Anne Sexton
Page 41
I have not written any other plays, nor do I intend to. To write for the theater is like writing on an elf’s wing. He flies away and is lost to you forever.
With all best wishes,
[To Claire S. Degener]
[14 Black Oak Road]
January 11, 1973
Dear Cindy,
Here is the new manuscript [The Death Notebooks]. I want your reaction, so please let me know, although I am myself sure that here and there in this book is the beginning of a “new life”.
As of yesterday I started a new book, entitled The Life Notebooks [later retitled 45 Mercy Street], which indeed [it] could be called, because with the clear realization of death, one gets (as dear, old Time magazine says) less concerned with getting the house-cleaning done. Both you and I, it seems, are questioning life, as perhaps millions of people are, our own lives especially.
Herewith some of my questions, some of my answers. I hope it is well written, but that seems extraneous. I ought to be able to know how to write by now, and it seems to me at this point I ought to know how to live. That is, I ought to be able to dig a trench in my soul and find something there.
To business! Dick McAdoo and I have agreed that this book will come out in the winter of 1974. That seems right to me.
Love,
P.S. Cindy and Dick, I want to be an important poet more than I want to be a popular one. Only God knows if the two go together.
[To George Starbuck]
[14 Black Oak Road]
January 27, 1973
Dear George:
Here is some ammunition. It seems ridiculous to me, but if under arts and humanities for the Ladies’ Home Journal Woman of the Year Award there are only two writers mentioned, Joyce Carol Oates, whom you are fighting to get and will pay what I deserve, and me, it seems to me worth your attention. You have been taking advantage of the fact that I live in Boston, that I am a good kid, etc.
Does Boston University want to be written about in my biography as undervaluing me in the way that the universities undervalued Theodore Roethke? I do not want this money—and money is what I am talking about—for the fall of 197[4]. I want it for the fall of 197[3].
Aside from the fact that I am “a name”, I am a great teacher. I do not mean to sound immodest, but I do know that I will the best out of my students. I will it with love and craft and knowledge of what makes a great poem. That may not be important to you, but it is important to me to teach well because it is important to my soul. If you do not believe me, gather my students into Mort’s office and ask them.
I do dislike being a trouble maker, and because of this, I have only mumbled my discontent. Now I shout it. If I do not get a response within two weeks from you or Mort, I will send this letter to the Dean and the President.
I have been loyal to B.U. and will continue to be. My loyalty was shown when Hunter College offered me $18,000 for one class this spring semester, and you said you couldn’t let me go. I understood why and I stuck with you.
I am very well aware of B.U.’s financial difficulties, but I am just as famous as John Barth or Joyce Carol Oates, and there is something criminal going on at B.U. if this is ignored.
With love,
[To Claire S. Degener]
[14 Black Oak Road]
March 7, 1973
Dear Cindy:
I am living nowhere. I am getting a divorce. Don’t try to call. I’ll call you when I can.
This gentleman [Yorifumi Yaguchi] I have corresponded with before. I think he would be a good translator, but I have no idea. I’d only like it handled legally. As far as I’m concerned, there could be twenty Japanese translations, and it wouldn’t be enough for me.
As I told Mr. Evans of your office (dear man) I want to get translated all over the damn world, somehow. I hope he is working on it.
Love and kisses,
Out of the loneliness following her decision for a divorce, Anne Sexton wrote to the woman who had been the Harvey housekeeper since Anne’s birth. “Meme,” as Anne’s children had affectionately nicknamed her, had been a family member for over forty-five years. Straightening, polishing, and scolding, she was a silent mother to all those she loved. At a barren moment in her life, Anne reached back to the gruff eighty-year-old woman who embodied the very essence of her childhood.
[To Mary LaCrosse]
[14 Black Oak Road]
April 19, 1973
Dear, dear Me-me:
I know that words are hard between us sometimes, and there are some that have been piling up in my head these last few weeks that I must speak to you in this personal way. We go back a long time together. You are my link with Ralph Harvey and Mary Gray Harvey and Anna Dingley: in other words, a link with the past—the childhood. Although I have sisters, as you know, we are not close.
