by Anne Sexton
Joan [Sexton] wrote me about a party on Nov 1st. I wonder if I’ll be home by then and how (in this condition) I can get through a party … If I am going to do this (and I’ll decide within one week) I would be home for SARA. That seems to be the day before the play.?????????? A strange time for a party … Linda will need rest. But anyhow … this letter will really leave you in limbo for I’m just speaking out, for a change. The real truth (not what you want of me but what is there of me) … I decided today to come home but am taking a few days in Capri to see if I can’t restore … and find a way … If not there will be lots of red tape with car (will store in Paris for time being) (thinking I may work something out in therapy and get back to Spain later.) … and the tickets and all that. Don’t climb the walls, boots, they are so uncomfortable. I’ve been on them all along. Only now you know. Rome is so lovely. But inside is where one must find a real monument. I find that out … Who knows maybe I’ll last it. But I think not. I think I’ve had it … can’t eat, or sleep. Even the sun, the lovely sun does no good … To tell you I love you seems silly. The letter is all truth and all love, every word. Who you are is who I love. Who I am is something else. I had better go home and start working on it. Here I am … and just that licks me … Oh Boots, I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow? I have learned much about us over here … and something about myself … I need help. I wish it were different … don’t worry if I don’t write for a few days. I am thinking, thinking very hard.
love you, my dearest, my Kayo …
[To Alfred Sexton,
telegram]
October 22, 1963
ARRIVING BOSTON SUNDAY OCT 27 3:25 PM ALITALIA FLIGHT 624 AM OK BUT CANCEL PARTY
Chapter IV
Flee on Your Donkey
November 1963–May 1967
I have come back
but disorder is not what it was.
I have lost the trick of it!
The innocence of it!…
Anne, Anne,
flee on your donkey,
flee this sad hotel,
ride out on some hairy beast,
gallop backward pressing
your buttocks to his withers,
sit to his clumsy gait somehow.
Ride out
any old way you please!
In this place everyone talks to his own mouth.
That’s what it means to be crazy.
Those I loved best died of it—
the fool’s disease.
“Flee On Your Donkey”
June 1962
from LIVE OR DIE
The months following Anne’s return from Europe overflowed with recriminations; no one was spared. Anne struggled daily with the need to accept the defeat brought on by her own inadequacies, and to cope with the ensuing depression. Even the prospect of the Ford Foundation grant failed to cheer her.
Her work with Dr. Martin resumed. Still complaining of the “leaky ego” which had brought her home from Europe, she faithfully transcribed the tape recording of each therapy session into a green spiral notebook by hand. She made a valiant effort to delve into her past.
Anne was a demanding patient. Dr. Martin had used hypnosis with some success and had allowed Anne lengthy hours for consultation instead of the customary fifty minutes. Her case was complicated not only by repeated suicide attempts but by various forms of hysteria, including trances, as well. Moreover, Anne tended to focus subtly on fee reduction and to insist on additional sessions, while denying that she had the slightest interest in either, and Dr. Martin’s marriage had added complexities to her fantasies and dreams. Yet a bond of trust had grown between the doctor and his patient, and their work had gone forward despite the threatening nature of their discoveries.
In the winter of 1964, Dr. Martin announced that he was considering moving his practice to Philadelphia. Panicked by the thought of his departure, Anne filled the next several months with hysteria and anger. She had relied on him for seven years, through many crises, including the death of her parents. Her dependence was deep. She found the idea of transferring to another therapist unthinkable, and repeatedly tried to dissuade Dr. Martin from leaving. When he told her that he would definitely move in August, she grew bitter, convinced that he was yet another in a long line of loved ones who had deserted her.
Finding a new psychiatrist was not easy. Many doctors were reluctant to cope with such a complicated patient. Finally, after months of interviews with prospective psychiatrists—which Anne referred to as a marriage brokerage—she decided she could work with Dr. Samuel Deitz. In July 1964, they began the long, slow period of adjustment.
The psychiatric ward of Massachusetts General Hospital and Westwood Lodge grew more and more familiar between 1964 and 1967. Anne’s mental illness was no longer novel and she grew bored with her anguish. She had written enough about “sealed hotels” and wondered if she would ever get well.
As she poured her energy into staying alive, she found it harder and harder to write. As far back as October 1963 she had written to Dr. Martin: “I think I have been getting to be an almost cheap artist since the first Radcliffe grant. Perhaps success is not good for me. I am beginning to think so. I am losing the innocence with which I began …”
She began filling a new black folder with poems placed in the order in which they were written; she remarked that they read “like a fever chart for a bad case of melancholy.” Even so, another book was not to be ready for publication until 1966. She called this third volume Live or Die, since it reflected her struggles with the daily process of living over the past five years. For several months after she had titled it, the book waited, unfinished. She needed a capstone, a positive statement with which to end it. Finally, in February of 1966 it came: the poem “Live.”
