Can I save myself?

I can try:
A Psychoanalytic Study of Anne Sextons Path from Writing to Silence
Steve Schessler

Abstract
The paper and presentation explore Anne Sextons archival material from the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, including manuscripts, letters,
marginalia, and medical records, along with psychoanalytic theory works (Freud, Klein, and
Winnicott) known to Sexton and her therapists and considered during her treatment, Sextons
published work, and relevant Sexton criticism.

The argument addresses Sextons struggle with what she saw as a dichotomy at the heart of her
psychic life: writing allows her to reach out to others from within her sea of pain, and yet writing
becomes a way of making that pain even more tangible and enduring. From one perspective,
writing and talk therapy offered a lifeline out of loneliness and depression. The other perspective,
for Sexton, is that writing about the fight creates and reinforces the madness around her.
Can I save myself? I can try examines Sextons turn to psychoanalytic therapy during her
search for a safe space within her own troubled existence, and then her eventual abandonment
of psychoanalytic practice and theories in favor for a personalized view of suicidal ideation and
mental illness. By claiming madness as her right, Sexton seeks to incorporate all aspects of her
existence as valid and right, no longer abjecting qualities she perceives as negative or
dissociating herself from the hallucinatory voices in her head. Sexton posits a counter-

Can I save myself? I can try

recuperative argument, one in which poetry does not keep death at bay or prevent the silence
from taking away language.
Key Words: Madness, Sexton, poetry, archival material, criticism, creativity
*****

1. I can keep right on trying

Throughout the course of her career, Anne Sexton struggled with what she saw as a
dichotomy at the heart of her psychic life: writing allows her to reach out to others from within
her sea of pain, and yet writing becomes a way of making that pain even more tangible and
enduring. From one perspective, writing and talk therapy offered a lifeline out of loneliness and
depression. In an unpublished [Confessional Statement] typescript dated December 1973 less
than a year before her suicide Sexton writes, I feel awfully alone--- crying in the bathroom so
no one need hear--- crying over these keys, where they sit patient as an old granny. Can I
save myself? I can try I can keep right on trying. Granny, you electric Smith Corona heart,
you buzz back at me, and I pray you do not break. The typewriter offers the hope that comes
with enduring struggle, the hope inherent in the belief that I can try. In another unpublished
note dated only Sept. 14 (no year), Sexton writes, I dont want to write about the fight - dont
want to keep it alive by putting it in a journal - a journal is a way of keeping things alive.
Much of the literature that followed Sextons suicide in 1974 replaced her body with her
body of work, treating her work as though it were a patient on the couch waiting to be analyzed
by a literary critic who saw something Sexton had not. Suzanne Juhasz writes that Sexton held
death at bay and with her poems sent a powerful awareness of life into the world, seemingly in

Steve Schessler

spite of Sextons end-career narratives of death. Rise B. Axelrod claims that Poetry liberates
one from the labyrinth of inward existence, choosing not to engage with Sextons attempts to
explore that very labyrinth, rather than escape it. More recent criticism finds value in Sextons
decision for suicide and silence to an extent, such as how Susan Gilbert raises the question of
death as a proper and reasonable choice (253).
When Sexton discovers that she has not been healed by therapy after six years of analytic
and poetic work, she begins to realize that there is no cure for her illness. Sextons work
becomes consumed with representations of madness and her struggle against it as it overflows
and floods her poetry. Her response to this development is a slowly growing acceptance of
madness itself as her natural condition, a personal characterization or way of existence that does
not need a cure. By claiming madness as her right, Sexton seeks to incorporate all aspects of
her existence as valid and right, no longer abjecting qualities she perceives as negative or
dissociating herself from the hallucinatory voices in her head. Once those voices of suicidal
impulse are accepted, Sexton posits a counter-recuperative argument, one in which poetry does
not keep death at bay or prevent the silence from taking away language.

2. There can be certain potions

The poem The Big Boots of Pain, from the posthumously published volume 45 Mercy
Street (1976), offers a unique perspective on Sextons career as she progress through stages in
her writing. In the poem, Sexton explores the search for a cure, inevitability of pain and death,
differing attempts to combat illness, the process of madness, and the roles of performance and
confession in addressing all these concerns.

