‘A Seducing Sort of Woman’ : ANNE SEXTON: A Biography <i> By Diane Wood Middlebrook</i> ; <i> (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95; 488 pp.) </i>

With something like a thousand new titles published every week, a book publicist needs a strong device to raise a single offering above the deluge. To be sure, a serious biography of a widely read modern poet from a major publisher might attract an audience on its own, but one can’t be too careful. And what could be more effective than a controversy lively enough to be aired on the front and Op-Ed pages of the New York Times?

At issue is Diane Wood Middlebrook’s use, in writing “Anne Sexton: A Biography,” of several hundred tape-recorded sessions that Sexton had with psychiatrist Martin T. Orne, material that other members of the psychiatric establishment consider confidential. This is not surprising, since a psychiatrist’s privilege depends in large measure on persuading patients that their utterances are too appalling for an ordinary mortal to bear, even though these are likely to be such similar versions of the all-too-human tale of woe that it’s a wonder mental-health professionals don’t go bonkers with boredom.

In Sexton’s case, the matter is a bit of a non-issue, since the circumstances aren’t likely to set the kind of precedent that would threaten anyone else’s confidentiality. Death has removed whatever need for privacy that Sexton may have felt, and she seems to have felt very little. Self-revelation was her stock in trade. Her survivors’ needs remain, but Orne released the tapes to Middlebrook with the “encouragement and approval” of Sexton’s family, he asserts in his foreword.

Regardless, the uproar has fulfilled its true function. Readers will be dying to discover what dark and unspeakable disclosures Sexton poured into the porches of her doctor’s ear. Unless they’re unusually susceptible, they are destined for disappointment. After 10 years of work, Middlebrook has produced a well-written, thorough, sober biography--longer on psychoanalytic conventions and apologetics than on literary insight--which, on the whole, tires and saddens more than it titillates.

Born in 1928 to parents who were “like characters out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel . . . good-looking, well-to-do, party-loving, and self-indulgent,” Anne Sexton grew up in Wellesley, Mass. Pretty and popular, she eloped at 19 with Kayo (Alfred Muller Sexton II), who dropped out of college and became a successful woolens salesman. Following the birth of their second daughter in 1955, she suffered her first breakdown, was hospitalized briefly, and began psychotherapy. Her first long-term psychiatrist, who diagnosed her condition as hysteria, encouraged her to begin writing.

In poetry workshops conducted by John Holmes and Robert Lowell, she refined her technique and formed friendships with such other emerging poets as George Starbuck and Sylvia Plath. Both highly gifted and “assiduous in the business end of poetry,” she achieved success quickly; Houghton Mifflin published her first book of poems, “To Bedlam and Part Way Back,” in 1960. Seven more followed, among them “Live or Die,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Other honors and awards, as well as teaching positions and highly paid readings, crowded the following years.

So did sexual affairs (including one with her second psychiatrist), suicide attempts, substance abuse, the molestation of her older daughter. “Mother was so often crazed,” this daughter reminisces. “She’d talk gibberish, she’d stare at the wall, her eyes traveling mechanically up then down in a way my father called ‘head lighting’. . . . One night she fell straight forward and her face landed in the mashed potatoes!” After she divorced Kayo and her daughters went away to school, she found herself increasingly alone. In 1974, shut in her garage with her car running, she succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning, joining the roster of modern poets dead by their own hand--among them Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman--who communicated to the following generation the belief that, in writing poetry, they courted death.

Perhaps unavoidably, these circumstances and events have driven Middlebrook toward what Joyce Carol Oates aptly termed “pathography.” Sexton was, as one of her acquaintances called her, “a seducing sort of woman,” one who insisted “on the priority, at all times, of her needs” and threatened collapse if opposed. By age 28, she was “officially ‘sick,’ quite possibly ‘insane.’ She took on the role of patient, which she did not abandon for the rest of her life.” Hardly surprising, in the face of such personal force, that her biographer organizes her material, as others organized their lives, on the premise of Sexton’s sickness, offering a conventional portrait of poet as mad(wo)man. Perhaps Middlebrook could not responsibly have done otherwise.

She could, however, have avoided framing her interpretation of Sexton’s life in terms of another cliche: the “fairy-tale transformation of a suburban housewife into a famous poet,” as though suburban housewifery were a wicked spell dooming its practitioners to stupefaction. The truth is that many prominent women poets--Sexton, her best friend Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Carolyn Kizer, to name a few--have come from comparable backgrounds. Now, if Sexton had been a 19-year-old single mother of two living in a shelter for battered women, we’d have the makings of a fairy tale. But, apparently without conscious irony, Middlebrook has spent the preceding four pages detailing the paid staff (nurse, secretary, and housekeeper) who, together with Sexton’s long-suffering mother-in-law, enabled her to spend mornings writing in her private study, afternoons by her swimming pool or at the hairdresser, winter weeks basking under the Florida sun. Under such circumstances, the wonder would be that a woman of Sexton’s talent and tenacity could fail to be transformed.

By the time I reached that October afternoon when, vodka in hand, Sexton closed the garage door and turned the key in the ignition of her red Cougar, I felt more release than regret. Whether my unadmirable response was due to Sexton’s contorted psyche, Middlebrook’s inability to render her charms as persuasively as her defects, or my own sympathetic deficiency, I’m not sure. Sexton was gorgeous and glamorous. Men (and one woman) tumbled into her bed; students thrived under her tutelage; audiences thrilled to her performances. “Annie gave as good as she got,” according to Maxine Kumin, but a sense of that generosity seldom comes across in these 400 odd pages.

What Annie really gave, of course, was poems. The best of these, in depicting vividly “mental illness, sexual love, spiritual anguish,” transcend the sad pathologies of an individual woman’s life. Read them.