by Anne Sexton
We have a swimming pool in our back yard. We put it in this April. It is small but cool. Sometimes I go in without my suit which is like being reborn … and my girls, Linda age 8 and Joy age 6 adore the pool. They think Momie is very naughty to go in without a suit. They stand at the bedroom window and watch me and they giggle and worry about it. We are all puritans in Boston … me too, that’s the trouble. To be a moralist without God is a lonely maze (and with no way out really).
Have I said “more” … Have I been more me, more Anne? This is the effort for today for you …
It’s all so jumbled. I am not calm today. I need order. I am supposed to be listening to my tape recorder … I tape (or rather he tapes) my appointments with the psychiatrist (I go to him twice a week, for six years now) and then I bring home the tape and am supposed to listen to it again (to put it all into order). Sometimes I have used it to record myself. Once, this fall, I recorded a radio program I was on … it was taped at the station and on the air two days later so I thought I’d record it. All quite funny because, of course, I had three martinis with another poet at the Howard Johnson’s next to the station before we did the tape. We were four, who were supposed to discuss something (they never defined it) about poetry. The moderator started with a long question (five minutes worth) and then said “And, Miss Sexton, what do YOU think about the state of modern poetry” … which caught me unawares as I didn’t know he was even asking a question and in fact I hadn’t been listening too accurately to him … so I said (it’s on the tape) “Well, Mr. Morgan (or whatever his name was) the state of modern FOETRY … I mean poetry …” now, around Boston, poets greet me with a question about the state of modern foetry!!
Brother Dennis, I love you. All the time I’ve been typing here it has been thundering. Now the sun has come out. Such bright greenery! Such lush and extra leaves on all sides. I feel unexpectedly happy and clean. I am wide-eyed and rich!
This is a lot of pages and yet I wonder if I’ve said anything at all
page FOUR!!!!!!!
… I lived in San Francisco once. At Hunter’s Point. Kayo was in the navy (Korean conflict) and we had run out of money (he was a sailor) so we lived in the federal housing which was full of quite a few cockroaches … but our window overlooked a small bay and a dump. At night the dump was lovely, burning in gray and scarlet fires out over the water. I remember most the rain, the rain, the rain. It was sept, october, november and december and it rained. I had never seen Christmas lights up over the streets in the rain … I drove out to the coast in five days … stopping seldom except once at Reno where I won about 50 bucks … it was a wild ride. I love the mountains and those huge trees, the redwoods […]
In view of the total disorder of this letter I’d like to close with a poem [“For Eleanor Boylan Talking with God” PO]. I’ve just been looking over the new book and chose one that I wrote to a very devout friend. She is the one I asked about “monks” when I got your first letter. She is a lovable and dear and humorous and talkative person. She is older than I am. We talk often about God and belief etc. She has no concept or understanding of “sin” except as the church teaches and knows it. Or perhaps that’s wrong … I mean, rather, that she is imbedded in a conventional viewpoint … I don’t really know. I love her, but I do not feel as close to her as I do to you. [… she closed letter with a poem]
[To May Swenson]
40 Clearwater Rd.
August 8th, 1962
Dear May Swenson,
I was so pleased today to receive a copy of your letter to Houghton Mifflin about my forthcoming book. I feel (as readers sometimes do) as if I knew you … for I have long admired your work … looking up to it and being, somehow, proud of it … for it is the work of a woman and the work of a fine poet. I have counted you at the top of the list … beside Elizabeth Bishop …
If I were to make up an anthology (and I don’t plan to but if I did) I would not be able to represent modern poetry without many of your poems …
So I am, of course, extraordinarily (sp?) pleased that you like my second book …
With all best wishes,
Anne first appeared on television in the fall of 1962, with Peter Davison. The two poets were interviewed by P. Albert Duhamel, a Boston Herald literary critic. The occasion was noted in a letter from a former colleague of Anne’s at the Hathaway House Bookshop.
