The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Her mental health deteriorated as her marriage crumbled. Dr. Orne, the therapist she had worked with rather successfully for years, moved to Philadelphia in 1964. Sexton was hospitalized after a suicide attempt in the summer of 1965, then prescribed Thorazine, a powerful antipsychotic with intense side effects, including weight gain. It inhibited her writing and forced her to stay out of the sun. Lethargic, uninspired, and gaining weight, Sexton worried that she had traded her facility with language for so-called sanity. “The g.d. tranquilizers I started to take at M.G.H. this summer have completely stoppered any original idea,” she wrote to Olsen. She lived like a shut-in. Everything the Institute had given her—her first home office, her work space in the house on Mount Auburn Street—had been lost.

  She would remain in this work slump through the beginning of 1966. Her marriage was “as fragile as a cracked egg,” and she feared stepping out of her role as the sick one, lest the egg crack open entirely. Writing to Olsen in October 1965, after her suicide attempt, she enclosed the poem “Self in 1958,” acknowledging that that poem was as relevant to her life now as it had been when she’d written it. “I am a plaster doll; I pose,” the speaker declares at the poem’s outset. She was hollow, lifeless, back in her old dark place.

  Even as Sexton regressed emotionally, her critical reputation continued to grow. After Oxford University Press published her Selected Poems, which comprised poems culled from her first two collections, Sexton faced criticism from British reviewers who thought her poetry overly personal. Their criticisms echoed some of the worst reviews she’d received in the past. In 1963, the poet James Dickey had used the publication of Sexton’s All My Pretty Ones as an occasion to attack “the confessional quality” in much recent verse, which to him was a “new kind of orthodoxy.” Though he had also faulted Lowell and Snodgrass, he had singled out Sexton as the worst of the lot. “It would be hard to find a writer who dwells more insistently on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience, as though this made the writing more real,” he had written in The New York Times Book Review. It would be many years before Sexton forgave her fellow poet. Until then, she carried a copy of the review in her pocketbook, a spur that she could dig into her side whenever she craved punishment.

  The relationship between Sexton’s depression and her poetry was a complicated one. Usually, Sexton couldn’t write at all during the acute phases of her mental illness. These were the times that she couldn’t get out of bed, or that she would go to the hospital. Her writing happened in the aftermath of these episodes. It is also true, though, that she got much of her poetic material from the feelings and experiences she associated with these bad spells, and that the writing had an ameliorative, if not a curative, function. Her disease did, in some sense, inspire her; she approached poetry because of her illness, even if illness and creative practice could never easily coexist.

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  And so, as Sexton stabilized from this last bout of suicidality, she turned once again to poetry. Just as she had in 1957, she mined her depression and suffering for material. During the brief respites from the lethargy her drugs produced, she wrote what she would later call her “death” poems. “Flee on Your Donkey,” the best of this set, describes the experience of returning to a mental institution. The speaker is jaded and weary; “it’s the same old crowd, / the same ruined scene,” she observes. The “permanent guests” haven’t made any changes to the place; meanwhile, doctors offer shock treatments to the “uninitiated.” The speaker is more experienced than these neophytes, less shocked. “I have come back,” she observes,

  recommitted,

  fastened to the wall like a bathroom plunger,

  held like a prisoner

  who was so poor

  he fell in love with jail.

  Gone is the lyricism of early poems about madness, like “Music Swims Back to Me,” Sexton’s first real work of art. It’s been replaced by sordid similes—the patient is like a “bathroom plunger,” a permanent fixture in a dirty space—and a kind of flat tone. The tragedy that the poem describes is not madness itself, but rather the speaker’s failure to leave madness behind, either through death or through cure. The command to “flee on your donkey, / flee this sad hotel,” near the end of the poem, to “for once make a deliberate decision,” might easily be read as a call for suicide—to exit the institution “any old way you please!” The speaker is agnostic about her exit strategy, for her fate feels foretold: everyone in her family has found a different way to die from “the fool’s disease.”

