Anne Sexton

by Anne Sexton

I want to thank you so much for the fine lunch and charming company. I got caught up and you got caught up or at least as best as one can do in a lunch time. I was pleased to see how many copies I had sold of Love Poems. It is strange as we both remarked that it took a sudden leap forward. Maybe it was Alice Smith buying them throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn!

  I enclose a sampling of my transformations. “The Little Peasant”[TR] was sold to Playboy and “Hansel and Gretel” [TR] and “Snow White” [TR] were sold to Cosmopolitan. It is a little odd to send you a book in progress, and I have no idea what Cindy Degener would say to it, but I think it’s good to let you know what is in the works and the direction I’m moving in.

  Did I hear you correctly? Did you tell me that Doubleday gave James Dickey a $25,000 advance? That seems preposterous. At any rate it’s what I told my husband when I got home. It raised his opinion of poets. He’s always saying to me “if only you’d write a sexy novel.” If I did hear you correctly, then it is no wonder they gave him a full-page ad in the Sunday Times trying somehow to get their money back. Maybe it impresses me unduly as right now I am having financial problems and within a year I have a daughter to send to college. $25,000 is just enough to put a child through college. Well, enough of money. My job is to write.

  I await your reactions to these poems. I think about twenty of them will make a book. I have written eleven.

  With love,

  [To Claire S. Degener]

  14 Black Oak Road

  September 22, 1970

  Dear Cindy,

  Here are four new ones. I think they are better than the ones you’ve seen before, or at least I think “Rapunzel” [TR] and “Sleeping Beauty” [TR] are two of my best. These have been turned down by The New Yorker, and I have three more there at the moment. As we mentioned on the phone, I would like to try Bob Manning at The Atlantic and then your man at Harper’s although I believe that John Hollander is the poetry editor at Harper’s. Come to think of it I’m not even sure these are poems. I think they are artifacts.

  By now you have probably seen the first issue of Audience and I’d be interested in your opinion of it as I am on the board of advisors. They would like to see more, and if you like the magazine and with due consideration for the fact that they pay $1,000, we might send them some of these after they have been turned down elsewhere. How about Richard Howard at The New American Review? I don’t think he’s too warm to my former stuff, but I think he might like this. At any rate he is not my enemy like James Dickey.

  Sorry to have called you at home but Paul Brooks’ letter distressed me. It is quite true, Cindy, that many of my former fans are going to be disappointed that these poems do not hover on the brink of insanity or, to be more accurate, intensity. I plan to write Paul a letter. God knows what I’ll say, but I surely intend to publish these poems, and I’d like them well-illustrated—a real zap of a production even if they aren’t the old Sexton style. One always makes a mistake projecting into the future. I think I would like to do a book of very surreal, unconscious poems called The Book of Folly. After that I would like to do a very Sexton, intense, personal perhaps religious in places book called The Death Notebooks and in between I do plan to look at Mercy Street and change a few things and decide with you whether it should be published. I would say what I am doing now is the opposite of Mercy Street, my confessional melodrama. That’s just to keep you up with my plans. God knows if they’ll be fruitful.

  Thank you for standing by me in my hour of need. It is surely that when one’s editor goes sour.

  Love,

  Anne

  P.S. Both Atlantic Harper’s have seen the “Transformations” you now have. So keep those aside.

  P.P.S. Don’t send “The Gold Key” [TR] to anyone—it is too prefatory & doesn’t stand on its own.

  XO

  Anne

  [To Paul Brooks]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  October 14, 1970

  Dear Paul,

  I wanted to let some time elapse before I answered you so that I could think carefully about what you had to say. I’ve written seventeen “Transformations.” My goal was twenty, but I may have to make do with seventeen. Seventeen would be a nice book anyway, but I will wait a couple of months and see what comes. I am in the process of typing up the manuscript to submit to you.