[To Mrs. Willard Fuller]
40 Clearwater Rd.
Oct. 9th, 1962
Dear Mrs. Fuller,
How wonderful to hear from you! I’m glad you saw me on T.V. and thought I was pretty good at it … mature and all that! I’m really the same girl who liked the lending library desk and who you taught many things … about books and who writes them and why etc. Also I remember you started to teach me French … but then I had to leave for California.
I think often of Hathaway (of course I go there still … but I mean the old Hathaway with you at your desk and Mrs. Benner in the children’s room). The other day I was thinking of it … thinking that I wish I was still working up there in the old aura (for me) of calm and order, the friendly people all pleading for a new mystery, the tea we would cook and all those books to read in between. Now my life is much more confusing than that. The two girls, Linda and Joy are 9 and 7 … and very busy and happy. I sit here at my desk and try to write some sort of “honest” poetry or else I dash over to Radcliffe where I am a scholar at their Institute for Independent Study. This is my second year at The Institute … I wish my mother were alive to see that … it would have impressed her greatly. I never went to college you know … the others at the institute have a “doctrate or eqivellent” (as you can see I still can’t spell) … I taught last year, creative writing, and found it difficult but interesting. (hoping my students wouldn’t find out that I can’t speak french or even spell english) …
I have written a little children’s book in collaboration with Maxine Kumin. It comes out this spring … called Eggs of Things [published by Putnam’s, 1963] … also I have a small piece (a reminiscence of Santa Claus in our family) titled “The Last Believer” which is coming out in the Nov. or Dec. Vogue. It is nothing like my poetry. Kayo (my husband) said that it was “too healthy” … which, as you may have noticed, my poetry is not (or, not often) … I feel, sometimes, sorry about my poetry … not as far as “the literary world” is concerned … but as far as the people in Wellesley and surrounding towns are concerned. It shocks them and I can understand why … they say it isn’t anything “like me” … “it is so depressing” or “cruel” … and I know that it is, in truth, like me inside. And, you see, “inside” is the place where poems come from. I don’t know why I explain this to you at such length except that I always did love you and admire you and would (indeed) like your approval despite the difficult subject matter of many of my poems.
I’m pleased that you remember my mother and my nana (Miss Dingley) so fondly. They are really “all my pretty ones” … for I loved them the very most and miss them terribly.
No, I didn’t know that Peter Davison sold you books. He never mentioned it … though I guess I knew dimly that he began as a salesman … (and me at the lending library) … now we are supposed to represent a poet and a critic. Strange, isn’t it!?… At any rate I don’t recall seeing him. After all, you always shut the door when you saw salesmen!
Your letter makes me very happy.
with love,
Anne (no pen at this desk)
[To Brother Dennis Farrell]
[40 Clearwater Road]
Nov. 19th, 1962
Your last letter said waiting and always praying … in deep ugly need a few weeks ago I tried to pray without knowing the rt words. I hope you aren’t angry over my last letter. I don’t honestly feel you are but that you are busy … it is import to rem that we won’t get angry with each other, there is too much trust between us, too much honesty and love … still I don’t know how to pray. I’m waiting and always without praying … tho you s
ay that writing a poem was a kind of prayer (as by mistake) and your letters are certainly an answer (by no sort of mistake) proof of something … goodness, I think.
You are my friend of friends (and if it doesn’t frighten you then by God I won’t let it frighten me) really how strange it all is, your life is made up of belief and mine of doubt. How strange we should meet. It is a gift for me, a prayer in sickness that was answered … me who opposes all authority, who struggles against misery and belief alike and even as I think of myself as an unbeliever … then why do I love God?… and the “love” such as it is (it being I suppose too sentimental) is not a feeling of surrender but a feeling of longing. It must be a diff. world … to believe instead of longing to … I am so rather hysterical that I have a feeling that if I did believe I’d lose all grip on reality … but then, it wouldn’t be the same reality.
Do I make any sense? Talk to me!
yrs with affection
[To George Starbuck]
[40 Clearwater Road]
dec 18th, 1962, sat night
Dear George!
