The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  Thomas didn’t quite understand but it was clear she was upset and was in distress. But when he saw her the next morning she apologized for being so silly. Nothing was wrong. She was fine. Everything was all right.

  What she didn’t tell him was that she would get back at them, both of them. Her ten years were up. And that Sunday, when she returned from the Beckers, she did.

  By the time Anne Sexton met Sylvia Plath at Robert Lowell’s poetry seminar, she had already tried to kill herself three times. By the time of her death by carbon monoxide poisoning, sitting in her car in her garage, after having lunch with a friend, she, like Plath, had acquired some considerable accolades: a Pulitzer Prize for her book Live or Die, honorary doctorates as well as a full professorship – although she lacked any academic training – a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature, as well as ones from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation. She had been nominated for the National Book Award, had received several scholarships and grants and had won literary prizes. She had even formed a rock band30. All this however did little to dent her basic lack of self-esteem. When asked by her therapist at their first session what she thought she might be good at, she replied that the only thing she might be good at was being a prostitute; that way she might be able to help men feel sexually powerful. “It is difficult,” her therapist wrote, “to communicate fully how pervasive Anne’s profound lack of self-worth was and how totally unable she was to think of any positive abilities or qualities within herself.”31 Like Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton received more objective confirmation of her own talent and abilities than most people do. Yet, like them, she had a kind of inner vacuum, a perpetual emptiness that sucked away any approval as soon as it was granted.

  Sexton’s trouble, her therapist concluded, was her “total inability to live the life she believed was demanded of her. She felt helpless, unable to function as wife or mother …”32 She came of age in post-WWII America, when women were supposed to be content with marriage, children and domesticity: the house, garage and 2.5 kids. Given this, its understandable that Sexton has become an important figure for feminists, and that her career, spanning the ‘swinging sixties’, would make her for a time something of a counter-cultural figure; a common remark about her is that she was read by people who didn’t usually like poetry, but felt her voice ‘spoke’ to them. Sexton’s first doctor diagnosed her condition as ‘postpartum depression’, following the birth of her second child, but she had already sought therapy before this, troubled by her infidelities while her husband was in the army during the Korean War. From the beginning, sex, often incest, was a central ingredient in Sexton’s problems. She confessed to an incident of incest with her daughter, and her childhood relationship with her great-aunt Nana, with whom she would ‘cuddle’ while ignored by her parents, and for whose death she felt responsible, may have included an element of incest. It’s also possible that she was sexually abused by her parents. She had many lovers and affairs, including one with one of her psychiatrists and also possibly with Sylvia Plath, and seemed to seek emotional security in sexual relationships. Her actual condition, although often described as bipolar or manic-depressive, seemed to defy definition; according to her therapist, she exhibited “a mental disorder that eluded diagnosis or cure.” Symptoms included trance states, manic and sometimes violent behaviour, dread of leaving her house, dread at being left alone, especially with her children, multiple personalities, memory loss, faulty memory (or outright lying), compulsive infidelity, and an inclination toward and fascination with suicide.

  At bottom though, Sexton comes across as someone, like Virginia Woolf, who “needed the care and protection of someone whose devotion was unquestioned.” As her biographer remarked, once her madness was out in the open, “she took on the role of patient, which she did not abandon for the rest of her life.”33 Not only her doctors, but her family, friends, and acquaintances were all drawn into the impossible and unrewarding task of saving her.

  Sexton’s symptoms began with her becoming a mother. Although in her last days, Sylvia Plath found taking care of her children a burden and a prison, she had been abandoned with them by Hughes in a cold, empty house; when their marriage was going well, she loved being a mother. Not so Anne Sexton. Sexton lacked Sylvia’s determination to excel, and her application to practical tasks. (Like Virginia Woolf, with whom she felt a connection, Sylvia used domestic chores to fight off her fears; in her last journal entry, Woolf comments on the virtues of cooking haddock and sausages.) Sexton was hopelessly undomestic. She felt inadequate in everything, especially when her husband was away on one of his many business trips. On one occasion, on a day when he had driven eight hundred miles, he called and asked her to put potatoes in the oven; he would fix the rest of dinner when he got home, as he usually did. When he returned, he discovered the potatoes were where he had left them. When he asked why she hadn’t put them in the oven, she replied that she didn’t know how. Helplessness is often a ploy for drawing attention and care, and whether or not Sexton was really as inept as she appeared, her impracticality, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s, had the desired effect.

