The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  In the spring of 1963, they had found it: a farmhouse, built in 1800, half a mile up a dirt road, and barricaded by blackberry brambles. There was also a large barn and plenty of land that looked as if it had once been used for livestock. Kumin was struck by the isolation: when she first saw the property, she “realized there were no other houses on this nameless road. No sound of vehicles in the distance. No voices. The silence filled with bird calls.” This house, known locally as “the Old Harriman Place,” was what the Kumins called their “Hope Diamond.” Kumin’s parents had not approved: her father had instructed her not to buy a place on a hill, presumably because it would be hard to drive to the house in the winter, and her mother, so confused by all of her daughter’s dreams, couldn’t understand why Kumin wanted to deprive herself of all that Boston had to offer. But Kumin had been certain. Once they’d cleaned out the dead field mice and patched up the roof, the Kumins had begun taking their three children—now ages nine, eleven, and fourteen—up for the weekend, starting in the winter of 1962–1963 and continuing into the following summer. Danny, their youngest, felt that the New Hampshire house was really his mother’s project, but at that age he had no objections to running around the countryside.

  Each Friday evening, they packed the car and drove up north as the light faded. They would arrive late; Kumin found it “very spooky going up dark rutted hill at 9:30, big barn looming on left, big dark house on right,” but soon enough they would turn on the lights and the TV and “all was cheery.” They spent the days strawberry picking—looking for “hidden tiny tits of red all under the pasture grasses”—and exploring the pine groves. “Going in,” Kumin wrote, was “like inching into a thicket; once in, its an underground, upsidedown world, only sunlight miles above at tops of pines & nothing growing underfoot except a century of brown needles, all slippery smooth.” The place fed her poetic sensibilities; even the cursed blackberry brambles served as inspiration for a poem. She spent much of her day outdoors, clearing the brambles, and was perhaps the happiest she had been since her teenage days at summer camp.

  Maxine Kumin outdoors, 1960s

  She was also hard at work on her first novel. For Kumin, returning to prose meant returning to that Radcliffe classroom where Wallace Stegner had steered her seventeen-year-old self away from fiction. Now, with a master’s degree, a book of poems, and the imprimatur of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, Kumin set out to prove Stegner wrong. “I WILL DO IT OR DIE TRYING,” she wrote to Sexton.

  She began working on a semiautobiographical novel about a New Jersey pawnbroker and his “Radcliffe Bolshevik” daughter. She spent hours sketching out the plot, continually compressing it until it was narrow and “gemlike.” When, in September, Sexton went overseas, Kumin sent her long plot outlines and chapter breakdowns, trusting that her friend would give her honest feedback. Sexton took her role as her friend’s first reader quite seriously; as she once put it to Kumin, “Our good critical instincts are the marriage vows that bind us.”

  When she read the first part of Kumin’s novel, Sexton cried. “It was with the words choked in my throat, she did it!” Sexton wrote from Florence. She felt a kind of maternal pride—“it was like I had done it, but not quite an other I, an extension who come out good.” In this letter and the ones that followed, Sexton encouraged Kumin to focus on the emotional lives of her characters. In one scene in the draft, the father hits the daughter, and Sexton took issue with the daughter’s rational response: her mood, Sexton thought, would be “of self hate, not taking this assessments of good points into mind.” The fictional daughter was based on Kumin—cerebral and controlled, a person inclined to think her way into and out of problems. Sexton, so often the beneficiary of her friend’s rational reassurances, offered advice about how to grasp unruly emotional reality.

  Kumin’s novel was published in 1965, under the title Through Dooms of Love. It received mixed reviews. The Boston Globe called it a “moving story,” while the Los Angeles Times declared that this “first novel falls short.” The Times reviewer noted that the novel’s “wordy prose…cries out for contraction…and belies Mrs. Kumin’s past record as poet and denies her entry as of now to the ranks of the [Jean] Staffords and the [Eudora] Weltys.” She still had work to do as a fiction writer, honing her prose, developing her characters. Kumin was never one to shy away from hard work, whether it entailed wielding a hoe or a pen. She decided to write a second novel. She had accomplished what she had set out to: she had made her escape, she had done everything she planned to do, and she had not died.