My God! What a wonderful Christmas present. A letter from you—so full and so dear, so George, who I’ve missed for so long … I have read it six times. I don’t think I have let myself realize how missed you were … how everything was without word and words of yours. My good friend! My needed friend. In simple words … I have missed you badly … I just kept drinking up your letter like mother’s milk … and there is so much to answer, to call back across the void […]
God! I missed you. In fact, I have needed you for one whole year. You are the only critic (for one thing) that I respect and the few things I write lie untouched and not sent out … sad little poems of guilt and loss—with no passion or conviction left to them.
You’ve GOT to tell me just what you thought of Pretty Ones … because I need your thoughts (you discovered me, you know, and you have got to keep up my morale in that department … I don’t trust the rest of them) … Please like Pretty Ones … it is all I really have. It won’t cop prizes (I’m sick of wanting them anyhow … this year I didn’t bother trying for a Guggy … shit on Guggys, … their applications just aren’t worth it … you have to crawl through a field of white worms to begin with … having done so 3 times I resign …) … No prizes. No awards … I want George’s opinions … that’s all. You count. For me, you just count. (s.o.s. newer poems no good … where do I go from here? Nothing any good anymore. Plays stinck … (sp?) poems now bad.… prose in wastebasket. Genius flew the coop. Alone with only book with black cover to go my bond) …
Pool covered with snow. No help. Linda plays the violin … pretty good but rather sloppy. Joy tried to learn to read but too busy day dreaming to bother. Kayo fine … happier now he has been in therapy for 2 years (him almost done) … Me still going to Dr. Martin … He is married (or did I say) … it mellows him but I’m still in hock to him. Crazy. Crazy as usual. (pills as usual and martinis at 5 … the f ococlack (god look at that!) Martinis!… I write you this letter as fast as I could talk (pretty fast) … with a rush of love and HELLO THERE!
Paul Brooks (formal shy and awkward) has taken me to lunch at Locks [the Locke-Ober Café, a renowned Boston restaurant] a few times. I puzzle him (and why not?) … read a manuscript for them a few weeks ago (msc. by bad poet. told them so and got 25 bucks reading fee. Hard way to make dough … reading bad poems … sent my opinion all misspelled too. He thinks I’m a cookie (kooky?) genius who can’t spell …) … Read my poems at Cambridge Center last week to overflow audience (me drunk as usual) … readings are a show. Read all around now … big show … rather depressing (miss you on show with me … us happy and drunk and not caring) […]
I want to send you new (bad) poems for help. If I call a REAL help will you answer? (now Anne! just after you promised “no questions”) … When you come back to U.S. I can afford to call you and ask. Rome too much money and all that ocean would get in the way I think.
The play I wrote is bad. If you read it you’d make a sad face. I’m still Sappho’s never-read understudy. […]
At a reading in Cambridge last week three people (more but these three stand out as rather typical for an after-Sexton triangle) came up to me … a girl who was crying cuz she’s been in a nut house too … a girl who was proclaiming Jesus and was trying to tell me “need IS belief” and an analyst who said “if you ever get tired of your analyst I’d be very interested in treating you”! (funny?) … I now make (if you can stand this) 250 bucks a reading plus expenses. Keee rist!!! So come home and you can make your living reading (I think to myself) dead and old poetry. (course it’s not dead but it’s not really RECENT … newborn as it ought to be … or we all wish it were) …
Maxine’s father died early this fall. It was expected but is hard just the same. Me. I’m tired of all these dead. There are getting to be too many of them. Maxine and I wrote a silly children’s book [Eggs of Things] and is coming out this spring. It is a limited vocab. We are going to do a sequel (sp?) this winter when she gets back from Puetro Rico (sp?) where the whole family went for 2 weeks. She has brought out a book of children’s poems. They are cute and good and it is selling well.
I see June [Hill] now and then. She is just the same. She held my hand and boozed me up and took me over to the T.V. station this fall when I had to be on Duhamel’s show. I had Peter Davison on with me … it was awfully phony I thought … but saw it later (being on tape) and it turned out fine. A few times June and I have gone over to Arthur [Freeman]’s and drank martinis … I also saw Galway Kinnell last time he was in town. He is very strange, George, and I’m not sure I like him too well. He is too silent on purpose with hair in eyes on purpose. Also he is a big gossip type. He asked me if I had ever been in love with you! I said “no” but that I loved you. Found out later from June he’d asked her the same damn thing the day before. (maybe at heart he is an old maid gossip) … Watch out for him I sez.
