Summer of '73 - Part 2

Copyright © 2008 Judith J. Bentley

I was 28 years old in the Spring of '73, teaching in the public schools in Atlanta, Georgia, and had taken some of my gifted high school English students to Georgia State University to hear Dr. John B. Stone, a physician at Grady Memorial Hospital, who was giving a reading of his poetry as part of the University's arts festival. It was a rare event for me to hear a live poet reading from his own work. I closed my eyes and listened to the words that pouring from his lips like gentle rain. After the reading, some of my students trailed off to the art department while a few remained to hear Dr. Stone's comments on "The Emperor of Ice Cream." He could not recall offhand who the author was. Fortunately, I had just taught the poem.

"Wallace Stevens wrote that poem," I chimed in. Dr. Stone turned to me. A smile came over his face.

"My dear," he said, "I believe you will pass your bar exam."

"Oh, I hope so," I replied as I clasped my hands gleefully under my chin.

He had mentioned the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference earlier in his reading, and I asked him if he had ever heard of Anne Sexton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who had once held the Robert Frost Fellowship at Bread Loaf. She was the only other person besides Albert Schweitzer I had ever really wished I could meet. I had read most of her poetry. Her book of poems Live or Die, which was published in 1966, had won her the Pulitzer Prize, but I sensed she might give it all up any day. After all, no sugar daddy in the sky was giving out guarantees on the good life to anyone.

"Yes, indeed, I know Anne Sexton. In fact, one of her friends, Maxine Kumin, a poet and novelist, will be at the conference this summer, and I have heard that Ms. Sexton might put in a guest appearance."

I felt my heart racing.

"I write a little myself." The words had slipped out.

"In that case, you might be interested in the conference yourself. I just happen to have an application at home and I'd be glad to send it to you."

My hands were shaking as I gave him my address, thanked him and rejoined my students in the art department. While they were sharing their reactions to the art exhibit, I contemplated this evening's encounter with Dr. Stone and his remark about my bar exam. My life seemed to be a perpetual bar exam. There were things to account for and I was constantly feeling the pressure to measure up to someone else's expectations.

In a few days I received the application to Bread Loaf from Dr. Stone. As I began to fill it out, I came to the reason for attending. I doubted I'd be admitted if I just wrote that I'd heard a rumor that Anne Sexton might make a guest appearance, so I decided to submit some of my poems and apply as a contributor.

Several weeks went by before I received a letter from the conference director informing me that the poet Robert Pack had read my poems and had accepted me as a contributor to the 1973 Bread Loaf Wrters' Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont for the August 14th through 26th summer session. Dr. MacRae, the superintendent of the Fulton County Schools in Atlanta, excused me from the teacher pre-planning week, and the principal at College Park High School where I taught reluctantly gave his permission. I got out the five volumes of Anne Sexton's poetry I had collected and began rereading them.

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It was a long trip from Atlanta to Vermont, nearly 1400 miles by car. I allowed myself five days to make the trip in my 1962 Karman Ghia Volkswagen. I stopped in Hershey, Pennsylvania and toured the chocolate factory. I rode through Hartford, Connecticut, the home of Mark Twain. In Boston, Massachusetts, I made a wrong turn and got lost in a maze of slums. When I arrived at Waldon Pond where Henry David Thoreau had found peace, I stood at the edge of the Pond looking out over it, aware that I was standing on historical if not sacred ground. I put my feet in the warm water hoping the Pond would bless me with a spiritual baptism. I knew Anne Sexton lived not too far in Weston, Massachusetts and on an impulse, I decided to drive to Weston hoping I might find her at home and get to meet her in the flesh.

It was early on a cloudy Sunday morning when I pulled into Weston. All the shops were closed. I inquired at a local service station where she lives and the attendant gave me directions to Anne's house on Black Oak Road. When I pulled into her driveway, got out of my car, and knocked on her screened front door, I felt like an idiot. Some force had compelled me to find her door without invitation. My standing there certainly ran counter to all the rules of social decorum of my Southern upbringing, yet I felt I had to be there. I could see through the screened door to the swimming pool in her backyard. She had guests.

A young man in wet swim trunks holding a martini in one hand came to the door. I had picked up my copy of Anne's latest collection of published poems, The Book of Folly, and stood at the door with it in my hand.

"Hello. My name is Judith Bentley and I am on my way to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. I understand Ms. Sexton might be coming to the conference and I was hoping she would autograph my copy of her book. "Is she here?" I asked awkwardly. He eyed me for a moment as if trying to decide what he'd say to this uninvited guest. He chose to be courteous.

"Yes, she is here, but it is doubtful she will make it to Bread Loaf this summer. She just got out of the hospital."

Well, that's something we have in common, I thought.

"In that case, would you please ask her if she'd be so kind as to autograph my book." I held it out to him and he hesitatingly opened the screened door.

"You wait here," he said, and he walked back to the swimming pool with my copy of her book in his hand. I stood at the door feeling ashamed of my impulsiveness yet hopeful too. In a few minutes, the young man returned.

"She signed it for you," he said, handing the book back. I thanked him and once back in my car and not yet out of her driveway, I opened to the inside front cover where her name was scrawled in black ink, still wet and slightly smeared from the pool water. I pulled out of the driveway disappointed that she might not make it to Bread Loaf after all, that I might not get to meet her, but at least I had her autograph and I had been to her home. I would have to be content with that.

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The experience at Bread Loaf was intense, electrifyhing and exhausting all at once. Each day during the first week, guest artists lectured on some aspect of their craft, and each evening one of them would read from his or her work in progress. Harry Crews, who had just hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in time for the conference, read from his novel, The Gospel Singer, set in Enigma, Georgia. Vance Bourjaily read from a novel he was working on. I listened with relish to other writers there including George Elliott (poet, novelist, and critic who was teaching at Syracuse University), Anthony Hecht (another Publitzer-prize winning poet), Mark Strand and Robert Pack, both poets, and Walter Goodman, Seymour Epstein and Peter Schrag.

After the readings, I went to the campus barn where there was a spacious reading room with a fireplace and a Baldwin baby ground piano. Other writers and contributors talked quietly in groups or read alone. They did not seem to mind that I was playing music from memory at the piano--Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," a Chopin Prelude, a Beethoven sonata, and some spirituals I could play by ear. I felt I needed to do something physical with my hands to thank whatever spirit it was that had brought me to this place. I had not given myself permission to see myself as a writer though everyone else there acknowledged that I certainly was one of them.

One morning at breakfast, Maxine Kumin joined us at a long table. Unable to restrain myself, I hollered down to the opposite end where she sat, disregarding everything my mother had taught me about table manners and Southern etiquette.

"Ms. Kumin, do you know if Anne Sexton is coming to this conference or not? I stopped by her house on the way up, but no one could give me any assurance."

"Oh," she replied, "so you're the one. I was embarassed that Anne had mentioned my impulsive stop to Maxine. As we were leaving the table, Maxine announced, "If Anne does make it up, I am sure everybody'll be duly notified." Well, I was just going to have to wait and see. And hope.

The second week was given to workshops in which selections of contributors' manuscripts were studied and read aloud by our assigned critics. I had been assigned to Mark Strand, a poet who had taught at Yale, Princeton and Columbia. Mr. Strand soon let it be known, however, that he was a ghost and it was his ghost who was writing his poems. I sure hadn't planned to talk to any ghost about my poems so I avoided him at mealtimes when the artists and contributors mingled informally. I chose, instead, to sit at a table with Peter Schrag, who was writing a book about the Pentagon Papers and the trial of Daniel Ellsberg. I also sat at the table with Maxine Kumin, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry and was a personal friend of Anne Sexton. When it came time for my scheduled appointment with Mark Strand, I hid out in the barn's reading room and played tunes on the Baldwin baby grand.

My doctor had released me from the hospital to attend the conference provided I would not stay the entire two weeks, so on a Wednesday morning of the second week, I packed and left my manuscript with Mark Strand's ghost to return to me by mail. I never got it back. At breakfast the conference director announced that Anne Sexton would be arriving that evening to give a reading of her poetry. I felt a hard knot in my stomach. I knew she despised poetry readings and would usually get herself good and drunk just to get through them. Still I knew I'd miss my chance-in-a-lifetime to meet her.

At sunrise that Wednesday morning, I walked across the campus to a field and sat down on a bench to gaze at the Vermont mountains. The sky was streaked with the colors of rose and lavendar and the mountains were a deep blue, almost purple. This was the place where Robert Frost himself had been, where countless writers known and unknown had come each summer to refocus, to find what they would give their energies to, to share in the fellowship with other writers, to celebrate as artists together doing their work, and this was the place that had welcomed me.

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When I got back to Atlanta, I wrote Anne a letter even though I knew she read very little of the mail she received. I chose to write in a Southern dialect I could hear in my head, one I had heard in Virginia towns where my father had been a Methodist minister and where I had spent my childhood and teenage years. I didn't really expect a reply of any sort, but I just wanted her to know how much her poetry had meant to me.

Dear Missus Sexton,

When I pulled into yo yard this summa in my old rattletrap all the way from Atlanter, Georgia 'n saw them nice cars in yo garage 'n yo beautiful house, I was plum ashamed tuh be there cause I knowed I ain't got no money 'n no nice house like you got, but I wanted tuh meetcha just the same as much as I wanted tuh meet Mister Schweitzer when I were a child. Well, them older folk told me I couldn't cause he were in Africker. After I had growed up some, I read how he loved people near as much as Missus O'Connor loved them forty peacocks she kept in her backyard tuh fly in her winders whenever they tuk a mind tuh 'n then I was sure I had tuh meet 'em, but those grownups said hit weren't no use tuh be whinin' 'bout meeting' Mister Schweitzer cause he were dead. Well, I thought they's just lyin' cause they's mean 'n I cried somethin' awful, but then they showed me in the newspaper where hit said all about his death 'n afta I seen it, I neva felt like meetin' nobody f' days 'n days. Thatus all befo I read yo poems.

