Anne Sexton

by Anne Sexton

  It looks as if I will be the only female poet at the festival (not counting Ginsberg!) … is that so? How strange. I look drawn and haggard now, I will be no addition. I will work on a tan. Not, of course, that you asked me because I was another sex. No. That is another lump I dislike[:] “female poets lump,” the “confessional poets lump,” or “Lowell, Sexton, Plath lump.” Your intentions were insightful and correct. Thus, be forgiven.

  Oxford U.P. brings out my new book Live or Die this [year]. They will be delighted. I hear from Mrs. Plath that the children are blooming. I am delighted—yrs Anne

  [To Dorianne Goetz,

  postcard]

  14 Black Oak Road

  [April 20, 1967]

  Dori! Dori! Dear! Your poem “SAFE GOODS” IS WONDERFUL, IS A SMALL MIRACLE. Please do not hurry. Sappho will turn in her grave. Someday you will be a great, a lasting, a only poet. You are already as good if not better than I am. Where you will wander one can only guess. I’m sure you’ll wander well.

  I give you all my luck and some [of]

  my love

  Anne

  My daughter loves it too. I tried to call to tell you, tell you, tell you!

  One late afternoon in May, Anne received a telegram: “Columbia University Trustees today awarded you Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Live or Die. Congratulations.” Soon other cables and messages flooded in—from Nolan Miller, Ben Shaktman, John Malcolm Brinnin, Howard Moss, Frederick Morgan, the Governor of Massachusetts, Hy Sobiloff, Dudley Fitts, Charles Newman, the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, her college roommate, and many others. It was the critical highpoint of her career.

  Chapter V

  Transformations

  May 1967–December 1972

  Daisy, you have been brought forth

  from a stiff-necked people.

  The zeal of your house

  doth eat you up.

  O Daisy, O Daughter of Jerusalem,

  there is an enormous hunger in Zion!

  from MERCY STREET

  During the next five years Anne completed Love Poems, Transformations, The Book of Folly, and her play, retitled Mercy Street. Success buoyed her spirits, and she developed an aura of confidence. Therapy with Dr. Deitz supported and reassured her; her relationship with Kayo kept her stable and safe. To the joy of her friends and family, suicide ceased to be a daily threat between 1967 and 1970.

  As Anne discovered new people and new ideas her life expanded. At the London Poetry Festival, she met poets she had admired for years. Returning home to her first real teaching experience, she put much of her new excitement to work. Public performances on the reading circuit still terrified her, but to compensate for her anxiety, she raised her fee to $700. The sales of her books continued to climb; she had become a genuinely popular poet.

  Awards rained in, confirming her new self-confidence: an honorary Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 1968 and Radcliffe in 1969; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969; honorary Doctorates of Letters from Tufts University in 1970, Fairfield University in 1972, and Regis College in 1973.

  Fan letters flooded her desk. She tried to respond to everyone—especially those writing from mental hospitals. If there was no time for a letter, she often drew a daisy on a postcard and signed her name. The memory of mental institutions never left her. She knew that any communication, any touch, was better than silence. In an attempt to conserve time, she began dictating her letters instead of typing them herself, even those of the most private nature. The appearance of her letters changed drastically—the charm of her misspellings and typos was replaced by a smooth, finished product. Anne’s skill and sophistication had grown since her elopement note in 1948; twenty years later, her letters had an easy lapidary quality which sometimes masked her true feelings.

  As Anne plunged into the politics of literature, demonstrating that she had as fine an acumen for business as she did for poetry, she did not hesitate to use her fame or the threat of her mental instability as a lever. Once she became fully aware of her ability to “psych into” other people, she adroitly manipulated them to do all she asked.

