The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  The Institute was different. Among the testimonies about this early period at the Institute, there are next to no memories of ennui or resentment—the kind of private feelings that might have roiled college campuses or neighborhood networks. In the beginning, face to face, these women worked well together. They traded tips on child rearing and gossiped about men. They developed real affection for each other because they respected each other as serious academics and serious artists. To Kathie, the difference between the social lives of suburban women and the intellectual love that formed among women at Radcliffe was clear: “People were not there to join a country club. They were there to work.”

  Kathie was in Cambridge for a few reasons: to be closer to her sister, to see more of the country, to find interesting work, and, in part, to support her mother. Kathie was not yet twenty when she arrived in Cambridge, in the spring of 1963. She had known nothing but the Bay Area. She was unprepared for the historic buildings, the maple trees, the antique bookshops tucked away on side streets off Harvard Square. When it first snowed, she was surprised and delighted, as was her mother. Olsen hadn’t seen snow since her Nebraska girlhood, and she romped through the transformed landscape with the enthusiasm of a woman half her age. She built snowmen, pegged her family members with snowballs, and dragged the whole gang around wintry New England. “She loved seeing nature wear that garb,” Kathie remembered. She knew that there was some energy in her mother yet to be unleashed.

  From the fall of 1962 through the spring of 1963, Olsen formed special ties to four creative women—Sexton, Kumin, Swan, and the sculptor Pineda—who would become some of her closest friends. Pineda and Olsen spent many evenings laughing with their husbands. Kumin and Olsen traded ideas about gender and literary history, their debates reviving the sparring of Kumin’s undergraduate days, when she stayed up late into the night smoking with her classmates and talking politics. Most significantly, Olsen spent plenty of time with her longtime correspondent Sexton.

  Sometime during that first year, Swan produced a portrait of Olsen: a lithograph, not a sketch. She did Olsen’s portrait at the same time she was working on one of Emily Dickinson—a hero of Olsen’s and a writer whom Swan loved as well. Swan chose to focus on Olsen’s face; Olsen’s body, a mess of faint lines, barely registers in the engraving. The face, though, comes through clearly: her soft eyes, her gentle, closed-mouth smile. Swan used shade and shadow, rather than line, to create contour; the result is a face free from wrinkles, a face that looks like a young girl’s. Swan had captured something of Olsen’s youthful exuberance—the spirit of a woman who would still camp in the wilderness at a moment’s notice, or dance around an apartment even as the hour grew late. She added the fifty-year-old writer’s face to her pantheon of Institute portraits. They were something like Olsen’s desk pinups—the faces of women who “sustained and judged” each other.

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  Over the course of that first year, these five women knit themselves together into a friend group, a sort of institute within the Institute. They collaborated and debated and celebrated each other’s work. They saw each other as artists first and foremost and in this way differentiated themselves from the more bookish associate scholars. They did not have PhDs, but as the application had requested, they had “the equivalent” training in artistic craft. Joking about the way the Institute compared artists to scholars, they called themselves “the Equivalents.” It was a loose association: there were no regular meetings, no clubhouse rules. The five women and their families occasionally socialized together on weekends, and the women saw each other regularly in the yellow house on Mount Auburn Street. But “the Equivalents” was less a formal title for a tight group of five than a term of affinity, a way of calling each other kindred spirits.

  When she first came to the Institute, Olsen felt the most kinship with Sexton. One afternoon, late in the fall of 1962, Olsen persuaded her friend to accompany her on a walk along the Charles River. It was a warm fall for New England—staying in the sixties and seventies throughout October—and Olsen loved being out of doors. She walked out from Harvard Square along Mount Auburn and Brattle Streets, admiring the eighteenth-century houses and copying inscriptions from the tombstones in Mount Auburn Cemetery. A transplant, not a native like Sexton, she delighted in the region’s deep history.

