Anne Sexton and God
McGill, William J.
. . . . . . AND AENE SEXTON 50D WIT_.LIAM J. McGIT.I. Preeminent:y Q confessional poet On October 5, 1974, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton was found dead inside an idling car...
...The collection Live or Die, for which she received a Pulitzer Prize, detailed chronologically her response to an iraIII WILLIAM d. MCGILL, an associate professor of history at Washington & lefferson Col&ge in Pennsylvania, with a Ph.D...
...Actually, all his presence did was make a serious dramatic subject into another comedy...
...All Allen's films are based on his own personality, of course, and in that sense all are autobiographical...
...Faustus and I," p. 7.) "One day He/ tipped His top hat/ and walked/out of the room/ ending the argument...
...Annie Hall is serious because it's about a relationship instead of a monomania - - a doomed relationship between a very successful comedian and a young woman he helps, sort of, to stardom...
...Mark we read how, when Jesus and his disciples crossed the Commonweal: 30J Sea of Galilee, they were beset by a great storm...
...And about Jesus, they couldn't be sure of it, not so sure of it anyhow, so they decided to become Protestants...
...from Harvard, is a priest in the Episcopal Church...
...Being alone is drowning and, as Anne Sexton knew, "There is no news in fear/but in the end it's fear/that drowns you...
...Her poetic expression was indeed powerful, but it was a power we equate with the dark night of the soul...
...They don't care if be was hiding or flying...
...When Woody Allen lets somebody besides him get a laugh in the film he's directing, that's serious...
...But now, in his new film, he really does come close to turning the tables...
...The Rowing Endeth," The Aw/ul Rowing Toward God, p. 85...
...Her heart did flutter like a moth, she prattled out her prayer, thrashing and bleating...
...You know that something is up just from the title of this new film, Annie Hall...
...Not So...
...Today life opened inside me like an egg/ and there inside/ after considerable digging/ I found the answer...
...No, she despaired because she reached her island and it was empty...
...Sound familiar...
...Her first poems, published under the title To Bedlam and Part Way Back, emerged directly, raw and passionate, from her confinement in a mental institution and the threat of a regression into mental depression, back within those walls, which hung enticingly over her life...
...By climbing the mountain, by reaching GOd, man anticipates that he will leave behind, in the valley from which he has begun, all the cares and miseries of life...
...The scene is set by the Boat Basin in Central Park, where one of New York's most curiously populated promenades is located...
...Despite being in the middle of a comedy, it strikes us peculiarly as a bit of comedy reliefDmore comedy for us, maybe, but at last a few moments relief for Woody...
...Live or die, but-don't poison everything...
...The Shepherd seeks out his sheep where they have gone astray...
...Making now a movie really about himself, Allen manages for once to get outside himself...
...But that insight failed her...
...Compare that with the image evoked in The Awful Rowing Toward God: the Shepherd and the island...
...Woody Allen is always outside himself...
...He goes down into the shadowy valley, into the thickets of life, to find them...
...And " . . . What is your death/but an old belonging,/a mole that fell out/of one of your poems...
...The Fury of Sundays," Death Notebooks, p. 48...
...He's someone alienated not just from society or politics or even other people, but alienated from himself...
...Live," p. 90...
...After the death/ after the black of black,/ this lightness--/not to die, not to die--/that God begat...
...But there is always the danger that frightened and confused, the sheep will drown out his call with their thrashings and bleatings...
...And of course "I'm mooring my rowboat/ at the dock of the island called God...
...All that happens is that assorted characters walk past and Allen makes scathing, generally hilarious comments on them to Keaton...
...Preeminently a confessional poet, Anne Sexton laid bare in her writings her struggles with a suicidal compulsion, struggles which were essentially visceral...
...The whole idea of the Chosen People arises from that conviction: not that the Jews by some special piety or accomplishments had raised themselves up among other peoples to place of eminence, but that, in spite of their frailties, in spite of their turnings away, God had reached out and touched them...
...When man reaches the mountain top he will find nothing: GOd is not there...
...Mine comes from the exact same place...
...Imitations of Drowning," Live or Die, p. 17...
...Well, it doesn't matter how he got there...
...One of the ways you can tell this is that Diane Keaton, in the title role, actually gets to be funny...
...Bouts with alcohol, dependence on tranquilizers, the unresolved anxieties of her childhood, all compounded that aching fear...
...And if her in3 May 1977:304 vocation of that vision appears most vividly in this posthumous collection, it nonetheless resonates throughout her work, for her poetry is fundamentally religious...
