The Equivalents

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by Maggie Doherty



  One March day in 1974, Kumin’s phone rang. It was around five in the evening, not quite dark in not-quite-spring New England. There was an emergency on Black Oak Road. Sexton was sitting in her kitchen, she told Kumin, with a glass of milk and a pile of pills. She was taking the pills one by one until they and she were both gone.

  Kumin rushed over to Weston, put Sexton in her car, and drove them both straight to the hospital; this was Sexton’s fourth hospitalization in the past twelve months. Rather than feeling relieved, Sexton was furious at being thwarted. “You won’t get another chance to save me,” she told a friend. Kumin, upon learning of Sexton’s threat, responded, “Well, Annie, if you’re going to telegraph your intentions, you don’t give me any choice: I have to rescue you.” Even in her frantic state, Sexton absorbed the message: if she truly wanted to kill herself, she would have to dissemble and conceal. She would have to act like a healthy and resilient person. In other words, she would have to adopt a persona.

  Sexton had always been a good performer. In fact, the same month she attempted suicide, she sold out a reading in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, which seats one thousand people. Clad in a black-and-white skirt with a knee-high slit, Sexton read from what she liked to call her “posthumous work”: the just-published collection The Death Notebooks and poems that would later be published in The Awful Rowing Toward God. (The latter would indeed be published posthumously.) Swan, who designed the cover for The Death Notebooks, loved “the SPIRIT” of the collection, as she put it in a letter. “I felt you deal with the UNDERBELLY of our lives. You aren’t afraid to describe the areas we never mention, our SHIT, our garbage,” she wrote to Sexton. That evening at Sanders, Sexton read these new poems and some old ones, including “Music Swims Back to Me,” the very first poem she had shown Kumin on that winter afternoon sixteen years earlier. When she was done, she received a standing ovation.

  Offstage, though, Sexton was flailing. Kumin, so steadfast and reliable, began to feel overwhelmed. As she wrote to a concerned friend of Sexton’s, “I have been through a lot with her in 17 years but nothing so terrible and distraught as this time.”

  Sexton, 1974

  Sexton’s descent had started in 1973, when she and Kayo divorced. The marriage had been charged and violent for decades: Sexton knew how to goad Kayo until he exploded in rage. He hit her on more than one occasion. Linda Gray Sexton’s memoir contains a frightening scene in which Kayo bangs Sexton’s head against the wall. But in the memoir, both parties are described as being active participants in orchestrating the violence. To complicate matters further, Kayo was also Sexton’s primary caretaker: the person who made her dinner and made sure she took the correct number of sleeping pills, which she had relied on for years to sleep. In her marriage, Sexton acted like a needy child; she did so both to prevent Kayo’s rages (she worried that he would become angry if she expressed her true feelings) and to get the care she needed. “We get along pretty well…with my talking baby talk,” Sexton once explained to Kumin. “Can’t really talk, damn it. Try. But can’t.” The marriage was premised on Sexton’s infantile weakness and Kayo’s competence, patience, and endurance. Only with her lovers did Sexton feel that she could be a full adult.

  Kayo and Sexton engaged in this dance of codependency until, in February 1973, Sexton decided that she wanted a divorce. Her work was going well; she was teaching at Boston University, writing poems, and earning enough from her readings to support her and her children. She felt flush and independent, ready to take on life as a single woman. And she wasn’t alone: inspired by the women’s movement and the ways it punctured the dream of the perfect nuclear family, women all over the country were walking out of their marriages and into new, exhilarating, terrifying lives. No-fault divorce, first instituted in California in 1969, made it easier to dissolve a marriage without ruining the reputation of one of the parties. Other states picked up the practice. (Massachusetts adopted no-fault divorce in 1976.) The divorce rate rose rapidly, doubling between 1962 (the year Sexton’s All My Pretty Ones was published) and 1973. In the year 1975, the number of divorces exceeded one million for the first time in U.S. history.

  When she and Kayo first separated, Sexton hopped from one friend’s house to another’s, staying with Kumin during the early days of the separation. But Sexton couldn’t live a vagabond life forever; by March, she was back on Black Oak Road in Weston, alone in a grand house with no pool. (Kayo had found a separate apartment, while Linda was at college and Joy at boarding school in Maine.) Sexton found a couple to live with her; they helped with yard duties and cooking. To her friends and neighbors, Sexton seemed strong and independent, as if she were setting out on a fresh start.

