The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  By 1957, Kumin was consistently earning money from her poetry. The checks sustained her ambition. She always got a thrill when her name appeared in print. Perhaps somewhere out there in California, Stegner was flipping through the Post and stopping, surprised, when he saw her name on a page.

  Publication eased her self-doubt, but it didn’t cure her loneliness. “I continued to write in isolation,” she later remembered, stealing time away from household chores to craft a few lines and then returning to the bustle of family life. As happy as she was with Vic and her three children, a part of her wanted intellectual community, even though she knew it could throw her life into chaos. She was busy enough at home, as a letter to her mother from around this time indicates:

  Up sooner than betimes; dryer broken, youngest out of underpants. All underpants soaking wet on line. Pouring. Ten minutes of earnest persuasion…Find plastic bag to protect violin case. (Pouring harder.) Write check for violin teacher. Overdrawn? Live dangerously…Find cough drops for middle child. Middle child coughs anyhow…Husband’s sales director coming for dinner. Husband has clean shirt? Whiskey sours? No rye. Can’t find noodle pudding recipes. Find it. Make pudding.

  Kumin family portrait, 1955

  Left to right: Judith, Maxine, Daniel, Vic, Jane

  The letter continues in this vein, stacking up household tasks like bricks. How could she add another obligation? Decadent as it was to sign up for yet another adult education class, this one with John Holmes, Kumin did just that.

  Throughout their first classes together, Kumin studied Sexton. There was something dramatic about her, and Kumin wasn’t sure she liked it. Kumin had recently lost a friend to suicide, and she had the sense that this newcomer was unstable in just the same way. Worse, Sexton didn’t seem self-conscious about her instability; many of the poems she presented were about her experiences at a mental institution. As the weeks passed, Sexton began to speak openly in class of her suicide attempts. Her behavior horrified Kumin, a woman who prided herself on being presentable—in this way, at least, she embodied her mother’s ideals—and who kept shameful secrets hidden away. At Radcliffe, Kumin had learned how to write and talk like a sophisticated intellectual. The idea that one would willingly reveal all the mess that lay underneath one’s social persona—it not only confused her; it repulsed her. She decided to keep her distance.

  Her plan failed. The following September, as the Holmes workshop kicked off its second term, Kumin and Sexton bumped into each other at the Newton Public Library. As they chatted cordially, they realized that they lived quite near each other: Sexton in Newton Lower Falls, Kumin in Newton Highlands. They decided it was only practical for them to start commuting to Boston together. Sexton usually drove the two of them to class in her old Ford; when the workshop concluded, she’d drive them back to the suburbs. All those hours driving down Route 9 undid whatever suspicions Kumin harbored. Soon, she was offering to drive Sexton to poetry readings around Greater Boston. That year, they went together to listen to the renowned poet Marianne Moore, then seventy, who dressed for the reading in a cape and fantastic hat. They also went together to hear the English poet Robert Graves, who was, in their shared opinion, “ghastly.” The readings provided something like a poetic education for Sexton, who had never formally studied poetry the way Kumin had.

  And then there was the teaching in workshop. Holmes had an odd teaching method: he refused to distribute copies of student poems. Instead, he read a poem aloud, and the class would listen for the poem’s strengths and weaknesses. The method honed the poet’s ear. Soon, Sexton and Kumin were running a mini-workshop of their own, using the same method: one of them would call up the other on her rotary telephone, read out a line or two, then wait for feedback.

  It wasn’t easy keeping the conversation going with children running around. Kumin, writing at home, felt as if she were working in the “eye of the hurricane.” Sexton faced a similar storm. Her children climbed all over her, and she hushed them: “Sh! poem! Maxine!” With one finger in her ear, Sexton tried to get a sense of the whole poem and suggested changing a word here, a line break there. Sexton and Kumin were often surprised when, later, they saw what each other’s poems looked like on the page. Though each poet sat at her own desk, in her own house, they felt intimately connected. Sometimes they stayed on the phone for hours.

