Anne Sexton and the Poetry of Therapy
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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 3. Catalogues of Lost Baggage 120 4. UtJe or Die's (sort of) Human Statement 157 5. An(ne) Impossible Legacy 212 Bibliography 253 Appendix 290 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).