For nearly an hour, Lowell muttered in iambs and the students listened in a state of barely contained panic. Their instructor liked to spend the first part of class reading from his favorites: William Wordsworth, William Empson, his good friend Elizabeth Bishop. He would read a poem and then quiz his students: What does the poem mean? Why is this line good? Sometimes one of the graduate-student types would make a stab at an answer. The women, Plath noticed, always stayed silent. Except for the latecomer.
“I don’t think that line is any good at all!” Sexton said, in response to one of Lowell’s pressing questions. Lowell, bemused, let her speak. It seemed that these two had an understanding.
In the second hour, Lowell turned to student poems—a move that only heightened the atmosphere of panic. His method was to study a poem, pause, and then offer one or two suggestions, seemingly at random. “This is the best part,” he might say, pointing to a single stanza. Or, “put the end at the beginning and the beginning at the end.” His remarks were like the pronouncements of an oracle: ominous and ponderable. Few of the students had anything insightful to say to their peers. “Lowell’s class yesterday a great disappointment,” Plath wrote in her journal that evening, back in her Beacon Hill apartment. She had some teaching experience—she’d taught at Smith College—and she knew what made for a good class. “I said a few mealymouthed things, a few BU students yattered nothings I wouldn’t let my Smith freshmen say without challenge. Lowell good in his mildly feminine ineffectual fashion. Felt a regression. The main thing is hearing the other student’s poems & his reaction to mine. I need an outsider.”
The night she wrote these words, Plath was twenty-six, racked with literary ambition, and keen to be the perfect wife. With her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes, she planned to “publish a bookshelf of books before we perish! And a batch of brilliant healthy children!” But literary success eluded Plath, who had published her first poem in Harper’s when she was still a student at Smith College. She believed she should have already made a name for herself as a writer and that if she had not lost a year recovering from a suicide attempt, she would have established herself already. Instead, she was dragging herself out to Boston University in the middle of winter, trying to make up for lost time.
The following week, she returned to Lowell’s dark classroom, suspecting that she was the best female poet in the class. Plath kept track of women rivals, ticking off lists in her journals: “Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America…Who rivals? Well, in history—Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all dead. Now: Edith Sitwell & Marianne Moore, the ageing giantesses & poetic godmothers. Phyllis McGinley is out—light verse: she’s sold herself. Rather: May Swenson, Isabella Gardner, & most close, Adrienne Cecile Rich—who will soon be eclipsed by these eight poems.” She stalked her rivals the way a poacher tracks game: diligently, and adequately camouflaged. Her erect posture and neat appearance masked the wild desire within.
To her surprise, she soon realized that Lowell held Sexton, that chaotic classroom presence, above all the rest. He seemed dazzled by her, but not in the way he usually was by pretty women (he’d had more than a few affairs, which his wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, ably handled, along with other aspects of her husband’s manic episodes). Instead, he demonstrated real respect for the voice, the confessing voice, that Sexton was honing that winter. Sexton hadn’t been writing for very long, and she had only been in Lowell’s class since September 1958, but she already had a gift for the construction of images. She expressed difficult feelings quite simply and truly. “She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff,” Plath observed in her journal.
Once Lowell started reading some of his own work in progress in class, Plath better understood his admiration for Sexton. Here was this educated, celebrated poet writing about his parents, his marriage bed, even his mental illness. For students who had studied T. S. Eliot, the poet who made a pitch for the value of “impersonality” in art, Lowell’s new writing was shocking and exhilarating. Perhaps one’s own small, domestic life could be a fit subject for lyric poetry.
Lowell’s validation meant a lot to his students. In 1959, he was the most respected poet in America. He’d been Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and he’d received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 (and would win another in 1974). Dylan Thomas had once laid a hand upon his head. And because his family had come over on the Mayflower, to certain snobby Bostonians his genealogy was as impeccable as his sonnets.
The challenge for someone like Plath—a young poet under his tutelage, eager to be anointed—was that Lowell didn’t tend to like women writers. He had two categories for writers: “major”—Wordsworth, Thomas, Stevens—and “minor.” Almost every female poet was a “minor” writer, with a few exceptions. He praised his friend Bishop—flinty and keenly observant, she’d infiltrated the male canon—as well as Marianne Moore, whom Lowell had once introduced at an event as the greatest “woman poet.” (Langston Hughes, who was also in attendance, sprang to his feet and suggested that Moore was the greatest “Negro woman poet.” Perhaps a few grasped the irony.) Female poets who wrote about women’s lives, such as Rukeyser and Denise Levertov, were particularly scorned. When Sexton confronted Lowell with a poem by the poet and editor Carolyn Kizer, a poem that indicted men in general—and Lowell in particular—for disrespecting women writers, he simply remarked, “Carolyn Kizer is a beautiful girl.”
Such misogyny was ambient in the scene. Kathleen Spivack, a poet who studied at Boston University alongside Plath and Sexton, remembered that the “whole establishment was male!” Women could often be found serving as devoted poets’ wives; they typed up manuscripts and managed their husbands’ insecurities. Men lounged on couches in the poetry shops of Harvard Square, talking only to each other as women scurried around them. Those women who did write viewed each other as competition. Even the successful, respected poet Adrienne Rich, the winner of the coveted Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1950, worried about being overtaken by some young upstart. “Competing in the literary establishment felt to me very defeminizing,” she later recalled.
