Anne Sexton
Page 28
Yes, I suppose you knew me once, or a carbon copy of me … for indeed I grew up in Wellesley. As little said about the child I was, the better. I was a fool who owned nothing but a convertible and who never learned to spell or do anything. I only started to grow at 28. So, if you do recall me, please forget me. I started all over 8 years ago and would prefer that no one knew about that other one—that terrible boy-crazy-unhappy-foolish girl … I met Sylvia later … and if she had known me in Wellesley I’m sure she would not have spoken to me. My name was Anne Harvey.
I’m sorry I’m so late in answering. If there is anything more I could tell you about Sylvia I’d be glad to do it. She wrote me a few times from England—but always about her life. About her death she was silent. Damn it. And then, maybe—maybe not—it was her business. Everyone runs around condemning her for it and I say[:]
She had a right!… But it does leave friends lonely.
Best wishes, Anne Sexton
[To Dorianne Goetz]
[14 Black Oak Road]
JUNE!
Dear Dori Goetz,
I hate to let you down in any way but what you ask is impossible. Yes, I liked your poems but I feel you are just beginning … Once, I too, was just beginning and I am very aware how much encouragement means at that time … But writing is a lonely art and can be done, in truth, only by that one person and at their own rate. I cannot predict for you, your rate of growth. But right now, for you, growth is much more important than publishing in a magazine. I have a feeling that if you were somehow magically lucky enough to get some one of your poems published that years from now you would regret it. It seems to me that T. S. Eliot and maybe Rimbaud were around 19 or 20 when they wrote some great poems. But that is the great exception. I started to write seriously (nine hours a day) when I was 28. (Not counting my efforts at 16-17-18) … I did not get anything published (although I wasted some important “growth-time” trying to) for about three years. This was very quick as the “racket” goes. Usually it takes a poet five or six or even ten years.
Emily Dickinson never bothered with the whole thing. She was content to write them. I would not be only content to write and never to publish or share … but some poems I do not send out (even when I could be almost sure they might get published) for I do not want to see too many mistakes in print.
It would or might be good for you to try to get in on some good course in Creative writing at some University. Even if the course stinks you will meet other poets and share the same interest, the same passion.
If you really want to send the poems out anyway try the magazine The Writer (in most libraries) and once a year they print all the poetry market … it offers a wide variety and some of the places actually do READ the poems. That is how I started altho I collected about 18900 rejection slips first.
My life is so hectic that I could not possibly read your poems as they “roll along.” I would not do justice to the poem or to you if I made such a promise. You see, Dori, I have so many demands upon my time—a family, two children, my work, my own therapy, the reading I never did, all the catching up to do—the growth-time still.
Your poems are sensitive. They show a great inner strength, a deep knowing of things. Keep it up—don’t get discouraged and don’t let my very realistic letter upset you. It also takes guts to be a writer. And discipline. And time. Give it all these. And do write again sometime to let me know how you are doing.
All best wishes, Anne Sexton
Anne’s children were growing up. At twelve, Linda devoted herself to horses and spent her first summer at the overnight riding camp, Highlawn Farm. A few years later Joy joined her sister, and discovered that she, too, loved the camp. Anne’s pain at the summer loss of her children often found its way into the letters bound for Warner, New Hampshire.
[To Linda Gray Sexton]
[14 Black Oak Road]
Thursday, July 8th, 1965
Linda dear,
How wonderful your letter is! Dishes, cups, silver and all! Also naps! (When in heck do you ever get to sleep at NIGHT?) … Nevermind, your letter, your Rachael [Linda’s pony] are precious to us all.
Now, dear, I must tell you the hard thing. You must come home in August. We have thought it over thoroughly and at some length. Daddy and I have talked. Dr. Deitz and I have talked. Maxine and I have talked. Everyone is talking and talking. Now, that Daddy and I have made up our minds there is no questioning on your part. I know that you want to stay. At first, my reaction was “Linda must stay. She is happy!” and I ran around trying to fix things so that you could. Linda, darling, I would lie to you right now and tell you that you had to come home because Potama [a Massachusetts day camp] said they wouldn’t give the money back. But that’s not true. Also I could say that Liz [the director of Highlawn Farm] doesn’t have room for you in August. But that’s not true.
Since when have I lied to you? Since when haven’t I given it to you straight?
Linda, there are many reasons you must come home for August. Yes, I was very enthusiastic about your reaction to freedom, your sudden response to the NEW LIFE and being all on YOUR OWN. Yes. And I do want you to continue on your own. However, there is a family back here in Weston—a family of four. None of us are ready to have you gone that long the first time. We can’t get used to your absence.
And I know that in a way it stinks at home. There are jumping bugs in the pool. The lake at Potama is full of dead fish. However, many of your old friends from Potama ask for you, says Joy, and have been promised your return in August. Also, in a funny way, your mother was promised your return then too. And Joy. And Daddy. Your room is too empty to last all the way through August this first year. Part of growing up is going away and liking it. Also part of growing up is having to come home in August and putting up with a yelling but loving Mother, a lake with dead fish, a pool with jumping bugs.
