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.