The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Anne tried and failed to impress her mother. When she was a teenager, she presented Mary Gray with a poem she’d written that had been accepted into the school yearbook. Mary Gray read over her daughter’s work, paused, and then launched an investigation. Surely this was not her daughter’s original work; surely she had copied it from somewhere. She sent this poem and others Anne had written to a family friend, a professor in New York, and asked him to find the source from which her daughter had plagiarized. (The professor wrote back: the poems were original, and they were promising.) Anne, chastened by the experience, didn’t show her mother any more poems. Soon, she stopped writing them altogether.

  Foiled in her creative pursuits, Anne tried to emulate her mother’s stable, high-status domestic life, and she succeeded—but only with lots of help from Mary Gray herself. When she was nineteen, Anne was dating an upper-class boy from the Boston suburbs, Alfred Muller Sexton II, known to friends and family as Kayo, and she feared she was pregnant. On the advice of Mary Gray, the couple drove south, to North Carolina, where the legal age of marriage was eighteen for both men and women. (In Massachusetts, it was eighteen for women and twenty-one for men.) They married, and Anne Harvey became Anne Sexton. The pregnancy was a false alarm—Sexton had started menstruating on the trip south—but the marriage stuck. The young couple bounced back and forth between their respective parents’ households before finally finding an apartment in Cochituate, a town just ten minutes from the Harveys in Weston. (The Harveys had moved there in 1941; their house, built from scratch, included seven bathrooms and five garages.) While Kayo served in the Korean War, Mary Gray steered her daughter away from tempting flirtations and encouraged her to recommit to her marriage. When Sexton did eventually become pregnant—she’d flown out to San Francisco to meet her husband during his leave—Mary Gray tended to her, took her shopping for maternity clothes, took her on vacation to Florida, and allowed her to move back into the Weston family home. With Mary Gray’s financial help, the young Sextons paid for a house in the comfortable suburb of Newton. They started to carve out something like an independent adult life, though Kayo—who had dropped out of Colgate University, where he had been pursuing medicine—worked in the wool business under his father-in-law.

  As long as Mary Gray was alive, Sexton never stopped craving her mother’s praise and fearing her criticisms. A harsh word from Mary Gray stung more than any of the insults Ralph had flung at young Anne when he was drunk. Sexton thought that if she could raise a family and run a household as her mother did, she would finally earn approval from this cold, elusive woman who always seemed to know what was best—the best dress, the best drink, the best book to demonstrate that you were cultured. As she later put it, “I had to be just awful or as good as my mother.”

  By August 1955, with her mother’s assistance, Sexton had put together an admirable life: she owned a house in the suburbs, she was tall and beautiful and well-off, and she was mother to two daughters, Linda, age two, and a newborn, Joy.

  But she struggled with the responsibilities of motherhood. She found herself reacting with anger and violence to her children’s needs. She once threw her older child across a room in frustration. She was eventually diagnosed with postpartum depression. “My heart pounds and it’s all I can hear—my feeling for my children does not surpass my desire to be free of their demands on my emotions,” she once wrote to a therapist. As the months ticked by and Joy approached her first birthday, Sexton’s symptoms lingered and deepened. Worried she would hurt her children, she contemplated using her sleeping pills to end her life. One dark night, she stayed awake for hours, fighting her worst impulses, and then, on a therapist’s recommendation, checked herself into Westwood Lodge—the same institution her father had gone to when he needed to dry out. Mary Gray cared for Linda, while Kayo’s mother, Billie, took in Joy. Sexton was released from Westwood Lodge after a couple of weeks, but her mental health continued to decline. She took an overdose of barbiturates in November 1956, one day before her twenty-eighth birthday. Her new therapist, Dr. Martin Orne, sent her to Glenside, a grim institution that put her at a safe distance from her family. “Her family was not very sympathetic about her problems,” Dr. Orne later recalled. He diagnosed Sexton with hysteria in the Freudian sense.

