#daniel mark epstein

The folktale features the taboo motif—the forbidden chamber, the locked door—and the fatal danger of breaking a taboo. Millay's use of the story is ingenious, extraordinarily subtle. The androgynous poet has cast herself in the role of Bluebeard, but this is a Bluebeard the likes of which the world has never known, a detached, nonviolent, swordless pirate. His strongest sentiment is his desire for privacy, and next to that is his lofty contempt for the traitor who has invaded it.

I have a lot of things to say but this is another death - this night. I've lighted my candle and I'm going to wear my ring all night. Perhaps I will tell you the things tomorrow.

Cora hauled her suitcase up the stairs at 25 Charlton. She peered through her wire-rimmed spectacles at Norma's bobbed hair, sighed deeply over the loss of the precious blond locks, called for scissors, and bobbed her own. She became as bohemian as the rest of them—writing poetry and stories for the Village magazines, singing and acting in the Provincetown Playhouse, sewing costumes—while serving as den mother to these rowdy children and their parade of suitors.

The virtue one must admire in Millay above all others is her courage, her absolute fearlessness. If beauty is dangerous, if it is a poison, then she will sip at it drop by drop until she can enjoy more of beauty than any man alive. If sex is dangerous, she will study and practice it until she has mastered all of its holds, feints, and attacks, and until she has learned to escape from sex without injury.

Falling in love with the two friends simultaneously appealed to Millay's sense of fun. She encouraged them impartially. What began as an innocent friendship in April, with the three of them dining out in restaurants and going to parties and concerts together, ended farcically as a ménage à trois in early winter on the daybed in Edna's apartment. That drunken evening the three wound up in bed together. Edna apportioned her body from the waist up to John Bishop, while leaving everything from the waist down to Edmond Wilson....A Few Figs from Thistles had just been published, and the sensational quatrain "my candle burns at both ends" was on the lips of poetry readers all over Greenwich Village, while the author was demonstrating the source of the poem in her bed on West Twelfth Street.

She was not at all camera shy, so quite a few magnificent photographs of Millay in the nude have survived, most of them in the possession of the Library of Congress. The pictures are under an embargo until the year 2010, so it will be the advantage of some future biographer to publish them.

It is obvious and completely understandable that Millay, acutely conscious of her public image, was taking no risks with her publicity pictures. In some circles she may have been known as a libertine, the sex goddess of Greenwich Village, but she wanted no hint of this in the book jacket portraits or the newspaper photos. In these she always looked like a nun, a librarian, or a lady lawyer. She meant to be taken seriously, and she meant it grimly.

So on Saturday night Dell led Ficke to the Millays' apartment. The sisters had just hung pale blue curtains on the two  windows that looked out on the street. The head of their bed narrowly fit between the tall windows. They had rolled the pillows up like a long bolster, covering them and the bed with cloth patterened with orange moons and green trees Kathleen had sent them, then tossed on a couple of golden throw pillows. Vincent's trunk, under the window where the radiator wasn't, also covered with the same cloth as the curtains, made a cozy window seat. Then there was space for a bureau and writing table, and not room for much else but the sisters and a few guests and the mice.