[PREV - MALAISE]    [TOP]

MELEE

                                           February 1-16, 2009


  Modern scholarship appears to have
  solved one of the more pressing
  issues of Bohemian history:               Allen Churchill suggests
  who exactly was Edna St. Vincent          that she had a fling with
  Millay doing?                             John Reed, right before
                                            he left the United States
                                            for the last time.
  Daniel Mark Epstein, the
  author of a new biography
  "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed",
  had access to her journals,
  and now knows all.

      Just consulting the review
      in the National Review,
      one can gleen a few names:
                                        [ref]

         "Besides being a writer, however, she was also
          a 'figure.' Her allure was captured gloriously
          by Edmund Wilson, one of her multitude of sex
          partners, in his 1952 book The Shores of
          Light. Wilson talked with an old friend about
          Edna, or Vincent as her close friends called
          her; and 'she told me of seeing her years ago
          in Greenwich Village running around the corner
          of Macdougal Street, flushed and laughing
          'like a nymph,' with her hair swinging.  Floyd
          Dell, also laughing, pursued her . . . And I
          leave this image here at the end to supplement
          my firsthand impressions-a glimpse of Edna as
          the fleeing and challenging Daphne of her poem
          'Figs from Thistles'-from the time when I did
          not know her, when she had first come down
          from Vassar to the Village.' Wilson had really
          loved her; we hear it in this prose. When I
          first read these sentences from Wilson in
          1952, I sort of loved her spiritedness myself."


                        "She hit Vassar, in 1913, like a tsunami.
                        ... She was a grand diva who almost brought
                        Vassar to its knees, breaking rules at will
                        and attracting a devoted cult following of
                        young women who joyfully went to bed with
                        her. She was a heroine to the entire student
                        body. As soon as she was out of Vassar,
                        however, she put aside the lesbianism;
                        consigning girls to the past, she now sought
                        to dominate men."

                        The National Review, as one might
                        expect, looks with disdain on her
                        promiscuity (she once went to bed
                        with three men in one day, oh my),     Why does no one
                        insisting it must have required        comment on the
                        "exceptional coldness of heart".       "coldness of
                                                               heart" of male
                                                               sluts like
                                                               Neal Cassady?


                             But their closing
                             line is cute, and
                             rings all too true:

                                  "This was an entirely self-regarding
                                  Circe who turned men into swine. She
                                  was not a lesbian; she was a thespian."




--------
[NEXT - SOCIAL_NET]