The title of my book is worrying me … someone has told me that the working title All My Pretty Ones was used in a book about models and call girls and maybe is going to be made into a musical on Broadway next year. I don’t think that would help my book. I could call it The Survivor or The Truth the Dead Know. Got any ideas?
Tony tells me that your play is being produced and that you and Elizabeth [Hardwick] are fine and entertained him so graciously. I guess he has filled you in on his troubles. I pointed out to Tony that he and I are at opposite poles—he has troubles with his life and is in a way “the victim” while I have absolutely nothing wrong with my life and if anything am the victimizer (if there is such a word).
I will be in New York around March 30th and perhaps could see you then. I might be down for a reading before then … I’m not sure.
Thank you, Cal, for that letter. I am still rereading it.
Anne
[To Brother Dennis Farrell]
40 Clearwater Rd.
Feb. 12, 1962.
Dear Brother Dennis …
You are awfully handsome to be a monk … but then … I’m glad you sent your picture because it is a distinct pleasure to behold. You have amazing eyes. Your letter is warm and funny and human. I am still laughing at your description of the wizened, bearded monk shuffling through drafty cloisters! What had I pictured? I’m not sure … a soul in space … with no age, no beard, certainly no eyes like that!
How do you picture me? You who have had the advantage of reading my poems plus seeing a picture of me on the back of my book … and in Newsweek too! Well, I guess you pictured me about the way I am. Though I may have a few secrets up my sleeve (I’ll think them up some other time).
Dear, dear Brother Dennis I forgive you for not sleeping in a coffin, wearing canvas underwear (I love that!) or scourging yourself nightly with a discipline. I forgive you on one condition that is … namely, that you’ll forgive me when I steal all your lavish description and put it in a poem about “us” … “the monk and the lady poet” or something like that. You write so well that I feel strongly inclined to steal your adjectives and your delightful humor. You’d better let me know fast if you, perhaps, stole it from someone else in the first place. So there! Having lost my lovely medieval romantic image of you I give you fair warning that I still find you to be a “soul in space” … and your picture … now that I have seen you with your face undressed before me, tells me that you are not a monk at all but a matador. Your face gives the whole thing away.
Your poems are very good. They are original and moving. You are awfully young to write so well. Perhaps it is due to all those hours of contemplation … your poems have a certain maturity and a sense of style. “Existential” scared me. But that’s because I don’t like throwing up from too much cheap wine … Have you written any longer poems. You must watch out for a tendency to let each poem be a “fragment” … if you know what I mean by that.
I have been busy this last month trying to write a one act play. It is not good, but I might be able to make it good in time. There are three characters in it … A 30 year old woman, a psychiatrist and a priest. The girl sees visions of Christ … but is cured of them in the end. The title is “The Cure”. The priest, you’ll be glad to hear, is a crusty old individual who sips brandy most of the day and is rather bored with this girl’s visions as he is pretty busy with the business of his parish, altar boys with measles etc. He doesn’t sleep in a coffin either! In this case, it would be better if he did.
My second book of poems will come out next October … Houghton Mifflin … title All My Pretty Ones. It is mostly about the dead … and love … and sin … but mostly the dead. I hope you will like it. You have seen most of the poems anyhow. I’ll save my poem about you for the next book … I need something to write about, I think. Haven’t written a poem in the last month. I feel empty. And sad.
I’m awfully glad that you have found some “truth” in my letters … and that, somehow or other, managed to reveal that I am I … that I of the poems. It’s not quite true that I, you know. Though I’ve never lied to you; I often lie to myself. It’s the same thing, really.
Yes. You are right. You can’t proselytize me … even though I wish you could. Still if you are praying for me and you are, then you must know that you are probably the only one who is praying for me … since I can’t … so, therefore, I offer you a sense of trust and a kind of devotion that you can’t turn down. I give you no choice … you must accept my faith in your faith. Probably I am a fool … most poets are fools … but for some reason I love faith, but have none. The girl in my play (who is after all, me) says, after she has been cured of her visions “belief like that is like reaching up into the sky and touching a live wire”.
And it is.
… and one time the priest says to her “and would you mock God?” and she says “God is only mocked by believers!” …
I wonder if any of it makes any sense? Anyway … if you say that you “believe grace is working in” me … well, maybe it is and I just don’t recognize it … the same way I recognized you but wouldn’t have been able to describe your face.
I am awfully glad that I somehow saved you from the total horrors of six units of lit. crit. It would be enough to finish me, I promise you. I think that you can usually believe poets … or, at least, believe their poems. Or at least, I find myself believing the poet’s poems that I love. Do you ever read Rilke … I don’t need a letter from him to love him and to know him. Did you ever read his book Letters to a Young Poet (Norton publishes it). I am very fond of that book and read it often, going to it when I am thirsty or lonely. Rilke himself was probably a bastard and a bum. Look at Dylan Thomas, an obscene despairing man … but his poems are all grace, sparkling with his words and his love. What I mean is this—believe in what you love. You already know how to do that better than I … you with that matador’s face and that monk’s heart!