  * * *

  —

  Kumin’s achievements were long planned; they were the products of foresight, hard work, and persistence. By contrast, Olsen’s successes were unexpected. The first surprise came just a few weeks after her March seminar talk, when she received an inquiry from a publisher named Seymour Lawrence. “Sam” to his friends, Lawrence was based in Boston and looking to start a publishing firm. He had heard that Olsen was at the Institute, and he asked her to join him for lunch. A publisher after the fashion of Bennett Cerf (Olsen’s would-be publisher at Random House), Lawrence could identify writers of talent who had commercial potential. (He would go on to publish Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.) At the time he reached out to Olsen, Lawrence had just published Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, a book more than twenty years in the making. Olsen admired Porter’s work, in part because Porter agonized over her writing in a way that reminded Olsen of herself. From working with Porter, Lawrence understood that some writers worked in stops and starts, taking years to produce great work. Olsen was flattered by Lawrence’s attention, but she was still bound to Cowley at Viking, to whom she had promised a book by the end of her fellowship time. She declined Lawrence’s lunch invitation, but a connection had been forged.

  Cowley, for his part, was growing frustrated. He had supported Olsen for years—intellectually, emotionally, even financially—and he was starting to worry that his investment would never be returned. He sent Olsen gently probing letters asking after her long-promised novel. “I think about you fondly & am delighted to hear that you’re getting some work done there in the chastely colonial reaches of Brattle Street,” he wrote in January 1963. Several months later, in April, he sent a follow-up note inquiring about Olsen’s husband, her health, and of course the book. “I have to ask about your novel,” he wrote, reminding her that he was her editor, “not that I don’t want to hear about it anyway, as friend, not editor.” And in September 1963, he insisted, “You should do what I’m trying to do: get it all down on paper & get it printed. I hear your work praised often; what we need is more & more of it.”

  Olsen had heard these words—or similar ones—from Cowley before, as well as from Cerf. But despite these professions of faith and confidence, she felt pressed by the idea of completing the book to deadline. In March, she sent him an update, saying that she was making progress on the novel. She enclosed some pussy willows, a sign of spring’s arrival, and, possibly, her own rejuvenation. But at other moments, she suggested that the book was dead.

  Her agent’s junior associate, Harriet Wasserman, suggested that Olsen publish something: an essay, a short story, anything that would break through the drafting and revising cycle in which she was caught. Olsen volunteered her seminar talk, “Death of the Creative Process.” Wasserman sent a transcript to the prestigious New York magazine Harper’s. In August, Harper’s agreed to publish the talk, but only if Olsen made some major revisions.

  When Olsen received the announcement, she was still in Boston: Connie Smith, miracle worker that she was, had found $2,500 to fund a summer of work. The Olsens had moved to Arlington, a working-class town that borders Cambridge, at the end of Olsen’s first Institute year; they’d wanted to be closer to ponds and parks, and they had wanted a cheaper apartment. Even with the Institute money and Jack’s income, the Olsens still borrowed money from friends. Ols
en had still been making notes toward her novel, but she now shifted her attention to the Harper’s piece, which needed to be transformed from notes into full sentences. Not long after she heard from Harper’s, near the end of September, Olsen and Jack flew back to San Francisco, where they moved into a new place on Alpine Terrace. Pineda, who had also lent money to Olsen throughout the Cambridge years, offered to pay an outstanding book bill at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, with “no worry about paying back.”

