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ANNE SEXTON VISITS COURT GREEN

(JULY 1967)

After reading more than her allotted time

(infuriating W.H. Auden, on stage behind her)

then blowing kisses to the audience

at the Poetry International Festival,

Anne accepts Ted’s invitation

to visit him in Devon.

Lois at the wheel (still unused to

driving on the “wrong” side

of the street), the two women leave London

and head west toward Herefordshire

(where they will meet a young poet,

D.M. Thomas, with whom Sexton has exchanged letters).

Anne, chain-smoking in the left-hand

passenger seat, is no help with the map.

It sits, a crumpled accordion, in her lap.

Having gotten lost on narrow country roads,

the women arrive three hours late.

Thomas, an “exuberant, curly-haired bear

of a man,” is ready with gin. As a fan

he’d written to Sexton: “There is no poet in the world,

not Graves, not Auden, not Lowell,

whose future work I look forward to

with as much excitement as I do yours.”

A few stiff shots and they settle in

for a pleasant evening. Anne reads

some of her poems, Thomas admiring

her courage to use material from her own life—

so free of English conventions of decorum.

(In the eighties, his novel The White Hotel will bring him fame and notoriety.) He drives them to the nearby village of Weobley. As promised, he’d booked the room at an inn, the Unicorn, where Rilke slept the year before Sexton was born.

Anne asks him up, then asks him

to turn away while she strips

and slides into her white negligee—

bought, she says, with her Pulitzer Prize.

When Thomas is allowed to look,

he breathes in her splendidness.

Anne counts out her colorful pills.

“Please stay until I fall asleep.”

He sits on the edge of the bed,

caressing her hand as she drifts off.

Her husband, he thinks, must perform this nightly duty. I feel like I’m tucking in Sleeping Beauty.

The next day, Thomas shows them

the border country. At a castle

in Shropshire, Sexton feels too lame

to climb the stone stairs. (She is recovering from

a broken hip.) She says to Thomas,

“Better than stones and castles are my bones.”

Then: “I’ll give that to you.” She tears out

a sheet of paper and writes down the line.

(Later he’ll use it to start an elegy to her.)

As night comes on, they stop at a pub.

Anne plays the fruit machines

and whoops it up when she wins

a “magic jackpot.” In the same breath

she talks about poetry, about death.

When Thomas drops them off at the inn,

he and Anne exchange a passionate kiss.

He thinks: Wow! I’ve kissed Sexton! The following morning, on their own again, the women proceed to Devon. They reach North Tawton in the early afternoon, easily locate Court Green. (Ted had told them to look for the adjacent church.) Lois inches the rental up the crumbling lane, between hedges and brick cottages, and parks in front of the imposing manor house. Painted white, with black trim, its most conspicuous feature is a primeval peaked thatch. As both women stare up, they hear the gate unlatch.

Ted and Assia emerge and welcome them.

Less radiant than they were

in London (Ted, one of the organizers

of the festival, seems especially worn out),

the couple usher them into the cobbled court yard.

Ted requests that they not talk about Sylvia

in the presence of the children, then leads

them around the property—two acres

teeming with vegetation. There is a sense

of ancient wildness about the place.

Trees that Ted points out—

three huge elms, a golden laburnum—

prompt Anne and Lois to share knowing glances:

they recognize them from Sylvia’s poems.

There the apple orchard, the remote white hive.

Here the old tennis court, the vegetable garden.

There the “row of headstones” (It really is true!), St. Peter’s Church, the graveyard, the Gothic yew.

Assia takes them inside to freshen up,

and to give them a tour of the house.

This is the playroom, with its black-and-white tiled floor,

like a Vermeer, and the children’s toys and books,

and the furniture Sylvia painted white and

enameled with primitive hearts and flowers.

Across the hall, the “red room,” where Sylvia listened

to French and German lessons on the wireless.

They come to the stairs. These

Anne does not hesitate to climb.

To see where Sylvia wrote Ariel she’ll put up with a little pain in her hip. Still, each step is a production. “Go on ahead, go on . . . I’ll catch up.” But of course Lois insists on assisting her. “This was her study,” says Assia, gesturing towards one of the bedrooms. In awe, Anne and Lois follow. By the window: Sylvia’s elm plank writing table. (“Ted refuses to move it.”)

Sylvia’s typewriter and journals and stacks of pink worksheets

are neatly arranged along its length.

Assia hands Anne the copy of All My Pretty Ones that Anne had sent Sylvia when it came out, and in which Sylvia had written her name. “You should take it,” Assia says. Anne considers it for a moment, then sets it down on the desk, runs her slender fingers along some ink stains in the wood. They leave Lois with the journals, scribbling notes for the Plath biography that she will never complete. “You must hate me. She was your friend.” Assia says this to Anne as soon as they’re alone. When it comes to adultery, Sexton doesn’t throw stones.

Plus she can’t help but admire her dark beauty

and her sexual heat. Assia prepares tea

and they sit under the laburnum.

“All parts of the tree are poisonous,” she remarks

as she pours. Anne praises the banana bread.

“It was her recipe,” says Assia distractedly, staring towards Ted on the lawn in the sun, with the children. Shura, her toddler, plays slightly apart. Assia expresses unease about Aurelia’s impending visit. (In August, fears put to rest, she’ll write to Anne that she finds Sylvia’s mother “a remarkable woman— a kind of near-genius knot herself” whose generous spirit “makes me feel humbler than I have ever been.”) Anne tries to reassure with some banter about her mother-in-law, though both understand the singularity of Assia’s situation. Ted joins them and, when Anne shifts uncomfortably in her deckchair, recommends bone meal for her ailing hip. “It has to be taken regularly, but if you take too much you’ll grow bone all over like a crab, so take it easy.” They smile. Then commiserate about reviews. “Both kinds are bad,” says Ted, “but the favorable are worst. They tend to confirm one in one’s own conceit. Also, they separate you from your devil, which hates being observed, and only works happily incognito.” He spies on his wrist, sharpening her needle, a bloodthirsty mosquito.

Late sunlight floods the laburnum,

igniting its “blond colonnades.”

In less than two years, Assia and her daughter

will be dead; in a little more

than seven, Anne. Ted will live

for three decades; Nicholas, four.

Only Frieda, age seven, who knows more

than she knows, will survive. Shyly suspicious,

she glances over at the adults

now and again. Ted swats his wrist.

Assia slices Shura a small piece of banana bread.

Anne lights a Salem, exhales upward, and watches a bee

bask in the brilliance of the poisonous tree.

Dear Prudence

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