Anne Sexton

by Anne Sexton

  Love from your youngest

  Anne

  P.S. I’m so happy!!!

  After a week in Virginia Beach, the newlyweds returned to Weston. Their first concern was the dentist appointment Anne had mentioned in her elopement letter: she had 101 cavities. While the dentist drilled and packed her teeth, Kayo sat on the floor of the office, holding her hand while she cried.

  Now came decisions over their future. The Sextons insisted that their son complete his education, and in spite of a wish to be independent, the couple decided to move to Hamilton, New York, so that Kayo could begin his sophomore year at Colgate.

  They rented rooms on a dairy farm, where their neighbors were twenty head of cattle; Anne washed the farmer’s overalls as part of the rent. She experimented with cooking and took pride in being married on visits to Kayo’s fraternity. She wrote weekly letters home to her parents; Kayo corrected her spelling and grammar. In one she confided her heart’s desire: an electric Mixmaster.

  [Scott Farm,

  Utica Road, Hamilton, New York]

  Nov. 2nd [1948] 7:30 P.M.

  Dear Mother and Dad,

  I thought it was about time for me to sit myself down and write you a letter. I have been MONSTROUSLY busy cooking, washing (and what a wash I had when I got back) cleaning, giving parties that don’t happen, and etc. etc. Doing all my little wifely duties. […]

  Thank you, Mother, for the advice about the party. The ideas were all good but we finally decided we would give a hay ride. We got Reg to fix up his hay wagon and he taught Kayo how to run the tractor. I was most surprised to find that you never had a hay ride with horses pulling the wagon—that is not keeping up with the machine age. (Reg says). Personally I am all for the old fashioned horse pulled wagon. But we settled for the tractor. All was prepared and everyone was most enthusiastic about the plan for the evening. Then the rains came. So no hay ride. We finally ended up at the fraternity house. The weekend proved a great success. All of Kayo’s Brothers (as they call them) are very nice. I have never met such a friendly group of people in my life. They all act as hosts from the minute you come into “The House” until you leave. They leave no stone unturned to see that you have a good time. And I did. I might remark that the weekend did not prove as wild as the one I witnessed at Bowdoin! Of course there was plenty of drinking and necking going on—But nothing was as fast as Bowdoin. (please pass the tid-bit on to Brad). I was looking at my very best, if I do say so myself. Friday I gave myself a very nice sun burn with the aid of my sun lamp. Therefore Friday night I was a pleasant pink—Saturday I ranged from a lobster red to a rather ruddy brown. I did not sleep at all on Friday night—I was really burned. Right now my face is a mass of peel—but it was worth it. My complexion was very complimentary all of the weekend—and I didn’t even wear any powder. Saturday night I wore my chartreuse satin dress. Mother you must remember that dress. You didn’t used to quite approve of it. But it fit the occasion and I figured that now I was married I might wear it. Kayo looked more handsome than ever. He just came home and read my last sentence. So now I have a beaming husband at my side.

  Daddy, Alfred (as you call him—and by the way why not Al if you don’t like “Kayo”???) received your very newsy letter and check. Both of which received a large welcome from the two Sextons.

  I am glad to hear that you are going to New York for a shopping tour. I really can’t think of any extensive list at all. My heart’s desire is an electric “mix master” (with the orange juice squeezer on top) like the one we have at Pembroke Rd. Also I could use a double blanket cover. I have plenty of clothes, as you know. I would also like some very nice perfume—just like the kind I use of Mother’s. And some cologne. That is all.

  Kayo is now reading over my letter and making jokes about all the misspelled words. He is going to edit this letter so that you will find it more readable. I just don’t have time to think about spelling.

  Kayo’s work seems to be coming along very well. He has been having hourly exams and the results are proving very satisfying to both of us.

  My cooking has taken a slight turn for the better. This morning we had coffee cake with our breakfast. We both thought it was delicious and it was. Tonight I made pineapple muffins—they are muffins with little bits of chopped up pineapple in them and they were also very edible. In fact I get two gold stars for today. I made an apple pie last week that was not so successful. In the first place the recipe was for an eight inch pie and then I found that I only had a ten inch pie plate. This caused me to stretch the pastry out and as a result the filling was too meager. But a first attempt isn’t expected to be too wonderful so I do not feel disheartened. Rather I feel very encouraged after my good results of today. Also the food budget is arranging itself better. I have found which markets offer the cheapest goods with highest quality.

  My teeth are just fine and the gold is becoming increasingly shiny. I am glad that the worst of my dentistry is over and I can start to chew like a normal being once more.

  That is all the news of the moment. Tell Brad that Colby lost to Bowdoin—Jean Vandenburg writes that Dick Bowker (speaking of Colby) wrecked his brand new car and it will cost him 789 dollars to get it fixed so he is selling it for junk. So much for Colby. Thank God it’s Colgate.

  Well—that’s all for now.

  Very Much Love

  from your youngest

  Anne

  P.S. The electric blanket works like a miracle!!! We love it.

  By Thanksgiving of 1948, Kayo could no longer tolerate their financial dependence on his parents and decided to leave college and get a job. They moved back to Massachusetts, where Anne’s father found him a job as sample boy in another woolen firm. Anne took a position as salesclerk at the Hathaway House bookshop in Wellesley, supplementing Kayo’s income with her weekly paycheck. The young couple stayed with each set of parents for several months and then rented an apartment in Cochituate, not far from Weston. With romantic nostalgia, they later recreated for their children the years in an apartment so tiny that Anne had to back out of the kitchen before she could turn around. She claimed that they often dined on a single slice of bologna apiece—but rejoiced in the fact that they were making it on their own.

  Having proved himself after two years, Kayo accepted a second invitation to join his father-in-law’s firm. But his rise in the business was to be delayed, for in the summer of 1950 the Korean War erupted. Like so many others of his age, Kayo avoided the draft by joining the Naval Reserves; he was sent to Baltimore, Maryland, in November for training in navigation. Anne accompanied him there, but returned home when he shipped out on the aircraft carrier Boxer in May 1951.

  At home, Anne lived with the Sextons, but frequently moved back and forth between their house and her parents’. She modeled for the Hart Agency, a Boston firm where her sister-in-law Joan was also employed. Wilhelmine Sexton spent hours ironing costume changes and chauffeuring the two young women into Boston with the back seat of the car full of petticoats and lace gowns.

  Anne’s new family now began to notice disturbing elements in her personality. Her moods shifted at lightning speed—alternating between deep depression and extraordinary excitement within a few minutes. Once, when asked to go to the store for milk while her mother-in-law prepared supper, Anne refused to go. She threw herself on the floor, drumming her heels and fists and raising her voice in rage.

  Meanwhile, Kayo was on the Sea of Japan, exchanging tender letters with his wife. When the Boxer was damaged in combat and returned to San Francisco for repair, Anne drove cross-country to join Kayo, stopping en route in Reno to try her luck at the slot machines—a vice she continued to cultivate through the years.

  In San Francisco they lived in a small walk-up apartment overlooking a burning garbage dump. Here they conceived their first child. Kayo was shipped out again to the battle area on the Sea of Japan and in Korea. Anne returned to her parents’ home in Weston to await the birth of her baby.

  In July 1953,
Kayo returned from Korea, but had to wait for his naval discharge in San Francisco. Anne went into labor with her mother by her side at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital, her own birthplace. Kayo phoned every half hour from the bar where he anxiously marked time. At 11:48 P.M., July 21, 1953, Linda Gray was born.

  Motherhood was overwhelming. Anne had found childbirth horrifying and later avoided discussing it. The continuous, irksome work of caring for an infant depressed her, and the baby cried incessantly, or so it seemed. Supervision by four capable grandparents added to Anne’s feelings of helplessness and inadequacy; living at the Sextons’, she resented her mother-in-law’s help and advice on the daily routine.

  In August, Anne and Kayo moved to a small red-brick house in Newton Lower Falls, a middle-class suburb of Boston. Anne fought bouts of depression and over the next two years was intermittently hospitalized at Westwood Lodge in Westwood, Massachusetts, for attempted suicide. Kayo’s mother took charge of Linda.

  In July 1954, when Linda was not yet a year old, Anne’s “Nana” died at the Woodside Hospital in Wellesley, where advanced arteriosclerosis had confined her for eight months. Anna Ladd Dingley was eighty-six years old. Her death was a blow from which Anne never really recovered.

  The next summer, on August 4, 1955, at 7:48 P.M., Joyce Ladd Sexton was born. Anne was unprepared for the responsibility of another infant, an inquisitive two-year-old, a household, and a husband; at twenty-seven, she felt she was drowning. One day, when she found Linda neatly stuffing her own excrement into a toy truck for the second day in a row, Anne picked her up and hurled her across the room. (Years later she was to describe the incident in “Red Roses” [45].) Her anger and concomitant depression deepened. Despair seized her. Again the family hospitalized her. Linda was sent to Grandmother Harvey and Joy to Grandmother Sexton, while Anne tried to pull the pieces together with the help of a wise and elderly woman psychiatrist.

  The next several months were a series of nightmares for everyone. Kayo was bewildered and grieving; he wanted his wife back, just as she had been before. Anne continued to search for a new identity while living in the structured routine of a mental hospital. Separated from both parents, neither child could put down roots. The Harveys and the Sextons reviewed the circumstances daily, alternating between rage and understanding. Anne returned from the hospital, and four months later, Linda came home to stay. But Joy, still an infant, remained with Grandmother Sexton for the first three years of her life, and ceased to recognize Anne as her mother.

  Always, life with Anne was a roller coaster. Her husband and children could never be certain what direction her mood might take. Often she was loving, exuberant, exhilarating to live with, but her suicidal depressions and violent expressions of fear and rage were frightening and confusing.

  Kayo had managed to advance to the position of road salesman. Like his father-in-law before him, he began to travel through the Midwest, persuading wool merchants to buy his samples. Anne found his absences depressing. As she struggled with the daily routine, she began working with another psychiatrist. Dr. Sidney Martin, a man close to her own age, was able to tolerate her fugue states and midnight telephone calls.

  In 1957, she wrote a letter to Kayo while he was at a hotel on one of his business trips to Chicago. The letter, the only one surviving from this period, attempts to convey the depth of her psychic struggles, and her need to love and be loved. With the letter she sent one of the first poems she had written since school days.

  [To Alfred Sexton]

  [40 Clearwater Road,

  Newton Lower Falls,

  Massachusetts

  March 13, 1957]

  My Darling,

  I miss you! I adore you all over the page and all over the lonely house … Your dear sweet face haunts the kitchen and in the bedroom I see the still made bed, and I know the quick void and loss of you […]

  Kayo, I think I am beginning, and I do mean just beginning, to find myself—you realize that I MUST find my own self and be something or someone, not necessarily in any concrete manner, but in a personal manner—However, I am growing, and I am doing it alone—perhaps you feel excluded in this but it can only happen alone … I feel the growth in one sharp way—I feel myself beginning to love you instead of just need you. I don’t think I have ever loved anyone in my life, not really—just needed them, wanted them to love me to possess me—to become such a part of someone that I could lose my frightened self … Now, I am learning—very slowly, with lots of backing and filling, but still learning … I find myself occasionally loving you not because I need you, or want your love, and feel in love—but rather an objective welling within my heart that comes from the sometimes whole person … whatever it is, I give it to you with no strings attached—You, my dear Kayo, I love.

