But if Elizabeth Taylor is the purest distillation of everything, good, bad and crazy, that can be extracted from a life spent on the sound stage and the movie set—if the unquestionable, paradigmatic nature of her stardom makes it her birthright—it goes a long way toward explaining her resilience. Elizabeth Taylor is not a stranger in her own life. Few other women, particularly those biologically predisposed to mental instability, will ever feel so at home in the world. Anne Sexton, the strikingly strong-boned poet who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966, had the wherewithal to advise her daughter in a poem to “let your body in, / let it tie you in, / in comfort,” but was never able to feel comfortable enough living in her own skin to keep herself from committing suicide in 1974. The impending emergency of everyday existence seems to have been the only guiding principle in Sexton’s life, with the simplest acts—she was petrified, for instance, of going grocery shopping—fraught with potential for crisis, so much so that the hugeness of her need resulted in the enormity of her appeal: somehow, she managed to cultivate a magnetism so electric that she was able to draw lovers and friends and fellow poets and distant relatives into her quotidian melodrama with the force of a high-powered vacuum. She needed attention, and she got attention. It may have driven Sexton’s mother-in-law crazy that Anne was a “flamboyant, pretty child who wore too much lipstick and slept all morning while the housework lay undone,” as daughter Linda Gray Sexton recalls in Searching for Mercy Street, but just the same, Anne did sleep and her husband’s mother did do the cleaning—a pretty impressive swindle, if you ask me.
And this feat of enlisting help through helplessness can only be understood in the context of the kind of personality that refuses to suffer in silence—and by making noise may well inspire pity or invite resentment, but no matter what always gets her way. “I don’t recall ever having been with Anne Sexton when she did not require someone to take care of her,” poet and editor Peter Davison writes as the first line of a chapter on Sexton in The Fading Smile, his memoir of the Boston poetry explosion that occurred at mid-century. Davison goes on to recall a scene that illustrates all the inventions of din and drama that indicate the desperation, idiocy, neediness, largeness, loudness, selfishness, not to mention the compelling, demanding and dictatorial nature of the depressive personality. “I can remember an evening at dinner at Arthur Freeman’s house when Sexton, who smoked continuously, struck a match and seared her hand with a fragment of phosphorus,” Davison writes. “For the next two hours her pain was a presence in the room larger than that of any of the guests: ice was brought, her hand was immersed in a plastic bag full of ice water, her ululations rose and fell, her husband comforted her again and again. The guests tried to speak of other things, but it proved impossible: it was the pain that governed.”
As irritating as it must have been to be at that dinner party, as an anecdote this mostly makes me want to congratulate Anne for taking over, for holding prisoners, for making her pain everyone else’s problem. What a triumph of the will, what a spirited assertion of self from a person in pieces, like the twisted but logically sound behavior of the man who only kills himself after he’s killed everyone he knows: If I don’t get to live, you don’t either. Anne refused to let anyone else feel complacent in her discomfort: Someday you will ache like I ache. This uppity unrest was what ultimately destroyed Sexton, but it was also what kept her alive for as long as it did. Davison notes that she required somebody to take care of her, and somehow she never went without: if Sexton’s loved ones were sick of the noise by the end of her life, they ministered to it for a long time. And I am certain that, more often than not, they did so happily; I believe that her beautiful, lively, functioning and fruitful hours must have been shimmery and brilliant enough to make everything about her seem like a precious, delicate gift from God. In the last year of her life, several of Sexton’s women friends worked out a schedule of shifts so each could be assigned a time to keep track of the increasingly suicidal and sloshed poet. As degrading as it must seem to be the object of this kind of pity and to be so thoroughly in need that you are bound to cause resentment and exhaustion among the ranks, Sexton surely must have been gratified to know that her life was so dear. “Anne was very seductive. Enormously so,” her close friend Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin said in an interview. “She probably had more personal charisma than anybody I’ve known since.”