  But her good spirits eventually disappeared. By summer, Sexton was sleeping until ten, drinking three or four vodkas with lunch, napping away the afternoon, and drinking again at dinner, with up to eight sleeping pills to follow. “It is a Christly time for me in the midst of a contested divorce with no one to marry,” she wrote in early September to the poet Adrienne Rich, who had left her husband in 1970. (He killed himself soon after their separation.) Sexton had not been alone since age nineteen.

  The divorce became final in November, just in time for Sexton to regret the very process she had set in motion. Once again, she had overestimated her inner resources. She had made a similar error a decade earlier, when she had thought herself strong enough to forgo therapy and travel overseas. This time, however, she couldn’t simply return home, for such a place no longer existed. Like the lyric speaker in “Music Swims Back to Me,” Sexton found herself asking, “Which way is home?”

  As she struggled to set up a new life for herself, Sexton began having bad dreams and hearing voices. She self-medicated with alcohol and pills and disappeared into fugue states like the ones she’d first experienced with Dr. Orne in the late 1950s. Sexton’s friends had trouble with her when she was drunk and needy, and they began to distance themselves.

  Linda, now a junior at Harvard, struggled to carve out a separate identity without abandoning her mother completely. “As the situation grew more and more intense, I grew angrier and angrier with Mother,” she wrote in her memoir. “I’d been able to move into an apartment”—in Inman Square, for the summer months—“to escape her antics, but Joy was still in high school.” Joy—home for the summer, warier of her mother, and less entwined with her than Linda was—eventually moved out in the middle of the summer and went to stay with Kayo. In July, just before her twenty-first birthday, Linda went over to her mother’s house for dinner and received a strange birthday present: a check for $1,000 and a copy of Sexton’s will, which named her Sexton’s literary executor.

  * * *

  —

  Sexton might have been able to cope with Kayo’s absence had she been able to keep her best friend by her side. But 1973 was also the year Kumin won the Pulitzer and began traveling to workshops and residencies. The two friends still talked every day, and neither ever published a poem without first consulting the other, but they talked more by phone than they did in person, and their conversations could be strained. “I had a little fame to deal with in my own life,” Kumin later explained. “I had won the Pulitzer; I was doing a lot more readings; I was in a lot more demand; I was traveling a lot more, and I was not just physically as available to her as I had been. And I think although she certainly did not take it as a betrayal on my part, she certainly felt some small alienation.”

  Kumin harbored her own feelings of betrayal. She bristled at being asked to play nurse. As she had hinted to Sexton years earlier, she didn’t want their friendship to slide into “common waspishness” as Katherine Mansfield and Ida Baker’s had. But as Sexton deteriorated, Kumin was more and more often thrust into the role of caretaker, just as her own career was taking off. Kumin never felt manipulated by Sexton—the latter’s distress was surely genuine—nor did she ever threaten to break with her friend entirely
. But neither did she always alter her plans to accommodate her friend. She accepted a weeks-long residency in Danville, Kentucky. (She and Sexton agreed in advance to split the phone bill.) She went up-country nearly every weekend. In 1974, she planned a three-week trip that would take her overseas—to Europe, Israel, and Iran—during Sexton’s birthday, a time when Sexton historically had needed care. Kumin was beginning to feel acutely the “dichotomy between the city life and the country life.” The only thing now keeping her in Newton, she eventually realized, was Sexton.

  Kumin and Sexton experienced different kinds of career arcs: the one started off unknown and ascended to fame, while the other burst onto the scene and won attention and accolades and then, like a falling star, descended into darkness. And yet, though they followed opposing trajectories, they remained deeply invested in each other’s work. For it wasn’t as though Kumin had nothing to do with Sexton’s incendiary arrival on the poetry scene: it was Kumin who had approved Sexton’s first real poem, Kumin who had accompanied Sexton to those early readings by esteemed poets, where the budding poet learned the tricks of the trade.