Honey, at Highlawn Farm you are learning lots about freedom and lots about responsibility. Here, at home, you must learn these things too. I need you home. That is a responsibility but it is also a freedom. Freedom, because now you know that you’re not just the baby needing the mother—but also the friend of mother, who needs you. There is freedom in this. There is growth in this. There is a song that is popular these days about “people who need people.” I don’t know if you know the song, but it says something about the way your family needs you in August.
We’re all set for July. We love you to have your July at Highlawn this year. But we are not quite ready to put up with the empty room for August too.
This does not mean you can’t go up sometime this fall with Maxine and ride. Maybe on Spring vacation you could even go up for a week. There are lots of times you can go up there and ride and do it all. But five weeks at once are all we can really (and in truth) bear.
I know this will make you sad. But I can only say that growing up does make people sad as well as happy and part of growing up is knowing that you are needed as well as the one who needs.
Make the most of your July. Have a ball! Try not to mind the dishes and concentrate on the riding and the fun and no one forcing you to go to bed at a certain time … and cokes when you wish. Try to be WITH it and do come home, my darling, with a good heart and a true wish to become one of us once more. I know I’ll just be cross-Mom again. But even cross-Mom needs you around, your face, your eyes that are so unusually open to the world.
You must be very grown up to understand this complication. But I believe that you are that grown up. I believe in you. And remember that I could have lied about it. But how could I look into your wonderful eyes and repeat such a lie? No! I don’t think the truth makes us (me) look like such a great family to you right now. But I feel the truth will, in its own time, make us a really close one.
And I do love you
And what do you want for your birthday? We have shopping to do for your big year at Junior High. And we are all going camping on Cape Cod with Peggy and John. Wait until you see Provincetown this Augu
st. You’ll Flip. It’s such a funny place. You’ll probably be the best at camping out down there … being so used to it now.
Linda, you are almost twelve. Please give me another year to grow up myself so that I can let you go longer. Meanwhile try to put up with me the way I am.
Tell me, when you have time, just what you are doing. The trotting and cantering and the walk-jog sound great.
I love you –
Mom –
Anne’s fans never relaxed their demands on her time and energy. Envelopes arrived daily, full of poetry and prose, their unknown authors asking for critiques. They wanted her to tutor them, to know them, to promote their work with Houghton Mifflin, to support them through their nervous breakdowns. She tried to answer them all.
[To Jonathan Korso]
[14 Black Oak Road]
aug. 12, 1965
Dear Jonathan Korso,
Your letter was very interesting, hard to define, making it hard on me somehow to set limits for you, advise or help in any real way. First of all let me tell you that I find your poems fascinating, terribly uneven … precious perhaps, flashes of brilliance … but the terrible lack of control, a bad use of rhyme and faults that I feel sure you will learn not to make in time. I am not a prophet but I think you will make it if you learn to revise, if you take your time, if you work your guts out on one poem for four months instead of just letting the miracle (as you must feel it) flow from the pen and then just leave it with the excuse that you are undisciplined.
Hell! I’m undisciplined too, in everything but my work … and the discipline the reworking the forging into being is the stuff of poetry … the original impulse is only that … and perhaps often poets get that as a gift. But it is what you do with the gift that makes the difference. Everyone in the world seems to be writing poems … but only a few climb into the sky. What you sent shows you COULD climb there if you pounded it into your head that you must work and rework these uncut diamonds of yours.
If this is impossible for you my guess is that you will never really make it. And the route you take about publishing won’t make any difference. In the end only the poem counts. I feel you should be concentrating on that and NOT on where you can get a book published. It would be good if you could study with someone persistently for three or four years, I would think.
As for madness … hell! Most poets are mad. It doesn’t qualify us for anything. Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing. Even though I’m often crazy, and I am and I know it, still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak … nothing grows from it and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail. […] Advice …
Stop writing letters to the top poets in America. It is a terrible presumption on your part. I never in my life would have the gall (sp?) to write Randall Jarrell out of the blue that way and all my life I have wanted to do so. It’s out of line … it isn’t done. I mean they get dozens of fan letters a day that they have no time to respond to and I’m sure dozens of poems. Meanwhile, these poets (fans or whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way—not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems, usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole. Read the magazines (you know them all) and write and make contact with others such as you. They are just as lonely, just as ready, and will help you far more than the distant Big Name Poet such as Lowell, Kunitz or Jarrell. The people you know at Amherst sound good and Honig too.
I’m not being rejecting, Jon, I’m being realistic.
Your drawings are marvelous, strange. Those perhaps you can let go on the rush of inspiration … I think. But the poems and I take it you want to be a poet … well then you must work. I talk as if I were sure of this. Well, it’s my opinion that Honig is absolutely right. Rework or forget the whole thing. Spots of brilliance, associative imagry (sp?) is not enough.
I’ve been the whole trip myself. It wasn’t until I learned to work my guts out that a true poem came into being.
If you come to Boston I might be able to arrange to see you if you have a car and can find your way out to Weston. And I’m not shutting you out with this letter but I sure am trying to tell you true.
