by Anne Sexton
“her father was an alcoholic; her mother was chained to her diamonds?” Need it be said “She was locked in her room until the age of 5 when she started school.” Or “She was unwanted, a third daughter used to cement a marriage that was unhinged” or “Her mother was a brilliant woman who excelled in all things and who shone brighter than the diamonds she wore” or “She was an awkward child, backward, breathing in Fairy tales and force fed on black market food” …
Isn’t it all in the poems somewhere? Isn’t too much of it in the poems, an almost shameful display and listing of one’s LIFE STORY
I understand Kafka. I understand Rilke. Only through them can I understand myself. The life story or better named, the case history, is only the machine, a Kafka machine. It makes me want to hide, back in the room where I was locked. I spill it all out in this hopeless fashion because you are a poet and will know there is no “nut-shell bio” but I beg you, make one up out of all this. Hide me! Not necessarily from “fans” but from myself. Let me see the bio you make of it. After I was married I worked as a librarian and as a fashion model. Two facts. Only they are lies because I was locked in a cell. I mean, the poems hadn’t come and the poems are my life. Please note I can’t spell, but that is obvious. That you admire my work makes my life a better one. Please send me a copy of the bio if you [can].
In the autumn, Charles Newman, editor of the Tri-Quarterly, wrote asking Anne to do a small essay on Sylvia Plath. She accepted, and over the next few months worked on “The Bar Fly Ought to Sing,” frequently calling Newman for advice.
[To Mr. Charles Newman,
Tri-Quarterly]
[14 Black Oak Road
circa autumn 1965]
Dear Mr. Newman:
Please excuse the paper, but I have run out of my proper letterhead. And please know that I meant to answer your letter more promptly but that I was busy reading your issue of the Tri-Quarterly on Yeats and also, having just returned from a reading tour, busy on my own poems.
I am very pleased to hear that you are going to put together a Spring issue with a feature section devoted to Sylvia Plath. I have already taken to chance that you wouldn’t mind it and sent this information along to a girl from Chicago who I met this summer and who is hoping and working on a book about Sylvia’s life and work. This girl, Lois Ames, might be able to add something—as she has started a bit of research. I did not know her before, but as she started her work she contacted me. I liked her and think she well may make it.
As for me. Oh hell! I have no length or major emphasis to add. One might say quickly that I have no contribution to make … However, I assume that you have seen the poem, the elegy, I wrote for Sylvia in Poetry. I sent it to an American magazine because I felt as you do—that not one had noticed over here. I hope that you have read and perhaps might reprint articles about her from Britain, by Alvarez, or those in The Critical Quarterly. If you do not know these please let me know. For they are important!!!!!!!!
I am writing late at night and my typing is more than poor.
I could add, for Sylvia, only a small sketch, such as my poem. I knew her for a while in Boston. We did grow up in the same small town, Wellesley, but she was about four years behind me and we never met. We didn’t meet until she was married and living with Ted Hughes in Boston. Then she heard, and George Starbuck heard, that I was going to a class at B.U. run by Robert Lowell. Then they both joined me … we orbited around the class silently and then, after each class, we would pile into my old Ford and I would drive quickly thro the traffic to, or near the Ritz. I would always park at a LOADING ZONE sign and tell them “It’s okay, because we are going to get loaded” and off we’d pile into the Ritz to drink 3 or 4 or 2 martinis … often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides, at length, in detail, in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. Ignoring Lowell and the poems left behind. After this we would all three weave out of the Ritz to spend our last pennies at the Waldorf Cafeteria—a dinner for 70 cents […] Sylvia’s Ted was able to wait or did not care and I had to stay in the city (I live outside of it) for a 7 P.M. appointment with [Dr. Martin]. A funny three. I have heard since that Sylvia was determined to make it—to be great. At the time I didn’t really notice. I was too determined myself. Lowell said, then and later, “I like her work. She goes right to the point.” I didn’t agree. I thought she dogged the point with her form and with her difficult and far-flung images. I felt she was not really making her own form or her own point. I knew she was skilled. Intense, perceptive—strange, blonde, lovely Sylvia … From England to America we exchanged a few letters. I have them now of course. She mentions my poems and perhaps I sent her new ones as I wrote—I’m not sure. The time of the loading-zone was gone and now we sent aerograms back and forth now and then. George was in Rome. He never wrote. He divorced and remarried over there. Sylvia wrote of one child, keeping bees, another child, my poems—and then in her own silence, died.
I could explain and better write such a small sketch if it will suit you. I can further say that I believe her later poems, her second book, is her really great stuff. I can add that I never guessed that she had it all in her. We were just two bar flies—talking of death—not of creation. What she did in her last poems, is I feel, worth a whole lifetime.
I know this is all mistyped and misspelled, but here you have it. Is this what you want?
