Sometimes even I (who lived through it) can’t believe the abusiveness of the old days, especially at “esteemed” educational institutions, like Harvard. We all want to forget our history, especially when it is shameful, and for this reason I am particularly grateful for a just-published biography of my peers, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, by Gail Crowther. I never met either one of these extraordinarily gifted poets, although we nearly crossed paths at Harvard in the late 1950’s and a few years later in Boston. But I was a short story writer, not a poet, and I was deeply entangled in the domestic role of wife and mother. Both Plath and Sexton struggled with that role, as well, but with very different outcomes.
I suffered abuse that today would call for legal action at Harvard in the later 1950’s: a” section man,” a short term exchange professor from an Israeli University, who tried to break me of my shyness by calling me up in front of his seminar class and telling me I had to teach it; a Freshman year English professor who made it clear that I needed to pay for my A+ with sexual favors; routine dismissal by noted professors who never recognized the “girls” in the class when we raised our hands; refusal to grant me permission to write my senior honors thesis on Charlotte Bronte and instead had to labor to produce something about the forgotten Edwardian novelist George Meredith—all of which meant shame and fear for me and the beginning of a realization that “something was not right” which would prod me into the women’s movement ten years later.
Like both Plath and Sexton, as carefully detailed in Crowther’s remarkable biography, I was cornered by expectations for girls and women that had developed and grown virulent in the prosperous, material-minded white culture that sprang up like a poisonous mushroom in the boom times that followed World War Two, when women were urged back into kitchens, full-time production of babies, and reliance on the herd of mechanical helpers—washers, dryers, etc.—that were ruthlessly promoted as essential guides on the road to happiness.
Also like these two great poets, I was raised by an angry deprived mother who alternated absence, both physical and emotional, with horrifying physical and emotional intrusions difficult for me even today to describe. Crowther describes the same in the early lives of both Plath and Sexton. Fortunately for them, they did not develop the excessive empathy that led me to understand my mother’s behavior as caused by her emotional and sexual deprivation; nor did I have the great advantage of a psychiatrist who told Sexton, “I give you permission to hate your mother.” The therapists I saw in the 60’s and 70’s were intent on finding ways to compel me to conform to my world’s conventional expectations.
We three shared, however, a stubborn insistence, often thwarted but never shattered, on the rightness of our own decisions. And we all struggled, as I continue to struggle, to be rewarded and defined by our writing. Both Plath and Sexton killed themselves: Plath when she was still so young her reputation was not yet established, and her husband and his sister were left in charge of her literary estate and substantially altered or eliminated poems that criticized marriage and men. Sexton was more fortunate in the care her daughter has exercised in administering her literary estate. And I have by the grace of God lived long enough to form and shape my literary life, and to see with amazed delight the progress women have made across the spectrum, almost eliminating the varied forms of abuse we three writers barely survived.
Oh, Sallie, You and I have so much in common. And, although we have lived and written and mused in the same town for years and years, we’ve never shared a meal or a long afternoon, with or without “the cups, the marmalade, the tea…” Perhaps, now that there seems to be an opening in the Covid curtain, perhaps you and I can begin to continue to explore what was and is—and what’s next! XXX, Linda Durham
Your reference to a “section man” who took on your ostensible shyness reminds me of my experience with Susan Sontag as a “section woman” at Harvard. (I am male, a sort of classmate of yours—HC ’59.) What happened was that by rights I failed utterly on the final test for Hum 5 by misreading the instructions. I was supposed to write two essays from a first group of topics and two more from a second group. I wrote four essays on group 1 topics. After the test I discussed it with my roommate who had also taken the test, and that discussion alerted me to my error. I desperately needed a good grade in the course to maintain my scholarship funding, and I thought my only chance was to ask Ms. Sontag for lenience. After finding out from her department where she lived—she had no listed telephone—I knocked on her apartment door. She listened to my story and said she could not, out of fairness to other students, overlook my failure. But when the grades were posted mine was an A. Undeserved external assistance got another huge entry in my life story, thanks to that woman who IMO deserves her fame.