by Anne Sexton
This trip was okay. Africa, rather hunting safari, is not for me, dust, fire ball heat, thorn tree and never shade tree, blood, slaughter. Watching the animal die slowly and then be served it that night for dinner. I can’t imagine living there and can’t believe you would like it—but then maybe I am wrong about you. It’s an angry continent, emerging, but with no rule book and great poverty and great hatred for the white man. Chicago is worse though, from what I read. But in U.S. someday the freedom will come and not through black power over white power as in Africa. Anywhere it is the feeling of hatred that gets to you, even as you said about your neighborhood.… Capri is the most beautiful. It is my spiritual home and like being born again. My nerves are better. I don’t look forward to going home, which we do on Thursday, Sept 8th, even before you’ll get this. Too many problems. I even associate home with being sick. Maybe the summer break will have changed things with my doctor. The trouble is that he is the best doctor I ever had … it just got too intense … Oh well, and Kayo and I were in Capri two years ago and yet it seems that we bore each other now. There isn’t anything to say. I irritate him if I tell him what I’m thinking so I am often quiet. He adored the safari. His dream did come true and he talks about nothing else. I’m glad he had it. It’s really just camping out in luxury surrounded by death, killing, unforgiving death at each turn. Capri is like a beautiful mother. The water holds you up like a float and is so clear. Capri is the mother we never had, young, beautiful, exotic, accepting and loving arms. Thank God I’ve been here again. Wish I could live here, with someone. My book is supposed to come out Sept 14th … I’ll know better when I get home. I hope you like the cover, as well as the contents with which you are familiar and even helped with some lines “I’m a little buttercup in my yellow nightie” and more.
Write soon and often. Am dying to see the Sylvia article and know it will launch you.
xo Anne
Live or Die came out in the fall to mixed reviews. The dry spell of four months without a poem ended in October, as Anne began writing more love poems: “The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts,” “That Day,” “In Celebration of My Uterus,” “The Nude Swim,” “Song for a Red Nightgown,” and “Loving the Killer.” Including the three written in early June, she had completed a full quarter of Love Poems, a book which was to be one of her most popular with both the reviewers and the public.
[To Robert Bly]
14 Black Oak Rd.
October 18th, 1966
Dear Bobby Bly,
What a wonderful afternoon I’ve just had with you and your books [The Sea and the Honeycomb), the spring ’66 Sixties and the wonderful Vietnam book. I love those inked-out places and the “In Mourning.” Why, this afternoon has been like a love affair. Such wondrous laughter and depth and so much talk between us (although you couldn’t hear all my remarks I will give you a few). Riot! There he goes right off … “How like Lowell and Sexton!” (much laughter) I can still laugh even [though] your point may be well-taken. Poor me, I ain’t got no Gott-natur. And maybe I don’t for god’s sake I think maybe I don’t. Still in my opinion Arthur Miller’s “ordinary salesman” not ordinary at all. He was in an EXTREME mental state and ended up killing himself. An ordinary man who killed himself. Killing oneself, sleeping with that stocking woman in Boston, lying about sales, fiddling around with a gas pipe, driving off the road (I haven’t read the play for a while) and maybe more—aren’t those all “Extreme mental states?” But I’m not angry. I think you are beautiful. Your magazine is full of wit and joy and love and is a wonderful experience. I think about the best lines are James Wright’s “I have wasted my life.” That’s a great poem of his and I think highly of his work … You know, you are right, I do think the human being is something extremely important in itself. I think I do. I asked myself today and said “Yah. I do.” I do like passenger pigeons and blue whales … the whales more than the pigeons (except in Venice where pigeons work on bells. Have you seen that? When one flies sometimes, especially if all the damn bells are pealing off (peeling? sp?) they all fly). But otherwise I’d say, human first, whale second, pigeon third. Also Zebras and Giraffes. I am very fond, personally, of zebras and giraffes, having just returned from Africa. Much to my horror my husband shot a zebra so unfortunately we will have a zebra skin in our “family room” which is really the room where I write, but also where everyone keeps gathering and leaving their books and stuff. Soon I will remove to the attic or build a small hut in the woods outside. Luckily giraffes are protected from hunters so I can keep on living with my love for them without suffering immediate guilt about having watched one die. My husband is an “ordinary salesman” and his case is worse (more EXTREME) than Willie Loman’s because he is married to me (gray eyes). That one. Thus, instead of killing himself he goes out to kill the wild creatures of Africa and test his courage. An Elephant charged and almost killed him but the professional hunter got it (in back of the eye I believe). I tell you, Africa was better than an abortion or a cancer operation if one is looking for mutilation and butchers. However it didn’t excite me. Later I washed the blood off in the Indian Ocean. And more in the Mediterranean where it is so clear and buoyant you never have the “fear of going down.” Marvellous lines of Machado!
