by Alex Beam
In a letter, Sexton responded, “You are right. I don’t like to discourage anyone at McLean. I feel that everyone has something to say and will perhaps, in time, have more important things to say. Poetry led me by the hand out of madness. I am hoping I can show others that route.” But Plunkett’s complaint wasn’t quite true. When Sexton sensed that one of her students could take constructive criticism, she freely dished it out. She continually pressed one of her poets, who later published a small collection of his poems, to push himself beyond writing fragments and expand into poetical form. He sent her these lines from a poem called “Anticipating Sexton”:I thought her eyes were green
before she came.... The scene
was her with lanky bone
and skirt above bare
thigh past knee ...
Exalted like a queen among sin
and those who only half dared to reach for help. But I believed
that anywhere she’d come would be where
all sorts of thoughts, ill-formed, might get conceived,
and come out twitching, perfect infants through the hair
I imagined she had never let them shave.
She seemed, before meeting, to be, in that way, say, brave.
She wrote back, “Good ending” and asked for “another verse about what she is like—however disappointing to me personally.”
Perhaps better than Plunkett, Sexton understood how close to the precipice some of her students were standing. Three girls in East House produced a mimeographed book for Sexton, entitled: “Behind the Screen: Poems from the Maximum Security Hall.” Several were on suicide watch and wrote about it. One not untypical fragment:(Half the skill of succeeding at suicide
Comes with having a decent knife.)
“The needs are so immense at McLean,” Sexton wrote halfway through the seminar. “And although I try to meet them I generally fail.”
In the spring of 1969, conflicting commitments started pulling Sexton away from the McLean seminar. She taught her last class in June. She corresponded with several of the patients for a few years after the class. Although she eventually lost touch with them, several followed her high-profile career in the newspapers and magazines.
Perhaps inevitably, the intensely self-critical and depressive Sexton viewed the seminar as a failure. In December 1973, she gathered some of the McLean poems and notes into a manila folder and scrawled a note in felt-tipped pen on the outside cover: “First teachings of creative writing—1969 (very difficult due to my insufficient knowledge of handling groups and the fact that the group was constantly changing and the aides were easily mixed up with the poets—Decide more commitment on the part of the poet is needed for me to be able to teach well.”)
Whatever her misgivings, the McLean seminars did give Sexton the confidence to press forward with teaching. One of the McLean students organized a weekly seminar for his Boston-area Oberlin classmates at Sexton’s home. Then Sexton arranged a faculty appointment at Boston University, where, in the 1970s, her poetry seminars achieved the same mythic cachet accorded to Lowell’s classes in the 1960s.
The McLean students seemed to love Sexton, for her celebrity, for her own struggles with mental illness, and for the effort she invested in the course. Margaret Ball, who sent Sexton periodic updates on the patients’ lives between the seminars, informed her more than once that her works were stolen more than any other author’s: “‘All My Pretty Ones’ (replacement volume 4) lasted 1 week on the shelf before stolen.... It’s their highest compliment, because usually they’re so honest.”
Robert Perkins, who remembers Sexton as “very pretty and very nervous,” wrote that “I’ve since come to appreciate how difficult it must have been for Anne Sexton to come back to the hospital and deal with a group of loonies. She had been there herself. Maybe she felt she could help one of us. Maybe she did.”
In 1973, Sexton’s awful wish was finally granted in full; she was admitted to McLean as a patient for five days of psychiatric examination. The grim “Patients’ Property Form” is one of the few documents remaining from this visit, detailing that Sexton surrendered her nine credit cards—one from the Algonquin Hotel—and $220 in cash and traveler’s checks ($5 in dimes, presumably for parking meters) on August 2 and reclaimed her effects on August 7.
Sexton’s former student Eleanor Morris met her teacher unexpectedly in the North Belknap medium-security hall. “She remembered me from the seminar, but we didn’t talk much,” Morris recalls. “She looked so awful.... my heart went out to her.” Here was the terrible leveling of mental illness; Sexton, the elegant, chain-smoking, Pulitzer Prize winner cast adrift among her student-patients on the desperate ocean of unhappiness. Sexton was just one year away from her own suicide, firmly embarked upon her Awful Rowing Towards God, the title of her last collection of poems.
