The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  On August 22, 1963, what she sometimes called her “execution date,” Sexton put an ocean’s worth of distance between herself and her support system. She and Robart stood on the deck of an ocean liner. They blew bubbles in the direction of the shoreline, where Sexton’s children were watching. Sexton had approached her departure date with a good deal of trepidation—at one point, she was so nervous that she passed out in Dr. Orne’s office—but she’d fortified herself with a load of reassuring objects: her typewriter, more than fifty pounds of books (and sixty-five pounds of clothes), and a bound volume of letters from her grandmother, to whom she had been very close. She’d also asked Kumin to check in regularly with Kayo and the girls. Sexton wouldn’t be able to call Kumin daily—transatlantic phone rates were too expensive—but they promised to write to each other. The day before she departed, Sexton had a final phone call with her best friend, then, perhaps dissatisfied with the farewell, sat down at her typewriter.

  The note was brief. “All I have to say is that I love you, and will write, and will not die, and will come home the same,” Sexton wrote. She signed the letter “Anne (me),” as if to remind Kumin—and herself—who she was. Kumin, receiving the letter, was “touched all the way down to the callouses on the balls of my feet.”

  Sexton left for her year abroad with the expectation that she would produce a book’s worth of new poems. What better place to write poetry than the land of Rilke and Rimbaud? She and Robart traipsed through the narrow streets of Paris—Sexton with a kerchief wrapped around her undone hair—stopping in cafés when their legs gave out. They particularly loved visiting flea markets. In Belgium, their second stop, their luggage was stolen, and they replenished their wardrobes with European-style blouses. With her new clothes and newfound love of café culture, Sexton was starting to assimilate to Europe.

  But she found it nearly impossible to write. She couldn’t find adequate solitude; someone, usually Robart, was always in the room with her. “I’m lonely as hell, but I’m crowded too,” she wrote to Kumin from Italy in October. Every poem she produced felt flat. She wrote a poem about the Atlantic crossing, which she later found disappointing. She drafted a poem about Venice, which she soon came to feel had a “false note.” She was haunted by Europe’s history: its many literary representations all pressed upon her, suffocating her creativity and her confidence. “You know whats wrong with poem I wrote in Venice,” she reflected to a Kumin, “it’s too much like Mary McCarthy who I had just read on Venice.” (McCarthy had published Venice Observed in 1956; it was a book full of idiosyncratic ideas about what McCarthy called “the world’s loveliest city.”) Too many American writers had offered their takes on the Continent. What could she say about it that would be new?

  The thirty-four-year-old Sexton, never one for vigorous exercise, was also physically and mentally exhausted. During the first few weeks of the trip, she and Sandy walked miles on foot, visiting the sights and searching out restaurants and cafés. She even started to style her own hair, though she was displeased with the results. Sexton was unused to such activity—“can you imagine me walking to Boston?” she wrote to Kumin—but she found it calmed her whirling thoughts and eased her anxiety about the trip.

  The real problem for the itinerant poet, though, was the absence of her best friend. “God, how awful it is to write and not call you up,” Sexton wrote to Kumin in October from Venice. “I mean, it really brings it home to me how much fun we add to our writing lives with our close friendship.” Without a creative community—the Institute, a workshop, or even just the collaborative dyad formed by two poets—Sexton found writing nearly impossible. Instead of composing poems, she spent much of her European trip meditating on the conditions necessary for writing poetry—a topic similar to Olsen’s seminar talk, which she’d just finished transcribing that past summer. In a letter from Amsterdam in early September, she reflected that the “true nature of the poet” is to be “shut out, to be always the observer of his (her) own life.” This was all well and good, but she wondered, “What good is being shut out if you don’t have someone to discuss it with.” Discussion happened too slowly via airmail; Sexton longed for the instant gratification that a phone call or a face-to-face encounter could provide.

