The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  * * *

  —

  “Winning the Pulitzer Prize for my fourth book was wonderful, but it filled me with anxiety,” Kumin reflected later.

  Being in the limelight terrified me. It was well known that fame often led to writer’s block. At that moment I dreaded the paralysis I was certain awaited me. Would I ever write again? As soon as I could, I fled to the farm. There I took Candide’s advice to cultivate my garden and started the season’s first crop of frost-hardy chard, lettuce, and spinach. I dug compost into the soil, raked, gathered bucketsful of stones, raked again. Once I had dirt packed under my fingernails I recovered my equilibrium.

  The experiences Kumin describes here in prose—tuning herself to the rhythms of the seasons, immersing herself in the natural world—are the same as those she renders in verse in Up Country. The book, published by Harper & Row, included illustrations by Swan, who sketched, quite realistically, the sights common to the woods of New Hampshire: pine trees, paw tracks, long-beaked birds. A few early poems made their way in: “Morning Swim,” one of the poems she had read at her first Institute seminar, and “A Hundred Nights,” a poem about her father from her very first collection, Halfway. But much of the writing was new, inspired jointly by Kumin’s country life and by Henry David Thoreau, whose Walden haunts the collection and provides epigraphs for a poem or two. Like Thoreau, Kumin believed that much could be learned about oneself, and one’s human companions, through close, uninterrupted study of the natural world.

  The collection’s greatest strength is its surprising images, a testament to Kumin’s powers of observation. In one poem, a group of stones is compared to oysters, mushrooms, and a herd of mammals; they are “as cumbrous as bears.” In another, a mare’s belly is a “church of folded hands.” In yet another, owl talk is “burned babies screaming,” a truly horrifying metaphor that somehow fits the mood of the final poem. Not every description works—a comparison between a horse’s neck and Victorian furniture is as ungainly as it sounds—but on the whole the natural world is sensitively, surprisingly rendered, in all its beauty and cruelty. Like many a writer, Kumin wanted to defamiliarize her subject, making it seem alien, even shocking, through metaphor and simile. She was particularly invested in portraying the unlovely parts of rural life: the decay and violence of the natural world were her way into the ugliness of human existence. “When people hear about nature poems, they immediately think of God and butterflies,” she once said. “But not all is pretty in nature and I am not deceived. The loveliness does not vitiate a raccoon killing a gander, abscesses on a horse’s mouth, worms in the excrement.”

  Divided into four parts, Up Country begins with a suite of hermit poems—“The Hermit Wakes to Bird Sounds,” “The Hermit Prays,” “The Hermit Has a Visitor”—then segues into a series of lyric poems about various features of farm and country life. There is a poem about mud, another about beans, and an exquisite elegy for a dead broodmare. The collection concludes with “Joppa Diary,” a series of poems with dates for titles (“June 5th,” “August 9th”). The Kumins’ farm was located in the Joppa district of Warner, New Hampshire, and the diary is clearly a record of the poet’s activities there, but the last poem also alludes to the biblical Joppa, a city in Israel. The allusion is one of several ways that Kumin elevated her worldly experiences—picking berries, birthing foals, shooting woodchucks—to an emotional or spiritual register.

  The human soul creeps in at the corners of these poems, even poems in which the focus is fixed on plant or animal life. “Beans,” an homage to Thoreau, is a poem about sexual desire: in the last stanza, the speaker stirs like “the shoots / of growing things” at the touch of a lover, a “gardener” like the assiduous Thoreau, who planted a “seven-mile plot” of beans. “Woodchucks” ends with a shock: the speaker, who picks off troublesome critters with a .22 rifle, wishes that the vermin had “all consented to die unseen / gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.” Even with this overt reference to World War II, it’s hard not to read the violence of the poem in the context of the war in Vietnam, where napalm was deployed frequently and deaths were far from quiet or unseen. The end of “Whippoorwill” is likewise tragic; the speaker, listening to this “indecent bird,” realizes that she too is a “discard / and you,” an old lover, “you stick in his throat.” The poems are subtle, probing at the experiences of love and loss and renewal only indirectly. As one critic put it, the collection “is a concentrate of controlled passion, compassion, and precise diction, seeking no profundities by grasp, but achieving them by indirection, luring the reader into them, happily so.” Profundity by indirection: a pretty good gloss for a reserved, middle-aged poet who, unlike her closest friend, preferred to stay out of the limelight.

  The poetry was too good for the critics to keep quiet. The novelist Joyce Carol Oates praised the book in The New York Times, alongside Plath’s Winter Trees, which had been published in 1971. (For the first time, Kumin and Plath were being read together, not Sexton and Plath.) Praising Kumin for her boldness, her variety of viewpoints, and her authenticity, Oates argued that Kumin, though inspired by Thoreau, had done the transcendentalist one better; her work had a “sharp-edged, unflinching and occasionally nightmarish subjectivity exasperatingly absent in Thoreau.” She also compared Kumin to Sexton, suggesting commonality where most critics saw difference; both poets, she argued, dramatized the voice of the “universal woman,” though they did so in different ways. The comparison preserved the distinctiveness of each poet, but it also equated the two women in a way few critics had done before. Oates concluded, “ ‘Up Country’ demonstrates beautifully how the transcendental vision is really the vision of imaginative existential life, available to anyone who seeks it.” Kumin, touched by the review, wrote Oates a brief note, expressing “how good it feels to be so closely read.”

  One imagines that Kumin hung onto that good feeling even in the midst of the Pulitzer furor. For a woman who was so often tending and attending, it must have been a nice change to receive close, critical attention, even if—or perhaps because—that attention changed her life.

  * * *

  —

  By 1972, the year Up Country was published, Kumin was spending more and more time at the farm and was contemplating a permanent move. She took her family up in all seasons: in the winter they skied cross-country, and in the summer they swam and rode horses through the pine woods. The Kumins had also accrued quite the collection of farm animals, all of which needed tending: there were Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the sheep; a Dalmatian named Caesar; two horses, named Juniper and Tasha; and an arrogant goat named Oliver. Kumin loved the quiet and beauty the farm offered her. In New Hampshire, she found respite from the neuroticism common to writers and intellectuals (herself included) and an easy way of socializing that was entirely different from the “polished silver candlesticks, the ironed tablecloths, the fancy desserts” of Newton. When a neighbor casually offered to host the Kumins for dinner without any of the formality and fanfare that characterized dinner parties in the Boston suburbs, Kumin was light-headed with relief. She marveled at “how seamlessly and graciously Liz’s invitation had been extended.” This was the way she wanted to live: casually, naturally, without the social protocol that her mother had tried so hard to teach her.

  Had Vic not had a job, and had she not also been teaching, Kumin would have moved the family right then. But their lives remained anchored in Newton, and Kumin remained near to Sexton, who, after a period of stability from 1971 to 1972, was once again battling her demons. Her marriage to Kayo was fraying. She drank too much and took too many pills, and she had yet to find a therapist who stabilized her as Dr. Orne had. She began to lean too much on teenage Linda, demanding to be parented as if she were the child. Worst of all, her creative powers seem to have atrophied: while she was still an excellent performer of her earlier poetry, Sexton couldn’t generate new work that rivaled the old. Poetry had kep
t her sane: as she suggested in the poem “With Mercy for the Greedy,” poetry was her substitute for religious faith. Without poetry to wrangle the tongue and soothe the mind, death began to look appealing once again. The old death wish had returned. Sexton was starting to ask the old question that she had asked in “Wanting to Die”: “which tools.”

  On some level, Kumin knew that she couldn’t move up-country as long as Sexton still needed her. Sexton didn’t care much for the outdoors. She visited Kumin’s farm infrequently, timing her visits so that they corresponded to her daugthers’ stays at a nearby overnight camp. There’s one photograph from a summer weekend, showing Sexton on one of Kumin’s horses. She looks far less comfortable in this one than in the many photos taken of her at her desk, in her indoor sanctuary.