Morris still remembers her clock radio waking her on Saturday, October 5, 1974. A newsreader announced that the poet Anne Sexton had died. “It just said she had died, but I knew she had committed suicide, and I spent the whole morning crying,” Morris says.
Morris still has a copy of a book of poems that Sexton gave her after one of the seminars, a 1966 collection called Live or Die. In the flyleaf, Sexton wrote: “My directive is LIVE—to Ellie.”
Eleanor Morris is living and writing poetry in Concord, Massachusetts.
Views of the McLean Hospital grounds, 1900.
Credit: McLean Hospital.
In these pictures taken during the late 1930s and early 1940s, nurses and aides skate on the “Bowl,” a concave expanse of lawn in front of the administration building; ski in the woods surrounding the hospital; and play croquet, tennis, and golf. Patients took part in these activities though they were never photographed for reasons of privacy.
Credit: McLean Hospital.
Horse and carriage, used to take patients on outings and visits, 1920.
Credit: McLean Hospital.
A hydriatic suite where nurses and aides administered the many different forms of hydrotherapy.
Credit: McLean Hospital.
A photo of the McLean medical staff in 1945. Director Franklin Wood stands in the front row, center, in a gray suit wearing his trademark red carnation. At his right is psychiatrist-in-chief Kenneth Tillotson, who later became embroiled in an opéra bouffe sex scandal involving a McLean nurse.
Credit: McLean Hospital.
The star-crossed couple Stanley and Katharine McCormick, on their wedding day, in 1904, in Switzerland. Stanley, an heir to the International Harvester fortune, lived at McLean for two years and eventually moved his doctors and nurses west to a family estate in Santa Barbara.
Credit: State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Dr. Harvey Shein, the brilliant young director of residency training whose suicide traumatized the hospital in 1974.
Credit: McLean Hospital.
Louis Agassiz Shaw II, the wealthy society “novelist” who never stood trial for strangling his maid at his mansion in 1964. Instead, his lawyer won him a lifetime of luxurious living at McLean.
Credit: Boston Globe.
An inventory map of hospital flora created by two patients in the mid-1960s. Copies still hang in many offices throughout the hospital.
Upham Memorial Hall, the magnificent “Harvard Club” of McLean. At one time, Harvard graduates supposedly occupied each of its sumptuous corner suites.
Credit: McLean Hospital.
9
Staying On
THE ELDERS FROM
PLANET UPHAM
When people came out here with major mental illness, the problem was, they just stayed. McLean did have a lot of long-term patients, so if somebody came out, the family would just say good-bye.
Dr. Stephen Washburn
Psychiatrists hardly ever use the word “cure.” They try to help patients, many of whom become “clear,” successfully freeing their minds from the shackles of anxiety, depression, or more severe mental illness. But the profession’
s wellness model is like that of oncology. To be cancer-free or mentally healthy is to be in the happy state of remission. But many patients never get there. Some patients never improve or improve only marginally, and in the McLean of the not-too-distant past, that meant they never left the hospital.
A young female social worker who worked in McLean’s children’s program during the 1980s told me about a group of particularly old patients whom the children called the “elders.” Ageless, wraithlike, oddly spectral, they were both scary to the children and also objects of infant mockery. They were quite literally a dying breed. They lived in the old style, in comfortably furnished single rooms. They had bookcases, attractive bedspreads, and furniture brought from home. Of course, they were home. Some of them had called McLean home for decades.