Well, Missus, I hope tuh see you someday in the flesh. You ain't never gonna have no friend tuh read yo poems more'n I have, 'n even though I ain't somebody yit, I's gonna visit you agin someday 'n I hope you is still alive by then.

Sincerely,

Judith J. Bentley

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After I'd signed my name and mailed the letter to Anne Sexton, I considered my experience as a contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference concluded. My father referred to such an event as a "mountain top experience," after which one must inevitably return to the valley below. I had returned to my valley, teaching my thirsty students who seemed to expect me to bring buckets of spring water every day.

It was the second week of the Fall quarter on a Friday evening around 7:00 o'clock p.m. when the phone rang. The operator's voice came over the line.

"Long distance for Miss Judith Bentley."

"This is she speaking."

I then heard the operator say, "Go ahead, please."

And then, a deep alto voice came over the line. "Judith? This is Anne Sexton." She had gotten my letter in the mail and had read it.

"You're absolutely mad to write me such a silly letter." I knew from her poems and articles that she used the word "mad" to apply to the antics of her beloved brother or herself and she was giving me a compliment. I was overjoyed. I don't recall all she said, but she told me not to allow her refusal to see her at Weston nor my missing her reading at Bread Loaf spoil whatever meaning and pleasure I had derived from her poems.

"They stand on their own merit," she said.

I thanked her for calling and for reading my letter. When I hung up, I knew one of my life's dreams had finally come true, though not as I had expected.

That was the summer of '73, a magical time in my life.

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In the Spring of 1974, I married and my husband and I lived in College Park, a suburb of Atlanta. I had written Anne Sexton and sent her a prose poem I had been working on titled "The Red Shoes." Three days before the birth of our only daughter, I received Anne's reply.

April 24, 1974

Dear Judith,

Thank you for your thoughtful letter, so sensitive, and that The Book of Folly has meant something to you. I kind of hope that you'll be able to get hold of the other seven books (paperback $2.95), but it is indeed strange about the red shoes. They seem to have a life of their own. Your prose piece on them is all rage and all truth. Please hid the red shoes. I will help you with my long fingered hands, and we will bury them.

With best wishes,
Anne Sexton

I believed that somehow Anne meant what she said--that she would help me bury the red shoes.

One Sunday morning in October of that year as I was sitting at my breakfast table reading the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, my eyes fell on the headlines: "'Live or Die' Poet May Be a Suicide." My right hand flew up over my mouth. I began to feel my blood shaking as I read the words from the Associated Press article.

"Anne Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work was preoccupied with death, has been found dead at her home and may have taken her own life, police said. She was 45.

"Ms. Sexton, who was recently divorced from her husband Alfred, was found Friday inside an idling car parked in her garage. She was dead at the scene.

"Ms. Sexton won the Pulitzer in 1967 for her book Live or Die, which was largely devoted to the subject of death. Her most recent work, The Death Notebooks, began with novelist Ernest Hemingway's exhortation to 'make a living out of your death.'

"'Life had a depressing effect on her,' said her friend Maxine Kumin.

"Mrs. Kumin, who won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1973 for Up Country, said she last saw Ms. Sexton alive when they had lunch together Friday afternoon.

"Ms. Sexton began writing poetry after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1957.

"'All her poems were marked by grave internal torment,' said Boston Globe reviewer Herbert A. Kenney of her latest book of published poetry.

"Ms. Sexton was born in nearby Newton. She leaves two daughters."

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While on a visit to Virginia that Fall, I took an afternoon walk with my mother and found nearly a dozen four-leaf clovers. I put one of them in the mail to Maxine, who wrote me that she had placed the four-leaf clover over her desk. She wanted me to know that Caedmon Records had recorded Anne reading her poems. It was one of Anne's proudest boasts, Maxine said, that she was one of a handful of living poets that Caedmon had put on record. My husband surprised me with that album for Christmas that year. Maxine wrote me about her close friend's death.

17 December 1974

Dear Judith:

It is still hard for me to face Anne's suicide and to find words to respond to letters like yours. Forgive me if I seem inept.... Certainly no one gave more to others than she did, but no one demanded, exacted and got more back, either. She was roundly loved and worshipped. The need was simply greater than any or all of us in the world could fill. She has been headed toward this end, indeed deflected from it not only by me personally several times but by others as well, all the years (18 of them) of our close personal friendship. So in that sense, although of course I'm not ready to say something stupid and pious like it was inevitable, I can come to terms with it. She had every right. I miss her terribly every day, my life is poorer without her, but she is done with the anguish, the misery, the self-inflicted but no less horrible pain of piling day on night on day. So take some comfort from that.

Yours,

Maxine Kumin

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