Anne Sexton

by Anne Sexton

  Enough! Winter comes. No Guggy … no nothing … no stories. The thing about stories, Nolan, is that they are so damn big and my time is damn little. Another thing about stories is that when my first one appeared in New World I was ashamed. I mean, I read Tillie Olsen’s story and I cried and I was ashamed to have my story appear … She is a genius. Her story will live. My story is nervous and only an experiment … it’s died right on the page.

  What I have been doing is reading. And that is good. I’ve been forming … Kafka, Mann, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Faulkner, Gide—etc. A mixed bunch, picking and delighting. I wasn’t kidding when I told you once that I had never read anything. I hadn’t. So I’m forming, eating books, words, thinking and now and then worrying about all this intake and no output. […]

  Write me some of your inner and outer …

  Best love,

  Anne

  p.s. Tillie Olsen has written me a sweet note, that great writer, that good woman. You pick the right friends … and now your friends become mine. This is worth keeping.

  Anne continued in the workshop with John Holmes, Maxine Kumin, George Starbuck, Sam Albert, and others. She wished to maintain her relationship with her first teacher, but this did not prevent her from asserting herself when he challenged her.

  [To John Holmes]

  [40 Clearwater Road]

  Monday, Jan. 30th, 1961

  Dear John,

  It has taken me this many days to get over your letter—that is, this many days to love you again and this many days to love me again. For once, I’m not going to beat around the bush. Your letter hurt me. More than you can imagine.

  What makes you believe that I am insensitive and that Sam [Albert] is, indeed, sensitive? I hear that you also wrote to Sam and I cannot know what he will reply but I can know the truth. He was not hurt by my comments nor would I ever hurt him in this manner. I have talked with Sam many times about his work and I am rather sure of what his ego and his deep heart can take in the way of crit. He, in fact, returned to my house after everyone had left. Returned, not to make a pass (wonders!) but to hand me a sheaf of forty poems to look over and comment upon and to talk, standing at the door, for one hour until I pushed him out. He was so enthusiastic over the workshop etc. Is that a hurt ego? or a stimulated one? You seem to think that my comments were thoughtless and went on and on. I believe that Sam NEEDS to hear them over and over. Sam is, in this way, much as I am. I have a hard time getting it once … I need the same comments over and over. This, of course, takes more time. I am willing to give Sam the time … with constantly renewed hopes that he will be able to HEAR. It is hard for Sam to hear. It was a compliment to his actual ability to go “on and on” over this point.

  What kind of workshop is this? Are we mere craftsmen or are we artists! I have felt that we have become increasingly close, increasingly attuned to each other’s needs—so individual—each needing something different, specifically different each time. I think this is a great strength and a great, but mutual intuitive creative act each time it happens. It is hard enough to be an artist (so called) without trying to be five artists at once. Yet, in our fashion, we do it … with each poem and at each workshop.

  I have talked about this with George and Maxine … I haven’t talked to Sam but I will shortly. After our last workshop both George and Maxine felt we had done an extraordinary job. Then your letter … you knew, of course, that I would read it to Maxine … and by that time I felt I ought to mention it to George (if only to find out if I had been as terrible as you suggested). Maxine has written to you so you know how she feels. George felt that he got a “very good” workshop. George doesn’t need a great deal of comment—his poems come so finished—the personal reaction that Maxine felt to one of his poems (a rant, if you wish) was enough proof to him that the poem was doing SOMETHING. And the other comments helped with details.

  Neither Maxine nor I had had as much to drink as we ordinarily do. But we were more relaxed. I know that I was rather manic … this can happen without drinking … I won’t say “I can’t help it” because I try to help it—sometimes it doesn’t work.

  Please, John, stop making me feel like a toad.

  Damn it all, life is complicated enough with “the poets” wrangling. This seemed like “one safe place” … where you could let go. Now I feel as if I were holding on … if there’s a rail.