Whatever the purpose of this charisma in private life, it was a boon for her public persona as confessional poet and woman of letters with a smutty mouth and a vulnerable soul. Audiences were drawn into her overcrowded readings by the promise of her Boston Brahmin good looks, and the shock of such a lovely, elegant creature admitting desperation for love in “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” and desperation straight up in “Wanting to Die.” Though Sexton’s features were a bit askew—an oddity of slant that is shared, to greater advantage and stronger effect, by actress Mimi Rogers—her eyes flashed aquamarine, and the white skin and dark hair that topped off a slender body with charm-school posture gave her the appearance of poet as fashion model (in fact, earlier on, as a bored housewife, Sexton had given life as a mannequin a brief try). With these physical endowments as a starting point, Sexton could easily work her hunger for attention, her voluptuous bearing and her dramatic use of small gestures into a strong stage presence: she read with a husky, throaty voice, and unlike the bespectacled poets of her day, Sexton wore bright red lipstick, high-heeled shoes, slim slit skirts and halter tops. “In addition to the strong feelings Anne’s work aroused, there was the undeniable fact of her physical beauty,” Maxine Kumin writes in her introduction to The Complete Poems. “Her presence on the platform dazzled with its staginess, its props of water glass, cigarettes and ashtray.”
Toward the end of her life, Sexton saw herself as almost a movie star—of the public television variety, no doubt—with prima donna airs, the tendency to send back meals in restaurants without cause, a flair for every dare that caused her to set a hundred-dollar bill on fire at the dinner table, a flamboyance that meant she wore orange chiffon negligees and cut a wide swath with spilled pills all over the breakfast table, an inability to sign books without just the right Waterman pen and an interest in her image that meant she had a special reading wardrobe. Most notably, there was a long, clingy red dress with big, bright gold buttons that was meant to convey strong, dangerous female energy, intended to announce the girl with the most cake; this was the dress that she wore for her last reading, it was the dress she wore when she danced on the banks of the Charles River in front of her daughter’s Harvard dormitory as she gulped down equine-quality tranquilizers with milk from a thermos in her final failed suicide attempt, it was the dress she wore for her cremation after she finally got it right.
Another of her reading outfits is on display in a famous photo by Gwendolyn Stewart that was on the cover of Diane Wood Middlebrook’s controversial 1991 biography of Sexton, which was a New York Times front-page cause célèbre when the author was given access to the dead poet’s psychiatric records and taped therapy sessions by daughter Linda, who also revealed that her mother molested her repeatedly. Just the same, the image on the front is so glorious and alive, it reveals a lust for life that makes it perfectly understandable why the book’s terrible revelations of character deficiencies—Sexton’s infidelity to the husband who cooked dinner and tended to her daughters so she didn’t have to, her constant drunkenness and relentless promiscuity after her divorce, the usual poet’s problems—are delivered in a tone that is sad and loving and forgiving, that is mostly just full of dismay that the gifted beauty and the ugly monster are both chained to the same weak and faulty life-support system, that neither will loosen its grip, like Siamese twins who will surely die if separated—but won’t live long if they are not. The photo is all charisma and charm, the poet is shown twisted into place, her legs tightly crossed, her feet in white shoes with a crisscross buckle, her sleek black-and-white dress aswirl in Matisse-style geometry, bang
les spangled down her arms, her hands lively and expressive, as if arguing a point or responding with glee to some juicy gossip, a Salem menthol draped between her fingers. This same image became a poster to advertise a reading Sexton was to give at Harvard, enhanced with white letters delivering date and time, but all that really matters, all the eye can see, alongside Sexton’s twisted-up body and her wide-open gaze, is the insistent line, “Hurry up please it’s time.” It does not much matter what this is referring to, if it came from a poem (T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” as it happens), if it’s tossing some levity at Anne’s inevitable lateness, whatever. Because in retrospect it can only speak to the urgency of life, a brilliant excess that is the mark of the madwoman, the reason she is fascinating, fun to watch, that these positive features live with her in the collective memory a lot longer than the tyranny of her personality disorders, the obnoxiousness that was the result of her sickness, the sickness that made her horrible, even though the struggle to overcome it made her great.
