by Anne Sexton
Hope all this fits into your schedule, busy as it is.
Love,
[To Ben Shaktman]
[14 Black Oak Road]
August 3, 1972
Dear, dear Ben:
It was good to get your warm letter, but I was sorry that you couldn’t think up some theater project for Transformations. I don’t know why I expect to get so much mileage out of one little book.
As for writing a new Daisy—only if you were working in Boston, could I manage it. I don’t work well in New York. A hotel room is not conducive to rewriting for me. I work well from my own desk here in Weston, but I disliked trying to rewrite in that squalid little room at the Algonquin under pressure. I do love the theater, but in truth for the short time I worked with you it was far more productive than anything I did with Chuck.
I worked two years on that play and hold nothing in my hand but dust. I know. I could print it, but I don’t even like it well enough for that. It bores me. Walter Kerr was gracious. Clive Barnes was gracious, but I can’t get out of my head Daisy throwing herself all over the stage. One thing I’ve learned, not to be quite [so] hysterical. At any rate, madness is not hysteria. It can be very quiet, but it wasn’t so directed.
Enough of these machinations and musings. Maybe, indeed, I will write another play. I have been writing so madly that I haven’t had a chance to think of it. But there will come a lull eventually perhaps. At any rate, let us keep in touch, so that if I do write a play or start a play, I can let you know.
I’m glad you are writing and selling. You speak of my daughters and the birch trees, and I tell you, Ben, they are lovely. Should you come to Boston, I will meet you for lunch or a drink (and not throw up), or make the monk’s bedroom ready for you.
With love,
In the summer of 1972, Kayo incorporated a new element into his wool business: mail-order crewel and needlework. He named this new addition “The Needleworker” and began spending long hours on the design of its first color catalogue. Once again, Anne turned her creative ingenuity to a task other than poetry, and began to write catalogue copy with Kayo. All through the heat of August they composed catchy blurbs, loudly arguing over what was best. Kayo complained that Anne’s copy was “too artsy” and that it wouldn’t appeal to a general public. Anne replied, “But Kayo, you’ve got to be imaginative!” Although Anne often made light of her part in the project, she was pleased that her craft was helpful to her husband in such a concrete manner. Soon the entire family began to think in terms of advertising jingles, and there was constant good-natured joking over Anne and Kayo’s arguments. She said in a letter to Dan Masterson in August: “Kayo and I have been working on this new business every night. I’ve only been in the pool twice even in this terrible heat. When I’m not working with Kayo, I’ve been writing myself.”
[To Joy Sexton]
[14 Black Oak Road
circa August 4, 1972]
Darling Joy
we’re here to say
we’re glad it is
your birthday!
We think it’s sweet
that you were sixteen.
But now you’ll really
be a queen.
At seventeen you can drive.
We hope there’s someone left alive!
At seventeen you can stay out
later
than a mater (mom)
sometimes.
or a pater. (dad)
You’ll still have to mind
and not be fresh. Be kind
and you’ll be okay in every way.
You’ll have to study even more.
We hope it’s fun and not a bore.
Hot Line will keep you hopping.
And, Joy, there’ll just be no stopping
the things you can do when you’re seventeen.
It’s no longer dress up. Dress like a queen.
Feed the cats. Feed the horse!
Well it could be wourse.
Drive the car. Buy the gass.
In that short skirt you’ll never pass!
Introduce the right way. Be nice.
And we promise not to be ice.
We promise to love and the whole bit.
We love you. You are our kitten,
and we are smitten,
with Joy at Seventeen!
Blue Eyes! Big butt. A queen!
love from Muggy
love from Thorpe
[To Anthony and Helen Hecht]
14 Black Oak Road
August 29, 1972
Dear Tony and Helen:
Hooray for Evan Alexander! I heartily congratulate you, and please tickle the dear baby’s feet for me.
I was sorry not to see more of you that night at the Y. [Anne and Anthony Hecht had read at the YMHA in New York City that year.] I was feeling so goddamned lousy, and there were so many people afterwards, that I turned around once, and you were gone. Did you know, Tony, that that is the largest crowd they have gotten at the Y with the exception of Neruda? I think we must be a good team. Let’s do it again.
My Transformations book is getting ghastly reviews in England, which they end with comments such as, “God bless America.” I doubt O.U.P. will do my next book, which is coming out in the U.S. on my birthday, November 9, the Book of Folly.
Kayo is starting a new business—mail-order needlework kits. I write the ads and the catalog, but not very well.
I taught at Colgate last year and will be at Boston University for the next five years. But the writing goes well—fluidly, that is.
Please write. I’d like more news, and even to see a new poem would be a pleasure.
x o
Anne
[To Rosalyn Tureck]
[14 Black Oak Road]
October 4, 1972
Dear Rosalyn:
Just a note lest we lose touch. In haste let me say that I listened to your record with devoted attention and supreme happiness, as well as writing to it, but I do believe that great works of art can inspire. I loved the way you phrased it, “Bach understood a great deal about God, creation, and death, but less about life.”
And so it is with me. I wonder if the artist ever lives his life—he is so busy recreating it. To work is to live. To create is to live. To perform (for me) is essentially false. Only as I write do I realize myself. I don’t know what that does to “life”.
I hope your concert tour goes well and that all good things come to you.
With best wishes,
In November, Olwyn Hughes—the literary agent for Sylvia Plath’s estate—wrote Anne in distress. Concerned about the impending publication of a book of poems by Robin Morgan which included derogatory remarks about her brother, Ted, she entreated Anne to do anything she could to stop the book’s publication.
[To Olwyn Hughes]
[14 Black Oak Road]
November 1, 1972
Dear Olwyn Hughes:
I’m so glad that you liked the poem and that you’d like to publish it. I’m not clear what “early next year” means. Do you mean February of ’73 or September of ’73?
I’m glad that Ted liked it. I respect his judgment more than anyone’s. Tell him I send my love. Tell him there’s nothing I can do about Robin Morgan. I called Fran McCullough as soon as I got your letter, and she said the books had already been shipped to the stores. You were right. The poem is vile, and the only reason Random House is publishing it is because anything about Sylvia is news. It is terribly written. It is not art. Anyone who knows anything about poetry will discount it. It’s a personal attack on Ted, and my heart goes out to him.
I think a libel action is a terrible idea. It would only give further publicity to ugliness. But frankly, I don’t think anyone will take it the least bit seriously. At least I hope not. I don’t think anyone will come ringing Ted’s doorbell. In a way it is too terrible to be in the public eye. But as Ted once told me, praise begets abuse. At the same time, I am fully aware that this [is] personal abuse, not literary
.
I will do all I can to discount this Robin Morgan on this side of the Atlantic, but it is too late to stop her from publishing.
Let me know about the date of publication for Rainbow Press, and give my love to Ted.
Sincerely,
In November, Anne accepted a position on the Pulitzer Prize poetry jury. She was excited by the prospect of judging the prize she had won herself only five years before. Louis Simpson and William Alfred were her fellow jurors, and before they finished, they had read nearly eighty books of poetry.
On her birthday, November 9, Houghton Mifflin gave a party at 2 Park Street, celebrating the publication of The Book of Folly. Subsequent reviews were disappointing. In England, Chatto and Windus replaced Oxford University Press as her publisher.
New interpretations of her poetry always intrigued Anne, and when Conrad Susa approached her with his ideas for converting Transformations into an opera she was ecstatic. On May 5, 1973, the Minnesota Opera Company opened its production of Transformations, with Anne in the audience. She adored it. She made another trip to Minnesota to hear the opera, and eventually bought herself an expensive tape recorder so that she could listen to the performance at home. Daughters, neighbors, and friends listened with her, note by note. It was the realization of a dream to hear her words become song.
[To Conrad Susa]
[14 Black Oak Road]
November 29, 1972
Dear Conrad:
I’m so glad that you got my new book, and more than that, happy that you like it. You write a damn good letter for a music man.
I so enjoyed meeting you, and let me thank you for that afternoon at Joseph’s. I was fascinated with your ideas and plans for the opera (dare I call it that?).
I hope the arrangements are settled. I spoke with my agent and told her some of your plans (the Andrews Sisters, the Mills Brothers).
You have all my warm feelings as you compose. May you be giddy, and may the ice hold you no matter how many gold bricks you wear on your back.
Best,
[To George Starbuck]
[14 Black Oak Road]
December 3 or 4 or something, 1972
Dear dear George,
[…] Query: If John Barth doesn’t come back next year and you pay his replacement four grand per course more than I am getting. I’m going to wonder if a woman’s fist shouldn’t be painted on my classroom door.!!! Even if John Barth stays at his same salary I’m going to wonder: I know it is a desperate time of money at B.U. but if a man gets it then why doesn’t a woman. Need I list my qualifications as a writer, teacher etc? If I’m important I want to be paid importantly.
Enough. I hope you like the poem. That’s all I meant to talk about in this letter and then my mind just kept right on—as in the poem itself.
Love,
Chapter VI
To Tear Down the Stars
January 1973–October 1974
That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.
Vincent Van Gogh
The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:
into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.
“The Starry Night”
from ALL MY PRETTY ONES
In February of 1973 Anne asked Kayo for a divorce. During their twenty-four years together, she had occasionally threatened him with the possibility of a separation, and now, against the advice of her psychiatrist and many of her friends, she began legal proceedings. Kayo contested the divorce until its bitter end in November, convinced that Anne was acting precipitously, continually questioning whether she knew what she was doing.
Having left Kayo in their home at 14 Black Oak Road, Anne spent seven weeks drifting from friend to friend, sharing her grief. At first, it was exciting to be a house guest, the center of attention, the dramatically estranged wife. But soon the sympathy waned. When the court awarded her temporary custody of both children and the house, she gratefully returned home. Terrified of being alone, she immediately advertised for a live-in couple who would rent a few rooms and serve as companions.
The summer months passed slowly. Anne tried to forget her separation through a premature love affair. She taught a summer class by the pool, had two teeth pulled, and wrote very little. In August, just before Joy’s eighteenth birthday, Joy signed Anne into McLean Hospital.
In the fall, Linda returned for her junior year at Harvard and Joy began her first semester at boarding school in Maine. Unable to sustain the complicated relationship, Anne’s first set of boarders departed. The house was empty. She thought often of Kayo, especially as the divorce date neared; he had protected her, supported her, waited for her. Even as she approached her divorce hearing, scheduled for November 5, she talked of marrying him again. Relying more heavily on her friends now, she insisted they fill the emptiness he had left behind. She asked them to humor her, to care for her like a child.
Her friends grew angry and frustrated with her midnight suicide threats, her inability to go to the dentist alone, enter a store alone, mail a letter alone. She required constant service and care, and those closest to her began to set limits in self-protection. Anne saw these limits as unreasonable fences erected by those she loved—the ultimate desertion.
She began cultivating new friends who would do all she asked, and punished those of long standing with silence. If they failed to give her what she wanted, she simply turned to someone else. No one was indispensable.
The gradual dissolution of her deepest relationships is mirrored in her letters of the early 1970s. Maxine Kumin, Lois Ames, Anne Clarke, Brian Sweeney, and Linda and Joy all gradually retreated from her life. Her files contain few exuberant letters to Snodgrass, Miller, Hecht, Morgan, Newman, Stallworthy, Shaktman. Instead she concentrated on her fans—short glassy notes which revealed little of herself. In letters to those she had known for years, a cheerfully glib tone replaced her earlier openness.
As her friends provided less and less support, she turned to God for comfort. During the spring and summer months of 1974, she read xeroxed weekly sermons from a church in Dedham, becoming friends with the curate, Patricia Handloss. Religion suddenly became quite important, but she answered defensively when questioned about her new-found faith. She had succeeded in creating her own private God—perhaps He would never leave her.
Anne had always been a romantic. With divorce she finally obtained the freedom to examine fully the other side of the fence. She was convinced that, as a divorcée, she would be overwhelmed by the attentions of many men. After all, they had been writing her love letters for years, despite her marriage. But what she found in her new state was neither rich nor strange, but instead remarkably disappointing. Eligible men were scarce for a forty-five year old woman; in desperation she finally sent her name to a computer dating service. Still, she was lonely. One afternoon in September of 1974, she confided to Linda that she had made a mistake. Divorce had not given her that dream man; it had only made her acutely aware of what she had lost.
Anne turned increasingly to her work—often writing all day long and forgetting to eat. Her class at Boston University became a kind of family. Between June of 1972 and October 1974, she had written three new books: The Death Notebooks, The Awful Rowing Toward God, and 45 Mercy Street. Her methods of
revision had altered drastically: often she wrote two or three poems in a few hours. On the file folder of first drafts for The Awful Rowing Toward God in the Boston University archive, she noted that “these poems were started 1/10th/73 and finished 1/30th/73 (with two days out for despair, and three days out in a mental hospital). I explain this so you will understand they are raw, unworked poems, all first drafts, written in a frenzy of despair and hope. To get out the meaning was the primary thing—while I had it, while the muse was with me. I apologize for the inadequate words. As I said in one of the poems, ‘I fly like an eagle, but with the wings of a wren.’ (1/31/73)”
The published poems in The Awful Rowing Toward God differ little from those first early drafts. The days of spending months over a single stanza were gone. Often her poetic instincts and natural ear allowed her to produce spontaneous poems that needed little revision; but many more awkward mistakes also slipped through into print. An unfinished tone crept in among the polished words. Her imagery became wilder, her lines more prosaic.
With this vast outpouring, she wrote against death; she seems to have been preparing instinctively for a final silence. Her late poetry, while not as carefully crafted as her early work, is an outstanding document of the evolution of her thought and emotion in these last two years.
Her life rapidly spiraled inward. She gave fewer readings, saw fewer friends, used fewer worksheets—blotting out all but the essentials.
[To J. Steinbeisser]
[14 Black Oak Road]
January 10, 1973
Dear Ms. Steinbeisser:
Mercy Street is not available to anyone. I consider it, among other things, a failure of nerve, and there really is nothing in it that is not in my poetry.
I do not intend to ever publish it, and I do not wish anyone to read it, even talk about it in a Ph.D. thesis. I do not know the subject of your thesis, whether it be contemporary plays or my work. If it is my work, I would be happy to send you a copy of a forthcoming book of poems.