  Being separated from Kumin had profound effects on Sexton. First, it destroyed her routine. “Oh Max, how I miss our good morning talk,” Sexton mused late in August, not long after her arrival in France. “I feel as sorry as tho I had lost an arm and were still trying to use it.” Picking up the phone had become second nature, a reflex that she now had to suppress. Too, Sexton could be honest with Kumin in a way she could be with no one else. (Dr. Orne inspired a different kind of honesty, more childlike and less coherent.) Though she kept up a loving and affectionate correspondence with Kayo, Sexton reserved her truthful, troubled letters for Kumin. Kayo’s letters “beg me…to be his princess,” she explained to her friend in October. “Kayo will always embrace…but understand? seldom? know me? never.” To Kumin, though, she could talk about her anxiety, her inefficiency, and her fear that she was really, truly mentally ill—that she needed constant care from medical professionals. Sexton thought that Kayo had pushed her to travel in part to demonstrate that she was “cured,” and she feared she was not and never would be.

  Most important, Sexton had long relied on Kumin for stability and for a sense of self. “Oh Maxine, all this chat is just to say, hello, I’m here,” Sexton said in a letter from Florence. It was through listening and talking to Kumin that Sexton affirmed that she really existed and would continue to exist the next day, and the next. Now, without her friend, Sexton began to feel manic and unstable; she had a “strong…feeling that I am just barely surviving.” She peppered her letters to Kumin with first-person pronouns, each “I” a visible sign of her endurance. Kumin attempted to calm Sexton with reminders that “nothing changes except the ribbon in the typewriter.” With her characteristic certitude, Kumin told her friend, “We are all going to make it.” The phrase became something of a mantra for Sexton, who insisted in all her letters that she would survive, that she would come home, that she would “make it.”

  One quiet night in Venice in late September, Sexton found herself thinking back to the year she and Kumin first met. John Holmes had brought them together in that strange little workshop in the Back Bay, but he had also nearly torn apart their incipient friendship. Sexton marveled at how close she and Kumin had come to being separated by him. There had been other tests since then—including the seventy-two hours when Sexton thought that Kumin alone had received the Radcliffe grant—but Sexton felt that these early years had been the real testing ground. In a letter to Kumin, she reflected on these trials: “If John could not separate us…who could,” she wrote. “We, Maxine, have been tried, and found never wanting…See. Our friendship has survived.”

  In an era when men dominated households, classrooms, and psychoanalytic studies, Sexton and Kumin nurtured an exclusive female bond. Despite the pressures imposed by the men in their lives, they had generated a love of their own.

  If Kumin was at all resentful of doing this caretaking at a distance, if she had perhaps hoped for a respite during Sexton’s year abroad, she didn’t show it in her letters. She did, however, admit to some jealousy. “I had not realized that I envy you,” she wrote to Sexton in August, “but find that I do.” While Sexton was jaunting from Brussels to Amsterdam to Zurich, Kumin was cooking, hosting several difficult family members, and treating back pain. “Some people have adventures with parapluies on the Metro,” she wrote to Sexton, a bit huffily, in early September, “and some people stay home & make the frigging jelly.” Sexton was drinking Negronis and going on gondola rides; Kumin was “downing crème de cacao” and rereading Sexton’s letters and “wishing I were there.”

  Though she ably performed her duties as touchstone and confidante, Kumin wondered at times how she could be someone’s friend and nurse, her critic an
d her caretaker. That fall while Sexton was abroad, Kumin read through Katherine Mansfield’s journals. Mansfield was a favorite of Olsen’s; perhaps Kumin picked her up at the older writer’s recommendation. Mansfield, who’d died at thirty-four in 1923, had been ill with tuberculosis for much of her life. Her husband, the critic and writer John Middleton Murry, had never been good at caring for her, and Mansfield had relied instead on a female friend, Ida Baker, whom Mansfield called “L.M.” (she had renamed her friend “Lesley Morris”). Baker was an extraordinarily devoted friend: as Katie Roiphe has written, she would “periodically drop everything and devote herself to Katherine in whatever capacity she was needed—as housekeeper, seamstress, confidante, companion, cook, or nurse.” Although Mansfield was often grateful and affectionate toward her friend—“friendship is every bit as sacred and eternal as marriage,” she once wrote—she later dismissed Baker’s help and abruptly ended the friendship.