I shouldn’t go on this way. The best thing about The Sixties is that it makes you want to start talking and it sometimes makes you want to start writing. I find that when you or Crunk or whoever is tearing something apart that I want to talk. When you offer the poem itself I want to write and I often do feel closer to life.
I don’t have much to say about the Lowell attack. I feel neutral I guess. Or rather, I’d rather not say what I feel. I guess I don’t feel Union Dead poems are melodrama. I think melodrama is more interesting. I think it’s a bit stale, as you say, but I rather like “floods of objects” and I don’t mind journalism either. But “a life of their own” is what is missing and gives one the feeling of a stale smoked-up room that has just been deserted by a literary cocktail party.
Oh well, I’m not much of a critic. I guess I don’t know enough to be a critic. I know one thing, though, the critics (so-called) who [go] after “Lying in a Hammock” are wrong. They couldn’t be real poets at all if they couldn’t feel what that poem was doing. I’d rather have written that poem than any I have written.
Today is a special day for me, not only because of your gifts, not only because of the orange-yellow-bloodred trees at my window and in my woods, but because I am once again saved from cancer. Day before yesterday they were going to give me a hysterectomy but yesterday I went to some big deal specialist in Boston and I can keep it. So saved is a part of the soul of the woman who lives in me. I thought today that I would write a poem “In Celebration of My Uterus” [LP] but I haven’t written it yet and, of course, you wouldn’t like it (too extreme). Of course it’s pretty human to want to keep it, it’s even exclusively human, as you say, but I assure you I do not want to bomb foreign populations (nor kill zebras or elephants) [Letter stops at this point.]
[To Constance Smith
The Radcliffe Institute]
14 Black Oak Road
November 9, 1966
Dear Connie,
Following our conversation of last evening, I am writing to you in an official capacity to apply for a scholarship in creative writing for the year 1967–1968. More specifically, I wish to write prose.
The history of my prose writing goes back to the publication of my first short story in New World Writing, Number 16, in 1960. In this same collection Tillie Olsen published “Tell Me a Riddle.” I saw that my own words were the words of a beginner and, much as a child learns to talk, I had only just begun. I tried to write more prose along with the poems that were coming but knew each time that the prose was inadequate. From 1961 to 1963, with the help of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, I worked on poems, finished “All My Pretty Ones,” started “Live or Die,” and thought a lot about prose. As you know, the American Academy
of Arts and Letters granted me some time in Europe in 1963–1964, and the Ford Foundation thought I could write a play in 1964 and 1965. I did write a play, not once but forty times, but it is stillborn and will be until I can find a director willing to work with me on any further rewrites.
Thus I have published three books of poems; and just at the end of my last book, the last poem dated February the Last, 1966, I started the bold and terrifying work on a novel. I worked constantly until May, when I realized that I was not writing well enough. Since then I have gone back to study [it and] found I had written three chapters and four pages into the fourth, and I started to rewrite. I want to try my hand, my heart on this foreign, mysterious, precious language. It is not easy for me to write well. Sentences come hard. But I am ready to try again. I am ready to spend four years or ten years or all years on what this novel must have.