  Sexton was released from Glenside after several weeks. It was a hard winter. Linda returned to her, but Joy stayed with Billie. Sexton was lonely and listless. “I walk from room to room trying to think of something to do,” she wrote to Dr. Orne. “I have this almost terrible energy in me,” she explained, and “nothing seems to help.” All that she’d learned about homemaking eluded her; she found herself incapable of baking a potato. She relied on Kayo as a child depends on a parent, and she feared his absences. He was often quite patient with her, but at times he exploded into rage. He was sometimes physically violent with Sexton (more often in the later years of their marriage). She loved her daughters, but she resented the way they circumscribed her life. “Who would want to live feeling that way?” she wrote to Dr. Orne in February 1957. It was a question that reverberated daily through her mind.

  Desperate, Sexton searched for a reason to go on living. She found it somewhere she never expected: lyric poetry.

  On Dr. Orne’s recommendation, Sexton began watching educational television; her analyst thought it would stimulate her mind and distract her from her emotional troubles. One Thursday evening in late 1956, just a month after her suicide attempt, Sexton tuned in to the local public television station WGBH and watched a program called Sense of Poetry. A Harvard English professor appeared on-screen; he looked every bit the academic, with his bald head and spectacles. His name was I. A. Richards, and he was one of the most influential scholars of English literature on either side of the Atlantic. While teaching at Cambridge in the 1920s, he had developed a practice of closely reading poetry without recourse to historical or biographical context. Richards called this “practical criticism”; by the time this practice spread to American universities, in the 1940s and 1950s, it was called New Criticism. This style of literary criticism appealed to university English departments at the mid-century because it made the study of literature seem scientific rather than dilettantish. It was also a very teachable method, perfect for educating undergraduates—or viewers of public television.

  In truth, Sense of Poetry was a bit boring. Richards wasn’t particularly dynamic, though he hosted several different educational programs throughout his career (despite his professed distaste for mass media). He read out famous poems, such as Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” enunciating precisely so viewers could hear the scansion and rhythm of the work. Sometimes, a poem scrolled down the screen, or a helpful chart appeared, but otherwise the camera fixed on this austere man, who seemed better suited for radio than for the screen.

  The program was dry and purely educational, and Sexton was rapt. She watched as Richards described the structure of a sonnet—fourteen lines, three quatrains and a couplet, ABABA CDCD EFEF GG—and took careful notes. “I could do that,” she thought to herself. The show over, the night dark, she wrote a sonnet of her own. Like an approval-seeking high school student, she showed the sonnet to Mary Gray. This time, Mary Gray believed the poem was original; she even suggested a better image to capture the poem’s sentiment. Sexton was grateful: she’d finally earned her mother’s approval, and she’d found a new way of managing her distress. She would order her disorder in verse.

  Suddenly poetry flowed from Sexton faster than tears. Between January 1957 and December of the same year, she wrote more than sixty poems—a remarkable output. Most of them marched out messages and morals in regular rhythm, like the poems one would find in The Saturday Evening Post, the leading middlebrow magazine. Many referred to therapy or to Freudianism, and some addressed Dr. Orne himself: “Appointment Hour,” “The Psychosomatic Stomach,” “A Foggy Adjustment.” She typed up her poems carefully and presented them to Dr. Orne, who
offered her the approval she craved. Untutored in the craft, unburdened by a traditional literary education, Sexton proceeded by instinct, learning “unconsciously,” a word she used frequently to describe her method. She set herself little challenges—write a poem in syllabic rhyme, write a double acrostic—just to see if she could succeed. When she made a second suicide attempt in late May 1957, Dr. Orne pointed to her poetry as her reason to live. “You can’t kill yourself,” he told her. “You have something to give.”