One of the white-haired old men was Louis Agassiz Shaw, a venerable Brahmin who had spent more than twenty years at McLean and was soon to be shipped off to a North Shore nursing home to die. A descendant of both Robert Gould Shaw, the heroic Civil War captain played by Matthew Broderick in the movie Glory, and of Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born Harvard zoologist who revolutionized the study of biology, Shaw started off in the right direction.19 He attended Noble and Greenough School, where he made his mark as a student poet. From Nobles, as it is called, Shaw proceeded to Harvard, where he joined the Porcellian Club, a watering hole for aristocratic “legacies”: boys whose fathers and often grandfathers and beyond had attended the college. In his senior year, 1929, Shaw published a novel, Pavement, under the pen name Louis Second. (His full name was Louis Agassiz Shaw II.) The book is almost unreadable and was probably printed at Louis’s expense; there is no trace of it in the Literary Digest, which reviewed most novels of the time.20 Ten years after graduating, and at five year intervals afterwards, Shaw dutifully, if laconically, reported to his Harvard classmates on his activities: “Engaged in writing for various publications and anthologies. ... on office staff of Citizens’ Committee of U.S.O. ... member, St. Botolph, Somerset and Myopia Hunt Clubs.” He often rode to Myopia, an exclusive polo club, along bridle paths that linked his fifteen-room Topsfield mansion with the club and with the neighboring estate of General George Patton. Twenty-five years out of college, he had little to show for himself, especially when compared with Harvard graduates climbing the ladders of business, government, and the arts.
Louis had two distinguishing characteristics: He was eccentric, and he was a snob. In the entrance hall to his mansion, Shaw used a plaster cast of his own foot to collect visitors’ calling cards instead of the customary silver tray. He also kept a copy of the Social Register next to his telephone and instructed domestics not to accept calls from men and women not listed there. When Shaw had his house painted, he insisted that the workmen place large metal trays under their scaffolding to ensure that no drips or scrapings fell into his garden. He arranged for frequent and costly repairs to the mansion and always waited a year before paying the “tradesmen.” A Nobles classmate, the landscape architect Sidney Nichols Shurcliff, recalls that Louis publicly humiliated him for accepting a glass of cool lemonade from Louis’s maid in the servants’ quarters one scorching summer day.
Moving into his fifties, Louis was leading the not altogether unusual life of the educated, ineffectual, Boston twit. He rode to the hunt. He appeared at his clubs. In the Thirty-fifth Anniversary Report to his Harvard classmates, he provided no details of his life other than his home address in Topsfield, Massachusetts—incorrectly, as it turned out. In fact, he had taken up residence at McLean Hospital.
Shaw was in McLean because he had killed someone. “Cousin Louis did something that was highly inappropriate,” is how his relative Parkman “Parky” Shaw, a longtime pillar of the Beacon Hill Civic Association, put it to me. When we first discussed Louis, Parkman and I experienced a classic Boston misunderstanding. “He’s the one in the Robert Lowell poem,” I said, meaning that Louis was clearly “Bobbie, Porcellian ’29” in the famous poem “Waking in the Blue.” “No, that’s Robert Gould Shaw,” Parkman corrected me. But we were talking about different Lowell poems; Parkman meant Lowell’s memorably dispiriting “For the Union Dead,” which evokes the bitter sacrifice of Robert Shaw’s “bell-cheeked Negro infantry” parading across the Boston Common just two months before their bodies, and Shaw’s, would be tossed into a mass grave after their suicidal attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Once we cleared that up, we moved on to discuss Louis’s “highly inappropriate” action: He had strangled his fifty-six-year-old Irish maid, Delia Holland, one night inside his sprawling mansion. According to the newspapers, Louis told police that Holland had been planning to kill him by turning on “secret gas jets” in his bedroom. Here is an account by the arresting officer, David Moran, of Louis’s last night of freedom:I pushed through the second door.... the room was a library. Stacks of books wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. Books.
And a man in an armchair staring at me.
At the opposite end of the room was a fiftyish guy seated calmly in a stuffed chair. I figured it had to be the owner, Shaw. Amazingly, he showed no observable reaction to a state trooper stalking into his study with a long-barreled thirty-eight for a calling card. What bothered me even more was his calm demeanor when a dead body lay outside his door....
I leveled my gun on him. It wouldn’t have taken too belligerent a move under the [lap robe that Louis was wearing] for me to react. Finally, he acknowledged my arrival. But his look was as if I’d just tracked mud on his Persian carpet.
“And just who might you be?” His tone suggested that I’d also interrupted his morning meditation.
“State Police,” I responded automatically. Taking a long shot, I blurted, “Why’d you kill her?”
