Anne Sexton: A Biography
By Diane Wood Middlebrook
Houghton Mifflin, 488 pages, $24.95
Anne Sexton, the troubled Massachusetts housewife who published her first serious volume of poetry in 1960 at age 32, had a personality as theatrical as Lord Byron`s, and her poetry is among the most flamboyant displays of private feeling yet written in English.
Attractive and with an expressive voice, Sexton made her public poetry readings into extravagant star turns. By 1968, when she read from her still unpublished ”Love Poems” in Chicago, the performance was so openly seductive as to suggest that something was going wrong. This was also the year she began a reading tour accompanied by a small rock group; the act was called ”Anne Sexton and Her Kind,” named after the poem, ”Her Kind,” that became her platform signature.
The first of Sexton`s 10 published volumes of verse was ”To Bedlam and Part Way Back”; the third, ”Live or Die,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Her ”The Awful Rowing Toward God,” was scheduled for publication in 1975, but on Oct. 4, 1974, she sat wrapped in her dead mother`s fur coat in her closed car with a glass of vodka and opened the throttle to end her life.
A good deal of unpublished work turned up in Sexton`s ”Complete Poems”
(1981), which was edited by her elder daughter, Linda Gray Sexton. Among these poems, the first stanza of ”Talking to Sheep” now seems a prophecy of this biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook: ”My life/ has appeared unclothed in court,/ detail by detail,/ death-bone witness by death-bone witness,/ and I was shamed at the verdict/ . . . But nevertheless I went on/ . . . confessing, confessing/ through the wire of hell/ and they wet upon me in that phone booth.”
It may be unfair to say that Middlebrook is the Kitty Kelley of literary biographers, but she certainly delivers a complete kiss-and-tell anthology of Sexton`s affairs-one with a woman friend, others with virtually every male poet she encountered (including one that resulted in an aborted pregnancy)
and-most spectacular of all-with one of her psychiatrists, to whom Middlebrook has given the pseudonym of Dr. Zweizung, a German name that translates as Dr. Forked Tounge. But it is Middlebrook`s accounts of Sexton`s physical violence and sexual attentions toward her elder daughter that could put this biography on the supermarket magazine racks.
It is Linda Gray Sexton, her mother`s literary executor, and Dr. Martin T. Orne-another of Sexton`s psychiatrists, who wrote the foreword to this book and against psychiatric principle provided the biographer with hundreds of audiotapes of therapy sessions-who are the chief powers behind this flood of revelations. Linda has wondered publicly ”if Mother is angry with me. . . . `Look, Mom, you wrote about this stuff. You lived it in public.” But she didn`t write about all of it, and although she certainly lived it, she didn`t live all of it in public.
Not all the material in the book is new; some of it was provided in the 1977 volume of her letters, in J.D. McClatchy`s 1978 collection of memoirs and reviews, and then in the ”Complete Poems.” In a note to that last volume, Linda Gray Sexton wrote, ”Certain poems have been omitted . . . because of their intensely personal content, and the pain their publication would bring to individuals still living. As she (Sexton) commented in February of 1974,
`part of ”45 Mercy Street” is still too personal to published for some time.` ” But now, together with Dr. Orne, Linda has provided material for the relentless display of every available detail of her mother`s destructive and self-destructive behavior.
Sexton`s mental illness put her several times into hospitals, mostly as a result of suicide attempts. The family history shows three strains linking Anne Sexton to her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents: writing, alcoholism and suicidal depression.
Her mother wrote verse-unpublished-and both her parents enjoyed drinking; her father seems to have been, like Anne, an alcoholic. The title poem of her second volume ”All My Pretty Ones,” written after her father`s death, exclaims in terms of a fearful Mass, ”My God, father, each Christmas Day/
with your blood, will I drink down your glass/ of wine?”
Sexton began writing seriously in 1955 when she was in therapy with Dr. Orne, after showing him one of her poems. He encouraged her, but it was her association with other writers that helped her poetry to define and refine itself. Her first mentor was the poet John Holmes, who led a writers`
workshop. Although Holmes tried to deter her from the self-revelations that mark all her work, this experience opened the way for her to join the company of the so-called confessional poets with whom her name continues to be associated.
Sylvia Plath, whose reputation as a poet has to some extent outshone Sexton`s, was among the friends she made in a later workshop with Robert Lowell. The relationship with Plath was rivalrous, and Middlebrook makes the most of evidence that in these early days Plath looked up to Sexton. It is not clear whether Middlebrook`s remark that Plath`s suicide in 1963 was a
”singular move . . . by means of which Plath had once and for all reversed their positions as senior and junior in the ranks of poetry” is Sexton`s perception or her own.
As she sifts through the debris of Sexton`s unconscious fantasies, their expression in her poetry and her inability to separate those fantasies from her daily life, Middlebrook seems to be earnestly searching for some kind of solution to the problem of creativity vs. repression. But aside from concerns about taste and Dr. Orne`s ethics, one wonders about the value of the revelations that this biography provides.
Sexton herself expressed the wish that her experience might be ”useful” to others, and Middlebrook finds it valuable as evidence of Sexton`s ability to ”survive” her most wounding memories. But the plain fact is the after several suicide attempts, she eventually succeeded, at age 47, in ending her life. Useful, perhaps, as a monitory example: To rework the fantasy into the poetry may be fruitful, but to release it into daily life is disaster.
Sexton`s younger daughter, Joyce, has stated that her mother ”was like wallpaper,” that ”she plastered herself all over the walls,” and this may be true. But no matter how far Sexton`s emotional neediness may have led her during her life, for her family to present this parade of misery smacks of exploitation.
Middlebrook`s further claim for the value of her biography is that it presents Sexton as a feminist example, a woman who developed through writing and therapy from a discontented if not mad housewife into a poet of achievement and recognition. But apart from Sexton`s demonstrated lack of interest in feminist causes, one wonders whether this aspect of her life could not have been illuminated without the uneasy confidences volunteered by the biographer`s sources.
On the other hand, Middlebrook has only taken what was offered to her and has done her best to present it with sympathy and sensivity. She is an alert and insightful reader of poetry, schooled in Freudian analysis and skilled in the manipulation of these and other materials.
But for all the apparent sophistication with which Middlebrook uses psychology as a means of understanding poetry, the sensational appeal of this biography may lead its readers toward some version of the old theory that it is the psychic wound that empowers the drawing of the poetic bow-that Sexton`s illness made her a poet.
The marvel is, rather, that struggling against such claims of illness, Sexton could have transformed the substance of her inner and outer life-childhood, marriage, motherhood, affairs, madness, hospitalization-into the poems that, when most successful, combine to form the narrative that is her best biography.
Despite all Dr. Orne`s notes and tapes, there is no record of any of Sexton`s dreams in the book. It might have been interesting had Middlebrook presented evidence of whether Sexton`s dream images turned up first in the dreams or in the poetry. An answer might have told us something about whether the poetry writing-and perhaps the treatment she received-served to help Sexton, or whether, as her repressed fantasies were partially released, the poetry or the therapy stirred the poisons in what she once called ”the bowl I offered up.”
In any case, no matter how strong Sexton`s poetic bow, the psychic wounds prevailed. What a pity that they have been so mercilessly celebrated by her physician and her heirs.
