Biographer of Ann Sexton Studies Driven Poet’s Life

. . . I would like a simple life

yet all night I am laying

poems away in a long box.

It is my immortality box,

my lay-away plan,

my coffin.

--Anne Sexton, 1972

Anne Sexton, a Boston housewife who became a major figure in contemporary American poetry, was certifiably mad. In 1956, on the eve of her 28th birthday, she made the first of 10 suicide attempts. Several months later she began writing poetry. Ten years later, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry volume, “Live or Die.”

On Oct. 4, 1974, Sexton finally took her own life: Taking no chances with pills, always in the past her chosen method for attempted self-destruction, she closed herself in her garage and turned on the car ignition. Her last volume of poems was published the next year; it was called “The Awful Rowing Toward God.”

Two Major Audiences

During her lifetime Sexton had two major audiences. One was women, who identified with the frustration and lack of fulfillment expressed by Anne Sexton, housewife. The other was the mentally ill, who in Sexton’s poetry found for the first time a soul mate who shared their silent agony.

But acclaim was not immediately universal, and among the skeptics was Diane Middlebrook, who now teaches poetry and feminist criticism and chairs the feminist studies program at Stanford University. Middlebrook, herself a poet, has been chosen by Sexton’s daughter to write her mother’s biography, scheduled for publication in November, 1988.

But as a graduate student at Yale in the early ‘60s, Middlebrook acknowledges, “I felt very snooty toward Anne Sexton. I thought of her as a housewife poet, the sort of poet who appeals to housewives, not to graduate students.”

Doubly Critical

Middlebrook, who belonged to the if-you’re-popular-there-must- be-something-wrong-with-you school of poetry criticism, was doubly critical, she said, because Sexton “wrote about being a housewife. I thought, ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to get away from by going to graduate school,’ right?”

By 1972, Middlebrook said, she was being pressured by her women students at Stanford to teach courses about women but “at first I was very defensive about this. I said, ‘I just teach great poetry. If a woman’s a great poet, I teach her.’ But I didn’t. I didn’t teach any women poets.” When she decided she owed it to her students and herself to do so, she nevertheless made a conscious decision not to teach either Sexton or Sylvia Plath.

“I really disapproved of their suicides,” Middlebrook said. “The connection between creativity and suicide in their lives always seemed to me to be an obstacle in talking about their writing. I was projecting that people would read the poetry as though it were sort of a script leading to a suicide and you’d never be able to detach the poetry from the death.”

Indeed, Middlebrook says now, she thinks that is a problem, but she now perceives that, for her, the larger problem was her own inability to deal with “the connectiveness between madness and creativity, self-destruction and fame as an artist. Those are very difficult subjects to me.”

No less a figure in poetry than Robert Lowell wrote the cover squib for Sexton’s first book, “To Bedlam and Part Way Back.” Its poetry is what Middlebrook terms “radically self-revealing, self-disclosing,” poems that told of madness and a longing for death and a quizzing of life in a way with which women could identify.

In Sexton’s poetry, Middlebrook said, “Madness serves as a kind of metaphor for feeling trapped in an identity that other people attribute to you that you don’t feel inside. Sexton’s poetry really tapped that. I think women who felt really repressed and oppressed by their housewives’ roles saw it as a dramatic kind of breaking out of an inner frustration.”

In her view, these women were also attracted to Sexton’s energy: “She was very good-looking, very actressy, a powerful presence onstage and she had a great sense of humor. When she’d get up in front of people and start saying these things--and she also just looked so great--there was a feeling of empowerment that came to women audiences from her.”

Sexton’s rise to fame came at about the time, Middlebrook noted, that Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique” and there were the first rumblings of feminism. “The culture was ready for this,” Middlebrook said, “and Sexton was one of its voices.”

Poetry as Therapy

Sexton also found a third significant audience--therapists, who saw the effect of her poetry on their patients. (Sexton’s own therapy, which began in 1956 and continued until her death, was, Middlebrook said, a textbook example of a patient running “roughshod” over her many therapists.)

Not only did Sexton’s narcissistic character disorders make her difficult to treat, Middlebrook said, but her therapy “was foxed by her drug addictions, particularly her alcoholism. She was clearly an alcoholic. She’d say, ‘I’m a drunk, not an alcoholic.’ Poets are drunk but people who are in treatment are alcoholics, right?”

Perhaps most important, she said, “Her former husband is convinced, her children are convinced, and I have become convinced that she didn’t believe she would get well and didn’t aspire to getting well after about 1962. She didn’t think that anything was going to help her, and in certain ways that was OK because she knew she could always kill herself.”