  Six months after entering treatment for her ‘postpartum depression’, Sexton’s condition worsened. She experienced a morbid fear of being alone with her babies. It began when she returned late from a party; her husband was away and a neighbour had offered to baby-sit. Joy, her second daughter, had croup, and when Sexton returned she was choking; it was clear she couldn’t breath. Sexton turned on the hot shower and held Joy in the bathroom all night, hoping the steam would help. After that she had a terrible fear that the children would die. Now whenever her husband went away, she went through terrific agonies. She wouldn’t eat, and she would cry ceaselessly. Only when he returned did her symptoms stop.

  These fears turned into attacks of rage against the children. She would seize Linda, her two-year old, and slap her. Once, when she found Linda playing with her excrement, she picked her up and threw her across the room. After this she became afraid that she would kill them. Her family stepped in, taking care of the children while her husband was away, hiring a woman to do the chores, even paying her psychiatric bills. It didn’t help. One night near the anniversary of her great aunt’s death, Sexton fell into a deep depression. She took a portrait of Nana and the diary she kept when the family had finally decided to put her in a nursing home. Then she took the bottle of sleeping pills her doctor had given her and went to the back porch. She sat there, the pills in one hand, the portrait in another, thinking it over. The idea that she would let her doctor down if she killed herself made her hesitate. Her husband woke up, found her sitting there in the dark, and called her psychiatrist. Sexton said she wanted to get to the place where Nana was; as with Sylvia, the womb was inviting her to crawl back inside.

  Sexton was hospitalised for three weeks; her sister took Linda, and Joy lived with her grandmother; Sexton was separated from her children for the next three years. In November 1956, the day before her twenty-eighth birthday, Sexton made another suicide attempt. She took an overdose of barbiturates, Nembutal, which she later called her ‘kill-me pills’. She would carry a supply of them in her handbag ever after, ready at any time to join Nana; for a backup, she also had a razor. When she felt she was drifting off, she phoned her mother-in-law. The failed attempt resulted in a stay at Glenside, a forbidding mental institution, grim and depressing compared to the first clinic she had stayed at. At this point she and her family accepted that she was officially ‘sick’, possibly insane. Sexton explained: “I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about twenty-eight. I had a psychotic breakdown and tried to kill myself.” The notion of the ‘desperate housewife’ is by now a cliché, but Sexton seems to have invented the role.

  It’s tempting to
suspect she took extreme steps to avoid her unwanted responsibilities. “My feeling for my children,” she wrote, “does not surpass my desire to be free of their demands on my emotions.” And even her first doctor expressed doubts that she had a true organically based depression. But breakdowns on both sides of the family history suggest some inherited predisposition, as do the severity of her symptoms: radical mood shifts, anorexia, insomnia, suicidal impulses, wild rages.

  Anne may have sunk into complete madness, or she may have killed herself much earlier than she did, if not for a suggestion by her therapist. Anne seemed to have reserves of energy, but, like Dostoyevsky’s Stavrogin, had no idea what to do with them. She talked about walking from room to room, thinking of something to do, feeling like a caged animal, feeling “this almost terrible energy in me.” She had to fight not to masturbate all day, and twined her hair into knots as she read a magazine. She made the beds, cleaned the bathroom, baked cookies, but it was all ‘displacement activity’, even the masturbation, although sex isn’t that far removed from creative work. Her feelings of inadequacy were rooted in the lack of attention she received from her mother, a lack she was now passing on to her own children. Her obsession with Nana was understandable: she was the one source of approval, a position that was now occupied by her husband. What Anne needed was to find some means of feeling capable herself. When she told her therapist that the only thing she could be good at was prostitution, he disagreed. His diagnostic tests showed she had a great deal of unrealised potential. Why don’t you write about your feelings, your experiences, he asked. If nothing else, it might help other people facing similar problems.

