The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Sexton kept working her images; she called Swan throughout the process to ask her to reckon with the new writing. A poem began to take shape. A voyager, to whom the poem is addressed in the second person, travels through time and space to arrive at an underground grotto, “a great hole in the earth.” A flutist of ambiguous gender plays a magical tune called “Being Inside.” “This is the music that you waited for / in the great concert halls, / season after season / and never found,” the speaker reports. Other travelers arrive for the concert, drawn by the piper, who, like the flutist, is somehow both woman and man. The dead arrive as well, their “protruding fingernails” having scratched out pathways from their coffins, down into the bowels of the earth. The concert turns sinister; you—the traveler addressed throughout the poem—learn that you will never leave this cave. Other voices clamor to be let in; perhaps they, too, will be granted entrance one day. The speaker promises, “There will be no pain.”

  Weeks later, on a May morning, Sexton sat in Kumin’s breakfast nook, pleading with her more learned friend to provide her poem with an organizing myth. Wasn’t there something…about the great search for…something? In the middle of the earth? Kumin was the kind of poet who would start with a myth and write a poem, while Sexton would write a poem and then look for a myth to match. Kumin couldn’t come up with anything. Sexton acknowledged that she didn’t really know what she was looking for—or, really, what she was writing about. The poem itself was an incomplete quest.

  Sexton didn’t publish the poem until 1966, when it appeared in her collection Live or Die, the title taken from that line in Bellow. By then, it had a new title: “To Lose the Earth.” But before she changed the title from “The Musicians,” she read it aloud, in May 1963, at an Institute seminar. Before the seminar began, she hung Swan’s Musicians on the wall behind her; the audience could look at it as the poet read her work. Sexton made her typical apologies—in this case, for the poem’s length as well as for the fact that “it isn’t a good reading poem.” The Institute women listened patiently, reading along with their mimeographed copies of the poem and noting that Sexton must have made changes as recently as the night before.

  The women in the audience felt themselves addressed by the “you” of the poem. They were along for the ride into the bowels of the earth. The poem moves from “the wreckage of Europe” and the “Common Market” to a cave “that a pharaoh built by the sea,” where a musician plays his flute. There, belowground, the dead protrude from the walls. Those who have found themselves in this underworld must try to decide if they want to leave, or even if they can. After all, the music is so enticing, and the figure playing it so mysterious. There might be enough in this cave to entertain a visitor for a long time.

  When she finished reading, Sexton addressed Swan, who was listening from the front row. “How about it, Barbara?” she asked. “Can we keep going forever?”

  As if Sexton’s question had been about their collaborative relationship, rather than a particular poem, Swan responded by revealing both a painting and a drawing she had done based on the fragments she’d heard over the phone. One was called The Sorcerers. It was as if the figures from The Musicians had shape-shifted in response to the music of Sexton’s piper.

  “My painting and drawing are extensions,” Swan explained. “There are images in your poem that I have yet to conjure with.” She sounded like a sorcerer herself.

  Swan propped up her new work alongside the old. Her drawing seemed to be a continuation of Sexton’s poem, a further evolution of the murky musician figure that had inspired the writing. It was as if the shape-shifter Sexton described in her poem—her musician, both a woman and a man—had transformed once again. Swan and Sexton were engaged in a strange artistic back-and-forth, passing the musician figure between them and altering him as they did so.

  “It’s like incest,” someone whispered.

  Murmurs of agreement and skepticism traveled through the audience. Swan and Sexton paid no attention. As if they were alone in Swan’s home studio, the two artists began debating between themselves the “truth” of their respective representations. “It’s a false image!” Sexton cried, disgusted with her poem. “It’s a poetic lie.” Swan tried to convince her friend otherwise, insisting that Sexton had gotten something right about the underground setting and about the enchanting nature of the music. “They’re both completely true to themselves,” she explained. Sexton, distracted, and at this point probably drunk, began riffing on the idea of a heavenly setting, something undiscovered. “Of course we all want to fly,” she said, almost to herself. She didn’t sound rational. But that, in a way, didn’t matter for Swan; their collaboration was based more on sound than sense.

  “The greatest art of all, to me, is music,” Sexton continued. “It says…it hits people directly, it’s so inside of you…writing can’t do it.” Nor could painting. Both writing and painting projected outward an individual’s consciousness and unconsciousness. Music, however, most often emerged from collaboration. Consider the composer who writes a score: musicians, and perhaps a conductor, are required to bring the composition to life. There was a reason that Swan’s painting features not one musician but two. Even as Sexton marveled at how both the writer and the painter failed to capture music, she engaged in an act of collaboration much like the musicians themselves.

  It wasn’t like incest, in the end. Sexton and Swan came from two different traditions; theirs was an exogamous love. They always remained a bit strange to each other—through their time at the Institute and throughout their future collaborations, of which there were many. Their friendship endured through—and even depended on—mutual misunderstanding. “Barbara and Anne had one of the most beautiful relationships between women that I’ve ever seen,” Olsen once said. “With Barbara, Anne was her most natural, the way she must have been with her children.”

