The Equivalents
Page 36
“nature…becomes my”: Ibid., 143.
While working, she sat either: Diane Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 128.
“I hoard books”: Sexton to Farrell, 16 July 1962, in Self-Portrait in Letters, 143.
edge of the pool: Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 157.
“climate of unexpectation”: “One Woman, Two Lives,” Time, 3 Nov. 1961, 68.
“intellectually displaced women”: Fred M. Hechinger, “Radcliffe Pioneers in Plan for Gifted Women’s Study,” New York Times, 20 Nov. 1960.
“Radcliffe Pioneers”: Ibid.
160 letters: Elaine Yaffe, Mary Ingraham Bunting: Her Two Lives (Savannah: Frederic C. Beil, 2005), 176.
“thought there was something wrong”: Betty Friedan, “Up from the Kitchen Floor,” New York Times, 4 March 1973.
“messy experiment”: Yaffe, Mary Ingraham Bunting, 171.
“salvation”: Lily Macrakis, interview by author, May 2016.
“the personal is political”: Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 196.
“the Equivalents”: Middlebrook. Anne Sexton, 197. This is a good moment to give Middlebrook, who wrote the only existing biography of Anne Sexton, credit for planting the seed of this project. To the best of my knowledge, she is the only scholar or writer to note the convergence of these five women at the Institute. Her essay “Circle of Women Artists: Tillie Olsen and Anne Sexton at the Radcliffe Institute,” adapted from the Sexton biography and published in Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), inspired this book.
“lasting”: Anne Sexton application to the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, 7 March 1961, Institute Archives.
“mythological”: Oral history interview with Marianna Pineda, 26 May—14 June 1977, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
“a real turning point”: Swan to Constance Smith, 27 Aug. 1963, Institute Archives.
the first book: A few scholars have discussed the Institute, usually in writing about women who were involved in it. For instance, biographers including Middlebrook, Panthea Reid (author of a biography about Tillie Olsen), Elaine Yaffe (author of a biography about Mary Ingraham Bunting), and Evelyn White (author of a biography of Alice Walker) all describe the Institute and its importance to their subjects. The Institute itself has published a number of histories, such as Radcliffe Institute, 1960 to 1971 (published by the Institute in 1972), and Voices and Visions: Arts at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, 1962–1967, edited by the former fellows Iris Fanger and Marilyn Pappas (and published in 1997). These histories, while helpful to the researcher, are necessarily celebratory and promotional and are far from objective. In writing about the Institute, I have tried to take an objective look at its strengths and its flaws while also attempting to see it through the eyes of the women who gathered there.
“sold approximately”: Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books, 2012) 148.
groundwork for feminist revolt: Labor historians and feminist historians have productively troubled this understanding of the immediate postwar years. Dorothy Sue Cobble’s Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004) shows how women labor organizing continued throughout the mid-century. The essays collected in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), likewise demonstrate how nurses, abortionists, beatniks, immigrants, and activists all challenged the gender norms of the time. Stephanie Coontz has engaged in a complementary project in The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: BasicBooks, 1992); she pokes holes in many of the myths about mid-century life. This is but a sampling of the important books in this field.
“A woman must have money”: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), retrieved from victorianpersistence.files.wordpress.com.
eighty cents on the dollar: Ariane Hegewisch and Heidi Hartmann, The Gender Wage Gap: 2018 Earnings Differences by Race and Ethnicity (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2019).
CHAPTER 1: Little White Picket Fences
She stepped into the room: My sources for this opening section are Middlebrook and the remembrances of Kumin and Sexton in “A Nurturing Relationship: A Conversation with Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, April 15, 1974,” conducted by Elaine Showalter and Carol Smith, Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (1976): 115–35, as well as Kumin’s remembrances in the essay “How It Was,” which opens Sexton’s Complete Poems.
“I was trying my damnedest”: Sexton, interview by Barbara Kevles, in No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose, ed. Steven E. Colburn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 84.
