by Anne Sexton
I’m glad you are not stable and I don’t even want or need you to be. My husband is so stable that he fulfills that need. He is so stable that he is a complete conformist, a middleclass lawn grower, good father, good golfer, nice all around guy (in other words also stable, just part of him to be stable). He doesn’t ask questions … even of me …
I am so glad that you love my black book … and if you think of me as the lovely lady on the back cover … please remember that your devotion makes it so. There are a few great souls in my life. They are not many. They are few. You are one.
Now you can do me a favor. I will enclose a poem and I want your opinion on it. I don’t think I sent it to you before. I wrote it last winter … but dared not publish. I want to know if it insults Christ? I want your reaction to it … your most honest thoughts. For I will change the last two lines if they do not work.
with love, as always,
Anne
[…]
Chapter III
Some Foreign Letters
January–October 1963
I have read each page of my mother’s voyage.
I have read each page of her mother’s voyage.
I have learned their words as they learned Dickens’.
I have swallowed these words like bullets.
But I have forgotten the last guest—terror.
Unlike them, I cannot toss in the cabin
as in childbirth.
Now always leaving me in the West
is the wake,
a ragged bridal veil, unexplained,
seductive, always rushing down the stairs,
never detained, never enough.
“Crossing the Atlantic”
September 1963
from LIVE OR DIE
Touring the college circuit all winter long, Anne gave reading after reading in dreary towns. Although All My Pretty Ones had been nominated for the National Book Award, William Stafford’s Traveling Through the Dark won. In another attempt to make money, she began work with Maxine on a second children’s book, More Eggs of Things, which Putnam’s published in 1964. New poems came slowly during these cold months: “To Lose the Earth” [LD] in January, “Sylvia’s Death” [LD] in February, and “The Legend of the One-eyed Man” [LD] in March. Spring brought “Man and Wife” [LD], “Love Song” [LD], “Protestant Easter” [LD], “Those Times …” [LD], “Two Sons” [LD], and “For the Year of the Insane” [LD].
Anne’s winter doldrums broke with the arrival of good news: the American Academy of Arts and Letters had awarded her their first traveling fellowship. It came as a surprise—she had not even applied for the grant. The Academy offered Anne two generous options: travel abroad for three months or, with a larger stipend, travel for an entire year. A full twelve months abroad attracted Anne, but she also knew her own limitations; she depended too heavily on her family and friends to spend that amount of time alone in Europe. Kayo’s job prevented him from going with her and he had asked her not to take the children. She decided to accept the shorter grant and take their next-door neighbor, Sandy Robart, as a companion. But Kayo, never content with second best, talked privately with Anne over a traditional Saturday night dinner of steak and Boston baked beans, and convinced her to accept the larger grant. He and his mother would care for Linda and joy, now aged nine and seven. Soon Anne notified the Academy that she and a friend would travel for a year on the $6,500 grant. In late spring, she and Sandy bought a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day and planned their tramp through the cities and small villages of France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Spain, and perhaps even Egypt.
[To Brother Dennis Farrell]
[40 Clearwater Road]
March 28, 1963
Dear good friend, Brother Dennis,
I was so relieved to get your letter today for I confess I was beginning to worry … not worry about you not loving me anymore but worry that something might be wrong. I thought for a while that my last letter was just too “strong” (for your superiors if not for you) or that maybe you were sick (either mentally or at least on the verge of death!) … such dramas of worry that I worried about … and in a way, when I’d forget to worry I’d try being cross and wouldn’t (as I do sometimes) listen to the evening rosary as I drove into Boston. Funny little girl that I am …
My dear lovely friend … I wish that your Dr. were around for you to talk this over with … But I suppose that is impossible. What I mean is so complicated that I’m not sure I can say it right … I hadn’t thought about this, you see … just hadn’t ever occurred to me that you might be thinking of “leaping over the wall” … for, of course, with the attraction of opposites I thought the wall wonderful and to be out of the everyday world, wonderful. I don’t mean wonderful … I mean escape … but more than that … it has something (in my mind) to do with a relationship to Christ that it wouldn’t seem anyone could get out HERE. But I know so little …
And since I know so little of monastic life and perhaps a little more about being a school teacher I guess I can only hold out my hand to you and say that I am your friend and do trust you will find happiness no matter where you go or stay.
Perhaps I know more about life “out here” (God! This is beginning to sound like prison terminology) … I do understand, pretty accurately what you mean when you describe your old attitude toward yourself as an isolated-spiritual-eunuch … I think I can understand it because it has qualities that would attract me.