  What Sexton and Swan shared was not a medium but a sensibility. They understood how to inspire each other. “Anne moved into my world like a tornado,” Swan wrote years later. “She shook it up, rattled it, possessed it like a demon.” Swan knew that if she opened up a book about Edvard Munch and showed Sexton The Scream, Sexton would be fascinated. She appreciated the way Sexton wrought meaning from the “murky textures” of her painting. “The creative mind deals with a world of the imagination,” Swan once explained.

  The artist and the poet carry this world around in their heads. They inhabit it. The scholar with a Ph.D. can study this world, analyze it, criticize it, even try to recreate it in biography, but the scholar can never really know the crazy, intuitive nonsense that whirls around in the mind of an artist.

  This is the world in which Sexton and Swan lived with each other.

  * * *

  —

  For the Equivalents, being “with each other” could mean talking on the phone, or writing intimate letters, or sitting together in a seminar, or walking along the river in the late afternoon. Sometimes a friendship existed in multiple forms: Kumin and Sexton’s phone calls complemented their in-person bonding. Similarly, at the Institute, Sexton transformed the correspondence between her and Olsen into an in-person friendship.

  Meanwhile, a friendship that had once taken place in person—that between Sexton and Sylvia Plath—had become a transatlantic correspondence.

  After their time at Yaddo, Plath and Hughes had left the United States and moved to London, where they had a daughter, Frieda. In a letter to Sexton from February 1961, Plath described her daughter as a “marvelous blue-eyed comic” who had convinced the couple that they wanted “to found a dynasty.” (Plath and Hughes had a second child, Nicholas, in 1962.) “We thrive in London,” Plath declared in her letter. She praised Sexton’s Bedlam, which she was rereading, and told Sexton to pass along compliments on Kumin’s “Fräulein poem,” in The New Yorker. At the time of writing, Plath had published a poetry collection, The Colossus, and Other Poems, in Br
itain and was hoping to find an American publisher. She was still determined to be a great poetess, even as she strove to be “an Earth Mother in the deepest richest sense,” as she had once put it in her journals.

  In an effort to accomplish this, Plath, Hughes, and their two children moved to Devon, in the southwest of England. In the winter of 1959, Plath had dreamed about “a house of our children, little animals, flowers, vegetables, fruits.” In Devon in 1962, she fulfilled this dream. “I am bedded in the country,” she wrote to Sexton in August, “keeping bees and raising potatoes and doing broadcasts on and off for the BBC.” She was also working on an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, which she would publish in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Her letters to Sexton were happy and chatty, though they also indicated Plath’s isolation. “How was the Radcliffe grant, did it really free you from the drudgery of housework?” she asked. “Tell me how things are with you, and Maxine and George. Who do you see, now?…I would love one of your newsy letters to stick on the wall.”

  Plath’s beautiful life shattered when Hughes left her for another woman. The couple separated, and Plath contemplated vengeance. She wrote fervently, frantically; the last months of her life were her most sustained and productive as a poet. It was during this time that she produced the work that Hughes, and many others, would come to see as true genius. “Daddy,” a controversial poem published in 1965 in the posthumous collection Ariel, repurposes fascist imagery to suggest that female suffering can be its own form of vengeance. The speaker, who loves “the boot in the face, the brute,” also sees herself killing her torturer. “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two,” she warns. “Lady Lazarus,” a poem from this same period, alludes to suicide. “I have done it again,” it begins; later, the speaker refers to “the second time,” when she meant “to last it out and not come back at all.” The last two stanzas of the poem constitute a warning to male readers as the speaker imagines a ghostly vengeance, wrought upon those who have wronged her. “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair,” she says. “And I eat men like air.”

  Lady Lazarus’s prediction came true: the ghost of Plath had its vengeance. On February 11, 1963, she died by suicide in her home. When the news of her death first broke in February, the Boston poetry community refused to believe that the poet had died from pneumonia, as was initially reported. They knew her death would be revealed to be a suicide, and they were unsurprised when their suspicions were confirmed. Plath had stuck her head in the oven—the site of feminized, domestic labor—and died of asphyxiation. According to the biographer and critic Diane Middlebrook, many Boston poets “saw the suicide as a particularly female revenge wrought on the model of a Greek tragedy, pathetic and terrifying.” Two years later, Hughes published the work his wife had written during the furious months before she died. Ariel, the posthumous collection, expressed all the rage and betrayal that Plath felt and that she’d hidden, even from her friends overseas.

  Plath’s death shook Sexton. It awakened her own suicide fantasies, and it concluded a long season of loss: Kumin’s father had died the prior fall, reminding Sexton of her own parents’ deaths. Plath’s crisp, cheerful letters to Sexton hadn’t indicated that anything was amiss. She had written “from Devonshire / about raising potatoes / and keeping bees,” as Sexton recorded in “Sylvia’s Death,” the elegy she wrote in the months after learning the news. In the poem, Sexton turned quickly to her own brushes with suicide and articulated something akin to envy. “Thief!” the speaker accuses: “How did you crawl into, / crawl down alone / into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.” Plath had usurped Sexton’s place as the era’s suicidal female poet; the poem was Sexton’s effort both to connect to her former friend and to reclaim her cultural position. “And me, / me too,” the poem’s speaker insists. She knows what suicide means.

