The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Olsen suggested that caring for children might be incompatible with creative life. “The very conditions of motherhood: those that are the same as creative work,” she noted. “The intensity, absorption, immersion, the trying and using and demanding and calling upon infinite variety of resources.” And yet “children need one now, and often husband distractibility.” She reflected that during the early years of motherhood it is nearly impossible to carve out the large chunks of time needed to immerse oneself in a creative project. But she also admitted that she enjoyed taking care of her children, that she loved those who had “claims and needs of me.” Hers wasn’t an easy binary: Olsen had felt torn—“I keep on dividing myself”—because mothering and writing both fulfilled her. She longed for an impossible life, one in which she could devote adequate time to each.

  Olsen’s account of navigating among life’s competing pressures gave the lie to the era’s easy solutions to the problems facing women: how to educate them to their satisfaction, how to encourage their femininity without trapping them in it, how to get them “back on track” after their children have grown. She feared that there was no getting back on track; you might have missed the one moment in which you could’ve composed that particular short story, just as you might have missed a child’s first steps. The right moment would never come again. Memories fade. Material slackens. Work you started years ago seems strange, or bad, or no longer worth completing. Inspiration is as fleeting as infancy; close your eyes, and you miss it altogether.

  Olsen, however, was no pessimist. Her Marxist humanism, which came through in her talk, demanded she produce a vision of a better world. She suggested an end to the “strange breadline system” of grants and foundation funding, which interrupt work with other work and which benefit only a lucky few. (These words surely landed awkwardly among the Institute crowd.) She recognized that women were socialized to be self-sacrificing: they were taught to put others’ needs before their own. They could be taught differently. She preached “reverence for life,” for the capable humans of all races, genders, and classes who, under the right circumstances, could produce miraculous art. Olsen wanted a world in which she wouldn’t have to choose between earning a wage, playing with her daughters, and writing her fiction. She wanted to bring into being a world in which all people could explore their creative capacities and fulfill their ambitions without fear of going broke. In her dreams, one heard echoes of that famous line from Marx, about how a communist society “makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.” Olsen added child rearing to the mix.

  She ended her presentation forcefully, with a series of pledges. “My conflict…to reconcile work with life,” she said, quoting from an old journal entry. “Where I create I am true…I seek no other realizations than those of my work…I will take every path back to the beginning…I will collect myself from everything that distracts me and out of my too facile proficiency I will win back and husband the things that are mine.” She would sequester herself in a solitary room—“my prison cell my fortress”—and listen for the voices from the past. She still feared it was too late for her to recover her writing, but she would try; as she’d said earlier in the talk, she did not detest failure so much as a lack of effort. She would shield the work from the rest of life.

  It was an unmistakable rebuke to one part of Bunting’s planned program, the idea that “studying…mixes wonderfully with homemaking,” as she’d written in her New York Times Magazine piece. Bunting had spent years arguing that motherhood and creative, or intellectual, work sustained each other and that a woman could divide up her day hour by hour and make progress on all fronts. Bunting, for one, could do this: with her daily to-do lists and hourly schedules, she kept up with her research and her homemaking. Most people could not. Bunting came from wealth, and in the early years of her career she had relied on her husband’s professional class income. Financial worries didn’t impinge on her intellectual life until her husband died. More than that, Bunting was a scientist, not an artist. She prized organization and reason; she didn’t while away days imagining fictional worlds. Olsen countered Bunting’s “common sense” perspective with her own lived experience. She suggested that there were fundamental incompatibilities between mothering and artistic creation—especially for those with fewer resources than Bunting had possessed throughout her life. Olsen argued that life was not like a calendar: it could not be divvied up and parceled out. Mothering and all its rewards took away from artistic inspiration and execution; you could not live in the world of your novel in progress and live with your children simultaneously. Even as she expressed gratitude for her time at Radcliffe, Olsen pushed back against the premise of the Institute.

  Olsen read out her last few half sentences. She had been talking for nearly two hours, twice her allotted time. The women in the audience were restless and annoyed. Some found the talk self-indulgent and self-exculpating—so many empty words to explain why this woman hadn’t produced any work, nearly six months into her fellowship time. They hadn’t been about to follow Olsen’s rambling way of speaking. As women largely from the professional class, they presumably weren’t compelled by Olsen’s struggle to work.

  But Sexton was captivated.

  She had listened intently for the entire two hours, her eyes fixated on her older, wiser friend. “If anyone had stopped her, I would have chopped their head off,” she later said. She had been worried about failure for the past few months, ever since The Cure, her play about religion and psychiatry, had failed to make the impact she’d imagined for it. The play—centered on a suicidal woman, Daisy, who is tormented by childhood trauma (she ran away from home on the night that her family’s house burned down, killing her family members) and who seeks help from a psychiatrist and from Christ himself—had been drawn from Sexton’s notes on her therapy sessions from 1961. Sexton had staged a reading of the play at the Charles Playhouse during her first year at the Institute, but it had gone poorly, and at that point she threw her copy in the glove compartment of her VW Bug. She later claimed that she left it there for three full years.