  Back in Newton, Kumin was in constant contact with her mercurial friend; she was likely to be the first to notice a sudden shift in mood or an allusion to self-harm. It was as if Kumin had signed a contract way back in 1957: she would be there for Sexton as long as Sexton needed her, and Sexton needed her still. “Anne was really our mother’s favorite child,” Jane, Kumin’s eldest, once quipped. Kumin worried that if she were to leave Sexton for too long, she would miss the last moment of crisis—the ringing phone unanswered, the harried knock on the door unheard—and it would be too late. “It was a terrible responsibility,” she later reflected. “And I felt the awesomeness of that responsibility, but I had taken it on.”

  Up Country closes with a poem about this terrible responsibility—about the impossibility of knowing, let alone controlling, another’s mind. It is an old poem, from 1963; Kumin had written it on the occasion of Sexton’s sailing to France and sent her a draft, calling it a poem “for my friend on the high seas.” It is the poem with the affirmation “We have our own constants,” the one that mentions the onionskins of the old poetry classroom. Sexton had liked the poem, then called “September 1”; “all good” she had written in the margins. She had particularly liked the lines in which Kumin described “the humpbacks of these / mink hills between us,” referring to the hills near the Kumin farm in New Hampshire.

  The published version, “September 22nd,” is a revised version of this valediction from 1963. It reads as if written for a lover: “darling” has replaced “dear friend” as a term of address, and the poem is now for some mysterious “Q. on the high seas.” The speaker is still “in the country of the no-see-ums,” still listening to the owl talk and imagining the sights and sounds of a ship at sea. “Darling what are your noises?” she asks. “Do you dance, play shuffleboard / bet on the ship’s pool?” The speaker wonders if her friend has selected a lifeboat—an appropriate worry for Kumin in 1963, when Sexton wondered openly if she would return from Europe alive. Looked at ten years later, the question seems idle, a bit detached; the speaker worries about her friend’s (or lover’s) fate from such a great distance. She is too far away to steer anyone into a lifeboat herself.

  By the end of the poem, the speaker is exasperated: with her addressee, and with herself. “I am tired of this history of loss!” she declares.

  What drum can I beat to reach you?

  To be reasonable

  is to put out the light.

  To be reasonable is to let go.

  The eye of the moon is as bland

  as new butter. There is no other light

  to wink at or salute

  Now let the loudest sound I send you

  be the fuzzheads of ripe butternuts

  dropping tonight in Joppa like

  the yellow oval tears of some rare dinosaur,

  dropping to build up

  the late September ground.

  Read as a lover’s lamentation, these lines are bittersweet. The speaker knows it is only “reasonable” to go to sleep, to accept the distance between her and her desired, but she can’t help reporting the sounds around her—as if her absent lover, attuned to her drumbeat, could hear. But when we consider this was first a poem for Sexton, the lines read differently. “What drum can I beat to reach you?” is both mournful and self-incriminating, as if the speaker has tried many ways to comfort her friend but not yet landed on the right strategy. The repetition of “reasonable” calls to mind all of Sexton’s unreasonableness. It also charts a possible course for Kumin, one that she continually turned away from. “To be reasonable is to let go” of Sexton, whom Kumin once called a “very demanding friend,” and to bask in the soft sounds of the Joppa district. But Kumin, like her speaker, refused to be reasonable—or refused in at least this one way.

  When Sexton first read the poem in draft form, she had suggested reversing the last two stanzas—although based on her marginalia, it seems rather as if she were suggesting a rearrangement of lines. She said something in the margins about wanting the poem to end on the loss, on the sound of loss, rather than “the wet September ground,” as it did in the first draft. Kumin stuck with her original arrangement, though the ground became that of “late September,” no longer “wet.” She ended not with tiredness, or loss, but with an effort at connection: a sound sent across the sea, from up-country on down to Boston, where, for the moment, Sexton lived still.

