Gracefully Insane

by Alex Beam

  Nobody can explain why Sylvia got over her depression after one or two shock treatments. She just didn’t want to have any more shock treatments, so she reorganized herself inside so she wouldn’t have any more. I never saw it happen with anybody else, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did happen.

  Most psychiatric hospitals still administer a milder form of shock treatment, more palatably rechristened “electroconvulsive therapy,” to blocked patients. When it works, doctors are still at a loss to explain how.

  Barnhouse and Plath continued to see each other long after their McLean encounter. When Plath lived in Boston in 1958 and 1959, she saw Barnhouse professionally, as often as once a week. To Plath’s considerable chagrin, she often lacked the money to pay her therapist, who lowered her hourly rate to five dollars to accommodate the struggling young poet. On Plath’s side, the transference held strong. She wrote often about her need to be “worthy” of Barnhouse’s friendship. She idolized the older woman, who seemed to be successfully juggling her psychiatric career with a strong marriage in which she bore responsibility for the raising of three small children. (The marriage later broke up.) By contrast, Plath fretted constantly about her career and worried that having children with her poet husband, Ted Hughes, would impede her literary progress. Although Barnhouse probably would not have admitted it—she soured on both Plath and Hughes at the end of her life—the psychiatrist probably stuck with Sylvia, gratis, because she was flattered by the attentions of the rising literary star. “The paid business is (not silly) but irrelevant,” Barnhouse wrote to Plath in 1962. “If I help you, it is my reward. I would love to have the dedication to RB. [Plath had talked about dedicating a book of poems to Barnhouse.] I have often thought, if I ‘cure’ no one else in my whole career, you are enough. I love you.”

  Their therapy sessions worked wonders for Plath. “Better than shock treatment,” Plath wrote in her journal. To Plath’s great satisfaction, Barnhouse gave her “permission” to hate her mother: “‘I hate her, doctor.’ So I feel terrific. In a smarmy matriarchy of togetherness it is hard to get a sanction to hate one’s mother especially a sanction one believes in. I believe in RB’s because she is a clever woman who knows her business and I admire her.” A few months later Plath wrote: “RB has become my mother.”

  Plath and her husband moved to London in 1960. The therapy sessions ended, although Plath did telephone her old friend and mentor on rare occasions. In late 1962, Plath’s marriage plunged into crisis; Hughes was having an affair. Sylvia wrote Barnhouse a despairing letter. To use contemporary jargon, Barnhouse was there for her; her own marriage had ended in divorce, and she offered Plath plenty of emotional support and tough, practical advice for dealing with wayward husbands. “Frankly, I am furious at Ted,” Barnhouse announced in September 1962:Has he left you? OK, sad, tragic stupid, unfortunate, anxiety-provoking, BUT NOT THE END. There are other ways of life, which may or may not involve another man. ... You help neither him nor yourself by going down in a whirlpool of HIS making. Decide what you will put up with and what you will not. Stick to it. Don’t be anyone’s doormat. Do your crying alone....

  The psychiatric pitfall that I see is your succumbing to the unconscious temptation to repeat your mother’s role—i.e., martyr at the hands of the brutal male. If he really needs a succession of twodimensional bitchy fuckings, let him have it. Set your conditions (quietly, in your own mind). Get a good lawyer, make him feel the bit of responsibility for the children (BUT NOT FOR YOU) in his pocketbook. Stand back and be an old-fashioned lady. If he is a boor, throw him out. If you happen to want to go to bed with him, do.

  Nine days later, Barnhouse was lecturing Plath on the importance of selecting a first-class nanny (“Get a really, really good one”) to throw into the child-care breach and offering more, concrete suggestions on coping with her rapidly dissolving marriage.

  If you really mean it about separation and not liking him, I would advise going whole hog and getting a divorce. You can certainly get the goods on him now while he is in such a reckless mood. If you wait, until he finds out a) you’re not as spineless as he thought and b) maybe he made a mistake and wants to wiggle in again, you’ll have a much harder time getting the evidence....

