Word: sextons
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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...
...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...
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...
...Anne Sexton was a pain, in the real, physical sense. Every large family has a pain or two: an iridescent liar, a middle-aged infant, a little Iago. But somehow, in Sexton's case, it turned out that the pain was also entangled with a miracle: the miracle of her 45-year-long survival, for one thing, when such a terrible undertow was pulling her, and the miracle of her poems, or some of them at least -- the dark, intelligent objects that she floated toward shore before she went under...
ESSAY Lance Morrow on Anne Sexton's posthumous mess...