  George says my trouble is that “I don’t listen” and I try to tell him that I try to listen, for God’s sake! (like that) … Well, holding onto that invisible rail, I’ll try harder to listen and not take up so much time. But I resent it. I resent the idea that an almost good poem isn’t worth any amount of time if we can make it better and first the actual writer has got to be able to HEAR. As with Sam. It takes me longer to hear.

  At the same time, I don’t want nor mean to take anyone else’s time. I never have. Can’t you perhaps help me with the real problem instead of just telling me that I am rather selfish and then in turn, thoughtless and then, what’s worse, very cruel. I may be noisy—but I’m not cruel and I never have been.

  In the long pull, John, where you might be proud of me, you are ashamed of me. I keep pretending not to notice … But then, you remind me of my father (and I KNOW that’s not your fault). But there is something else here … who do I remind you of? Whoever he or she was or is … it isn’t my fault. I am not them! (Perhaps I am all wrong, but I wish that you would consider this for a minute and remind yourself.)

  Now … that is all hysterical raving. I thought, as you did, that I had better express it than brood over it. And “brood” is a mild word in this case. Well …

  As for the drinking. You were wrong. We were that way, but it wasn’t from drinking … just from personality quirks. Workshop is so tense, so concentrated … I doubt if I could bear it without drinking. I know that YOU do and God bless you … I know that it must be hard to put up with us but I think we will have to continue it. (Perhaps I could try to drink more and SAY less … that can happen if you drink enough … and it would have the same effect). I do not WANT to be a toad, you know.

  … I am, after all this, glad you like the revised poem. Now, to yours … I think you have taken it into your hands and made it your poem. It is not what I would have done … it gets kind of loose … It doesn’t have the impact that it might have had if you could have followed our ideas. But, so what? Impact is not all. (I, myself, tend to forget this). Our comments seemed to make you redefine it … and in your own words. You hide your impact inside it … it drifts off, like a faint (but unheeded) call to children … It is, perhaps, the right tone. I don’t honestly think you improved it … but I do think that you now OWN it. Does that make sense? It is a really good poem and worth the effort you have spent. I liked it in the first place … very original … I think it is right.

  … I talk too much, even in a letter. Oh my, this toad suit is very uncomfortable.

  [To W. D. Snodgrass]

  [40 Clearwater Road]

  Feb. 17th, 1961

  Dear Snodsy,

  I know I don’t owe you a letter … but I just typed up a couple of copies of the group of poems that will appear in the spring PR (march–april) and thought you might like to see what I’ve been doing. It is an awfully bitter group, I fear … stark, in places … But, it is like me, bony and stark in places …

  Untermeyer is taking five of my poems (one of them in this group, “In The Deep Museum” [PO]) and one other new one from the forthcoming group in Hudson and three from the book … for a revision of Modern American Poetry. This, of course, pleases and surprises me … In fact, it scares me. It will be like opening the bible and finding my name in it … I suppose you are used to this sort of thing …

  I’m reading at Amherst next Friday (in a week) and it scares me because I shake … but the money is great. This reading is a real racket … a fine one! Hope you can make the B.C. thing … so you can hold my hand if I shake. God knows who’ll hold it at Amherst.

 
I’ve been reading the last 2 copies of The Fifties and The Sixties … do you read it? I think [Robert] Bly is the only critic with energy and a goal … very exciting, even when he’s wrong.

  I do expect to see you sometime this spring. Wait till you see the kids … they have grown so. You were right … Linda is like me … you are awfully sensitive to people … what makes you that way?

  Despite all my seemingly good news and all … I seem to be full of despair this winter … each grim and bleak day follows another … I wish someone were in love with me or that I was having a wild affair or something! But I’m not. (guilt-wise this is fine … my Doctor says I am a moralist and although this amazes me perhaps he is right … guilt-wise) … Still, I wish there were some nonguilty escape from the self … psychiatry is a dirty mirror … How do you tolerate it? How do I?