  Her friends and family began to resist her small but taxing requests. Her husband pressed her to give up her fear of the marketplace and to shop, at least by phone, for the family groceries. Her daughters entered rebellious adolescence. Her friends were focusing on their own expanding careers and lives. On a trip to New York City in the spring of 1969, she made an appointment with Frederick Morgan. Telephoning him from a hotel two blocks away from the Hudson Review, she asked if he would come over and get her in a taxi—claiming that she was too frightened of the city to hail a cab herself and incapable of walking the two blocks. When Morgan refused, explaining that he was running an office, not a taxi service, she grew cool. She stopped corresponding with him and simply crossed him off her list. This pattern of demand and rejection had begun in the early 1960s with W. D. Snodgrass and grew more apparent with the years.

  In late 1969, Anne underwent the trauma of changing psychiatrists again. Dr. Constance Chase, who replaced Dr. Deitz, took an unprecedented approach. She would not tolerate hysterical midnight telephone calls; she refused to accept or support Anne’s weaknesses and demanded a modicum of control. Anne responded to the challenge, and made some progress in her therapy. But it was hard work. As she tried to cut down on her Thorazine and sleeping pills in an attempt to reduce her addiction, her dependence on family and friends increased.

  [To Anne Ford

  Houghton Mifflin Company

  Publicity Department]

  14 Black Oak Road

  17 May 1967

  Deal Anne,

  I would like to be quoted about Sallie Bingham’s book with your first sentence and not your second. “Sallie Bingham writes with precision, irony and subtle compassion,” unless you’d like to add “it’s a damn good book”?

  Your story of Carson McCullers remains in my mind. I keep worrying about her. Anne, do you realize some day that will be me! And I won’t know that my writing is lousy and sodden. In my opinion Hemingway did the right thing.

  Love,

  Anne

  Anne had first tried her hand at teaching poetry with a small group of Harvard and Radcliffe students in 1962. Although she found it an intriguing experience, she felt she was not effective as a teacher.

  In early 1967, Robert Clawson, a former English teacher at Weston High School, and Anne attended the Huntington Conference on Long Island as members of the Teachers’ and Writers’ Collaborative. There they met Herbert Kohl, the educator and writer. The Collaborative dedicated itself to promoting new and imaginative methods of teaching. On their return to Massachusetts, Anne and Bob convinced the Wayland High School Board to hire them as a team for the academic year 1967–1968, sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Together they set up an innovative English literature class, unprecedented in the history of the school.

  [To Herbert Kohl]

  [14 Black Oak Road

  circa spring 1967]

  Dear Herb,

  I hate to try to fit words around what Bob and I would do together in a highschool class of English. How can one describe an aim? How can one be specific about “opening,” “unlocking,” “setting on fire” with each student? But that is the aim.

  But you want a plan, a list of objectives. So I’ll give you ours with the reminder that our objectives are flexible enough to allow for student objectives and student innovation. I feel this is as important an ideal as the ones I will list.

  A group of sophomores, juniors and seniors (15 in number) of mixed ability and interest in English will gather daily in a classroom where books will be in abundance and the teacher (Bob) and the poet (me) will argue about content, meaning, life, the honesty of literature and in turn encourage all student writing as valuable communication and never give it a mark or hold it up to evaluation that would tend to kill, or block, or “clog.”

  Both Bob and I will keep separate journals of our
lives with the students. We are going to suggest, perhaps require, the students to keep similar journals. Their feelings about us, about different books, etc. might be more interesting than our observations of them. Certainly their journals would be a value.

  If we succeed the students will run the class, or at any rate should be able to call it “our class.” They will learn to feel free to bring in any book that interests them. We want to find out what they feel in their literature and not impose ours. However, we will introduce ours and try to communicate our passions and encourage open discussion and argument. We hope this leads to their writing, their reading, and to the knowledge that books are written with honesty, despair, passion, and by real people (me, the poet), real people (them), and real people (Bob, the teacher).