  The rest, you have said for yourself. Keep him out of your bed. In the U.S., if a woman sleeps with her husband after he has committed adultery, she can no longer sue him for divorce on those grounds as her act of sleeping with him constitutes condoning his misdoing. That is the practical reason. The other reasons you already know.

  Plath and Hughes formally separated the following month. Four months later, Plath committed suicide at the age of thirty.

  In 1968, Anne Sexton got her wish, sort of. Like a bolt from the blue, Sexton received an invitation to teach a poetry seminar at McLean:Dear Mrs. Sexton,

  During the past two months, I have been directing quite a small group of McLean patients who write. Some are quite talented; some of the poems, especially, are fascinating.

  I have heard you had, at one time, an interest in the writings of psychiatric patients; the patient who told me this is a great admirer of yours and suggested I invite you to address the group. I would like to amplify her suggestion to include a possible series of workshop or lecture meetings which you would lead. Your visit or visits would be immensely valuable to motivate as well as instruct the patients.

  Margaret Ball, Patients’ Librarian

  The librarian’s proposal was well timed. Not only was Sexton still fascinated by McLean, but she had just befriended a young Philadelphia poet named C.K. Williams, who had been teaching poetry in a mental hospital. Williams was ghostwriting books for local psychiatrists and had started up a literary magazine edited by the disturbed patients of the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital. “The editorial meetings started becoming group therapy, and we started taking advantage of that,” Williams remembers. The formal term the psychiatrists used to describe the patients’ quasiliterary outpourings was “primary process thought.” “The thing I found amusing was that the people who were most floridly psychotic would talk like geniuses but write very conservatively,” Williams told me. “The rule seemed to be that the crazier you were the better you talked but the worse you wrote. This was the group I had told Anne about.” Sexton was fascinated by Williams’s experiment and anxious to replicate his work at McLean.

  Still, she had her doubts. “Anne was quite agitated one day, and called and said she’d been asked to do a poetry workshop at McLean,” recalls Ames. “She saw this as an enormous responsibility. ‘What if they’re suicidal?’ she asked. ‘What if I say something about a poem that sends them over the edge?’” Furthermore, except for a high school seminar she had arranged with a friend, Sexton had never taught before. The pair decided that Ames, an experienced social worker, would help her teach the seminars at McLean.

  The seminar assembled every Tuesday evening in the hospital library. Typically, Sexton would read a few poems written by her contemporaries, such as Diane Wakoski, Frederick Seidel, Robert Bagg, and Aliki Barnstone. Discussion would range from highly agitated to desultory, depending upon the mix of student-patients in the room. Sexton would ask each participant to prepare one or more poems for the following session, which Margaret Ball would collect during the week. Ball then sent the poems to Sexton’s Wellesley home, where she read them and prepared her comments for the next class.

  Some of Sexton’s initial trepidation about her new charges was confirmed. From week to week, there was no way of knowing which patients might show up for the seminar. Although some patients enjoyed privileges to meander around the hospital grounds or even take the subway into town, others emerged from maximum-security wards with aides, dubbed “angels,” holding them gently by the wrist, meaning that the patient was on suicide watch. Some patients’ conditions varied from hour to hour, not to mention day to day. A patient who wrote an excellent poem might then disappear for several weeks until his or her condition improved.

&nb
sp; Robert Perkins, an author and documentary filmmaker now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, described the seminar in his 1994 memoir Talking to Angels: While I was [at McLean] Anne Sexton taught a poetry-writing class. She would come every two weeks to meet with a small group of aspiring poets. It was as boring a two hours as any other, although some of the students were entertaining. These wackos would rise to their feet and make up their poems right there, often yelling them out loud. A chorus of nutcakes. Occasionally, Anne Sexton would speak, but more often she sat there with the rest of us and let events swirl around her. If people wanted to argue about poetry or about poems, that was fine with her. Most of us, and I was one, could barely raise our heads, let alone write poetry or find anything intelligent to say.