In “To Bedlam and Part Way Back,” Sexton wrote of daily life in a mental hospital, which she experienced for the first time (there would be 21 more times) after suffering a nervous breakdown soon after the birth of Linda, her first child, in 1953. The diagnosis: depression.

In a poem titled “Lullaby,” Sexton wrote:

It is a summer evening.

The yellow moths sag

against the locked screens

and the faded curtains

suck over the window sills

and from another building

a goat calls in his dreams.

This is the TV parlor

in the best ward at Bedlam.

The night nurse is passing

out the evening pills.

She walks on two erasers,

padding by us one by one.

My sleeping pill is white.

It is a splendid pearl;

it floats me out of myself . . . .

It is significant, Middlebrook believes, that Sexton suffered a nervous breakdown shortly after the birth of her first child. When Sexton’s second child, Joyce, born in 1955, was 8 months old, and Sexton had survived another suicide attempt, doctors began treating her for postpartum depression, a somewhat elusive malady (is it psychological, hormonal?) for which therapy and tranquilizers were prescribed.

Middlebrook, analyzing this depression, sees it as a metaphor for “rebellion against the assumptions about maternity, that is, that your life is now devoted to the well-being of other people, not to yourself. That’s depressing. That’s depressing to anybody but particularly when you’re very, very tired.”

Middlebrook said Linda Sexton has told her that in her writing so far she has “underestimated her mother’s violence” toward her children. Linda told of her mother picking her up and choking her in fits of uncontrollable rage.

Couldn’t Cope

“That’s why Sexton went into therapy,” Middlebrook said. “She was terrified that she would kill her children” and she loved them deeply.

“Anne Sexton really wanted to have children,” she said, “and then found that she couldn’t cope with them.” A lot of women understood that, she said, in a time when the media hype was “a glorification of being a bride, having babies and the fulfillment that these things represented” when for many women the truth was thankless drudgery for which they were ill-prepared.

True, most women who become mothers do not go mad. “No,” Middlebrook said, “but an awful lot of them do” and Sexton’s writing was, in a sense, “an uncovering of the failure of ideology.”

Perhaps the most important poem in the first work is “The Double Image,” in which Sexton writes about her recovery from the second suicide attempt and her separation from her daughter Joyce, who had lived for three years with her maternal grandmother.

Speaking to Joyce, Sexton wrote:

. . . I, who was never quite sure

about being a girl, needed another

life, another image to remind me.

And this was my worst guilt; you

could not cure

nor soothe it. I made you to find

me.

“A beautiful, exploratory and quite sad poem in many ways,” Middlebrook said. “If you read it closely you see that what it’s about is recognizing that when she had a baby she became a mother like her own mother. That is, that what mothers do is project ideals onto daughters. They make them into their own image and the daughter can never be that and so wants to die.”

People were “astonished” by Sexton’s writing, Middlebrook said--in 1960, “People just didn’t write about being in a mental institution. If they did, it was about somebody else being in a mental institution. (Her writing) was sort of a relief, an acknowledgement. It was saying the most horrifying things but it was so fresh, so intelligent about itself.”

In an interview in Paris Review soon after Sexton received the Pulitzer in 1967, she wrote candidly about becoming a woman of letters:

“Until I was 28, I had a sort of buried self who didn’t know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn’t know I had any creative depths. I was a victim of the American dream, the bourgeois middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. I thought the nightmares, the visions, the demons would go away if there was enough love to put them down. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up and it was what my husband wanted of me, but one can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out. . . .”

Did motherhood and its attendant responsibilities push Sexton over the edge or did she, in fact, project her problems onto motherhood? “A good question,” said Middlebrook. “My own sense is that the moment of her breakdown was overdetermined. By exhaustion, first of all, physical exhaustion. Having two babies is hard work. Secondly, the fact that her husband was traveling and she could predict these cycles of being alone, which terrified her. Why was she afraid to be alone? Because she didn’t know who she was. If somebody else was there, she knew who she was. (Alone), she didn’t know and she was terrified of who she might be. The murderer of her children, for example.”

Another factor possibly contributing to Sexton’s depression, in Middlebrook’s view, was that her mother-in-law, a model mother, wife and grandmother, had in her adoration virtually appropriated Sexton’s first-born. Sexton wanted the second baby just for her own, Middlebrook said, and it was probably no coincidence that her breakdown came at just the time that this second child was beginning to separate a bit from her mother, to assert herself as a small human being.

Sexton wanted to be a mother and a wife and loved both her husband Alfred (Kayo), with whom she eloped at 19, and her daughters very much. According to Middlebrook, she loved being married from the first and “they were very much in love, these two people.” But, although the wife-mother role exhausted her physically, she could not bring herself to feel that being those things was enough to do , enough to be . She once said that, if she spent her life as many women did, interfering in the lives of her husband and children, they would go mad.

