[In the following essay, Middlebrook discusses Sexton's friendship with James Wright and the composition The Awful Rowing Toward God.]

Between 10 and 30 January 1973, Anne Sexton wrote—"with two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital"—an entire volume of poems. Eventually titled The Awful Rowing Toward God, this proved to be the last book Sexton saw into print. A few hours after correcting the galleys on 4 October 1974, she committed suicide. Important in its own right as Anne Sexton's "last" book, this volume gains great interest from being viewed in the context of collections of worksheets, correspondence, and other items in the Sexton archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

The HRHRC acquired the Sexton archive in 1980, sixteen years after the poet's death. Sexton's elder daughter Linda, executor of the estate, decided that all manuscripts and correspondence and miscellany—including Anne Sexton's library—should be sold together. She rightly assumed that Sexton's voluminous papers would interest scholars, since Sexton, virtually an autodidact, kept careful track of her own progress as an artist and businesswoman—and as a patient in psychotherapy.

The Sexton archive offers an unusually full range of materials pertaining to the poet's life and work. Born Anne Gray Harvey in 1928 in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Sexton acquired a love of books from her mother, Mary Gray Staples Harvey, who collected fine editions. Sexton's maternal grandfather Arthur Gray Staples was a writer, and for many years editor of a newspaper in Lewiston, Maine. During her teenage years, Anne began keeping letters, pictures, and memorabilia in scrapbooks, many of which made their way into vertical files in the HRHRC's Sexton archive. At age 19, Anne Harvey married Alfred Muller Sexton II (nicknamed "Kayo"); they had two daughters: Linda Gray Sexton, born 1953, and Joyce Ladd Sexton, born 1955. Anne Sexton's career as a poet began with treatment for a "nervous breakdown" in 1956, when her first psychiatrist, Martin Orne, suggested writing as a form of therapy.

A resident of suburban Boston, Sexton sought formal training in local workshops, and rapidly developed a very professional attitude toward writing. From the outset, she kept letters she received from other writers, and made carbons of her own letters; thus, both sides of Sexton's correspondence are available to readers at the HRHRC. Moreover, she was a careful steward of her own manuscripts. Abundant worksheets for each published volume of Sexton's work make possible a full view of the development of many individual poems and all of her books. In addition, the HRHRC contains worksheets and completed versions of stories and plays by Anne Sexton, most of which remain unpublished, as well as voluminous unpublished business correspondence which provides a detailed view of the economics of her career. Finally, the Sexton archive contains numerous audiotapes and films that convey the poet's skills as a performer of her own work.

At the time Anne Sexton wrote The Awful Rowing Toward God, she was preparing to leave her marriage of twenty-five years. Her husband Kayo, a wool salesman whose hobbies were hunting and fishing, had never taken much interest in poetry or poets. Both daughters—Joy now age 18, Linda 20—had left the family home for boarding school and college. Like many couples of their era, Anne and Kayo found that the departure of their children opened a void across which they measured how little else they had in common. Moreover, career success had given Anne Sexton the confidence and financial security to make divorce a viable option. By 1973 she held a position as Professor of Creative Writing at Boston University, and had made herself one of the best-paid performers on the poetry circuit that burgeoned on American campuses during the 1960s. Correspondence with universities shows Sexton setting fees at the level James Dickey had established when he moved into the poetry business out of advertising. In 1973, Sexton regularly demanded $1200-$1500 for any reading that required airplane travel or an overnight stay out of town. Letters to her department head at Boston University regarding raises and job security show Sexton calling attention to the three honorary degrees she received in 1970–1971 and threatening—just a joke, of course—to post a feminist fist on his office door if her salary did not rise to meet that of her male colleagues. The daughter of one salesman and the wife of another, Sexton knew how to deal in the literary marketplace. That, indeed, was the theme of many poems in the new book she had in press in January 1973, The Death Notebooks, which bore an epigraph from Ernest Hemingway's A Movable Feast: "Look, you con man, make a living out of your death."

In contrast, The Awful Rowing Toward God is a book exclusively about religious belief. Though in 1973 Sexton belonged to no established church, spiritual questions engaged her deeply. She exulted to a friend that the thirty-nine poems of Awful Rowing emerged from "two and a half weeks of frantic, devout inspiration." Religious themes had appeared in Sexton's work from the beginning, and had recurred with increasing significance in each succeeding volume, attracting the interest of priests, nuns, and other religious people with whom Sexton enjoyed corresponding; particularly rich are letters Sexton exchanged with Brother Dennis O'Brien, F.S.C., between 1961–1963, on deposit at the HRHRC. But nowhere are Sexton's questions about religious faith pursued with the urgency expressed in Awful Rowing. In these poems Sexton aggressively probes the possibility of God's immanence in the secular world of her daily life. If God is everywhere, the devout must be able to find him even in their kitchens, even in themselves at their worst.