  An observer might have been struck by their different kinds of beauty: one was lean and dark-haired, her face made up like a catalog model’s; the other had silvered curls framing a surprisingly youthful face. Both looked sharp: Sexton favored fitted blouses and she still loved to wear jewelry, while Olsen had taken to wearing clothes from the Finnish company Marimekko, which could be purchased at the Design Research store in Harvard Square. (The company paid women to walk around Harvard Square modeling the latest styles.) Sometimes, she bought bright, patterned cloth from the company and then paid someone to sew blouses and dresses to her measurements: she was stunned that you could pay someone to make clothes for you. Moved by the beauty around her, Olsen spoke aloud a few lines of Sara Teasdale’s poetry. Teasdale had written short, musical lyrics about beauty, love, and death; though she won prizes in her lifetime, including the 1918 Columbia Poetry Prize (later renamed the Pulitzer), male critics found her unsophisticated. She died by suicide in 1933—a fate that calls to mind the final couplet of her poem “The Answer”: “I found more joy in sorrow / Than you could find in joy.”

  Sexton knew this poem, and others, for when Olsen quoted Teasdale, she became strangely agitated. “Oh, so you love her poems too!” she exclaimed. “But you must never, never admit it to anyone,” she cautioned.

  Olsen, unfamiliar with the taste making and gatekeeping that preoccupied men of letters on the East Coast, looked bewildered. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Sexton confessed that she’d once shared her preference for Teasdale at the Holmes workshop, where Holmes replied that Teasdale was a poor poet, technically unimpressive and overly sentimental. Sexton had accepted, blindly, Holmes’s hierarchy of poets; according to him, Teasdale was “the lowest of the low.” But Olsen didn’t think in terms of canons and critics; she thought about a writer’s relationship to the truth, her vivacity, her intelligence. She evaluated writers by determining how and if they made her want to live. Later, when she gained a public platform, she praised the wide range of writers—men and women, white and black, working-class and aristocratic—who, in her estimation, were engaged in the hard, necessary work of “the maintenance of life.” That afternoon with Sexton, she insisted that they talk without shame about the writers who moved and sustained them. Teasdale was one; Edna St. Vincent Millay was another. Sexton admitted to her love of both.

  Sexton had once been afraid of becoming a lesser Millay; she had written to male poets for reassurance that she would be something other than a lady poet, a minor writer. This fear waned at Radcliffe, where women echoed and affirmed her tastes—not to mention her loves, her experiences, and her fears. As Olsen put it, “Our love of Sara Teasdale or Edna St. Vincent Millay didn’t shame us, with each other.”

  For the Equivalents, to be “with each other” meant more than simply being in each other’s presence; it meant supporting each other as artists and intellectuals, emotionally and practically. Swan’s husband, Alan, connected Kathie Olsen with a secretarial job with a science education organization. (Jack, having posted his union card, ended up with a job at the print shop for the Cambridge Chronicle, where he worked from 4:00 p.m. to midnight.) Several of them lent Olsen money; Kumin lent her at least $1,100. Kumin and Sexton watched each other’s children and tutored each other’s daughters. Each of the Equivalents hosted the others and their families for dinner; as Kathie explained, these were easy gatherings to justify because “everybody had to have dinner.” The socializing happened around meals because the women wanted to reserve the rest of the time for work. Meals were convivial but informal, such as the picnic that
was held on the Fourth of July. Each time an Equivalent took responsibility for feeding the others and their children, she eased the domestic burden on her friends.

  During this time, Olsen and Pineda became close friends. It was hard to know what it was about the gifted, cosmopolitan sculptor that attracted Olsen; perhaps it was her seriousness, perhaps her generosity, perhaps her interest in the earthly feminine. (Julie, Olsen’s second daughter, believed that it was impossible to pin down the reasons the friendship between Olsen and Pineda bloomed: she asked, why does anyone ever fall in love?) Within weeks of their first meeting, the two women began socializing with their husbands. Evenings, the Olsens hosted the Tovishes in their third-floor apartment for dinner, or they traveled out to the Tovish house in Brookline. They listened to music—a love shared among all four—and ate well. The couples discussed the politics of the day; the Olsens leaned further left than the Tovishes, but all four opposed U.S. military imperialism and believed in civil rights for African Americans. And they shared their work with each other. Olsen lent the Tovishes a copy of Tell Me a Riddle. One evening, back in their house in Brookline, the Tovishes stayed up late reading the title story aloud and weeping. They agreed that their new friend was a true talent.