  Writing both signaled and fed Sexton’s happiness. By the spring of 1965, she had turned a corner. “For the very first time I WANT TO LIVE and do live,” she wrote to Olsen. She began writing poems on the theme of living. Some were for her growing daughters: “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman,” written for Linda, and “A Little Uncomplicated Hymn” for Joy. Others were love poems. “Your Face on the Dog’s Neck” was written for Olsen’s friend Annie Wilder, a San Francisco–based psychiatrist, “short and funny and smart as a whip,” who had visited Cambridge right before Sexton sailed for France. The connection between the two Annes was intense and immediate, a kind of coup de foudre. “I’m in love with you already,” whispered Sexton to Wilder on the day they met. Wilder reciprocated: she referred to Sexton as Icarus, and to herself as Icarus’s “catcher.” The two began a furious correspondence. They later traveled together and, according to Sexton’s biographer Middlebrook, engaged in a sexual relationship. Sexton had found another source of adoration and emotional support.

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  —

  Sexton published these poems in Live or Die, released by Houghton Mifflin in 1966. “Live,” the poem that closes the collection, takes its epigraph from Bellow’s Herzog: “Live or die, but don’t poison everything,” the line she’d quoted in a letter to Olsen after the two first met at the Institute. It is an unlovely poem, with ugly images and base language: the speaker describes “the baby on the platter, / cooked but still human, / cooked also with little maggots, / sewn onto it maybe by somebody’s mother, / the damn bitch!” But its message is one of endurance. “Even so, / I kept right on going on, / a sort of human statement,” the second stanza begins. Later, she describes a life that “opened inside me like an egg,” an allusion, presumably, to one of her children. The poem ends triumphantly: “I say Live, Live because of the sun / the dream, the excitable gift.”

  The ending, with its repetition and its heavy stresses (“Live, Live”) makes the message clear. It’s an unambiguous ending, and the poem is weaker because of it. The Holocaust imagery, perhaps inspired by Plath, seems unoriginal, if not in poor taste. But Sexton herself was feeling strong, and the certitude of her final stanza reflects this newfound strength. The hospital of “Flee on Your Donkey” has been replaced by the natural world; the patient’s shift has been exchanged for the sun.

  Sexton was quite pleased with the collection and its affirmations. “I have a feeling the poems are splendid,” she wrote to her agent Cindy Degener. “But then, one has to have some sort of feeling like that about their own work no matter who prints it or likes it.” She arranged the poems chronologically—“with all due apologies for the fact that they read like a fever chart for a bad case of melancholy”—in the hopes that the arc of the collection would make apparent, and secure, her own journey from despair to joy.

  She was less pleased with the planned cover design. Houghton Mifflin proposed a book cover with pink and blue flowers and green frogs. Sexton thought it looked like the cover of a children’s book.

  Frustrated, she called Swan—her friend, fellow artist, and former collaborator. “They’ve sent me a terrible book cover,” she explained. “Have you anything I can use?” By this time, Swan had turned away from portraiture—and particularly from the parent-child portraiture—that had fascinated her in the 1950s. She had become interested in pai
nting other things: bottles, glass, still life. She was annoyed by those fans who wanted her to keep doing mother-child portraits: “I’ve outgrown that, you know, but sometimes your audience doesn’t.”

  She was also grappling with a health challenge: lupus. Swan had faced health problems before. She had been born with a clubfoot, though it didn’t impact her life too much. She had received a surgical correction when she was very young, and other than needing to buy different-sized shoes for each foot, she didn’t find herself impeded. Lupus presented a much more significant obstacle. She was diagnosed shortly after she finished her term at the Institute. An autoimmune disease, lupus produces inflammation throughout the body and often manifests as joint pain, fatigue, and rashes or lesions. It landed Swan in the hospital for weeks at a time, where Olsen, who was in her second academic year at the Institute, visited her regularly. By March 1965, she was out of the hospital and had moved to a different house in Brookline. She continued to see doctors, rest, and take pills.