  One snowy winter Sunday in 1958, Sexton called Kumin to ask if she might come over and share a piece of writing—something she wasn’t even sure could be called a poem. She’d been listening to a 45 on repeat, an old song that reminded her of her time at Glenside, and she’d written down some of her memories of the place. (She’d had to climb over Kayo, who was building a hi-fi set, each time she wanted to replay the record.) Kumin said yes, and Sexton hopped into her Ford.

  Just several minutes later, Kumin was welcoming Sexton into her home for the first time. It was a new level of intimacy. They sat awkwardly on a couch—they’d never seen each other outside a classroom, a car, or a lecture hall—and Sexton handed over a draft of the poem “Music Swims Back to Me.” “Is this a poem?” she asked.

  The poem takes place at what seems to be a mental institution. The speaker, physically restrained in a chair, listens to snatches of a radio song and asks some anonymous “Mister” how she might find her way home. She’s lost in a place where “everyone…was crazy.” She glimpses older women in diapers and menacing shadows. She hears, or imagines hearing, a song she first heard on her first night in this strange place. The poem circles, repeating its refrain—“Oh, la la la, / this music swims back to me”—again near the end, like a mind caught in its own inescapable cycle. There’s no regular meter to anchor the poem. There’s no clear path home. With its strange, discordant rhythms, “Music Swims Back to Me” was a break with Sexton’s earlier poetry, which was usually in iambic pentameter, a form Kumin found juvenile.

  Kumin was floored by “Music Swims Back to Me.” This new poem was serious work. As the workshop progressed, Sexton continued to experiment with more complex rhymes. That winter and spring, she composed three poems—“Unknown Girl in a Maternity Ward,” “The Double Image,” and “You, Doctor Martin”—that were especially strong. “Unknown Girl,” a dramatic monologue, contained striking images of mothering: a baby tips over “like a cup”; the mother’s arms fit the child “like a sleeve”; the mother, ashamed not to have a partner present, “tighten[s] to refuse” her child’s “owling eyes.” Sexton was beginning to discover her knack for image making.

  Watching and listening to Sexton unspool her soul, Kumin was inspired to write more about her own life—her loud father, her elegant, infantilized mother. She was not inclined to write about any present frustrations, the way Sexton did, but she did mine her past. In a poem called “Halfway,” she recalled her house in Philadelphia, which stood halfway up a hill in Germantown, “between a convent and a madhouse.” It was a strange place to grow up. Kumin had been educated by nuns, despite her Jewishness, and she was at once fascinated and confused by Catholicism. Her youthful impressions inform the poem: the sounds of Mass and the cries of “the mad ones” mingle in the air, and the speaker can’t remember which is which. Was the Mass coming from the convent or the asylum? Were the screams the prayers of nuns or the cries of an impaled Christ? The speaker sees, as only an outsider can, the way pain and pleasure, sadism and asceticism, commingle in the Catholic tradition. “But I have got / The gardens mixed,” Kumin wrote.

  It must have been

  The mad ones who cried out to blot

  The frightened sinner from his sin.

  The nuns were kind. They gave me cake

  And told me lives of saints who died

  Aflame and silent at the stake.

  The young speaker listens to the legends of Christ; she thinks she sees “their Christ” and begins to cry. The poem ends as it began, in a house on the hill, granting some kind of c
larity to memories that remain elusive.

  Over the course of the workshop, Kumin composed several more poems about her childhood. Some take seemingly unremarkable events and render them unusually frightening. In “A Hundred Nights,” her father is an “avenging ghost” who smacks the bats flying through his house; he aims to “stun,” not to “kill.” The young speaker cries and wishes her father would stuff the chimney to keep “those flapping rats” outside. The “crepey nights” loom large in her memory, even though her parents claim they were infrequent (there were, in fact, not “a hundred nights” of bat combat, as the title implies). “Once, before my father dies,” she resolves, “I mean to ask him why he chose / to loose those furies at my bed.” The speaker wants an acknowledgment of the effects of such violence on her vulnerable child-self.