      I will take a crowbar
      and pry out the broken
      pieces of God in me.
      Just like a jigsaw puzzle,
      I will put Him together again
      with the patience of a chess player.
 
      How many pieces?
      It feels like thousands,
      God dressed up like a whore
      in a slime of green algae.
      God dressed up like an old man
      staggering out of His shoes.
      God dressed up like a child,
      all naked,
      even without skin,
      soft as an avocado when you peel it.

Characteristically scatological, transgressive, exhibitionistic, the poems of Awful Rowing struggle to bring God down to a level with Sexton's sense of the evil that inhabited her body in the forms of obsessional neuroses, depression, addiction. The principle that united Sexton with God, in her personal system of belief, was the gift of language that could connect anything to anything else, via the syntax of metaphor. She states the principle simply in a poem from Awful Rowing: "the typewriter […] is my church / with an altar of keys always waiting."

Language and imagery were rampant in Sexton during those weeks of composition, and the craft of association she had developed permitted the poems to lengthen down the page without false starts or revision. Rapidity resulted in thematic focus: the poems of Awful Rowing are organized around congregated images of the body in pain: references to veins, blood, skin, tongue, hands, eyeballs, nakedness recur in the poems (as in "The Big Heart": "The artery of my soul has been severed / and soul is spurting out …"). A worksheet Sexton filed carefully with the first draft of the book shows her calculating her output: on several days in January 1973 she wrote as many as three different poems. The abundance was unusual even for her; in earlier work, Sexton would typically put every poem through many drafts. (For example, the HRHRC files contain 38 worksheets spanning four years for Sexton's "Flee on Your Donkey," before its acceptance at The New Yorker and its appearance as a major poem in the Pulitzer-prizewinning volume Live or Die, 1966.)

Sexton considered another title for the book: Washing the Feet of God, suggestive of a relationship between the speaker of her poems and Mary Magdalene, the "fallen" woman who wiped the feet of Jesus with her hair. She also considered titling it The Life Notebooks, to point the contrast between this devotional volume and its immediate predecessor The Death Notebooks. But in several of the poems themselves, metaphors of rowing and swimming are used to express intense, laborious struggle toward a longed-for ground of faith. Worksheets reveal Sexton shuffling and reshuffling the order of the poems; eventually she decided to open and close the volume with "Rowing" and "The Rowing Endeth."

By early February the manuscript was ready to send to her agent Cindy Degener at Sterling Lord Agency. It was Degener who would negotiate the contract with Sexton's publisher, Houghton Mifflin Company, and who would try to market any unsold poems to high-paying magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue. Sexton herself began doling out several pages at a time to Howard Moss for consideration at The New Yorker, where she had held a "first reading" contract since 1961. Sexton always dealt personally with editors she knew well, such as Moss.

Following her usual practice, Sexton also sent the manuscript to poets whose advice she trusted, hoping for detailed criticism. Her first editor, George Starbuck—now her "boss," as head of Creative Writing at Boston University—received a copy, as did John Malcolm Brinnin, a senior colleague at B.U. who had the office next door to her own. Perhaps on impulse, Sexton also decided to request criticism from her old friend James Wright. Wright's very interesting response is well-detailed in the manuscript collection at the HRHRC; to grasp its importance requires a bit of background.

Anne Sexton's friendship with James Wright had begun in February 1960, when she impulsively sent a note praising his new book of poems, Saint Judas:

Dear Mr. Wright, I doubt you remember meeting me at Robert Lowell's class and later at a party at John Holmes' house, but at any rate … I am writing to say in a I sincerity, having re-read your book for the six[th] time thou wast born altogether a great poet.

This fan letter inaugurated what quickly turned into a passionate correspondence; in the next eleven months Sexton wrote and received from Wright what she described as "several hundred 'faintly scarlet' letters." Most of these letters disappeared mysteriously after her death. However, enough remain in the Sexton archives at the HRHRC to reveal that, for a time in 1960, Wright filled an enormous void at the center of Sexton's life. Offering her what quickly developed, on paper, into a blend of mentorship and courtship, Wright answered her hunger for affectionate recognition with a hunger of his own.

In his surviving letters, as in person, Wright was garrulous, gossipy, warmheartedly pedantic. His advice about music and reading came complete with serial numbers of recordings by favorite conductors, his reading notes convey a quirky, avid intelligence. Introducing Sexton to a pair of translations of Neruda's "Walking Around," Wright thought it useful to inform her,

[Neruda] is a South American Communist, which is a historically complicated kind of creature. In any case, he is, like, say, Mayakovsky in that his directly political poems are so bad as to be, not funny, but distressing, as if you were seeing Sir John Gielgud forget several lines at the very dramatic crisis of Hamlet.