  Sexton didn’t fully understand what she was doing as a poet; for years to come, she would describe poetic technique as “trickery.” She was an unpublished amateur. She submitted a few poems to publications, signing them “Mrs. A. M. Sexton,” but she heard nothing back. She considered finding a classroom of some sort, somewhere, and trying to learn as she had never done before. Dr. Orne recommended enrolling at Boston University or Newton Junior College. A return to school was a gamble for the girl who had been kept back and kicked out, undermined by teachers and family both. With her mental health still precarious, she weighed the risks against the possible rewards. She would have to leave the house and meet strangers; that would be terrifying. But perhaps some of these strangers would understand her in ways her family never did. Maybe, if she could push through her fear, she would find those she called “my people.”

  * * *

  —

  When Sexton appeared in Holmes’s workshop, Kumin was at once “taken” with the stranger, as she later recalled, and “terrified.” Kumin marveled at the new student’s looks: Sexton was “tall, blue-eyed, stunningly slim,” a woman who was “all intimidating sophistications in the chalk-and-wet-overshoes atmosphere” of the classroom. Kumin’s style was plainer, and her manner was “much more closed up, restrained,” as she put it. She wore glasses on occasion and drew her hair back in a bun. Even in her thirties, she could easily slip back into the role of the student. She felt herself to be the “chief frump,” while Sexton was “really chic.”

  But despite appearances, the two women had more in common than they realized. Both were mothers of multiple children—Sexton had two, Kumin had three—and both made their homes in Newton. Though Sexton had plenty of help from her mother-in-law, she still found her home life stifling. “Nothing seems worth while [sic],” she wrote to Dr. Orne in February 1957, around the same time the workshop began. “I feel like a caged tiger.” Kumin felt similarly. “I chafed against the domesticity in which I found myself,” she later wrote. “I had a good marriage and our two little girls were joyous elements in it. But my discontent was palpable.” Like Sexton, Kumin had enrolled in the workshop with “great fear and trembling.”

  Kumin hadn’t been raised to be a poet or an intellectual; she had been raised to be a lady. Born Maxine Winokur in Philadelphia in 1925, “Max,” as she preferred to be called, bristled against mandatory femininity and her mother’s grooming. Doll Winokur was an elegant woman, sophisticated and eager to appear fully assimilated into American society (she discouraged the use of gesture in her children; Kumin thought for years that only Jewish people used their hands during conversation). Kumin once recalled, “My earliest visions of my mother place her in an evening dress, about to depart in a cloud of French perfume for an important social event.” Originally from Virginia, Doll was the kind of woman who demanded care and caresses as her birthright.

  Pete Winokur, Max’s father, owned the largest pawnshop in the city of Philadelphia. Doll, status conscious, encouraged the children to refer to their father simply as a “broker” on school forms. She also tried to mold her only daughter into the perfect lady, and at every turn young Max resisted. Chubby when she was little and athletic in her adolescence, Max preferred running wild at summer camp and swimming competitively to sewing and socializing among her urbane peers.

  She rejected an invitation to join her high school sorority (like a college sorority, but for high school girls), mortifying her mother, who had encouraged Max to transfer to this high school from a public school because of its social opportunities as well as its superior education. “The passage through adolescence was a lonely, introverted time,” Kumin later wrote. “Forced to attend dancing classes on alternate Saturday nights, where all of the popular girls were indifferent students in my French or history section, I hid in the ladies’ room until the ordeal ended.” Academic work soothed her anxieties: “I took refuge in scholarship; getting all A’s was my only balm.”

