The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  The “I” of this poem was unmistakably Sexton, but this was not always the case. “In the Deep Museum,” a poem written in the voice of Christ, showed how far the poet could submerge herself in a persona. As she read this poem to the group, she emphasized that no matter how personal the content of a poem, it was never a straight confession. Every poem existed at a remove from the self: the process of composition allowed the poet to gain some purchase on her feelings.

  On this February afternoon, the wan winter light coming through the windows, Sexton gave her own kind of writing lesson. If she could show these scholarly women anything, it was that the “I” of a poem was not as simple or straightforward as they might think. Yes, she wrote personal poetry—she drew from her own life—but she often used another character: “someone else that I wasn’t, or that I couldn’t have been, or that I imagined I was.”

  Sexton was, in fact, remarkably insightful about poetry, but she lacked her fellow poet’s analytical bent. She couldn’t always explain why she’d made a given decision: it just looked right on the page, she would explain, or the image just came to her. Perhaps self-conscious about the almost anti-intellectual tone of her presentation, she excused and defended herself throughout the talk. “I’m afraid all my poems are fairly serious that I’m reading today,” she said. “I’m sorry my poems are so serious.” (At one point, she apologized for apologizing.) She closed her talk with “The Fortress,” her poem for Linda; it was her first time reading it in public. She described how she had gotten a “ghastly backache” while writing the poem because she’d spent days at her desk, working straight from eight in the morning until eleven at night. “I was working on it, and my kids were running around, and the cleaning woman ran in and out, dinner wasn’t ready and my husband came home, and that’s no example of how you’re supposed to act as a wife,” she said apologetically. (Kayo had stolen a secretary’s chair from his office the very next day; he understood her need to concentrate.) It might not be the traditional behavior of a wife, but it was the behavior of an artist or a scholar; it was an experience that many women at the Institute would recognize.

  “It’s for all of us,” Sexton announced, when the poem was over. “Us mothers, the graduate mothers.”

  “The Fortress” was the final poem that Sexton read that afternoon. Thirty minutes after she’d started reading, she declared that the poets were done. The poets had revealed themselves to be two different people after all.

  Anne Sexton with her daughters, Linda and Joy, 1962

  “Turn off the tape!” someone yelled, but the recording continued. Tea was passed; after some time, wine was poured. Sexton helped herself. “I don’t really think a wine cellar makes an alcoholic, necessarily,” she said, to no one in particular. Like an orchestra starting up, the audience came to life. Some directed questions at the poets; others engaged in side conversation. Someone complained about a local paper’s coverage of the Institute: we’re not “rusty mothers”! Sexton and Kumin disagreed: they’d both had periods of latency. “We did get rusty,” Sexton admitted. Now they were back at their desks. Their children resented them at times, but they also benefited from being exposed to art. Sexton’s children, though young, knew what a poem was: “It’s what your mummy types all day.”

  Sometimes Sexton felt like a question was too heady for her, and she would ask Kumin to help her answer. At some point during the discussion, someone asked Sexton about her self-critical process. How do you know when something is finished? “Oh, that’s a most complicated process,” Sexton replied, and paused. Then: “I call up Maxine and I ask her.”

  Her audience hooted and laughed. Sexton went on to describe their work routine: the daily phone sessions, the callbacks. Kumin chimed in: “We’ve been doing this for years, long before Radcliffe.” “We didn’t let Radcliffe know when we applied that we knew each other,” Kumin said. “We figured they wouldn’t want us if they knew.” They had applied “very separately,” these two women who were each other’s superegos, their critical selves. But now the secret was out. They acknowledged publicly for the first time the central role they played in each other’s creative lives. If they were worried about how their secret would be received, they needn’t have been. The scholars were charmed. After a semester at the Institute, the women all saw the value of a supportive female friend, someone who could give you notes on your work and advice about your youngest child. The two poets performed the kind of mutual support that all the Institute women would recognize. Their confession made, the poets continued to speak, but they were soon drowned out by waves of affectionate laughter.

  At one point, Kumin recalled a fight with her middle daughter, Judith, which ended when Judith slipped a note under the door: “Dear Mrs. Kumin, I think your books are bad. The plots are terrible and the rhymes are worse. Yours sincerely, a well-wisher.” The other mothers laughed; they understood.

  * * *

  —

  Women are “supposed to destroy each other,” as the literary scholar Elaine Showalter once observed. In the scarcity economy that is the heterosexual love market, women have been told they must outdo each other to earn a man’s affection and the security he provides. In male-dominated professional environments—a corporate law firm, a tech start-up—women are encouraged to compete with each other, because it seems as though there were only so many spots available for those of their gender. Often, these women, anxious and aggrieved, are more aggressive, more cutthroat, than the men in their circles. Capitalism and patriarchy combine to encourage female competition. Women are trained to be rivals.

