2001
An article in The Guardian today (today in history, not today in writing) found not less than three of my favourite poets, all of them intermittently insane, at that élite boarding school for the psychologically challenged, the McLean Hospital in Belmont, near Boston, Massachusetts.
Sylvia Plath I already knew about - she set "The Bell-Jar" there. Anne Sexton did not surprise me, though I hadn't followed through to the end of the line that poetic map that reads "We're driving to Cape Cod. We're heading for the Bourne Bridge" - McLean is about seventy minutes north. The eventual suicide was struggling to get out in everything she wrote, sometimes overtly - "But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build" - sometimes more tacitly, more subtly, such as the heart that breaks falling down stairs, and the agonised cry for help: "Who cares about you, who cares?", which turns into "So I fell apart. So I came all undone." The heart as allegory for the still more delicate mind.
What did take me by surprise, though it was the exclusive fault of my own ignorance, was Robert Lowell, who I had always thought of as such a sober, balanced, velvet-jacketed "chap", such a Harvard-bourgeois, for whom writing poetry went with playing the piano and attending coming-out balls, and not at all the Hurtle Duffield type. But apparently Lowell, who taught both Plath and Sexton at Boston University, "experienced uncontrollable manic surges... he would swell up with power, anger and delusion. He would shower his closest friends with bitter, mocking curses, or proclaim undying love to an airline stewardess and insist on leaving the plane with her to start a new life."
The poem that reveals all is "Waking In The Blue", which I must have mis-read a hundred times, never having heard of McLean until today, presuming from the opening line - "The night attendant, a BU sophomore" - that it was set in Boston University and "Bowditch Hall at McLeans" was just a reference to some sorority or fraternity house. Now the closing couplet takes on awesome new darkness, and I shall never again re-read him in the same way:
"We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor."
What I also did not know, because the article in The Guardian does not mention it, and because I tend to ignore the autobiographies of poets or the saga-memoirs of their lives, was how he died: by his own hand, like Plath or Sexton, or by natural causes? But looking it up afterwards, it transpired he had a sudden heart-attack, aged only 62, on September 12th 1977. Plath was long gone by then - she killed herself on February 11th 1963, by gas-oven, as was entirely predictable given the number of references to the Holocaust in her later poetry. Sexton followed her on Saturday October 5th 1974, likewise asphyxiated by carbon monoxide, but in her case it was the fumes from her car, inside her locked garage. Somehow I cannot imagine the same fate befalling Stevie Smith or Sir John Betjeman.
Sylvia Plath I already knew about - she set "The Bell-Jar" there. Anne Sexton did not surprise me, though I hadn't followed through to the end of the line that poetic map that reads "We're driving to Cape Cod. We're heading for the Bourne Bridge" - McLean is about seventy minutes north. The eventual suicide was struggling to get out in everything she wrote, sometimes overtly - "But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build" - sometimes more tacitly, more subtly, such as the heart that breaks falling down stairs, and the agonised cry for help: "Who cares about you, who cares?", which turns into "So I fell apart. So I came all undone." The heart as allegory for the still more delicate mind.
What did take me by surprise, though it was the exclusive fault of my own ignorance, was Robert Lowell, who I had always thought of as such a sober, balanced, velvet-jacketed "chap", such a Harvard-bourgeois, for whom writing poetry went with playing the piano and attending coming-out balls, and not at all the Hurtle Duffield type. But apparently Lowell, who taught both Plath and Sexton at Boston University, "experienced uncontrollable manic surges... he would swell up with power, anger and delusion. He would shower his closest friends with bitter, mocking curses, or proclaim undying love to an airline stewardess and insist on leaving the plane with her to start a new life."
The poem that reveals all is "Waking In The Blue", which I must have mis-read a hundred times, never having heard of McLean until today, presuming from the opening line - "The night attendant, a BU sophomore" - that it was set in Boston University and "Bowditch Hall at McLeans" was just a reference to some sorority or fraternity house. Now the closing couplet takes on awesome new darkness, and I shall never again re-read him in the same way:
"We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor."
What I also did not know, because the article in The Guardian does not mention it, and because I tend to ignore the autobiographies of poets or the saga-memoirs of their lives, was how he died: by his own hand, like Plath or Sexton, or by natural causes? But looking it up afterwards, it transpired he had a sudden heart-attack, aged only 62, on September 12th 1977. Plath was long gone by then - she killed herself on February 11th 1963, by gas-oven, as was entirely predictable given the number of references to the Holocaust in her later poetry. Sexton followed her on Saturday October 5th 1974, likewise asphyxiated by carbon monoxide, but in her case it was the fumes from her car, inside her locked garage. Somehow I cannot imagine the same fate befalling Stevie Smith or Sir John Betjeman.
Since writing this, I have found another article about the three poets, and several other well-known literati as well, who spent time at McLean - "The Mad Poets Society" in The Atlantic magazine - click here to read it.
Amber pages:
-3, Jesus Christ's birthday, according to Clement of Alexandria (but doesn't that undermine to a point of mockery the "gospel truth" of the remainder of the story?)
Lee Strasberg, who developed Stanislavski (see Jan 17) into the "Method" and gave birth, among others, to Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix (why are all the famous "Method" actors male?), born today in 1901
Today in 1869, the Suez Canal was formally opened
Today in 1969, SALT talks began in Helsinki, Finland
Today in 1970, Lunokhod I, Russia's belated response to Kennedy, landed on the moon - by which hangs a very interesting tale, and a very interesting question, as to whether or not the Americans actually were the first to land on the moon: both can be found by clicking here
And today in 1989, the "Velvet Revolution" began in Czechoslovakia, rather more successfully than its predecessor, the "Prague Spring".
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