Resistance, rejection, reparation: Anne Sexton and the poetry of therapy

297 Pages·2012·9.38 MB·English

Resistance, Rejection, Reparation: Anne
Sexton and the poetry of therapy
Adrian Jones
PhD 2010
Department of English
Faculty of Arts
University of Sydney
Contents
Acknowledgements Ill
1. Anne Sexton Anxiety: split, fragment, repeat 1
2. Queen of this Summer Hotel 64
120
3. Catalogues of Lost Baggage
4. UtJe or Die's (sort of) Human Statement 157
212
5. An(ne) Impossible Legacy
253
Bibliography
290
Appendix
Acknowledgements
This thesis would not have been possible without the support of Linda Gray Sexton, Executor
of the literary Estate of Anne Sexton. The kind professionalism I experienced at a range of
libraries throughout the United States has been invaluable, particularly at the Schlesinger Library,
Radcliffe Institute, Harvard. My warm thanks go out to Diana Carey, Diane Hamer, Laurie Ellis,
Susan Earle & Carmen Mitchell. I'd also like to acknowledge the wonderful Karen Kukil at the
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. Thanks to the staff at the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas, at Austin, and the Woodberry Poetry Room, Houghton
Library, Harvard. I have benefited from various grants, including the University Postgraduate
Award (2005-2009); the Kathleen Margaret Kamaghan, FA Elgar & J A Waldock Scholarship
(2006 & 2008); the Postgraduate Research Support Award (2006, 2008 & 2009); the Thomas
Henry Coulson Scholarship (2006 & 2007); a PhD Research Travel Grant (2007); a British
Comparative Literature Association Bursary (2007); a Postgraduate Research Support Award
(2008); and in 2008, the Carol K. Pforzheimer Dissertation Grant from the Schlesinger library
on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard
University.
Thanks to Bruce Gardiner and Melissa Hardie for their friendship and support. My dear friends:
lindsay Tuggle, Fergus Armstrong and Rodney Taveira.
Very special thanks to Kate Lilley: "How can I thank you for the pleasure of your company."
I'm eternally grateful to Jean-Michel Carriere.
This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Dorothy Hewett, who led me to Anne Sexton in the
first place.
I
Anne Sexton Anxiety: split, fragment, repeat
The Anne Sexton Tapes
During the North America summer of 2006, I went to Boston to listen to Anne Sexton's
therapy tapes.' The tapes are a restricted holding of the Schlesinger library on the History of
Women in America, at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard. The collection
consists of 101 reels of audiotape from Sexton's psychotherapy treatment with her psychiatrist
Dr. Martin Orne, recorded during the years of 1961-1964. My thesis finds its structure from these
tapes, in that it traces the poetry which emerged from Sexton's first major therapy, published in
her first three books: To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1961), All My Pretty One.r (1962) and Uve or Die
(1966)2 The tapes follow what biographer Diane Middlebrook terms Sexton's "maturation as an
artist," providing the greatest insight into the emergence of her creativity in proximity to her
therapy.' Although she was not in an analysis, Sexton's desire to be analyzed was a theme she
often explored during her treatment with Orne, as she notes in a letter to her mentor, poet W. D.
Snodgrass (24 Nov. 1959):
I wish I might try classical analysis as my psychiatrist is not doing me the good he
ought to, or I ought to. I've wasted a complete year blocking out everything and
trying not to talk about my parents being dead. Mostly I fight with him in an
underhanded way. One day though I broke out and picked up all the things on his
desk and threw them at him (including a lamp and an ink bottle). I'm better some,
though. I don't go around trying to kill myself all the time as I once did. Qust him.
Ha!)
1
But my writing is in its beginning of trouble because I just have the most difficult
time forcing myself to write about what I won't work on in therapy. My
psychiatrist wants me to write short stories as you have to use more ego in order
to write them.4
Beginning in January 1961, following Orne's sabbatical to the University of Sydney,
Australia, Sexton's therapy tapes represent a unique archive in the history of women, poetry and
psychotherapy. Donated in 2002 to the Radcliffe Institute by Sexton's daughter, Linda Gray
Sexton, the tapes were used by the late Diane Middlebrook to write Anne Sexton: A Biography
(1992). Linda Sexton also incorporated material from the tapes into her memoir, Seanhingfor Merry
Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (1994)5 Linda granted Middlebrook unrestricted
access to the sprawling Sexton archive, which included the collection of tapes. She also gave me
access to this rare materiaL In Archive Fever, Derrida discusses the origins of the word "archive,''
from the Greek "arkheion," originally meaning a place, house, address or domicile: "It is thus," he
writes, "in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place."' The Radcliffe Institute
represents a true home for Sexton's tapes, both in terms of the Instihlte's links to Sexton's past
she was one of the original Radcliffe Scholars-and the specialist focus of the Schlesinger itself.
