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Sexton was both a victim and a manipulator, as these things often go. She was shrewd, self-centered, half cracked. She abused her children. In episodes of rage she would seize her daughter Linda and choke or slap her, and one day she threw the little girl across the room. Linda says that when she was older, in her teens, her mother sexually abused her. The poet had many love affairs during her 24-year marriage, including a long sexual involvement with her psychiatrist -- a disgraceful breach of medical ethics on the doctor's part. Sexton actually paid for these appointments. (A second psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne, raised a different question of ethics by turning over to biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook some 300 hours of audiotapes he had recorded during sessions with Sexton, but Middlebrook seems to have used them with discretion.) All of the untidy history is told in Middlebrook's Anne Sexton: A Biography. Middlebrook, a professor of English at Stanford University, is judicious and canny. She appreciates both Sexton's gifts as a poet and her attractive side as a human being (humor, intensity) but looks at her destructive weaknesses with a steady eye. Linda Sexton, who is now 38 and executor of her mother's estate, cooperated with the biographer and on the whole admires the end result.
Some members of the family are outraged. They think the biography opens windows on a universe of Sexton's own disturbed imaginings -- which, being a good biography, it does. Two of the poet's nieces, Lisa Taylor Tompson and Mary Gray Ford, sent a letter to the New York Times Book Review in which they try to rescue the family from Anne's messy version. They assert the rights of the sane and normal. "We take pride in her art and her accomplishment," the nieces write. "But we strenuously object to the portrayal of people we knew as libidinous, perverted beasts whose foul treatment of this deeply troubled soul drove her to the anguish she felt."
The worst parts of the published story, the nieces say, involve suggestions that Anne's father sexually abused her and that her sainted great-aunt Nana administered erotically disturbing back rubs to Anne as a girl. Middlebrook's book makes it clear that these suggestions almost surely originated in Sexton's mind and had no basis in fact.
But sanity screams at the innuendo, like a gull blackened in an oil spill. It wants to cleanse itself. The poet's version has the power of her black magic, her words on paper. "Where others saw roses," the nieces write, "Anne saw clots of blood." The sick, brilliant woman has the inestimable advantage of being dead and therefore beyond examination on questions of who abused whom and how.
Does the poet's work redeem the poet's mess? Sexton was working in a rich literary tradition. Her immediate American predecessors were not a wholesome precedent: John Berryman (alcoholic, suicide), Robert Lowell (episodically psychotic), Delmore Schwartz (alcoholic), Theodore Roethke (manic-depressive), Elizabeth Bishop (alcoholic). Sexton had shrewd instincts. "With used furniture he makes a tree," she wrote. "A writer is essentially a crook." Maybe.