The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Others did not thrive. Plath soon left Boston, fearing what a life alone with Hughes would mean for her. “I have no life separate from his, am likely to become a mere accessory,” she wrote just a few weeks after leaving, with Hughes, for a residency at Yaddo arts colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Adrienne Rich, Plath’s rival, was meanwhile living “in such despondency”; she couldn’t see how she could continue writing while caring for her three children. Her life seemed to be over. Kumin was teaching at Tufts; she was the first woman hired by the English department, in 1958, although she was allowed to teach only physical education majors and dental technicians. Even the formidable Hardwick felt anxious and angry, trapped in a city that she thought of as “spindly-legged…slightly mad with neurotic repressions, provincialism, and earnestness without intellectual seriousness.” She and Lowell soon left for New York.

  Even when women writers managed to find each other in male-dominated, mid-century literary Boston, the friendships they formed were often fragile, subject to competition and jealousy. There were so few seats at the seminar table and so many young writers clamoring to be recognized. The connections they formed were ephemeral: the nights at the bar ended, and the women retreated home to waiting husbands. Come morning, despite its pressures (or perhaps because of them), the married couple was more stable than the female friendship.

  This fragmentary collection of female writers—Sexton, Rich, Plath, Kumin—remarkable for its concentration of talent and future fame, never cohered into a true community. In light of how difficult it was to forge connections between women, Sexton’s friendship with her neighbor Kumin—initiated in an adult education classroom and renewed in the Newton library—seems all the more remarkable. But even their friendship sometimes came under threat when a powerful man decided that it was his right, even his responsibility, to intervene in the hopes of helping one woman free herself from the other.

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  The threat came in 1961, just a few years after Kumin and Sexton had met and bonded. From the summer through the fall of that year, Holmes and several people from his seminar participated in a kind of informal workshop; the poets came together to share works in progress and trade jokes and jibes. The group included Starbuck, Sam Albert, Ted Weiss, and, of course, Holmes. The participants took turns hosting the workshop in the evenings and made sure to provide drinks. Kumin’s children hated it when their mother hosted the group. “Oh, the poets!” they complained as the workshop began. “Now we’ll never get any sleep.” The children fought for the privilege of sleeping in the room over the garage, the part of the house farthest away from the raucous gatherings.

  Kumin later described the feeling of this workshop: “During this period, all of us wrote and revised prolifically, competitively, as if all the wolves of the world were at our backs. Our sessions were jagged, intense, often angry, but also loving.” The poets spoke passionately, objecting to unwelcome suggestions and arguing for necessary revisions. Sexton was the worst offender. She fought for her poems with the ferocity of a lioness—“it was like they were taking my babies away from me,” she later said—only to go home and make the very changes her peers had suggested. She helped herself to whatever alcohol was on offer and then pranced around the room, shouting with delight at her friends’ brilliant lines.

  Holmes detested Sexton’s performances on these evenings. He hated what he called her “insistent me-me-me” way of being, which he thought infected her poetry. He had never liked her: not when she was a novice in 1957, and not now that she was a published poet. Her drinking bothered him—he was a recovering alcoholic—as did her instability. Kumin and Sexton suspected that his first wife had suffered from mental illness and died by suicide and that he disliked Sexton because he saw resemblances between these two women. Everything about Sexton triggered his anger and defensiveness.

  The conflict between Holmes and Sexton had been brewing for years. They’d had their first row in 1959, when Sexton, while studying with Lowell, asked Holmes to read her first book manuscript. Holmes had made no secret of the fact that he disliked Sexton’s overly personal poetry—the very style that Lowell so admired—and he discouraged her from publishing the book as it stood. Sexton wasn’t surprised by her teacher’s reaction, but his criticisms stung. She drafted a letter, in which she admitted to being hurt and attempted to flatter Holmes. Despite their differences, she wrote, she was learning so much from him; he’d taught her with “firm patience and a kind smile.” How could he turn away from her now? In the end, Sexton didn’t send the letter. She couldn’t find the courage to challenge such an influential man directly.