In 2006, I also spent several days rifling through folders of typescripts, pouring over
manuscripts and letters, at Sexton's other archival home in the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, part of the University of Texas, at Austin. This collection also contains
photographs of the poet, some of which I've included in this thesis. It is a broad archive in its
scope, housing Sexton's paintings, her typewriter, a pair of her reading glasses. Yet Sexton's
materials feel somehow restricted by their relocation to Texas. Although my access to the tapes at
2
the Schlesinger involved some luck (in the form of a forwarded email, which included Linda
Sexton's personal email address), and spontaneity (I decided to write to Linda direct, and she has
been exceptionally supportive since our first correspondence), my experience of the tapes
transformed my very notion of the Sexton archive.
During the many hours I spent listening to her voice (I listened to the collection twice,
over the course of two separate trips), Anne Sexton emerged as a whole person. More than a
textual trace on the page, her voice became a kind of acoustic "holding environment" in which to
consider the poet and her work7 Through my encounter with the tapes, she became alive to me.
Working alongside Diane Middlebrook's rough transcripts (now part of the Anne Sexton Papers
at the Schlesinger), a makeshift guide through the three oversized boxes of CDs, I knew
approximately which tapes were going to enrich my understanding of Sexton's poetry, and which
tapes I preferred to avoid.' It may well have been my "archive desire" (Derrida 85) which
motivated my second trip to the Schlesinger Library in 2008, to the scene of the poet who,
through puffs of her cigarette and bouts of silence, talked to Orne, and to me, for days and weeks
on end. The months I spent in Boston led me to the same places where Sexton spent her early
creative life (Cambridge, Harvard), as well as the very street (Marlborough St), where Sexton went
to see Dr. Martin Orne in his elegant brownstone, several blocks up from Boston Common.
In his Foreword to Middlebrook's biography, Martin Orne details the extreme memory
difficulties that Sexton experienced, and how this impacted on her treatment. According to Orne,
Sexton's memory problems led to an impasse in her therapy. Each session became (not unlike a
poem), a contained unit, or vignette. The work of treatment broke up into individual, cliscrete
narratives; each with a beginning, middle and an end (xv). Orne sensed that insufficient progress
3
was being made across his patient's therapy, as he remarked to Sexton during her treatment: "You
have the tendency to isolate experiences, and have kind of a commitment to keep them as
separate vignettes," to which she replied that it was just like her poems, "each one is different."9
In order to overcome what he termed Sexton's "inability to recall what had occurred in previous
sessions," and to circumvent this disruption to treatment, Orne began to audio-tape each
. IU
sesston.
Orne describes how Sexton made notes from memory, direcdy following their usually
twice-weekly sessions; and how on the following day, she would listen to the session, in order to
note, "discrepancies between her memories, her notes from the previous day, and what actually
happened on the tape" (xvi). Middlebrook suggests that this complicated process of notetaking
"placed Sexton in the role of the analyst in the psychodynamic relationship."" \Vhether or not it
had this effect, Orne's use of the tapes was unconventional. As was his pennissiveness about
session times which often exceeded the "customary" fifty-minute mark (Lel/er.r 225).
In her analysis of "Anne Sexton's Treatment" (via Middlebrook's biographical account),
Susan Kavaler-Adler points out that at the time Sexton was seeing Orne, although the object-
relations school of thought was all the rage in Britain, the work of Melanie Klein, Ronald
Fairbairn, D.W. Winnicott, and Michael Balint had not "voyaged across the Adantic. There was
no established technique for treating the whole range of borderline, schizoid, and narcissistic
disorders."12 Following the lead of the New York Psychoanalytic Training Institute, Sigmund
Freud's writing went mosdy unchallenged in the States, including among psychiatrists practicing
psychoanalytically-inclined psychotherapy. As Kavaler-Adler states, Orne was "a clinical
psychologist (Ph.D.), as well as an M.D." - in other words, he practiced as a psychiatrist-
4
psychologist, with a working knowledge of "Freudian psychoanalytic theory," such as
transference and defense mechanisms (186-87). Orne may well have been a radical in Boston
circles, initially proscribing shock treatment following Sexton's admission at Glenside (several
months after her stay at Westwood Lodge in 1956), and replacing it with an intensive
psychotherapy regimen Orne's use of audio-tape recordings raises a number of questions about
the work of therapy, particularly in relation to the processes of memory. He notes that after
implementing this procedure, Sexton was able to point to errors in his memory, creating a
scenario in which "the patient now could know more than the therapist" (xvi). The taping
technique was implemented not only to provide Sexton with a sense of object constancy, but also
in response to the intellectual interest she invested in the process of therapy.