  Kumin was dismayed by the way that this “touching deep friendship…deteriorates into common waspishness or worse over the years of companionship, nursing, gen’l homely looking afters, so that KM eventually despise her, & everything about her is exaggerated to rasp, grate, pick.” Though Kumin used the Mansfield anecdote as an occasion to think about the difficulty of taking forward old friendships into a new phase of life (“There ought to be an Exchange open for swopping [sic] off used up friendship & trying on other ones,” she wrote), it’s hard not to see the warning in the story. A person who is too constant, too dependable, can be taken for granted. Someone who assumes completely the mantle of caretaker cannot also be a true friend.

  Kumin wanted to be more than a caretaker. She was a friend, not a nurse, and she too had needs. She needed Sexton’s intellectual companionship and understanding. She needed Sexton to shake her up and pull her out of her proper, reserved self—her persona of a dutiful daughter of a “beautiful lady.” Sexton was the stormy, wind-tossed counterpart to Kumin’s stable, grounded self.

  Sexton once joked that she was Kumin’s first real female friend; in these letters, Kumin admitted as much. “I let you in, bag, baggage, gifts and impediments,” she wrote to Sexton, one cold and wet day in late September. She had “dared to have these precious feelings and dare still to hold onto them.” She turned some of these “precious feelings” into a poem, a valediction that forbade one friend to mourn the other. “We have our own constants,” one line began:

  There is a world of water between us

  and the humpbacks of these

  mink hills between us

  and months before we will speak

  except in the clipped words of cables

  or the mechanical click

  that our portables make

  talking on onion skin

  across the Atlantic.

  The “onion skin” might have reminded Sexton of Lowell’s seminar, where the sound of onionskins rustling filled the silent classroom. That’s where Sexton had met and befriended Plath, who was now dead. Now Sexton was struggling to survive.

  In October, Sexton wrote Kumin a desperate letter from Rome in which she alluded to a crisis, one that she would have to explain in person. (It was a brief affair that Sexton had engaged in while in Italy, which she would keep secret from Kayo.) She asked Kumin to drop some hints to Kayo that an imminent return was possible and that it might be all for the best. To her friend, Sexton confessed that she was incurably sick and that she needed therapy, no matter what Kayo said. “Max, the thread is bare,” she wrote. “If I don’t come home I will die. Some wine does not travel well. I am such a wine.”

  On Sunday, October 27, Sexton and Robart returned to Boston; Sexton had made it through only about two months of what was supposed to have been a twelve-month trip. Nine days later, she returned to Westwood Lodge, the mental health facility where she’d first stayed in 1956. She’d become suicidal in the days since her ship docked in Boston, and Dr. Orne decided that she needed rest and stabilization more than probing therapy.

  When she’d concluded her time at Radcliffe, Sexton had thought she had won her freedom—from therapy, from her family, from a conservative part of the country—but it turned out to be more than she could handle. Now she was nearly a prisoner, kept in an institution she did not much like (she would have preferred McLean Hospital, which housed Lowell during his breakdowns), against her will, and to her husband’s disappointment.

  Still, she was glad she had traveled, even if only for those two months. She’d glimpsed new sites and gathered material for a poem or two. (She wrote one upon her return, “Menstruation at Forty,” that alluded to her European fling.) More important, she’d seen anew the value of her friendship with Kumin. Their letters had forced them to articulate what they meant to each other in new ways. Sexton perhaps put it best in a letter from Rome, written right before she fell apart. “Oh Maxine,” she wrote, “to have a friend that loves you as you are…that is precious, that, in itself, is an embrace.”

