4 October 1974 -- Suicide of Anne Sexton

“Mercy Street” -- Peter Gabriel

The muses speak most eloquently through the unhappy and the mad. Emily Dickinson, Robert Haydon, Jack Kerouac, Robert Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Roethke, Siegfried Sassoon, Dylan Thomas, and Tennessee Williams are but a few who toddlered on the verges of the Abyss. Too many an artist would come too near the edge, and escaped unrelenting pain by hurling themselves into the embrace of unending oblivion -- Ernest Hemingway,  Nick Drake, Sylvia Plath, John Kennedy Toole, and Virginia Woolf, just to name a few.

Also among the talented voices stolen by vicious depression is American poet Anne Sexton.

As a young wife and mother wrestling with fits of mania and depression, Anne was encouraged by her therapist, famed if controversial pioneering psychiatrist and psychologist Dr. Martin Orne, to explore her literary ambitions as a means to combat the demons haunting her mind. After timidly enrolling in a workshop taught by poet John Holmes, where she would meet Maxine Kumin with whom Anne would collaborate for the remainder of Anne’s brief life. Anne would later study at Boston University under the tutelage of Robert Lowell. Her fellow students included Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck. Anne would later cross paths with her future mentor, the talented if uneven W. D. Snodgrass.

She proved an apt pupil. Her work soon found a welcome home within the pages of Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and the Saturday Review. But that was just the beginning of her meteoric success. Within a mere 12 years of writing her first sonnet in John Holmes workshop, Anne Saxon had won a Pulitzer Prize, elected to the Royal Society of Literature, became the first female member of Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, and offered honorary degrees from and professorships at Colgate University and Boston University

Anne Saxon’s candle certainly burned brightly, but it also faded quickly. Even as Anne mastered her craft, she, in turn, was dominated by unremitting mental anguish, pained amplified by her own personal failings and inexcusable misconduct.

Anne Sexton

Anne, a beauty by any standard and scion of a distinguished family, was the object of many a suitor's desire from an early age. When 19-years-old, she abandoned her fiance to elope with Alfred "Kayo" Sexton II. Unfortunately, marriage failed to temper Anne’s fickleness which in turn would lead her into numerous ethical lapses. While her husband deployed to the Korean War and, later, when again a civilian, he would travel on business, Anne frequently sought solace from boredom in the beds of many a male and female lover. But infidelity was not the worst of her sins. Far more damning was the physical and sexual abuse of her two young daughters. Anne’s lax sexual mores led to constant feuding and occasionally brawls with her husband. Suicide attempts were frequent.

Whether her destructive conduct urging Anne ever closer to her final fatal failing was born of mental illness or her damaged psyche is an open question. But there can be no doubt that even as her literary star was at its apex, her circle of family and friends was fracturing. She would eventually drive away her family and most of her friends, sinking into a pit of lonely alcoholism, frequent yet unfulfilling sexual encounters, bizarre religiosity, and ever-increasing levels of medication. Finally, it all became too much for her.

It might be that Anne sought to inform readers and friends of the doom she realized ahead. Her last collection of poetry to be published while Anne still remained among the quick was the ominously-titled The Death Notebooks. Her final days were working on The Awful Rowing Toward God, an anthology of poems she insisted not be published before her death.

On 4 October 1974, Anne met with Maxine Kumin, one of those few friends not completely alienated by her increasingly erratic behavior. The two friends discussed galleys of The Awful Rowing Toward God over lunch. Afterwards, Anne returned to her home, poured herself a glass of vodka, and retired to her garage. She there took her own life by running her automobile engine until the garage’s carbon monoxide levels proved sufficiently poisonous. She was 46-years-old.

Long after Anne had departed this human realm, English singer and songwriter Peter Gabriel discovered her works while browsing in a bookstore. He was especially taken by two similarly named pieces. Mercy Street, a play Anne’s wrote and live to see produced, tells the story of a woman seeking to escape the tangles of madness, produced. In the poem, "45 Mercy Street," Anne describes the isolation she hates but cannot help imprisoning herself within. I cannot help but think these two works mark a search for that quality of mercy Anne so desperately desired but realized would ever be denied her.

45 Mercy Street,

Published Posthumously, 1976 

"45 Mercy Street" (Anne Sexton)

In my dream,

drilling into the marrow

of my entire bone,

my real dream,

I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill

searching for a street sign -

namely MERCY STREET.

Not there.

I try the Back Bay.

Not there.

Not there.

And yet I know the number.

45 Mercy Street.

I know the stained-glass window

of the foyer,

the three flights of the house

with its parquet floors.

I know the furniture and

mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,

the servants.

I know the cupboard of Spode

the boat of ice, solid silver,

where the butter sits in neat squares

like strange giant's teeth

on the big mahogany table.

I know it well.

Not there.

Where did you go?

45 Mercy Street,

with great-grandmother

kneeling in her whale-bone corset

and praying gently but fiercely

to the wash basin,

at five A.M.

at noon

dozing in her wiggy rocker,

grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,

grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,

and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower

on her forehead to cover the curl

of when she was good and when she was...

And where she was begat

and in a generation

the third she will beget,

me,

with the stranger's seed blooming

into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress

and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,

enough pills, my wallet, my keys,

and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?

I walk. I walk.

I hold matches at street signs

for it is dark,

as dark as the leathery dead

and I have lost my green Ford,

my house in the suburbs,

two little kids

sucked up like pollen by the bee in me

and a husband

who has wiped off his eyes

in order not to see my inside out

and I am walking and looking

and this is no dream

just my oily life

where the people are alibis

and the street is unfindable for an

entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down -

I don't care!

Bolt the door, mercy,

erase the number,

rip down the street sign,

what can it matter,

what can it matter to this cheapskate

who wants to own the past

that went out on a dead ship

and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,

as women do,

and fish swim back and forth

between the dollars and the lipstick.

I pick them out,

one by one

and throw them at the street signs,

and shoot my pocketbook

into the Charles River.

Next I pull the dream off

and slam into the cement wall

of the clumsy calendar

I live in,

my life,

and its hauled up

notebooks.

Mercy Street (Peter Gabriel)

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see

Are the dreams all made solid

Are the dreams all made real

All of the buildings, all of those cars

Were once just a dream

In somebody's head

She pictures the broken glass, she pictures the steam

She pictures a soul

With no leak at the seam

Let's take the boat out

Wait until darkness

Let's take the boat out

Wait until darkness comes

Nowhere in the corridors of pale green and grey

Nowhere in the suburbs

In the cold light of day

There in the midst of it so alive and alone

Words support like bone

Dreaming of Mercy Street

Wear your inside out

Looking for mercy

In your daddy's arms again

Dreaming of Mercy Street

'Swear they moved that sign

Looking for mercy

In your daddy's arms

Pulling out the papers from drawers that slide smooth

Tugging at the darkness, word upon word

Confessing all the secret things in the warm velvet box

To the priest, he's the doctor

He can handle the shocks

Dreaming of the tenderness, the tremble in the hips

Of kissing Mary's lips

Dreaming of Mercy Street

Wear your inside out

Dreaming of mercy

In your daddy's arms again

Dreaming of Mercy Street

'Swear they moved that sign

Looking for mercy

In your daddy's arms

Looking for mercy

Looking for mercy

Looking for mercy

Mercy, mercy

Anne, with her father is out in the boat

Riding the water

Riding the waves on the sea