Pains of The Poet -- And Miracles

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Anne Sexton was a popular, Pulitzer-prizewinning poet who was capable occasionally of a dark brilliance. She had a favorite palindrome: RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR. The trick has first of all its bright little surprise of words, and then, on second look, a deeper, perverse magic -- a double negative of meaning that ends in a metaphysical buzz. RATS LIVE ON EVIL STARS would work in a sane world, or else RATS LIVE ON NO GOOD STAR. But as it is . . .

Like her contemporary Sylvia Plath, Sexton had a gift of the self- dramatizing and self-destructive kind. She was the mad housewife of Weston, Mass., beautiful if you caught her in the right light, "a possessed witch," as she thought of herself sometimes, "haunting the black air, braver at night." Both Plath and Sexton wound up as cautionary tales. In 1963 Plath stuck her head in an oven in London. Sexton told her psychiatrist, "Sylvia Plath's death disturbs me. Makes me want it too. She took something that was mine, that death was mine!" Eleven years later, in 1974, at the age of 45, Sexton poured herself a tall glass of vodka, went into her garage and closed the door, started up the old red Cougar, turned on the car radio and waited for the exhaust fumes to kill her.

It was not an impulsive act. Sexton tried to kill herself many times in the course of her adult life. Or anyway, she had a long flirtation with death by overdose. She carried a virtual pharmacy around in her pocketbook. She drenched herself with alcohol. As she wrote in an early poem, "the odor of death hung in the air/ like rotting potatoes." She checked in and out of sanitariums. Doctors tried to minister to her hysteria, depression, anorexia, insomnia, wildly alternating moods, lacerating rages, trances, fugue states, terrible confusions, bouts of self-disgust.

Anne Sexton was Ophelia, all grown up and turned into suburban mother and basket case. She was an obsessive who used up all the oxygen in the room. Now, posthumously, the poet, the generator of her own myth, is achieving a certain celebrity at the expense of the family that put up with her for years. Her version of the story, elaborately unpretty, is the one being told, the tale that survives. Her family gets dragged into the nightmares of its most disturbed and most articulate member. Literature 1, Life 0.

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