  Soon after Anne began to bring her doctor her poems. He was impressed. They were polished, accomplished, and showed surprising technical mastery. She had finally found something she was good at.

  By 1960, her collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back was published to good reviews. The seminar with Robert Lowell and the other poetry workshops she attended had paid off, although she was too frightened to make the telephone calls to ask to join them, and had to get a friend to do it. Throughout the rest of her life, Sexton did practically nothing by or for herself, except write and give her poetry performances. These were more of an entertainment than a traditional poetry reading, and were not always to the cognoscenti’s liking: at one event, an academic asked, “How about more Anne Sexton and less Phyllis Diller,” the name of a popular comedienne of the time. She refused or was unable to do the simplest things, like go shopping, unless accompanied by a close friend. The only activities she could manage were her doctor’s appointments, and those with her hairdresser. (Sexton always managed to keep her appearance elegant, and in her early years had been a model.). Any other need to leave her house threw her into a panic. She once agonised for weeks over the need to get the children some new shoes.

  She became associated with the ‘confessional’ school of poetry; as her biographer wrote “all that was ‘sick’ or ‘hysterical’ about her behaviour in day-to-day life could be turned into something valuable through the act of writing poetry.”34 Understandably, her central theme was death. Her poems had titles like “Godfather Death,” “The Death of Fathers,” “For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open,” “The Death Baby.” Her last book published in her lifetime was The Death Notebooks. The posthumously published The Awful Rowing Toward God, which showed her later, more religious pursuits, suggests the tension and strain of her experience; this, however, was less popular with her readers.

  As the sixties moved on Sexton’s achievements accrued, and she moved away from strictly ‘confessional’ verse to cultural criticism. She lived a kind of double life. A public figure, publishing books, accepting awards, receiving distinctions, on one hand; on the other, her intractable self-hatred led to repeated breakdowns, suicide attempts and the inevitable hospitalisation. Her dependencies and neuroses increased. Among others she developed an obsession with constipation, and wouldn’t travel without a supply of laxatives. In Detroit, after a performance, she discovered she’d ran out, and asked a friend to find some. The friend refused; Sexton got a cab and at midnight prowled the streets, looking for an open pharmacy. Other, more necessary medications became a routine. Like many performers, she developed a stage persona that contrasted sharply with her ‘real’ self. Confident, glamorous, commanding before an audience, in the dressing-room she was a wreck, dependent on alcohol to induce the manic mood necessary for her act. Heavy drinking had always been part of her adult life and in the end would lead to her final depression. Some of her ‘fans’ also noticed another duality. While on stage, Anne could speak about the ‘truths’ of human relations, the insights that made her poetry so meaningful to her readers. Yet in her own life, she was unable to make much use of these.

  Throughout her rising success, and repeated breakdowns and suicide attempts, her husband and children tried to cope, but the situation was unstable and at times exploded into violence, followed by forgiveness and reassurance. Yet Sexton’s infidelities were a regular part of their marriage, and in 1973, she asked for a divorce. Their break-up precipitated her final decline. Her daughters, now young women, found it difficult to handle their unpredictable mother, and many friends had been used up, their supply of affection and concern gone. Increasingly, Sexton depended on drink and affairs to keep her going, but her health had visibly declined. Of Ernest Hemingway’s suicide she said “to shoot himself with a gun in the mouth is the greatest act of courage I can think of.” Her friend Sylvia’s death fascinated her. They were, she had felt, in a kind of competition, and Sylvia had got there first. “I’m so fascinated with Sylvia’s death: the idea of dying perfect, certainly not mutilated … Sleeping Beauty remained perfect …” It was time to join her.