...Allen returns to the joke a couple of times later in the film, too, as if it were the tagline for his whole life---the touchstone against which all his experiences must be proven, or rather, disproven...
...The auto-critique is always implicit...
...Was it that the island was too far away...
...Not So...
...In the Gospel according to St...
...They don't know...
...How is it you have no faith...
...This scene stands out because we realize that, while Allen always works, as here, by a kind of sly ridicule, the contest he's running is usually for a Woody Allen look-alike, and he usually awards the first prize to himself...
...4:40) Possessed by fear they could not remember clearly what he had said to them and done for them...
...The mental depression which had almost overwhelmed her previously but which she had driven a~'ay with the cries of her art now swirled close once more...
...In a better moment she knew something else: "Look to your heart/that flutters in and out like a moth./God is not indifferent to your need./You have a thousand prayers/but God has one...
...I keep on looking at the ceiling...
...The game on whose sidelines Allen sits is always the one in which he is playing...
...But if there was that yearning, that seeking, why was there the despair...
...The impromptu quality of the scene----the promenaders seem to have been shot with a candid camera so Allen could shoot them with his mouth--is very much in the 13May 1977:306...
...Her marriage had failed...
...He's so irreconciliably outside himself that he is by nature a parody of the alienation of us all...
...It remains a suggestion made in passing, a mere hint Allen is dropping about himself, which is its effectiveness...
...By psychoanalysis...
...GOd it seems,/ has turned his backside to us,/giving us the dark negative . . ." ("God's Backside," p. 58...
...In irony or blunt truth she wrote "Jonah made his living / inside the belly...
...her world had in it more shadowy valleys than sunlit highlands...
...The pain of writing had sharpened...
...To be sure, there were better moments...
...And in the mists of the mountain GOd and man pass one another...
...The Addict," Live or Die, p. 85...
...They could not remember, they could not hear, not because of the wind, but because of the clanking of the chains of their own mortality, because fear engulfed them, isolating them from one another and from Jesus...
...In The Way of All the Earth John Dunne recounts what he calls the "Parable of the Mountain...
...Laughed even...
...Any time there are two interesting characters instead of just one, no matter how funny they are, what you're going to get, basically, is a dialogue, and dialogue, unlike a stand-up monologue, is a dramatic art form...
...Alleluia they sing...
...Now she followed, she fulfilled her own belonging...
...In the Gospels, in the New Testament, at the very core of the JudeoChristian tradition glows the conviction that religion is not simply man's quest for God, but is God's search for man...
...She herself described those poems as reading "like a fever chart for a bad case of melancholy," yet she ended hopefully: "I say Live, Live because of the sun,/the dream, the excitable gift...
...Yet how does one deal with the uncertainty, the sense of futility that rises...
...The reason it remains thus is also to be found in the scene by the Boat Basin...
...He makes a comedy work as a drama...
...I went to the opera and God was not there/ . . . . I went to the galleries and God was not there/ . . . . I went to the bookstore and God was not there...
...In it he describes man climbing a mountain at the top of which, he thinks, is God...
...Mother and Jack and the Rain," Live or Die, p. 18...
...Preeminent:y Q confessional poet On October 5, 1974, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton was found dead inside an idling car parked in her garage...
...LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN Woody Allen wants to break our hearts...
...She had not thought it would be easy: but I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me back and I know that that island will not be perfect, it will have the flaws of life...
...By piety...
...Anne Sexton had forged her art out of anguish, breakdown and a preoccupation with death...
...The Aw/ul Rowing Toward God, p. 84...
...What then will he do...
...Her imagery is sometimes Biblical, and sometimes blasphemous, but chorus-like her preoccupation with the God question emerges...
...Annie Hall begins with Allen addressing the camera, monologue-style, and telling two old jokes, one of which is the Groucho Marx gag about not wanting to "belong to any club that would have me as a member...
...Yet amidst this pain, depression, death, another theme haunts Anne Sexton's poetry...
...Did the effort exhaust her so that she could not continue...
...Jesus calmed the wind and then chided his disciples "Why are you so frightened...
...The point of that joke, the iron fist barely concealed within its velvetglove funniness, is that it is oneself who is being rejected rather than the club...
...He manages to be, for a change, not quite so inconsequential...
...Indeed, one rather quiet scene in which he and Keaton literally sit on a sideline is in a way the crux of the whole film...
...Perhaps the favorite Christian image of God's search for man is that of the Good Shepherd...