  Likewise, Sexton had continued to support Kumin and vouch for her friend’s work. “She made me see that the cerebral really needed a strong admixture of the visceral,” Kumin once said of her friend. As Kumin began to write more, and better, Sexton feared that her friend would surpass her and leave her far behind. She once dreamed of visiting Kumin at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury, where both poets taught at various points in their careers. In the dream, Kumin left Sexton to go to a lecture, though Sexton pleaded with her to stay. “Please,” she said in the dream, “I’ve come all this way to see you.” But Kumin kept walking, leaving behind her tremulous friend.

  Any fear or jealousy never affected Sexton’s judgment of her friend’s work. When she had the opportunity to award Kumin the Pulitzer, she fought hard to do so. It was an act of self-sacrifice, for Sexton knew that if Kumin won the prize, “I was going to lose her.”

  Sexton never entirely lost Kumin, but their hidden jealousies and resentments and fears—long buried under the surface of love and mutual regard—eventually surfaced in April 1974. The two poets were giving a reading at Douglass College, barely a month after Sexton’s suicide attempt, and though the poet no longer seemed suicidal, she was not her best self. They agreed to give an interview to the scholars Elaine Showalter and Carol Smith, and though the conversation began well, Sexton soon took over and began rambling, as if she were on the couch in an analyst’s office. Sexton began talking about her troubled relationship with her mother and her grandmother, hinting at inappropriate contact. “I think I’m dominating this interview,” she acknowledged. Kumin replied in annoyance, “You are, Anne.” Sexton confessed, “I’ve been having an upsetting time.”

  Kumin usually tolerated Sexton’s self-involvement, but this time she lost her temper. After the interview was over, she upbraided Sexton for being selfish and needy—both during the interview and over the past few months. Those words—“selfish,” “needy”—stuck with Sexton. For ten days, she turned them over in her mind, wondering what exactly she had done wrong, fearing that she was in fact the succubus that Kumin had implied. Back in Weston, the reading and the shameful interview behind her, Sexton sat down with her typewriter and attempted to explain herself to her friend.

  The letter began like a memo: “Subject: Selfish; needy.” She acknowledged that everyone was selfish, and that she was no exception, but she suggested that Kumin’s irritation at this quality was a recent development. At first, she’d thought that the divorce might have changed her relationship to Kumin, but in the letter she speculated that it was perhaps Kumin’s Pulitzer Prize that had changed the relations between the two friends. Sexton reminded Kumin of all the ways she had helped her and tried to be sensitive to her needs; each example was followed by a parenthetical question—“(Selfish?)”—as if to prompt Kumin to reexamine her ideas. “Yes, I am needy,” Sexton acknowledged. “But you too, Max, have been needy, and I have never resented it.” Sexton had talked Kumin to sleep after a disk operation. She had listened to Kumin complain about analysis. She had understood when Kumin, rushing to get up-country, had forgotten to call Sexton back to talk about a promising poem. Now, she confessed how upset she’d been at their separation, even though she understood how the New Hampshire farm fed Kumin’s creative spirit. “I suppose in a way this left me more needy for your presence, but at least I understood,” she concluded. “Could you perhaps try to understand me…?”

  In truth, Kumin did understand Sexton, better than anyone else. She recognized her friend’s talent, calling her a true “original,” the likes of which would not be seen again soon. She also understood that in her own way the demanding Sexton was a thoughtful, giving person. “Annie gave as good as she got,” Kumin once said. “She was extremely generous and giving, loving.” Sexton loved easily (arguably too easily) and volubly. Her letters were covered with hand-drawn flowers and filled with expressions of affection. She answered fan mail from adolescents and the institutionalized. She gave poetry lessons to Kumin’s daughter (Kumin did the same for Linda); she let her own daughter host large groups of friends at the Weston house.

  These acts of generosity weren’t exactly selfless: Sexton needed contact with people constantly. Like a hummingbird buzzing from flower to flower, she went from person to person sucking up affection and care until she could see that her current host—or student, or friend—was worn out. In her own way, Sexton was deeply sensitive to the needs and limitations of others, and though this awareness didn’t always stop her from demanding more than people could offer (she certainly asked too much of her children), it did provide a check on some of her behavior. This was why, after her separation from Kayo, she left the Kumin home after only five days; she could tell “how upsetting my presence was” to Kumin and her husband. “Thus I did not stay again,” she later explained, “not wanting to cause pain to you and yours.”