Enough gossip. I miss you. I love you (just like I said) and hope you’ll write me that “other” page about all my pretty ones.
[To Brother Dennis Farrell]
[40 Clearwater Road]
Dec. 26th, 1962
My good friend, my dear Brother Dennis …
Your letter, as usual, one worth eating up and I did. And your card, reminding me that I hadn’t answered though I’d read seven times. I am your friend, that poet girl who still
a. loves you
b. reads your letters
c.saves your letters
d. thinks up so many answers that she can’t contain them in any envelope
e. wishes you’d convert my doubt to belief
f. knows you won’t cuz it ain’t that easy
g. thinks, well, anyhow, he is praying for me!
h. knows that’s a lazy way out
i. needs your friendship and love
j. yours, not just any monk
k. hadn’t thought you (what you TOO) were in a nut house making those moccasins and weaving those useless mats … but now I know it makes no difference one way or the other except why didn’t you tell me sooner.
l. (at least I think that is the alphabet … I can’t spell and can’t add or subtract … oh well.
m.
mnopqrstuvwxyz …!
I love you. E. E. Cummings is dead, bless him …
I’m writing but I can’t really answer your letter. No. I’m not withdrawing from me! I couldn’t. I’m just sitting beside you being quiet as a child might. A small child (mine are not always so quiet).
Job-like, your job, your ambition and all the clutter and waste of it all … Please do blow off steam to me. I would think it hard to be a teacher-monk … like trying to walk a picket fence all the way home. In a way more like a picket fence than a Cross … imagine carrying a picket fence! Despite the ambition that you feel you shouldn’t have … and isn’t that ambition for them as well as you? I mean, if you want your classes to be best so much … won’t that (just that quality
of ambition) make them better and if so won’t your students receive more because of it?… You know, I confess to an extraordinary ambition myself … I want my poems to be better than anyone else’s. I do. Because (one reason anyhow) I wrote and rewrote them … and now the reader (even such as you were a reader and found you “received” from my poems) finds the poems a “gift” … So perhaps this ambition to be “the best” and “to give the most” though it starts inward goes out and from you and from me and spreads out its roots in other people. So, after all, forget the original motive … And please note how much easier it is for the poet for people think poets are in touch with some mystical power and they endow us with qualities we do not possess and love us for words that we only wrote for ambition and not for love. At least a poet is ignored, hated, or adored and strangely respected. Where as the teacher just goes around being taken for granted and used … literally used like a highway.… If I’m not being saccharine I’d say (or rather, perhaps being saccharine, I’d say) that I think the poet tries to be God while the teacher somehow serves God … and ambition be damned. The Pope was ambitious too … and it’s a hell of a lot more difficult to be ambitious when you know you are going to carry a picket fence all your life.
Well, I’m quite ignorant about monks and teachers … but that’s the way I see it and maybe it will mean something to you. I sit here at my desk which is covered with unanswered letters, requests for poems I haven’t written, haven’t dared to write … knowing that the vein I’m still tapping is so inward that I dare not bring forth poems … that my ambition to write good poems is going to stop me from daring to write bad ones. But I feel a new confidence somewhere, a new daring … to write for its own sake and give up the goal. I am going (I hope) to love my poems again and bring them forth like children … even if they are ugly …
I have been reading The Way of the Cross. I like it. I see it twice, through my eyes and through yours. A double vision … far richer! I think of Mary … I wonder what she felt. How could I find out more about her?… I’m silly. I wish Mary had kept a diary … and put down her thoughts. The birth seems to be told too often in the same words and the early life of Jesus … all like a fable that no one quite believes or is sure of. Where can [one] read about Mary …? What was the weather and temp. in Bethlehem that night? What was she wearing? How long was her labor? Things like that … it is the poet in me that wants to know. The book is giving me a new insight and love and understanding of Jesus and of his humanity. Thank you, dear Brother Dennis …