  Now Olsen was offering her a theory of failure, a way of understanding how and why creativity stalls and sickens. The talk shed light on the failed play, the bad times around her birthday, the stymied poems. Sexton was used to talking about her creative powers as something beyond her control—“Genius flew the coop,” she once reported to George Starbuck, her former classmate and lover, during a lull in 1962. But Olsen suggested that it was all less mysterious than Sexton had once imagined. Sexton was particularly moved by Olsen’s descriptions of artistic self-sabotage. Hemingway’s line about his own failures resonated: he had destroyed his talent, Olsen said, “by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much he blunted the edge of perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook, by selling vitality all his life, trading it for security, for comfort.” Sexton, too, felt torn between comfort—respite from her internal demons—and creative success, which she knew depended on her ability not to silence but to master those feelings that tortured her. “What kills the creative instinct—what blunts the axe?” she wondered later, thinking back on Olsen’s talk. She contemplated trying to do without alcohol and pills: “Maybe I’ll have to do without my crutches.” She might gamble her life’s assistants for her work.

  After the talk, as the women dispersed, Sexton shyly approached Olsen and asked to borrow her notes. That summer, Sexton hired a secretary, with whom she spent hours transcribing “Death of the Creative Process.” The strange, stuttering document they produced more closely resembled a diary than a formal presentation; it was all notes and abbreviations and quotations. It is fitting, then, that Sexton tucked the copy away among her more private papers—her letters, notebooks, and drafts of poems. There it would remain for decades�
�a testament to Olsen’s influence and to the intimacy between the two artists.

  “Tillie rededicates you,” Sexton once said. In times of struggle, perhaps Sexton turned to the transcript, read a few lines, and gathered her strength to write once again.

  * * *

  —

  The summer of 1963 was the last time the five Equivalents were all together in the same place. Two of them—Olsen and Pineda—had one more year at the Institute. For the rest of them—Swan, Sexton, and Kumin—their time was up. They would be going on to other things; they had plans to travel and to go back to teaching positions. They were going to revive old routines or maybe explore new opportunities. In any event, these three would not be returning to the yellow house on Mount Auburn Street come fall.

  And so they made the most of their remaining time together. At least once that summer, they all went swimming in Rockport, a town on Massachusetts’s North Shore about an hour-and-a-half drive from Cambridge. In the nineteenth century, Swan’s ancestors had landed in Rockport after emigrating from Sweden. They had stayed there for a generation and had worked in the stone quarries. When she was studying at the Boston Museum School, Swan used to picnic up in Pigeon Cove quarry with her fellow painters. Black-and-white photos in her personal papers show the twentysomething Swan in a printed skirt and a sweater over a collared shirt. Her hair is short and curly. She sits between two men—the painters Ralph Coburn and Ellsworth Kelly—and next to the remains of a picnic: paper packaging and food scraps and drinks in glass bottles. She looks as if she has been caught mid-laugh by the camera. She looks very young.

  Now, almost twenty years later, she returned with a new group of friends. There are no photos from this gathering—or at least none in the archives of any of the Equivalents. In fact, there are no photos in the archives that show all five of the Equivalents together. Whatever picnics they enjoyed or laughs they shared that summer are lost to history. Perhaps they thought they would reunite again soon, and so they didn’t think to preserve their memories. Or perhaps they knew on some level that they couldn’t stop time—that their year together was perfect and ephemeral and impossible to replicate.

  On July 4, 1963, the Equivalents held a picnic. It’s not clear who hosted or how long they spent together. Still, it’s possible to imagine what such a day might have been like: children playing, strawberry shortcake, fireworks. Maybe the men talked about Willie Mays’s game-winning home run for the Giants a couple days before. Maybe the women talked about cake recipes, or maybe about their works in progress. It was one of their few purely social occasions, a time when family and fun took priority over work and writing. It must have been a lovely day.

  The joy of that summer picnic cannot be retrieved. The traces these women left on paper are necessarily limited, as was their time together: a fleeting window of women’s camaraderie and autonomy in a society not designed for such things. In another sense, though, the record of what it meant for the Equivalents to be together is almost limitless, for it is preserved in the essays, poems, sculptures, and paintings that they made. Even after their shared time at the Institute was over, the Equivalents continued to make art and to collaborate with each other. They celebrated each other’s publications and went to each other’s art openings. They listened to each other give public readings; sometimes they sat in the audience of a lecture hall, and other times they tuned in via radio.

  But it wasn’t always as easy among them as it had been when they were all in Cambridge. Conflict erupted more easily and was harder to patch up. Someone became jealous; someone else delivered an insult that she couldn’t retract. The discord too is part of their story—just as it is part of the story of the women’s liberation movement, which swelled and fractured and dissipated in the decade after the Equivalents disbanded. There is no friendship without complexity, and no social movement without internal disagreement.

  As the five women turned toward the future, they wondered what they might achieve and what it might cost them in the process.