  Such book swapping was common. Passing books among each other, the Equivalents created their own canon. It included Olsen’s copy of Kafka, collections by the lady poets—including Teasdale and Dickinson—and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. One might argue that Woolf’s text, with its emphasis on solitude and resources for the writer, was the theory, and the Institute, the messy practice.

  One day, Sexton went to dig up a copy of Woolf’s book in the Newton Public Library. She found a copy, gifted to the library in 1929. She took it to the circulation desk, where she learned that the book had never been checked out. It had been sitting on the shelf for more than thirty years, while the women of Newton went to college, quit jobs, contributed to the war effort, and marched back to the kitchen.

  “It makes me so mad,” she said later. “There are women sitting out there and they don’t know this exists…there’s something wrong with a town, you know, with a marvelous school system and everything else and this book had never been taken out…and it’s about being a woman! It’s about all of it!” Woolf’s argument about the need for one’s own space resonated strongly with Sexton. She reflected that her study had not only helped her write but also made for a happier home. With a room of her own, she felt as if she had come into herself. She called Woolf’s book “health.”

  Sexton rejoiced in her own room, but she also delighted in the women who occupied the rooms around her. At the Institute, she and Kumin continued to collaborate on individual poems and on their joint projects. Their children’s book Eggs of Things came out with Putnam’s in 1963. Charmingly illustrated by Leonard Shortall, the book follows the adventures of a foursome: Skippy, Buzz, Skippy’s younger sister (nicknamed Pest), and their dog, Cowboy. Their mission? To save the neighborhood vegetable garden from cutworms. The children decide to hatch some toads (“Did you know that two toads can eat a hundred cutworms for breakfast?”), but first they have to harvest the eggs from the nearby pond; these are the “eggs of things” of the book’s title. The toads save the garden, but not before tormenting poor Cowboy, who ends up in the bathtub where the tadpoles matured into toads. The book bears the imprint of Kumin’s naturalism: her love of seasons and soil, her attention to the invisible riches all around us. A second book, More Eggs of Things, followed in 1964. The volumes represent a happy time for both the Sexton and the Kumin families, a time when the children and their mothers remained open to discovery.

  Nothing represents this spirit of discovery—the spirit of the Institute—better than Aspects of the Oracle, the sculpture series Pineda produced while on fellowship there. Inspired by the Oracle of Delphi—the most renowned oracle in ancient Greece—Pineda crafted a series of oracle sculptures, each of which expressed a different mood: ecstatic, rapturous, jubilant, accusative, portentous, and exhausted.

  Her sculptures spoke with their limbs and torsos; they saw visions behind their closed, sunken eyes. In their agonies and ecstasies, they communicated mysteries that only women could understand. The “ecstatic” oracle turns her face up to the sky, as if awaiting benediction. The “rapturous” oracle looks upward too, though unlike her kinswoman she’s curled up, her knees tucked, her arms wrapped around her torso in a self-protective gesture. The “jubilant” oracle raises her arms skyward in either celebration or praise; the “accusative” oracle points ahead of her, in a pose not dissimilar to her “portentous” cousin. The “exhausted” oracle sits with her head bowed forward, her feet dangling, her head downcast. More than the others, this last one captures the affect of the historical Pythia, the prophetesses who spoke for the oracle, who forced themselves into trances, and who served visitors all day.

  The sculptures are recognizably human and even historically accurate (the bronze tripod, the shapeless dress); they are also, simultaneously, representations of emotions and ideas. The artist once said of the series, it “had something to do with the creative process, and struggle of getting something out, speaking something, or delivering it to somebody else.”