  In place of the letter, she sent Holmes a poem. She called it “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further.” She wanted to show Holmes just what value she saw in the experience of madness and why she thought it was a subject fit for poetry. The speaker begins the poem by claiming that she saw “something worth learning” by examining her inner life. She then flies through a string of different metaphors to describe her mind: it’s first a diary, then an asylum, then, most intriguing, “glass, an inverted bowl,” something that she can study. And it is through this self-inquiry that the speaker comes to understand others. Though her own life once appeared to her as something “private,” she sees, by the end of the poem, how sharing her personal experiences can help her forge interpersonal connection. “Then it was more than myself,” she muses, imagining how her inner world might be refigured as her reader’s house, or her reader’s kitchen—private, domestic space. The face she sees in the mirror could just as easily be her reader’s: “my face, your face.” The poem defends confessional poetry, showing how easily the personal becomes public.

  “For John” was an olive branch, and Holmes flung it aside. He believed that poetry should be a form of self-transcendence. Like the John addressed in the poem, he preferred to “turn away” from the cracked, awkward beauty that confessional poetry presented. Sexton was willing to learn from Holmes, but in the end she had no interest in transcending the self; after all, it was her poetic subject. The two never saw eye to eye.

  Sexton decided to publish her book without Holmes’s approval. To Bedlam and Part Way Back was released by Houghton Mifflin in April 1960. She received a positive review in The New York Times: “Mrs. Sexton’s craft is quick and deft. There are no long-sustained metaphors, no elaborate conceits. She is master of the simple declarative sentence…[T]he pauses, accents and rhymes are varied so skillfully that there is no sense of strain.” Sexton was pleased by the review and thought it would sway Holmes’s impression of her work. She told her therapist that Holmes had indeed “changed his mind about my ‘bedlam’ poetry…he (John Holmes) had been wrong.”

  But as it turned out, Sexton was wrong about Holmes’s conversion. In the summer of 1961, about a year after the glowing Times review, Holmes tried to expel Sexton from the informal workshop. To do this, he turned to her best friend.

  Holmes had some influence with Kumin. Responding to her work, he was encouraging. He also helped her secure her first teaching job. Perhaps he thought that Kumin would have influence over Sexton where he did not, or perhaps he wanted to drive a wedge between the two women, such that Sexton, the more vulnerable one, would begin to feel herself unwelcome. He wrote a letter to Kumin, confessing his frustration. Sexton was “on my mind unpleasantly too much of the time between our workshops,” he wrote. “I can’t stand another meeting and her there,” he continued. “She is utterly selfish, blood-sucking, destructive, and I’m not sorry for her, not one bit, but instead getting pretty damned bored with her.” (One wonders if “bored” is the best adjective to describe Holmes’s feelings here.) “I not only think she is poison for you,” he continued, “but no good for anyone else.” He knew the two women were close, and he claimed to feel bad about sharing these thoughts with Kumin—though he had lodged versions of this complaint with her several times before. But he was ada
mant that Sexton was a bad influence; others, he claimed, shared his opinion. He also “resented her dependence” on Kumin. He explained, “I think she has been very bad for you. If I were Vic, honest to God I’d make every effort to get you to break up with her. I wish I knew what he thinks.”

  The paternalistic letter tested Kumin’s loyalties. Kumin confronted a decision that could alter the course of her budding poetic career. Would she obey her respected instructor, the man who had arranged her first teaching job, who placed her poems on his undergraduate exams, who called her “darling” in his letters, who wrote that he thought that she and he were much alike? Or would she support her friend—a woman who had once scared her, who demanded much of her, but who also gave her much in return?

  “Here was my Christian academic daddy, saying stay away from her, she’s bad for you,” Kumin recalled years later. “He was my patron; he got me my job at Tufts.” Denying Holmes could have disastrous consequences. Kumin pondered his request for several days; when Holmes hadn’t heard back by the weekend, he wrote another letter, half apologizing, half reiterating his request that Kumin sever ties with Sexton.

