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

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

It seems the gay afternoons at the Ritz-Carlton, the mutual infatuation between Sexton and Plath, would have occurred during the months of March and April, 1959. In April, to Snodgrass, Sexton wrote: "Ted Hughes and his wife (Sylvia Plath) are in Boston this year (he is an english poet) and they are going to Yaddo for 2 months next fall.

She wants to know what it's like if you can drink and etc. She is going to Lowell's class along with George Starbuck (poet) (and publisher at Houghton Mifflin) and we three leave the class and go to the Ritz and drink martinis. Very fun. My book is at H.M. now." "Not martinis," insisted Starbuck when he was interviewed by Sexton biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook some thirty years later, "Anne drank stingers at the time-awful stuff-I don't remember what Sylvia drank." Middlebrook would have us believe nothing at all: she makes the following assertion about Plath's drinking habits in Her Husband (her study of the Hughes/Plath marriage): "Sexton says they drank martinis at the Ritz-this would have been very unusual behavior for Plath." Could Sexton have misremembered, or projected? And could she have exaggerated about the frequency of the trio's outings to the Ritz? About Sexton and Plath's death talks, Starbuck concurs (although the tone of their conversations seems lighter than Sexton implies): "They had these hilarious conversations comparing their suicides and talking about their psychiatrists." Then he adds: "It was just a few times that I was privileged to eavesdrop on them." Starbuck was a junior editor at Houghton Mifflin (not a publisher, as Sexton wrote Snodgrass) and according to Middlebrook would "now and then [take) off from work ... to drop in on [Lowell's] seminar." So it doesn't appear he was a regular presence in the class or at the Ritz. From the vantage point of age and more modest accomplishments, Starbuck said this about Plath: "Her journals indicate that she was wary of me, which is odd. Everybody at that age thinks the other people are the lions."