  Marianna Pineda, Aspects of the Oracle: Portentous

  A woman is at once a figure and an idea, a symbol and a person. Pineda once said that she was interested in how women occupied positions of power in myth and in history, “as we think they may have been in pre-patriarchal societies.” She saw in the female figure a range of earthly forces. With this new series, Pineda suggested that the female body, and the emotions it conjured and contained, could be a vessel for knowledge—the kind of wisdom that not even the most learned men could understand. Her oracle was a supernatural woman, but she wasn’t a witch—a persona Sexton used in her poetry and occasionally adopted onstage. The oracle was powerful but not menacing. She didn’t haunt. Instead, she offered what help she could to those who wished to know more about the mysteries of the world.

  CHAPTER 10

  Me, Me Too

  THERE ARE MANY SITES OF COMMUNION. Churches are one; libraries are another. Some people arrange séances and conjure spirits. Others turn the pages of old books, hoping to touch the dead. The connections they establish might elude language: a person senses the presence of another, even if the latter doesn’t speak aloud.

  Pineda believed that women were particularly attuned to spirits. She made sculptures of priestesses and prophetesses—and later, in 1980, a bronze statue called The Spirit of Lili’uokalani, a representation of Hawai’i’s last sovereign monarch—because she thought these works captured women’s spiritual powers. But there are other ways that female artists can conjure. In 1962, Swan and Sexton took a journey into the underworld together. Their collaboration happened in the spaces beyond speech.

  Swan had spent her first year at the Institute studying with George Lockwood, a master lithographer who had founded the Impressions Workshop in Boston, a school of printmaking. Swan was excited by the chance to learn a new medium, to make it “say what I want it to say,” and she joked to her friend about how grateful she was to Lockwood for employing a bunch of strapping, mustachioed young men to do the hard labor involved in printmaking. She laughed whenever these young men referred to women as “chicks.”

  On May 1, 1962, Swan gave a seminar talk on her lithographs—a “small visual essay,” she called it. Her pieces were strewn about the seminar room at 78 Mount Auburn, where they caught the afternoon light. The size of the pieces made it clear that lithography was indeed “backbreaking labah,” as Swan said, pronouncing the last word like a New Englander. She introduced the audience to the components and techniques of her chosen medium: you draw on the stone, she explained, then etch it with acid so the white parts will be covered and the black released by the pressing. Lithography was remarkable because an artist could revise the piece in between print
s: unlike painters, who simply covered up prior versions with more paint, lithographers revealed their artistic process—their errors, revisions, redirections. She paused over a lithograph called The Musicians, inspired by a line of Keats: “Heard melodies are sweet, / but those unheard / Are sweeter.” This had been one of her first efforts in the medium. Two figures, playing wind instruments, are set against a murky background—a fitting way to figure music, an art form that defies representation. The women in the audience gazed upon the work admiringly; Sexton in particular was captivated.

  The Musicians haunted Sexton. She purchased one of the early versions from Swan and hung it first in the living room, then moved it to her study, where she would glance at it in between writing letters and typing out a poem. To her, it had a sense of magic, maybe a twinge of evil. So much of Swan’s early work had been expressionist but nonetheless figurative; this lithograph, however, conjured figures only in the loosest sense. Sexton hadn’t seen anything like this in Swan’s other work, though she liked that work, too, and would have bought more lithographs if she could have afforded them. Occasionally, she would stand up from her desk and sidle up to the lithograph, getting close to it, far closer than one is supposed to get to a work of art. (Think of how an impressionist painting loses its coherence when viewed up close.) She was looking for something, though she didn’t know what—something that was inside the lithograph, she thought to herself, something that maybe wasn’t even there.

  She started to write. As always, she started with the images: “old palaces”; a piper, who is also a midwife, with an “unforgettable woman’s face”; a flute that “grows out of the wall like something human,” that is “driven into the wall like a pipe.” She wasn’t sure what she was describing; it wasn’t music so much as magic, perhaps? The images piled up until she felt herself lost among them. She picked up the phone, as she always did when she felt lost, but instead of calling Kumin, her most frequently phoned friend, she called Swan. Sexton began to read out loud what she’d written. Swan, interested and perhaps bemused, responded that she didn’t quite know what Sexton was after, but she felt inspired herself; perhaps she would draw something in response to Sexton’s lines.