Anne Sexton

by Anne Sexton

  [To Philip Legler]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  MONDAY MAY 2, 1966

  Phil dear of the unnamed wonderful flower otherwise known as THE PHILIP LEGLER FLOWER

  a rather nice name too. […]

  Let’s see what my news of the moment is. Tonight I take part in a vast Anti-Vietnam read-in. I expect they will throw eggs, or my husband (the republican who hates my pink—he calls it—politics) says they may throw hand-grenades. Now, if I don’t die tonight there is always tomorrow when I have an apt. with my O.B. because Linda took the pamphlet from the cancer collecting lady this Sunday and immediately read my symptom at William and Mary and the month before, namely I almost bled to death. Not usual for me so in I go to be checked over like a piece of meat. I would have forgotten it but Linda reminds me that I don’t want to die. She also underlined HOARSENESS, as I almost lost my voice completely on this last trip. Well, my throat’s drying up and elsewhere I’m hemorrhaging and so forth. As for the rest of the list I have all of them, as a matter of fact. Cancer at every hole! Eyes going bad also. Stomach, Kayo calls it my beer-belly, will, I fear, [end in] my throwing out of four very cute bikinis that I have lounged around in each summer. I’m the shock of the proper Bostonian neighborhood in my bikini suits. I think I’m going to Chicago next week if I don’t die first. I love you, also and in amongst all this here things. Tomorrow morning (P.M. for the O.B.) go to Joy’s psychiatrist to see how she is. Meanwhile waiting for my husband’s doc to call back and give me an appointment so I can see what’s up with Kayo. His shrink has never seen me and finally I made a fuss so that even Kayo got mad and now he says he’ll call today but I haven’t heard him ringing. Yes. DOCTOR Z. We are surrounded. Might as well jam Linda into therapy. It’s like a swimming pool. Why not? Every one else is in. Poor farm also. Even our two dogs pant for medical care, one for its sixth puppy shot and the other, next week, to be fixed. FIXED. When will we ever all get fixed.????

  You need not return the Cancer seven danger signals. We don’t need them. Linda, the dear, knows them by heart. She has a cold. She is upstairs reciting the seven danger signals and waiting, oh longing, to menstruate and be a woman and meanwhile please god don’t let mummy die of too much of it.

  I love your letters. I wish I had another joke to send you. I will send/lend the only other interesting thing, a picture that Van Gogh painted at the nut house. It’s lovely. It writhes. It makes me want to stand out there with him taking my sleeping pills. Or maybe delay them for an hour or two and converse with him or be silent with him, whichever he felt like. The strange-like hairs in the skotch tape are dog hairs or dust. I haven’t anaylsied them and 18m not spelling very well, am I? I keep sending you the varieties of my desk/life etc.

  For the moment I seem to have lost Van Gogh in this rubble but perhaps it will pop back in a minute. So you are on Librium. That’s two of the eight pills I swallow every night. Two 25, green and white types. Very nice. Are you taking round orange pills? You said something about blood pressure. Do they keep taking it? And also giving you orange pills, if so then you’re also on thorazine—my favorite, get-well type drug. It took them ten years to figure out the only drug that does me any good. It is also part of my pill structure at night, but only because I might as well take everything all at once. The Thorazine is good for me. I mean it really calms me down and has more or less saved my life when it needed saving, by taking huge amounts of it more or less five times a day. It’s orange anyhow, in case you’ve been taking orange ones. Librium is also a good calmer downer. Phil, don’t look down on pills. They make a hell of a difference and are almost cleaning out the nut houses of the world. I love the story of the man with his penis saying the world. This is the truth! He is probably right! I laughed when you said that most of the patients shook too much to play poker. Did you notice me? I shake like hell. Kayo says it’s all the pills, my chemical mixture, my little nightly factory. No matter why, I have distinct tremors and hate signing my name because my signature looks like I’m 89.

  Glad your wife knows you love me. Nothing wrong with it anyway. I haven’t told my husband. But he notices, flowers and letters. You’d like him, I think. Or nevermind, he’d like you. He doesn’t like too many poets. […]

  Later … dear god … lost the cancer thing, lost something else but found Van Gogh … Where is my desk? Who took my heart? Dinner is cooking and Kayo is making Hollandaise for the broccoli and I am dressed (in same blue reading dress) for Anti-War reading. Wrong nite Anne!

