Living with the Excitable Gift

By R.Z. Sheppard

ANNE SEXTON: A SELF-PORTRAIT IN LETTERS Edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames Houghton Mifflin; 433 pages; $15

A poem is a one-of-a-kind, heart-made object. To make one right takes a great deal of silence: also hearing nothing but one's own voice. Poetry exacts its measure of pain, but that is not to be confused with anguish. Anguish is what has obsessed many of our best-known "confessional poets," including Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. They also expressed some joys, but in the end depression always tipped the balance. Lowell fought the dank beast throughout his life. Berryman, Plath and Sexton took their own lives when, as Rilke wrote in "The Song of the Suicide," the world's profusion entered the head rather than the bloodstream.

No other contemporary American poet has written more urgently and directly about this fatal shunt than Anne Sexton. Her poems were torn from her life as a daughter, housewife, mother, lover, mental patient and custodian of what she called "the excitable gift." The phrase is from her poem "Live," from a collection that embraced such titles as "Wanting to Die," "Suicide Note" and "Sylvia's Death." Plath (1932-63) and Sexton (1928-74) were friends who spent hours discussing their art, illnesses and the ways they would kill themselves. Yet it is difficult to read Sexton's correspondence and conclude that she truly wanted to die. Her tragedy was that she wanted to live on her own intense terms, not merely to survive as an emotional cripple on Thorazine crutches. "Life screams in the head of every artist with his typewriter or his pen, so let it," she writes to a fellow poet undergoing psychiatric treatment. "Write it all down ... anything you write now will be gold later so mine it and don't make the God-damned baskets."

The bravura of such statements must be weighed against Sexton's desperate reliance on family, friends and Pharmaceuticals. Her need for love and reassurance was inexhaustible. "I want everyone to hold up large signs saying YOU'RE A GOOD GIRL," she confesses to Poet W.D. Snodgrass, the "Snodsy" of dozens of mash notes. Sexton could not settle for having ordinary pen pals. Her correspondents were her audience, confessors, advisers and advisees. Editors Linda Gray Sexton, the poet's elder daughter, and Lois Ames, a close friend and estate-designated biographer, make it quite clear that to be on the poet's mailing list could mean finding oneself embroiled in a passionate postal love affair. "Dearest dear De," "Dear One," "Dear Phil Baby," "Dear Wonderful Nolan!" "Dear wonderful lovely Tillie Olsen" are typical salutations. She lavished compliments, flattery and secrets, and expected to be repaid in kind. Like her poems, her letters were uninhibited pieces of herself offered " in deep fear of rejection.

Some reasons for this dread can be found in the editors' bridging commentary. As the youngest daughter of a successful Weston, Mass. businessman, Anne believed she had been neglected and unloved by her father. "Did I ever tell you about Elizabeth?" she writes to a friend many years later. "She's manic-Anne and sometimes sexy-Anne. You've seen her. But perhaps didn't know her name. My father called me 'a-little-bitch.' I thought he meant my name was Elizabeth."

She apparently gave him cause. Sexton was a demanding child, prankish and defiant. She grew into a beautiful young woman who enjoyed playing one boy off against another. In 1948 Anne, 19, eloped with Alfred ("Kayo") Sexton, a 20-year-old college student ("Dearest Momie and Daddie--I don't know how to begin this letter"). By 1957 Kayo was a traveling wool salesman and Anne had two young daughters and a bad case of the housewife blues.

At the urging of her psychiatrist, Sexton began to write verse. What started as therapy quickly became a craft, a vocation and a career. Her letters frequently refer to poetry as her life saver, but elsewhere she sees her work as appalling in its blunt candor. "Creative people must not avoid the pain that they get dealt," she writes an editor. "I say to myself, sometimes repeatedly 'I've got to get the hell out of this hurt' ... But no. Hurt must be examined like a plague."

Excerpt

Wed--2:45 p.m.

Dear Linda,

I am in the middle of a flight to St. Louis to give a reading. I was reading a New Yorker story that made me think of my mother and all alone in the seat I whispered to her 'I know, Mother, I know.' (Found a pen!) And I thought of you--someday flying somewhere all alone and me dead perhaps and you wishing to speak to me.

And I want to speak back. (Linda, maybe it won't be flying, maybe it will be at your own kitchen table drinking tea some afternoon when you are 40. Anytime.)--I want to say back.

1st I love you.

2. You never let me down.

3. I know. I was there once. I too, was 40 and with a dead mother who I needed still. [...]

This is my message to the 40-year-old Linda. No matter what happens you were always my bobolink, my special Linda Gray. Life is not easy. It is awfully lonely. I know that. Now you too know it--wherever you are, Linda, talking to me. But I've had a good life--I wrote unhappy--but I lived to the hilt. You too, Linda--Live to the HILT! To the top. I love you, 40-year-old Linda, and I love what you do, what you find, what you are!--Be your own woman. Belong to those you love. Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart--I'm in both: if you need me. I lied, Linda. I did love my mother and she loved me. She never held me but I miss her, so that I have to deny I ever loved her--or she me! Silly Anne! So there!

XOXOXO Mom

From the beginning, Sexton found it relatively easy to get published. At a time when much academic poetry had turned mannered and stale, her frontal assault on readers' sensibilities was fresh and exciting. In San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets were gaining fame with a similar style. In Newton, Mass., Sexton confides that "I am kind of a secret beatnik hiding in the suburbs in my square house on a dull street."

Despite her complaints about domestic obligations, Sexton was well aware that her family was her life-support system. From her "wooden tower" she was able to conduct not only the art of poetry but its politics and business as well. After her divorce in 1973, Sexton's need for friends grew ever more frantic. Her letters turn slick, disingenuous and manipulative. She flirts with religion, tries to cheat her psychiatrist and when, at 45, she discovers that men no longer flock to her, files with a computer dating service. The news on Oct. 4, 1974 was not unexpected. Sexton drove into her garage, closed the door and left the motor running.

Sylvia Plath described one of her poems as being about two kinds of fire, "the fires of hell, which merely agonize, and the fires of heaven, which purify." Plath and Sexton tried to transform their private hells into the immaculate heat of poetry. They were consumed, but the work continues to burn.

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