It wasn’t just Boston. Throughout the Northeast—across the nation—educated women were up against walls of self-assured men. This was a time when women without college degrees were employed as typists, and women with college degrees couldn’t even get such a job (they were overqualified). But their employment woes didn’t penetrate the consciousness of most public officials. As Adlai Stevenson reminded Plath’s graduating class at Smith in 1955, a woman’s “primary task” was “making homes and whole human beings in whom the rational values of freedom, tolerance, charity and free inquiry can take root.” Make babies, not poems.
And so they did. But some women remained curious, and so they learned how to listen. They listened to men try to one-up each other, hoping to glean a bit of knowledge from the words being exchanged. As the writer Anne Roiphe remembered the New York literary scene, women were “at the edges of the conversation.” “We girls, not yet called women,” she recalled, “were like the Greek chorus, mopping up after the battle was over, emptying ashtrays, carrying the glasses to the sink. The main event was man to man, writer to writer.”
Sexton, however, didn’t want to be part of the chorus: she wanted to be a writer. But being a woman writer proved difficult, and she worried unceasingly. “Being a ‘poet’ in Boston is not so difficult except that there are hoards [sic] of us living here,” she wrote to a friend that February. “The place is jammed with good writers—it’s very depressing.” Even after she’d won Lowell’s admiration, earning his praise both in and out of class—he often called her on the phone to remark on her talents—she still worried that she was simply, irrepressibly feminine. In a letter to the poet W. D. Snodgrass, whom she’d met and befriended at a writers’ confere
nce at Antioch College, she worried about “writing as a woman writes,” and confessed a “secret fear” that she was “a reincarnation of Edna St. Vincent.” Although Lowell hadn’t made any such comparison, Sexton still fretted over her femininity. “I wish I were a man—I would rather write the way a man writes,” she told Snodgrass. For years, she believed that “she writes like a man” was the highest possible praise.
In March, the same month that Sexton confessed her fears to Snodgrass, Lowell surprised her by asking her to read aloud one of her poems in class. She had written “The Double Image” the prior fall; it had already been accepted for publication by The Hudson Review. Sexton had composed the poem during her first semester in Lowell’s class, in the fall of 1958. That fall had been a difficult time for her. Her father had suffered a stroke, and Mary Gray, who had been diagnosed with cancer in February 1957, found that the cancer had metastasized. When she was first diagnosed, Mary Gray had blamed Sexton for the cancer, thinking it was caused by the stress of caring for her mentally ill daughter. Since then, Sexton had harbored difficult, complicated feelings about her mother’s illness. “Part of me would be free if she died,” she once confessed to Dr. Orne. “It would also be awful—I would dissolve.”
By February 1959, Mary Gray’s cancer was terminal. Now, with her mother in her last days, Sexton, sitting in a quiet BU classroom, read aloud her poem about intergenerational need. (Mary Gray died the next month.) “The Double Image” is addressed to a young daughter, a child separated from her mother at a young age and for so long that she did not recognize her mother’s voice when it called to her. The mother, the speaker of the poem, is reflecting on that period of estrangement—“the three autumns you did not live here”—and remembering her own guilt and distress at her failure to mother in the right way. “Ugly angels spoke to me,” she recalls.
The blame,
I heard them say, was mine. They tattled
like green witches in my head, letting doom
leak like a broken faucet;
as if doom had flooded my belly and filled your bassinet,
an old debt I must assume.
Fear and error are passed from mother to child, via blood that simultaneously nourishes and condemns. The speaker knows about maternal curses, for she too is a daughter, a woman who inherited her mother’s smile. She recalls recovering in her mother’s house from a bout of insanity, “a partly mended thing, an outgrown child,” and how her mother couldn’t forgive her suicide attempt or her sadness. Instead, the speaker’s mother commissions her daughter’s portrait and has it hung in the family home next to her own, one of the “double images” of the poem’s title. Meanwhile, the speaker’s mother grows ill “as if death were catching,” an inverse inheritance (“she looked at me / and said I gave her cancer”), while the speaker herself slowly recovers. The poem doubles the “double image”—the mother-daughter portrait—as the speaker, over the course of seven sections of irregular length, alternates between describing her relationship with her mother and her relationship with her daughter. She is the hinge point, the figure that slips between roles, giving care, receiving care, and sometimes doing both at once.
“The Double Image” ends with the speaker’s reflections on the selfishness that mothers harbor and the impossible demands they make on their daughters:
I, who was never quite sure
about being a girl, needed another
life, another image to remind me.
And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure
nor soothe it. I made you to find me.