  Such was Sexton’s bind: to suffer great pain without causing it in others, to ask for the help she needed without asking too much of anyone. By 1974, as her loneliness and drinking increased in tandem, she could no longer navigate these competing claims. The only way to keep herself together without wearing out friends and family was to return to the mental institution, to the bedlam of her first poetry book—the place that her art had helped her escape. Sexton, who wrote about “the quality of life in mental hospitals” when “mental illness was still a prissy epithet,” knew all too well what an institutional life would be like. It would be “antiseptic tunnel[s]” and “the moving dead,” handmade moccasins—a common crafting activity in mental hospitals—and dinners without knives. Noon walks on institutional lawns, ringing bells, a “world…full of enemies” and “no safe place.” Sexton would not be able to abide it, not again.

  On Friday, October 4, 1974, Sexton drove from her therapy appointment to Kumin’s house in Newton. As they had done for decades, the two poets ate lunch and discussed work in progress. Sexton had a quadruple vodka and a tuna fish sandwich. At 1:30 p.m., they parted ways; Kumin had to pick up a passport for her three-week trip. Sexton reassured her friend, “Don’t worry. I’m not a Berryman yet,” referring to the poet who had died by suicide in 1972. Kumin was not particularly worried; ever since the March suicide attempt, Sexton had appeared “healed—at least cured for the moment of her terrible obsession,” as Kumin later put it in a letter. Sexton reminded Kumin to return a borrowed dress, then drove home, where she dug her mother’s fur coat out of a closet. Wrapped in the coat, with a glass of vodka in hand, she proceeded to the garage and climbed into her car. Alone, in the closed garage in Weston, she started the car’s engine.

  * * *

  —

  To the horror of her friends and family, Sexton’s death was an event. The Associated Press published a long article. Memorials were held in classrooms around the country. The n
ation’s poets, both those who knew Sexton and those who didn’t, offered their remarks. The poet and critic J. D. McClatchy scrambled to transform his critical work on Sexton into a set of posthumous remembrances.

  Poets felt that they had to respond. Denise Levertov vehemently denied any connection between poetry and suicide. “The tendency to confuse the two has claimed too many victims,” she mourned. “Anne Sexton herself seems to have suffered deeply from this confusion.” Lowell, now divorced from Hardwick and remarried to Caroline Blackwood, offered strange commentary, calling Sexton an “amateur” and lamenting her downward trajectory. “For a book or two, she grew more powerful,” he mused. “Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author.”

  One poet who remained strangely reticent about Sexton’s legacy was Kumin. After offering some quick remarks to the Associated Press, Kumin clammed up. She was put off by what she called the “necrophiliac cult” that wanted to know the details of Sexton’s death. After granting an interview to the Associated Press in the immediate aftermath of Sexton’s suicide, Kumin decided to refuse all future requests. For her, Sexton’s death was “the open wound I must live with day by day,” as she wrote to a friend. Along with Vic, Kumin left the country for three weeks. She toured the sites by day and dreamed of Sexton by night. “I carried Anne’s death in my pocket,” she wrote to Swan.

  Everyone knew the role Kumin had played in Sexton’s life. In the months after her death, Kumin was bombarded with messages: from Sexton’s fans, friends, and ex-lovers, as well as from her own friends and acquaintances. Kumin dutifully tried to respond to those she felt deserved responses, though she struggled to be compassionate in this moment, and she resented the infringement on her own grieving process. She was particularly annoyed by Olsen’s strange, grief-stricken note that, among other things, remonstrated Kumin to be “a more active sworn enemy” of suicidal thoughts. Kumin responded mildly, but she made clear that she wanted “no more reproachful little notes I can’t read.” Three years later, after receiving several more “reproachful little notes,” Kumin wrote a more forthright letter. She was sick of Olsen’s playing the victim, and frustrated, too, that Olsen had never repaid her monetary debts, even after winning grants and fellowships. Kumin resented Olsen’s performance of pain, her insistence that it was she “alone who bleed[s].” Such a performance was not entirely dissimilar to Sexton’s, but Kumin had not signed on as Olsen’s helpmate, nor did she feel that Olsen, like Sexton, “gave as good as she got.” “A line out of Sexton fits exactly what you do,” Kumin wrote in frustration. “ ‘My pain is more valuable.’ You may make a profession out of it with others, but please do not rub my nose in it.” It does not appear that Kumin ever wrote to Olsen again.

 

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