  “A Hundred Nights” was Kumin’s effort to capture a man with a temper, a father who chased his wife down flights of stairs when they fought until Doll, imperious and composed, locked herself in her music room and played a Steinway piano for hours. Kumin also began to write more about motherhood. The poem “The Journey” is dedicated to “Jane at thirteen”; the speaker bids goodbye to her daughter and remembers how she, too, was once thirteen and was once “stunned, like you, by my reflection.” She greets, but also says goodbye to, a younger self.

  Marianne Moore, a poet championed by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, wrote difficult poetry about abstract concepts: the natural world, poetry itself. “I, too, dislike it,” perhaps her most famous line, might just as well express the reaction of a frustrated reader, befuddled by her line breaks and stumped by her syllabics. Some poets, such as Elizabeth Bishop, followed in Moore’s footsteps, though Bishop’s poems are more plainspoken. Sexton and Kumin, however, took a different approach. Their poetry was smooth, not discordant, candid, not inscrutable. They believed that the direct expression of difficult, personal experience was as necessary as meditations on the meaning of art.

  Though both poets wrote out of personal experience, their work—quite different in tone—reflected their distinct temperaments. Sexton was energetic, a woman who drew admirers to her like bees to an open flower, whereas Kumin was charming but reserved. Kumin was skeptical of emotional intensity, and she disliked too much social time. Once she settled in Newton, she began plotting ways to escape suburbia for the peace and quiet of the country. Sexton, nerves soothed by drink, would be the last guest to leave a party.

  And yet they became intimate companions. This was partly a function of proximity—their two homes were mere miles from each other—and partly a sign of their complementarity. Kumin was stable where Sexton was inconstant, responsible where Sexton was flighty. She offered Sexton the knowledge she’d gleaned from college, and Sexton showed Kumin how to write from a place of feeling rather than thought. Their shared inquiry into the use and value of personal experience, and of poetry, drew them together. The bond they hatched by happenstance would endure for as long as both of them were alive.

  CHAPTER 2

  Who Rivals?

  SEXTON AND KUMIN came of age at a strange moment for American women, after a hot war and in the midst of a cold one. During the final years of the 1940s, women were carried aloft by the country’s surging optimism. The rationing and austerity of World War II were over. Coffers emptied, flooding the country’s cultural institutions with hoarded cash. It was a buoyant time, a time to go to school, to kiss a soldier, to fall in love.

  By the 1950s, the culture had shifted from exuberant to wary. Another war seemed to be looming, this one potentially more devastating. In 1950, 61 percent of Americans thought the United States should use the atomic bomb in another war; by 1956, two-thirds had come to fear that the United States itself would be bombed, should another war break out. In an effort to avoid open conflict, now that the stakes of violent conflict were unspeakably high, America aimed to fight on the cultural front. The United States presented and promoted its beliefs, its freedoms, and its inimitable brand of happiness in the hopes of winning foreign nations to its side. The peaceful and prosperous American family became an image of national security.

  Though the diplomat George F. Kennan first used the term “containment” to describe American foreign policy with regard to communism in 1947, the word applied equally well to domestic life. Deviance and “softness” could not be tolerated; “red” and “lavender” menaces had to be stopped. Homosexuals, communists, and political dissidents faced public shaming. Meanwhile, women were asked to surrender the freedoms—of movement, of dress, of affiliation—they had guarded closely since V-J Day. They put down their books and wrenches and picked up spatulas. They left college in droves.

  Still, in the small circles of Boston artists in which Kumin and Sexton moved, one could find a few women watching and listening. There, a sizable and vibrant poetry scene thrived. The nation’s best poets passed through town, teaching classes and giving readings. They took the train from New York and flew overland from Iowa. At well-lubricated parties, one could hear, through the din, the resonant voices of Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass—names that would be known for years to come. And through the smoke and sea of tweed, one could spot the dresses and the pageboy haircuts that belonged to the poetry world’s few women: Sexton, Adrienne Cecile Rich, Sylvia Plath. They clasped their drinks like entry passes and shouted over the voices of men.