[To Felicia Geffen
The American Academy of Arts and Letters]
40 Clearwater Road
Nov. 5th, 1963
Dear Miss Geffen and Dear American Academy,
This is a letter of failure. If you can bear with me I will try to explain why I am “home” and not in Europe. I could, I am aware, just tell you that I am home under doctor’s care and that he forbids an[y] further extensive travel.
And yet I think there is a point to my failure. As the salmon fight upstream to spawn I fought to stay in Europe. Everywhere my eyes and sense were stimulated and excited. But I began to feel smaller and smaller, unreal. There is more to it than that. It is called in psychiatric terms “impoverishment of the ego” … for someone with my history staying was becoming an endurance test, and in the doctor’s word a “luxury” a “skating on thin ice”.
You, I know, did not intend the trip to be that way. Even when I said “yes” I knew I’d have trouble (but I have trouble at home) but I wanted, desperately wanted to see, to know, to find out with my own eyes.
Perhaps now I have learned only one thing, a very American thing—that to fail (the endurance shattered, broken into small unimportant pieces) is the ultimate humiliation. How does one muddy oneself with failure in this “literary marketplace” and survive? There is something about it that is not respectable … to crawl home, shrunken, hardly a wife, hardly a mother—and the “writer” has fled. I left suddenly, the thin ice was breaking under me … left clothes and books and my car in Rome.
I was most honored by your award to me—and have still no wish to dishonor it. That is why I write you now, although I am still incoherent—because I felt you deserved to know first—not via the grapevine “Sexton cracked up” and all that. I am sure you know what I mean. It has become quite popular in our time (perhaps even other times?) … for this news to create interest and even a technical excitement.
My doctor suggests that I would be able to return for two months with my husband next spring. However, I am quite aware that this does not fit the terms of the grant at all. Please know that I understand your position in this matter. The rest of the money must go to someo
ne else; let it be combed out of my failure and let it become something of its own. At this point in my life I have no idea if my months in Europe drove toward a new recognition in my work. It is a matter of mending, waiting and persevering. Damn! It is hard to send you this. A bludgeon to my pride and even worse, to hope and to that bright place “a year abroad.”
I know this letter isn’t very official in tone. I could not. Drowning [is] not so pitiful as the attempt to rise.
With sincerity,
Felicia Geffen graciously replied that the Academy wished Anne to keep the remaining grant money. In June, Anne and Kayo were to go to Rome, Capri, and Venice on “an eating tour.”
[To Felicia Geffen]
40 Clearwater Road
December 12, 1963
Dear Miss Geffen and American Academy,
There are no words—how can I express my gratefulness? Very simply, let me say that your response to my letter is helping me renew my faith, not only in myself as a person but as a writer.
When all the world seems dead, I do know this … the Academy is alive.
Yours sincerely,
One night at the Radcliffe Institute, Tillie Olsen introduced Anne to Anne, Clarke, a psychiatrist from California. They immediately formed a strong friendship which survived over the years via the mails.
Their correspondence began during Anne’s crisis over Dr. Martin’s impending departure. Clarke insisted that she could not replace Anne’s doctor; nevertheless, Anne’s letters constantly elected Clarke to the role of consulting psychiatrist with verbatim transcripts of her therapy.
Clarke suffered from the incurable degenerative disease lupus, and Anne was drawn to her by her own empathetic fascination with death. Once reassured that the disease was not necessarily fatal, Anne knew she had found a friend who would not desert or limit her.
[To Anne Clarke]
[40 Clearwater Road]
jan what the hell is the
date … I guess it’s prob the 21st or
something … no 22nd …
1964
Sweet Anne,
I love you. Do you know how I look for the mail and it is your letter that I hunt for, that I spring from the desk for when I hear the mailman slip his letters thru the lock. Yep! It’s your envelope I hunt for. Yep! It’s your voice. Your cadence!
Okay? […]
Anne, the thing that really is bugging me, putting me, mouth at the wall (I mean wall) is that Dr. Martin is leaving … Christ. I can’t. I mean I can’t. That’s all. I just can’t. Christ’s sake! How can I explain … it would take too many pages … hours … get the picture, Anne … eight years of therapy … At start me nothing … really nothing … for two years me still nothing … and then I start to be something and then my mother dies, and then father … a large storm … then recovery and that slow and trying to both Martin and me … I mean “hell” not just “trying” (and, for him too) … (I’m a very difficult, acting out patient) … and I’d come quite far,,,, but now … now … if he goes next Sept. and he thinks he will … I have had it. I can’t make it (the intense trust, the transference all over AGAIN) … Anne! Please! Help me! Don’t be my doctor … but for God’s sake be my friend who is also a doctor. I could use that. I mean, I not only could use it … but it might be essential for me for a time … I HAVE GOT TO HAVE SOMEONE. (Am I too dramatic … after all, I know I’m not dying … not really … but it [is] so close … as you said, just as you said. When you die you are really alone. I mean no one is going along with you and you’d like to do it without losing control, to maintain a little pride, a little respect …) … Anne, I feel so alone. I think, between you and me, that I’m half so well and half so sick … and I don’t want the sick to win … to lose all control … but …
but …
alone …
I was thinking more about the facts of death (real death) after I read your letter and I thought, after your words, that this was, Indeed, the awfulness of dying … that you must do it alone. I remember well being right beside my mother as she died, and trying to help her, to stay there, right there so she wouldn’t have to walk the barrier alone … to go as far as I could into that dumb country … I wanted to hold her hand, as one holds a child’s hand, to take her across, to say “It’s all right. I’m here. Don’t be afraid.” … And I did. And then she was gone. She was in the nothingness … Without me. Without herself!… Thus she made the transition from something-ness to nothingness … but what good was I? With all that love (longing) I couldn’t stop the hours or the pain … I couldn’t matter. No. Pain mattered more and it was, dear God, pain that rocked her out. Not me. For all my longing and my wanting, not me. And now she is a nothing. Except for me … for me she is a big something … a something I love and hate and still react and talk to. That is what keeps us alive. That living thing we leave behind. That[’s] the flame. But that the body should be gone, a piece of furniture only,,, that dear body …
Oh anne.
