The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Though many of the book’s major plot points have no basis in the poets’ real lives (and though Kumin made some alterations to their shared history), the quality of the friendship rings true. Throughout the novel, Kumin tries to hone her description of their bond. At first, describing the constant phone calls, she calls them “snugger than sisters. If one had a headache, the other took the aspirin.” Later, she refines this description. “Whatever they undertook jointly became an affair of just proportions,” Hallie reflects, while recalling the two of them listening to one of Dr. King’s public speeches. “They reinforced each other, their sympathies meshed, a long journey became a lighthearted visit…They were nothing like sisters, except in the ideality of sisters. They slandered, praised, fed, robbed. They depended.” It’s a lovely portrait and possibly an idealized one: an astute reader of the novel might wonder who, ultimately, depended on whom.

  It was this friendship that Olsen, unforgivably, criticized. In the same letter in which she pointed out the novel’s lack of depth, she offered a strange and damning critique of the friendship it depicted. Assuming Sexton would read the letter she sent to Kumin, Olsen spoke directly to the poet. “I love you,” she wrote, “and your friendship for Maxine but you also messed it up (you let her, Max) instead of helping Maxine to her best her great best respecting, insisting on her comprehending, working to what she most nakedly, singularly had to say you had to mix in what you wanted said, thought should be there, shallowized diffused yes putting the attention to surface pattern clutter technique.”

  It was an odd complaint—that somehow Sexton was responsible for a fictional alter ego constructed by Kumin—but it was not altogether incorrect: indeed Sexton had exercised a strong hand in Sukey’s construction. In 1967, while recovering from a broken hip, Sexton called Kumin daily to get updates on the novel in progress and to offer dialogue for Sukey. A visiting nurse, overhearing these phone calls about marital affairs and unintended pregnancies, would mistake them for gossip. For her part, Sexton loved the fictionalized friendship. A woman who knew a thing or two about portraits (recall “The Double Image”), she thought The Passions of Uxport was a fine one.

  In the end, Olsen’s discussion of Hallie and Sukey’s friendship amounted to more than a critique of the product: it was also a critique of the process, of the way Sexton sometimes dominated Kumin, and the way Kumin sometimes let her. It was also a critique of a close friendship that Olsen had seen as closed off to her. Reading Uxport, she had longed to “get into that Hallie-Sukey talk.” She had told Kumin she was “lonesome.” Sexton and Kumin always had each other, while at times Olsen felt as if she had no one.

  Kumin, not given to quick reaction, fell silent. Sexton, shocked, did as well. It was years before Sexton confronted Olsen about that neologism, “shallowized.” When she did, she expressed her hurt plainly, in a way that Kumin never did.

  “I was so shocked those many years ago when you said that I shallowized Maxine’s book,” Sexton wrote in July 1970. “No, Tillie, I never understood what you meant…It wouldn’t matter to me if I didn’t love and respect you, but I do, and it still matters.” She wondered if John Cheever, a favorite of Kumin’s, was to blame for whatever shallowness Olsen detected. She suggested that Olsen might like Kumin’s next novel better. (The novel was The Abduction, published in 1971 to reviews that called it “the weakest of Mrs. Kumin’s novels.”) She closed her letter by wishing Olsen all the best and said she would remain a “devoted reader.” Compared with prior letters to Olsen, in which she called Olsen “a genius and a good woman,” Sexton’s well wishes sounded cold. She was merely a devoted “reader,” no longer a devoted friend.

  Just as she had with Kumin, Olsen tried to write a letter that would make things right. “Anne—cherished and estranged,” she began. She thanked Sexton for her unlisted phone number “in the oddly formal, unsigned message” that Sexton sent her, either before or after the confrontational letter. She felt that she did not have the words to express her feelings, and so borrowed a few from Thoreau. In the end, though, she offered Sexton her own good wishes, more heartfelt than the ones Sexton had offered her: “Estranged or not always I cherish your hopes, feel kind to your dreams, see you nature groping garden like mine, do not like apart (your books, your picture, memories, part of me)—Be and work well—Fare well (not farewell), dearest Anne.”

  * * *

  —

  The Passions of Uxport had arrived at a bad time for everyone. Sexton, recovered from her broken hip, was facing negative reviews from overseas. Her British editor, Jon Stallworthy of Oxford University Press, wanted revisions made to her new book, Love Poems; he found these new poems too loose and missed the neat, formal poetry that had marked her early collections. Kumin continued to grapple with pain from her bladder infection. “This has been a ghastly year here,” she wrote in April, just after Uxport’s publication. “Almost no days without pain—but a dreadful reluctance to go back in to another hospital for more tests and more poking about.” Pain had become so central to her life that it’s no wonder that the central drama of Hallie Peakes’s life in Uxport is her mysterious stomach pain. Olsen, meanwhile, was grotesquely ill and despondent. In February 1968, right around when she received the blurb request from Harper & Row, she wrote a dark letter to Sexton, detailing her suffering:

  My pants are pulled down

  after a bloody bowel movement that hurt

  I am an old woman

  the pain in my back nags

  thats how they say it on the aspirin ads nags

  I use ad language more and more

  I come back to my work room

  where I do no work

  The sick Tolstoy (1904) glares at me

  hands wringing the afghan

  Emily Hardy Chekhov Anne look away.