  At the same time, American culture has long valorized specific forms of female intimacy, the mother-daughter relationship being foremost among them. A mother is charged with teaching her daughter the art of womanhood, with showing her how to navigate a treacherous world. And yet this relationship carries its own danger. So often a mother wants to mold her daughter in her own image, and she reacts with rage if the daughter, skeptical of the mother’s decisions, separates and claims her own path. In different ways, Sexton and Kumin had chafed at the prescriptions of their domineering, distant mothers. Each had wanted to carve out a separate identity, although neither stopped wanting her mother’s approval. Both had seen how female intimacy could threaten one’s very sense of self.

  The challenge for Sexton and Kumin, then, was to find a more sustaining way of being close. They began this project in Holmes’s seminar, but they perfected it at the Institute, where women supported each other’s intellectual and creative work. The poets’ intimacy no longer seemed unnatural or dangerous. At Radcliffe, they found an audience for their friendship as well as for their poems; they found, too, the right words to describe their bond. “Maxine and I are very much alike,” Sexton said that spring. “First we’re good friends, second we both smoke every single minute, we both have a cocktail before dinner, we use the same kind of rhymes, same kind of ambition, same kind of feelings, but we write with a different intent, we’re really very different poets.” Twelve years after Radcliffe, Showalter asked them if they worried about becoming too similar in their writing:

  MAX: No, no, we’re different.

  ANNE: You can tell we’re completely different.

  SHOWALTER: Yes, but was there ever a period when it was a struggle?

  ANNE: No, there was never a struggle. It was natural, it wasn’t hard.

  MAX: It seems to be so normal. It wasn’t ever an issue.

  ANNE: There was never any struggle.

  This dance of sameness and separateness defies easy categorization. One could say they were like sisters, that their relationship anticipated the calls for “sisterhood” that defined the second wave of American feminism; the feminist activist Kathie Sarachild coined the phrase “sisterhood is powerful” in 1968. But this would be to elide their crucial differences, the way that their friendship depended upon their points of contrast.
“I would say we never meddled,” Kumin once wrote, explaining their habit of collaboration. “I don’t know exactly how to explain what that means except to stress that we were different voices, we knew we were different & honored those differences.” Neither ever assumed a position of authority relative to the other. Nor did they merge, or become representative of a type, as members of social movements sometimes do. Instead, they alternated speaking and listening, seeking advice and advising—their voices sounding different notes, forming something like a song.

  CHAPTER 8

  Happily Awarded

  IN JANUARY 1962, just a few weeks before she and Kumin came out as intimate collaborators, Sexton sat down to write a long overdue reply to another woman writer. Olsen had written her a letter back in the fall, asking about the Radcliffe Institute. The letter was typed on a sheet of office letterhead; Olsen was working as a secretary again. Sexton knew how her friend loathed this kind of day job; Olsen claimed that typing letters and memos all day ruined her feel for language.

  When she wrote to Sexton, Olsen was struggling. She had been struggling for years. In 1959, she had been awarded a two-year grant from the Ford Foundation, which provided her with $3,600 each year (just over $30,000 in today’s currency). The list of winners read like a who’s who of mid-century American literature: James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, E. E. Cummings, Robert Fitzgerald, Stanley Kunitz, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Theodore Roethke, and Niccolo Tucci. But Ford grant or no Ford grant, Olsen was still a mother, with a mother’s obligations and commitments. She described her typical grant-time schedule to Sexton in a letter: “Up at six, breakfast in shifts, lunchpacking—then, if no one ill, or it isn’t a holiday, or any of the other ORs, the day for work until four, sometimes longer or an evening—depending on housework load, shopping, errands, people, current family or friend crisis.” The work came slowly. The interruptions were frequent. “Too much life enters this house,” she confided.

  Now that her grant had ended, she was back working a day job at San Francisco General Hospital, and she still didn’t have the novel manuscript that she’d promised Viking’s Malcolm Cowley years earlier. While Cowley had been pleased with the critical reception of Tell Me a Riddle, Olsen’s story collection, he insisted that his company could offer her an advance only for a novel; story collections didn’t sell. “The novel is the book to finish,” he’d written to her when she’d started publishing her short fiction. “Only if some accident (pray God there is none) stops you from work’g on the novel should you turn to the stories.”

  The letter Olsen wrote to Sexton was brief and desperate. She was attempting to plan the next year, she explained, and she needed to find another fellowship that would buy her time to write. Nolan Miller, a mutual friend to Sexton and Olsen, had pointed her in the direction of the Institute. “How interrupting is it?” she asked Sexton. “How free are you for your own work & for what feeds work? What does it involve. Please when you can, write me specifics.”

  Sexton had meant to respond sooner, but then November had come, and with it her birthday—always a hard time for her—and the anniversaries of her suicide attempts. She had fallen into a depression; she had fought with Kayo; she had again attempted suicide. It wasn’t until the New Year that she was in better spirits. She sat down at her typewriter, in her study, and wrote Olsen a generous and enthusiastic reply.