  Like many fledgling writers before them, these women came together to pay homage to the master teacher of their age—the kind of charming, eccentric male genius who earned fame within literary and artistic movements at the mid-century. The handsome Robert Lowell wasn’t the first to earn this kind of treatment from novice artists. Pablo Picasso, later memorialized as “terribly famous, not terribly nice,” stood at the center of cubism. The cranky, erratic Ezra Pound served as the impresario of transatlantic modernism (his outsized influence on the era led one critic to dub the interwar period the “Pound Era”). Allen Tate, a genteel man of letters, led the charge of the Southern Agrarians and changed the way students and teachers understood poetry. By the postwar era, however, the figure of the master teacher had taken on a new significance. This was the heyday of the American university, a time when higher education was becoming more democratic. Funded by the GI bill, veterans flooded university halls, swelling the undergraduate population and enticing more funding from the state. Schools invested in both the arts and the sciences, founding laboratories and starting fine arts programs. Creative writing programs were also on the rise, producing new artistic circles and offering new points of access to literary genius (by 1975, there were fifty-two programs, a dramatic increase from the several programs that had existed in the 1940s). Though creative writing had been taught at the University of Montana and the University of Iowa since 1920 and 1936, respectively, writers didn’t infiltrate the ivory tower until the late 1950s and the 1960s. Now young men and women could formally sign up to study with a superior mind. The classroom became a temple of worship—or, sometimes, a battlefield between one generation and the next.

  Wandering through Boston’s literary scene in the 1950s, one might stumble upon women, in clusters of twos and threes, learning from magnetic men and clinging to the chances they’d been given. They evaluated the competition; they kept tabs on their rivals; occasionally, they found confidantes; rarely, they made friends.

  * * *

  —

  One February afternoon in 1959, almost two years to the day since Sexton first made her nervous walk down Commonwealth Avenue, the young poet Sylvia Plath stepped into a tiny Boston University seminar room. The windows looked out upon slushy streets; just a few blocks away, the Charles River divided Boston from Cambridge. Her blond hair was longer than usual, and she’d meant to cut it into a pageboy or something similarly fashionable, but she hadn’t yet made the time. Still wearing her camel-hair coat, she found a seat directly opposite where an instructor would sit and waited for class to commence. I
t was not yet 2:00 p.m.

  One by one, students shuffled in—mostly graduate students at Boston University, though the course was open to others, and mostly men. As they shrugged off damp overcoats and took their seats, they unfurled the thin, translucent papers on which they had typed up their poems. The room was silent but for the rustling of the onionskin papers.

  Just after 2:00 p.m., Robert “Cal” Lowell entered the room. He was just as Plath remembered him from an awkward recent dinner at her apartment on Willow Street: tall, square-jawed, and, despite his thinning hair and his thick glasses, remarkably good-looking. Rumor had it that Lowell had been unwell recently, either physically or mentally, but today he seemed stable enough. He didn’t turn on the overhead light and instead shuffled through the midwinter gloom before taking his seat at the head of the table. The air seemed to grow gradually thicker, as if saturated with student nerves. Because it was early in the spring semester, Lowell began class by asking the students to name their favorite poets. Plath, who was auditing the class, offered Wallace Stevens, to Lowell’s approval. Others offered the canonical greats: John Keats, Samuel Coleridge, John Donne. If any student had secretly loved a notable female poet—Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example, or Muriel Rukeyser—she would have been sure to offer a different answer: it was understood that “feminine” poetry had no place in Lowell’s classroom. Once all the students had taken their turns, Lowell opened a leather-bound anthology of nineteenth-century poetry, hunched over it, and began to read at such a low volume that students had to lean forward to hear.

  He had been speaking for a few minutes when a dark-haired, harried woman burst into the room. She was a bit older than most of the other students; she wore a low-cut blouse and visible makeup. Pretty, certainly, but a bit undone in some imperceptible way. The latecomer sashayed to the back of the classroom, her bangles clanging as she walked. A male student got up to offer her his seat, because the chairs were all taken. Once she settled into it, she removed a high-heeled shoe and a pack of cigarettes and proceeded to smoke, using the heel of the shoe as an ashtray. This woman was Anne Sexton.