  But she did not want her friend to look away: she wanted Sexton to see how broken she was. Her sentences snapped in half like dried twigs. Reading this winter note, with its stanzas and enjambment, Sexton might have thought that the fiction writer Olsen had written a poem.

  Surely these circumstances shaped the way each woman responded to the disagreement over Uxport. Perhaps had everyone been healthier, Olsen’s criticisms could have been discussed more calmly. But there is also something predictable about this falling-out—and not just because Olsen on more than one occasion fell out with writer friends. The bond among these three writers had been surprising at the start: Sexton, a woman who came from money, knew so little about how a working-class mother like Olsen lived. For a moment, their common goals had brought them together; now their political and artistic commitments were pushing them apart.

  Olsen and Sexton never recovered their formerly affectionate and intimate friendship. Sexton, who depended on her friends for care and support, couldn’t understand how Olsen could so casually insult her and Kumin. Olsen, who believed in high standards for all artists, including herself, refused to sacrifice her critical honesty in the service of friendship. Though the three friends had one last lunch together in Boston, during one of Olsen’s visits east, they never again felt the ease they’d had at the Institute, where they shared their great literary loves and finished each other’s sentences. The closest they came to healing was, fittingly, in their letters; they were writers before they were anything else.

  When words failed them, the natural world came to their aid. Olsen often turned to nature for solace. Kumin did as well; she always described the countryside sensuously in her poetry and her prose. Sometimes, a pressed flower or a leaf said what words could not. Once, sometime after the disagreement over Uxport, Olsen, traveling somewhere to give a talk or teach a class, found herself carrying three leaves, each pressed between pages of poems by Hardy and Dickinson. Kumin had sent the leaves to her as signs of autumn’s arrival in the East. “I take them as your forgiveness of my hurt of you,” Olsen wrote. “Thank you, Max. It steadies
.”

  CHAPTER 16

  There’s Nothing Wrong with Privilege, Except That Everybody Doesn’t Have It

  “THE CENTER WAS NOT HOLDING,” begins Joan Didion’s 1967 essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” first published in The Saturday Evening Post. She’s describing “the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967,” a country in distress.

  It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those who were left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.

  Things were falling apart, as the Yeats poem goes, and Didion had gone to San Francisco—“where the social hemorrhaging was showing up”—to interview hippies and runaways and to describe the broken lives they lived. She recounts her conversations with hippies and her observations of the counterculture. The essay ends with a small fire in a house, started by a three-year-old, and a couple of hippies desperately trying to retrieve “some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard that had been damaged in the fire.” The structure is clearly unsound.

  The world Didion described seemed nothing like the world of the 1950s, the one in which the Equivalents came of age. (Didion was born roughly a decade after Sexton and Kumin, but in attitude and manner she was closer to their generation than to the younger one.) In the ten years between 1957 and 1967, a nation defined by consensus and containment—or at least by the illusion of such things—had become one marked by division and disruption. Baby boomers born to members of the “silent generation”—those proud World War II veterans and proper homemakers in pearls—rejected the styles, habits, and mores of their parents. They clamored for civil rights and sexual freedom. The year 1967 saw the “Summer of Love” and a youth exodus to San Francisco. Skirts got shorter. Hair got longer and straighter if you were white, bigger and bolder if you were black. Music got louder and weirder: the Monterey International Pop Festival, the first rock festival in America, took place in June; it featured Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Following the advice of Timothy Leary, a researcher and advocate for the use of psychedelics, young people turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. Not even ten years after Sexton and Plath sipped martinis at the Ritz-Carlton, acid had replaced alcohol as some young people’s drug of choice.

  By this time, the women’s movement, like the country itself, had fractured. You could say the break happened in May 1968. One year prior, in 1967, a feminist named Valerie Solanas—a playwright and professed lesbian—had self-published the SCUM Manifesto; the acronym seems to have stood for “Society for Cutting Up Men.” Solanas identified as a radical feminist—a group that differed from liberal feminists like Friedan in that they rejected the belief that formal equality, at work or under the law, meant anything in a world that was ruled by men. They wanted revolution. In the SCUM Manifesto, Solanas advocated the complete destruction of men—as well as the overthrow of the government and the elimination of the money system. A year after publishing this document, and just two months after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Solanas shot the artist Andy Warhol, who survived the attempt on his life. (She had wanted his help producing one of her plays.) A prominent member of Friedan’s NOW—the blond, ex-Republican Ti-Grace Atkinson—visited Solanas in prison. Atkinson hired the witty black lawyer Florynce Kennedy to help with Solanas’s case, which prompted Friedan to send a frantic telegram: “DESIST IMMEDIATELY FROM LINKING NOW IN ANY WAY WITH SOLANAS.” Atkinson and Kennedy soon broke from NOW and founded their own radical feminist group, the Feminists.