  When marks are required for school credit we will let them mark themselves. We will discuss their self-evaluating marks with them personally (privately) and hopefully prove that we don’t care what mark they get, that we aren’t in the business of evaluating them, but in the business of listening to them, reading with them, and thinking together. We are more interested in their ideas than their marks, in their openness to writing for its own sake, rather than for the “marks’” sake.

  After a month or two we want to start sending them into lower grades, one through nine, to teach, to spread the word. We want them to choose the material they teach but we will give suggestions if they ask for them. We don’t plan to “require” them to do this, but will try our damndest to sell them on the idea. It will be an individual problem. If they want specific “backing up” such as one of us “along” for a week or two, then they can take one of us while the other remains with the class. Later, the whole class will participate in the “feedback” of each student-teacher experience. Maybe they will want to spend three or four class periods a week with a certain grade. We’ll play it by ear and try to keep our ears open. Their own teaching might be more valuable to them than our “teaching.” […]

  As for money, we would like $3000 apiece for the year. Bob is a teacher with 7 year’s experience and I am a writer with ten year’s experience. It’s what we need, in truth. But we don’t want to ask for more than you can budget for this.

  So that’s it. Hastily written down for you without real organization. To unchain, to set on fire, to send forth, to set more fires and unchain others—that’s the goal. Yes, it will be a regular credit English class, but what we hope for is far from regular.

  I thought this was going to be short but I got wordy in my enthusiasm.

  Love you all and all good luck,

  Anne

  [To Claire S. Degener]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  21 June 1967

  Dear Cindy,

  It was wonderful to see you and find out you were just as real and nice as I had expected you to be. As for me, how could I help but be human? If you read the books, or even the play, although the play doesn’t tell that much about me, you would know I was no Marilyn Monroe.

  That nice teacher and I found a cab by talking an off-duty cab in[to] going on-duty, but you were sweet to be concerned and to give us that telephone number.

  Both Lois and I are staying in London at the 69 Hotel; 69 Cadogan Gardens, Sloane Square. The festival will be held in Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room, South Bank.

  Please do send me the play along with your comments on it. I suppose I could get a reading or a production of it from the Theater Company of Boston or maybe the Charles Playhouse if you would like to try these avenues. I like the idea of working on the production in Boston, but I hate having it produced here, I don’t want my suburban friends clacking around about it.

  I love you, dear, and there’s no bad side of Boston. There’s just a windward and leeward.

  Love and kisses,

  [To Jon Stallworthy]

  14 Black Oak Road

  28 June 1967

  Dear Jon,

  Remember me? I’m that poet from the United States that gets the lousiest reviews that Britain can hand out. You’d better give away the champagne to someone else. Tell me someone, just one person beside yourself, that likes my poetry. They’ve put me through a meat grinder, and I have come out weighing one quarter of a pound of hamburg. My heart and my hand is a chicken liver. Mixed imagery—very bad.

  I don’t know what it means to you, but finding out that I’m staying at the 69 Hotel has put me into gales of laughter. Impossible that there should be a hotel named that. What does one do in such a hotel and being the only woman at the conference? 69 Hotel! Don’t they know I have a broken hip?

  I hope you will meet me quickly at the Festival so that I don’t become lost, and do please excuse the hysteria of this letter, but the despair over my English reviews plus my humor at the 69 Hotel have put me and my secretary into fits of madness.

  Love to you,

  Anne

  [To Jon Stallworthy]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  3 August 1967

  Dear Jon,

  You are simply the most. I really adore you. You’re my editor and I’m proud of it. I adore being called the Nefertiti of New England. It was you that wrote that, wasn’t it, although I think my reading on Sunday night was better than the reading on Thursday or so Lois tells me. I’ve been reading some of Fleur Adcock’s poems and liking them tremendously.

  The festival was very hectic. I never recovered from the plane trip and I drank too much to keep going and worse than that the broken hip was just a drag. At least I didn’t follow Ted Hughes’ suggestion of appearing in the wheelchair although the last night when Muggeridge introduced me as “the lady with a stick” I felt like hitting him with it. I’m a lady with a poem, not a stick.