Depression in all its dreariness is an unlikely focus for literary or any other kind of intrigue, and yet it has structured the plots of lives and stories as juicy and jumbled as the freshest Hollywood gossip. Its sufferers have been cast into the roles of icons and idols, the brilliance of what some of the afflicted did in what little bit of life they lived was truly heroic and beatific, in the Christian sense of the word: even while they were still alive, often they did not live much, often they were engaged in a slow rowing toward death, absorbed by blackness as if it were not a color but an atmosphere as thick and suffocating as the inside of a steam room. And yet, with what little brightness seeped though the slats and bled through the shades, they did so much. Sylvia Plath, who has by now been dead longer than she was alive, wrote The Bell Jar, composed her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, put together a collection of short stories, had a Fulbright Scholarship at Cambridge, graduated summa cum laude from Smith, taught a couple of semesters at her alma mater, had a couple of stays in a mental hospital, managed to have many love affairs that ended badly and one marriage that was on its way to ending badly, gave birth to two babies—and still she was able to die at age thirty, a suicide on schedule preceded by a life that ran at a breakneck pace. I point out this prodigious output because I think depression ought to be understood as much more than a monolithic force—in fact, it ought to be understood as something so mighty and complicated that it drives its sufferers in a multitude of directions, and occasionally gives the impression that if behind every great man there is a woman, then behind every great woman there is a madness. If the male driving force is the need to make a living, the female ambition is fueled by suffering.
But I also point to Plath’s numerous and voluminous achievements because I want to make clear that her depression was a useful motivator only insofar as she fought against it with these accomplishmerits. People romanticize insanity because they believe it is the thing behind the art; in fact, it is the thing in front of the art, the roadblock and police barrier and phantom tollbooth that you are pushing against. Plath happens to have fought a valorous, mighty battle, and in that sense she is fit to represent all the other women who were “difficult” or “bitchy” and were probably behaving badly—resulting occasionally in great art and, more often than not, only in frayed tempers—because they too had demons to fend off. Suicide and depression are words that often punctuate the life of Sylvia Plath; they mark the atmosphere that she travels in, but they do not describe the whole of her life, they do not define a body of work more complicated and nasty and funny than all that; as New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm points out, if all Ms. Plath had to offer was the extravagant effulgence of her misery, “we wouldn’t be reading the poems; they would simply be the inarticulate cries of an anguished woman.” Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: “All bad poetry is sincere.”
And in contrast to her heart of darkness, Plath seems to have taken great pains to present herself as a fifties fixture of sweetness and light, a Seven Sisters version of Doris Day, a girl who always traveled in a neat little suit with reliable Samsonite luggage in tow. In a New Yorker article that filled an entire issue of the magazine one week—it was later bound into a book called The Silent Woman in 1994—Janet Malcolm quotes a teacher Plath had at Cambridge who was greatly impressed by the way the young poet was “always neat and fresh, wearing charming, girlish clothes, the kind of clothes that made you look at the girl, not the garments; hair down to the shoulders still, but ever so neatly brushed and combed … This charming American neatness and freshness is what I chiefly recall about her physical person.” Alfred Kazin, who taught Plath while she was still at Smith, wrote of the prim undergraduate: “When we met at home, she was the first to clear the dishes after coffee. She was certainly a ‘regular’ girl, full of smiles.” All of Plath’s attention to grooming and styling and decorum—a trait mentioned in every account by every acquaintance—is notable because it indicates a person who wants to be normal and well adjusted. Granted, this pre-hippie and pre-grunge era did not avail itself of eyebrow rings and nose studs and purple hair, but there were beatniks, and there were Vassar girls in black turtlenecks who did not wash their hair. More likely than not, these deliberately filthy girls were posers and Plaths manqué who mistook despair for depth: one of the surest signs of a person who is deeply depressed is in all the things they do to not be depressed, how willingly they will cop to a huge desire to just be normal and happy, to find stability and start a family. By the end of her life, Plath had abandoned all pretense to vanity—Alvarez recalls a visit he paid her a couple of months before her death, remembering that “her hair gave off a strong smell, sharp as an animal’s”—which was a sure sign she’d surrendered all hope.