I am greatly impressed by the Tri-Quarterly and thank you, more than you could know, for sending me that issue.
Please let me know if you want my Bar Fly sketch expanded … and if you would or could use any advice. I want to help. I am ashamed of America—when I think of Sylvia’s last poems. I read at many universities and yet no one mentions her work. Are they all fools? You are not, at any rate.
With best wishes,
[…]
Anne successfully avoided most literary controversies with adroitness and charm. But she had one bête noire: she never forgave James Dickey for being himself. The rivalry began with his brutal review of All My Pretty Ones in the New York Times Book Review in 1963. After a chance meeting in 1965, there followed a series of letters, midnight telephone calls, and encounters, all filled with anticipation and ending in resentment. Her acerbic references to Dickey over the years became so ritualized that they added a note of jocosity to otherwise mundane exchanges. Generous in her enmity, Anne never faulted the poet, only the man.
[To James Dickey]
[14 Black Oak Road]
Dec. 12th, 1965
Dear Jim,
How fine to receive your letter. It is strange—or perhaps it is not—that I wrote you one all by myself some weeks ago and then tore it up the next morning—a wastebasket correspondence? of some sort. Anyhow, I thought—“No Anne, perhaps he forgot that he met you or, forgot you, whoever you are.” That’s what I thought.
Wrong though. You wrote. And even after I had said that I had little time for letters … Yes, Jim, little time … my desk is piled high with letters to answer … but I wonder if I meant that. I’ll tell you this, and in truth, I fear a letter relationship. […] I once made the mistake of believing in a letter-relationship—I “wrote around” … letters, believing-God forgiven, water lost and sky found letters in which I believed. I sure as hell wrote around once. […]
Well, now we can forget all that. I’m glad you wrote, that you being you. I would enjoy dinner with you this spring. I will be away a few times giving readings, myself. Let me know the date so we can be sure if we will both be here at the same time. I hope we will.
We can argue about your “ill-gotten gains” of Boston College at the time. Hardly, ill-gotten, I’d say. I would like to see you and have dinner with you—no matter who pays the bill.
I’ve been writing new poems—but none right-good enough to include. Here are some old ones from The Hudson (which you said you never read) … I check one that might (?) interest you. I
know that it’s all wrong, and yet it is all right.
Or toss it aside if you are busy. But not the letter.
“The Starfish” is fine (Joy) … so is The String Bean (Linda)
[To James Dickey]
[14 Black Oak Road]
the end of December 1965
Dear Jim of San Fernando Valley,
I like your letter of today. I can’t find your first letter—how silly, how very like me—the misplacer of the meaningful. Still, I recall well that it came and that I answered. And now, in hand, I have proof that you answered.
I like it.
I suppose we must go through the tangle of constant redefining of ourselves to each other—or “our relationship” in its own terms. To make sure the other understands. Also to just plain make sure.
To begin with—yes, I know well the letter that drains—the letter that begs “Please James Dickey, tell me I’m great. I wrote to Anne Sexton but she never answered and I know from your poems that you are more …” Sure, I’ve got those, stacked up on the desk. Plus a horrible number from ex-mental patients who think they can write and even quite a few mental patients who are in there and think they can write. Fact is, some can write—just that I never advertised (though perhaps I did) that I’d be everyone’s mother. Fact also, I can’t take them all on, even the talented ones. There just isn’t time or strength. An awful lot of completely sane people write me too. Categories are silly—too many people write that I don’t feel I need to answer (need meaning the great impulse, the desire to respond, the want of it) …
We (I) will forget them all in regards to you or to me. The desk of course gets cluttered—business too—but the human sympathy-tender-friend—doesn’t really get in the way. Might say it adds to the trip—seeing as we are all on our way anyhow.
Now, to continue—I see for us—and if a miracle can happen once, then it can continue to happen if two people want it, really will it—a good friendship, a tender friendship, writing as we wish, back and forth, seeing each other when it happens that we can, as decent, responsible literary folk and earthlings subject to social limitations! I underline your words, so that I may reinforce my own. Tenderness does not require passion to make it real. Not for me. Tenderness is even unique and maybe it is far more valuable than passion. I would, in all frankness, hold it so. I do not want or look for a mad passionate affair. I would avoid one if it looked me in the face. I would run to the end of town to avoid it. Not because I am frightened, or because I feel it would be immoral … but because I feel it might be wrong (self wrong—or him wrong—or life wrong) and because, please believe me, I do not want a lover. Sometimes, on readings for instance, I feel that everywhere I go I could find a lover—and I do not want a lover. I want a friend. One can look and look and still there is no friend. I would like, as a child might say it, to be your friend. After all, you say to me that “I don’t know if this is what is going to happen” and I say to you, this is what I want to happen. Then, I add my miracle talk—if friends once, then why not forever. Why ask what will happen when we are the ones who can control what will happen.?????