Lowell loved the poem—it fit his idea about the expression of a simple, difficult truth. “I think this means that he liked my reading and now likes the poem better,” Sexton wrote to Snodgrass, describing the class session. “More better. As a whole it has a good dramatic structure—but many faults when picked apart—He didn’t pick it apart tho.” Plath, for her part, was intrigued by the poem. Sexton’s work was more revealing than anything Plath was writing at the time. Inspired, Plath struck a poem from her book draft: “A leaf from Ann [sic] Sexton’s book would do here,” she reflected. “She has none of my clenches and an ease of phrase, and an honesty.” In class, Lowell often grouped the two poets together in the hopes that they would influence each other. “Anne was more herself, and knew less,” he said later, about the pair of poets. “I thought they might rub off on each other. Sylvia learned from Anne.”
Soon after Sexton read her mother-daughter poem, Plath and Sexton formed their own sort of double image. Along with George Starbuck, a poet and editor at Houghton Mifflin who had befriended Sexton in Holmes’s workshop, they began socializing after class. Each Tuesday evening, the trio piled into Sexton’s Ford and headed to the Ritz-Carlton hotel, a place Hardwick once described as “the only public place in Boston that could be called smart.” Sexton often parked illegally, in a loading zone. “It’s okay,” she joked, “because we are only going to get loaded!” With a woman on each arm, Starbuck guided the group into the bar.
The three friends went through three rounds of drinks, sometimes four. The women compared suicide attempts and munched on potato chips. Starbuck, who was, by that point, completely enamored with Sexton, listened to the macabre conversation. (During this time, he and Sexton embarked on a short-lived affair.) Later, the trio headed to the Waldorf Cafeteria, with its checked tile floor and coffee urns, where dinner cost seventy cents. The friends claimed one of the small square tables, with salt and pepper shakers neatly arranged in the center, and they peered out the venetian blinds onto the streets of Boston. Sexton was drawn to “intense, skilled, perceptive, strange, blonde, lovely, Sylvia,” but she thought that as a poet Plath was getting in her own way. “I told Mr. Lowell that I felt she dodged the point and did so perhaps because of her preoccupation with form,” Sexton later wrote. “Those early poems were all in a cage (and not even her own cage at that).”
Plath planned to be “Poetess of America,” as she’d written in her journal, but no matter how she reshuffled her lists of poets, she found that fame eluded her. Meanwhile, everyone else seemed to be meeting with success. That spring, Sexton sold her first book of poems to Houghton Mifflin, where Starbuck worked as an editor (he had encouraged the press to sign up Sexton’s book). Plath took Sexton’s success as a personal affront. At a celebratory dinner, Starbuck was, in Plath’s words, “smug as a cream-fed cat,” for, as Plath perceived it, Sexton was “in a sense his answer to me.” Not that Starbuck was without his own achievement; in June, he won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. The same day that she heard about Starbuck’s prize, Plath resolved to write a story about her suicide attempt (this after toying with the idea of writing a story about Sexton and Starbuck’s affair). “There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff,” she noted. “I am a fool if I don’t relive, recreate it.” The Bell Jar, her story turned novel about a “college girl suicide,” was published in 1963. It was the last work of hers to be published while she was alive.
As Plath schemed, Sexton locked herself away in her study and furiously revised her book manuscript. Lowell had suggested replacing fifteen of the poems with new work. She composed at a rapid pace, but she wasn’t entirely confident in her teacher’s advice. “I am just not sure about Lowell,” she wrote to Kizer, author of the accusatory poem, now a friend and regular correspondent. “I think he may like my work because it is all a little crazy or about being crazy and it may be that he relates to me and my ‘bedlam poetry.’ ”
Lowell did share Sexton’s interest in writing about one’s personal struggles. In May, the same month Sexton sold her manuscript, Lowell’s Life Studies was published. M. L. Rosenthal, reviewing the book for The Nation, argued that Lowell’s poetry was “soul’s therapy.” Titled “Poetry as Confession,” the review explained how “Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life
Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.” The book won the 1960 National Book Award and signaled a revolutionary movement in American poetry, one called “confessional,” after Rosenthal’s review. The designation was at first meant to be derisive, but after the success of Life Studies it was a term a poet might want to claim.
For many years, the writers who once sat in that small, dark classroom on Commonwealth Avenue—Sexton, Plath, and Lowell himself—would all be grouped together as “confessional” writers. The label always annoyed Sexton, who hated to find herself lumped into any category. She particularly resented the idea that she had learned her poetic style from Lowell. At times, she denied his influence entirely and claimed not to have read his work. If anything, she explained, she had learned from him what not to write. What he had taught her was a mind-set, a way of thinking about poetry, but her writing was her own. “Jesus, I’m a defensive creature!” she wrote to Snodgrass in June 1959. “And in manicy moments I say to myself, I’m better than Lowell!—How is that for poetic conceit.! ! !”
After the seminar concluded, Sexton spent the summer putting the finishing touches on her manuscript. By the time her book went to the printers in August, she was far from the “reincarnation of Edna St. Vincent” that she had felt herself to be in October. She had sold a book and given a reading at the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge. Kumin—who was herself working on a book manuscript—and Starbuck had been by her side at the event. She had weathered the anxieties and criticisms of Lowell’s seminar. In a competitive, treacherous literary climate, Sexton had emerged triumphant.
The Equivalents Page 5