  Finally, Kumin wrote back. She told Holmes she felt he had put her in the middle and that she had somehow been included in his “disapproval and anger.” Holmes reassured her that this was not the case, and he allowed that the workshop wouldn’t break up; Sexton would not be expelled. But he insisted again that Sexton be steered in a new creative direction, and he saddled Kumin with this responsibility. “You can’t let her alone to go on doing this,” he warned. “It could be on your conscience, that fierce and famous conscience, that you didn’t do what is to be done.”

  Kumin had a choice to make, a choice that could affect her budding career and her friend’s life. She chose her friend.

  For the next thirteen years—that is, for the rest of Sexton’s life—she helped Sexton write the confessional verses that so chafed Holmes. She stayed on the other end of the telephone as Sexton composed poems one line at a time. She watched Sexton’s daughters. She dropped in on Sexton’s husband when Sexton traveled to Europe, and she helped her friend come home when the travel proved to be too much. She was Sexton’s friend and confidante, collaborator and colleague. She offered support and love that Sexton valued deeply and did her best to reciprocate. No matter what Kumin had on her conscience, it is hard to imagine any friend doing more.

  CHAPTER 3

  Writer-Human-Woman

  IN SOME WAYS, the women of Boston were lucky.

  Provincial in comparison to New York or Paris, Boston in the 1950s could still claim to be a cultural center. It boasted excellent art schools and universities, as well as a robust population of educated elites, people who would purchase books and attend poetry readings hosted in cavernous halls. Like-minded women passed through town, and small circles of friends formed for a few months or for half a year. To be sure, Boston was cold and intimidating; women like Plath, Sexton, and Kumin often found themselves in classrooms filled with men, where, nervous and eager, they were reminded that greatness could never be theirs. Still, the city provided these young poets with plenty of examples of those who did become great, and it facilitated their ephemeral, complicated friendships.

  It was harder elsewhere. Away from the East Coast, writers, particularly women writers, were even more lonely and isolated, desperate to succeed and yet flummoxed about how to do so. They didn’t have access to the institutions and networks available to a writer like Sexton. Instead, they had to work to live, then find time to do the work that made them want to live. They wrote in quiet houses with sleeping children; their drafts languished in drawers. Instead of reading to others in workshop, they reread their own words in silence.

  The only way to meet like-minded women was, appropriately enough, through the written word. Women writers read each other, and when they were brave, they wrote to those whom they admired. In this way, isolated women made seemingly impossible connections and began to imagine possible lives.

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  In November 1960, roughly a year after she’d finished drafting “The Double Image,” Sexton received an exciting mail delivery. New World Writing, a literary anthology edited by Stewart Richardson and Corlies M. Smith, contained her first published work of fiction: a mother-daughter story, another attempt to wrestle with the shadow of Mary Gray. “Dancing the Jig” is narrated by a woman at a suburban party who is battling frenetic impulses: she wants to leap up and dance; she wants to speed up time rather than wait for conflict to arrive or for chaos to descend. Like a patient on an analyst’s couch, she thinks back to a dinner table scene from childhood that, she suspects, gave rise to her condition. In this memory, the narrator, a preteen, faces a drunk father, hostile sisters, and a difficult aunt—clear avatars for Sexton’s own family members. The figure that looms largest, though, is the mother, who holds her daughter’s attention by criticizing her steadily and without interruption. The narrator, experienced in the art of self-examination, connects her childhood anxiety with her present restlessness; she realizes that she anticipates disaster and so, through her own behavior, invites it. “Dancing the Jig,” one of Sexton’s favorite phrases for describing her vulnerability to Mary Gray, is an analysis session rendered in prose.

  Sexton had been pleased with the story when she’d first written it—she thought it demonstrated good psychological insight—but seeing it now among work by more experienced writers, she felt deflated. Other writers demonstrated more judiciousness, more critical instincts. “There are no guards in prose,” she once mused, alluding to how poetic form restrains overwhelming feeling. In prose, as in life, Sexton was unguarded and less graceful than she would have liked to be.