The intimacy with her subject that Middlebrook gained from listening to the tapes led to
the creation of a provocative biography. In her biography, Middlebrook constructs a therapeutic
narrative arc, through which a Boston housewife is transformed into a Pulitzer Prize winning poet
(xviii). In this way, the biographer offers her readers a quasi-therapeutic experience of reading. In
her Preface, Middlebrook establishes the biography's therapeutic terrain:
Everything I have learned about her suggests that she would not have held back
from the archive her manuscripts and private papers the full collection of tapes.
Sexton was not a person with a strong sense of privacy. She was open and
impulsive: many people found her exhibitionistic, and some of the people who
lived with her found her outrageously, immorally invasive ... If suffering like hers
had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an
individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others. (xxil-
xxiii)
5
As Eugene Garfield observes, the biography's publication was a blockbuster event,
provoking high-profile responses from both literary and psychiatric communities.~' Although
Middlebrook had been publishing academic articles on Sexton for over a decade, on the front
page of The New York Times, Alessandra Stanley reported the 'story' behind the publication of the
biography, in her article titled "Poet Told All; Therapist Provides the Record," on July 15 1991.
This highly visible article incorporated quotes from various sources, including Linda Sexton ("!
sometimes wonder if Mother is angry with me ... "), and Middlebrook("! don't think Anne Sexton
cared what was known about her private life ... She just didn't want to be known as a bad artist").
In the months that followed, Middlebrook's biography received close attention from the literary
and psychiatric establishments. In her Times article, Stanley quotes the poet and editor of Anne
J.
Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics, D. McClatchy, who levels his criticism squarely at Sexton's
psychiatrist, and the vicissitudes of counter~transference: "There is something a little sleazy about
the way [Dr Orne] has put himself forward as [Sexton's] Pygmalion'' McClatchy's compassion is
reserved for Middlebrook, who he considers blameless for mining such a rich literary and
biographical vein: "Imagine if we suddenly found tapes of the psychiatric sessions of Virginia
\Voolf, who would not want to listen?" Also writing for the Times ("Anne Sexton's River of
Words," 17 Aug. 1991), EricaJong (who Sexton mentored, and whose commentary was rejected
in some quarters as "spurious"), 15 asks the more provocative version of McClatchy's question:
"Do some people denigrate Anne Sexton's revelations because she was a woman?"; and, "If the
poet Robert Lowell had left these therapy tapes, would we rejoice or denounce'"
Orne's response to Stanley's article was published the following week, again in the Times
("The Sexton Tapes," 23 July 1991 ). His opening sentence framed the main point of contention
in relation to the use (and suggested misuse) of the Sexton tapes: "Few would dispute that a
6
patient's right to confidentiality survives death, but what about a patient's right to tlisclosure?" In
Stanley's discussion of the tapes, she describes Sexton's "carefully hoarded" heaps of memorabilia
and letters, illustrating Sexton's long-term interest in posterity. Sexton's investment in her own
posterity was a constant throughout her life, evidenced by the scrapbooks she filled long before
she was either a patient or poet." In his Op-Ed piece, Orne's comment that "Anne knew what
she was consenting to tlisclose because she had srutlied the tapes and taken extensive notes on
them outside of therapy," suggests Sexton's desire to believe in the therapeutic narrative that
Orne (and ultimately Middlebrook), helped construct for her-"
My own experience of the tapes confinned Sexton's obsessive desire for a posthumous
after-life. In her own words, she wanted to leave the "impact of [her] personality carved in
marble."18 listening to the tapes was an insight into just how destructive that need to be great was
for Anne, the person; and at the same rime, how productive it was for the perfectionist poet.
linda Sexton describes the session on 30 November 1961 in which Orne suggested the
destructiveness inherent in this need:
Over the years there would be more prizes, more honorary doctorates, more
acclaim. 'I have to be great, that's the entire problem- I want to leave the impact
of my personality carved in marble,' she had said to Dr. Orne back in 1961 in one
of her more grandiose moods. His response . . . expressed concern over her
destructive need to become a star ...
All Sexton's "star" successes in the poetry world could not cure the depressive disturbance that
she, and her friends and family, lived with. As Mudu Blasing boldly puts it in "Anne Sexton, 'The
T ypo '" : "The typ.m g cure I.S not t h e tal kin g cure ... "19
7