"Two Sweet Ladies": Sexton and Plath's Friendship and Mutual Influence

American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2006 by Trinidad, David

I SHOULD SAY AT THE OUT SET THAT I AM, HAVE been-on and off- since the 1970's, a Sexton and Plath-oholic. When I first encountered Sexton she was on the cusp of being, thanks largely to the women's movement, co-opted by academia. Plath was already being taught in literature classes at my college; Ariel had been published in this country in 1966, and thanks largely to the shock value of Plath's suicide, and the role that suicide plays in her poems, she was very popular. Both writers' preoccupation with death, of course, connected them in my mind. As did the fact that they had been friends. For me there was an irresistible glamour about their friendship. It's always felt like I was honoring-in my devotion to and my obsession with their lives and their work-the bond between them. Something intimate and yet Olympian, if you will, touched by creative genius. Over the years, however, I've begun to question the depth of their friendship. There are a number of holes in the story, mysteries of a sort. And although it is an accepted fact that Sexton and Plath influenced each other's work, there has been very little scholarship, to my knowledge, in this area. It's these holes, these blind spots that I'd like to explore.

For many years the accepted (and pretty much sole) record of Sexton and Plath's friendship has been Sexton's brief memoir "The Bar Fly Ought to Sing." In the fall of 1966, Tri-Quarterly magazine published a, and I quote, "womanly issue," which featured a special section called "The Art of Sylvia Plath"-one of the earliest, if not the first, tributes to Plath. A year earlier, Tri-Quarterly's editor Charles Newman had contacted Sexton about "a feature section devoted to Sylvia Plath," originally intended for spring 1966, to coincide, no doubt, with the June publication of Ariel. Sexton's response to Newman is basically a rough draft of her memoir. At first she tells him she has "no contribution to make," but then proceeds to describe her friendship with Plath. At the end she offers to expand her letter into a "small sketch." And adds: "I am ashamed of America-when I think of Sylvia's last poems. I read at many universities and yet no one mentions her work. Are they all fools?" This is an interesting glimpse of Plath's neglect, at least during the three years between her suicide in 1963 and the American publication of Ariel in 1966, in light of the immense attention she was about to receive.

Sexton fleshed her memories into "The Bar Fly Ought to Sing" and included two poems: "Sylvia's Death," an elegy she wrote on February 17, 1963, just six days after Plath's suicide, and "Wanting to Die," which she wrote one year later. "I knew [Plath] for a while in Boston," says Sexton, and tells how they both grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, though didn't meet until they were both adults, both poets. Plath and George Starbuck heard, she says, that she was auditing a poetry workshop at Boston University taught by Robert Lowell and "kind of followed me in, joined me there." Lowell was then a leading American poet; Sexton depicts him as a merciless judge of student poetry, but a personally kind father figure. She describes how after class she, Starbuck, and Plath would "pile into the front seat of my old Ford and . . . drive quickly through the traffic to, or near, the Ritz. I would always park illegally in a LOADING ONLY ZONE, telling them gaily, 'It's okay, because we are only going to get loaded!' Of Twe'd go, each on George's arm, into the Ritz and drink three or four or two martinis. George even has a line about this in his first book of poems, Bone Thoughts. He wrote, I weave with two sweet ladies out of The Ritz. Sylvia and I, such sleep mongers, such death mongers, were those two sweet ladies." In the "plush, deep red" Ritz-Carlton bar, the three would eat free potato chips and drink "lots of martinis," and Sexton and Plath would discuss, "like moths to an electric light bulb," their passionate flirtation with death. Later they made their way to the nearby WaIdorf Cafeteria, where dinner could be purchased for a mere seventy cents. After Plath moved back to England, Sexton tells us, they "exchanged a few letters . . . I have them now, of course . . . Sylvia wrote of one child, keeping bees, another child, my poems-happy, gossip-letters, and then, with silence between us, she died." Sexton also tells us, regarding Plath's talent: "Something told me to bet on her but I never asked it why." Although in her original letter to Newman she states: "I never guessed that she had it all in her."

It takes a little detective work, culling facts from various letters, journals, memoirs, and biographies, to get the timeline down, and to fill out the details. In another, earlier "small sketch" of Robert Lowell as a teacher, Sexton says she studied with him "during the fall of 1958 and the winter of 1959"-she doesn't specify these dates in "The Bar Fly Ought to Sing." In September of 1958, Sexton, who had yet to publish her first book, applied to Lowell's graduate writing seminar at Boston University. She did so at the suggestion of W. D. Snodgrass (himself a former student of Lowell's), whom she had met earlier that year at the Antioch Writers Conference. A week later she received a letter from Lowell accepting her into the class. Lowell (we now know, thanks to his recently published letters) praised the poems she had submitted to him: "They move with ease and are filled with experience, like good prose ... You stick to truth and the simple expression of very difficult feelings, and this is the line in poetry that I am most interested in." The editorial notes in Anne Sexton: A SelfPortrait in Letters inform us that "[t]he class met on Tuesdays from two to four in a small room. Although smoking was forbidden, Anne lit up furtively, defiant as in her high school days, using her shoe as an ashtray." According to Sexton's Lowell sketch, the class "consisted of some twenty students-seventeen graduates, two other housewives (who were graduate somethings), and a boy who snuck over from M.I.T. I was the only one in that room who hadn't read Lord Weaty's Castle." By October 6, Sexton is writing to Snodgrass: "I am learning more than you could imagine from Lowell." In the same letter she says "Lowell just called," as if they're suddenly chums, and passes on some professional gossip. But such chumminess is short lived: on November 26, after a brief stay in a mental institution, Sexton writes Snodgrass: "Went to Lowell's class yesterday. I guess I forgive him for not liking me (if he didn't like me as I thot) because he has such a soft dangerous voice. He seemed more friendly yesterday. He is a good man; I forgive him for his sicknesses whatever they are. I think I will have to god him again; gods are so necessary and splendid and distant." Still, in November, again according to Sexton's Lowell sketch, she gives him a manuscript of her poems, "to see if he thought 'it was a book.'" Another letter to Snodgrass, written on January 11, 1959, confirms that Lowell is still looking over Sexton's manuscript. This same letter gives us a pretty good idea of what it was like to have Anne Sexton as a workshop peer: