TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092391/0923640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 127 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 76

Pains of the Poet -- And Miracles


By Lance Morrow


    Anne Sexton was a popular, Pulitzer-prizewinning poet who
was capable occasionally of a dark brilliance. She had a
favorite palindrome: RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR. The trick has
first of all its bright little surprise of words, and then, on
second look, a deeper, perverse magic -- a double negative of
meaning that ends in a metaphysical buzz. RATS LIVE ON EVIL
STARS would work in a sane world, or else RATS LIVE ON NO GOOD
STAR. But as it is . . .

    Like her contemporary Sylvia Plath, Sexton had a gift of
the self-dramatizing and self-destructive kind. She was the mad
housewife of Weston, Mass., beautiful if you caught her in the
right light, "a possessed witch," as she thought of herself
sometimes, "haunting the black air, braver at night." Both
Plath and Sexton wound up as cautionary tales. In 1963 Plath
stuck her head in an oven in London. Sexton told her
psychiatrist, "Sylvia Plath's death disturbs me. Makes me want
it too. She took something that was mine, that death was mine!"
Eleven years later, in 1974, at the age of 45, Sexton poured
herself a tall glass of vodka, went into her garage and closed
the door, started up the old red Cougar, turned on the car radio
and waited for the exhaust fumes to kill her.

    It was not an impulsive act. Sexton tried to kill herself
many times in the course of her adult life. Or anyway, she had
a long flirtation with death by overdose. She carried a virtual
pharmacy around in her pocketbook. She drenched herself with
alcohol. As she wrote in an early poem, "the odor of death hung
in the air/ like rotting potatoes." She checked in and out of
sanitariums. Doctors tried to minister to her hysteria,
depression, anorexia, insomnia, wildly alternating moods,
lacerating rages, trances, fugue states, terrible confusions,
bouts of self-disgust.

    Anne Sexton was Ophelia, all grown up and turned into
suburban mother and basket case. She was an obsessive who used
up all the oxygen in the room. Now, posthumously, the poet, the
generator of her own myth, is achieving a certain celebrity at
the expense of the family that put up with her for years. Her
version of the story, elaborately unpretty, is the one being
told, the tale that survives. Her family gets dragged into the
nightmares of its most disturbed and most articulate member.
Literature 1, Life 0.

    Sexton was both a victim and a manipulator, as these
things often go. She was shrewd, self-centered, half cracked.
She abused her children. In episodes of rage she would seize her
daughter Linda and choke or slap her, and one day she threw the
little girl across the room. Linda says that when she was older,
in her teens, her mother sexually abused her. The poet had many
love affairs during her 24-year marriage, including a long
sexual involvement with her psychiatrist -- a disgraceful breach
of medical ethics on the doctor's part. Sexton actually paid
for these appointments. (A second psychiatrist, Dr. Martin
Orne, raised a different question of ethics by turning over to
biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook some 300 hours of audiotapes
he had recorded during sessions with Sexton, but Middlebrook
seems to have used them with discretion.) All of the untidy
history is told in Middlebrook's Anne Sexton: A Biography.
Middlebrook, a professor of English at Stanford University, is
judicious and canny. She appreciates both Sexton's gifts as a
poet and her attractive side as a human being (humor, intensity)
but looks at her destructive weaknesses with a steady eye. Linda
Sexton, who is now 38 and executor of her mother's estate,
cooperated with the biographer and on the whole admires the end
result.

    Some members of the family are outraged. They think the
biography opens windows on a universe of Sexton's own disturbed
imaginings -- which, being a good biography, it does. Two of the
poet's nieces, Lisa Taylor Tompson and Mary Gray Ford, sent a
letter to the New York Times Book Review in which they try to
rescue the family from Anne's messy version. They assert the
rights of the sane and normal. "We take pride in her art and her
accomplishment," the nieces write. "But we strenuously object
to the portrayal of people we knew as libidinous, perverted
beasts whose foul treatment of this deeply troubled soul drove
her to the anguish she felt."

    The worst parts of the published story, the nieces say,
involve suggestions that Anne's father sexually abused her and
that her sainted great-aunt Nana administered erotically
disturbing back rubs to Anne as a girl. Middlebrook's book makes
it clear that these suggestions almost surely originated in
Sexton's mind and had no basis in fact.

    But sanity screams at the innuendo, like a gull blackened
in an oil spill. It wants to cleanse itself. The poet's version
has the power of her black magic, her words on paper. "Where
others saw roses," the nieces write, "Anne saw clots of blood."
The sick, brilliant woman has the inestimable advantage of
being dead and therefore beyond examination on questions of who
abused whom and how.

    Does the poet's work redeem the poet's mess? Sexton was
working in a rich literary tradition. Her immediate American
predecessors were not a wholesome precedent: John Berryman
(alcoholic, suicide), Robert Lowell (episodically psychotic),
Delmore Schwartz (alcoholic), Theodore Roethke
(manic-depressive), Elizabeth Bishop (alcoholic). Sexton had
shrewd instincts. "With used furniture he makes a tree," she
wrote. "A writer is essentially a crook." Maybe.

    Anne Sexton was a pain, in the real, physical sense. Every
large family has a pain or two: an iridescent liar, a
middle-aged infant, a little Iago. But somehow, in Sexton's
case, it turned out that the pain was also entangled with a
miracle: the miracle of her 45-year-long survival, for one
thing, when such a terrible undertow was pulling her, and the
miracle of her poems, or some of them at least -- the dark,
intelligent objects that she floated toward shore before she
went under.