  … found all notes!!!!

  enc.

  please find: comment of Anne Sexton

  SEXTON SPELLBINDS LISTENERS etc.

  and late, but not least, Cancer’s 7 danger signals

  and VAN GOGH

  I light a green cigarette. I think, Phil, of you. I am your anyhow poet. I’m not De Snod, not anyone but your anyhow, all my own and all your own … and it is a wierd abundance. Really is. Abundance the main thing, the good thing, the wished for, looked for and needed. Wierd spelled wrong is still wier weird can’t spell it, forgive me. Look at me, Phil! I’m supposed to be sane. Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I KNEW. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know—no matter what they call it.

  i love you

  [with a hand-drawn heart]

  Anne

  [To Philip Legler]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  may 4th, 1966

  Wednesday

  Dear Phil of the poems, the letters, of The Philip Legler Flower,

  Now, I have been thinking about you for a long time—since your phone call. I’ve been thinking further than the phone call and seriously and wisely as I could.

  Phil, that you were worried is flattering. But it isn’t realistic.

  Yes, we are two of a kind, the abundance stuff that runs wild, runs as wild with love as cancer. Moves in and takes over. I know. I know all about it. And you said in one letter “you’re the only woman I’ve ever met.” I told Linda (between us two) that you said that and she replied “He’s wrong. There’s me!” Ah, the female ego!

  Seriously, Phil baby, everyone is wrong here. Your love, your abundance for me is partly sick. I can tell you this because I am the healthiest, wisest sickest human you’ll meet outside the nut house (patient or doctor/nurse). The sanest thing in this world is love. And what is important is honesty.

  I believe that you love me and I know how you love and yet I say that your love is too intense to be making sense for your life or mine. Okay! So I’m the only woman or the “other” or the “muse magitick” or whatever—so. So what! Yes. You are very intense and so am I. However, I am married to a very intense, practical SQUARE. He is good for me for he has complete plans on how to run each day. He is with the world. I am not of it whatsoever. You? Perhaps only your wife is of the world. And maybe you and I are otherworldly—poets, to be exact. Poets can’t live for/die for/live with/breathe in nothing but themselves—they need the sensible people, the roots, the down the house world of people. You need them. I need them. We cannot exist without them.

  That guy was right—only he didn’t know how right. I feel in my heart that if you concentrate (as you have been doing) on your Anne Sexton campaign that you’ll run off into a tornado. I mean yes we love each other—but it’s a mirror—of sorts—it’s the male of the female and the female of the male. In other words, you’re me. Also I’m you. I realize that the thought that someone else understands every motion and feeling and word is almost too much. I feel that you are experiencing this with me. Be still and listen! This way leads us both into madness. You must look homeward for sanity—maybe not for communication. For communication I hate to tell you where I look—for I am a very lonely person—I look to my doctor and to Linda … and a few friends, very few to treasure. Phil, I’m not saying I don’t love you. I’m saying that your love for me is true and at the same time it is sick and you’re hea
ring this from someone who is pretty goddamn used to being sick and told she was and knowing she is. You’re sick. You need help. Also with me, help is badly needed.

  I’m not scared off by your letters. No. Your letters scare me for you. Now, Phil, I’ve been hanging around the shrink’s office longer than you and I hope I’ve picked up a little bit of wising up on life, driving in into it, that is. I tell you “The Black Art” [PO] (tho written unconsciously, it’s true—take two abundances and they get weird and the children … the ones we love more than ourselves, the products, the extensions, leave. THEY CAN’T TAKE TWO OF THEM). Neither, in your life, can you afford to concentrate all this attention on a girl/poet named Anne Sexton. I hope she is a good poet, and a true person to meet. However, she isn’t what you, Phil Legler, poet and true person, need. I mean, you are sick (which doesn’t mean you don’t KNOW MORE than the nurses/doctors/wife/friends), but that you aren’t operating at your best potential. The full you isn’t getting used up properly. That’s why you’re in the nut house. I’m not your mother—naturally—but I lecture away and yet it isn’t a lecture, it’s a worry. Worry that you’ll use yourself up on me, on loving me, protecting me, when that isn’t your job. If you love me, in passing, like the tulip that will never die, then it’s enough. You’ve done your job. You fill me. But don’t keep growing new Philip Legler flowers every day. Not flowers for Sexton. Then and if you do this, that Richard Howard (is that his name?) would be right in saying I’m poison. Christ! I can’t bear to be poison.