I think privately publishing your book a waste of time. Get to work, man, and let the publishing come in its own time even if it’s 15 years from now. No matter. Fight for the poem. Put your energy into it. Force discipline upon madness. You can do it. I did it. Why not you? Guard yourself from the easy thing. Push for the stars or, at least, go back and push one poem all the way up there. And then another.
Have you got Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet? You must. And read and reread. Read it like a Bible. I wish for myself that I could care [carve?] it into my eyes, word by word.
And good luck and write again.
During the summer of 1965 the Congress for Cultural Freedom awarded Anne a grant for travel in Africa or South America; Frederick Morgan of the Hudson Review had nominated her. She was delighted to be their first Literary Magazine Travel Grantee.
[To Nolan Miller]
[14 Black Oak Road
Sept. 5, 1965]
Dear Nolan how wonderful your good news!
sept 30 …
well, you can see how far I got
with that letter … just now after
a rather protracted bout with the
flu, have I returned to my desk.
How strange to think you speak of my letter as “such a rich letter” for I am getting sloppy and have no copies of letters anymore and can’t now imagine anything “rich.” But if you say so.
By necessity or needed I mean MORE that the poet needed to write it. I mean … ie. The wife eyes her alcoholic husband and says “do you really need that drink” … so I (jaded) look at many published poems and say do I (as reader) need this poem. After all, we could all make a personal anthology of our favorite poems (all an anthology should be in the first place) and one begins to ask that question of much that is published … I am saying it wrong on paper. It is something for talk, not for typewriters to make clear.
I could give only my small instances … here and about my desk are a couple of started poems … one “The Magic of Things” another, “The Addict” [LD], another not titled possibly about a father and daughter walking in the evening … … They will probably never be poems. They don’t look “needed.” “The Magic of Things” looks already too cerebral. “The Addict” (sp?) looks more promising, more interesting. The father-daughter looks too watery, too easy … not needed … But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my need will make them. Perhaps I must need them more. Maybe I have to be ready to pay that cost of emotion … Oh, perhaps I know too much in a way. Way back when I was at Antioch I didn’t know. I just wrote. The year preceding and the year after Antioch were my most productive times. Or maybe the three years after. It’s hard to pin down. A third book is coming so slow and I feel my best is behind me … and yet grants come rolling in, never quite right but grateful to awarded. The first Literary Magazine Travel Award (Kenyon, Hudson, Partisan, Sewanee, and Poetry) sponsored by The Congress for Cultural Freedom … to go to Africa or Latin America. I think I’ll go two months this year and two months the following. I’d really rather be teaching. Isn’t that queer!?
This letter sounds so depressed—it’s the silent for months typewriter that does it—
& again—how fine, how truly good your good news is. A miracle! Love, Anne
[To Jon Stallworthy]
[14 Black Oak Road]
sept 24, ’65
Dear Jon Stallworthy,
No. I just can’t face that woman, that Margaret Close (I think that’s the name) with an accounting of my “life story.” I did write that other rather sweet and old woman a letter … but life story. DEAR GOD! It’s nice to have fans … but they seem a strange lot. One could read my poems and know a hell of a lot about me. Perhaps there ought to be a feature article done … The Life Story of a woman poet in America.???
>
Well, I don’t mind seeing the letters, rather enjoy them, but can’t possibly answer them all. I usually try to answer (once) a fan letter here in America. But in cases such as this, and if you have such time in your busy editorial life for such as this … I’d rather you gave out the life story.
I am 36, fairly attractive, a mother, two girls are 10 and 12, a husband in the wool business. I live nine miles outside of Boston. I do not live a poet’s life. I look and act like a housewife. My daughter says to her friends “a mother is someone who types all day.” But still I cook. But still my desk is a mess of letters to be answered and poems that want to tear their way out of my soul and onto the typewriter keys. At that point I am a lousy cook, a lousy wife, a lousy mother, because I am too busy wrestling with the poem to remember that I am a normal (?) American housewife.
I led an average childhood of rather well-to-do parents. I did very badly in school because I was (is this an American expression?) too boycrazy to bother. I attended public school (free) until the last two years when I was sent away to boarding school (where there were no boys). At boarding school I spent my time writing to boys … (It’s rather dull isn’t it!) At any rate I eloped at nineteen and thought it a great idea. I am still married to the same man, by the way. Still … I wish I hadn’t married until 30. I wrote poems, a little in high school, but stopped and didn’t start again until I was 27. I knew nothing about poetry at the time. I had to start from the very beginning. My children were young at the time. I worked like hell, staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning to type out years of bad poems.
My family tree goes back to William Brewster who came over here on the Mayflower. It goes back further to William the Conqueror, to Peter The Cruel, King of Castile, to Sir Edward Neville who was beheaded in 1538, to Edward the Third who married Phillipa of Hainault, his mistress age 15.
I live the wrong life for the person I am. I’m tall and thin and that’s all right with me, but my life is square and small and I wish I had a maid but that wouldn’t help, and I wish I lived in Italy but that wouldn’t help. But only important part of the story is that I started to write, and it was a solitary act … One might add that interviews and life stories give me the horrors. I’d throw it all out, like rotten apples, word by word, except for some of the [illegible] (love comes so easily) and old [illegible]