Listen to this … it’s a poem by Rilke [“Lament”], translated by Randall Jarrell. […]
Oh, how I wish I’d written that poem. It is so simple, so direct, so just right. Do you like it? I do.
Write me again. As you may have noticed I can’t spell or type very well. As for you being “still in college” … although Radcliffe gave me a grant and I seem to be trying to teach creative writing to Harvard-Radcliffe students once a week … I never went to college at all! (see, I have some surprises … minor, but still, some …) … keep working and get that BA. You are just as lovely and medieval and romantic to me as you were in the first place (only handsomer) …
You know, in a way, you are more “in” the world than I am. Almost every day my desk is my world.
This is a much longer letter than I meant to write … yet the words keep falling all over each other to get out on the page and off to you.
with love,
Anne
[To Tillie Olsen]
40 Clearwater Rd.
[spring 1962]
Dear wonderful lovely Tillie Olsen,
Your letter that babbled was/is dear to me. I put it away thinking, I will write her when the first flower blooms and I can send her a petal or a something … I will cherish writing her and not overdo every relationship. So please, please never worry about babbling … you are very contained … do not worry when you overflow. I am very uncontained and so try, sometimes, to put up measures, walls, rules, margins … That’s why I can’t write prose, I guess … it won’t contain me as a poem will (sometimes, when I can write them).
I can’t wait for your “stories” and I feel humble to think that you would want and did send me a copy. I will treasure it.
Well, I didn’t write you when the first flowers came … though they are hardly here, a late and sulky spring. But I many times think of you, have thought, do think. You are like a secret that I don’t dare think about too often for fear it will go away. As a writer, I am jealous of your talent … but then, as a writer-human-woman I am so glad of
it and for it. And then, reasoning right now with myself, I know I have put it falsely. What you do with a “story” is the high point, the impact, the pitch … it measures just what I want to do with a “poem”. I want to be that good, that true. I want my poem to do what your story did to me. Having touched, sensed, the great talent, I know my own goals better. Deeper too.
Sick? Be well, please be. It is dreadful to be sick. The body is precious … it is a luxury to be able to forget it … a precious house … And now you must work for money. Oh dear, there ought to be a grant or something for you … have hope … there will be soon. Perhaps under the hardness of having to leave your writing and work for dollars you will find new objects, words, new stuff for new writing? Or am I being faint … It takes such time to build your stories and without the time … how can you write? I have time right now, you see, but no new or old objects, words or stuff. My desk is empty, I stumble over it, paper by paper, not knowing my way nor finding comfort in old paths. Nothing speaks … vague mutterings of ghosts … they mutter like Macbeth’s witches … otherwise the radio honks in the background and children pound over the steps. I waste hours keeping my soul out of the cauldron (sp?) but near enough the edge to hear any important messages.
I have some new poems in Hudson that I send on with affection. You have seen some. I think. I do not write stories. If I could study with you I would. But I don’t need to write stories really—I will leave it to you.
Write me contained or overflowing … either way you are lovely.
proud to be your friend—Anne
[To Brother Dennis Farrell]
[40 Clearwater Road]
May 17th, 1962
Dear dear Brother Dennis,
For just a quick minute—this note. This note that says I love you, you of your feelings, you of your belief. Your letters have a profound effect upon me! You can’t imagine!
You are the reason I wrote the poems. I didn’t even know you were there—but you were. “There ought to be something for someone in this kind of hope” I wrote … but I wasn’t sure.
Now I am sure.
I will write a long letter soon and I will send the book and let us never stop being friends. Please!
with great affection,
Anne
[To Brother Dennis Farrell]
[40 Clearwater Road]
June 21st, 1962
Dearest friend,
I haven’t answered your last letter—not really. Somehow I can’t get it all in my head at once … I savor it. I think of it, but I cannot answer it … yet.
I write now because I need you in some way that I can’t explain … that, in truth, I do not know … in what way (I mean) … Only that I reach out to you. I do not know why or how, but I need your love, in the truth of it, the gentleness of it, the Godliness of it. Knowing you, at times better than myself, I ask for it without fear.
Here I am with your truly fine letter and I ask for more. Does that seem strange? Not really “more” … for there isn’t any more after such sincerity and impact … but there is a now … I’m in trouble NOW. Write me anything … just words … I need a friend. You are that friend.
Did you get BEDLAM … can you keep it? I hope so. I would like it very much if you can keep it. I will, if I may, send you the second book this October. If you cannot keep it let me know.
Here, also, are two poems … dated and recent. In the last poem I don’t mean the “real” God. I don’t think I do.
I shouldn’t even be writing to you. I don’t make any sense.
Forgive me for writing when I’m in such a dark room.
with love,
Anne
[To Brother Dennis Farrell]
[40 Clearwater Road]
july 16th, 1962
Dear ever present friend,
Please don’t let any letter I write disturb or worry you about me too much … or make you question our relationship or my response to you. If I sometimes sound vague about what my “problem” is … then you can be sure it isn’t you. Dear friend, I am a very direct person. If there were one thing, one small thing wrong between us, I would speak up. If I am sometimes reticent it is because it is too complicated to go into or too obscure … if I am reticent it is because I must tell you I’m in pain or whatever … but do not feel compelled to burden you with the specifics. Does that make sense? I will tell you this, my letters to you and my poems enclosed are real!… and they all mean I trust you. Now let me say in A LOUD VOICE you have never presumed too much on our friendship. You could not do so. I trust you and I believe in you. Your letter telling me all—all you went through and your very personal response to my poems and letters—has let me know you … has given your own secret self to me … and you are valued and dear to me. Your letter strengthened the bond and your words put their arms around me and I felt like a child who feels safe.