And she was openly scornful of those women who derived their whole identity from being “good mothers,” whipping up cakes for the PTA bake sale, taking charge of Brownie troops. “Anne Sexton had an incredible amount of energy,” Middlebrook said, “and she just didn’t want to use it on that. Also, let’s face it, she had very grandiose notions of herself. She wanted an audience. She loved performing and was very good at it.”

Finding Her Calling

When she discovered that she could write poetry, a discovery that took place through watching Boston’s public television station and was later nurtured in adult education poetry classes, she had found her calling. To those who said it is hard to be a woman and a poet, Sexton replied that it is hard to be a man and a poet.

Once Sexton knew what she wanted to do, she did it with a fury; writing became her all-consuming passion. Middlebrook noted, “Her family was very disapproving of that until she started to be famous. They stayed disapproving, but they had this star in their home and they dealt with her properly.” (Her husband, an outdoorsman, never read her poems, Middlebrook said. He explained that he didn’t like poetry anyway, didn’t understand what she wrote and thought most of her poet friends were “real creeps.”)

Sexton’s beliefs about women needing to do something in addition to raising families weren’t ideological, Middlebrook pointed out, more common sense observations--”She was not a feminist. She didn’t have politics.” But perhaps she was a pre-feminist, Middlebrook suggested, in that “she wrote out of her experience and she realized that it was the experience of a woman quite specifically, a very ordinary sort of woman’s life.”

The symptoms of her mental illness did not set in until the birth of her children though, on reflection, friends pointed out certain childhood behaviors that were revealing--boy-craziness, tantrums. Her family tended to view Sexton’s first big depression as more bad behavior on her part, a shirking of duties, self-pity.

Throughout her life, Sexton struggled with love-hate feelings toward her mother and father, who were wealthy, privileged and, as Sexton remembered them, too busy to pay much attention to Anne and her two sisters. When her mother contracted terminal cancer, she blamed Sexton, citing the stress her hospitalizations had caused her.

And when, soon after her mother’s death, her father died of a heart attack, Sexton wrote to a friend: “The trouble with everyone just up and dying like that is that there are no faces left to throw your emotions at. . . .”

In February, 1973, Sexton asked her husband for a divorce and got it, an action that she conceded to her daughter Linda a year later had been a mistake. Without him, “She was desperately lonely,” Middlebrook said. A bitter Kayo Sexton felt betrayed and said that while he had always put family first and tried to hold things together, she had let fame go to her head.

Divorce as Liberation

Why had she left him? “It’s puzzling,” Middlebrook said. “Like other women of her time, she thought she would be better off without a husband. Divorce was kind of in the air. Divorce was liberation to her. He didn’t appreciate her friends, he didn’t appreciate her work. He was a redneck husband and she was tired of the type.”

And, she said, “She had the idea that there were a lot of men out there who would be interested in her. . . . Everybody who knew her well has said they warned her against it and just were baffled by her notion that she could live by herself but of course she thought she wouldn’t be alone. She had thousands of fans, she had all these men falling at her feet. . . .”

Perhaps this was the final blow but Middlebrook thinks the moment when Sexton began “sliding toward an inevitable suicide” was actually a year earlier, while she was writing “The Awful Rowing Toward God,” and began to sense that her life was out of control.

Sexton once described herself as “a Mixmaster of every (mental) illness,” most probably a manic depressive. But, in talking about her, Middlebrook emphasizes that “when she was writing she was not sick. Her poetry was not written by a mad woman. You have to be sane to write. When she was really sick she was not working. When she was working she was fine. She said, ‘Poetry keeps me alive.’ ”

Did Anne Sexton perhaps see her madness as a badge of being an important writer? Yes, Middlebrook said, adding, “In the ‘50s and ‘60s, her company was terrific. Most of the people who had any status in American poetry had either been institutionalized or were very alcoholic.” To Sexton, Middlebrook has concluded, madness was both “a source of humiliation” and “a credential.”

“She was an artist, an important one, and she was a mad woman.” And Middlebrook believes there is still a great deal to be learned from her writing. She wrote about women’s sexuality as experienced in the suburbs, about motherhood, about parents, about being a daughter. “The problems (for women) haven’t changed,” Middlebrook said. “Today, again, there’s a cry to ‘send women back home and remind them that it’s fulfilling.’ ” And, she observed, because many women in 1986 don’t care to sacrifice “being connected to other people,” Sexton still has an audience. She added, “Illness and madness are still alternative roles, of course, for women who are just defeated by the problems.”