But let me explain something … rather complicated something too … Our letters … no matter how direct and human they may seem to you are not to be compared to a direct relationship. In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in … there are no walls in a letter, no objects—the words can fly out of your heart (via the fingers) and no one really need live up to them. I mean this seriously and coldly and (as always) lovingly. You tell me “suddenly I found myself within a human relationship that I had often dreamed of, but never realized existed” … Oh dear God. You must listen to me, for I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans …
You have got to believe me for I feel a strange guilt. You see, I’m pretty sure that no relationship like this, with the love we can have for each other, does exist in daily living. I’m afraid you’ll take “us” as a kind of standard and go out looking for it. There aren’t many of us! And even “us” wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for paper and stamps and the U.S. mail.
I knew an “us” once and after many more letters and even quite a few phone calls the “us” met and it crumbled apart like a rotten cookie. It was built on air and ghosts … it was truly beautiful but it died … because it tried to get real and it was never real.
I love you, but this is so.
Yet you should not deny your honest and good emotions! If you had been denying them you would never have written me the first letter … nor would you have liked my first book much less read it. Because my poems are all emotion, goofed up, but still emotion!
You know, it seems like I’ve been out in “the world” so long … for so many years and, of course, you haven’t … you’ve grown so much in between. If your ideals hadn’t changed it would have been a terrible thing! But … well … I know you say that you have no romantic illusions about life on the “outside” … probably far less than I have about life on the “inside” I am sure. But just the same, I worry that you are being romantic just for the reason that my letters seem to have made so much difference.
Only because I worry.
Well, of course, Anne … (I talk to myself when I write to you) … if I had to be completely truthful I would have to admit … that I like you being a Monk … let’s face it! Not for romantic reasons but for safety …
What have I said … three hours went by; dinner, cocktails, dishes, children, etc. and back here. Kayo (my husb
and) just came in and took 5 silly polaroid pictures of me. I will send them … a matter of reality and how I happen to look right now as I write. They are pretty bad but might amuse you for a moment. I meant to send you some others … but I never did. So here I am, for the moment … just a person … who is it that said “It is by loving men that one learns how to love God”?
And so I will not tell you any longer how our humanity (you and me) is not real … because it isn’t exactly so … for the love is real, I think … it is just that I worry, dear Brother Dennis, that it won’t be like this for you out in “the world” …
And another thing … I will lose you. Sooner or later you’ll find a wife and she won’t let you write letters like this (unless you are a poet or a crazy writer … It isn’t a very conventional thing to do … and it is amazing that the church can allow it … all I can say is that wives are a hell of a lot more conventional than the Church!) … so I will lose you … But I think I can tolerate that (having thought heavily of it since reading your letter) … In truth, I do want your happiness … And this will take me time to readjust … to think, to relearn.
I’m not saying anything right but you do understand, don’t you, that I am trying, harder than ever, to be honest and direct?
Your picture is over my desk. You look very nice. Better than I do at my desk. I have your picture over my desk as I write.
The reason I am replying so quickly (aside from the fact that I feel moved to do so) is your Freudian slip “write now” instead of “right now” that said something to me about … well, it said, either “I’m writing now” or “please write to me” and it seemed like a hidden message inside your beautifully written lines … a hidden plea that I am moved by (but perhaps I am projecting) …
… I love you. I wish we were real. We aren’t, but we are just as real as is humanly possible. If we met we would be awkward and you’d feel awfully let down and you’d think “why, she’s just an ordinary woman … much like the mothers of those kids I teach” … that’s what you’d think … I wouldn’t be … but that’s how we’d be. But there will be other people who won’t be like that. It is just hard to get to know someone when you already know them so well. […]
An hour later … Will this letter ever end!!!!???? I can’t send it because I’m not sure of what I’ve said … I just sat here this last hour rereading all our letters … watching them become so full of understanding and of love; noting that they began that way right off; remembering how far we have come and how much, in our way, we have shared … No. I was wrong what I said at the first of this letter and because of that I have to keep trying to say it right. I just try! I notice, through all the letters, that we both keep asking the other not to think so much of “me” (the one who writes) as if we were afraid to be thought as good and true … afraid of the pedestal the other kept putting us on. Afraid to be loved when inside we both knew we couldn’t possibly be lovable!!! That’s what we keep doing. We are both afraid! And now I am … even more … because I am afraid I influenced you to think of a sort of a world that exists in our letters … But, in truth, for me, in my world, our letters have existed! Have indeed! And meant a great deal to me and have become an important part of my life. And all through the letters I kept putting you on some sort of a pedestal because you were a Monk … and you put me on a pedestal because I was a poet (or that poet).… In a way we were both snobs … were, not are. Something happened in between and it is real … Perhaps I’m saying that our relationship just isn’t part of the world, but is part of mine. (make sense?)
… The next morning … I’d like, for some reason, to quote you from a preface of “Letters to Milena” by Franz Kafka … seeing as the subject of “letters” seems to have enveloped this whole LETTER … just fragmentary quotes … “writing letters … means to denude oneself before ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by ghosts.”