  … Well, here are some new poems, if you can bear to read em …

  Lovingly,

  Annie

  In 1961, Anne met the poet Anthony Hecht in New York City, over dinner with Frederick Morgan. Her first letters to Hecht date from April 1961, and he soon came to stay with the Sextons in Newton Lower Falls. Hecht became the family’s favorite guest of the year; even the children fell in love with him after they spent a frosty winter’s evening zooming down a toboggan slide behind him.

  [To Anthony Hecht]

  [40 Clearwater Road]

  MAY DAY [1961]

  Hello Tony! I have a sore (cut) thumb and it hurts to write … type I mean … but I really feel that I must write you on May Day … not because I am any kind of a revolutionist … but because it is, for me, the festival of little children running from house to house and leaving baskets of flowers and candy on their friends doorsteps … this is my basket of flowers and candy … and I leave them secretly on your doorstep … (the way it’s done here is to place it on the doorstep … ring the bell and run and hide) …

  Hello Tony’s doorstep … OUT OF THE WAY CALL GIRLS THIS IS A FLOWER GIRL …

  Please don’t say that I write with eloquence … because it shouldn’t make you feel YOU need to. I am (I fear) eloquent by nature … Most people I just won’t bother to write letters to … so when I do, when I must and like to, then I’m just naturally happy …

  I feel very special about you. I suspect it’s your face … but then, it’s your manner … your voice, your intuitive kindness and sensitiveness etc.… Ah, that isn’t it quite … this is more what it is … you know that poem of mine “Old Dwarf Heart” [PO] that I wrote to Bellow’s lines … well, just before the lines I quote it says … rather the woman of Bittahness says to Henderson … “World is strange to a child. You not a child, sir?” … and then his reply … “True, all too true. I have never been at home in life …”

  You make me feel at home. You make me feel that the world is not strange …

  What kinder gift can someone give another one? Is all this mere eloqeunce … (sp wrong) or simple humanity … simple love. Love, perhaps, should always be this simple …

  I really don’t want our letters to become famous … I want to keep them simple and true. Famous letters are (my damn thumb) neither … or else they are only (simple and true) … Letters are false really—they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are … (poems might come under this same catagory sp wrong) […]

  Dear, dear dear tony, happy spring, happy may day, happy doorstep,

  Anne

  [To Anthony Hecht]

  [40 Clearwater Road]

  May 24th, Wed 1961

  5:15 P.M.

  Oh Tony,

  oh.

  What a lovely, full, rushing right day we had (see I like adjectives too). I have thought about it all day long. Every time I turned around I was thinking about it or, at least, I knew it every minute. How one day can seem like one hour … it’s so strange. Being with you is just like your face said it would be.

  I feel today at home at home. You remember I said I didn’t feel at home in life, well that was almost always any life—not just the outside world—more the outside than my house here. But sometimes, all my life really, I’ve stayed home hiding from the world. Hiding is different from being “at home”. Today, just now, I was working around the kitchen singing at the top of my lungs … and I was just kissing Linda who came in for a drink of water and as I kissed her I thought again of you. They match really, for kissing my girls makes me feel pretty “at home” too.

  And as I have spent this day rather busily with daily things, not at my desk except for one letter I had to answer, I have thought and rethought our “our day”. Of course, I haven’t thought it out with YOU DR. MARTIN’S help … but I don’t need him for everything. I’m getting so I can do it myself … a regular do it yourself psychiatrist … And these are some of my thoughts (only some because there are so many). You said that I’d told you more about me than you had about yourself … Maybe. And yet, there are many ways of telling things. And, anyhow, my feeling for you outshone the few big sins I could throw out at you … by sins I mean those things you ought to hate me for and that if I don’t tell him then I’ll be lying by not telling him and he’ll think I’m something I’m not. All that. And after all I exaggerated my sins. They aren’t that bad. I’m not that bad. And in a way I was rather mysterious about them … telling the facts and not the reasons and the emotions […]

  Well, what I mean is … if it was going to matter to you I had to tell you quickly … Now, about you. The thing is, it doesn’t really matter to me what you’ve ever done so you didn’t have to tell me. The way you are is what you are. It’s true even for both of us. I was afraid that the way I was wouldn’t be true. But it was. I know it today.