...perative she had encountered in an early draft of Saul Bellow's Herzog: "With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life...
...When a pudgy little dandy in a Panama hat goes by, Allen awards him first prize in a "TrumanCapote look-alike contest...
...He knows the climbing was a mistake, but will he in the agony of that recognition fall down in despair and in the cold and vacant night weep...
...Live," Live or Die, p. 88...
...Her vision shuddered with gloomy forebodings and morbid longings...
...A theme touched to be sure with the same anguish that colored her preoccupation with death, but touched also with a yearning hope, a hope which found expression in the collection The Awful Rowing Toward God published after her death...
...But while he climbs God is coming down the mountain, down into the valley, down amidst the toil and grief...
...And that conception lies at the heart of Christianity as well, at the core of the vision of the ecclesia, those who have been called out, the pilgrim people: not that Christians have raised themselves by some special piety or accomplishments, by the attainment of some special knowledge, but that in spite of all God has touched them...
...The diet failed...
...The irony is that the film should cede so much of the stage to Ms...
...She sang vigorously and the silence overwhelmed her She struggled "though the oarlocks stick and are rusty" and she dared to hope...
...The fear that it would be so had permeated the poems of the Death Notebooks...
...But the island was empty, just as she had feared...
...The coroner in Weston, Massachusetts, ruled her death a suicide...
...These allusions echo another common theme of religious literature and imply the futility of the search...
...Religion, conceived as man's quest for God, again and again has found ex,_:ession in images and visions like those of Anne Sexton...
...But this one goes further: it is actually based on Woody Allen's life, complete with two marriages and, most recently, Diane Keaton...
...Making a Living," Death Notebooks, p. 3.) The confessional nature of her art means that, like Augustine, she roamed the fields and palaces of memory: "With this pen I take in hand my selves/and with these dead disciples I will grapple...
...Annie Hall isn't that serious, but it is more serious than usual for a Woody Allen movie...
...Flee on Your Donkey," Live or D/e, p. 6.) The promise remained unfulfilled...
...I always sit straight...
...But she never experienced a moment when anxiety for her past life faded away: reaching for the blossoms of memory, she was repeatedly stung...
...Maybe this is also why, funny as the scene is, it has its melancholy side as well...
...Neither here nor elsewhere, however, does the melancholy get the upper' hand...
...But that's not really fair either...
...He calls to them...
...Where God has gone seeking him...
...Don't cry, you idiot...
...After a long string of comedies of less and less consequence, he turned up last time in (what was billed as) a serious dramatic film, The Front...
...That collection begins with a poem entitled "Rowing": and God was there like an island t had not rowed to, still ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked, and I grew, I grew, I wore rubies and bought tomatoes and now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd ~ay I am rowing, I am rowing In this vision echoes the intense desire for God which characterizes some of the great religious literature of all ages...
...She moored her boat at the island she thought was God...
...It makes you think this is a movie about a labor organizer in the 1930s who became disillusioned when she got lynched...
...Keaton...
...It has to be...
...Or will he turn to retrace his path, through the mists, into the valley, to where God has gone seeking him...
...When her friend and fellow poet Sylvia Plath commited suicide in 1963, Anne Sexton had written " . . . What did you stand by,/just how did you lie down into?/Thiefl--/how did you crawl into,/crawl down alone/into the death I wanted s o badly and for so long . . . . " ("Sylvia's Death," Live or Die, p. 38...
...The Fury of Sunrises," Death Notebook, p. 51...
...By drugs7 "The pills are a mother, but better,/ every color and as good as sour balls./ rm on a diet, from death...
...That's a name for a serious person, not a dumb movie like Bananas or What's Up Tiger Lily...
...But you, my doctor, my enthusiast,/ were better than Christ;/ you promised me another world/to tell me who/I was...
...Then heard the utter silence of the empty island, and fearful, drowned, hopeless, died...
...Those who knew her work, which includes some of the most emotionally challenging poetry of our time, were stunned--but not surprised...
...The Fury of God's Goodbye," p. 46...
...Those are the people that sing when they aren't quite s u r e . ("Protestant Easter," Live or Die, p.43...
...From those grapplings she hoped to recover a dearer sense of who she was, at least a happier vision of who she might be, and to recall a time "When we were young and did not look/into the abyss/that God spot...
...That's what makes him funny...
...Apparently by late 1974 she feared that she was poisoning everything...
...The important thing for me is that rm wearing white glove...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 10