Oh hell.
I feel awful. I tempered my suffering about “them” because I had “him”—good and bad and as doctory as he is … he was the first to believe in me … the first to care … the only … (it seems) and for him to leave is … is to leave myself. Do you know?
If I could run. If I could only. If I could put it out of mind …
Oh nevermind, Anne, what good will it do to talk about.
… Blah. Blah …
By the way, when I said “what is death for you, something angry” I meant for Me (the you talk meant another voice asked it of me …) … but you and I are close enuf to mix up. Only in that little “drawing” it was a dialogue between me and me. Ya know?
For god’s sake don’t let Doc Martin mind his own store. He is about to leave it. I’ll still be standing in it, looking around, wondering where in hell “this is” … Talk to me serious as much as you feel like it … it’s half way like death … I need someone, aside from pain, to rock me out, away, alone. (Sorry this letter so sad. But it’s real Sexton and thus, as always, real stuff … which means real LOVE
[To Anne Clarke]
[40 Clearwater Road]
SUNDAY feb 9 1964
Dearly Anne,
A few words on a Sunday. One I note that my anxiety about us is quieter. I think it was the aftermath of worrying about the letter from you … I am much calmer today.
I’m writing to share a couple of ideas. Not to write about them but just to say them to you.
From Camus’ notebooks … “an intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this because I am happy to be both halves.”
And from something I read a few months ago and the source is forgotten … “the uncommitted life is not worth living.”
… That’s really all I have to say of any import.
My therapy is degenerating to SEX. Boy, there are some things that I do avoid, avoid, avoid! But we got to it by the back door, starting with the poem “Wanting to Die” [LD] … and the discussion of the sex of death. When (to me) death takes you and puts you thru the wringer, it’s a man. But when you kill yourself it’s a woman. And it goes on from there to his discovery that 1. I don’t really think the dead are dead 2. that I certainly don’t think I’ll die even tho I’m dead 3. that suicides go to a special place … asleep for instance. 4. that suicide is a form of masturbation!!!
Well, my rationalization for today is that if “an intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself” the same could be said for masturbation or even better for suicide. Bow wow! How’s that! I look at it this way (magically) that there are those that are killed and the few who kill and then the other kind, those that do both at once … I do think that killing people for any reason is perfectly terrible. I don’t care what they did, even Hitler for instance. And I think that being killed is perfectly terrible, even dying softly in your sleep. But (I rationalize) when you take both things at once, then you have a certain power … power over what? Well, life for instance … and death too. I g
uess I see it as a way of cheating death. Doc Martin says (Christ I forgot what I was going to say??? INSTANT REPRESSION. For god’s sake! Damn me. I was interested in what I was about to say … thinking … trying to remember … I KNOW. He sez it’s a way of “staying alive” … and also (now I really remember!) a way of cheating pain. Killing yourself is merely a way to avoid pain despite all my interesting ideas about it.
It is a blue sky! A white snow. A yellow sun. Pretty nice out my window, rolling off into the distant pine trees … Sandy and Les are about to come over for a drink.
I shall now go out to new kitchen and prepare shrimp and cocktail sauce.
Anne Anne
[To Anne Clarke]
[40 Clearwater Road]
Feb 12th, 1964
Dearly Anne,
[…] I’m working like mad on this (now appearing) section of poems on death. Maxine says I’m going to exorcise all my death wishes and get rid of them. I think so. I don’t mind either! Pretty damn good idea. And nice also to do something with it. I see already what a strange poem I wrote last year is all about (death) and am rewriting it enough to make it a little clearer. I think I’ll make a section of them … I like making sections of poems that interrelate. Maybe I’ll call it (the section) “The Wood of the Suicides” (from Dante’s Inferno) … I am fascinated with the whole thing and as I work on it I create it (instead of doing it) … a fine substitute!
Doc Martin also thought it was interesting that I sent you tapes that showed me being angry … anger is a rarity … I’m really not (he agrees) an angry patient. I would say I was a little bit too much of a loving patient (Clover type) … but really, he Martin is great … I dig him … He is my good parent. He cares. I keep thinking no one else would.