I’ve not spoken to Jane for nine years, although I have tried to call her, and once in a while Blanche calls, but it is like I was talking to a stranger almost—fond of her though I am.
The feeling I have for you is a continuous one from the littlest child that I was. I remember you and Fred too—don’t forget I remember Fred very well, and he was very dear, but mostly Mary […], of whom my mother would write in her diary, which I still have, “Mary has been here today, and the house looks altogether different; the house looks like magic had made it clean.” I share my mother’s feeling about you, only more so, because you were part of my childhood, my young motherhood, and my adulthood.
So many things you do for me, so many small things, and each one I notice and don’t always thank you, but I always notice. Last night I crawled in between clean sheets and thought, “Thank you Me-me.” And there are many things—the flowers you arrange, the seasons you observe, the way you make a room look after you leave it, the pure artistry of the way you cut bushes and little things and water plants and love dogs, which are as much yours as mine.
Now, I know it has been a terrible ripping, the divorce of Kayo and Anne, and it has hurt you a great deal, for you are very fond of Kayo, and who wouldn’t be? He is a great man, Mary. I can only say I could not stay married to him any longer and stay alive, and it is very hard for me still to be without him, and harder on him even more perhaps. I do not wish to go into the gruesome details, and I know they say “till death do us part,” but there are many kinds of death, and our marriage had multiple ones.
I remember you when I was nine or ten at Oxbow Road, bringing up a coke to me when I was sick, and you were the only one who came all day, even though I was a terribly undisciplined girl and very messy and even worse than Joy. And inside of me is still that same girl although I try to be more adult, and I am indeed supporting myself somehow by my teaching and my writing. […]
Back to us, Mary. What it means to me that you are still here is that my life is not completely broken, that Mary Gray Harvey and Ralph Churchill Harvey are not quite dead, that not all the beauty of my life has gone out of it, and I want to thank you very much for sticking by me.
I couldn’t say these words to you in any way aloud because you would have been embarrassed, and I would have cried. But in a certain way, you are something more special to me than anyone else I have.
Love,
[…]
The Wizard’s Tears, a children’s book published by McGraw-Hill in 1975, was a lighthearted venture in collaboration with Maxine Kumin. Anne invented the cure for the chicken pox and the chocolate cake breakfast.
Readers of all ages felt at home in Anne’s study, where the knotty pine shelves were filled with thousands of books, and whenever a daughter, a student, or a friend wanted new reading material, they had only to ask. Joyce Carol Oates’s novels were some of her favorite lending books, never safely perched on a shelf for very long.
[To Joyce Carol Oates]
[14 Black Oak Road]
June 4, 1973
Dear Joyce Carol Oates:
What a wonder the United States Post Office is when it brings forth a letter from one whom I
admire so much and read avidly. […]
I don’t know quite how I can point out the differences between you and me. You write of heartbreak so well, crunching, terrifying things, and yet are not nervous yourself. You investigate, but perhaps not yourself but something that is so deeply lodged within you like a gall stone that no one has discovered, and you know it not. Of course, when one thinks of the experience or of my own experiences so similar, one could call it just good, old-fashioned drama, but I like my drama to be between a few intimate people, not up on some damn stage being stared at. Of course, one must not avoid unpleasant events. I would say they come to me weekly like a strange tide, but they are usually personal, not public.
Yes, it is my nature to be apprehensive almost constantly, and my hunger for love is as immense as your eating people in Wonderland. When I feel the antithesis, I do not know how to get enjoyment out of it, although it is part of life, and as a writer I should enjoy being in touch with agony. I think it is true that I have been given a dramatic role in that I am popularly known as the crazy poet, something I avoid acting out in front of people. And after all, it is my fault. I did write about it thoroughly, explored it so I made my own costume, so to speak, and at each reading I must step into it, although it no longer fits, and I do everything within my power to act perfectly normal and charming and win them over.
