rev. of Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook
When Anne Sexton died in her garage, asphyxiated by exhaust, in October of 1974, a generation of writers and readers were jolted, if not quite surprised. Death had been a main subject of hers; yes, poetry was, in Peter Davison's phrase, a "dangerous trade."
When Sexton was twenty-eight, living the hemmed-in life of an unfulfilled housewife in Newton, Massachusetts, she had a severe breakdown and tried to kill herself. With the support of a therapist, she wrote poems as a way of reclaiming her hold on life. ("I kept writing and writing and giving them all to him just from transference; I kept writing because he was approving.") That experience would lead her to define poetry as "the opposite of suicide," but death, madness, and the threat of suicide were continual themes in her work.
In 1967 Anne Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize. She published eight books of poetry, and was regarded as a peer by the best poets of her generation, including her tutors Robert Lowell, Maxine Kumin, George Starbuck, and W. D. Snodgrass. She was one of those rare poets whose work was cherished by a wide public, in part because her voice gave such powerful expression to the anger and pain of women at a time when anger and pain were sparking modern feminism.
She was linked in the minds of many with Sylvia Plath, who preceded her in suicide by more than a decade. Plath and Sexton worked together in the famous Lowell seminar at Boston University in the late 1950s. "We talked death with burned-up intensity," Sexton wrote of conversations with Plath, "both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric bulb, sucking on it." As Sylvia Plath's poetry has been read through the lens of her suicide, so has Sexton's, as if death were what justified their work. The fact about both these poets, of course, is that their work needs no justification beyond itself. A cult of morbidity surrounded them nonetheless. Yet to others, their deaths were outrageous rejections of the exuberant if painful gift of life that their art enshrined. Adrienne Rich said, "We have had enough suicidal women poets, enough suicidal women, enough self-destructiveness as the sole form of violence permitted to women." And Denise Levertov wrote in her obituary of
Sexton, "We who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction."
In recent years Sylvia Plath has been rescued from the demeaning niche of suicide-poet, and from the limiting one of feminist-poet by a number of serious biographies (especially Anne Stevenson's
Bitter Fame and Paul Alexander's
Rough Magic), which have seen her work in its proper context — as some of the best poetry written in this century.
Now an acclaimed biography of Anne Sexton has appeared. When Diane Wood Middlebrook's
Anne Sexton: A Biography was published in the fall of 1991, it generated enormous publicity, a rare thing for a work about a poet, even a popular one like Sexton. The notice included a front-page article in
The New York Times. Of course, as one might expect in present-day America, what drew such wide attention was not poetry or fine literary biography, but the whiff of scandal.
The main scandal concerned one of Middlebrook's sources. Dr. Martin T. Orne, the psychiatrist whose encouragement gave Sexton her vocation, had turned over to Middlebrook tapes he'd made of their therapy sessions. That this violated the sacred tradition of confidentiality did not stop Middlebrook from making liberal use of what the patient had said to her doctor. Because some of the material involved tales of child sexual abuse in which Sexton described herself both as victim (as a child) and as perpetrator (as a parent), some of Sexton's relatives joined the chorus of outraged psychiatrists who denounced both Orne and the book. (Few were heard denouncing either "Dr. Ollie Zweizung," Middlebrook's coy pseudonym for another of Sexton's therapists, who had sex with her during regular sessions, or Dr. Constance Chase, who encouraged her to divorce her husband, leaving her more vulnerable than ever, and who then terminated her treatment.) Of course the Anne Sexton whose poems
were so outrageously exhibitionist would have loved the uproar — all those wagging heads and offended sensibilities. But sadly enough, just as the true genius of her poetry was overshadowed by the shocks of her life and death, the worthiness of Diane Wood Middlebrook's powerful biography has been undercut by the controversy over Orne's violation.
The biography has several special virtues. Its first success is as a
literary life. We never forget this is a
writer about whom we are reading; and the life and writing illuminate each other throughout the narrative. Middlebrook edited
The Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, knows the poetry well, and has constant reference to it. She also knows the work of the various poets who influenced Sexton and loved her, sexually and otherwise ("Poets," George Starbuck said, "were always in love"). Because the biography is so carefully keyed to Sexton's texts, we not only are able to see the exact experience out of which certain lines arose (the loss of her doctor, say), but then in reading them we can experience it for ourselves. ("Every one has left me / except my muse /
that good nurse. / She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.")
Middlebrook's biography of Anne Sexton is deeply compassionate — in the literal meaning of that word, that the author "suffers with" her subjects, and enables the reader to do so as well. In the case of Anne Sexton, of course, that is more suffering than one ordinarily wants. She never fully emerged from her madness. Middlebrook's narrative makes clear that it was closing in on her at the end, destroying her
and her muse. (The book compares her last poems to "the senile ravings of an old woman"). Sexton had reason to dread living out her days in an institution, and it was out of that fear, Middlebrook says, that she killed herself. This biography's greatest achievement, I believe, is that it leads back to Sexton's awful death in a new way, so that we can see it neither as merely "shocking" nor as somehow "fitting," but as a sad human outcome.
The biography of an admired artist succeeds if it shows us something of the sources of the work we have made part of ourselves. Middlebrook's book does that and more. With insight and a love proper to her task, she lays bare Anne Sexton's suffering so that we can see more clearly than before the beauty Sexton drew out of it. ("Mother of fire, let me stand at your devouring gate / as the sun dies in your arms and you loosen its terrible weight.") We are left with a sense not of what a loss it was when she died, but what a gift it was when she wrote.
James Carroll is the author of eight novels, the most recent of which is Memorial Bridge.