  There was one long story in the anthology that struck Sexton as the ideal representation of a difficult mother. “Tell Me a Riddle,” by Tillie Olsen, narrated the last months of an old woman’s life. Eva, married for forty-seven years, is committed to finding solitude, even within her marriage. Her husband, David, wants to move to a retirement community, but Eva refuses; she is enjoying the privileged privacy of the old. “Tranquility from having the empty house no longer an enemy, for it stayed clean,” she reflects. “Not as in the days when it was her family, the life in it, that had seemed the enemy: tracking, smudging, littering, dirtying, engaging her in endless defeating battle—and on whom her endless defeat had been spewed.” She swears that she will never again “be forced to move to the rhythms of others.” When Eva is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she and her husband make a pilgrimage to see their children and grandchildren. David having sold their home, they end up in Los Angeles, where David and a granddaughter, Jeannie, care for the dying Eva, who sings songs from her Russian girlhood and shares memories. As observers perceive it, her spirit leaves at the story’s end, and Jeannie implores David, who is racked with grief, to return to his wife’s deathbed and “help her poor body to die.” The story is a masterful blend of vernacular speech—“Because I’m use’t,” says Eva, explaining why she won’t leave her home—and modernist style. Olsen wove together allusion, stream of consciousness, and lively dialogue to create a moving portrait of an elderly couple. It was based on her own parents and on her mother, Ida, who had died from cancer in 1956.

  “Tell Me a Riddle” struck a chord. As a writer, Sexton admired Olsen’s facility with images: in her weakness, Eva is “light, like a bird, the fluttering body, the little claw hands, the beaked shadow on her face.” As a woman, and as a daughter, Sexton was moved by the exquisite rendering of the complicated love that family members feel for difficult women. Admiring and a bit jealous of Olsen’s skill, she later wrote to Nolan Miller, “I read Tillie Olsen’s story and I cried and I was ashamed to have my story appear…She is a genius.” She decided she wouldn’t write any more prose until she could find another writer who could teach her.

  Remarkably, Sexton’s insecurities didn’t prevent he
r from heaping praise on those she envied. She decided to write to the story’s author; she didn’t know Olsen at all, but she felt as though she’d come to know her through her fiction. Writing fan mail was nothing new: Sexton was an avid letter writer, and she didn’t hesitate before writing to writers she admired. These writers were often men: Sexton wrote consistently to Snodgrass, Lowell, and the poet Anthony Hecht. With these correspondents, she wheedled and charmed as she might have done at a party, making herself seem attractive and vulnerable at once.

  With Olsen, a woman whom she didn’t know, a woman with whom she shared no mutual acquaintances, Sexton struck a different note. “My eyes are still crying and I cannot possibly tell you how much your story has moved me,” she began. She praised Olsen’s perfect story, written in a “human key,” then confessed that she too had a story in the anthology. She was embarrassed by her work, though, when she compared it to Olsen’s. She was a novice at fiction writing, she explained; she’d never published prose, but she did have some better poems. With typical self-justification, she explained that she was talking about her own talent only to show that her evaluation was worth something. And she evaluated the story quite highly: she believed it would be read for years to come. (Sexton’s admiration for this particular story never ceased; years later, she sat alone in a red chair, rereading “Tell Me a Riddle” and crying.)

  The letter reached Olsen on Laidley Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, a place far from Boston in both geographic and spiritual senses. The Mission was a working-class neighborhood, populated, as Olsen once wrote, with “many Latin American, Negro, Samoan, firstgeneration [sic] Irish & Italian, families.” Olsen loved it. A beautiful adobe church, the oldest building in the city, stood at its center, and Dolores Park extended from its western border. Riding the bus, or watching her children play, Olsen could hear snatches of different dialects. She recorded interesting phrases on scraps of papers, then balled them up and stuffed them in the pockets of her slacks as she carried about her day.