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53 Anne Sexton, 1959–1974 Anne Sexton was at the beginning of her poetic career when she attended Robert Lowell’s class at Boston University in the spring of 1959. Anne, ten years older than I, had been writing for several years. Lowell had decided that I needed to be befriended by the women writers of his acquaintance. He had written to them, formal letters of introduction . These letters worked wonders. I was invited by each one of them. For these occasions, I dressed up; “heels and hose,” as my college would have said. I wore white gloves too. Teetering on the heels, nervous, it was intimidating to “call on” Plath, Rich, and Sexton. But such was Boston in the late ’50s. While many of Lowell’s women-writer friends were kind, if slightly patronizing, Anne Sexton, irrepressibly exuberant, was genuinely warm. She had a way of drawing me right in. Anne was generous and immediately invited me to her house. I was to spend a lot of time there in the coming years. Her study was her sanctuary , invaded only by her two large Dalmatians, who curled at her feet and looked up at her adoringly as she composed her poems. For fifteen years we continued to work together, laugh, talk, swim in her pool, write, read poems, gossip, and commiserate. For a number of years, I had a job in the Counseling Center at Brandeis University, near Anne’s house, and saw her several times a week. Anne’s house was where I would go to relax. Though I knew of course—who didn’t?—of Anne’s attraction toward death, the focus of our friendship was on joy, even frivolity, shared experiences, and on that most complex preoccupation, poetry. After her death, many Sexton-imitators appeared on the scene, eager to suffer, write about it, and kill themselves. (“Get rich, get published, get famous , get even!”) But few had Anne’s imagination and image-making ability . The poet as mad, the poet as suicide, the vulnerable deranged woman: Anne was a believer in, as well as a victim of, that archetype. But her vision encompassed the range of women’s lives: work, family, children, love. At the same time she journeyed into a more shadowy private world of selfdoubt , pain, hallucination, and terror. All this is recorded in her poetry. Anne treated me like a little sister; she teased and encouraged me. And I looked up to her—her poetic gifts, her imagination and humor and beauty. She was a magical “older sister”: so gifted, glamorous, supportive, • With Robert Lowell & His Circle 54 and funny. But what I actually lived with Anne Sexton was informal and relaxed. We sprawled in her study, reading poems, or lounged in the sun on plastic lawn chairs in her backyard, glasses of strange-colored fizzy drinks by our sides, typescripts on our laps, as we talked about poetry. There was often the clink of ice cubes around Anne, and she smoked cigarettes just as Lauren Bacall did in the movies. She even looked like Bacall—and also a bit like Hedy Lamarr: wedgie sandals, longish hair, long legs, full skirts, plunging silk blouses, creamy lipstick, eye makeup. A “war bride” out of the ’40s. She was smart and talked “tough” and had a ready laugh. In summer we hung out at her swimming pool, experimented with nail polish, commented on each other’s figures—for who ever sees “figures” during layered Boston winters!—and talked about men and children and poems and letters of rejection. Anne came to Lowell’s seminar with a desperate ambition and tremulous nerve. She was not yet thirty, but it was considered that she had started writing “late in life”; late, that is, when compared with the undergraduates whodominatedtheclass.Herfinepoem“TheDoubleImage”hadappeared in the Hudson Review, and a few others had been published here and there. To Bedlam and Part Way Back was still in manuscript. Lowell advised her on the organization of that first collection. Anne Sexton was, on the surface, entirely different from her contemporary , Sylvia Plath. Anne was “heart” and shaking hands; Sylvia was “head.” Anne had an outstanding natural poetic—that is, image-making—ability, and “The Double Image” was a tour de force of rhyme and form. She had vulnerability and was touchingly raw. Chain-smoking or observing thoughtfully from large, tilted green eyes, she was a soft presence in the class. The poems she brought in were to appear in her...

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