  Divorced, living alone, estranged from friends and family, she had been emptied by her misery, and her alcoholism had deadened her creativity. Her suicide, though not unexpected, was a surprise. There was no note, no warning. After a final lunch with her long time friend Maxine Kumin, at which she seemed normal, at least for her, Anne Sexton got into her car in her garage and turned on the ignition. The radio was playing. It was the act, her therapist wrote, “of a lonely and despairing alcoholic.”35 In a tribute to her in the New York Times, Erica Jong wrote, “Anne Sexton killed herself because it is too painful to live in this world without numbness, and she had no numbness at all.”36

  Notes

  1 William Styron Darkness Visible (Picador: London, 1991) p. 50.

  2 Ibid. p. 17.

  3 William James The Varieties of Religious Experience (Collier Books: New York, 1977) p. 129.

  4 Kay Redfield Jamison Touched by Fire (Free Press Paperbacks: New York, 1993) p. 13, 17

  5 Ibid. p. 17.

  6 Quoted in Carolina King Barnard Hall Anne Sexton (Twayne Publications: Boston, 1989) p. 7.

  7 Anthony Storr The Dynamics of Creation (Atheneum: New York, 1972) p. 75

  8 Ibid. p. 76.

  9 Quoted in Diane Wood Middlebrook Anne Sexton: A Biography (Virago Press: London, 1991) p. 259.

  10 Trevor Thomas Sylvia Plath: Last Encounters (privately printed, Bedford, England, 1989) p. 4.

  11 Mitchell Leaska Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf (Picador: London, 1998) p. 179.

  12 Storr p. 82.

  13 Kay Redfield Jamison points out that depression ran in Virginia Woolf’s family. “Her grandfather, mother, sister, brother and niece all suffered from recurrent depressions, her father and another brother were cyclothymic [a milder form of the ailment], and her cousin James, who had been institutionalised for mania and depression, died of acute mania.” (Jamison, p. 225). Clearly, there is evidence to suggest that manic-depression and other mental and emotional disorders can be inherited. It is also highly possible that such inherited traits remain latent unless released by a ‘trigger’, which in Virginia’s case seemed the death of her mother and the incestuous attentions of her step-brothers.

  14 Although Virginia
Woolf has been retroactively diagnosed as having bipolar (manic-depressive) illness, some of her symptoms seem to suggest similarities to schizophrenia. On a disastrous Italian holiday, she heard voices ordering her to do “all kinds of wild things,” King Edward spouting obscenities, and the birds singing in Greek. Other symptoms included violence, incessant talking ending in gibberish, coma, anorexic body image, delusions, fear of being seen in public, and the belief that strangers were talking about her.

  15 Virginia Woolf A Writer’s Diary ed. Leonard Woolf, (The Hogarth Press: London, 1953) p. 229.

  16 As his satiric novel attacking the clique, The Apes of God, made clear.

  17 Woolf, A Writer’s Diary pp. 228–231.

  18 Storr, pp. 78–79.

  19 Ibid. p. 79.

  20 Leaska, p. 433.

  21 Quoted in Herbert Marder The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf’s Last Years (Cornell University Press: 2000) p. 55.

  22 There is a blue plaque on the house, announcing, understandably, not that Plath killed herself there, but that W. B. Yeats had lived there. Plath, who lived for a time in nearby Chalcot Square (this house does have a blue plaque noting that fact) came across the house by chance, saw that flats in it were to let, and quickly arranged a five-year lease, of which Hughes paid a year’s rent in advance. Later, Plath opened a volume of Yeats at random, half-hoping for some kind of sign. The passage she found read, “Get wine and food to give you strength and courage and I will get the house ready,” which she took to mean she had made the right decision. Like Plath, Trevor Thomas, who himself had come across the house first and wanted the maisonette that Plath, he felt, stole from him (he wound up renting the garden flat below), was also attracted to the idea of living in a house that Yeats had inhabited, because of his interest in the occult, something, as is well known, Yeats was devoted to. In his memoir mentioned above (n. 10), Thomas speculates some vague connection between Yeats’ occult interest and Plath’s sad end. Yet, as Yeats lived in the house as a child and only briefly, he could hardly be responsible for the “forces for good and evil” that “may have been evoked in the séances possibly held in No. 23 Fitzroy Road,” the effects of which, Thomas hints, “linger on and affect others there.” Yeats’ mother, who also lived in the house, was, it is true, a believer in ghosts and fairies, but not, as far as we know, a practitioner of black magic, nor, for that matter, was Yeats.