  Eleanor Morris, then a young patient who had dropped out of Bryn Mawr several years before, preserves a different memory of the sessions with Sexton:I have a mental image of Anne leaning on something in the library, maybe a piano, and the rest of us sitting around in chairs. She assigned us exercises, and you had to read your own poetry, which took a lot of courage. What I remember most is the blue, blue eyes. Her eyes were a piece of hope for me to see every week, they were daring me to do something.

  Ellen Ratner, who has channeled her intense energy into a successful career as a syndicated radio talk-show host and television commentator, now reflects cynically on the proceedings: “Frankly I couldn’t care less about poetry but she was famous and I wanted to meet someone who was that well-known.” Ratner called Sexton, who was often mistaken for a model or an actress, “Sexy Anne,” and even questioned her motives for teaching the “loonies.” Ratner remembers, “I said, ‘Well, Sexy Anne, why are you doing this?’ She replied that she wanted to ‘give back,’ this that and the other. I always had the impression that she was teaching us either as a way to gather more material for her poems or she was doing it for her biography, since her biographer [Ames] was in the room.”

  To be fair, there is no evidence that this suggestion is true. Sexton kept few notes of the sessions, and most of those were teaching guides for herself. She wrote only one poem, “Out at the Mental Hospital,” about her experiences at McLean, and she never published it:No one has been tamed out at McLean

  See how the machine man is pounding with his stick!

  Notice that the pole girl rides a noon plane

  over her lunch. The clock browses. It’s sick ...

  ...

  Let us have pity,

  Let us have pity.

  Night comes on and the nurses offer up a pill

  while the stars in the sky burn like neon jacks.

  There was no shortage of breeding or brainpower in the Sexton seminars. Perkins sprang from one of Boston’s venerable First Families; he had interrupted his studies at Harvard for a year to acquire his McLean “diploma.” Morris was a collateral relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Law Olmsted. But Sexton’s favorite student proved to be a young girl from Fort Smith, Arkansas: Eugenia Plunkett, who had suffered a nervous breakdown at Radcliffe College and checked into McLean.

  Plunkett, an attractive and precocious high school poet, had been a patient at McLean for five years before meeting Sexton. The transition from Arkansas to Radcliffe and Cambridge of the 1960s had overwhelmed her. “She wasn’t prepared for the transformation to Harvard,” says her younger brother Robert, a businessman in Fort Smith. “Her grades had been straight A’s beforehand, but the competition was pretty tough. She wanted to have more of a social life, but she didn’t know how to proceed.”

  It may have been Plunkett who suggested that the patient librarian invite Sexton to teach at McLean. Although she made much of being shy, she sent Sexton some of her poems before the seminar began and emphasized that she was a big fan. In one note, she told Sexton, “I feel like your stringbean girl,” a reference to a famous poem (“Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman”) that Sexton had written on the occasion of her daughter Linda’s eleventh birthday.

  The two women corresponded between classes. Sexton gossiped about the other patients in the seminar and enjoyed sharing confidences with her young acolyte. When Plunkett announced that she had left her psychiatrist because he had divorced his wife and refused to embark on an affair with her, Sexton—no stranger to the temptations of the therapist’s couch—reacted knowingly:He could have handled it better. Of course you felt rejected, but it seems too bad that you had to stop seeing him. One thing I’ll say. All the psychiatrists I’ve seen have been crazy and yet I learn from them. From your description of him you certainly wouldn’t want to be married to him, but I know the feeling better than you think.

  Sexton offered heartfelt congratulations on Plunkett’s success when she published poems in the Hudson Review and the American Scholar during the seminar. And she did not hesitate to criticize Plunkett’s work more firmly than that of the other patients. Upon receiving one batch of Plunkett’s poems, Sexton wrote her, “I find them quite different and not worth much bother on your part.... Frost once said a poem should be ‘lively,’ not personal. I say a poem should be personal—in the sense of somebody having really lived something they are writing about.”