  Yet Swan remained a dedicated artist and a good friend. She rummaged through her drawings and came up with one she called Gothic Heads. It is a delicate drawing, quite different from Swan’s bold, expressionist early portraits. The image features two faces turned toward each other, possibly a man and a woman, but it’s hard to tell. One has its eyes closed; the other’s eyes are open wide, in fear or awe. The eyes, nose, mouth, and chin on each face are all rendered precisely, but the jaw and hairline fade into white. It’s as if the models have poked through some invisible plane and left half of their heads on the other side. The image reflected the collection’s duality—the twinned, opposing desires that it aims to express.

  Sexton persuaded Houghton Mifflin to use this image for the book cover. According to Swan, the design team managed to ruin the image by orienting the figures vertically and arranging large type over it, but it was nonetheless far better than the colorful, cutesy image the publisher had first proposed. Swan would go on to draw the cover images for nearly all of Sexton’s remaining books: Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), The Death Notebooks (1973), and The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), which was published posthumously.

  Anne Sexton’s Live or Die, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1966

  Jacket art by Barbara Swan

  Transformations, a book of poems inspired by the Grimms’ fairy tales, was their most involved collaboration. The collection had actually been inspired by Linda, who, when she was an adolescent, often read and reread the Grimms’ tales at the kitchen table. Transformations, published in 1971, was one of Sexton’s most popular works. In the estimation of the critic Helen Vendler, the collection was Sexton’s most formally successful work. Her “most realized tone is precisely a malevolently flippant one,” Vendler wrote in a piece for The New Republic in 1981. The “grim tit-for-tat of fairy tales” and the “clean trajectory” they offered appealed to Sexton and allowed her to play the satirist. “No matter what life you lead / the virgin is a lovely number,” begins “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”:

  cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,

  arms and legs made of Limoges,

  lips like Vin Du Rhône,

  rolling her china-blue doll eyes

  open and shut.

  Here, the beautiful virgin is but a cobbled-together commodity, a patchwork of pleasing products: wine, porcelain, china. She is a thing to be bought or sold, ruined or preserved.

  Elsewhere, Sexton mocked the optimism of certain fairy tales, such as “Cinderella.” The poem about that tale’s princess begins, “You always read about it: / the plumber with twelve children / who wins the Irish Sweepstakes. / From toilets to riches. / That story.” Other versions of “that story” follow: “from diapers to Dior,” “from homogenized to martinis at lunch,” “from mops to Bonwit Teller.” There’s something deflationary about this litany of success stories; they seem not romantic, or miraculous, but rather banal, even a bit crude. Sexton anticipated the work of the British writer Angela Carter, who published a book of feminist fairy tales in 1979; both writers used the genre to explode myths about virtuous women and the conduct that is required of them.

  Swan illustrated each of these witchy poems. A poem would arrive from Sexton in the mail, Swan would suggest an image, and then the two would go back and forth tweaking the design. Though Swan disclaimed any knowledge of poetry, she inevitably saw things in Sexton’s poems that the poet herself did not see—just as with the collaboration around The Musicians, when she and Sexton saw new things in each other’s work. A poem based on the fairy tale “Iron Hans” seemed, to Sexton, to be a warning about the danger and chaos of the world, whereas to Swan it was a story about caretaking and protection. She illustrated the poem with an image of a boy riding safely on the back of a gentle giant.

  Sexton trusted Swan “more than I trust myself,” she confessed in a letter in 1973. Swan, according to Sexton, was “very sensitive to the poet’s word.” Swan later also collaborated with Kumin: she provided the cover image and seventeen illustrations for Up Country, Kumin’s 1972 book of poetry. She did all this even in the midst of her and her family’s own challenges: her health, her husband’s decision to open his own gallery, her children’s complicated teenage lives. Her life was full and fast-paced; Swan only slowed down in her early sixties, when she fell on a step and injured her foot, limiting her mobility. She kept painting throughout everything, even in her later years. Her last show was a posthumous one, a retrospective held at the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 2013, ten years after Swan died. The show included some of her early portraits, including one of her dear friend Sexton.