  In a way, it is like starting all over again—what we have had was good, but do you remember how I was always dissatisfied—I hope to reach the stage where I can stop begging for more and find myself giving regardless of what I get …

  Do not resent my growth, darling, because it is bringing me closer to you in a more delicate way—closer because I want to be yours and not because you are my only refuge … In a way you will always be my only refuge—I am so half an orange without you—

  Linda is a pixie—she had five friends romping in the playroom yesterday … “I had a fun time. We played ghost and witch and we fighted and everything”—thus goes the child’s report on a three year old existence.—How fleeting it is—and how nievly (sp ha) special. […]

  I am not depressed, except for the reality factor of no Kayo with a wispy wisp to love and tickle—[…]

  The doves are cooing in the pine tree and spring will come—will come—will come.

  You will come home, too—and I can’t wait …

  Kayo! your wife is proud of you—thank God for such as you in this world—

  Last time you were in Chicago for the weekend I received a letter all about the undulating figures of the women and they slunk by your table—all the twos and twos while you were one … Put on blinders, Boots, I cannot bear to think of MY PETE waving stiff in the air for any other than me—I love Kayo and Boots and Peter—

  Anne

  TRAVELER’S WIFE

  Although I lie pressed close to your warm side,

  I know you find me vacant and preoccupied.

  If my thoughts could find one safe walled home

  Then I would let them out to strut and roam.

  I would, indeed pour me out for you to see,

  a wanton soul, somehow delicate and free.

  But instead I have a cup of pain to drink,

  or I might weed out an old pain to think.

  Perhaps old wounds have an easy sorrow,

  easier than knowing you leave me tomorrow.

  The mind twists and turns within the choice

  of some sagging pain, or your departing voice.

  In the last hour I’ve tried images and things,

  and even illusion breaks its filament wings

  on the raw skin of all I wouldn’t know

  about the waiting dawn when you smile and go.

  You must not find, in quick surprise,

  one startled ache within my vacant eyes.

  Chapter I

  The Business of Words

  December 1957–September 1959

  “The great theme is not Romeo and Juliet … The great theme we all share is that of becoming ourselves, of overcoming our father and mother, of assuming our identities somehow.”

  —from Anne’s early introduction for “The Double Image”

  [TB], used during readings of her poetry

  In December 1956, Anne had seen the program “How to Write a Sonnet” on Educational Television. Curiosity overcame her fears of rejection and she telephoned her mother, the only person she knew who had written poetry, to ask “What is an image?” Shortly after Christmas she showed her toughest critic her first sonnet of the decade.

  Dr. Sidney Martin
also encouraged Anne. He recognized that her therapy progressed as she began to discover and appreciate her talents. As if to compensate for all her earlier years of scholastic laziness, she worked hard to learn about both poetic form and herself. She found that emotions she couldn’t deal with in therapy appeared increasingly in her poetry worksheets. Spending hours listening to the tape recordings of her psychiatric sessions, and days rewriting her worksheets, she slowly pulled poetry from the dark core of her sickness.

  In September of 1957, believing that she needed a teacher, Anne enrolled in a poetry seminar taught by the poet John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Here she met Maxine Kumin, who would be her staunch friend and constant companion in poetry for the next seventeen years. Maxine, a Radcliffe graduate, possessed a technical expertise and, an analytic detachment that balanced Anne’s mercurial brilliance.

  As the years went by, Anne and Maxine often communicated daily, by letter if separated by oceans, otherwise by telephone. They supervised each other’s poetry and prose, “workshopping” line by line for hours. They discussed husbands, friends, loves, and enemies; they worried and exulted over their children and their publications, borrowed each other’s clothes, and criticized each other’s readings.

  If anyone else viewed Anne’s writing as therapy or a hobby, she did not. Very quickly she established a working routine in a corner of the already crowded dining room. Piled high with worksheets and books, her desk constantly overflowed onto the dining room table; she wrote in every spare minute she could steal from childtending and housewifely duties. To make extra money for baby sitters, she began to sell Beauty Counselor cosmetics door-to-door.

  By Christmas Day 1957, Anne could present her mother with a sheaf of poems she had written and rewritten over the previous year. She began publishing on a modest scale in The Herald Tribune, The Fiddlehead, and The Compass Review. On July 28, 1958, “The Reading” appeared in the Christian Science Monitor.

  THE READING