“terrible nervous wreck”: Sexton, interview by Alice Ryerson and Martha White, Jan. 1962, Radcliffe Institute Archives. Details about Harvey household from Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 9, and from the interview.
“Oh, your mother is smart”: Interview with Sexton, Institute Archives.
failed to impress her mother: Sexton tells a less detailed version of the story in ibid. Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 20–21, fills in some of the details.
seven bathrooms and five garages: Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 13.
“I had to be just awful”: Interview with Sexton, Institute Archives.
“My heart pounds”: Quoted in Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 36.
“Her family was not”: Ibid., 34.
“I walk from room to room” Ibid., 36.
“Who would want”: Ibid., 37.
Sense of Poetry: Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx, “New Critical Television,” Openvault, WGBH, 2015, openvault.wgbh.org.
“I could do that”: Interview with Sexton, Institute Archives.
Many referred to therapy: Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 52.
“unconsciously”: Interview with Sexton, Institute Archives, and hereafter
“You can’t kill yourself”: Ibid.
“trickery”: In 1958, she even composed a poem on the topic, “An Obsessive Combination of Ontological Inscape, Trickery, and Love,” in Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, ed. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 4.
“my people”: Sexton, interview by Kevles, in No Evil Star, 87.
“taken”: Showalter and Smith, “Nurturing Relationship,” 116.
“tall, blue-eyed”: Maxine Kumin, “How It Was,” introduction to The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), xix.
“much more closed up”: Showalter and Smith, “Nurturing Relationship,” 117.
“chief frump”: Ibid., 116.
“Nothing seems worth while”: Quoted in Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 36.
“I chafed against the domesticity”: Maxine Kumin, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 72.
“great fear and trembling”: Showalter and Smith, “Nurturing Relationship,” 121.
“My earliest visions”: Kumin, Pawnbroker’s Daughter, 21.
“The passage through adolescence”: Ibid., 28.
“one of the most important”: Lewis quoted in James R. Hepworth, “Wallace Stegner, the Art of Fiction,” Paris Review, no. 115 (Summer 1990).
“Some element of the unexpected”: Stegner quoted in ibid.
“I was just floundering”: Kumin, interview by Alice Ryerson and Martha White, Jan. 1962, Institute Archives.
“And I made a pact”: Showalter and Smith, “Nurturing Relationship,” 120.
“There never grows”: Kumin, Pawnbroker’s D
aughter, 73.
“I had found”: Ibid.
Vic had had to supply: Ibid., 75.
“I continued to write”: Ibid.
“Up sooner than betimes”: Ibid., 77–78.
She decided to keep her distance: Showalter and Smith, “Nurturing Relationship,” 121.
“ghastly”: Ibid., 118.
“eye of the hurricane”: Phillip Newton, “Years of Study, Writing Cheers Newton Lady Poets,” Boston Traveler, 7 June 1961.
“Sh! poem! Maxine!”: Showalter and Smith, “Nurturing Relationship,” 123.
She’d had to climb: Ibid., 121.
“Is this a poem?”: Ibid., 122.
“everyone…was crazy”: Anne Sexton, “Music Swims Back to Me,” in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 6.
“Unknown Girl”: Ibid., 24.
“It must have been”: Maxine Kumin, “Halfway,” Harper’s Magazine, 1 Jan. 1959, 37.
“avenging ghost”: Maxine Kumin, “A Hundred Nights,” Harper’s Magazine, 1 June 1960, 73.
“Jane at thirteen”: Maxine Kumin, “The Journey,” Harper’s Magazine, 1 Feb. 1961, 49.
“I, too, dislike it”: Marianne Moore, “Poetry,” in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse, ed. Alfred Kreymborg (New York: N. L. Brown, 1920).
CHAPTER 2: Who Rivals?
by 1956, two-thirds had come to fear: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 23.