What I am trying to get across here was that this was a woman who put up a huge fight for her own life and happiness—but the fight was not against sadness so much as it was against largeness, against the outsize and oversize emotions she felt about so many things, too many things—a way of thinking and being that is intolerable to the world under any circumstances, but certainly had no place in the quietude of the fifties. It is not hard to love the poetry this emotional life produces, to appreciate it as a stand-in and catharsis for the petty problems we have that are a dollhouse version of her overwrought Taj Mahal, but that does not mean we love the poet or the person. And it is not hard to love the struggle that the poetry represents: with the perfectionist’s precision of language that is a literary analogue of Seurat dot-by-dot paintings, Plath’s extraordinary care—which you would think would be stifling—is the exhilarating expression of a soul dying to be free.
No one should make the mistake of thinking Plath and Sexton—the alpha and the omega of the poetry girl-gone-wrong on the page—offer the world no more than their dreary surrender. They fight and struggle against their demons the way anyone else created in God’s image, with a lust for life, is driven to do. They fight in the brilliance of their poetry, images so sharp and neat, they fight by falling in love, they fight by giving birth, they fight by wearing high heels to do housework, they fight by wearing bright red lipstick just to run to the market, they fight by refusing to get out of bed ever again, they fight by giving readings with great elegance and eloquence, and sometimes they even fight by making Sunday brunch for their mothers-in-law. They also fight by being fucking impossible: they are late or they are very late; then they pretend they thought they were supposed to be there then. You want to help them, but they don’t answer the phone, and when you come over to their house to find them, they get mad. You lend them money for rent, they go for a facial. The notion of the damsel in distress that accompanies the posthumous vigil-type atmospheres that occur when a famous depressive does herself in, the loved ones saying we tried, she was so sad, nothing helped, must be discounted as agitprop. Any truthful rendition of a woman falling apart will make it clear that what is happening to her is terrible and what it is turning her into is also terrible. “Angie is a deeply sympathetic character,”
film historian Jeanine Basinger writes in A Woman’s View, referring to the drunk and disorderly and career gal-cum-neglected homemaker Susan Hayward played in the 1947 film Smash-up, the Story of a Woman. “Although it is understood that one sympathizes with her situation, not with what it makes her do.”
To make this point about Plath is to make it doubly so about Sexton, who lived a lot longer and wrought far greater damage. Here’s what I want you to know: Neither one of them died of sorrow, because if sadness had been the whole story, then the whole world would have delivered them hankies on a silver platter and eventually the sympathy would have made sense and seeped in and they would have gotten better. They died because they were complicated, because they were large, because they contained multitudes that Walt Whitman could not have begun to imagine. They died because, indeed, they were frequently quite sad, and they did not like it one bit, and they did not want to stay home and feel sorry for themselves, so they left the house and it only made them sadder: they refused to accept the limits of their mental conditions, and instead were confronted by the limits of the world’s ability to tolerate them. They died because they were difficult and incredible, and because no matter how many people want so badly to have wunderkind children that they send their little three-year-olds to preschool enrichment programs or get their high school juniors tutored for the SATs, not one of these poor benighted parents has any idea how undesirable a truly talented child actually is, none of them can see that everything about brilliance and beauty and excellence and genius leaves us absolutely awestruck until we realize that the personality disorders and maladjustments and mental diseases that tend to accompany these gifts are not optional features. “I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him,” writes Sir Max Beerbohm, offering an appraisal of the modern human condition. “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief,” opined King Solomon in Ecclesiastes, weighing in on the ways of the ancient world. In the Old Testament, God extracted huge tolls and brutal trials from his most favored mortals, and not a damn thing has changed since then.
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