  Sexton was pleased with the poem. She thought it expressed something about the secret knowledge that she and Sylvia shared. As she would put it in another poem, “Wanting to Die,” written a year later, those who contemplate suicide are akin to “carpenters”: “they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.” The language of craftsmanship is notable. In some strange sense, for a woman constrained to a particularly deadening form of life, suicide itself could become a site of almost professional expertise and achievement. Though she usually took notes well, Sexton, in this case, cared little for the opinions of her readers: though the poem was rejected by The New Yorker and criticized, in letters, both by Robert Lowell and by the poet Galway Kinnell, Sexton continued to think it quite good. “You may paste it on your wall,” she told George Starbuck, her former lover, who had spent many nights drinking at the Ritz and listening to Plath and Sexton talk about suicide attempts. It was a fitting directive: he is mentioned in the elegy as the “boy,” the one who sits in the cab between two women whose knowledge of mortality far surpasses his own.

  Sexton and Plath shared a death wish, one that stemmed from their own particular, troubled pasts. Whatever their respective chemical imbalances, it is likely no coincidence that both poets grew up in adjacent, straitlaced suburbs, places where women conformed to traditional domesticity. Their “fascination with death,” as Sexton called it, was surely augmented by the constraining, claustrophobic culture of mid-century America. This was a world that told them, again and again, that marrying and raising children were a woman’s best and only callings. At every turn, they were faced with the message that unhappy wives must be crazy. Sexton and Plath accepted that diagnosis and behaved according to script.

  “It is not when I have a baby, but that I have one, and more, which is of supreme importance to me,” Sylvia wrote in her journal, in June 1959. “And for a woman to be deprived of the Great Experience her body is formed to partake of, to nourish, is a great and wasting Death.” Some women, like Pineda, found the generative power of the female body inspiring. Others found it burdensome or terrifying. They longed to be defined otherwise.

  CHAPTER 11

  Mad for the Message

  ON FEBRUARY 19, 1963, just eight days after Plath’s death, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published by Norton. In the book, Friedan argued that women needed to work. They needed to work outside the home, and they needed to be paid. If they didn’t, they would sink into the depths of depression. Their sanity, the happiness of their families, and the health of the nation depended on their making “a serious professional commitment.”

  Friedan’s book was an analysis of the “happy housewife” ideology that had set in during the postwar years. College graduation rates for women were down; marriage rates were up. More and more census takers wrote down “occupation: housewife.” The women who responded to the census taker in this way—many of whom were white, middle-class, and college educated—were, according to the reigning ideology, supposed to be among the happiest women in the world. Yet many claimed to suffer from a vague malaise that neither money, nor medicine, nor psychoanalysis could fix. One called it “the problem that has no name.”

  Friedan named the problem—“a vague undefined wish for ‘something more’ than washing dishes, ironing, punishing and praising the children”—and described the dangers it posed. Women suffered under the spell of the “feminine mystique,” a belief that “the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity.” Proponents of the “mystique” argued that Western culture has devalued femininity. Women should stop trying to be like men and should instead accept their distinctly feminine characteristics, which included “sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.” This wasn’t the same as historical sexism, according to which women were inferior, inhuman—so much property to be protected and exchanged. The feminine mystique even allowed for female sexual pleasure: a vaginal orgasm (as opposed to a clitoral orgasm) from penetrative sex with one’s husband was not only appropriate but also a sign of one’s femininity. But, as Friedan noted,
this newfound attitude toward the feminine aligned perfectly with old prejudices and gender conventions. It wasn’t enough for women to give up education and career, to shrink their world down to “the cozy walls of home.” According to the feminine mystique, women were supposed to lobotomize themselves and to like it.

  How did the mystique take hold? Friedan argued that ladies’ magazines, their advertisers, and some influential theorists, such as Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead, had spread the “feminine mystique” throughout the country. Magazine columnists and short fiction writers idolized the “happy housewife heroine,” who had supplanted the “spirited career girls of the thirties and forties,” a time before the mystique took hold. Meanwhile, advertisers, on television and in print, appealed to the housewife’s creativity, suggesting that she could “express herself” by buying products for the home. Advertisers pitched the housewife products that required her to contribute something of herself (she could be “creative”!) while saving her labor. These products granted the housewife more time to spend with her children (though not enough time to pursue a career outside the home). A cake mix, to which she could add eggs and milk and butter, was the prototypical example: a homemade cake generated no profit for the company, while a store-bought cake would leave the woman free for other pursuits. Friedan, who called this tactic the “sexual sell,” made the incisive observation that “the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house.” In other words, capitalism itself was to blame for women’s suffering. Friedan had spent years working as a labor journalist, and her radical roots could be perceived in this critique.