Of course, the words come from a communal level of consciousness. As I often say to my students, (I, too, teach at Boston University), don’t worry about being original. You will do it quite naturally, but beyond that, it’s all one large poem, parts and parts being written by each poet.
I have a feeling from reading your many articles, letters in the New York Times, columns—not especially from reading your creative work—that you have the ability to rush right in, and yet at a remove, something impersonal, as you say. As for your creative work, to speak of the art, the guts leak out and tear at the reader on every level.
I try, I try, I try to gravitate towards the positive emotions, and there are many God-given experiences and people. Yet there is a motor in me that keeps vibrating, sucking up the room, and at the same time embracing the people who are in it.
I wish I could borrow some of your surface, your ease, your composure. Please stay just as prolific. To hell with the critics who complain about it. What do they know? For happiness is picking up a new book of yours.
Fondly,
In early 1973 Anne gave a reading in Cleveland, Ohio. She later felt it was such a traumatic experience that she wrote “The Freak Show,” detailing each real and imagined horror—from specific commentary on her heartless hosts to generalizations about antagonistic, predatory audiences:
What’s in it for the poet? Money, applause, adulation, someone to hear how the poems sound coming out of the poet’s mouth, an audience. Don’t kid yourself. You write for an audience … You are the actor, the clown, the oddball. Some people come to see what you look like, what you have on, what your voice sounds like. Some people secretly hope that your voice will tremble (that gives an extra kick), some people hope you will do something audacious—in other words (and I admit to my greatest fears) that you vomit on the stage or go blind, hysterically blind, or actually blind.
After “The Freak Show” was published in The American Poetry Review in 1973, Anne received a furious letter from one of the members of the Cleveland audience, Diane Friebert. Friebert felt that Sexton had mistaken a hall of loving fans for an army of hungry vultures. Anne filed Friebert’s letter under “Hate Mail” and then wrote her back.
[To Diane Vreuls Friebert]
[14 Black Oak Road]
July 20, 1973
Dear Diane:
Jesus, your letter dug deep. I read and reread. It digs and digs. You were the one I read to—or at least the other one aside from Janet Beeler—you and your husband. I do not think the reading itself was bad, and I hope that it gave something to you despite my terrible despair due to its strange beginning.
I want you. I need you. There are few of you. Although you mention many, there are still few. For those I would climb a rope ladder or even crawl on the stage on hands and knees and as I said in my column, “read my God-damned heart out.” Of course, you do not come as executioners, but for some reason I am terribly afraid, and I could go on about that in detail, but for those few who did come to hear my living voice I say, “God is holding me.”
I did not cut myself off from the positive vibes, although you seem to think I did. It’s just that a large fear like a crab was gripping me. As for making money, that really isn’t the point. The crab has never even met a dollar bill.
I did not feel cynicism, not really, and as for “hardboiled contempt”, that was far from my thoughts. I was like a stick of butter that had come out of the refrigerator and felt itself melting.
I am, very plainly speaking, sorry that I hurt you. “La-de-da” is making fun of myself, is calling attention to the absurdity of the poet reaching for God or the past or the present or whatever.
I could go on for pages, but I won’t. I just ask you to forgive me for seeing blindly.
Sincerely,
In September of 1973, after her parents’ separation, Joy Sexton had entered a private boarding school in Maine. She wrote letters full of anguish for a home which would never be resurrected. Anne comforted her with answers which resound with the sincerity and warmth found in so much of her earlier correspondence.
[To Joyce Sexton]
[14 Black Oak Road
circa September 1973]
My darling:
Be strong. Know you are deeply loved by your mother and that it is even a strange thing to be a mother seeing we are only just human beings who live together in our own ways.