I cannot promise that I am geared to your kind of self. I think maybe I am. But I cannot promise. I do not know you well enough yet. I can promise that I will not hurt or presume upon the self you offer to me. I can tell you this as a friend who trusts—I trust that you do not lie to me. I trust what I met of you. I trust the (and now I must hesitate or will get into trouble) … but nevermind … say it, Anne,—the poet in you.
I am wondering if you got the job at Rochester … I knew, heard, you wanted one, but you do not say. I told what-his-name (Ford-frod-fraud) that you’d be good but I don’t know how much my word stands for up there or across over there from my Boston-state. I have read there before and was the guest of (now I remember) george and pat frod? ford (keep making typo-s on his name whatever that means).
As a matter of fact, I am having a terrible time lately on typing (not to mention spelling which I could never do—from the third grade up) but now I can’t type. My fingers won’t obey. Maybe it’s some disease. Maybe it’s just foolishness … But even with poems typed out to The New Yorker, Howard Moss writes back two or 3 pages of mostly corrections of my typos. Perhaps my next book should be titled THE TYPO … Thus I must ask you to understand that the letters I do send to you may be almost unintelligible in some fashion. How will I ever get to the guitar at this rate????
Christmas has been very busy for my family—with the kids home and all of it. Still, very happy-time too. I wish I could have another child—and although I could medically my husband (who is as nice as you say he is) thinks not—in view of many things—me mainly. Still, I could!
I hope the holiday has been happy for you, your wife and your children. I know they are “good” as you put it, for they are yours.
Have I affirmed enough? Have I started what should be only affirmation—not a sermon on anyone’s part—but clarity. Clarity is important, at the beginning—even always I guess. One must be sure …
although the affection came without anyone being sure …
one must say hello to miracles—I think.
[To Tillie Olsen]
[14 Black Oak Road
circa January 1966]
THE YEAR OF! (——
OR THE YEAR OF!???**
ACTUALLY THE TYPEWRITER DOESN’T
know everything
THE YEAR OF 1966
may it be happy and creative for you. I love your calendar and have it on my desk always and use it too. It smiles at me.
My work, at present, is [in] a dreadful slump. When one tries (what an understatement) to keep a marriage together that has been cracked and is as fragile as a cracked egg … when there are children who are growing and not growing on purpose … when you know that although you are supposed to be the sick one and are not and yet must play a constantly weak role to keep the egg from cracking open and out falls two chicks as well as 18 years of stubborness … when one’s poems are damned for being tragic and confessional constantly from both sides of the ocean …
Thank God for Maxine. She is close by always and knows me. No one else who is within literal reach allows me to be real or to think.
Such complaints! Ugh. So mundane … I wrote a poem in October that I think is fair. I’d send it to you but I left my manuscript (all unprinted poems at Barbara’s [Barbara Swan, an artist friend of Anne’s] by mistake. How foolishly destructive one can be. I just called her and it’s there, after frantically looking through this house. Anyhow it’s not a book yet because I haven’t written a book—just a bunch of ill-kempt poems that don’t walk happily together. There are enough poems but not enough to say what I must say if I can ever say it. & even more confessional & tragic this time—reviews are bad for us—we should be blinded before we read such public praise or damnation. I meant only to write Happy New Year and look what happens—Oy! Joy is going to a psychiatrist now—too—that leaves only Linda, who, at 12-1/2, cries an hour a day—but I figure it’s the age—the sensitivity—& also the world. Just a blue mood!
Sorry
Love
Anne
In January of the new year eight new members joined the Sexton household: Penny, the Dalmatian who had followed Angel, gave birth to a litter of puppies. A month later Anne had incorporated the joy of their arrival in her poem “Live,” which completed Live or Die:
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn’t drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst,
blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn’t take.
So I won’t hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.
[To Charles Newman]
[14 Black Oak Road]
Feb something or other,
day after valentine day, at that.
1966
Dear Charles Newman,
Thanks so much for your call last night. It really helped. And please don’t get too depressed with Ted Hughes if he never comes through. You can do it without him, after all. Sylvia did! (I might add).
Yippie for all of us. I have just now finished my first draft of my piece for you. I don’t have the energy to retype it … but think it won’t be reworked or changed much. It’s about six or seven pages counting the poems. This is what I must know—I suddenly had an inspiration and included another poem of mine. It fits in perfectly and is right DIRECTLY to the point of the whole thing. It has been printed before, but only in England—printed in The Observer. May I include it in my piece? Title is “Wanting to Die” [LD] and it has such pertinent lines as “But suicides have a special language./ Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.”
I feel the wanting to die poem is needed in order to further show the desperately similar need that Sylvia and I share. I could, I know, rework the wanting to die feelings into prose, but the poem says it so much better.