  “Write them,” she instructed her friend. She provided the address and alerted Olsen to the problem of residence. She supposed that her friend could apply to be a more senior resident fellow, but those positions were usually nominated by an outside observer, and they went to women who were already famous. Sexton concluded her letter with some words of praise for Tell Me a Riddle and a description of how she’d spent her time at the Institute. She added a handwritten postscript: “Write if you can—I feel lonely somehow.”

  Olsen took her friend’s advice. In her busy house at 116 Swiss Avenue, in San Francisco’s Mission District, she put together an application to the Institute. Though she detested the process of applying for grants and fellowships—she believed that such opportunities should be freely available to all, not meted out to a lucky few—she still worked to make her application stand out.

  And it did. Olsen’s application was a challenge to the Institute’s conception of talent. Under “educational background,” she listed her writing grants, making no apologies about the absence of more conventional educational credentials. Elsewhere on her application, she presented her clerical and domestic work as training for her writing: they had made her efficient, competent, and highly observant. She didn’t distinguish between paid labor and domestic labor; unlike women of the middle and upper-middle classes, Olsen performed both kinds of work and saw both as equally valuable. After typing out the required information—married, four children, a granddaughter whom she counted as a partial dependent—she listed all of the “unskilled work” she’d taken on since 1928: “Armour’s, Mannings, Carpenter Paper Co., Best Foods, Cal Pak, Various warehouses, as Pork trimmer…Checker for Baker & Hamilton (warehouse). $1.55 an hour (?)…Secretary with Calif. Society of Internal Medicine, one and one-half years; secretary with Graziani & Appleton, att’ys, and temporary office work. $2.00 hourly to $375 monthly.” (Her $2.00/hour wage was the equivalent of a $16.00/hour wage today.) Leaving blank the sections on education, languages, and theses, she listed instead her nonacademic talents:

  1. A writer’s training in observation, perception and steeping.

  2. Office work. Fast, accurate typist, transcriber; knowledge various office machines; experience in various offices from legal to industrial.

  3. Jugglery of mothering, wifehood, fulltime work on a job, running a household, and somewhere writing or hope of it.

  These were Olsen’s credentials. She thought that her experiences as a worker and a mother had made her a more sensitive writer of fiction. She was arguably better prepared to write a novel than a woman who had spent all her life within the halls of a university. She had lived in a range of communities, among different kinds of people, and, as an organizer and activist, she had listened to them talk about their hopes, dreams, and fears.

  On the last page of the application, Olsen outlined her vision for her future work. She still planned to write the great proletarian novel, a book that would bring to life the struggle of the working class. Her aim was not to instill pity in her readers but to catalyze social change. “It is a social novel, and my intention is to move the reader to that comprehension which alters,” she wrote. She wanted to show how “human lives are wasted and barred from full development” and “how most people are denied a society in which they can be valuable.” It was a project straight out of the 1930s—something like the work of James Farrell, or Theodore Dreiser, or John Dos Passos—but it was also, she hoped, timeless. The book would “promote reverence for life,” she wrote. “Because what is is unendurable otherwise.”

  She concluded by enumerating the benefits of the Institute for a writer like her:

  Economic freedom to work full time on writing for a clear space of time

  Distance (personal): 3000 miles from happenings and needs of those dear to me, which when close can pull from and sometimes interrupt writing.

  Distance (impersonal, in sense of exile): To live away for a while from daily happenings. For balance.

  Literary atmosphere. Access to that which is timeless. To be able to use a great library, look at mss. of dead writers who have been sustenance to me, go sometimes to hear lectures and readings, perhaps to talk with someone whose life has been literature. Sense of being near a center of evaluation and education.

  This last benefit—the literary and intellectual atmosphere—was particularly appealing to Olsen. The Olsen household had always been one of books and intellectual inquiry. They were the family that talked politics at dinner, the family that exchanged used bo
oks on holidays. “I think it was the first real ‘family’ I ever saw in action,” T. Mike Walker, Julie’s friend, once said. “They were talking, laughing, joking, teasing, telling their stories of the day, being listened to with respect, being responded to with love. They discussed literature, music, film, and politics. They wanted to know what I thought, what I believed, what authors I was reading.” When a young Julie vocally disagreed with a schoolteacher’s depiction of slavery as largely benign, the entire family went out for dinner in celebration. To be in Boston, a culturally elite city, and to study at Harvard, the nation’s most prestigious institution of higher learning—these were tantalizing opportunities.

  Olsen also made sure to list her publications: her reporting for Partisan Review, individual works of short fiction, and the collection Tell Me a Riddle (she sent three copies, calling them “an essential portion of this application”). She noted that the collection had been named one of the nine best books of the year by Time; she also listed the “response of over a hundred letters” from readers as evidence of her “professional accomplishment.”

  When she wrote the application to the Institute, the world of higher learning was still a little bit mysterious to Olsen; her classes at Stanford had all been in creative writing, and she wasn’t sure what a community of “scholars” would require from its applicants. But she knew there would be at least one person at the Institute she could talk to, whose life had also been saved by literature: Sexton.