  Her hard work resulted in admission to one of the prestigious Seven Sisters schools, the female equivalent of the Ivy League, which was all male at the time. Max matriculated at Radcliffe in the fall of 1942, where she made her first discouraging foray into poetry. Buoyed by first-year hubris, she skipped an English prerequisite and registered for an advanced creative writing course taught by Wallace Stegner, the man Sinclair Lewis once called “one of the most important novelists in America.” At the time, Stegner was writing the semiautobiographical The Big Rock Candy Mountain, his fifth novel. He had strong ideas about what constituted good fiction. He believed that a writer must unearth the truth about an experience, handle it carefully, and then include something serious or surprising. “Some element of the unexpected is necessary,” he once explained, “or some element, at least, of the—what would you call it?—profound.” Such profundity eluded young Max. While her classmates were writing the kind of “good, fat fiction stories” that appealed to Stegner, she was making aborted attempts at both prose and poetry. “I was just floundering,” she later remembered. “He [Stegner] let it be known in no uncertain terms that I was totally without talent. And I was making a big mistake if I thought I was going to be a writer. Certainly I shouldn’t try to be a poet, because I just didn’t have it.” Despondent, Max decided to give up on creative writing and focus on literary history; she eventually won a prize for her senior thesis. She didn’t write poetry again for eight years.

  In the interim, she followed the path laid out for the East Coast, middle-class white women of her generation: marriage, children, Cape Cod colonial house. Twelve days after she graduated from Radcliffe with honors, she married Victor Kumin, a Jewish engineer she’d met on a blind date in Boston. Vic had spent World War II working on a secret project in Los Alamos—Kumin eventually realized he was working on the atomic bomb—and the couple wrote to each other during their time apart, cementing a relationship before Kumin’s parents, back in Philadelphia, even had a chance to meet their future son-in-law. Following Vic’s job prospects, the young couple moved first to Woods Hole, then to downtown Boston, then finally to Watertown.

  But Kumin wasn’t content. She still yearned for intellectual excitement. It was through school that she’d become someone other than “the pawnbroker’s daughter.” She thought of her high school Latin teachers as inspiring people who had transformed her life. She had always taken solace in study.

  And so after the end of the war, and with Vic’s encouragement, Kumin used her savings to go back to Radcliffe to study for a master’s degree in comparative literature. The couple lived frugally and Kumin worked during the summer, but the sacrifices were worth it: she received her master’s in 1948. Soon after, she gave birth to her first child, a girl named Jane. Another daughter, Judith, followed in 1950. As a self-identified housewife, though, she remained discontented. While other women were happy to host bridge games and steer Girl Scout troops, Kumin took adult education classes and picked up freelance work as a researcher. She kept up her freelance work even as Vic’s career advanced; his income enabled the family to move to Newton, a step up from Watertown, and buy a house at 40 Bradford Road.

  Sitting in her Newton home—a Cape Cod colonial—in 1953, pregnant for the third time, Kumin made a life-changing decision. She subscribed to The Writer, a Boston magazine, and purchased Richard Armour’s guide Writing Light Verse. Even though she’d promised herself that she’d never again write poetry, she wondered if she might have the skills to writ
e poems that weren’t serious. She played with the kind of four-line verses that she saw in the pages of Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post. “And I made a pact with myself,” she later recalled: “If I didn’t sell anything by the time this child was born, I would chuck all my creative discontents.” She would heed Stegner’s cruel prediction.

  Eight months into her pregnancy, she sold her first poem to The Christian Science Monitor for $5, more than the cost of Armour’s instructional book. Her investment had been recouped. The poem paled in comparison to the Renaissance poetry she admired as an undergraduate:

  There never grows so red the rose,

  So sound the round tomato

  As March’s catalogues disclose

  And yearly I fall prey to.

  But as a form of validation—a license to continue her little indulgence—it would do. Kumin exchanged her freelance work for the chance to feed this muse. “I had found a profession that was infinitely portable,” she later wrote. “I could try out lines in my head while doing the dishes or hanging the laundry—no dishwasher, no dryer—or conveying a child to a music lesson or the dentist. I grew adept at composing in the car while I waited for the musician or patient to be trained or treated.” Within two years, she had been published in The Wall Street Journal, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post. The Post was one of the leading magazines at the time, a real coup. There was just one detail that rankled: Vic had had to supply a letter, signed by his employer, certifying that Kumin’s poem was original.