  My self’s self tells me this is wrong. The poet wants love. But not at this cost. First, foremost, Phil, work out your constant need for affection, closeness with students, or with this poet. Maybe because they aren’t used up yet, or dirty with life. Maybe some poetic words like that. Oh hell. I just feel I haven’t done you any favor to write needs, my needs like yours, just like yours, and to sponsor what needs to be worked on with your doctor-daddy.

  Phil, I do love you. Phil, I think you need help, think you are sick. But hell, the nurse who said not to read that sick poetry is in far worse condition on account of she ain’t even ALIVE. But your wife is alive. I’ve met her. She’s alive. She was a wringlet of worry and love, all over you. Her voice, her hands, all love and need and worry. Maybe she doesn’t talk our language but her language is the language of life, of living. For you I think/feel.

  I know you aren’t making mad proposals to me. I’m not scared of that. Hell no. It’s that I’m scared for you. Scared you’ll miss the point of where you are and why. Phil, take the pills and start on the road to growing. Only chance. […]

  About your poems. Write in there as you will, but don’t send out in such a hurry. Keep them on the fire. Write more but don’t make final acts on them for months. Or I wouldn’t. Thorazined as you’ll be and as nutty as you are, it is no time to judge. Maybe a time to write but not to judge finally, like sending out, howard moss or whoever. One poem, “Flee On Your Donkey,” [LD] I wrote in 1962 in the nut house and rewrote 98765432 times until this spring, until I sent to New Yorker (not that they are good but that they pay), and it’s coming out this week, May 7. Please buy at newsstand somewhere. Took me all those years to figure it out right. Give yourself some years. The first poem to me takes, or will, that long—I don’t feel you have finished it or should have. Give that poem time. It may be getting bigger before you’re done with it. Or smaller. Or less you to me. Or its own self’s self. Don’t hurry it. There’s no hurry. It’s not a horse race. […]

  I don’t think form is constipation. But now you mention constipation I know why you couldn’t finish reading my poem, “Cripples and Other Stories” [LD] … All about it, really.

  No. I don’t have cancer. A D&C (Dilation and Curettage) for May 26th. Go in hospital 25th. Get home 28th. I hope that will end it. I’m fond of my womb and its life-giving characteristics. If they say it’s cancer, I’ll let you know right off. I promise.

  I will always treasure your letter about the fight with the nurse over my Bedlam book. It’s too much. It’s great. It’s a tulip! Jesus.

  I love your letters, even if I can’t always write myself.

  [a hand-drawn heart] Anne

  [To Maxine Kumin]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  May 20, 1966

  Dear Maxine,

  I think I’ll send this to Amsterdam where you’ll be riding bikes over the canals. A lovely city. Seeing as this will take a while to get there.

  … (Time Mag is sitting here, the vultures, reading the sketch I wrote about Sylvia for the Tri-Quarterly … Mrs. Plath is having a kind of paranoid fit about their presence and so it goes) … Charlie Newman gave Time permission to read the thing so what the hell. The guy is sitting here.… Also I have the Flu, temp and a feeling of throwing up. Shit! I hate waking up in the morning and having no call to make or to answer. Your private number, on a piece of paper over my desk and on my bedside table, looks sad as I look at it sadly.

  Decided that I couldn’t stand that book cover [for Live or Die], it probably made me sick! Am pleading with HM Co. NOT to use it. Think, as I dashed in there in the rain yesterday and with a temp. and all—that I convinced them not to use, but tried, unsuccessfully I think, to get them to use Barbara [Swan]’s drawing of MAN CARRYING A MAN.

  … went out to lunch with Time mag guy … nothing but a boy, his first assignment and he seems awkward and scared.

  Went also to dentist, weather turned suddenly hot, came home and Joy and Linda and Joy’s horse-friend (not a horse, a friend with horses … Molly Cameron) went swimming. I did not go in (the Flu).