  But this rupture reflected long-standing disagreement around strategy and tactics. Should “women’s libbers” pursue legal recourse and policy reform, or should they take to the streets? Should NOW announce official stances on marriage, abortion, and the nuclear family, or should it stay silent on these cultural issues and thus avoid alienating potential allies? Are lesbians part of the women’s liberation movement? Just how should feminists relate to men? NOW didn’t answer these questions to the satisfaction of women like Atkinson and Kennedy. The organization was particularly problematic on the question of lesbianism: Friedan once called lesbians a “lavender menace” and barred them from the First Congress to Unite Women, a NOW-sponsored gathering held in New York City in 1969. Radical feminists—Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Kathie Sarachild, Robin Morgan, Patricia Mainardi, and others—had far-reaching goals; they planned to work against the government and the legal system rather than working in collaboration with them. Soon, in New York, an eager, newly liberated woman could choose among rival radical feminist cells: Redstockings, the Feminists, New York Radical Feminists, and Cell 16. Many of these groups practiced “consciousness-raising,” a term coined by Sarachild in 1968. The historian Ruth Rosen defines it as “the process by which women in small groups could explore the political aspects of personal life” and notes that it was a technique borrowed from the civil rights movement, where it was called “speaking truth to power.” (Sarachild had worked as a civil rights organizer in Mississippi, where she encountered this organizing tactic.) The idea was that by talking about their daily lives—“speak from your own experience, sister”—women would come to realize how they had been oppressed. They would experience what came to be called the “click” of recognition.

  In addition to differentiating themselves from liberal feminists, radical feminists diverged from orthodox socialist feminists, like Olsen, who believed that a working-class revolution and the redistribution of resources would eliminate sexism. Radical feminists saw gender oppression as prior to and separate from capitalism, though it could work in concert with capitalism. But while radical feminists all agreed on the primacy of gender and on the need for a women’s movement, they were divided on a number of other important questions. Some believed in the value of consciousness-raising; others thought it hindered the movement. Some believed that the institution of marriage should endure—at least until after the revolution. Others called for its immediate elimination. Still others believed that lesbianism was the only politically coherent sexual practice for feminists. These disagreements—about leadership structures, the value of direct action, and whether a vanguard group was more effective than a group that welcomed many members from all walks of life—split organizing cells and resulted in the proliferation of different groups. Between 1970 and 1973, as the historian Alice Echols writes, “the movement was ravaged by intense factionalism over the issues of elitism, class, and lesbianism.”

  The conflict over the last of these proved to be particularly heated. On May 1, 1970, a group of protesters, hoping to raise the issue of lesbian rights, interrupted the proceedings of the Second Congress to Unite Women, a gathering organized by Friedan’s NOW in New York City. Some of them wore shirts emblazoned with the slur Friedan had once launched at lesbians in the movement: “Lavender Menace.” While a small cadre of women planned the action, many more joined the protesters once they’d taken the stage. That December, a group of prominent feminists, including Gloria Steinem, held a press conference to declare that both women’s liberation and gay liberation were “struggling towards a common goal,” but for many this statement was both inadequate and too late. Many lesbians had left the movement by this point, and Friedan, who was still homophobic, continued to purge the New York chapter of NOW of lesbian members. The historian Echols calls her chapter about the schism “The Eruption of Difference.”

  * * *

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  An eruption of difference can be destabilizing, and that can be a good thing. Sometimes an explosion can rock old buildings off their foundations. It can destroy old structures and clear a path for something new.

  Despite its reputation for political liberalism, academia is in many ways a conservative realm. Professional dress is formal; hierarchy is the law of the land. Curriculum changes slowly, while canons shift and expand only when pressure is applied. This conservatism is, in part, a function of a professional structure that empowers the old and makes vulnerable the young. Graduate students must please older advisers who can discourage untraditional or radical work. All these factors make the academic world slow to change its ways.

  But in the late 1960s, universities were under intense pressure to change. Black students mobilized for African American studies; a group of them staged a sit-in at Cornell University in April 1969. Students and faculty also agitated for increased representation of women, both in university department hires and on college syllabi. (A 1971 report by a university English instructor noted that women represented between 10 and 11 percent of faculty in modern languages and literatures.) In 1968, at what was remembered as a “politically volatile” annual convention, the Modern Language Association (MLA), the professional association for graduate students, teachers, and scholars of literatures and languages (including but not limited to English), passed a resolution to create the Commission on the Place of Women in the Profession. (That this commission appeared eight years after Kennedy’s nationwide commission on women’s status gives one a sense of the lag time in academia.) One year later, the commission began its work. The MLA’s president, Henry Nash Smith, appointed seven women to the commission—now called the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession—including Florence Howe, a woman sometimes described as the “Elizabeth Cady Stanton of women’s studies.” A graduate of Smith College, Howe had been politically awakened by her students at Goucher College, where she had worked as an assistant professor in the early 1960s. She had dropped out of a PhD program to accommodate her then husband (at the time, assistant professorships, which were teaching positions, did not always require a complete dissertation). She participated in the civil rights movement and, later, the women’s movement. Her experience in these social movements radicalized her: she “finally freed herself from marriage and even began to write the dissertation.”