Wright was translating Neruda at this time, as part of an effort to transform his formal style into a poetry more spare and imagistic. His own early work had been snubbed for its "plodding sincerity" by James Dickey in a review that roused a controversy in the Sewanee Review for a few issues, before Wright, endearingly, decided he agreed with Dickey's judgment and gave up the argument. Wright then turned to translating poets such as Georg Trakl, an Austrian writer whose imagery had an immediacy he admired. In this undertaking he found an ally in Robert Bly. At the time Sexton and Wright were becoming ardent correspondents, Wright and Bly were collaborating on several volumes of translations from Trakl, César Vallejo, and Neruda.

The formation of Wright's friendship with both Sexton and Bly occurred at an important phase of transition in his life, when he was leaving his marriage and attempting to reach some authentic mode of expressing his own inwardness in compelling imagery. He was, briefly, disposed to find in Sexton a muse who reconnected him to inspiration. Wright's name for Anne Sexton—"Blessing," sometimes "Bee," or "B,"—was also the title of a much-admired poem he wrote during the period of their intimacy. "My beautiful kind Blessing, my discovered love," he called her. "In the midst of everything you do you can know you are utterly loved. […] I survive by sitting and thinking of you." Sometimes they wrote each other two or three letters in a single day. "It was wonderful for her: an enchantment," Maxine Kumin remembered. Wright's feelings in these documents are not so much for Sexton herself—whom he knew only through letters and phone calls, not from any day-to-day contact—as for the sense of himself that writing to her gave him. This is manifest in the remarks that accompanied his gift to her in July of a book he treasured, the collected poems of Edward Thomas, now at the HRHRC:

Ten years ago I secretly bought and hid this book and another copy which is identical to it […] I also had an old, very personal copy of Whitman. But once about a year ago, in despair, I tore the Whitman to pieces and thrust it down into the rankest mucky bottom sludge of an old garbage can near a dirty railroad track in Minneapolis; then I burned my manuscripts. Years of them. A symbolic suicide, if there ever was one. […] But whatever in me has been worthy of life, for ten years, clings to each page of this book. I always (even in the worst times) hoped to be worthy of giving this book to somebody. Oh, I knew you would come. But it was a long time. Thank you for being alive and for letting me give you this book. Because, in letting me give the gift, you give me at the same time a gift in return: myself.

For many months this feeling was completely mutual. Wright held a place of magical significance in Anne Sexton's development as a poet, for the first book of poems she ever bought for herself—long before sending him that first fan letter—was James Wright's The Green Wall, prizewinner in the Yale Younger Poets series in 1957, her copy of which is at the HRHRC. In one of her long letters to Wright, Sexton recalled that one day she had made $2.75 selling Beauty Counselor Cosmetics door to door: "I wasn't poor, but I had to work awfully hard selling face cream to strangers who wouldn't open the door and besides I'd just come out of the booby hatch and I was nervous with strangers, I was even nervous with face cream." She'd taken the job in order to pay her psychiatrist's fees. On the way home that particular day she went into a bookstore to look at poetry.

I had never heard of you … but I had never heard of Yeats either. I read SHE HID IN THE TREES FROM THE NURSES (I think that is right) and a few others. I took out my face cream money and bought the book. At first I didn't read it, that day I didn't. I was saving it. The next day I went to visit my mother who lived on top of a large rock that overlooked the ocean. I went to spend a weekend with her. It is funny how I have forgotten all this. But the clear memory was when I left my mother's very nicely cruelly perfect living room (don't think I didn't love her—it was just that now I had something of my own to do. I had a book of poems and they were mine … unlike her perfect room.) I went out on the rocks, high over the sea and found a little nitch [sic] there, hidden from the land in a way. I [sic] little place, such as children find to hide in and to keep themselves in. A MY place. I took a pack of cigarettes and this green book that I had bought with my face cream money. The sea was there, and the sun and wind. It was a nice day. It was my place, my book, words written for me, to me. I held it in my hand and it moved, not like the sea below me, but like a small mechanical heart might. I say that, extravagant or not, because the book told me who I was, who I could be. The book was more alive than all the ruined sea.

On her own side of the correspondence that they were conducting in 1960, Sexton fed her deep hunger for growth as a poet on Wright's unflagging attention. Just beginning her second book in 1960, she was anxious for new sources of encouragement, new models, a wider intellectual horizon. Under Wright's tutelage Sexton read eclectically in world poetry: many worksheets for poems written in 1961 and 1962 have carbon typescript translations from other poets on the back, which Wright probably either sent her or recommended to her.