  God damn it, I have so much to say that I need to come right back to New York and have another day with you.

  Tony, I want to be your friend forever and I’m glad that I didn’t sleep with you. I mean, I’m glad in a total sense. I hope you are.

  Later Thursday 10:00 A.M. Dr. Martin says that I am a moralist—& maybe I am in a way. I do know this—I’m beginning to learn how to love without feeling it necessary to be all things to the person I love. In other words—how to love you without having to prove it by sleeping with you.

  Does that make sense? I feel very happy—I should have ordered snails for lunch—I keep tasting that garlic butter & have developed a CRAVING for snails.

  What does your Dr. say about me—? Tell her I’m not crazy when I’m with you. Tell her I’m your friend who loves your face. That’s what I am—There isn’t anything sick about us—I think we are healthy together—We don’t have to be healthy for each other—we just are.—also kind to each other.

  Anne

  That spring, the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study appointed Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin its first Scholars in Poetry. As usual, Anne used the money for baby sitters and a housekeeper. The grant also provided her with office space in Cambridge—a long-awaited haven away from the children, which, once gained, she seldom used.

  Another fan wrote Anne that summer—a monk from California, Brother Dennis Farrell. She responded quickly. Religion fascinated her, and she wrestled incessantly with her own need to believe. Her long intense correspondence with Brother Dennis became at least as confessional as her poetry.

  The myth, the belief, and the mystery of Christianity intrigued her, and she always talked eagerly with any acquaintance of the church. In these years she called herself an atheist, and the Sextons joked that on Sundays they went to St. Mattress.

  [To Brother Dennis Farrell]

  [40 Clearwater Road]

  July 11th, 1961

  Dear Brother Dennis:

  Your letter reached me through various routes last Saturday and I hasten to answer. It means a great deal to me. I am pleased that my “four dark girls” (“Letter Written on a Ferry Crossing Long Island Sound” [PO]) meant enough to you to lead you into my book. In my book, I fear, there are no good nuns drinking the sky … and thus, I va
lue your letter even more.

  I am, at this point, working slowly away toward a second book—very slowly. I am afraid you will not like all of it … but I do not know, I really don’t. I want someone to like and understand … and yet I wobble on a drunken sea, crawling between pebbles and slow fish, never knowing if anyone will like any poem. The poems that worry me most will appear shortly in the Partisan Review … a group of six. I have no copies or I would send them to you right now. Perhaps you will see them someday and give me your reaction. I hope so.

  I am pleased with your choices of favorites … they are mine. I have hope that we can continue in accord, more or less. I don’t know much about the life of a Monk (do you capitalize monk?) but I would like to. I asked a Catholic friend about monks and she told me … but still, I don’t really know. Believe me, I treasure the thought of your prayers and Mass intentions (in case it’s true, I tell my Catholic friend … in case it’s true, I tell myself, and plead with it to be true, after all. No matter what I write, I plead with it to be true! Even if I can’t believe it—nevertheless I want it to be true. That is true … no matter how it sounds.) Well … no matter … you know, what a question. As long as there is someone like me, I am thankful that there is someone like you. There is a phrase that Guardini said, that sticks in my mind and that I might even use somewhere in my next book … it goes … “I want no pallid humanitarism—If Christ be not God, I want none of him; I will hack my way through existence alone …”

  And I am. I will enclose some new poems from The Hudson Review, printed this spring … but they are not the ones that might interest you most. Still, by way of a gift, I enclose them … for what it’s worth … and wish all my best wishes. I would very much enjoy hearing from you in the future if you feel like it. Your letter gives me great pleasure and great fear. I will now enjoy both of them; they are both important!