  But back to your comments. I realize that the “Transformations” are a departure from my usual style. I would say that they lack the intensity and perhaps some of the confessional force of my previous work. I wrote them because I had to … because I wanted to … because it made me happy. I would want to publish them for the same reason. I would like my readers to see this side of me, and it is not in every case the lighter side. Some of the poems are grim. In fact I don’t know how to typify them except to agree that I have made them very contemporary. It would further be a lie to say that they weren’t about me, because they are just as much about me as my other poetry.

  I look at my work in stages, and each new book is a kind of growth and reaching outward and as always backward. Perhaps the critics will be unhappy with this book and some of my readers maybe will not like it either. I feel I will gain new readers and critics who have always disliked my work (and too true, the critics are not always kind to me) may come around. I have found the people I’ve shown them to apathetic in some cases and wildly excited in others. It often depends on their own feelings about Grimms’ fairy tales. You mentioned showing them to an outside reader. I think so much depends on who that reader is. I even think an introduction would be nice if we could talk someone like John Updike into doing it … or someone like him. Maybe I’ll have to write my own, but I am not very good at that sort of thing. I’d like them illustrated … woodcuts perhaps, or line drawings. A real zap of a production. I wonder how Houghton Mifflin can give me that if you are apathetic about the book? As for outside readers, what about X. J. Kennedy? He’s in the English Department at Tufts and a poet himself. He gave me a very good review for Love Poems and pointed out the humor in the book. He might be a good one to ask.

  Now that I’ve almost finished Transformations I see it as part of my life’s work … a kind of dalliance on the way. After this, and I have already begun, I would like to do a book of very surreal, unconscious poems called The Book of Folly. At the same time I plan to start another book called The Death Notebooks where the poems will be very Sexton … intense, personal, perhaps religious in places. I will work on the Death Notebooks until I die. It’s strange being a writer. You see your life not only in terms of kids being in college, braces, grandchildren, but in terms of what you write and how imminent death is and how one writes to forestall being blotted out. If I were to heed your warnings about Transformations and see my life work with that book omitted, I would be very sad. It would be a mistake. Perhaps it has even been a mistake not to publish Mercy Street. I plan to look at that in the future. One thing for sure … with Transformations I got as far away from Mercy Street, that confessional melodrama, as possible. I know it’s dangerous to project into the future as I just have, but I thought it would give you a feeling of where I’m headed and where the Transformations fit in.

  All this is rather heavy, but do let me know what you think. Cindy Degener suggests that I let another publisher publish Transformations and that I then come back to you with the rest of my books. I was not too keen on that idea but perhaps … it depends on what you want.

  Love,

  [To Anne Clarke]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  November 17, 1970

  I have so much to say to you, Annie, that I’ll never get to it except by saying it in installments. When two friends are as close as we were and then let all those years go by without writing, it is impossible to catch up, and I don’t think I’ll even make the effort. The reason you didn’t get a reply five days after your letter came was that I felt I must be in perfect zestful, ongoing order to write to you.

  To hell with that. This is just me o
n a Tuesday morning paying you a little visit. What we need are two weeks together. The kids ask for you, ask when you’ll be coming to Boston. Kayo too. And last winter, Mary [Meme]. I second them all. Come.

  I am teaching at BU, creative writing. I started last January. It was great fun last year. One class, meeting two hours a week and then every other week I met with the students privately. As someone pointed out to me, “no wonder you’re so happy teaching. It’s like having a love affair.” And it was. They loved each other. They loved me. I loved them. Unfortunately, this year there seems to be a lot of anger in the class, a lot of destructiveness. They seem out to get each other, and I’m not sure how to handle it. I told them “this isn’t an encounter group. For one thing, I’d charge more for an encounter group.” And more. I talked about loving and they seemed to be more gentle for about two times and now they’re back to cutting each other down at every turn. Oh well, the money helps and there are some good moments. This year it’s kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.