  * * *

  —

  Such friendship was exactly what Olsen had found at the Institute and what she couldn’t bear to lose when she returned to the Bay Area in September 1964. In the months leading up to her departure, she’d been unfocused and unproductive. On May 8, 1964, she’d given her second Institute seminar, titled simply “Two Years.” The weather that day was sweltering; as the fellows assembled in the stale first-floor room, Smith apologized for the heat. The talk Olsen delivered was circular, stuttering, and digressive. Her speech was filled with “ums” and “uhs”; her tone was apologetic, as if she knew she should be talking about her writing, not about why she could not write. She alluded obliquely to class and race, and she suggested that her shifting class position was one reason she, and myriad unnamed others, found writing difficult. Even as she reveled in the fact that she could now “dwell in possibility,” as her idol Emily Dickinson once put it, she was distressed that so few people would have a chance like hers, and though she didn’t say so, her nervousness suggested that she was ashamed she had done so little with her chance. In some ways, she might have felt that she had betrayed those who were not as lucky as she had been, those whom she wanted to serve.

  She left Boston at the end of the summer, with notes toward a book and debts that she had to pay. Back in San Francisco, loneliness assaulted her immediately. Jack was back at work, while Laurie returned to boarding school in Vermont. Olsen had loved the solitary weeks of the past summer after Jack and Laurie had returned to California—“the first time in my life alone,” she’d told a friend—and she disliked being back on the West Coast, away from the Boston bookstores, which had amazing stock and let her browse for hours. Her friends were all socializing without her; she heard of their escapades only in retrospect. One fall evening, the Equivalents gathered with their husbands for a dinner party. The only one missing was Olsen, who was back in California, back in her old life. Sexton wrote to Olsen later that they had meant to call her while at dinner, but they had all forgotten. “We thought anyhow and of you very much.”

  Wounded, isolated, Olsen called and wrote frequently. She sent her East Coast friends colorful vintage postcards and longer typewritten letters, a habit she would keep up for years. “I sometimes get so longing lonesome to talk its only the bonds of my undone work keeps me from flying out for a week,” she wrote to Kumin. On another occasion, she wrote, “Sometimes perhaps you [Max] + Anne—poets—come to see me. Or I will—an other day—come to Cambridge. (Perhaps.)” Often she enclosed some small token: rose petals, rhododendron blossoms, sprigs of spring growth. Most of her recipients were grateful, but some, like Sexton, were simply “bemused,” both by the curious gifts and by the strange tone of Olsen’s letters. Olsen could be at once dramatic and evasive; if received at the wrong moment, her gilded cards and dried flowers could seem excessive or twee.

  Desperate for the twinned goods of solitude and community, Olsen turne
d elsewhere. She had made close friends among some of the writers she had met at the MacDowell Colony. Still, she failed to make progress on the novel. As she had done at the Institute, she wrangled extra time at the colony, but the fiction still didn’t come. Age, anxiety, and travel fatigue conspired to prevent her work. For years, she had claimed that her obligations—to a boss, to her children—had held her back from writing. Now those obligations were eradicated, at least for a time, and she still couldn’t seem to write. Her grant time was again running out. Olsen feared she was “done for.”

  * * *

  —

  When Olsen wrote about being “done for,” she was imagining the end of a writing career. Sexton, meanwhile, was envisioning the end of her life. In late 1964, one month after Olsen left Boston, Sexton and Kayo purchased a house at 14 Black Oak Road in Weston, the town in which Sexton had grown up. They wanted a bigger house, a better school system, and, ideally, a full-time housekeeper. “What I need is a mother,” Sexton wrote to a friend. “WANTED…A RENTED MOTHER!! U.S.A….That is how the ad ought to read.” The colonial they settled on didn’t please the poet. The house was too big, and the room that she worked in wasn’t private enough. And worst of all, there was no pool. The Sextons later built a pool on the property.