  I haven’t even read Is Paris Burning? yet and soon we will have to return the copy. I imagine you have both devoured it. If you care for such things, Kayo has two others about the last days of the war. Just have no pep as must be plain from this letter. But thought you’d like my news even if I can hardly type or get up any great enthusiasm.

  Love to you in Venice of the north and all of it. It’s the city where I walked out on the rooftop and hung up our wash and sang “I Like Roofs” … and Anne Frank’s city, of course.

  War and Tourists

  and love

  After months of research, Anne and Kayo decided to take a hunting safari in Africa with the award money from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Anne was determined to give her husband the dream of his childhood. But, close to their departure date, the impending slaughter of animals became more and more repugnant to her, as she had become virtually a vegetarian. In late July, she attempted suicide.

  Nevertheless, she drew on reserves of physical and emotional strength and kept her promise to Kayo. Shortly after her release from Massachusetts General Hospital, they boarded the plane bound for London and Nairobi. For her husband the safari equaled the fantasy, but Anne found it horrible: flies, dirt, and endless blood. Still she was exultant over her gift to him; as she remarked to a friend, “I gave Kayo his dream! How many of us ever get our dreams?”

  [To Lois Ames]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  Aug 2 1066

  Dear Lois back in Chicago,

  See date! […]

  I’ve been in a mess, Lois, from bad to wrose. Worse. I mean. Can’t even type. This is first time at typewriter in over two or 3 weeks. Greater love hath no friend.

  I haven’t really been well. In July I tried—well, rather I took an overdose of pills and ended up in MGH being pumped out and with private nurses for 48 hours. Rather a stupid mess. Live or die, you fool, but don’t mess with Mr. in-between! Still, it wasn’t a serious serious attempt or I would have succeeded. Part of me is live. But I forgot about the diet from death. I went on a binge. Terrible to wake up afterwards into a little hell, strapped into bed/crib, arms tied to sides, feet tied together at the bottom of bed—lost control of all functions—literally on a cross—a little crucifixion—very sadistic nurses (and tied down for them) … God, Lois, one nurse was terrible, like a Faulkner preacher breathing sin and hell fire at me for such an im
moral act.

  Dr. Deitz was nice—I mean understanding. Have yet to really understand all I was trying to do. Now he is gone on vacation and I’m about to leave for Africa and I’m in no condition to do so but can’t bring myself to let Kayo down. I just feel terrible in the body, no strength and bizarre symptoms … and as for the head, I know I’m crazy but knowing doesn’t help. Dr. Deitz wishes I wouldn’t try to go to Africa now but it’s all set. Can’t back out.

  Don’t let this letter disturb you. Remember the inner core. It’s got to be there this time … or I’ve had it.

  I must be nuts. Why didn’t I come see you instead of killing myself? I would really prefer to visit with you. Perhaps I was punishing myself? That among other things. Perhaps I want and need my doctor to see me as sick. That and other things. The old need to die, and how it returns under any stress. An old command of my mother’s. Hell. If I’d died it would have been awful in light of my forthcoming book.

  I’m scared of bugs, animals, blazing sun (having upped my Thorazine so I will really burn), voices in my head. I am looking forward to falling in love with African skies. I want to see it, if only I can make it despite fears. I am all fear.

  I had to tell you all this so you’d understand why the form is such a mess. I’m sorry, Lois, best I can do right now.

  love from your all mixed up crazy friend

  Anne of Weston

  [To Lois Ames]

  CAPRI, ITALY

  Sept 7th, 1966

  Dear Lois,

  Got your letter just as we swept into Roma and came down to Capri, the island of happiness. It was wonderful to hear from you and I had thought about you often and wondered how it was going with Mrs. Plath. In your letter you told me really very little about how that went. Did she really unbend? […] Say just when the phone was pulled from the root? I can see that her life is a hard one. Did your fantasy come true—that you would be able to help her face it?

  I really wish that you could find a way to come visit me for a week anytime this year. We have so much talk between us that we haven’t talked. It makes me feel all stoppered up, the words can’t get through on the typewriter, there are too many. I have vowed solemnly not to use the long distance phone as I have done in the past and that makes it worse for our communication. How about a visit? Would it be possible?