Lots of words … am I getting through?
Here’s naked truth.
Your letters give me many things … an aura of yourself, of God, of a different life, of a constant friend. I love you. I know you love me. I am, to be sure, afraid if you knew me that you wouldn’t love me. But this must be faced … I fear it in any relationship. Thus I am perhaps afraid to reveal facts about things … or to say too much for fear if I make too much noise you’ll drift away, pull down the shade of your ivory tower … and all that. Afraid, I guess, that I’ll lose you … I keep losing people.
No. I don’t have you on such an awfully high pedestal. I am deeply touched by your miraculous presence in my life … that’s the pedestal. That fact that you are a monk endears you to me … it can’t be helped. But the fact that you are a monk and are YOU … that’s the core of it all, all this reaching and gathering in. You see, I dare write to you quickly, pouring forth, badly written, all misspelled, any old way the words come. Only in a poem is the emotion intensified, sharpened, made acute and sometimes more than I knew I knew. Too much verbiage in a letter by Anne Sexton … too many words, words all over the field like obstacles. Not meaning to, I get mixed up in them … and nothing remains defined except the gesture, the pouring forth, the friendship and the aknowledgement of love. (how in the world do you spell aknowlegdement fgfydusoepgmbnebs???)
I keep hearing the beautiful sound … “I am black but beautiful …” That is a true gift to me … for perhaps it will become a poem for me … it touches a chord … I will wait for it.
Do you know about my room? It is quite lovely … a wooden tower (ground level). We built it last summer when I got the Radcliffe grant. I used to write in the dining room, books, papers etc etc all over the place. My husband (Kayo) loathes poetry and does not care too much (at all) about his wife being this poet-person. So with the grant money we built me a wooden tower … this room used to be the porch … now a little larger (how large) maybe 10 by 6 feet … I’m not too good at figuring those things out. It is made of plywood mostly … the long window all one wall, looking out over a small back yard, that looks out over a golf course which really resembles a field, with very old (200 years maybe?) pine trees on it, and beyond that blue hills. The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave. I think it is too bad that monks are not allowed to keep books … I mean lots of them … I have a filing cabinet … a tape recorder (I will explain in a minute its function) a red chair, a straight chair for the desk when I’m writing and a softer chair for when I’m sitting at the desk, with my feet on a book shelf and I’m reading or thinking. I often sit as you saw me in that picture in Newsweek, feet up … etc. I do not often face the view for I am busy with words and nature (out the window) becomes my enemy.
You want more of that????? If you want I will go on and on … and yet it hardly makes all that difference … You know, Brother Dennis, I am actually a “suburban housewife” only I write poems and sometimes I am a little crazy (withdrawn for a time and then flashing into a manic excitement, wild words, wild talking) … yet not quite as crazy as all that.
I mean, if you wrote me I would promptly be myself. That is because I am myself when with you. Whereas I fear I am not myself here in my suburban housewife role.
I drink quite a bit. I’m not an alcoholic but I seem to rely on drinking too much (my Dr. says). I drink three martinis before dinner. That’s really all. I might have a beer with lunch when I remember to eat lunch. The time I actually drink too much is when I go away as to give a reading at a college. Then I drink secretly in my hotel room for I am afraid to meet people, afraid of the audience, afraid of the deans and instructors etc and determined to impress them … Which all makes me sound dreadfully shy and if you should meet me I would seem like an extrovert (but I would be so afraid to meet you that I would have 4 martinis first and that’s where the extrovert comes from). At Cornell, I was there five days during a great conference, poetry festival etc.… they still tell stories (so people have told me) of Anne Sexton who was the last to leave any party, who after her reading took off her shoes and stood around talking to students with her shoes in her hand while the faculty drank coffee (and the students snuck in a beer for Anne Sexton) … In five days I could hardly sleep and my engine went only on booze. When I got home I slept for 52 hours straight. I must learn moderation in all things, my Dr. tells me.
You see, I am given to excess. That’s all there is to it. I have found that I can control it best in a poem … if the poem is good then it will have the excess under control … it is the core of the poem … there like stunted fruit, unseen but actual.
There now! You said “I only want to know you as you are—no pretenses/defenses”. Do you still want it all … I don’t mind except I’m afraid myself you know. Don’t YOU put me on some honesty-pedestal. I will only tell you this much for sure. It never occurred to me to lie to you or to deceive you in any way. My moods shift so … In June I got quite upset … I had a rather violent fight with my Dr. (psychiatrist, “You, Dr. Martin” [TB]) and went into the mental institution for a while. Got better, a bit, and came out. I wrote “Flee on Your Donkey” [LD] in there. It needs work … it needs the stunted fruit …