“terribly famous”: Alan Riding, “Grandpa Picasso: Terribly Famous, Not Terribly Nice,” New York Times, 24 Nov. 2001.
by 1975, there were fifty-two programs: Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 24.
The latecomer sashayed: This is how Kathleen Spivack, a classmate of Sexton’s, remembers her entrances (see next citation, 54–55). Sexton discusses smoking in class in her essay “Classroom at Boston University,” in No Evil Star, 3–5.
“This is the best part”: Kathleen Spivack, With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and Others (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012), 48.
“Lowell’s class yesterday”: Sylvia Plath, 25 Feb. 1959, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Random House, 2000), 471. I consulted several sources in order to describe Lowell’s seminar. First, there is Sexton’s remembrance, “Classroom at Boston University.” Plath’s journals provided me with various details of the classroom and of Plath’s mental and physical state at the time. I also consulted Spivack’s memoir, With Robert Lowell and His Circle.
“publish a bookshelf”: Plath, 25 Feb. 1957, Journals of Sylvia Plath, 270.
“Arrogant, I think I have written”: Plath, 29 March, 1958, Journals of Sylvia Plath, 360.
“She has very good things”: Plath, 20 March 1959, Journals of Sylvia Plath, 475.
“Negro woman poet”: Hughes quoted in Kumin, Pawnbroker’s Daughter, 79.
“Carolyn Kizer is a beautiful girl”: Sexton to Kizer, 1 April 1959, in Self-Portrait in Letters, 68. Details about Lowell’s classroom from Spivack’s memoir.
“whole establishment was male!”: Spivack, With Robert Lowell and His Circle, 57.
“Competing in the literary establishment”: Quoted in Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 111.
“primary task”: Adlai E. Stevenson, “A Purpose for Modern Woman,” Women’s Home Companion, Sept. 1955, 30–31.
“at the edges”: Anne Roiphe, Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason (New York: Anchor Books, 2011), 141.
“Being a ‘poet’ in Boston”: Sexton to Carolyn Kizer, 5 Feb. 1959, in Self-Portrait in Letters, 56.
In a letter to the poet: Sexton to Snodgrass, 6 Oct. 1958, Self-Portrait in Letters, 40.
“Part of me would be free”: Quoted in Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 47.
“Ugly angels spoke to me”: Anne Sexton, “The Double Image,” in Complete Poems, 35–42.
“I think this means”: Sexton to Snodgrass, 11 March 1959, in Self-Portrait in Letters, 65.
“A leaf from Ann [sic] Sexton’s book”: Plath, 23 April 1959, Journals of Sylvia Plath, 477.
“Anne was more herself”: Ian Hamilton, “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” in Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 170.
“the only public place in Boston”: Elizabeth Hardwick, “Boston,” in The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: New York Review Books, 2017), 74.
“It’s okay”: Anne Sexton, “The Bar Fly Ought to Sing,” in No Evil Star, 7. Additional details of their nights drinking from this essay.
“intense, skilled, perceptive”: Ibid., 10.
“I told Mr. Lowell”: Ibid., 9.
“smug as a cream-fed cat”: Plath, May 20, 1959, Journals of Sylvia Plath, 484.
“There is an increasing market”: Plath, June 13, 1959, Journals of Sylvia Plath, 495.
“college girl suicide”: Ibid.
“I am just not sure”: Sexton to Kizer, April 1, 1959, in Self-Portrait in Letters, 70.
“Lowell removes the mask”: M. L. Rosenthal, “Poetry as Confession,” Nation, 19 Sept. 1959, 154.
“Jesus, I’m a defensive creature!”: Sexton to Snodgrass, 9 June 1959, in Self-Portrait in Letters, 79.
“I have no life separate”: Plath, 7 Nov. 1959, Journals of Sylvia Plath, 524.
“in such despondency”: Quoted in Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 111.
“spindly-legged…slightly mad”: Hardwick, “Boston,” 70.