  I’ve been having some sort of trouble with my heart. I don’t know the name of it, but it’s rapid heart beat, and at the same time I have blackouts. I don’t mean I pass out. I mean everything goes black. I had one about a month ago on the Mass. Pike doing 65. I get no warning or maybe a ten-second warning of the heart pounding so I drove in blackness for one mile and the gods were looking after me. I haven’t driven since then which is very difficult. I like to choose my dependencies. My internist put me on Quinidine for the heart but finally told me the blackouts were of psychogenic origin. God damn it, that made me depressed, so I went to another internist and he said it was entirely possible that when the heart became so rapid it couldn’t get oxygen up to the brain and, thus, the blackouts. He also persuaded me to cut down drastically on the cigarettes. Apparently cigarettes are very bad for this condition. For the past two weeks on only fifteen cigarettes a day as opposed to three packs a day, I have not had a blackout. I was having them at least every day, sometimes seventeen a morning, so we’ll see. All of the tests were negative. No petit mal. No low blood sugar. No thyroid. No heart block from Thorazine. So it’s up in the air really. The next thing we’ll try is digitalis, the new internist says. Otherwise I am in fine health. Fit as a fiddle. BUT I WANT TO DRIVE AGAIN. And I will. I’ve had these blackouts and this heart condition for four years, but I always thought it was psychological. I attributed it to anxiety and took seven 50 mg. Librium. You can imagine. I know you can just picture it.

  The heart emotional is just fine. It would be nice to be making a run for it to use your words to Maxine, and maybe I will some day again.

  My new poems are a strange sort of thing. I am submitting the book this week. The title is Transformations and the subtitle inside the book will read “Transformations From the Brothers Grimm.” They are kind of a dark, dark laughter. They are very modem, sometimes fall into cuteness. Well, I can’t describe them. I see that I have seven copies here, so I think I’ll send them. They aren’t unfortunately the best ones or the most moving, but they’ll give you an idea. There is one that I don’t have a copy of that mentions Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. It is a rather lovely one, and I hope you will like it. Not that Grimm had ever heard of Ypsilanti, but he’s there whether he knows it or not. I have just sent a full set of these, my last set, to Kurt Vonnegut, asking him if he’d be interested in writing an introduction. I think he would be wonderful, but of course, he’ll probably turn me down. I met him this fall, and he’s a nice guy, but what he’ll think of me sending the book and asking him to join up, I don’t know. I think I would like woodcuts, too. I think it lends itself to that. I sold “The Little Peasant” [TR] to Playboy of all places. I’ll be very interested to [hear] your reaction to these. A lot of people who really like my work don’t like these. But I think it’s about time I showed some signs of a sense of humor.

  Kayo got fired from his job. It was obvious that was going to happen. Last January they cut his salary in half. The wool business is awful. Within twenty-four hours, however, another fellow who was in the wool business took him in as a partner. There are only the two of them, and they are managing to make ends meet. He’s much happier on his own, and I don’t have to feel so guilty about being happy. For years I’ve been married to a gray man, a martyr whose only happiness was Africa. Now he sees a challenge in his present position almost as great as shooting an elephant. He’s out there all by himself, and he’s got to make it. He had to invest some money, but we borrowed on insurance, sold stocks, and I was proud to give him $5,000 from my earnings. Often when he comes home he is manic and enthusiastic. It’s so wonderful. He is still rigid and politically repulsive. Last year he had a sign in his car that said “Register Communists, Not Firearms.” I didn’t say much, but I was ashamed. Then he put an American flag sticker on the car. Oh well, with this new job he has a new car, and there are no flags or signs as yet.

  Linda is seeing a psychiatrist, supposedly to get over her closeness to me. She is succeeding in doing that. I adore her and we fight often. She has a car of her own, a used Mustang, and we are trying to give her some freedom or independence. She wants to go to Radcliffe or Tufts or Simmons or Wells. I’d like to see her at Tufts. They gave me an honorary degree [Doctorate] of letters last year. So now I’m like you. Just call me Doctor Sexton. Can you imagine that? Linda has a steady boyfriend at the moment. She is still a virgin I think. At any rate she’s on the birth control pill for cramps. Joy is a woman fifteen years old. She has huge boobs and she is tiny, just five feet. We call her our Italian mama. She eats spaghetti for breakfast.