  At other times, Sexton would proffer advice tempered by her own considerable self-doubt: “Your work is very accomplished. You have tons of talent. Still, I feel you are holding something back, some emotions you don’t dare speak of. Do you wish it that way, I wonder? And then again should you listen to me—the me who is known for spilling her guts? ... I can’t think rationally and you can. I envy that.” Sexton said more than once that she “envied” Plunkett’s abilities, and of course the young poet was duly flattered: “I was quite proud to hear you envy my poem—I hadn’t expected that at all, and it is quite a flattering thing to know.”

  One of Plunkett’s most harrowing and successful poems appeared in the Hudson Review. Entitled “Encounter, Psychiatric Institute,” it took place at McLean:That awful

  Anonymity.

  She smiled at me

  From her pinned-down, stretch-out position flat

  On the tilted stretcher two big men

  Were hustling down the stairs. “And whom have I

  To thank for care of me?” she seemed to say.

  She smiled at me. Dark red and bright red were

  The colors of her arm. Suddenly I knew she’d done that shredding.

  Dire, innocuous smile!

  That anonymity? All people, strange

  (Sudden, yet by an awful, slow degree

  I knew), could never get a small word in

  On her dark room, her razor, finger, arm,

  Or her blind soul presiding. “Hear ye!” she

  Said to the dark room of the world, alone.

  And later even, outside, like galaxies

  Of rocks—the stars—or animals—the dogs—

  All we could ever do was stand and stare.

  And there, the arm, bare. Like her own soul, bare.

  She smiles at me across the ribbons—flesh—

  That say, “I am alone—without a sound

  You talk, without a recognition see

  The star, the animal, the blood of me.”

  In the summer of 1969, Plunkett returned to Arkansas, where she remained in touch with Sexton. In June, she announced that she had again been institutionalized; “No sweat, though, be out soon, I think.” She described the experience of listening to Sexton’s poetry/rock record, Anne Sexton and Her Kind: “I cried all the way through ‘Her Kind.’ ... The music is haunting, but nothing to the words. Had to hold my aide’s hand—she, poor kid, not having the faintest idea of what was going on.”

  That was the summer of the moon landing, and Plunkett sent Sexton a poem about the event. In her last letter to her former student, Sexton wrote, “I was pleased that you sent the poem to me although I didn’t understand it. Your rhyming is very skillful, but I do hear you, Jeanie, I do hear you sing.” Later that year, Plunkett published her only book of poetry, If You Listen Qui
etly, which included the poem “Fragment for Anne.” Sixteen years later, after an adulthood beset with psychological and physical disorders, she died of a neurological seizure in Fort Smith at the age of fifty-three.

  How good were the other students’ poems? A few of them were very good and were eventually published. Most of the poems were student quality, some good enough to print in the hospital newsletter. And some were just blots, words scrawled on paper by men and women shocked into the verges of catatonia.

  One anonymous patient satirized his mental predicament:Once I could

  and now I can’t

  Write poetry

  I merely rant

  Sexton believed in encouraging all of her McLean students. When the late journalist John Swan wrote a poem called “Kids,” describing his feelings for the his two young daughters, Sexton handed back his work with “GOOD” swathed across the page in capital letters. When she read this fragment of Swan’s,This last time

  When the children were told I was off

  For another rest ...

  Lynn cried quietly ...

  Her real cry.

  Sexton responded, “Powerful—maybe better than anything Lowell or Sexton has done on the subject.” The praise was real, and her comment anything but casual. At the time, Sexton perceived Lowell as an important competitor, and both poets had trouble expressing affection for their children in their poems.

  At one point, Plunkett chided Sexton for being too solicitous of her students’ feelings. “You seem afraid to discourage anybody.”