Just as Wright welcomed Sexton's letters, he welcomed manuscripts of her poems in progress, and was liberal, even prodigal, with advice. He would write all over her drafts of poems with a blunt soft lead pencil in tiny script. Wright had direct influence on several of the poems Sexton wrote in 1960 and 1961. Worksheets of manuscripts of Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know" and "A Curse Against Elegies" suggest that they may have started out as the same poem, titled "Refusal"; in August 1960 a letter from Wright notes their similarity to his own poem, "The Refusal," observing that Sexton's two versions have different themes, and that in following him, she chooses the "narrower and less powerful" theme. He tried to dissuade her from imitation of him. "B. must trust her own imagination: call her own stubbornness to aid!" he advises.

But it was not so much Wright's practical advice as his acceptance of her as a peer that mattered to Sexton, helping her internalize the identity she was rapidly acquiring in the professional world of poetry. Shortly after their correspondence began, Wright sent her a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, with a sibylline inscription:

To Anne Sexton, for whom this book was written—"Let those who may complain that it was only upon paper remember that only upon paper have humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue and abiding love" (G. B. Shaw, on his letters to Ellen Terry)—Jim Wright, Spring 1960.

Wright may have been thinking of Rilke's miserable record as a husband, father, and lover of other human beings, much in contrast with the commitment to love and work that Rilke idealizes in Letters to a Young Poet. Both Wright and Sexton were married to loyal, hardworking spouses, and Wright, a guilty soul, apparently did not acknowledge to others his attachment to Sexton. In any case, his literary advice was excellent. Sexton adopted Letters to a Young Poet as a personal manifesto, and re-read it whenever she wanted to make emotional contact with Wright.

This old connection, then, lay in the background of Sexton's decision to send Wright the manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, in January 1973. She wrote him an affectionate letter and signed it with his old name of endearment, "Bee." Wright's reply was most ambivalent. He returned the manuscript with numerous penciled annotations on various poems; he also returned Sexton's letter, with a terse reply written in pencil below her signature:

Dear Bee, I'm returning your manuscript in faith for you and your poetic genius. I have no intention of excusing your bad verse and your bad prose. There are some poems here that I think are fine. There are some that I think are junk. The choice between them is yours.

—C[omfort].

Pedantic, impassioned, Wright argued both with Sexton's craft and her theology. "Leave God his own poems, and cut these lines out. God damn it Bee, stop trying to be a saint. Be a poet, and get rid of the junk.—Cf 'The Sea,' by Cecilia Moraes (of Brazil)." Regarding "The Earth Falls Down" he commanded, "Delete this poem. For Christ's sake, Bee, read Jung's analysis of Job." He urged her to abandon all but three lines of "After Auschwitz," adding, "Bee, what I ask is a terrible sacrifice. But listen, listen; trust your own strange voice."

Wright's commentary generated a second and third layer of marginal glosses as Sexton reacted with irritation and chagrin to his exhortations, then passed along the manuscript to Maxine Kumin. Around the margins of this draft, a small but heated war goes on, with aggressive reactions to Wright in the neat handwriting of Kumin and in Sexton's big scrawl. "The Fallen Angels" had elicited from Wright a whole column of irritable dispute over the nature of heaven, culminating in the advice, "Bee, stop making stupid cute remarks about angels. We don't even know enough about each other." Sexton had penned a big black X through the poem; but Maxine came to its defense in the left margin: "I like this poem—it isn't intended as a deep theological investigation but a way of hoarding up the good signs, or omens to keep going." The poem stayed, as did other poems and stanzas and images that Wright rejected.

Undoubtedly, Sexton should have given Wright's advice more weight; reviewers would echo Wright's privately-voiced criticism of the poems. But Sexton was in a hurry to finish this book. Her divorce from Kayo proved psychologically damaging in ways she might have foreseen, and did not. Both inspiration and health deserted her in the months following their separation; and worries about money distracted her constantly. Most of the Sexton correspondence dating from 1973–1974 is concerned with the business of poetry, not the process of creation.

Nonetheless, the final version of The Awful Rowing Toward God reflected Wright's intervention. Imploring her to "listen, listen" and to "strip the language and shackle accidents," Wright had guided Sexton's attention to arbitrary similes and rhythmically wooden passages which she sometimes decided to revise. Readying the final manuscript for publication, Sexton completed it with a dedication: "For Brother Dennis, wherever he is, and for James Wright, who would know." With Maxine Kumin's help, Sexton corrected the galleys of the book the day she died. Her touching acknowledgment shows that the spirit and not the letter was of use to her as she brought this final manuscript to press, in what were to be the last months, days, and hours of her life.