Can I save myself? I can try

Sexton begins The Big Boots of Pain with an abstract aside, positing that There can
be certain potions / needled in by the clock / for the bodys fall from grace (CP 547-9). This
initial suggestion of magical or medical interference creates a sense of hope, raising the
possibility of a therapeutic or chemical intervention to untorture the body as it falls. Sexton
then returns to the question of potions, regarding them as an evil greater than the illness they
seek to prevent: "These I have known / and would sell all my furniture / and books and assorted
goods / to avoid, and more, more." The narrator dismisses these potions, these promises of relief
from the bodys torturous descent and its increasing distance from grace. The distraction of these
potions, which at various times included alcohol, lithium, Thorazine1, and hope itself, takes on a
quality so negative that the narrator would divest herself of all object possessions furniture,
books, goods in order to avoid it.

3. But the other pain / I would sell my life to avoid

Discarded objects litter Sextons work, often threatening to overwhelm metaphors and
poems in displays of concrete objects and tangential associations. Sexton considers herself a
hoarder particularly a hoarder of words (CP #) and yet she also is a fantastic purger. We
can think of Melanie Kleins theories of object relations as Sexton discards objects and words
and drafts. This divestiture of eyes, letters, memories, furniture / and books and assorted
goods, may enable The Big Boots of Pain narrator to escape, but it seems these attempts to
separate one-self from objects have not worked quite yet. This newest attempt at objectexchanging instead leads to a direct confrontation with the other pain. The narrator introduces
1 Kumin, for one, describes Sextons struggles with Thorazine in her introduction to the Collected Poems (xxxiii).

Steve Schessler

this other pain in the next stanza, a pain superlative both to the bodys fall from grace and to
the emptiness of distraction. This narrator begins, But the other pain. . ., the ellipses here
indicating a description beyond words, a pain recognized in the silence, in the imagination. I
would sell my life to avoid it, she writes, the pain that begins in the crib.Every birth signifies
a death, Geoffrey Hartman notes (696-99), and nowhere more so than here. The narrator posits
a pain inherent within life, a pain of life, coexisting with survival and development, a desire to
die bound within the beginning of life.
While on the subject of the pain that begins in the crib, it is worth remembering
Freuds postulation of Eros and Thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The instincts of selfpreservation require a replacement of the pleasure principle by its topographically different
partner, the reality principle. The natural extension of this pleasure principle and the impulse
toward restoration to an earlier state of things is the expression of inertia inherent in organic
life (Freud 43). We can connect this move toward an earlier state of things to the idea that her
poems are about . . . how indeed to move backward, as Robert Mazzocco writes (23).
The narrators expression of this original pain signifies the fear of that excitement. The
narrator of The Big Boots of Pain locates a memory of this pain in the crib / with its bars.
In Sextons posthumously published poem beginning I remember my mother dying the
narrator describes a baby as it lies there, " lies there getting used to being outside of something, /
while you, death-child, lie fitfully / waiting to go inside" (CP #). In the unpublished poem The
Baby, Sexton uses the voice of a newborn, who says, If this is life the world / then I dont
want it. / I know my life already / It is a dark fellow.2 When Sexton writes I know my life
already in this draft, she iterates the same experience of fate as she does in The Big Boots of
2 Sexton, The Baby, Sexton Papers.

Can I save myself? I can try

Pain. This first baby breath marks the time when the planets drill / your future into you, a
moment at which fate violently invades ones existence, for better or worse. This fateful
intrusion comes as you marry life with that intake of breath, and as you marry the love that
gets doled out / or doesnt.

4. I alternate treading water / and deadmans float

Within this fated yet liminal space, there is an ever-present abundance of pain: "I find
now, swallowing one teaspoon / of pain, that it drops downward / to the past where it mixes /
with last years cupful / and downward into a decades quart / and downward into a lifetimes
ocean. This overwhelming sea of experience is a hallmark of Sextons work, her oeuvre
abundantly bursting with poems, metaphors, and images of weird abundance.3
In two lines added to the final version of Big Boots of Pain, the narrator summarizes
her condition in light of this abundance of pain: I alternate treading water / and deadmans
float (CP 548). As a response to threat of being overwhelmed, the narrator finds two positions
possible for her survival in this deep ocean; one requires constant activity (treading water), and
the other requires the narrator to float lifeless, suspended (deadmans float). To further develop
this metaphor, one finds a paradox central to Sextons poetic themes: the active response might
kill you more quickly than a passive one. One can view Sextons poetry as an expression of that
struggle, the poet moving through active and passive positions in response to the sea of mental
and medical troubles that threaten or promise to drown her. What we see is that Sextons

