Well Doctor--all my loving poems
write themselves to you.
If I could channel love,
by gum, it’s what I’d do.
And never pen another
foolish freudian line
that bleeds across the page
in half assed metered rhyme.

If all this bother and devotion
is not, in truth, for you--
(since you’re the expert on emotion)
tell me Doctor--who?--Anne Sexton, “Real Love in an Imaginary Wagon”
On the morning of 4 October 1974, Anne Sexton (left) already had, at the age of forty-five, a lot of things that many people would envy. She had a lifetime of accomplishments: among other things a lecturer position at Boston University and a visiting professorship at Colgate--which is quite a coup for a former fashion model who never graduated from college herself. She had numerous accolades, among them a fellowship from the Royal Society of Literature, and a Phi Beta Kappa key. Her 1967 Pulitzer Prize for a collection of poems titled Live or Die brought with it fame and prestige. She had a new book coming out in 1975. And she had friends and family, including two grown daughters. She even had her own rock band (Her Kind).

So there is some poignancy to Sexton’s actions on that day. After a lunch meeting with Maxine Kumin to go over some galley proofs of her upcoming book The Awful Rowing Toward God, the woman with so much to live for went home, locked herself in her garage, started her car, and sipped vodka while she patiently waited for the carbon monoxide to chase away the breathable air.

Although stunned, those who knew Sexton could see her suicide coming for years. She had a history of suicide attempts and bipolar disorder. She and her pal, Sylvia Plath, openly shared a fascination with death, especially their own. Her mortal obsession manifest itself early, during her teenage years, where she would, as a prank, fake her demise. A former boyfriend, Jack McCarthy, recalled for biographer Diane Middlebrook an incident when he came to a snow covered hill to meet her for a moonlight sledding date. He arrived late to find Sexton crumpled motionless at the bottom of the hill covered in what looked like blood. As it turned out, the blood was Mercurochrome. They were fifteen at the time.

Sexton had other problems, as well. Family life seemed to overwhelm her. Her in-laws in large part raised her children, for she was often unable to care for them. And despite her love for and seeming dependence on her husband, she felt compelled to sleep around with other people. As she once explained:

I don’t really want to have an affair with anyone, but I have to; it’s the quality of action. I first had this feeling, I suppose, when I was dating, after Kayo [Alfred Sexton, her husband] went into the service. Pound, pound, pound heart: makes me feel crazy, out of control.

By now, you’re probably thinking that the woman really needed psychiatric help. Truth was, Sexton had seen a parade of shrinks for over two decades. In a way, psychiatry had become her life. That’s kinda ironic, actually, for she saw psychoanalysis as out-and-out quackery. She derisively called it “the big cheat.”

One has to wonder what she saw in psychiatry given her low opinion of the profession. That opinion had to have intensified when one of her shrinks, referred to by Middlebrook by the pseudonym Dr. Zweitung, bedded her.*

One of her early shrinks--in fact, the one who treated her for the longest contiguous period of time (eight years)--would later answer that psychoanalysis gave her the most important thing she ever had: her gift for poetry.

__________________

*Translating the name from German, Dr. Middlebrook’s really calling him Dr. Two-Tongue, or Dr. Forked-Tongue. The New York Times identified him as Dr. Frederick Duhl.