  Olsen missed the East Coast, though, and just a few months after leaving it, in April 1965, she flew back. On a friend’s recommendation, she had applied for and won a two-month stay at the famed MacDowell artist colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The colony had been founded in the early twentieth century by Marian MacDowell in honor of her husband, a composer whose muse required silence, solitude, and a lunch left silently in a basket on the porch of his cabin studio. By the 1960s, the colony was a robust cultural institution, led by the American composer Aaron Copland. Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker were just a few of the writers who had walked its woods and worked (or stewed) in the silent cabins. Lunch baskets appeared on porches each day.

  At MacDowell, Olsen had not just a room of her own but an entire cabin; instead of seminar talks, she attended daily breakfasts and dinners. The colony was coed, but in most other ways it resembled the Institute, with its mix of solitude and community. The Institute had not only prepared Olsen for this working environment but also helped her gain access to it; honors have a way of snowballing. The literary world has always relied on markers of prestige to determine whom to publish and whom to prize, and Olsen, now the recipient of multiple fellowships, found herself with more grant-funded writing time.

  That spring, Olsen had a surprise visitor: Sam Lawrence. Lawrence, who since their first meeting had moved to New York and established a relationship between his own imprint and Delacorte Press, had driven all the way to Peterborough to persuade Olsen to break her contract with Viking and sign with him. He offered her a $3,500 advance for her great social novel (with a check in the same amount upon manuscript delivery), as well as financial help with her daughter Laurie’s college tuition. Olsen acquiesced, broke her contract with Viking, and, newly flush, promised she would deliver her novel. It was something like a fresh start, or a third life.

  In October 1965, Harper’s published the first part of a two-part supplement titled “The Writer’s Life,” which included Olsen’s piece on the creative process. The supplement in which it appeared featured an essay in defense of editing by Norman Podhoretz, the editor in chief of Commentary magazine; reflections from the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer; and musings from Gore Vidal, who, with characteristic self-regard, interviewed himself. Olsen was the lone woman contributor. Her essay, now titled “Silences: When Writers Don’t Write,” was a touched-up version of her Radcliffe seminar talk: there were fewer extended quotations, and all the sentences were now complete and grammatically correct. Olsen had resisted the magazine’s edits—she couldn’t bear to see relevant material excised—but she eventually gave in. (An obsessive rewriter, she still made changes to the proofs.) Even with cuts, the article still covered seven magazine pages. It concluded with Olsen’s poignant personal reflections on her recovered writing life, on how she went from being the “emaciated survivor trembling on the beach” to the author of one published book. “This most harmful of all my silences has ended,” she wrote, referring to the period just before her time at Radcliffe, “but I am not yet recovered, may still be a one-book instead of a hidden and foreground silence.”

  Like “Tell Me a Riddle,” “Silences” was a lovely, mournful piece of writing, more art than polemic. It seemed a bit out of place among dutiful, prosaic accounts of the literary life. But publishing in Harper’s was a coup for a writer published in campus magazines and literary journals more frequently than in high-circulation periodicals.

  Sexton, who had loved the talk before anyone else, wrote Olsen a note of congratulations.

  * * *

  —

  The Institute had served its purpose: it had empowered its fellows, granted them access to present and future opportunities, given each woman a boost that she needed and deserved. And the fellows returned their part of the bargain: they published, they prospered, they showed that the Institute’s investments had been wise. Swan, who had a successful solo show in 1963, described this kind of symbiosis in a letter to Connie Smith: “My show has already earned the equivalent of another Radcliffe grant. I truly wish that all the Institute alumnae could publish their books, articles, poems and thereby gain a self-endowed grant.”

  But the Institute couldn’t fix every problem. Olsen remained a painfully slow, meticulous writer. She ended her time at the Institute without a finished novel. Kumin, for her part, was still seeking balance—splitting herself between states and responsibilities. Rather than immerse herself fully in farm life, she was driving back and forth to Boston, alternating home renovations with writing prose, trying to keep her needy friend Sexton afloat while tending to her growing children. She determinedly finished every writing project, but she had yet to produce a truly excellent work.