  CHAPTER 19

  Which Way Is Home

  ON OCTOBER 11, 1973, former members of the Institute for Independent Study returned to the Radcliffe Quadrangle. It was half past twelve on a bright fall day, the grass still green, the leaves just starting to turn. Some of the women present lived just a few blocks from the Quadrangle; others had to come by train or plane or car. For a few, it was their first time back at Radcliffe in a decade.

  The women of the Institute were gathered together to celebrate the life of their beloved director, Connie Smith, who had died of cancer in November 1970. She was only forty-eight. The loss shook her friends and colleagues, who had cared deeply for her. There had been a service at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, where Kumin had delivered a eulogy. Decades after her death, former Institute fellows recalled her warmth and her extraordinary ability to get things done. They insisted that anyone interested in the Institute—how it was, why it worked—attend to the life of dear Connie.

  Pineda, as generous with her work as she was with her money, wanted to honor Smith’s life by dedicating one of her Oracle sculptures to her former director. (Her fellow visual artist Swan had also donated some work to the Institute in 1967: two lithographs and one drawing.) She wanted the work to live in Radcliffe Yard, near Fay House, where Smith had made her first selections for admission to the Institute. The current Institute director, Alice Kimball Smith, rejoiced in the offer from Pineda, but she noted that the organization could not afford to purchase such a large sculpture from such a successful artist, nor could it pay for the installation. Pineda’s mother came to the rescue, as she had many times before: she offered to cover the costs of the sculpture.

  The day of the dedication arrived. Pineda had chosen Aspects of the Oracle: Portentous, an elegant, seated figure with her left hand raised in the air. The statue was placed in a corner of Radcliffe Yard, between the Schlesinger Library (so named in 1965) and a small gate that opened onto Brattle Street. Those attending the dedication ringed themselves round the statue. A photo of the event captures at least two dozen of them, their backs toward the camera, their bodies turned toward the oracle. Light descends from above, bathing the statue and those surrounding it. The dedication ceremony included a flute performance by a young-looking, curly-haired woman in a patterned dress; her presence next to the statue showed off the size of the sculpture. It was a substantial memorial.

  There is a photo of Pineda from the dedication ceremony. In it her hair is short, shorter than it was when she was at the Institute, and she is wearing a shirt with a big collar and smiling broadly. The light falls on her face as she turns toward the gesticulating flute player. She seems extraordinarily happy.

  Pineda went on to make m
ore sculptures. Her most important achievement was arguably her statute of Queen Lili’uokalani—a commissioned work completed in 1980—that is installed on the south side of the Hawai’i State Capitol. Pineda was especially proud of this work, and she produced a documentary, Search for the Queen, about the research and making of the artwork. She and Tovish found studio space—separate studios, of course—in Cambridge’s Porter Square. They continued to work there until the end of their careers.

  She died, like Smith, of cancer, in 1996. She was seventy-one. Her husband was devastated. In a letter he wrote to her after her death, he reflected on their shared craft: “I tremble to think what it would be like for me if I had no work to do. In the studio, mixing plaster, repairing casts—all the kitchen chores of our trade allows me, for a moment, to let you escape from my mind. But you return soon enough, and you are always welcome.” Tovish lived until 2008.

  The sculpture that Pineda dedicated to Smith still stands in Radcliffe Yard today. The oracle sits on a small, elevated bench; her feet dangle over a small rock garden. She stabilizes herself with one arm, one hand grasping the corner of the bench, while the other arm arches over her bowed head, as if to pluck something from the air. Her face is nearly featureless, but she is nonetheless recognizably female: her breasts swell under the cloth that drapes her body. She has weathered rain and snow; her surface, oxidized from exposure, is now a green color that blends with the surrounding shrubs. Her pose is at once contemplative and full of tension as her torso twists and her arm strains skyward. She is poised, waiting, preparing for whatever comes next.

  * * *