“Oh, the poets!”: Quoted in Showalter and Smith, “Nurturing Relationship,” 127–28.
“During this period, all of us”: Kumin, “How It Was,” xxiv.
“it was like they were taking”: Quoted in Showalter and Smith, “Nurturing Relationship,” 128.
“insistent me-me-me”: Holmes to Kumin, 6 Aug. 1961, Kumin Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, and hereafter.
“firm patience and a kind smile”: The letter, which is presumably to Holmes, is reprinted in Paula Salvio, Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 67.
“something worth learning”: Sexton, “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further,” in Complete Poems, 34.
“Mrs. Sexton’s craft is quick”: Thomas Lask, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 18 July 1960.
“changed his mind”: Quoted in Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 125.
“on my mind unpleasantly”: Holmes to Kumin, 6 Aug. 1961, Kumin Papers.
“Here was my Christian academic daddy”: Quoted in Showalter and Smith, “Nurturing Relationship,” 122.
he wrote another letter: Holmes to Kumin, 13 Aug. 1961, Kumin Papers.
“disapproval and anger”: This is gleaned from Holmes’s response: Holmes to Kumin, 16 Aug. 1961, Kumin Papers.
CHAPTER 3: Writer-Human-Woman
“There are no guards”: Quoted in Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 146.
“Tranquility from having the empty house”: Tillie Olsen, “Tell Me a Riddle,” in Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and Other Works (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 60–61.
“help her poor body to die”: Ibid., 98.
“Because I’m use’t”: Ibid., 58.
“light, like a bird”: Ibid., 92.
“I read Tillie Olsen’s”: Sexton to Miller, 14 Nov. 1960, in Self-Portrait in Letters, 116.
“My eyes are still crying”: Sexton to Olsen, 5 April 1960, Sexton Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, and hereafter.
Sexton’s admiration: Sexton to Olsen, 1 March 1964, Sexton Papers.
“many Latin American, Negro, Samoan”: Olsen to Sexton, 26 Jan. [n.d., but presumably 1961], Sexton Papers.
“most sought-after writer”: Quoted in Panthea Reid, Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 88.
talked over every ballot issue: Julie Edwards Olsen, interview by author, 30 Jan. 2016.
“nothing but girls”: Quoted in Reid, Tillie Olsen, 174. The details of Olsen’s twenties come from a few different sources: Reid’s biography, interviews with Olsen’s daughters Julie and Kathie, my impressions from reading collected archival material from the 1930s, and my reading of her reportage from this period.
“early genius”: Robert Cantwell, “Literary Life in California,” New Republic, 22 Aug. 1934.
“Do not ask me”: Tillie Lerner, “The Strike,” Partisan Review 1, no. 4 (1934): 3–9.
“She worked, she had a job”: Julie Olsen Edwards, interview by author.
surprise visit from FBI agents: Reid, Tillie Olsen, 250.
“Not a moment to sit”: Undated scrap of paper (possibly a journal entry), Olsen archives, Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University, and hereafter.
“I don’t even know”: Ibid.
“Pushed by the most elementary force”: Quoted in Reid, Tillie Olsen, 190. I quote from Reid here to give her credit for the archival labor in dating these notes and ordering them correctly.
“Dr. Raimundi fellowship”: Quoted in ibid., 191.
“a young mother”: Tillie Olsen, “I Stand Here Ironing,” in Tell Me a Riddle, 5–14. Olsen retitled “Help Her to Believe” for publication in The Best American Short Stories 1957, ed. Martha Foley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
she had just taken Kathie: Reid, Tillie Olsen, 195.
she had three new stories: For more on Olsen’s years at Stanford, see ibid., 197–203.
money for a washing machine: Julie Edward Olsen and Kathie Olsen, interviews by author, 13 June 2016.
“Last night”: Undated scrap of paper (possibly a journal entry), Olsen archives.