However, I am badly in need of money; and although I have the means to make money by public readings (my little one-night stands, my little vaudeville act), it is never enough to meet the expenses. I believe in work and am not afraid of it—I will work in a department store this Christmas if that is my only choice this year. However, the money situation will not get any better. The needs of my two children, ages 11 and 13, grow greater every year, and the only way to change the status of our income is for me to go out and do something about it. Further, a novel is a lot less “part time” than a poem. A novel eats time, and its characters refuse to do dishes and iron blouses. I have a cleaning woman once a week; I dare not fire her, for while she irons, I type. To concentrate on the enormity of a book I need her more often—further, I need a secretary now and then. One who can type, punctuate and spell. A novel seems so big, so “full time.” I cannot hold it in my arms like a poem, though one may have to hold a poem in his arms for a week or even for years. Still, I am a very stubborn person and a doer of things. I must write this novel, and I must write it better than I can write. I do not aspire to merely write a novel that will be published as my first story was, so easily, but to write one that is lasting.
I do not write with facility, the pen is awkward in my hand, but I think I am ready to begin again.
Please do call me about that lunch, that “never frivolous lunch,” you mentioned.
Best wishes,
The only time Anne had ever enjoyed her birthday was in 1965, when electric power failed across the northeastern seaboard. Canceling dinner at Locke-Ober’s, the family had stayed home, roasted hot dogs in the fireplace, and celebrated by candlelight. In 1966 she wanted to do it the same way. Anne set out candles and turned off the lights. Then Joy went upstairs to take a bath; while she was in the tub, her candle went out and Anne ran to relight it. In the dark, she caught her heel and fell a full flight of stairs. Joy called an ambulance and Anne was taken to the hospital. Her hipbone was in fragments. “The Break” [LP], written a month later, was to recreate the experience.
[To Lois Ames]
[The Newton-Wellesley Hospital]
Sat. Nov. 19th, 1966
This is the 1st and probably only letter I’ll write anyone from this joint—
Dear Lois—your ms. of Sylvia Plath is really fine! I take a certain little private pleasure in knowing I helped you get started.—Fascinating material—sick!—more about it later.—
You must be wondering why a letter by hand?—Eh? I never write by hand—it is so ugly—like my adolescence—I seldom write poems this way as you know—half the time can’t read it later. And tonight this is most awkward as I’m flat on my back & WILL BE FOR A YEAR—God! On my birthday (see “Menstruation at Forty” [LD]—that day when one is supposed to be dead, the birth-night of the soul—Nov 9th—I tripped at the head of the gold carpeted stairs & fell & fell & fell & BROKE my hip—I can’t walk for a year. Have 2 “PINS” (SCREWS really) in my hip to keep it together. Only Joy was in the house when it happened. I couldn’t move—thought I’d broken my spine—worst pain of my life—am just today crawling out of the “pain machine” (I call it). I kept yelling “Jesus! Jesus!” and the nurse would shout back “Wrong name! I’m not Jesus. I’m Barbara”—I guess I get blasphemous and religious all at once when I’m pushed to the rail (& twice screwed)—
No driving my blue jewel. No walking except as a one year old, with my walker—& crutches, when I can manage them. If I step on right leg my hip will be permanently crippled (“I was an instant cripple … I’d known it from the start …”) In my sleep I try to get up & walk & must be forcibly held down. What[’s] wrong with me??? Must I be a cripple? Is there no other way?—Oh Lois! Lois, Lois, Lois—Will you ever come East & stay with us? I shall perish cooped up in the house for a year. Once in a while I’ll have to be driven to see Dr. Deitz, Daddy—& to the bone man. […]
About Sylvia—I wish you’d mentioned something about her suicide—& you never say she was alone. Perhaps both by design? to placate Ted & Mrs. P. so you can really get the book.—Your work is the work of a PRO—I leave Newton Wellesley Hosp. on Wed. with a R.N. to help me until Dec. 20th—Please write. Lois, Lois, Lois—
XO—anne
I was cold sober—too.
After three years of silence, Brother Dennis Farrell wrote to Anne. She replied immediately to her old friend, who was no longer a monk, but it was the last letter they were ever to exchange.