  “I did it because of friendship…with the two poets,” she said years later, speaking about her cover designs. “It’s not as if I had an agent and I was out there hounding the publishers to please, please let me do a book you know…That’s not my—I just did it out of friendship.”

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  Live or Die won the Pulitzer Prize in the spring of 1967. The prize, which came with $1,000 and the approval of the literary establishment, elevated Sexton’s entire oeuvre, including all those poems about “the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience,” as Dickey described them. (Today the prize comes with $15,000.) Kumin rushed over to the house in Weston to celebrate. Kayo bought flowers. Even Sexton’s estranged sister sent a telegram: “Generous greeting from us both it is great to be related to a celebrity.”

  Sexton accepted the “celebrity” status her sister conferred upon her, and she raised her speaking fees to $700. For the rest of her life, she would measure her fees against those of Dickey, one of the highest-paid readers of poetry, and challenge her agency to match them.

  She had also triumphed over her death wish, at least for the moment. Her poetry both gave voice to it and silenced it. “Language”—her favored term for poetic composition, always capitalized—was her life force. It was what she offered her readers, many of whom were similar to how she had been in the late 1950s: young, female, mentally struggling. Unlike many writers of her stature, Sexton read and responded to poems and letters from readers, offering thoughtful yet honest critiques of their work. To one woman, whose work she had criticized fairly harshly in a prior letter, she wrote with significant words of encouragement: “Your poems are sensitive. They show a great inner strength, a deep knowing of things. Keep it up.”

  This was Sexton’s way of nurturing—the task with which she had so struggled as a young mother. She might not be able to bake cookies or a potato, but she could evaluate a line, share her own drafts, be honest about her own difficulties. This is what she offered her elder daughter as Linda became a writer herself. “Mother was generous in teaching me everything she knew about writing,” Linda recalls in her memoir. “She also began to ask me for my opinion of her poems as they emerged from her typewriter and thoughtfully considered whatever reaction
I could muster….Never once did she laugh at my naïveté, my clichés, the melodrama of my adolescent yearnings.” She gave her interlocutors the gift of taking them seriously. Through collaboration and critique, she attempted to “make not so alone the lonely art.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Hurt Wild Baffled Angry

  IN NOVEMBER 1966, two months after the release of Live or Die, Betty Friedan held a press conference from her apartment on Central Park West. Friedan—once Polly Bunting’s co-conspirator, now a best-selling author and a staple on the lecture circuit—held forth from a lilac velvet chair. She wore a tailored black suit with a fur collar; neat and feminine, she seemed to observers “more like a chic-career woman…than a Susan B. Anthony–type crusader.” Her voice was gravelly and deep; it was a surprise coming from such a small person.

  Poised and confident, she began to speak. Women did not have true equality, she explained to the members of the press. They faced sex discrimination in the workplace; they couldn’t find affordable child care. They were consistently underpaid. President Johnson had promised that his Great Society would bring citizens on the margins into the mainstream of American life, but as Friedan saw it, there was no concentrated effort to involve women as a distinct class, nor to validate their rights. Such apathy was no longer acceptable; women demanded governmental action now. Punching the air with each point, like a boxer warming up for battle, Friedan declared, “We will take strong steps in the next election to see that candidates who do not take seriously the question of equal rights for women are defeated.”

  Three weeks earlier, Friedan and hundreds of other women had come together in Washington, D.C., to participate in the National Organization for Women—known by its acronym, NOW. The acronym was Friedan’s idea. She had scrawled “NOW” on a cocktail napkin the prior June while attending the third national conference of commissions on the status of women, also held in D.C. Frustrated by governmental inaction and by her own lack of influence, Friedan had turned to activist Pauli Murray, who held a JD from Yale Law School, who was also present at the conference, and asked for her thoughts on how to provoke government action. (Murray was the first African American student to earn a JD from Yale Law.)