And here is something else that G. B. Shaw wrote on his letters to Ellen Terry [:]
… “Let those who may complain that it was only upon paper remember that only upon paper have humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue and abiding love.”
And you know about Rilke’s letters. But someone told me an amusing and telling incident about him the other day. He was so close and wise and giving in his letters … yet as an artist he was such a selfish and self-protecting human being. When his son got married he did not “have the time to waste” to go to the ceremony but asked if his son would drop by with the girl afterwards … some humanity!
What will you do when you are “out” … will you live in Chicago … get a Master’s? Have you any thoughts or plans?
… Well, even if this letter isn’t very coherent I’ll just have to let it stand and do its best for me. When I woke up this morning I thought of tearing it up and starting over but then decided that isn’t the real point … and even if it is disorganized it is, at least, as much of me as is possible.
Lovingly,
Anne
W. D. Snodgrass had begun resisting the demands of Anne’s long, involved letters in early 1962. Tired by the constant requests for critiques and reassurance, he had stopped writing her so frequently. The diminution of her correspondence with Snodgrass was paralleled by the development of other letter-writing relationships filled with the same exuberance and intensity. However, in time, each correspondence finally reached the same impasse; the writer could not reply as often, as promptly, and as thoroughly as Anne asked.
[To W. D. Snodgrass]
40 Clearwater Road
May something, 1963
De! Darling De!
It has been just so long since I wrote you, owing you a letter for over a year. Christ! And just now I was cleaning (trying) out a desk drawer and ran across your last letter … so here I am again, that “bean sprout” (remember that?) as always, etc.
The year a book comes out is always hell and has been again for me. If you don’t have a copy of my book tell me and I’ll send for though I asked my publishers to send you one they are not entirely dependable and I do want you to have one. It is called All My Pretty Ones and it is a good book even if it didn’t win any prizes (I mean, I believe in the book … even now … it’s better than the first, way better. Oh hell. I think it’s a “great” book in its way. But then, I would …)
Lots of readings and for the old (money disturbs me!) $250.00 with the agency taking a big bite, one third. But their main function is to turn down offers for 25 or 50 bucks. Readings really unnerve me … they actually scare the shit out of me! But it is money and I have to have it. Actually I read pretty well tho I’m a little bit of a ham and I can’t seem to cut that out and give them a “straight” reading. But of course if I’d try reading sober it might make a difference. But if sober I shake … so what the hell. Fear, always fear.
Haven’t been writing hardly anything this year tho … a few that aren’t good and that’s it just about … now I know what you were talking about. Jesus. If I’d get well or something, but I don’t seem to … tho a little better. Kayo is now out of therapy. His doctor says he is done and he thinks so too. And so I guess he is although I had hoped it might have tapped some of his unrealized potential. Still, our marriage is happier than it has ever been and that is what really matters.
Everywhere I read they talk of your reading. In fact everywhere I go they talk of you and it makes me feel close and happy. That is fine but I suppose it is irritating to all of [us] to have reviewers call Lowell, Snodgrass and Sexton (and now [Frederick] Seidel) a new school of conformity. I got a really terrible review from James Dickey in the New York Times blasting my work and saying this of us. The strange thing, for me, is that many reviews of All My Pretty Ones sound as if they were reviewing Bedlam. I mean, Pretty Ones is quite different and has a far larger dimension … but then, they probably don’t read it anyway!
Kayo and I did the craziest th
ing last spring. We put a swimming pool in our back yard. It is canvas but it is in the ground and you can dive into it from one end. Great fun, for us and for the girls. Joy swims mostly and for three minutes at a time under water, more like a porpoise than a child. Linda can swim 100 laps (on top) and it’s great fun.
Have you enjoyed your Renault? I have a Volkswagen. Never tried making love in it, either. Maybe tho you could standing up as it has a sun roof!…
Another crazy thing (and even my doctor frowns at this) is that I am going to spend next year abroad … the Am. Academy offered me the dough and I just couldn’t turn it down (and strangely Kayo is the one who insisted I take it, saying “it is your chance of a life—Take it!”) … so now, suddenly I’m going. Tho Kayo can’t go or he’ll lose his job and he asked me please not to take the kids … So off I go in August. I’m taking Sandy Robart (a next door neighbor, I forget if you met her) as a “keeper” or “chaperone” or simply as a friend. We sail (Christ! it scares me to talk about it!) August 22 on the S.S. France to Paris and pick up a VW and from there, God knows! France, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Egypt, Spain, Portugal, England and last week I decided as long as we were over there (and as long as I’m scared anyhow) to go to Russia too, Moscow and Leningrad. In June Kayo will come over for a month and we’ll drive around France, drinking wine.