[To Brother Dennis Farrell]
[14 Black Oak Road]
Dec 10th, 1966
Dear Dennis,
Thank God you wrote to me. I’ve been worrying about you for years, wondering if you were alive or dead, a monk or not or where and how you were. You shouldn’t have left me with this silence. Was it that last letter I wrote to you? You must excuse my letters. Often they are hasty and one must not take them as the total truth.
I even wondered when my last book came out this fall (have you seen it? Live or Die is the title) if you’d ever read it and write to me once more. It had that poem in it, the “black but beautiful” one. Your words in my poem. […]
Tell me what you are doing. I gave a reading in Chicago last winter. We might have met, or at least spoken for a minute. But things like that can’t happen if I don’t know where you are.
Merry Christmas and all best,
Anne Sexton
After Christmas, Anne received an invitation from Ted Hughes to the International Poetry Festival in London. She had long wanted to meet Pablo Neruda, who was coming to the festival from Chile. When she wrote Hughes accepting his offer, she spoke frankly of her distress over a remark he had made about her poetry and Lowell’s in his article on Sylvia Plath in the Tri-Quarterly. She attended the London Poetry Festival in July, in her wheel chair.
[To Ted Hughes]
14 Black Oak Rd.
Jan 20th, 1967
Dear Ted,
I assume you got my cable. I couldn’t get up the energy to reply quite then … but I was pretty sure I could come to the Festival in July and thought you ought to know. Further, my delay in answering might look like a refusal to understand your feelings about the article on Sylvia. I think I can understand what a difficult spot you were in. I knew that Cal sent you that letter as he read it to me.
I did feel a little sour about the torture cell with the daily newspaper (good writing but … a kind of parody)))) … Perhaps you didn’t mean to detract from the poetry that I write or the poetry that Cal writes but you did. In this case, in Sylvia’s case, I agree, it needed doing. More separation is needed. I am personally quite tired of every review etc. linking my name with Cal’s—much as I respect his work, and I do. Still, my poems ARE different. Sylvia’s are different too. I love her work—pure genius. And the loss of it, the terrible loss of the more she could have done!… At any rate, I do accept your apology and thank you for it. I’m not sure what your terms “spirit” or “nature” or “society” mean … but if you say so.
Cal is sick […] and perhaps has not answered you. I’m sure he will and that if he is well he will come to the Festival in July. He si
mply (he said) wanted an apology; he added, at the time, that he often fought with FRIENDS and made it up subsequently. I’m sure he counted you as a friend.
I couldn’t answer you personally until I had seen my surgeon (saw him today). I have a broken hip and he had said I could not walk until next November. However, there is a chance now that I might be capable of walking with a cane by this summer. He said I could come in a wheel chair. Which is what I planned to do. When I got your letter I wasn’t sure if I could make it because of the hip—I would need someone to take care of me and as you know the money doesn’t quite cover my expenses (the flight!) let alone my nurse or my husband or daughter. However, Lois Ames (she is doing that biography of Sylvia and is now on a grant to do it) tells me she will fill in and be my “caretaker” as she has work to do in London herself. She is quite nice. I think you will like her and find her easy to talk to—even better, tactful. I met her only in connection with her work on Sylvia … but as you know, I had little to add. That poem of mine makes everyone think I knew her well, when I only knew her death well. If the poem disturbed you let me say I am sorry and apologize for it. I thought Mrs. Plath (whom I met through Lois) would hate the poem, but she doesn’t.
Oh Ted, it must all be a battle for you! I do understand.
As for accommodation—Lois perhaps will find us some free digs—if not I will let you know. In the meantime you could let me know if everyone is staying at the same place and how much. Brown’s Hotel (where I stayed last summer) is 15 dollars a day without meals. Are you fixing everyone up somewhere cheaper? Also, where (London Wl?) is the festival being held? Brown’s is in 1. I may have to use taxis with the hip. Can Neruda speak English or am I lost? I haven’t talked to Tony Hecht—he is a good friend. He might be able to push me around or help me hobble. I will need help … but maybe not as much as I’d feared. I fell down the stairs in November and shattered the hip bone. It is still painful and the mail is stacked up a yard high. It hurts some to sit up to type and I can’t write by hand as even I can’t read it …