3 The phrase weird abundance comes from Sextons poem The Black Art. Sexton, The Black Art 88.

Steve Schessler

poetic work eventually represents the dead mans float a reliance on the very sea of pain, rather
than a fight against it.
The struggle becomes overwhelming. In the next stanza of The Big Boots of Pain,
Sexton returns to the teaspoon of the present, noting, The teaspoon ought to be bearable / if it
didnt mix into the reruns / and thus enlarge into what it is not. The idea persists that one should
be able to handle this pain, that at each moment the pain can be managed, survived. This pain
enlarges, "a sea pests sting turning promptly / into the sharks neat biting off / of a leg because
the soul / wears a magnifying glass." The soul, aware of the pains maritime past and its
continued presence, cannot separate this moment of pain from the lifetime of pain; every small
encounter becomes a traumatic event. The narrator follows this marine metaphor of trauma with
the title image, Kicking the heart / with pains big boots running up and down / the intestines
like a motorcycle racer. In one of Sextons frequent jumbled metaphorical sentence fragments,
this magnifying-glass-wearing soul dresses in pains boots, becoming personified and
metaphorized into a motorcycle racer, so entirely internalized that no protective shield can be
raised against it. The density, and seeming randomness, of metaphoric associations leaves an
impression of pains invasive maneuvers to attack the heart, to turn the body (and its digestive
tract) into a paved raceway on which the mechanized and soulless version of pain can run in a
loop.

5. One learns not to blab about all this / except to yourself or the typewriter keys

Yet one does get out of bed / and start over, plunge into the day / and put on a hopeful
look, the narrator continues. The attempt to face the day is reinforced by performativity, a

Can I save myself? I can try

hopeful look to mask the despair. This daily performance of existence continues as one does
not allow fear to build a wall / between you and an old friend / or a new friend, a necessary
summoning of psychological strength to overcome the defensive aims of fear that would only
leave the subject in isolation. A plunge into the day, then, requires one to reach out your hand
despite the fears, shutting down the thought that / an axe may cut it off unexpectedly even
though in this traumatized existence one always expects the axe to come.
This poems specific example of hallucinatory paranoia and the traumatic response leads
to a declaration of confessionalism on the authors own terms: "One learns not to blab about all
this / except to yourself or the typewriter keys / who tell no one until they get brave / and crawl
off onto the printed page." This declaration clarifies the confessional position, a game of secretkeeping and the displacement of agency from the author onto the text-objects. J.D. McClatchy
asserts that confession is a repetition of action or of certain behavior substituted by
displacement with different emotional material, highlighting the link between the confessional
poetry itself and the traumatic repetition that drives it (247). In the unpublished [Confessional
Statement], dated December 1973, Sexton writes, If I COULD Id just die inside. . .and only to
this typewriter, let out the truth.

6. leaving me in silence

The narrator maintains this faade of privacy as she communicates with the typewriter
again: Im getting bored with it, / I tell the typewriter. / This constantly walking around / in wet
shoes and then, surprise! / Somehow DECEASED keeps getting / stamped over the word
HOPE." Even the performance has to crumble under the irrefutability of realitys repetitions, and

Steve Schessler

even traumatic anxiety cannot prepare the ego for that surprise! This awareness of reality still
does not prevent the narrator from trying to move on. She describes herself falling thankfully /
into each new pillow of belief, hoping to believe-away the pain she knows is real. Finding that
belief, then, finding my Mercy Street, / kissing it and tenderly gift-wrapping my love, becomes
another way of putting on the mask of the hopeful look. But, then, of course, The pillows are
ripped away, / the hand guillotined, / dog shit thrown into the middle of a laugh, /a hornets nest
building into the hi-fi speaker / and leaving me in silence. The narrator has lost belief, has
suffered for reaching out to others, has joy mocked and sound cut off; its dark. And yet.

7. perhaps it is a medicine

Sexton frequently ends poems with an attempts to find a brighter side, a version of hope
already declared deceased and yet resurrected for one more stanza. The final stanza begins,
Well, / one gets out of bed / and the planets dont always hiss / or muck up the day, each day.
The narrator instead offers a proposal: "As for the pain and its multiplying teaspoon, / perhaps it
is a medicine / that will cure the soul / of its greed for love / next Thursday." The turn here to
potions and a discrete teaspoon of pain nicely returns the poem to its beginning and all the
potions the narrator would sell anything to avoid. In this last hope, pain becomes the potion
that cannot be avoided; maybe if pain can kill the soul, its greed for love and human contact
and life outside the wall, the narrator might find one day (next Thursday) when she can
manage the pain. With this pain incorporated, pain becomes a medicine itself. When you
embrace the water in a dead mans float, the sea may support you.

