but to wear shoes up there, because the roof was dirty. And that, when asked about the internment camps that she and other Japanese-Americans were forcibly removed to in the early years of World War II, she spoke not about the deprivation, but of the people she met there and the crafts they made. And that she darned Stacey's father's socks, and she turned his collars, so that he assumed for years that everyone practiced such economies.

Or I remember that I’ll have to tell my nephew about my Great-Grandpa Colonel, an auctioneer, born late in the nineteenth century, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, but who, living his whole life in Kansas, experienced a very different twentieth century. I've been told that once he bought a new shed at an auction and, knowing that Great-Grandma Inez would not agree that they needed a second shed, attempted to hide it by placing it behind the first shed. The ploy failed. When my father first met him, on an unbearably humid Kansas night in the late 1960s, Colonel offered him ice cream, then revealed a reach-down freezer holding a dozen different flavors. My father knew from that point that he and Colonel would get along just fine. And I remember that into his early nineties Colonel, an inattentive but enthusiastic driver, delivered meals-on-wheels to housebound old folks.

Then there was my Great-Grandmother Marie. Elegant, patrician, and a bit imperious, she never seemed quite certain about children, though she was always kind to us great-grandkids. Her daughter, my Great-Aunt Mary, had a labrador retriever named Gator, who had a pet rock that he carried in his mouth. He removed it only to eat, and if it somehow went missing, the whole household was enlisted in a careful search. Years of carrying the rock wore the teeth on the right side of Gator's mouth to nubs.

And thus we keep our past and its people with us. Near the end of Wendell Berry’s elegiac novel Jayber Crow (2000) Jayber, who, being younger than most of his friend and acquaintances, has outlived most of them, thinks

I am an old man now and oftentimes I whisper to myself. I have heard myself whispering things that I didn’t know I had ever thought. “Forty years” or “Fifty years” or “Sixty years,” I hear myself whispering. My life lengthens. History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room. They could loaf together in the old poolroom up in Port William and talk all of a Saturday night of war and rumors of war.

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. one by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cots. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.

But the rest of us remain, and we speak of our friends.

Christopher Marlowe

As presented by Robert Graves in I, Claudius, ancient Rome, with its double dealing, spying, and state-sanctioned murders reminded me more than a little of the presentation of Elizabethan England in David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004). Claudius’s tendency to quietly stay out of the way, underestimated and unremarked, would have served him well amid the religiously inspired plots and counterplots of Elizabeth’s reign nearly sixteen centuries later.

Sadly, Christopher Marlowe probably wouldn’t have taken such advice. From the little we know about him, and David Riggs’s extrapolations from that evidence, Marlowe seems like a man who would have found trouble in any era, no matter how hard he had to look. He brawled in the streets. He might have been gay, was likely an atheist, and he traveled in questionable circles. Worst of all, he spoke and wrote freely in an age when that was perilous. His mysterious, much-studied stabbing death in a private house in Deptford, during a quarrel with swindler Ingram Frizer, could not have come as much of a surprise to his friends. Anyone courting death in the violent culture of Elizabethan England should not have expected a long engagement.

The son of a shoemaker in Canterbury, Marlowe attended Cambridge on scholarship. In 1587, Cambridge officials hesitated to grant his degree because of rumors that he might be involved in Catholic plotting, but a cryptic note from the Queen’s Privy Council changed their minds. It asked that they award the degree and allay any rumors, because Marlowe “had done her Majesty good service . . . in matters touching the benefit of the country.” Spying? No one knows. The note is the only piece of hard evidence, though Riggs makes a good case for Marlowe the spy from other, circumstantial evidence. And thus began the mysteries that surrounded Marlowe the rest of his life.

About Marlowe the writer, a little more is known. He wrote “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” In a time when Virgil was all the rage, he translated the politically unacceptable Ovid. In 1587, his first London stage production, Tamburlaine the Great, was a tremendous hit, so he followed it with Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. In the next five years, he had hits with The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, and The Massacre at Paris, each bloodier than the last.

In the midst of his writing success, Marlowe was dogged by trouble. He was arrested in the Netherlands for counterfeiting, getting off somehow on the excuse that he only wanted “to see the goldsmith’s cunning.” In Shoreditch, he was arrested as a participant in a brawl wherein one of his friends killed a man, and later he was required to post a guarantee that he would not disturb the peace. In Canterbury, he was sued for destruction of property. (Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, Marlowe didn’t, so far as we know, kill anyone.)

He consorted regularly with half a dozen or so of Elizabeth’s spies, at least some of whom were double agents. And, if one of her informants is to be believed, Marlowe loudly and regularly proclaimed his atheism, in the pugnacious manner of late-night college dormitory disputants:

Marlowe “doth not only hold [these opinions] himself,” Baines concluded, “but almost into every Company he Cometh he persuades men to Atheism, willing them not to be afeared of bugbears and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both god and his ministers.”

Under torture, Marlowe’s friend and fellow playwright Thomas Kyd corroborated the accusations:

“It was his custom,” he wrote, “in table talk or otherwise to jest at the divine scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men.”

Such beliefs were not to be spoken aloud, for any doubt gave aid and comfort to the queen’s Catholic enemies. Days after the accusations, Marlowe was dead after the “great reckoning in a little room,” about which Charles Nicholl has written a whole book, and which Riggs describes—and investigates—extremely well. Was Marlowe murdered by order of the Queen? The facts are complex, but Riggs argues convincingly that “all relevant evidence leads back to the palace.” Within a fortnight, the Queen had pardoned the killer.

Near the book’s end, Riggs asks:

Was the great poet a good man? Firsthand recollections about Marlowe’s character are hard to come by. Nashe counted him “among my friend that used me like a friend.” The printer Edward Blount calls him “the man, that hath been dear unto us.” The satirist John Marston memorably refers to “kind Kit Marlowe.” On the other hand, Kyd’s letters to Puckering assert that Marlowe was “intemperate and of a cruel heart,” a person who rashly attempted “sudden privy injuries to men.”

Riggs attempts to mitigate Kyd’s words, arguing that, having been tortured, he was attempting to distance himself from Marlowe, but Kyd’s description sounds as apt as the kinder ones.

That’s the Marlowe who’s so fascinating: a man of contradictions and confusions and mysteries, living in an era that seems a heightened composite of those qualities. And David Riggs does a laudable job of, essentially, creating that Marlowe for us, making him real and compelling against the backdrop of those times. His brief life and penchant for trouble call to mind the Edna St. Vincent Millay lines, from "First Fig" (1920):

My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night.
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

I've already imagined Marlowe consorting with Claudius, so I might as well pull him out of history again and wonder how he would find our era, when a person with his literary talents has a more clear—and certainly much safer—path. I don’t think I’d like to have been friends with Marlowe, but I’d like to have had other friends who were. That way, I could avoid being dragged into his troubles, but I’d get to see him once in a while at parties. I’d always be kept up on the gossip. And I’m guessing that wouldn’t lessen the mystery or the contradictions one bit. Kit Marlowe would still be trouble.