Know that I pray for you and your happiness and that I am with you, with you, with you, whenever you DO need me, wherever, whenever. I hope it will help, being at Gould and that you can get away, somehow, from the turmoil, at home and some of the turmoil within you. If—or whenever you wish to call or write or whatever, your muggy is here to listen, or try to listen to any grief or sorrow or even, god bless us all, joyousness that will occur.
My love is with you like a pillow (if and when you need or reach out for it) always, always, always.
Mom
[hand-drawn daisy]
[To May Swenson]
[14 Black Oak Road]
September 19, 1973
Dear May,
Sorry to hear you’ve not been well this summer. I do hope this letter reaches you in bare fact and also finds you of stout heart and good health.
I have a favor to ask—one of these terrible grovelling favors that poets ask of one another. Would it be possible for you to recommend me for a Guggenheim? I am three-quarters of the way through a divorce and very broke and have a Christly need for some foreign land and some space to work in. If you would like, please feel free to call me collect (it is so much easier than writing a letter). My numbers are unpublished, unlisted […]
All best wishes for your work and all that can give pleasure or even soothe.
Best wishes,
Only nine months after her separation from Kayo, another crisis erupted. Anne began having serious difficulties with Dr. Chase. While discussing her divorce settlement with her doctor, she inadvertently revealed the truth about her financial status. Dr. Chase, who had adjusted her rates to accommodate what she believed to be Anne’s “restricted finances,” felt duped and raised her fee accordingly. When Dr. Chase asked Anne to accept realities she did not wish to see, Anne insisted that the doctor had lost her professional objectivity and was confusing her own needs with those of her patient. Anne’s powerful and demanding personality made it difficult for any psychiatrist to remain totally objective.
At a time in her life when so many other elements were cut adrift, dissolving, or shattering in her hands, the rupturing of this mainstay was too much. During the fall and early winter of 1973, Anne spent much time hospitalized in the Human R
esources Institute in Brook-line. Her overwhelming bitterness toward Dr. Chase in the spring of 1974 made termination of the therapy inevitable. After several consultations with a noted psychoanalyst, Anne was referred to a psychiatric social worker, Irene Rosenberg. But the improvement in her condition was slight.
She distorted situations increasingly, often so casually, so skillfully, that she managed to convince those around her, and perhaps even herself, that she was seeing clearly. Although she was earning a substantial living yearly in royalties, readings, and teaching fees, she became obsessed with money and complained bitterly that she was in debt. In letters, she wrote of financial obligations she had not actually incurred, and she repeatedly told friends that she had assumed responsibility for her children’s education and support, which was, in fact, paid for by others.
Yet Anne spent money more lavishly than ever on restaurants, wines, clothes. She had succeeded in liberating herself from Thorazine with the assistance of Dr. Chase, but her drinking was escalating sharply, and her friends and family slowly began to admit that she had become alcoholic. She grew harder and harder to live with.
[To Donald Hall]
14 Black Oak Road
December 12, 1973
Dear Don,
Humblest sorries. Dear Christ I called the moment my psychiatrist handed out her edict. I’ve just been too Christly busy—either readings or my class or hospitals. Dear God, only one poem since July and that not finished. I must remember that I am a poet—at least I must remember it now and then and I must get working on a book written (forgive me all poets and critics—indeed the poet and critic in me) in two and a half weeks last January just prior to leaving my husband. After all OF COURSE it needs to be totally rewritten or at least partly because inspiration ain’t all—at least for an entire book. […]
I am fed up with a lot of things: the terrible financial responsibility that I alone face with two rather adult daughters—but costly in their schooling which necessitates more readings than I would care to give and may necessitate me going from a part time professor at Boston University to a full time (of course I don’t teach English—I am lucky, just a small, ten to thirteen, creative writing class who become my allies, mostly, and I pretend that I am doing some good and I know they feed me too. But there’s just so much time and if one feels committed, as I do, to writing SOMETHING—for good or bad—then one must absolutely discard anything that is too interruptive or costly emotionally.