  PART THREE

  1964–1974

  CHAPTER 13

  Do It or Die Trying

  ON AN EARLY SUMMER EVENING IN 1963, just over six years since she had made that nervous walk down Commonwealth Avenue toward John Holmes’s seminar, Sexton found herself walking down a different city’s streets, toward a different group of poets.

  She was in the upper Sixties on the West Side of Manhattan, a quiet part of the city close to Central Park. The iconic restaurant Tavern on the Green was in one direction, the new Lincoln Center in the other. As she walked, she could admire beautiful, historic buildings in a range of architectural styles: neo-Renaissance, art deco, beaux arts, an occasional Queen Anne. Sexton was again walking with a companion: her husband, Kayo, who had accommodated himself to his wife’s literary success and had decided to go with her on this particular journey. They were together, on their way to a gathering of literary elites.

  Eventually, they reached their destination: 15 West Sixty-Seventh Street, the home of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. With a confidence that she hadn’t possessed six years earlier, Sexton led her husband up to the one-bedroom apartment. What she found there was very different from the adult education classroom where she’d made her first public appearance as a poet. The apartment—compact but still elegant—was self-evidently the home of writers. Books filled the built-in shelves, and ladders leaned against the walls to facilitate the retrieval of the works that lived near the ceiling. Great windows looked out onto the city streets. Famous writers moved through the sitting room.

  Stanley Kunitz, whose Selected Poems had won the Pulitzer in 1959—the same year Sexton had enrolled in Lowell’s workshop—was in attendance. So was Marianne Moore, the “great lady poet” whom Sexton and Kumin had heard read not so long ago. Then Sexton had been just another anonymous audience member; now she was fit to sit at Moore’s table. When the group sat down to dinner, Kayo found himself right next to the intimidating playwright Lillian Hellman, who had been indirectly responsible for Sexton’s two delightful years at the Institute when she’d sat on the executive committee. Kayo, the lone salesman among a group of artists, had no idea who his tablemate was.

  But Sexton knew Hellman, just as she knew Kunitz and Moore, Lowell and Hardwick: prizewinners and poet laureates, former mentors and current members of the New York intelligentsia. And here she was among them, no longer a student or an amateur but a published, celebrated poet. If she had any moments of feeling intimidated, of feeling less-than, she needed only to recall her newfound credentials: a well-reviewed second collection (All My Pretty Ones), a two-year stint at the Radcliffe Institute, and, most recently, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the very first of its kind.

  Sexton had received the award in May, during her last month at the Institute. On the strength of her two collections, the academy had granted her a traveling fellowship of $6,500 (more than $50,000 today); she had not even had to apply. “The Am. Academy offered me the dough and I just couldn’t turn it down,” she wrote to her old mentor Snodgrass. The award was to support a year of travel in Europe, from the summer of 1963 through the summer of 1964. With the fellowship funding, Sexton could travel all over Europe—France, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Egypt, Beirut, Spain, Portugal—visiting all the places her beloved grandmother had once visited. She would write poetry inspired by long-dead European writers. This was a dream, though a daunting one for a woman who preferred intimate companionship and the comforts of home to solitary adventures in unknown lands. But Kayo insisted she grab the opportunity. “It is your chance at life,” he told her. “Take it!”

  Sexton’s triumph was also a victory for the Institute itself. An established institution had recognized the brilliance of one of its first fellows, thus legitimating the selection committee’s choice and validating Bunting’s hypothesis. The Radcliffe president had argued that a program like hers could ser
ve as an on-ramp to prestigious and important professional opportunities, and for Sexton it had. She was the Institute’s first success story. The New York Times covered Sexton’s fellowship award, and The Boston Globe profiled her after the academy announced its prizes. At the year’s final seminar talk in May 1963, a joint presentation on poetry by Sexton and Kumin, Connie Smith announced Sexton’s award. The entire group of fellows applauded.

  * * *

  —

  Sexton was not the only Equivalent to use the Institute as a launchpad for a new adventure.

  Kumin had set two goals for herself when she’d entered the Institute in the fall of 1961: find an escape from the suffocating social life of the suburbs, and make a go at writing fiction. By the summer of 1963, she had made progress toward both. That summer, the Kumins spent their weekends going “up-country,” to a farm they’d purchased for $11,500 in the early fall of 1962, after a yearlong search. Kumin had been longing for a country escape since at least 1961. She had wanted to get away from suburban life with what she called its “day-to-day hazards”: “The lost socks, the white blouse that has turned pink from proximity to a never-before-washed red sweatshirt. The missing dog leash, followed by the errant dog. And the endless Saturday dinner parties where wives outdid one another with inventive hors d’oeuvres and cocktails of grenadine and pineapple juice.” She was determined to get away from all these petty obligations and find time and space to become a “serious female poet.” Vic didn’t have a particular desire for country living, but he was happy enough to follow his wife, and he could imagine getting back into skiing, a sport he’d learned while stationed in New Mexico. When the Kumin couple inherited roughly $5,000 each—Kumin from her grandmother, Vic from his mother—they began their search for a place far away from the Boston suburbs.