  Are you reading the profile on Erik Erikson in The New Yorker? God, it’s fascinating. I’d love to be analyzed by him, but I suppose everyone who reads the profile feels the same way. I’d like him to put the finger of greatness on me. Did you read Joan Didion’s book Play It As It Lays? It certainly makes Southern California sound as awful as I thought it was. Maxine is reading Sexual Politics and then will lend it to me.

  Glad that you woke up in 1970 and started gabbing to me. Jesus, I’m sorry to hear about the three dentists. That root canal man sounds ghastly. My opinion of a periodontist is “I’d rather not be there” if you please. All that blood. God! How I hate that.

  So many songs remind me of you. You are indeed my musical lovely one. Just for instance, “The Girl From Ipanima” (sp?). Just think about that for a minute. The winter descends here, a few yellow leaves hang on.

  Love,

  [To Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  November 17, 1970

  Dear Kurt,

  I meant to write you a postcard before your dentist appointment, but I was away at the time I should have sent it. Sorry. Your graph for “Cinderella” [TR] is right over my desk.

  The enclosed manuscript is of my new book of poems. I’ve taken Grimms’ Fairy Tales and “Transformed” them into something all of my own. The better books of fairy tales have introductions telling the value of these old fables. I feel my Transformations needs an introduction telling of the value of my (one could say) rape of them. Maybe that’s an incorrect phrase. I do something very modern to them (have you ever tried to describe your own work? I find I am tongue-tied). They are small, funny and horrifying. Without quite meaning to I have joined the black humorists. I don’t know if you know my other work, but humor was never a very prominent feature … terror, deformity, madness and torture were my bag. But this little universe of Grimm is not that far away. I think they end up being as wholly personal as my most intimate poems, in a different language, a different rhythm, but coming strangely, for all their story sound, from as deep a place. To get to the point. I am submitting the book to my publishers this week. I have already discussed with them that I would like an introduction. Is there any chance you would be willing to write it? Naturally you would be paid for doing this. I’m sure you have plenty of money now so that won’t be much inducement … only if you’re in the mood. I was talking with D
an Wakefield two days ago and asking him if he thought you would consider the project. He seemed to feel you were between things, saying things like “fuck books,” so I am rushing this off to you in hopes of catching you at the right moment.

  The first poem is an introductory one and doesn’t give the flavor or have the zest of the others, so I’d skip it to begin with. Perhaps “Snow White,” “The Little Peasant,” “Iron Hans,” “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Briar Rose” could give you a feeling of the project. “Cinderella,” unfortunately, is not very good despite the aura of your graph.

  Sending you this seems like a rather forward move on my part, but I thought I’d give it a try. I enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope in which you can whisk these back to me if you’re so inclined. Many thanks.

  Best wishes,

  [To Brian Sweeney]

  [14 Black Oak Road]

  November 24, 1970

  Dear, dear Sweeney,

  I liked your effusive letter. Perhaps you should call me more often. It was wonderful to talk to you and Happy Birthday. We are born four days apart … only on different years. Of course I will need you more in my fifties. As a matter of fact, I think I shall save you for my fifties. But you’d better be around.

  The overseas phone is not too trustworthy. The book of poems that I shall work on all my life is entitled The Death Notebooks. The one I shall work on until it’s finished is The Book of Folly. I have just written a new one for the Notebooks which is enclosed. It may be part of a series. I haven’t quite decided. Just so you can get a feeling for it, I enclose one from The Book of Folly. I like it when you know what’s going on with me.

  You are so right about my fear of death. I think I have embraced it only because I feared it so. By the way I embraced it this August only to come out alive. I hate it. I love it.

  Yes, it is time to think about Christ again. I keep putting it off. If he is the God/man, I would feel a hell of a lot better. If there is a God, Sweeney, how do you explain him swallowing all those people up in Pakistan? Of course there’s a God, but what kind is he? Is he our kind? […]