Can I save myself? I can try

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8. I must live the life of the dead.

The Big Boots of Pain began by fighting, and ended in a somewhat winking
acceptance of the reality of pain. Falling into this dead mans float, this narrator persona renders
herself inanimate in that sea of pain, no longer fighting her surrounding waters, but not yet
drowning. Once she rejects the well-worn path to recovery in January 24th, from the
Scorpio, Bad Spider, Die section of Words for Dr. Y (594-5),4 Sextons narrator finds, I am
alone here in my own mind. / There is no map / and there is no road.
What one has instead of a road to recovery is psychosis. Psychosis is better / than
loneliness, Sextons narrators says in the draft of Touch entitled Psychosis.5 The voices
Sexton hears and frequently writes about in her later work insistently focus on suicide and the
promised relief of death. In Letters for Dr. Y., the first voice identifies itself thusly: "I am the
leaves. I am the martyred. / Come unto me with death for I am the siren. This siren song of
death promises a hope Sexton would not reject. In the unpublished poem Killer, Killer, the
narrator asserts, I must live the life of the dead. A desire for death marks Sextons poetry from
her first volume to her last, death offering itself to Sextons poems as a nurturing muse or the
promise of freedom. Within this structure, death becomes the positive aspect offering refuge
from the other pain that begins with birth. In Dr Y. / I need a thin hot wire, dated February
16, 1960 (561-2), the narrator craves To die whole, / riddled with nothing / but desire for it
(page). The promise of this hallucinatory draw is to die whole, to undo the psychotic
4 Words for Dr. Y is the first collection of Anne Sextons poetry from which her editorial guidance was totally absent, as Linda Gray Sexton
states in her Editors Note to the volume. The collection in Scorpio, Bad Spider, Die was written between July 1971 and July 1973, and set
aside 45 Mercy Street and other poems intended for publication. Linda Gray Sexton, Editors Note, 559-60.
5 Sexton, Psychosis, box 10, folder 6, Sexton Papers.

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fragmentation, the dissociations, abjections, and negations that have marked the mental illness
with which the poet has struggled throughout her adult life.6

9. Words are useless. They are weak and pale.

Sextons struggle with illness and expression a long, painful, process productive of
astonishing creativity and work is captured even on the note in which Sexton contemplated
saving herself. On the front side of the page, Sexton explores that idea: Can I save myself? I
can try (ts). On the reverse of the page, however, in marker, in cursive, Sexton writes, A cat
ran down the street after the smelly mouse. / A cat ran down the street after the smelly mouse. /
you suck! / you suck! / Fuck you! / Fuck you! / Fuck you / Fuck you! / fuck you! So there! / So
there! So there / You are crazy! Crazy - daisy! / Crazy - daisy! (ms.).
Sexton can try. She can try to save herself through the patient typewriting, the electric
Smith Cornoa heart that she prays does not break. But the words, no matter how nicely typed,
can be turned over in analysis, in interpretation to reveal a sad story of a fruitless, clichd,
and dirty chase, the cat pursuing the smelly mouse. When the narrative turns inward? outward?
words can tell another truth in perfect rhyme. When it comes to the end, Sexton notes, Words
are useless. They are weak and pale.7 Sexton combines her approach to death with the
wonderfully titled unpublished Drunk on Pain, in which she asserts: One should not write

6 Kate Green terms this poetry of fragmentation a mythology of separation, operative, for her, in the late poems of 45 Mercy Street (qtd. in
Colburn, Anne Sexton, 377).
7 Sexton, Real Snow draft, Sexton Papers.

Can I save myself? I can try

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about it. / One should do it. 8 Drunk on pain filled inside with the waters of pain as well as
surrounded by them the poet can stop her dead mans float and finally merge with the
surrounding sea.

8 Sexton, Drunk on Pain, box 15, folder 2, Sexton Papers.

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Mazzocco, Robert. Matters of Life and Death. New York Review of Books, XXII.5 (April 3,
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Steve Schessler is an Instructor at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, USA. He completed his
PhD work at Emory studying autobiographical American poetry, with a special emphasis on
Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. He additionally conducts research in instructional technologies
and is passionate about American Literature and autobiographical works from all cultures.