  And Sexton, successful and accomplished, arguably at the height of her powers, showed signs of another breakdown. When she’d won her traveling fellowship, she almost immediately began worrying about whether she could survive a year away from her family, her therapist, and Kumin. In the end, she enlisted Sandy Robart—the same neighbor who had accompanied her to the Boston Center for Adult Education in 1957—as her traveling companion in Europe. “I can barely cross a street in Boston alone…much less an Alp!” she wrote to Nolan Miller in early August. She was open with Miller and many others about her fears. “I’m terrified,” she told The Boston Globe, which profiled her on the occasion of her award. “The regularity of my home life, my husband, my daughters mean so much to me, to my sense of security that I am not at all easy about leaving them.”

  In May, as she contemplated her impending life change, she reached out to her old mentor W. D. Snodgrass. Their correspondence, so constant and necessary for Sexton early in her career, had tapered off, and Sexton picked up other correspondents to take his place. Sexton was often in closest touch with the correspondent who was most attentive and replied most frequently; she sent off letters much as a child, lost in a public space, might reach out to any number of passing adults, hoping that one of them might stop and hear her fears. That summer, in her state of trepidation, she wrote more letters than usual, to friends both old and new. “I wish I were back to the old days when I sat hunched over the typewriter, doing the desperate and lonely and even heart breaking work of trying to write, and rewrite and rewrite ‘The Double Image,’ ” she wrote to Snodgrass. “I was ‘true’ then.” She suggested the poems should be published anonymously; in this way, poets like her could avoid the pressures of fame.

  * * *

  —

  By “true,” Sexton meant that she had not yet, back then, developed the persona that she now exhibited at her readings, but she also meant something about professionalism more generally: the way it transforms therapeutic, introspective, self-preserving activities into obligations, a kind of wage labor. While Sexton, during that interview at the Institute, had told the researcher Alice Ryerson how important it was for her to be paid, to be recognized as a professional poet, she also resented some of the pressure that professionalization placed upon her. Poetry, for Sexton, was no longer just about self-inquiry or catharsis, though it was about these things still. It was how she supported her family (for much of her life, she made more money than Kayo). It was a public performance, one that would be admired and judged.

  * * *

  —

  The time for anonymity was over. Sexton was a somebody, and she had to perform. She had to attend dinner parties at the apartments of famous poets, fraternize with imp
ortant writers, and decide where she ranked among them.

  This is what Sexton was doing right before she left for Europe. That night at the Lowells, halfway through the meal, the dinner table supporting the elbows of writers suddenly and inexplicably cracked. Kayo, habituated to cleaning up messes, leaped into action. Sexton was struck by the image of her husband sitting on the floor and trying, futilely, to hold the broken pieces together.

  “I shall never forget the table in the midst of its earthquake with Kayo trying to hold it up and undoubtedly making things worse,” she wrote, rather uncharitably, to Lowell in early June. “I hope that it was fixable and that you are back in one piece.” She herself was patched together, as solid as she would ever be. She readied herself for a reward, one that would feel like a test.

  CHAPTER 14

  We Are All Going to Make It

  FREEDOM, EVEN WHEN IT IS FOUGHT FOR, is a thing to be feared; doubt and disruption often follow its arrival. Sexton, perhaps more than anyone, feared the opportunities that rose in front of her. She relied on the limitations placed on her life—her needy and noisy children, her difficult but dependable husband—to keep her emotionally steady and safe. Wearing a straitjacket is not so different from being swaddled; there is comfort in being constricted and constrained. If the decade of the 1950s didn’t offer women equality, or opportunity, or autonomy, it did offer them a set of rules and a clear life course. It promised them certainty—moral, social, existential—if not intellectual or creative fulfillment. In the beginning of the 1960s, the Equivalents and their peers were forced to reckon with problems that they had long felt to be beyond solving.