“She was bothering me. Made too much noise!” he answered sedately. “I told her to stop.”
Shurcliff reported that Louis killed Delia—the same maid who had been upbraided for serving him lemonade in the pantry—because she threatened to resign. In a self-published memoir, Shurcliff, a landscaper to the rich and famous, wrote that Louis “flew into a rage and effected her immediate resignation by choking her to death!”
Whatever the motive, the crime heaped shame upon the venerable Shaw family. “It was on the front pages of everything,” Parkman Shaw lamented to me. Indeed it was. “Bay State Scion Admits Strangling His Maid,” barked the New York Herald. “Louis Shaw Second Held in Strangle Death,” cried the Boston Globe. The press had a field day. No story failed to mention Shaw’s Harvard degree, his dilettante’s lifestyle—he is alternately described as a “wealthy retired writer,” “a mystery writer,” a “country squire,” and a “part-time author”—and his esteemed antecedents. Old Boston still remembers that Louis’s father, Robert Gould Shaw II, had married Nancy Langhorne, who later became “the nutty Lady Astor.” The former Mrs. Shaw went on to marry Lord Astor and became a champion of social reform and “Tory democracy” (and, more disturbingly, of pro-Nazi sentiment) in midcentury England. She was also the first woman to win election to Parliament. At McLean, Shaw bruited to one and all that he was “related to the Astors,” which, strictly speaking, he was not. Louis was the only child of his father’s second marriage.
Louis had plenty of money, and he hired a deft, Harvard-trained lawyer who just happened to be a distant cousin, James Barr Ames of the white-shoe law firm Ropes and Gray. At his arraignment in Salem District Court, it emerged that Louis had been seeing a psychiatrist for more than ten years, and he tried to pick a fight with the clerk who read out the criminal charge. Louis never came to trial. Ames had him committed first to the state asylum at Bridgewater and then to the far more comfortable and familiar surroundings at McLean. “I don’t believe cousin Louis was ever indicted,” says Parkman, whose memory on this point of family lore proves to be quite precise. “He was remanded to Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and then some time later he graduated to the McLean hospital where he was well liked and well respected.”21
After a stint on Bowditch Hall, where Robert Lowell immortalized him as “Bobbie,” Louis transferred to Upham Memorial, affectionately known as the “Harvard Club” because at one time, each of its majestic corner suites was said to have been occupied by a graduate of Harvard College. Indeed, when Louis arrived on Upham, there was no shortage of well-bred ladies and gentlemen to greet him. He must have felt right at home.
When they first committed themselves to the Belmont move in the 1880s, the McLean trustees approved construction of only two buildings: Belknap House, a combined office and residence space for thirty women, and Appleton, a residential ward for eight female patients. More or less out of the blue, George Phineas Upham, a partner in the merchant banking firm of Upham, Appleton, and Company, approached the board and offered to finance a third building as a memorial to his son, George Phineas Jr. A graduate of Harvard like his father, the young man had joined the family business but died unexpectedly at age thirty-two. Whereas the trustees had been using the leading institutional architects of the day, Upham insisted upon using his personal architect, William Peters, who had designed many a splendid residence in Boston’s Back Bay. The resulting hall, Upham Memorial, was and is by far the most grandiose structure on the McLean campus. Sitting across the vast, grassy bowl from the rest of the hospital, Upham is a lavish, sprawling brick colonial pile larger than many hotels—and intended to house just nine male patients. (Women lived there, starting in the 1960s.) The exterior is bright red pressed Somerville brick trimmed with white Georgia marble. The foundation (“underpinning”) is “hammered Troy Granite,” according to the announcement of its completion; the roof is covered with “dark Eastern slate.” The ground floor had two grand, open hallways, each featuring a sweeping, carved wooden staircase; the dining room; and four suites, each with fireplace and private toilet and bath. Writing for the American Journal of Insanity, Dr. Henry Hurd picked up the description: There are two suites on the westerly side of the house which have an outlook towards the valley of the Charles. A short corridor leads from the rear hall past the serving room and adjoining the dining room, to an exit upon a terrace at the northwest corner of the house, and to the grounds in the rear.