  I am glad I had a chance to show you some of the new poems and that you liked some of them. The festival was a humbling experience which is a good thing as against the humiliating experience of my bad reviews. Do write when you have a chance just to tell me you like me as much as I like you.

  Love,

  Anne told several of her friends that she had not written a single poem since breaking her hip. But between November of 1966 and September of 1967, she had actually written ten new love poems: “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife” in November; “The Break” in December; “You All Know the Story of the Other Woman” and “It Is a Spring Afternoon” in February; “Moon Song, Woman Song,” “Barefoot,” and “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” in May; “Just Once” in June, and “The Papa and Mama Dance” in September.

  [To Philip Legler]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  Sept 6th, 1967

  Dear Crazy Phil Baby dear,

  Yes. Yes. Yes. I hear. Your silence is loud. I guess you still think “fame” has done me in. It hasn’t but I guess you’ll always think so. It did do in my letter writing. Time too has done in my letter writing. I don’t write to anyone anymore. The typewriter feels strange to my fingers, it feels difficult, like pushing pebbles apart.

  I start teaching tomorrow and that will be daily a high school class. I’m scared although I’m teaching it experimentally along with an experienced teacher (one with a degree). We are supposed to keep separate journals. So typewriter will HAVE to come out of hiding. Poor typewriter with no new poems. God, I wish I could write something. Have been blocked for so long … nothing but one poem since the hip. This has been a terrible year (not because of the hip really). I hope this coming one won’t be so difficult. It gets hard to “keep going on.” I think I have been silent because I was down deep pretty depressed. It appears so. Appears in this letter. Bizarre things have been happening upon me, things I can’t speak to you about … but it is due to them that I don’t write—not fame as you think.

  Soon the yellow leaves will come to New England … ah ache and nostalgia and grief. And why? Grief comes because outdoors looks like a calendar? No, but …

  And how are you? Your book? A job for this year? I wish (but you never comment on the wish) that you’d com
e to Boston to teach. Or near. Or, at least, Nearer.

  Phil baby, how old are we? Are we 38 or 39? Think … soon it will be 40! What will we say to each other then? Or perhaps we will never say anything in person again. I mean, it doesn’t look as if we have gotten together in all this time and why not, and if so how will we ever?

  I can walk without a cane most of the time. I limp, but not too much.

  Are you angry with me? Oh Phil, it’s not the way you think it is. Not at all. I still respond to the yellow flower. I think I am the yellow flower. I bite myself and stick myself in a drink to revive.

  Are you still there? Are you alright? Your silence worries me. I could bear you being angry rather than sick. Don’t be sick. I’m sick enough for both of us.

  Abundantly, lovingly, caringly,

  [To Anne Clarke]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  Sept 21, 67

  Dear One,

  I’m writing because I want to hear from you and this looks like ONE way of getting some mail from Hillsborugh (sp wrong). We talk on the phone but that is necessarily brief and it would be good to get an envelope with some of you inside it.

  I did tell you that I’m fat. The new me. It all comes from lying around drinking eggnogs and not walking. But I do walk now and most times without a cane, but I need to be the woman with girdle but I protest the discomfort and the idea and so I have just plain grown. Three sizes larger and a lot in the pot, quite a bit in the breasts and a lot in the round face. Can you imagine it, Anne? None of my clothes fit, even those that go in and out with me, seem to go out quite round in the belly. So I wear shifts and hope no one notices. I look four months pregnant. Tho I have lost about five pounds since I started teaching (nerves) and a recent gingivectomy (cut gums). I’m back on thorazine to try to calm down but I hope it doesn’t make me too uncreative in the classroom. I love my students, even the very fresh ones. I’d like to stamp on the fresh ones just twice and then pick them up and hug them. It is very hard to teach with no curriculum, but so far so good or as the poet says, so good so far.