Gracefully Insane (23 page)

Some of Sexton’s initial trepidation about her new charges was confirmed. From week to week, there was no way of knowing which patients might show up for the seminar. Although some patients enjoyed privileges to meander around the hospital grounds or even take the subway into town, others emerged from maximum-security wards with aides, dubbed “angels,” holding them gently by the wrist, meaning that the patient was on suicide watch. Some patients’ conditions varied from hour to hour, not to mention day to day. A patient who wrote an excellent poem might then disappear for several weeks until his or her condition improved.

Robert Perkins, an author and documentary filmmaker now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, described the seminar in his 1994 memoir
Talking to Angels:

Eleanor Morris, then a young patient who had dropped out of Bryn Mawr several years before, preserves a different memory of the sessions with Sexton:

Ellen Ratner, who has channeled her intense energy into a successful career as a syndicated radio talk-show host and television commentator, now reflects cynically on the proceedings: “Frankly I couldn’t care less about poetry but she was famous and I wanted to meet someone who was that well-known.” Ratner called Sexton, who was often mistaken for a model or an actress, “Sexy Anne,” and even questioned her motives for teaching the “loonies.” Ratner remembers, “I said, ‘Well, Sexy Anne, why are
you doing this?’ She replied that she wanted to ‘give back,’ this that and the other. I always had the impression that she was teaching us either as a way to gather more material for her poems or she was doing it for her biography, since her biographer [Ames] was in the room.”

To be fair, there is no evidence that this suggestion is true. Sexton kept few notes of the sessions, and most of those were teaching guides for herself. She wrote only one poem, “Out at the Mental Hospital,” about her experiences at McLean, and she never published it:

There was no shortage of breeding or brainpower in the Sexton seminars. Perkins sprang from one of Boston’s venerable First Families; he had interrupted his studies at Harvard for a year to acquire his McLean “diploma.” Morris was a collateral relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Law Olmsted. But Sexton’s favorite student proved to be a young girl from Fort Smith, Arkansas: Eugenia Plunkett, who had suffered a nervous breakdown at Radcliffe College and checked into McLean.

Plunkett, an attractive and precocious high school poet, had been a patient at McLean for five years before meeting Sexton. The transition from Arkansas to Radcliffe and Cambridge of the 1960s had overwhelmed her. “She wasn’t prepared for the transformation to Harvard,” says her younger brother Robert, a businessman
in Fort Smith. “Her grades had been straight A’s beforehand, but the competition was pretty tough. She wanted to have more of a social life, but she didn’t know how to proceed.”

It may have been Plunkett who suggested that the patient librarian invite Sexton to teach at McLean. Although she made much of being shy, she sent Sexton some of her poems before the seminar began and emphasized that she was a big fan. In one note, she told Sexton, “I feel like your stringbean girl,” a reference to a famous poem (“Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman”) that Sexton had written on the occasion of her daughter Linda’s eleventh birthday.

The two women corresponded between classes. Sexton gossiped about the other patients in the seminar and enjoyed sharing confidences with her young acolyte. When Plunkett announced that she had left her psychiatrist because he had divorced his wife and refused to embark on an affair with her, Sexton—no stranger to the temptations of the therapist’s couch—reacted knowingly:

Sexton offered heartfelt congratulations on Plunkett’s success when she published poems in the
Hudson Review
and the
American Scholar
during the seminar. And she did not hesitate to criticize Plunkett’s work more firmly than that of the other patients. Upon receiving one batch of Plunkett’s poems, Sexton wrote her, “I find them quite different and not worth much bother on your part.... Frost once said a poem should be ‘lively,’ not personal. I say a poem should be personal—in the sense of somebody having really lived something they are writing about.”

At other times, Sexton would proffer advice tempered by her own considerable self-doubt: “Your work is very accomplished.
You have tons of talent. Still, I feel you are holding something back, some emotions you don’t dare speak of. Do you wish it that way, I wonder? And then again should you listen to me—the me who is known for spilling her guts? ... I can’t think rationally and you can. I envy that.” Sexton said more than once that she “envied” Plunkett’s abilities, and of course the young poet was duly flattered: “I was quite proud to hear you envy my poem—I hadn’t expected that at all, and it is quite a flattering thing to know.”

One of Plunkett’s most harrowing and successful poems appeared in the
Hudson Review.
Entitled “Encounter, Psychiatric Institute,” it took place at McLean:

In the summer of 1969, Plunkett returned to Arkansas, where she remained in touch with Sexton. In June, she announced that she had again been institutionalized; “No sweat, though, be out soon, I think.” She described the experience of listening to Sexton’s poetry/rock record,
Anne Sexton and Her Kind:
“I cried all the way through ‘Her Kind.’ ... The music is haunting, but nothing to the words. Had to hold my aide’s hand—she, poor kid, not having the faintest idea of what was going on.”

That was the summer of the moon landing, and Plunkett sent Sexton a poem about the event. In her last letter to her former student, Sexton wrote, “I was pleased that you sent the poem to me although I didn’t understand it. Your rhyming is very skillful, but I do hear you, Jeanie, I do hear you sing.” Later that year, Plunkett published her only book of poetry,
If You Listen Quietly,
which included the poem “Fragment for Anne.” Sixteen years later, after an adulthood beset with psychological and physical disorders, she died of a neurological seizure in Fort Smith at the age of fifty-three.

How good were the other students’ poems? A few of them were very
good and were eventually published. Most of the poems were student quality, some good enough to print in the hospital newsletter. And some were just blots, words scrawled on paper by men and women shocked into the verges of catatonia.

One anonymous patient satirized his mental predicament:

Sexton believed in encouraging all of her McLean students. When the late journalist John Swan wrote a poem called “Kids,” describing his feelings for the his two young daughters, Sexton handed back his work with “GOOD” swathed across the page in capital letters. When she read this fragment of Swan’s,

Sexton responded, “Powerful—maybe better than anything Lowell or Sexton has done on the subject.” The praise was real, and her comment anything but casual. At the time, Sexton perceived Lowell as an important competitor, and both poets had trouble expressing affection for their children in their poems.

At one point, Plunkett chided Sexton for being too solicitous of her students’ feelings. “You seem afraid to discourage anybody.”

In a letter, Sexton responded, “You are right. I don’t like to discourage anyone at McLean. I feel that everyone has something to say and will perhaps, in time, have more important things to say. Poetry led me by the hand out of madness. I am hoping I can show others that route.” But Plunkett’s complaint wasn’t quite true. When Sexton sensed that one of her students could take constructive criticism, she freely dished it out. She continually pressed one of her poets, who later published a small collection of his poems, to push himself beyond writing fragments and expand into poetical form. He sent her these lines from a poem called “Anticipating Sexton”:

She wrote back, “Good ending” and asked for “another verse about what she is like—however disappointing to me personally.”

Perhaps better than Plunkett, Sexton understood how close to the precipice some of her students were standing. Three girls in East House produced a mimeographed book for Sexton, entitled: “Behind the Screen: Poems from the Maximum Security Hall.” Several were on suicide watch and wrote about it. One not untypical fragment:

“The needs are so immense at McLean,” Sexton wrote halfway through the seminar. “And although I try to meet them I generally fail.”